Swan Song (79 page)

She had to find Sister, and fast. Her face tight and strained and her teeth clenched with anger, Swan urged Mule forward.

Mule started running like a thoroughbred, his head held low and his ears laid back.

There was a high chattering noise, and hot currents of air seemed to sweep around her. Swan felt Mule shudder and heard him grunt as if he’d been kicked, and then Mule’s legs went out from under him. The horse fell, throwing Robin free but trapping Swan’s left leg under him. The breath was knocked out of Swan, and she lay stunned as Mule desperately tried to stand up. But Robin had already seen the bullet holes in Mule’s belly, and he knew the horse was finished.

An engine growled. He looked up and saw a Chevy Nova with an armored windshield and a rooftop gun turret coming. He bent to Swan’s side and tried to pull her free, but her leg was firmly pinned. Mule was still struggling to get up, steam and blood spraying from his nostrils, his sides heaving. His eyes were wide with terror.

The Chevy’s gun turret fired, and bullets ripped across the ground dangerously near Swan. Robin realized with sickening certainty that he didn’t have the strength to free her. The armored car’s radiator grinned like a mouthful of metal teeth. Robin’s grip tightened around the axe handle.

Swan grasped his hand. “Don’t leave me,” she said, dazed and unaware that Mule was dying on top of her.

Robin had already decided. He pulled free and sprinted toward the armored car.

“Robin!” she cried out, and then she lifted her head and saw where he was going.

He zigzagged as the turret’s gun chattered again. Bullets kicked up snow and dirt at his heels. The Chevy veered toward him and away from Swan, just as he’d hoped it would. Move your lazy ass! he told himself as he dove to the ground, rolled and scrambled up again to throw off the gunner’s aim. The Chevy picked up speed, steadily closing the range. He jinked to both sides, heard the machine gun speak and saw the hot streaks of slugs zip through the air. Oh, shit! he thought as a searing pain ripped across his left thigh; he knew he’d been tagged, but it wasn’t too bad, and he kept going. The armored car followed him into the smoke.

On the northern perimeter, Paul Thorson and forty other men and women were surrounded by soldiers. Paul had only two bullets left, and most of the others had run out of ammunition a long time before; they wielded clubs, pickaxes and shovels and dared the soldiers to charge.

A Jeep pulled up behind the protective barrier of AOE infantry, and Colonel Macklin rose to his feet. His coat was draped over his shoulders, and the deep-set eyes in his skeletal face fixed on the group of defenders who’d been pushed back against the wall. “Is she with them?” he asked the man occupying the rear seat.

Friend stood up. He wore an Army of Excellence uniform and a gray cap pulled over his thin, dark brown hair; today his face was plain and nondescript, soulless and without character. His watery hazel eyes ticked back and forth for a few seconds. “No,” he said finally, in a toneless voice, “she’s not with them.” He sat back down again.

“Kill them all,” Macklin told the soldiers. Then he ordered his driver on as the Army of Excellence troops sprayed the trapped men and women with machine gun bullets. Among them, Paul squeezed off a shot and saw one of the soldiers stagger-and then he himself was hit in the stomach, and a second bullet broke his collarbone. He fell on his face, tried to get up and shivered as a third and fourth bullet hit his side and pierced his forearm. He pitched forward and lay still.

Three hundred yards away, the armored Chevy Nova was searching through the smoke, its turret gun firing at every hint of motion. The tires crunched over corpses, but one of the bodies that lay sprawled on the ground suddenly pulled in his arms and legs as the vehicle passed right over him.

When the armored car had cleared his body, Robin sat up and grasped the axe that had been hidden underneath him. He stood up, took three running strides and jumped onto the Nova’s rear fender. He kept going until he stood on the roof-and then he lifted the axe and smashed it down with all his strength on the sheet metal turret.

It crumpled inward, and the gunner tried to swivel his weapon, but Robin jammed it by placing his boot against the barrel. He battered down on the turret, his axe ripping through the sheet metal and slamming into the gunner’s skull. There was a strangled cry of agony, and the driver put his foot down on the accelerator. As the Nova shot forward Robin was thrown off the roof to the ground; he’d lost his grip on the axe, and when he scrambled to his feet he could see the axe’s handle still sticking rigidly up in the air, its business end about two inches deep in the gunner’s head. Robin expected the car to come at him again, but the driver had panicked, veering erratically. The Nova kept going and disappeared in the smoke.

