Swan Song (21 page)

Twenty-Four - [Land of the Dead]

A squeaking sound coming from a corner of the basement made Josh reach to his side for the flashlight and switch it on. The weak bulb threw a dim yellow spear of light, but Josh guided it toward that corner to find out what was over there.

“What is it?” Swan asked, sitting up a few feet beside him.

“I think we’ve got a rat.” He played the light around, saw only a tangle of timbers, cornstalks and the mound of dirt where Darleen Prescott lay buried. Josh quickly moved the light away from the grave. The child was just now getting her senses back. “Yeah, I think it’s a rat,” Josh decided. “Probably had a nest hidden down here somewhere. Hey, Mr. Rat!” he called. “Mind if we share your basement for a while?”

“He sounds like he’s hurt.”

“He probably thinks we sound pretty bad, too.” He kept the flashlight’s beam away from the little girl; he’d already seen her once in the meager light, and that was enough. Almost all of her beautiful blond hair was burned away, her face a mass of red, watery blisters. Her eyes, which he remembered as being so stunningly blue, were deep-sunken and a cloudy gray. He was aware that the blast hadn’t spared his looks, either; the backwash of the light revealed splotched gray burns that covered his hands and arms. More than that, he didn’t care to know. He was going to wind up looking like a zebra. But at least they were both still alive, and though he had no way of calculating how much time had passed since the explosion, he thought they’d been down here for maybe four or five days. Food was no longer a problem, and they had plenty of canned juices. Air must be entering from somewhere, though the basement remained stuffy. The worst concern Josh had was the latrine’s smell, but that couldn’t be helped right now. Maybe later he’d figure out a neater sanitation system, perhaps using the empty cans and burying those in the dirt.

Something moved in the light’s beam.

“Look!” Swan said. “Over there!”

A small, burned little animal perched on a tiny hillock of dirt. Its head tilted toward Swan and Josh, and then the animal squeaked again and disappeared into the debris.

Josh said, “That’s not a rat! It’s a-”

“It’s a gopher!” Swan finished for him. “I’ve seen lots of them before, digging out near the trailer park.”

“A gopher,” Josh repeated. He remembered PawPaw’s voice, saying Gopher’s in the hole!

Swan was pleased to see something else alive down here with them. She could hear it sniffing in the dirt, over beyond the light and the mound where… She let the thought go, because she couldn’t stand it. But her mama wasn’t hurting anymore, and that was a good thing. Swan listened to the gopher snuffling around; she was very familiar with the things, because of all the holes they dug in her garden…

All the holes they dug, she thought.

“Josh?” Swan said.

“Yeah?”

“Gophers dig holes,” she said.

Josh smiled faintly at what he took to be just a childlike statement-but then his smile froze as what she was getting at struck him. If a gopher had a nest down here, then there might indeed be a hole, leading out! Maybe that was where the air was coming from! Josh’s heart leaped. Maybe PawPaw knew there was a gopher hole somewhere in the basement, and that was the message he’d been trying to relay. A gopher hole could be enlarged to make a tunnel. We’ve got a pickaxe and shovel, he thought. Maybe we can dig ourselves out!

Josh crawled to where the old man lay. “Hey,” Josh said. “Can you hear me?” He touched PawPaw’s arm.

“Oh Lord,” Josh whispered.

The old man’s body was cool. It lay stiffly, the arms rigid by the sides. Josh shone the light into the corpse’s face, saw the mottled scarlet burns like a strange birthmark across the cheeks and nose. The eye sockets were dark brown, gaping holes. PawPaw had been dead for several hours, at least. Josh started to close PawPaw’s eyelids, but there were none; those, too, had been incinerated and vaporized.

The gopher squeaked. Josh turned away from the corpse and crawled toward the noise. Probing into the debris with his light, he found the gopher licking at its burned hind legs. It abruptly darted under a piece of wood wedged into the corner. Josh reached after it, but the wood was stuck tight. As patiently as he could, he began to work it free.

The gopher chattered angrily at the invasion. Slowly, Josh got the splintered piece of timber loose and pulled it away. The light revealed a small round hole in the dirt wall, about three inches off the floor.

