Swan Song (85 page)

Robin retreated. The door was unbolted and shoved upward about eight inches.

“Throw it out! The cup! Throw the damned thing out!”

A bloody tin cup was slid through the opening. The sergeant picked it up, felt the ragged metal edge and tasted the blood to make sure it was real. It was. “Damn it!” he raged, and he pushed the door up the rest of the way.

Robin stood at the back of the truck, away from the door. Curled on the floor near him was the body of Josh Hutchins, lying on his right side with his face averted. Sergeant Shit-pants climbed into the truck, his gun aimed at Robin’s head. The guard with the rifle climbed up as well, and the third man stayed on the ground with his pistol unholstered and ready. “Stay back and keep both hands up!” Sergeant Shitpants warned Robin as he approached the black man’s body.

Blood gleamed on the floor. The sergeant saw blood all over the black man’s clothes, and he reached down to touch one outthrust wrist; his own fingers came away bloody. “Jesus!” he said, realizing he was tailbone deep in trouble. He holstered his.45 and tried to turn the man over, but Josh was way too heavy for him. “Help me move him!” he told Robin, and the boy bent down to grasp Josh’s other arm.

Josh gave a low, guttural groan.

And two things happened at once: Robin picked up the bucket of waste lying beside Josh’s arm and hurled its contents into the face of the guard with the rifle, and Josh’s body came to life, his right fist smashing into Sergeant Shitpants’ jaw and snapping it crooked. The man gave a scream as his teeth tore into his tongue, and then Josh was wrenching the.45 out of its holster.

The blinded guard fired his rifle, and the bullet sang past Robin’s head as the boy lunged at him, grabbing the rifle and kicking him in the groin. The third soldier fired at Josh, but the bullet hit Sergeant Shitpants in the back and drove him into Josh like a shield. Josh wiped the blood out of his eyes and shot at the soldier, but the man was already running through the rain shouting for help.

Robin kicked the guard again, tumbling him out of the truck to the ground. Josh knew they would only have a minute or so before the place was swarming with soldiers, and he started digging through Sergeant Shitpants’ pockets, looking for the truck’s key. Blood was streaming down his face from three slashes across his forehead, inflicted with the ragged edge of metal; he’d smeared his wrists with blood and gotten it all over his clothes to make it appear as if he’d cut his veins. In the wrestling ring, a small sliver of razor blade hidden in a bandage had often been drawn across the forehead to create a superficial but nasty-looking wound, and in this case the gore was needed for a similarly theatrical purpose.

Two soldiers were running toward the truck. Robin took aim and shot one of them down, but the other fell onto his stomach and crawled under a trailer. Josh couldn’t find a key. “Look in the ignition!” he shouted, and he fired shots at random as Robin jumped to the ground and ran around to the truck’s cab.

He opened the door and reached up to the dashboard, his fingers searching. There was no key in the ignition.

The soldier under the trailer squeezed off two shots that ricocheted dangerously around Josh, who flung himself flat. Another soldier opened up with an automatic rifle, over to the left. The air turned hot above Josh’s head, and he heard bullets whack off the inside of the truck like hammers beating garbage can lids.

Robin searched under the seat and found nothing but empty cartridges. He opened the glove compartment. There! Inside was a tarnished key and a snub-nose.38. He fit the key into the ignition, turned it and jammed his foot down on the accelerator. The engine coughed and racketed, then roared to Me, the entire truck quaking. He gaped at the gearshift. Shit! he thought; one thing he’d forgotten to tell Josh while they were planning their escape was that his experience in driving had been very limited. Still, he knew you had to press the clutch down to engage the gears. He did, and he forced the gearshift into first over the transmission’s objections. Then he put his foot to the floor on the accelerator and let up suddenly on the clutch.

The truck shot forward as if it were rocket-powered. Josh was propelled to the edge of the truck’s bed, and he kept himself from flying out by grabbing the upraised track of metal on which the door slid up and down.

Robin jammed the gearshift into second. The truck bucked like a wild stallion as it tore through the encampment, grazing a parked car and scattering a half-dozen soldiers who had been alerted by the noise. A bullet shattered the windshield and sent wasps of glass flying around Robin’s head and face, but he shielded his eyes and kept going.

Robin shifted upward as the truck gained speed. Glass glittered in his tangled hair like wet diamonds. He reached over for the.38, popped its cylinder open and found it held four bullets. He veered past another parked vehicle, almost crashed into a trailer, and then the truck was out on the open road, speeding away from the camp. Just ahead was the turnoff to the right that Robin knew must lead up the side of Warwick Mountain; he could see the tracks of the Jeeps’ tires in the mud as he slowed the truck enough to take the sharp turn. In the rear of the truck, Josh lost his grip and was battered against the opposite wall with bone-jarring force, and it occurred to him that this was surely going to be a day to remember.

