Swan Song (23 page)

Behind them, in the burning gym, they heard the crazy woman’s voice float up into the tunnel: “Where’d everybody go? It’s hot in here… so hot. God knows I didn’t come all this way to cook in a mine shaft!”

Something about that voice clutched at Roland’s heart. He remembered a voice like that, a long time ago. He kept moving, but when the crazy woman screamed and the smell of burning meat came up into the tunnel he had to stop and clasp his hands over his ears, because the sound made the world spin too fast and he feared being flung off. The screaming stopped after a while, and all Roland could hear was the steady sliding of the King’s body further along the shaft. Coughing, his eyes watering, Roland pushed himself onward.

They came to a place where the shaft had been crushed closed. Macklin’s hand found another shaft branching off from the one they’d been following: this one was a tighter fit, and it clamped around the colonel’s shoulders as he squeezed into it. The smoke was still bad, and his lungs were burning. It was like creeping up a chimney with a fire blazing below, and Roland wondered if this was what Santa Claus felt like.

Further along, Macklin’s questing fingers touched Fiberglas. It was part of the system of air filters and baffles that purified what Earth House residents breathed in case of nuclear attack. Sure helped a whole hell of a lot, didn’t it? he thought grimly. He ripped away the filter and kept crawling. The shaft curved gradually to the left, and Macklin had to tear through more filters and louverlike baffles made of rubber and nylon. He was straining hard to breathe, and he heard Roland gasping behind him. The kid was damned tough, he thought. Anybody who had a will to live like that kid did was a person to reckon with, even if he looked like a ninety-pound weakling.

Macklin stopped. He’d touched metal ahead of him, blades radiating from a central hub. One of the fans that drew air in from the outside. “We must be close to the surface!” he said. Smoke was still moving past him in the dark. “We’ve got to be close!”

He put his hand against the fan’s hub and pushed until the muscles in his shoulder cracked. The fan was bolted securely in place and wasn’t going to move. Damn you! he seethed. Damn you to Hell! He pushed again, as hard as he could, but all he did was exhaust himself. The fan wasn’t going to let them out.

Macklin laid his cheek against cool aluminum and tried to think, tried to picture the blueprints of Earth House in his mind. How were the intake fans serviced? Think! But he was unable to see the blueprints correctly; they kept shivering and falling to pieces.

“Listen!” Roland cried out.

Macklin did. He couldn’t hear anything but his own heartbeat and his raw lungs heaving.

“I hear wind!” Roland said. “I hear wind moving up there!” He reached up, felt the movement of air. The faint sound of shrilling wind came from directly above. He ran his hands over the crumpled wall to his right, then to his left-and he discovered iron rungs. “There’s a way up! There’s another shaft right over our heads!” Grasping the bottom rung, Roland drew himself up, rung by rung, to a standing position. “I’m climbing up,” he told Macklin, and he began to ascend.

The windscream was louder, but there was still no light. He had climbed maybe twenty feet when his hand touched a metal flywheel over his head. Exploring, his fingers glided over a cracked concrete surface. Roland thought it must be the lid of a hatch, like a submarine’s conning tower hatch that could be opened and closed by the flywheel. But he could feel the strong suction of air there, and he figured the blast must have sprung the hatch, because it was no longer securely sealed.

He grasped the flywheel, tried to turn it. The thing wouldn’t budge. Roland waited a minute, building up his strength and determination; if ever he needed the power of a King’s Knight, it was at this moment. He attacked the flywheel again; this time he thought it might have moved a half inch, but he wasn’t sure.

“Roland!” Colonel Macklin called from below. He’d finally put the blueprints together in his mind. The vertical shaft was used by workmen to change the air filters and baffles in this particular sector. “There should be a concrete lid up there! It opens to the surface!”

“I’ve found it! I’m trying to get it open!” He braced himself with one arm through the nearest rung, grasped the flywheel and tried to turn it with every ounce of muscle left in his body. He shook with the effort, his eyes closed and beads of sweat popped up on his face. Come on! he urged Fate, or God, or the Devil, or whoever worked these things. Come on!