“Found it!” Josh exclaimed. He got down on his belly and shone the light up into the hole. About two or three feet out of the basement, it crooked to the left and continued on beyond the range of the light. “This thing’s got to lead to the surface!” He was as excited as a kid on Christmas morning, and he was able to get his fist up into the hole. The ground was hard-packed and unyielding, burned even at this depth to the solidity of asphalt. Digging through it was going to be an absolute bitch, but following the hole would make the work easier.

One question nagged at him: did they want to get out of the basement anytime soon? The radiation might kill them outright. God only knew what the surface world would be like. Did they dare find out?

Josh heard a noise behind him. It was a hoarse rattling sound, like congested lungs struggling for air.

“Josh?” Swan had heard the noise too, and it made the remaining hairs on the back of her neck stand up; she had sensed something moving in the darkness just a few seconds before.

He turned and shone the light at her. Swan’s blistered face was turned to the right. Again, there came that hideous rattling noise. Josh shifted the light-and what he saw made him feel as if a freezing hand had clenched his throat.

PawPaw’s corpse was shivering, and that awful noise was emanating from it. He’s still alive, Josh thought incredulously; but then: No, no! He was dead when I touched him! He was dead!

The corpse lurched. Slowly, arms still stiff at its sides, the dead man began to sit up. Its head started turning inch by inch, like a clockwork automaton, toward Josh Hutchins, its raw eye sockets seeking the light. The burned face rippled, the mouth straining to open-and Josh thought that if those dead lips parted he would lose whatever marbles he had left right then and there.

With a hiss and rattle of air, the mouth opened.

And from it came a voice like the rush of wind through dried-up reeds. It was at first an unintelligible sound, thin and distant, but it was getting stronger, and it said: “Pro… tect…”

The eye sockets faced the beam of light as if there were still eyeballs in them. “Protect,” the awful voice repeated. The mouth with its gray lips seemed to be straining to form words. Josh shrank backward, and the corpse racheted out, “Protect… the… child.”

There was a quiet whoosh of air. The corpse’s eye sockets caught fire. Josh was mesmerized, and he heard Swan give a soft, stunned “Oh.” The corpse’s head burst into a fireball, and the fire spread and enveloped the entire body in a writhing, reddish-blue cocoon. An intense wave of heat licked at Josh’s face, and he put up his hand to shield his eyes; when he lowered it again, he saw the corpse dissolving at the center of its fiery shroud. The body remained sitting upright, motionless now, every inch of it ablaze.

The burning went on for maybe thirty seconds longer; then the fire began to flicker out, and the last to burn were the soles of PawPaw’s shoes.

But what lingered was white ash, in the shape of a man sitting upright.

The fire went out. The ashen shape crumbled; it was ash through and through, even the bones. It collapsed in a heap on the floor, and what remained of PawPaw Briggs was ready for a shovel.

Josh stared. Ash drifted lazily through the light. I’m going off my bird! he thought. All those body slams’ve caught up with me!

Behind him, Swan bit her lower lip and fought off frightened tears. I won’t cry, she told herself. Not anymore. The urge to sob passed, and she let her shocked eyes drift toward the black giant.

Protect the child. Josh had heard it. But PawPaw Briggs had been dead, he reasoned. Protect the child. Sue Wanda. Swan. Whatever had spoken through the dead man’s lips was gone now; it was just Josh and Swan, alone.

He believed in miracles, but of the biblical version-the parting of the Red Sea, the turning of water to wine, the feeding of the multitude from a basket of bread and fish; up until this moment, he’d thought the age of miracles was long past. But maybe it was a small miracle that they’d both found this grocery store, he realized. It was certainly a miracle that they were still alive, and a corpse that could sit up and speak was not something you saw every day.

Behind him, the gopher scrabbled in the dirt. He smells the food leaking from the cans, Josh figured. Maybe that gopher hole was a small miracle, too. He could not stop staring at the pile of white ashes, and he would hear that reedy voice for the rest of his life-however long that might be.

“You all right?” he asked Swan.

“Yes,” she replied, barely audible.