But they had to reach Sister and Swan before the final hour-whatever and whenever that was. Robin was driving like hell up the mountain road, the tires skidding back and forth, the truck careening from one side of the road to the other. Josh hung on as best he could, and he saw sparks fly as the truck grazed the right-hand guard rail. A plate of concrete suddenly slipped out from under the rear tires, and the wheel tore itself from Robin’s hands. The truck hurtled toward the cliff’s edge.

He threw all his weight against the wheel to twist it around, his foot fighting the brake. The tires threw up plumes of mud, and the front fender dented the guard rail about six inches before the truck came to a stop.

Then he felt the tires starting to slide back over the broken concrete, mud and snow. He pulled up the emergency brake, but there was no traction to lock the tires. The truck slid in reverse, quickly gathering speed as Robin tried to jam the gearshift into first again. But he knew it was the end of the line; he opened the door, shouted “Jump!” and did so.

Josh didn’t wait to be told twice. He jumped from the rear of the truck, hit the mud and rolled aside as the vehicle fishtailed past him.

It kept going, the front of the truck sliding around as if the vehicle was trying to spin in a circle-and then a Jeep carrying five Army of Excellence soldiers suddenly veered around the curve, heading uphill and going too fast to stop.

Josh saw the expression of stark terror on the driver’s face; the soldier instinctively threw up his arms as if to hold back metal with muscle and bone. The runaway truck and the Jeep crashed together, and the truck’s weight shoved the smaller vehicle through the guard rail and followed it over the cliff’s edge like an anvil. Josh looked over the rail in time to see human bodies tumbling through space; there was a chorus of high screams, and then the bodies disappeared in the ravine, and either the Jeep or truck exploded in a burst of flame and black smoke.

Josh and Robin had no time to ponder how close they’d come to taking a one-way flight. Josh still gripped the automatic in his hand, and Robin had the.38 with four bullets in it. They would have to go the rest of the way on foot, and they had to hurry. Josh took the lead, his boots skidding over the tortured surface, and Robin followed him upward toward the realm of God.

Ninety-Two - [Prayer For the Final

Hour]

In the aftermath of the slap, Friend curled his hand into the man’s collar, drawing him close. ‘God’ wore the dirty rags of a blue-checked shirt and khaki trousers under his coat. On his feet were leather moccasins, and he wore emerald-green socks. Sister realized that the unkempt, wild-eyed man would have fit right in among the street people of Manhattan before the seventeenth of July.

“I could hurt you,” Friend whispered. “Oh, you don’t know how I could hurt-”

The man gathered a mouthful of saliva and spat in Friend’s waxy face.

Friend threw him to the ground and kicked him in the ribs. The man curled up, trying to protect himself, but Friend kept kicking him in a frenzy. He grasped ‘God’ by the hair and slammed his fist into the man’s face, breaking his nose and splitting his lower lip open; then he hauled ‘God’ up again and held him for the others to see.

“Look at him!” Friend crowed. “Here’s your God! He’s a crazy old man who’s got shit for brains! Go on, look at him!” He grasped the man’s beard and angled his bloody face toward Swan and Sister. “He’s nothing!” And as emphasis, Friend drove his fist deep into the man’s belly but held him upright even as his knees buckled. Friend started to strike him again-and a calm, clear voice said, “Leave him alone.”

Friend hesitated. Swan was standing up in the second Jeep, the rain running through her hair and across her face. She couldn’t bear to watch the old man being beaten, and she couldn’t sit in silence. “Let him go,” she said, and the man with the scarlet eye grinned incredulously. “You heard me. Take your hand off him.”

“I’ll do as I please!” he roared, and he laid his fingers alongside the man’s cheek. His nails began to tear through the skin. “I’ll kill him if I want!”

“No!” Roland protested. “Don’t kill him! I mean… we’ve got to find the black box and the silver key! That’s what we came here for! Then you can kill him!”

“You don’t tell me what to do!” Friend shouted. “It’s my party!” He shot a challenging glare at Colonel Macklin, who did nothing but sit and stare blankly ahead. Then Friend’s gaze met Swan’s, and their eyes locked.

For a second he thought he could see himself through her unflinching eyes: an ugly, hateful thing, a small face hidden behind an oversized Halloween mask like a cancer under gauze. She knows me, he thought; that fact made him afraid, just as he’d feared the glass ring when it went black in his grip.

And something else speared him, too. His memory of the offered apple, and his desire to accept it. Too late! Too late! He saw, just for an instant, who and what he was-and in that brief space of time he knew himself, too, in a way that he’d shoved aside a long, long time before. Self-loathing uncoiled within him, and suddenly he feared that he was going to see too much, and he would start to split at the seams, unravel like an old suit and blow away in the wind.