He kept straining against it, unwilling to give up.

The flywheel moved. An inch. Then two inches. Then four. Roland shouted, “I’ve got it!” and he started cranking the flywheel with a sore and throbbing arm. A chain clattered through the teeth of gears, and now the wind was shrieking. He knew the hatch was lifting, but he saw no light.

Roland had given the wheel four more revolutions when there was a piercing wail of wind, and the air, full of stinging grit, thrashed madly around the shaft. It almost sucked him right out, and he hung onto a rung with both hands as the wind tore at him. He was weak from his battle with the flywheel, but he knew that if he let go the storm might lift him up into the dark like a kite and never set him down again. He shouted for help, couldn’t even hear his own voice.

An arm without a hand locked around his waist. Macklin had him, and they slowly descended the rungs together. They retreated into the shaft.

“We made it!” Macklin shouted over the howling. “That’s the way out!”

“But we can’t survive in that! It’s a tornado!”

“It won’t last much longer! It’ll blow itself out! We made it!” He started to cry, but he remembered that discipline and control made the man. He had no conception of time, no idea how long it had been since he’d first seen those bogies on the radar scope. It must be night, but the night of which day he didn’t know.

His mind drifted toward the people who were still down in Earth House, either dead or insane or lost in the dark. He thought of all the men who’d followed him into this job, who’d had faith in him and respected him. His mouth twitched into a crooked grin. It’s crazy! he thought. All those experienced soldiers and loyal officers lost, and just this skinny kid with bad eyes left to go on at his side. What a joke! All that remained of Macklin’s army was one puny-looking high school geek!

But he recalled how Roland had rationalized putting the civilians to work, how he’d calmly done the job down in that awful pit where Macklin’s hand remained. The kid had guts. More than guts; something about Roland Croninger made Macklin a little uneasy, like knowing a deadly little thing was hiding beneath a flat rock you had to step over. It had been in the kid’s eyes when Roland had told him about Schorr waylaying him in the cafeteria, and in his voice when Roland had said, “We’ve got hands.” Macklin knew one thing for sure: He’d rather have the kid at his side than at his back.

“We’ll get out when the storm’s over!” Macklin shouted. “We’re going to live!” And then tears did come to his eyes, but he laughed so the kid wouldn’t know it.

A cold hand touched his shoulder. Macklin’s laughter stopped.

The Shadow Soldier’s voice was very close to his ear. “Right, Jimbo. We’re going to live.”

Roland shivered. The wind was cold, and he pushed his body against the King’s for warmth. The King hesitated-and then laid his handless arm across Roland’s shoulder.

Sooner or later the storm would stop, Roland knew. The world would wait. But it would be a different world. A different game. He knew it would be nothing like the one that had just ended. In the new game, the possibilities for a King’s Knight might be endless.

He didn’t know where they would go, or what they would do; he didn’t know how much remained of the old world-but even if all the cities had been nuked, there must be packs of survivors, roaming the wastelands or huddled in basements, waiting. Waiting for a new leader. Waiting for someone strong enough to bend them to his will and make them dance in the new game that had already begun.

Yes. It would be the greatest game of King’s Knight ever. The game board would stretch across ruined cities, ghost towns, blackened forests and deserts where meadows used to be. Roland would learn the rules as he went along, just like everybody else. But he was already one step ahead, because he recognized that there was great power to be grabbed up by the smartest and strongest. Grabbed up and used like a holy axe, poised over the heads of the weak.

And maybe-just maybe-his would be the hand that held it. Alongside the King, of course.

He listened to the roar of the wind and imagined that it spoke his name in a mighty voice and carried that name over the devastated land like a promise of power yet to be.

He smiled in the dark, his face splattered with the blood of the man he’d shot, and waited for the future.

Wheel of Fortune Turning

Black Circle /

The Hurting Sound /

Strange New Flower /

Tupperware Bowls /

Big fist a-Knockin’ /

Citizen of the World /

Paper and Paints/

Twenty-Seven - [Wheel of Fortune

Turning]

Sheets of freezing rain the color of nicotine swirled over the ruins of East Hanover, New Jersey, driven before sixty-mile-an-hour winds. The storm hung filthy icicles from sagging roofs and crumbling walls, broke leafless trees and glazed all surfaces with contaminated ice.