Josh nodded. If something beyond his ken wanted him to protect the child, he thought, then he was damned well going to protect the child. After a while, when he got his bones thawed out again, he crawled to get the shovel, and then he switched off the light to let it rest. In the darkness, he covered the ashes of PawPaw Briggs with cornfield dirt.

Twenty-Five - [Land of the Dead]

“Cigarette?”

A pack of Winstons was offered. Sister took one of the cigarettes. Doyle Halland flicked a gold butane lighter with the initials RBR on its side. When the cigarette was lit, Sister drew the smoke deeply into her lungs-no use to fret about cancer now!-and let it trickle through her nostrils.

A fire crackled in the hearth of the small, wood-framed suburban house in which they’d decided to shelter for the night. All the windows were broken out, but they’d been able to trap some heat in the front room due to a fortunate discovery of blankets and a hammer and nails. They’d nailed the blankets up over the largest windows and huddled around the fireplace. The refrigerator yielded up a can of chocolate sauce, some lemonade in a plastic pitcher, and a head of brown lettuce. The pantry held only a half-full box of raisin bran and a few other cans and jars of left-behinds. Still, all of it was edible, and Sister put the cans and jars in her bag, which was beginning to bulge with things she’d scavenged. It was soon going to be time to find a second bag.

During the day they had walked a little more than five miles through the silent sprawl of the east Jersey suburbs, heading west along Interstate 280 and crossing the Garden State Parkway. The bitter cold gnawed at their bones, and the sun was no more than an area of gray in a low, muddy brown sky streaked with red. But Sister noted that the further away they got from Manhattan, the more buildings were still intact, though almost every one of them had blasted-out windows, and they leaned as if they’d been knocked off their foundations. Then they reached an area of two-story, close-cramped houses-thousands of them, brooding and broken like little gothic manors-on postage-stamp-sized lawns burned the color of dead leaves. Sister noted that none of the trees or bushes she saw had a scrap of vegetation. Nothing was green anymore; everything was colored in the dun, gray and black of death.

They did see their first cars that weren’t twisted into junk. Abandoned vehicles, their paint blistered off and windshields smashed, stood here and there on the streets, but only one of them had a key, and that one was broken off and wedged in the ignition. They went on, shivering in the cold, as the gray circle of the sun moved across the sky.

A laughing woman wearing a flimsy blue robe, her face swollen and lacerated, sat on a front porch and jeered at them as they passed. “You’re too late!” she shouted. “Everybody’s gone! You’re too late!” She was holding a pistol in her lap, and so they kept going. On another corner, a dead man with a purple face, his head hideously misshapen, leaned against a bus stop sign and grinned up at the sky, his hands locked around a business briefcase. It was in the coat pocket of this corpse that Doyle Halland had found the pack of Winstons and the butane lighter.

Everyone was, indeed, gone. A few corpses lay in front lawns or on curbs or draped over steps, but those who were still living and still halfway sane had fled from the radius of the holocaust. Sitting in front of the fire and smoking a dead man’s cigarette, Sister envisioned an exodus of suburbanites, frantically packing pillowcases and paper bags with food and everything they could carry as Manhattan melted beyond the Palisades. They had taken their children and abandoned their pets, fleeing westward before the black rain like an army of tramps and bag ladies. But they had left their blankets behind, because it was the middle of July. Nobody expected it to get cold. They just wanted to get away from the fire. Where were they going to run to, and where were they going to hide? The cold was going to catch them, and many of them would already be deep asleep in its embrace.

Behind her, the others were curled up on the floor, sleeping on sofa cushions and covered by rugs. Sister drew on the cigarette again and then looked at Doyle Halland’s craggy profile. He stared into the fire, a Winston between his lips, one long-fingered hand tentatively massaging his leg where the splinter was driven through. The man was damned tough, Sister thought; he’d never once asked to stop and rest his leg today, though the pain of walking had bled his face chalky.

“So what were you planning on doing?” Sister asked him. “Staying around that church forever?”

He hesitated a moment before he answered. “No,” he said. “Not forever. Just until… I don’t know, just until someone came along who was going somewhere.”

“Why didn’t you leave with the other people?”