“Don’t look at me!” he screamed, his voice shrill, and he lifted one hand to shield his face from hers. Behind his hand, his features churned like muddy water disturbed by a stone.

He could still feel her there, drawing the strength out of him like the sunlight drawing the wet from rotten timber. He flung ‘God’ to the ground, backed away and kept his face averted. Now the truth was coming back to him: It was not himself he should loathe, it was her! She was the ruin and enemy of all creation, because she-

Too late! Too late! he thought, still backing away.

-because she wanted to prolong the suffering and misery of humankind. She wanted to give them false hope and watch them writhe when it was wrenched away. She was-

Too late! Too late!

-the worst kind of Evil, because she masked cruelty with kindness and love with hate, and too late! too late! too-

“Late,” he whispered, and he lowered his hand. He’d stopped retreating, and he realized then that Swan had gotten out of the Jeep and was standing over the gray-bearded old man. He saw the others watching, and he caught a thin, mocking smile on Macklin’s skull of a face.

“Stand up,” Swan told the old man. Her spine was rigid, her bearing proud, but inside her nerves were knotted with tension.

‘God’ blinked at her, wiped the blood from his nostrils and looked fearfully at the man who’d struck him.

“It’s all right,” Swan said, and she offered him her hand.

She’s just a girl! Friend realized. She’s not even worth a rape! And she’d like me to rape her, too, she’d like me to stick it in hard and grind up to my ankles!

‘God’ hesitated uncertainly-and then he put his hand into Swan’s.

I’ll rape her, Friend decided. I’ll show her it’s still my party! I’ll show her right fucking now!

He advanced on her like a juggernaut, and every step he took made his crotch bulge larger. He was leering, and she saw that leer and knew what was behind it, and she waited for him without moving.

The hollow, booming echo of an explosion drifted from the distance. Friend stopped in his tracks. “What was that?” he shouted, to everyone and no one. “What was that?”

“Came from the road,” one of the soldiers said.

“Well, don’t sit there! Get off your ass and find out what it was! All of you! Go!”

The three soldiers left the Jeeps and ran across the parking lot. They disappeared around the heavily wooded bend, their weapons ready.

But Friend’s weapon was shriveling. He could not look at the bitch without thinking of the apple, and he knew she’d planted some kind of evil, soul-destroying seed right in him, too. But it was still his party, and it was too late for turning back, and he would rape her and crush her skull when she was eighty years old and her fingers were worked to the bones.

But not today. Not today.

He aimed his machine gun at Sister. “Get out. You stand over there with the little bitch.”

Swan let her breath out. His attention was on other things now, but he was still as dangerous as a mad dog in a butcher’s shop. She helped the old man to his feet. He staggered, still hurting from the blow that had shattered his nose, and looked around at the malformed faces of Macklin and Roland. “It is the final hour, isn’t it?” he asked Swan. “Evil’s won. It’s time for the final prayer, isn’t it?”

She couldn’t answer. He touched her cheek with spavined fingers. “Child? What’s your name?”

“Swan.”

He repeated it. “So young,” he said sadly. “So young to have to die.”

Roland got out of his Jeep, but Macklin stayed where he was, his shoulders stooped now that Friend was in control again. “Who are you?” Roland asked the old man. “What are you doing up here?”

“I’m God. I fell to earth from Heaven. We landed in water. The other one lived for a while, but I couldn’t heal him. Then I found my way here, because I know this place.”

“What’s your power source?”

‘God’ extended a finger and pointed to the earth at his feet.

“Underground?” Roland asked. “Where? In the coal mine?”

‘God’ didn’t reply but instead lifted his face toward the sky and let the rain beat down.

Roland drew his pistol from the holster at his waist, cocked it and placed it to the man’s head. “You answer when I ask you a question, you old fuck! Where’s that power coming from?”

The man’s insane eyes met Roland’s. “All right,” he said, and he nodded. “A-OK. I’ll show you, if you want to see.”

“We do.”

“I’m sorry, child,” he told Swan. “Evil’s won, and it’s time for the final prayer. You do understand, don’t you?”

“Evil hasn’t won! Not everybody is like they are!”

“It’s the final hour, child. I fell from Heaven in a whirlwind of fire. I knew what had to be done, but I waited. I couldn’t make myself pray the last prayer. But now I can, because I see that the world has to be cleansed.” He said to the others, “Follow me,” and he started walking toward the large building with the metal roof.

“Colonel?” Friend prompted. “We’re waiting for you.”

“I’ll stay here.”

“You’ll come with us.” Friend swung the machine gun’s barrel up at him. “Roland, take the colonel’s pistol away from him, please.”

“Yes, sir,” Roland answered at once, and he approached Macklin. He held out his hand for the other man’s weapon.

Colonel Macklin didn’t move. The rain was falling harder, hammering on the Jeeps and streaming down Macklin’s face.