The house that sheltered Sister, Artie Wisco, Beth Phelps, Julia Castillo and Doyle Halland trembled on its foundations. For the third day since the storm had hit they huddled before the fire, which boomed and leapt as wind shot down the chimney. Almost all the furniture was gone, broken up and fed to the flames in return for life-sustaining heat. Every so often they heard the walls pop and crack over the incessant shriek of the wind, and Sister flinched, thinking that at any minute the entire flimsy house would go up like cardboard-but the little bastard was tough and hung together. They heard noises like trees toppling, and Sister realized it must be the sound of other houses blowing apart around them and scattering before the storm. Sister asked Doyle Halland to lead them in prayer, but he looked at her through bitter eyes and crawled into a corner to smoke the last cigarette and stare grimly at the fire.

They were out of food and had nothing more to drink. Beth Phelps had begun to cough up blood, fever glistening in her eyes. As the fire ebbed Beth’s body grew hotter-and, admit it or not, the others sat closer around her to absorb the warmth.

Beth leaned her head against Sister’s shoulder. “Sister?” she asked, in a soft, exhausted voice. “Can I… can I hold it? Please?”

Sister knew what she meant. The glass thing. She took it from her bag, and the jewels glowed in the low orange firelight. Sister looked into its depths for a few seconds, remembering her experience of dreamwalking across a barren field strewn with burned cornstalks. It had seemed so real! What is this thing? she wondered. And why do I have it? She put the glass ring into Beth’s hands. The others were watching, the reflection of the jewels scattered across their faces like the rainbow lamps of a faraway paradise.

Beth clutched it to her. She stared into the ring and whispered, “I’m thirsty. I’m so very, very thirsty.” Then she was silent, just holding the glass and staring, with the colors slowly pulsating.

“There’s nothing left to drink,” Sister replied. “I’m sorry.”

Beth didn’t answer. The storm made the house shake for a few seconds. Sister felt someone staring a hole through her, and she looked up at Doyle Halland. He was sitting a few feet away, his legs outstretched toward the fire and the sliver through his thigh catching a glint of light.

“That’s going to have to come out sooner or later,” Sister told him. “Ever heard of gangrene?”

“It’ll keep,” he said, and his attention drifted to the circle of glass.

“Oh,” Beth whispered dreamily. Her body shivered, and then she said, “Did you see it? It was there. Did you see it?”

“See what?” Artie asked.

“The stream. Flowing between my fingers. I was thirsty, and I drank. Didn’t anybody else see it?”

The fever’s got her, Sister thought. Or maybe… maybe she had gone dreamwalking, too.

“I put my hands in,” Beth continued, “and it was so cool. So cool. Oh, there’s a wonderful place inside that glass…”

“My God!” Artie said suddenly. “Listen, I… I didn’t say anything before, because I thought I was going nuts. But…” He looked around at all of them, finally stopped at Sister. “I want to tell you about something I saw, when I looked into that thing.” He told them about the picnic with his wife. “It was weird! I mean, it was so real I could taste what I’d eaten after I came back. My stomach was full, and I wasn’t hungry anymore!”

Sister nodded, listening intently. “Well,” she said, “let me tell you where I went when I looked into it.” When she was finished, the others remained silent. Julia Castillo was watching Sister, her head cocked to one side; she couldn’t understand a word that was being said, but she saw them all looking at the glass thing, and she knew what they were discussing.

“My experience was pretty real, too,” Sister went on. “I don’t know what it means. Most likely it doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it’s a picture that just floated out of my head, I don’t know.”

“The stream is real,” Beth said. “I know it is. I can feel it, and I can taste it.”

“That food filled my belly,” Artie told them. “It kept me from being hungry for a while. And what about being able to talk to her”-he motioned toward Julia-“with that thing? I mean, that’s damned strange, isn’t it?”