“I stayed to give the last rites to as many as I could. Within six hours of the blast, I’d done so many that I lost my voice. I couldn’t speak, and there were so many more dying people. They were begging me to save their souls. Begging me to get them into Heaven.” He glanced quickly at her and then away. He had gray eyes flecked with green. “Begging me,” he repeated softly. “And I couldn’t even speak, so I gave them the Sign of the Cross, and I… I kissed them. I kissed them to sleep, and they all trusted me.” He drew on the cigarette, exhaled the smoke and watched it drift toward the fireplace. “St. Matthew’s has been my church for over twelve years. I kept coming back to it and walking through the ruins, trying to figure out what had happened. We had some lovely statues and stained-glass windows. Twelve years.” He slowly shook his head.

“I’m sorry,” Sister offered.

“Why should you be? You didn’t have anything to do with this. It’s just… something that got out of control. Maybe nobody could’ve stopped it.” He glanced at her again, and this time his gaze lingered at the crusted wound in the hollow of her throat. “What’s that?” he asked her. “It looks almost like a crucifix.”

She touched it. “I used to wear a chain with a cross on it.”

“What happened?”

“Someone-” She stopped. How could she describe it? Even now her mind skittered away from the memory; it was not a safe thing to think about. “Someone took it from me,” she continued.

He nodded thoughtfully and leaked smoke from the corner of his mouth. Through the blue haze, his eyes searched hers. “Do you believe in God?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Why?” he asked quietly.

“I believe in God because someday Jesus is going to come and take everyone worthy up in the Rap-” No, she told herself. No. That was Sister Creep babbling about things she’d heard other bag ladies say. She paused, getting her thoughts in order, and then she said, “I believe in God because I’m alive, and I don’t think I could’ve made it this far by myself. I believe in God because I believe I will live to see another day.”

“You believe because you believe,” he said. “That doesn’t say much for logic, does it?”

“Are you saying you don’t believe?”

Doyle Halland smiled vacantly. The smile slowly slipped off his face. “Do you really think that God has His eye on you, lady? Do you think He really cares whether you live one more day or not? What singles you out from all those corpses we passed today? Didn’t God care about them?” He held the lighter with its initials in the palm of his hand. “What about Mr. RBR? Didn’t he go to church enough? Wasn’t he a good boy?”

“I don’t know if God has an eye on me or not,” Sister replied. “But I hope He does. I hope I’m important enough-that we’re all important enough. As for the dead… maybe they were the lucky ones. I don’t know.”

“Maybe they were,” he agreed. He returned the lighter to his pocket. “I just don’t know what there is to live for anymore. Where are we going? Why are we going anywhere? I mean… one place is as good as another to die in, isn’t it?”

“I’m not planning on dying anytime soon. I think Artie wants to get back to Detroit. I’ll go there with him.”

“And after that? If you make it as far as Detroit?”

She shrugged. “Like I say, I’m not planning on dying. I’ll keep going as long as I can walk.”

“No one plans on dying,” he said. “I used to be an optimist, a long time ago. I used to believe in miracles. But do you know what happened? I got older. And the world got meaner. I used to serve and believe in God with all my heart, with every ounce of faith in my body.” His eyes narrowed slightly, as if he were looking at something far beyond the fire. “As I say, that was a long time ago. I used to be an optimist… now I suppose I’m an opportunist. I’m very good at judging which way the wind blows-and I’d have to say that now I judge God, or the power that we know as God, to be very, very weak. A dying candle, if you like, surrounded by darkness. And the darkness is closing in.” He sat without moving, just watching the fire burn.

“You don’t sound much like a priest.”

“I don’t feel much like one, either. I just feel… like a worn-out man in a black suit with a stupid, dirty white collar. Does that shock you?”

“No. I don’t think I can be shocked anymore.”

“Good. Then that means you’re becoming less of an optimist too, doesn’t it?” He grunted. “I’m sorry. I guess I don’t sound like Spencer Tracy in Boys Town, do I? But those last rites I gave… they fell out of my mouth like ashes, and I can’t get that damned taste out of my mouth.” His gaze slipped down to the bag at Sister’s side. “What’s that thing I saw you with last night? That glass thing?”

“It’s something I found on Fifth Avenue.”

“Oh. May I see it?”