Mute was dying, steam rising from his nostrils and the bullet holes in his belly. Swan’s head had cleared enough for her to realize what had happened, but she knew there was nothing she could do. Mule still twitched, as if trying to stand with willpower alone. Swan saw more soldiers coming, and she pulled at her leg, but it was jammed tight.

Suddenly someone bent down beside her and worked his arms under Mule’s side. Swan heard the muscles and sinews crack in his shoulders as he heaved upward, supporting some of the horse’s weight and easing the terrible pressure on Swan’s leg.

“Pull yourself out!” he said, his voice strained with the effort. “Hurry!”

She wrenched at her leg and worked it a few more inches toward freedom. Then Mule shifted again, as if using his last strength to help, and with an effort that almost dislocated her thigh from its socket she pulled her leg out. The stinging blood immediately rushed back into it, and she gritted her teeth as the pain hit her.

The man withdrew his arms. His hands were blotched with white and brown pigment.

She looked up into Josh’s face.

His skin had returned to its rich, dark umber color. He had a short gray beard, and almost all of his tight cap of hair had turned white. But his nose, which had been broken so many times and been so misshapen, was straight-bridged and strong again, and the old scars of football and wrestling had been wiped clean. His cheekbones were high and sharp, as if chiseled from dark stone, and his eyes were a soft shade of gray that shone with the translucent wonder of a child.

She thought that, next to Robin, he was the most handsome man she’d ever seen.

Josh saw the soldiers coming, and adrenaline pumped through his body; he’d left Glory and Aaron in the house to search for Swan, and now he had to get all of them to safety. Where Sister was he didn’t know, but he understood all too well that the soldiers were breaking through the walls on all sides of Mary’s Rest, and soon they’d be in the alleys, setting the shacks on fire. He picked Swan up in his arms, his sprained shoulder and his ribs aflame with pain.

At that instant, Mule’s body trembled and a burst of steam came from the horse’s nostrils, pluming up into the sky like a tired soul finding release-and Josh knew that no beast of burden deserved rest as much as Mule. There would never be another horse as fine, or as beautiful.

Mule’s eyes were already beginning to glaze over, but Swan understood that what Mule had been was already gone. “Oh…” she whispered, and then she was unable to speak.

Josh saw Robin running out of the smoke. “This way!” Josh shouted. Robin ran toward them, limping a little and holding his left thigh. But the soldiers had seen, too, and one of them started firing a pistol. A bullet plowed up dirt about four feet from Robin, and another whined past Josh’s head.

“Come on!” Josh urged, and he started running toward town with Swan in his arms, his lungs working like a bellows in a metal forge. He saw another group of soldiers on the left. One of them shouted “Halt!” but Josh kept going. He looked quickly back to make sure Robin was following. Robin was right on his heels, wounded leg and all.

They were almost to the warren of alleys when four soldiers stepped into their path. Josh decided to barrel through them, but two of the men lifted their guns. He stopped, skidding in the mud and looking for a way out like a fox trapped by hounds. Robin whirled to the right-and about ten feet away were three more soldiers, one of them already leveling his M-16. More soldiers were approaching from the left, and Josh knew that within seconds they were going to be cut to pieces in a crossfire.

Swan was about to be killed in his arms. There was no way out now, and only one chance to save her-if indeed she could be saved. He had no choice, and no time to ponder the decision.

“Don’t shoot!” he shouted. And then he had to say it, to keep the soldiers from firing: “This is Swan! This is the girl you’re looking for!”

“Stand where you are!” one of the soldiers commanded, aiming a rifle at Josh’s head. The other men formed a circle around Josh, Swan and Robin. There was a brief discussion among several of the soldiers, one of whom seemed to be in charge, and then two of the men headed off in opposite directions, obviously going to find someone else.

Swan wanted to cry, but she dared not let a tear show, not in front of these men. She kept her features as calm and composed as if sculpted from ice. “It’s going to be okay,” Josh said quietly, though the words sounded hollow and stupid. At least, for the moment, she was alive. “You’ll see. We’ll get out of this some-”

“No talking, nigger!” a soldier shouted, pointing a.38 in Josh’s face.

He gave the man the best smile he could muster.