“This is something very special. I know it is. It gives you what you want when you need it. Maybe it’s…” Beth straightened up and peered into Sister’s eyes. Sister felt the fever rolling off her in waves. “Maybe it is magic. A kind of magic that’s never been before. Maybe… maybe the blast made it magic. Something with the radiation, or s-”

Doyle Halland laughed. They all jumped, startled by the harshness of that laugh, and looked at him. He grinned in the firelight. “This is about the craziest thing I’ve ever heard in my life, folks! Magic! Maybe the blast made it magic!” He shook his head. “Come on! It’s just a piece of glass with some jewels stuck in it. Yes, it’s pretty. Okay. Maybe it’s sensitive, like a tuning fork or something. But I say it hypnotizes you. I say the colors do something to your mind; maybe they trigger the pictures in your mind, and you think you’re eating a picnic lunch, or drinking from a stream, or walking on a burned-up field.”

“What about my being able to understand Spanish, and her understanding English?” Sister asked him. “That’s a hell of a hypnosis, isn’t it?”

“Ever heard of mass hypnosis?” he asked pointedly. “This thing comes under the same heading as bleeding statues, visions and faith-healing. Everybody wants to believe, so it comes true. Listen, I know. I’ve seen a wooden door that a hundred people swear holds a picture of Jesus in the grain. I’ve seen a window glass that a whole block sees as an image of the Virgin Mary-and do you know what it was? A mistake. An imperfection in the glass, that’s all. There’s nothing magic about a mistake. People see what they want to see, and they hear what they want to hear.”

“You don’t want to believe,” Artie countered defiantly. “Why? Are you afraid?”

“No, I’m just a realist. I think, instead of jabbering about a piece of junk, we ought to be finding some more wood for that fire before it goes out.”

Sister glanced at it. The flames were gnawing away the last of a broken chair. She gently took the glass ring back from Beth; it was hot from the other woman’s palms. Maybe the colors and pulsations did trigger pictures in the mind, she thought. She was suddenly reminded of an object from a distant childhood: a glass ball filled with black ink, made to look like a pool-table eight-ball. You were supposed to make a wish, think about it real hard,’ and then turn it upside down. At the bottom of the eight-ball a little white polyhedron surfaced with different things written on each side, such as Your Wish Will Be Granted, It’s a Certainty, It Appears Doubtful, and the aggravating Ask Again Later. They were all-purpose answers to the questions of a child who desperately wanted to believe in magic; you could make whatever you wanted to out of those answers. And maybe this was what the glass thing was, too: a cryptic eight-ball that made you see what you wanted to see. Still, she thought, she’d had no desire to go dreamwalking across a burned prairie. The image had just appeared and carried her along. So what was this thing-cryptic eight-ball or doorway to dreams?

Dream food and dream water might be good enough to soothe desire for such things, Sister knew, but they needed the real stuff. Plus wood for that fire. And the only place to get any of that was outside, in one of the other houses. She put the glass thing back into her bag. “I’ve got to go out,” she said. “Maybe I can find us some food and something to drink in the next house. Artie, will you go with me? You can help me break up a chair or whatever for some more wood. Okay?”

He nodded. “Okay. I’m not afraid of a little wind and rain.”

Sister looked at Doyle Halland. His gaze skittered up from the Gucci bag. “How about you? Will you go with us?”

Halland shrugged. “Why not? But if you and he go in one direction, I ought to go in another. I can look through the house to the right, if you go to the one on the left.”

“Right. Good idea.” She stood up. “We need to find some sheets that we can wrap wood and stuff up in to carry it. I think we’d be safer crawling than walking. If we stay close to the ground, maybe the wind won’t be so bad.”

Artie and Halland found sheets and clutched them under their arms to keep them from opening like parachutes in the wind. Sister made Beth comfortable and motioned for Julia to stay with her.

“Be careful,” Beth said. “It doesn’t sound too nice out there.”