Sister brought it out of her bag. The jewels trapped within the glass circle burst into blazing rainbow colors. The reflections danced on the walls of the room and striped both Sister’s and Doyle Halland’s faces. He drew in his breath, because it was the first time he’d really gotten a good look at it. His eyes widened, the colors sparkling in his pupils. He reached out to touch it but drew his hand back at the last second. “What is it?”

“Just glass and jewels, melted together. But… last night, just before you came, this thing… did something wonderful, something I still can’t explain.” She told him about Julia Castillo and being able to understand each other’s language when they were linked by the glass circle. He sat listening intently. “Beth said this thing’s magic. I don’t know about that, but I do know it’s pretty strange. Look at it pick up my heartbeat. And the way the thing glows-I don’t know what this is, but I’m sure as hell not going to throw it away.”

“A crown,” he said softly. “I heard Beth say it could be a crown. It looks like a tiara, doesn’t it?”

“I guess it does. Not quite like the tiaras in the Tiffany windows, though. I mean… it’s all crooked and weird-looking. I remember I wanted to give up. I wanted to die. And then I found this, and it made me think that… I don’t know, it’s stupid, I guess.”

“Go on,” he urged.

“It made me think about sand,” Sister told him. “That sand is about the most worthless stuff in the world, yet look what sand can become in the right hands.” She ran her fingers over the velvet surface of the glass. “Even the most worthless thing in the world can be beautiful,” she said. “It just takes the right touch. But seeing this beautiful thing, and holding it in my hands, made me think I wasn’t so worthless, either. It made me want to get up off my ass and live. I used to be crazy, but after I found this thing… I wasn’t so crazy anymore. Maybe part of me’s still crazy, I don’t know; but I want to believe that all the beauty in the world isn’t dead yet. I want to believe that beauty can be saved.”

“I haven’t seen very much beauty in the last few days,” he replied. “Except for that. You’re right. It is a very, very beautiful piece of junk.” He smiled faintly. “Or crown. Or whatever it is you choose to believe.”

Sister nodded and peered into the depths of the glass circle. Beneath the glass, the threads of precious metals flared like sparklers. The pulsing of a large, deep brown topaz caught her attention; she could sense Doyle Halland watching her, could hear the crackle of the fire and the sweep of the wind outside, but the brown topaz and its hypnotic rhythm-so soft, so steady-filled up her vision. Oh, she thought, what are you? What are you? What-

She blinked.

She was no longer holding the circle of glass.

And she was no longer sitting before the fire in the New Jersey house.

Wind swept around her, and she smelled dry, scorched earth and… something else. What was it?

Yes. Now she knew. It was the odor of burned corn.

She was standing on a vast, flat plain, and the sky above her was a whirling mass of dirty gray clouds through which electric-blue streaks of lightning plunged. Charred cornstalks lay about her by the thousands-and the only feature on that awful wasteland was a large dome that looked like a grave about a hundred yards away.

I’m dreaming, she thought. I’m really sitting in New Jersey. This is a dreamscape-a picture in my mind, that’s all. I can wake up anytime I want to, and I’ll be back in New Jersey again.

She looked at the strange dome and wondered how far she could push the limits of this dream. If I take a step, she thought, will the whole thing fall to pieces like a movie set? She decided to find out, and she took a single step. The dreamscape remained intact. If this is a dream, she told herself, then, by God, I’m dreamwalking somewhere a long way from New Jersey, because I can feel that wind in my face!

She walked over the dry earth and cornstalks toward the dome; no dust plumed beneath her feet, and she had the sensation of drifting over the landscape like a ghost instead of actually walking, though she knew her legs were moving. As she neared the dome she saw it was a mass of dirt, thousands of burned cornstalks, pieces of wood and cinder blocks all jammed together. Nearby was a twisted thing of metal that might once have been a car, and another one lay ten or fifteen yards beyond the first. Other pieces of metal, wood and debris lay scattered around her: here was what appeared to be the nozzle from a gas pump, there was the burned lid of a suitcase. The rags of clothes-small clothes-were lying about. Sister walked-dreamwalked, she thought-past part of a wagon wheel half buried in the dirt, and there was the remnant of a sign that still held barely decipherable letters: P… A… W.