The noise of gunfire, explosions and screams still drifted over Mary’s Rest like the residue of nightmares. Our asses are grass, Robin thought, and there wasn’t a damned thing they could do about it. Two rifles and four pistols were aimed at him alone. He looked out toward the blazing eastern wall, then toward the west, way over beyond the cornfield, where trucks and armored cars seemed to be grouping to make camp.

In five or six minutes, one of the soldiers who’d left returned leading an old brown United Parcel Service truck in their direction. Josh was ordered to put Swan down, but she still had difficulty standing and had to lean against him. Then the soldiers conducted a thorough and rough body search. They let their hands linger on Swan’s budding breasts; Josh saw Robin’s face redden with anger, and he cautioned, “Be cool.”

“What’s this shit?” The tarot card that had been in the pocket of Josh’s jeans was held up.

“Just a card,” Josh replied. “Nothing special.”

“Damn straight.” The man tore it into fragments and let The Empress fall in pieces to the ground.

The rear door of the UPS truck was opened. Josh, Robin and Swan were shoved inside with thirty other people. When the door was slammed shut and bolted again, the prisoners were left in total darkness.

“Take ’em to the chicken coop!” the sergeant in charge ordered the driver, and the UPS truck carried away its new load of parcels.

Eighty-Four - [A Five-Star

General]

Swan clasped her hands over her ears. But she could still hear the terrible hurting sounds, and she thought her mind would crack before they stopped.

Out beyond the “chicken coop”-which was a wide circle of barbed wire surrounding the two hundred and sixty-two survivors, now prisoners-the soldiers were going through the cornfield, shearing the stalks off with machetes and axes or wrenching them up roots and all. The stalks were being piled up like corpses in the backs of trucks.

No bonfires were allowed within the coop, and the armed guards who stood around the wire were quick to fire warning shots that dissuaded people from huddling together. Many of the wounded were freezing to death.

Josh flinched at the laughter and singing of the troops in town. He looked toward the shacks with weary eyes and saw a large fire burning in the middle of the road, near the spring. Parked around Mary’s Rest were dozens of trucks, armored cars, vans and trailers, and other bonfires blazed to keep the victors warm. Bodies were being stripped of clothes and left in macabre, frozen heaps. Trucks moved around collecting the clothes and guns.

Whoever the bastards were, Josh thought, they were masters of efficiency. They wasted nothing but human life.

There was the air of a wicked carnival over Mary’s Rest, but Josh consoled himself with the fact that Swan was still alive. Also nearby, sitting as close as the guards would allow, were Glory and Aaron. She was shocked beyond tears. Aaron lay curled up, his eyes open and staring and the thumb of one hand jammed into his mouth. The soldiers had taken Crybaby and thrown it onto a bonfire.

Robin walked along the barbed wire like a caged tiger. There was only one way in or out, through a barbed wire gate the soldiers had hastily built. Off in the distance were more rapid gunshots, and Robin figured the bastards had found somebody still alive. He’d counted only six of his highwaymen inside the coop, and two of them were badly wounded. Dr. Ryan, who’d survived an attack on his makeshift hospital, had already told Robin those two were going to die. Bucky had made it, though he was sullen and would not speak. But Sister was missing, and that really twisted Robin’s guts.

He stopped and stared across the wire at a guard. The man cocked his pistol, aimed it at Robin and said, “Move on, you piece of shit.”

Robin grinned, spat on the ground and turned away. His groin crawled as he waited for the bullet to slam into his back. He’d seen prisoners shot down for no apparent reason other than to amuse the guards, and so he didn’t breathe easily again until he’d gotten far away from the man. But he walked slowly; he wasn’t going to run. He was through running.

Swan took her hands from her ears. The last of the hurting sounds were drifting away. The cornfield was a stubbled ruin, and the trucks rumbled away fat and happy as cockroaches.

She felt sick with fear, and she longed for the basement where she and Josh had been trapped such a long time ago. But she forced herself to look around at the other prisoners and to absorb the scene: the moaning and coughing of the wounded, the babbling of those who’d lost their minds, the sobbing and wailing of the death dirges. She saw their faces, their eyes dark and turned inward, all hope murdered.