“We’ll be back,” Sister promised, and she went across the room to the front door-which was about the only wooden thing that hadn’t gone into the fire. She pushed against the door, and immediately the room was full of cold, spinning wind and icy rain. Sister dropped to her knees and crawled out onto the slick porch, holding her leather bag. The light was the color of graveyard dirt, and the wind-blasted houses around them were as crooked as neglected tombstones. Followed closely by Artie, Sister began to crawl slowly down the front steps to the frosted-over lawn. She looked back, squinting against the stinging whipstrike of ice, and saw Doyle Halland inching toward the house on the right, drawing his injured leg carefully after him.

It took them almost ten freezing minutes to reach the next house. The roof had been torn almost off, and ice coated everything. Artie went to work, finding a crevice in which to tie the sheet into a bag and then gathering up the shards of timbers that lay everywhere. In the remains of the kitchen, Sister slipped on ice and fell hard on her rear end. But she found some cans of vegetables in the pantry, some frozen apples, onions and potatoes, and in the refrigerator some rock-hard TV dinners. All that could be stuffed into her bag went in, and by that time her hands were stiff claws. Lugging her bundle of booty, she found Artie with a bulging sheet-bagful of bits and pieces of wood. “You ready?” she shouted against the wind, and he nodded that he was.

The trip back was more treacherous, because they were holding their treasures so tightly. The wind thrust against them, even though they crawled on their bellies, and Sister thought that if she didn’t get to a fire soon her hands and face would fall off.

Slowly they covered the territory between houses. There was no sign of Doyle Halland, and Sister knew that if he’d fallen and hurt himself he could freeze to death; if he didn’t return in five minutes, she’d have to go looking for him. They crawled up the ice-coated steps to the front porch and through the door into the blessed warmth.

When Artie was in, Sister pushed the door shut and latched it. The wind beat and howled outside like something monstrous deprived of playthings. A skin of ice had begun to melt from Sister’s face, and little icicles dangled from Artie’s earlobes.

“We made it!” Artie’s jaws were stiff with cold. “We got some-”

He stopped speaking. He was staring past Sister, and his eyes with their icy lashes were widening in horror.

Sister whirled around.

She went cold. Colder than she’d been in the storm.

Beth Phelps was lying on her back before the guttering fire. Her eyes were open, and a pool of blood was spreading around her head. There was a hideous wound in her temple, as if a knife had been driven right through her brain. One hand was upraised, frozen in the air.

“Oh… Jesus.” Artie’s hand pressed to his mouth.

In a corner of the room Julia Castillo lay curled up and contorted. Between her sightless eyes there was a similar wound, and blood had sprayed like a Chinese fan over the wall behind her.

Sister clenched her teeth to trap a scream.

And then a figure stirred, in a corner beyond the fire’s fault glow.

“Come in,” Doyle Halland said. “Excuse the mess.”

He stood to his full height, his eyes catching a glint of orange light like the reflecting pupils of a cat. “Got your goodies, didn’t you?” His voice was lazy, the voice of a man who’d stuffed himself at dinner but couldn’t refuse dessert. “I got mine, too.”

“My God… my God, what’s happened here?” Artie held onto Sister’s arm for support.

Doyle Halland lifted a finger into the air and slowly aimed it at Sister. “I remembered you,” he said softly. “You were the woman who came into the theater. The woman with the necklace. See, I met a friend of yours back in the city. He was a policeman. I ran into him while I was wandering.” Sister saw his teeth gleam as he grinned, and her knees almost buckled. “We had a nice chat.”

Jack Tomachek. Jack Tomachek couldn’t go through the Holland Tunnel. He’d turned back, and somewhere in the ruins he’d come face to face with-

“He told me some others had gotten out,” Doyle Halland continued. “He said one of them was a woman, and do you know what he remembered most about her? That she had a wound on her neck, in the shape of… well, you know. He told me she was leading a group of people west.” His hand with the extended finger jiggled back and forth. “Naughty, naughty. No fair sneaking when my back’s turned.”

“You killed them.” Her voice quavered.

“I freed them. One of them was dying, and the other was half dead. What did they have to hope for? I mean, really?”