“Roland,” Macklin said in a strengthless voice, “we created the Army of Excellence together. Both of us. We’re the ones who made plans for the new America, not… not that thing over there.” He motioned toward Friend with his nail-studded right hand. “He just wants to destroy it all. He doesn’t care about the Army of Excellence, or the new America, or feeding the troops. He doesn’t care about the girl; all he wants to do is put her on that prison farm, out of his way. And he doesn’t care about you, either. Roland… please… don’t follow him. Don’t do what he says.” He reached out to touch Roland, but the young man stepped back. “Roland… I’m afraid,” Macklin whispered.

“Give me your gun.” In that moment Roland despised the cringing dog who sat before him; he’d seen that weakness before, back when Macklin was delirious after his hand had been amputated, but now Roland knew the weakness went soul-deep. Macklin had never been a King, only a coward hiding behind a warrior’s mask. Roland pressed the barrel of his own weapon against the colonel’s head. “Give me your gun,” he repeated.

“Please… think about what we’ve been through… you and me, together…”

“I have a new King now,” Roland said flatly. He looked at Friend. “Should I kill him?”

“If you like.”

Roland’s finger tightened on the trigger.

Macklin knew death was very near, and its oily perfume energized him to action. His spine stiffened, and he sat up ramrod-straight. “Who do you think you are?” he said vehemently. “You’re nothing! I was fighting for my life in a Viet Cong POW camp when you were shitting your diapers! I’m Colonel James B. Macklin, United States Air Force! I fought for my life and for my country, boy! Now you get that fucking gun away from my head!”

Roland faltered.

“Did you hear what I said, mister? If you want my weapon, you ask for it with the respect I deserve!” Every muscle in his body tightened as he waited for the gun to go off.

Still Roland didn’t move. Friend laughed quietly, and ‘God’ was waiting for them about ten yards beyond Swan and Sister.

Slowly, Roland took the pistol away from Macklin’s head. “Give… me your gun… sir,” he said.

Macklin removed it from his holster and flung it to the ground, and then he stood up and got out of the Jeep-but unhurriedly, at his own pace.

“Let’s go, kiddies,” Friend said. He motioned toward Swan and Sister with the machine gun, and they followed ‘God’ to the metal-roofed building.

Inside, it was apparent that the building was nothing more than a huge shed protecting the entrance to the Warwick Mountain coal mine. The floor was of hard-packed dirt, and a few naked light bulbs that hung from the ceiling gave off a dirty yellow illumination. Bundles of cables and wires lay around, as well as old pieces of steel track, piles of rotting timber and other bits of refuse that suggested Warwick Mountain had once boasted a thriving coal business. A steel stairway ascended to a series of catwalks, and at the far end of the building, where the structure abutted Warwick Mountain, was the dark square of the mine’s entrance.

‘God’ led them up the stairway and along one of the catwalks to the mine shaft. A few light bulbs gave off a meager yellow glow within the mine, which slanted downward at a steep angle. Resting on tracks inside the shaft was a large wire mesh cage about six feet high and four feet wide, its wheels like those of a railroad car. Inside it were padded benches and straps to hold the riders in place. ‘God’ opened the rear of the cage and waited for them to enter it.

“I’m not getting in that damned thing!” Sister balked. “Where are you taking us?”

“Down there.” ‘God’ pointed along the mine shaft, and the yellow light winked off something metallic in the sleeve of his blue-checked shirt. Sister realized the old man was wearing cuff links. He looked at Friend. “Isn’t that where you want to go?”

“What’s in there?” Roland asked, all his bluff and bluster gone.

“The power source you’re looking for. And other things you might be interested in seeing. Do you want to go or not?”

“You get in first,” Friend told him.

“A-OK.” ‘God’ turned toward the rock wall, where there was a panel with two buttons on it, one red and the other green. He punched the green button, and the sound of humming machinery echoed up the shaft. Then he climbed into the cage, sat down on one of the benches and buckled himself in. “All aboard!” he said cheerfully. “We’ll start moving in ten seconds.”

Friend was the last one in. He crouched at the rear of the cage, his face averted from Swan’s. The machinery got steadily louder, and then there were four clicks as the brakes on each wheel disengaged. The cage began to descend along the tracks, its speed restrained by a steel cable that had snapped taut and was reeling out behind it.

“We’re going down more than three hundred feet,” ‘God’ explained. “This used to be a working mine about thirty years ago. Then the United States government bought it. Of course, all this rock is reinforced with concrete and steel.” He waved his arm at the walls and roof, and Sister saw the cuff link glitter again. Only this time she was close enough to see that it looked very familiar, and it had writing on it. “You’d be amazed to know what the engineers can do,” he continued. “They put in ventilation ducts and air pumps, and even the light bulbs are supposed to last for seven or eight years. But they’re starting to burn out now. Some of the same people who put this place together worked on Disney World.”