They’d fought and suffered for her, and here she was sitting on the ground like an insect, waiting for a boot to smash down. Her fists clenched. Get up! she told herself. Damn it, get up! She was ashamed of her own frailty and weakness, and a spark of rage leapt within her as if thrown off by an iron wheel grinding flint. She heard two of the guards laughing. Get up! she screamed inwardly, and the rage grew, spread through her and burned the sick fear away.

“You’re a leader,” Sister had said, “and you’d better learn how to act like one.”

Swan didn’t want to be. Had never asked to be. But she heard an infant crying not too far away, and she knew that if there was to be a future for any of these people, it had to start right here… with her.

She stood up, took a deep breath to clear away the last cobwebs and walked among the other prisoners, her gaze moving left and right, meeting theirs and leaving the impression of a glimpse into a blast furnace.

“Swan!” Josh called, but she paid no attention and kept going, and he started to get up and go after her, but he saw how stiff her back was; it was a regal posture, full of confidence and courage, and now the other prisoners were sitting up as she passed them, and even the wounded were struggling to rise from the dirt. Josh let her go.

Her left leg was still stiff and aching, but at least it was unbroken. She, too, was aware of the energizing effect she was having on the others-but she did not know that around her they could have sworn they felt a radiance that briefly warmed the air.

She reached the crying infant. The child was held in the arms of a shivering man with a swollen, purple gash on the side of his head. Swan looked down at the child-and then she began to unbutton her coat of many colors and shrug out of it. She knelt down to wrap it around the man’s shoulders and enfold the infant in it.

“You!” one of the guards shouted. “Get away from there!”

Swan flinched, but she kept at what she was doing.

“Get away!” a woman prisoner urged. “They’ll kill you!”

A warning shot was fired. Swan arranged the folds of the patchwork coat to keep the child warm, and only then did she stand up.

“Go back to where you were and sit down!” the guard ordered. He was holding a rifle braced against his hip.

Swan felt everyone watching her. The moment hung.

“I won’t tell you again! Move your ass!”

God help me, she thought-and then she swallowed hard and started walking toward the barbed wire and the guard with the rifle. Immediately he lifted his weapon to a firing position.

“Halt!” another guard warned, off to the right.

Swan kept going, step after step, her eyes riveted to the man with the rifle.

He pulled the trigger.

The bullet whined past her head, and she knew it must have missed her by three inches or less. She stopped, wavered-and then took the next step.

“Swan!” Josh shouted, standing up. “Swan, don’t!”

The guard with the rifle took a backward step as Swan approached. “The next one is right between your eyes,” he promised, but the girl’s merciless stare pierced him.

Swan stopped. “These people need blankets and food,” she said, and she was surprised at the strength in her voice. “They need them now. Go tell whoever’s in charge that I want to see him.”

“Fuck you,” the guard said. He fired.

But the bullet went over Swan’s head, because one of the other guards had grabbed the rifle barrel and uptilted it. “Didn’t you hear her name, dumb ass?” the second man asked. “That’s the girl the colonel’s looking for! Go find an officer and report!”

The first guard had gone pale, realizing how close he’d come to being skinned alive. He took off at a run toward Colonel Macklin’s Command Center.

“I said,” Swan repeated firmly, “that I want to see whoever’s in charge.”

“Don’t worry,” the man told her. “You’ll get to see Colonel Macklin soon enough.”

Another truck stopped over by the chicken coop’s gate. The rear door was unbolted and opened, and fourteen more prisoners were herded into the containment area. Swan watched them come in, some of them badly wounded and hardly able to walk. She went over to help-and an electric thrill shot through her, because she’d recognized one of the new arrivals.

“Sister!” she cried out, and she ran toward the dirty woman who’d stumbled through the gate.

“Oh, dear God, dear God!” Sister sobbed as she put her arms around Swan and held her. They clung together for a moment, silent, each just needing to feel the other’s heart beating. “I thought you were dead!” Sister finally said, her vision blurred by tears. “Oh, dear God, I thought they’d killed you!”

“No, I’m all right. Josh is here, and so are Robin, Glory and Aaron. We all thought you were dead!” Swan pulled back to look at Sister. Her stomach clenched.

Burning gasoline had splattered onto the right side of Sister’s face. Her eyebrow on that side had been burned off, and her right eye was almost swollen shut. Her chin and the bridge of her nose had both been gashed by flying glass. Dirt was all over the front of her coat, and the fabric was charred and torn. Sister understood Swan’s expression, and she shrugged. “Well,” she said, “I guess I was never meant to be pretty.”

Swan hugged her again. “You’re going to be okay. I don’t know what I would’ve done without you!”

“You’d get along fine, just like you did before Paul and I showed up.” She glanced around the area. “Where is he?”

Swan knew who she meant, but she said, “Who?”

“You know who. Paul.” Sister’s voice tightened. “He is here, isn’t he?”

Swan hesitated.

“Where is he? Where’s Paul?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “He’s not here.”

“Oh… my God.” Sister clasped a dirt-caked hand to her mouth. She was dizzy, and this new blow almost finished her; she was weary and sick of fighting, and her bones ached as if her body had been snapped apart and rearranged. She’d retreated from the western wall as the soldiers overran it, had found a discarded butcher knife and killed one of them in hand-to-hand fighting, then had been forced across the field by a wave of attacking troops. She’d hidden under a shack, but when it was set afire over her head she’d had no choice but to surrender. “Paul,” she whispered. “He’s dead. I know he is.”

“You don’t know that! Maybe he got away! Maybe he’s still hiding!”

“Hey, you!” the guard shouted. “Break it up and move on!”

Swan said, “Lean on me,” and she started helping Sister back to where the others were. Josh was coming toward them, followed by Robin. And suddenly Swan realized that Sister no longer had the leather satchel. “The glass ring! What happened to it?”

Sister put a finger to her lips.

A Jeep roared up. Its two passengers were Roland Croninger, still wearing a helmet and with mud splattered across his bandaged face, and the man who called himself Friend. Both of them got out while the driver kept the engine idling.

Friend stalked along the wire, his brown eyes narrowed as he searched among the prisoners. And then he saw her, supporting an injured woman. “There!” he said excitedly, and he pointed. “That’s her!”

“Bring the girl out,” Roland told the nearest guard.

Friend paused, staring at the woman who leaned on Swan’s shoulder. The woman’s face was unfamiliar, and the last time he’d seen Sister she’d been disfigured. He thought he recalled seeing that woman the day he’d overheard the Junkman talking about the Army of Excellence, but he hadn’t paid any attention to her. That was back when he was sick, and details had escaped him. But now he realized that, if indeed the woman was Sister, she no longer had that damned bag with the circle of glass in ft.

“Wait!” he told the guard. “Bring that woman out, too! Hurry!”

The guard motioned for another to help him, and they entered the containment area with their rifles ready.

Josh was just about to reach out for Sister when the guards ordered Swan to halt. She looked over her shoulder at the two rifle barrels. “Come on,” one of the men said. “You wanted to see Colonel Macklin? Here’s your chance. You too, lady.”

“She’s hurt!” Josh objected. “Can’t you see-”

The guard who’d spoken fired his rifle into the ground at Josh’s feet, and Josh was forced back.

“Let’s go.” The guard prodded Swan with his rifle. “The colonel’s waiting.”

Swan supported Sister, and they were bracketed by the two guards as they were escorted to the gate.

Robin started after them, but Josh grabbed his arm. “Don’t be stupid,” Josh warned.

The boy angrily wrenched free. “You’re just going to let them take her? I thought you were supposed to be her guardian!”

“I used to be. Now she’ll have to take care of herself.”

“Right!” Robin said bitterly. “What are we going to do, just wait?”

“If you have a better suggestion-and one that won’t get a lot of people killed, including yourself and Swan-I’d just love to hear it.”

Robin had none. He watched helplessly as Swan and Sister were herded toward the Jeep where the two men waited.

As they neared the Jeep, both Swan and Sister felt their skin crawl. Sister recognized the one with the bandaged face from her confrontation with the tank-and she knew the other as well. It was in his eyes, or his smile, or the way he cocked his head or held his hands in fists at his sides. Or maybe it was the way he trembled with excitement. But she knew nun, and so did Swan.

He did not look at Swan. Instead, he strode forward and ripped the collar of Sister’s coat away from her neck.

Exposed underneath was a brown scar in the shape of a crucifix.

“Your face is different,” he said.

“So is yours.”

He nodded, and she saw a quick glint of red deep in his eyes, there and then gone like a glimpse of something monstrous and unknown. “Where is it?”

“Where is what?”