Swan Song (86 page)

Sister caught his sleeve and looked closer at the cuff link.

On it was a very recognizable blue, white and gold emblem, and the much-polished lettering said: Seal of the President of the United States of America.

Her fingers had gone numb, and she let his arm go. He stared impassively at her. “What’s… down in here?” she asked him.

“Talons,” he said. “The talons of Heaven.” They went through a long area where there were burned-out light bulbs, and when they approached the illumination again, the President’s eyes burned with inner fever as he stared across the cage at Friend. “You want to see a power source?” he asked, his breath wisping out in the chilly air. “You will. Oh, yes; I promise you will.”

In another minute the brakes engaged again and shrieked along the tracks as the conveyance shuddered and slowed. It bumped against a thick foam rubber barrier and stopped.

The President unbuckled his seat belt, opened the front section of the cage and stepped out. “This way,” he said, motioning them on like a demented tour guide.

Roland shoved Swan ahead of him, and they entered a passageway that led off to the right of the tracks. Bulbs burned fitfully overhead, and suddenly the passageway ended at a wall of rough-edged rocks.

“It’s blocked!” Roland said. “It’s a dead end!”

But Friend shook his head; he’d already seen the small black box embedded in the rock wall at about chest height. The upper half of the black box seemed to be some sort of display screen, while the bottom was a keyboard.

The President reached up to his throat with his good hand and lifted off a braided length of leather that had been hanging around his neck. On it were several keys-and the President chose one that was small and silver. He kissed it, and then he started to insert it into a lock in the black box.

“Hold it!” Friend said. “What does that thing do?”

“It opens the door,” the man replied; he fit the key into the lock and twisted it to the left. Instantly, pale green letters appeared on the screen: HELLO! ENTER CODE WITHIN FIVE SECONDS. Swan and Sister watched as the President punched three letters on the keyboard: AOK.

CODE ACCEPTED, the screen replied. HAVE A NICE DAY!

Electric tumblers whirred, and there was the muffled sound of locks opening in rapid-fire succession. The false wall of rock cracked open like the door of a massive vault, hissing on hydraulic hinges. The President pulled it wide enough to admit them, and clean white light glowed from the room beyond. Roland started to reach up for the silver key, but the old man said, “No! Leave that alone! If it’s disturbed while the door’s open, the floor’s electrified.”

Roland’s fingers stopped an inch away from the key.

“You go first.” Friend shoved the man through the opening. Sister and Swan were pushed in. Macklin followed, then Roland and finally the man with the scarlet eye.

They all squinted in the bright light of a white-walled, antiseptic-looking chamber where six mainframe computers quietly conversed, their data tapes slowly turning behind windows of tinted glass. The floor was coated with black rubber, and there was the polite rumble of the air-purifying system drawing cleansed air through small metal grilles in the walls. At the center of the room, sitting atop a rubber-coated table and connected by thick bundles of cables to the mainframe computers, was another small black box with a keyboard, about the size of a telephone.

Roland was delirious at the sight of the machines. It had been so long since he’d seen a computer, he’d forgotten how beautiful they were; to him, the mainframes were the Ferraris of computers, pulsing brain matter squished into sleek plastic and metal skins. He could almost hear them breathing.

“Welcome to my home,” the President said-and then he walked to a metal panel on the wall. There was a small lever that you could fit your finger into and pull upward on, and above it a little red plastic DANGER sign. He hooked his finger into the lever’s notch and wrenched it up.

The door slammed shut, and instantly the electronic locks bolted themselves. On this side of the false wall was a sheet of stainless steel.

Swan and Sister had turned to face him. Friend had his finger on the machine gun’s trigger, and Macklin stood staring numbly at the old man.

“There,” the President said. “There.” He stepped back from the metal panel, nodding with satisfaction.

“Open that door!” Macklin demanded, his flesh crawling. The walls were closing in on him, and this place was too much like Earth House. “I don’t like to be shut up! Get that damned door open!”

“It’s locked,” the other man replied.

“Open it!” Macklin shouted.

“Please open it,” Swan said.

The President shook his gray-maned head. “I’m sorry, child. Once you lock the door from in here, it’s locked for good. I lied about the key. I just didn’t want him to pull it out. See, you can open it from the inside if you have the silver key. But now the computer’s locked it-and there’s no way out.”

“Why?” Sister asked, her eyes wide. “Why’d you lock us in here?”

“Because we’re going to stay here until we die. The talons of Heaven are going to destroy all the evil… every bit of it. The world will be cleansed, and the world can begin again-fresh and new. You see?”

Colonel Macklin attacked the stainless steel door, hammering at it with his good hand. The insulation in the room soaked up the noise like a sponge, and Macklin couldn’t even put a dent in the steel. The door had no handles, nothing to grab hold of. He turned on the old man and charged at him with his deadly right hand upraised for a killing blow.

But before Macklin reached him, Friend stopped the colonel with a short, sharp blow to the throat. Macklin gagged and fell to his knees, his eyes bright with terror.

“No,” Friend said, like an adult chastising a naughty child. Then he lifted his gaze to the old man. “What is this place? What are these machines for, and where’s the power coming from?”

“Those gather information from satellites.” The President motioned toward the mainframes. “I know what space looks like. I’ve looked down on the earth. I used to believe… it was such a good place.” He blinked slowly as the memory of falling through the flaming whirlwind again stirred like a recurrent nightmare. “I fell to earth from Heaven. Yes. I fell. And I came here, because I knew I was close to this place. There were two men here, but they’re not here now. They had food and water, enough to last them for years. I think… one of them died. I don’t know what happened to the other one. He just… went away.” He paused for a moment, and then his mind cleared again. He stared at the black box on the rubber-coated table and approached it reverently. “This,” he said, “will bring down the talons of Heaven.”

“The talons of Heaven? What’s that mean?”

“Talons,” the President said, as if the other man should know. “Tactical Long Range Nuclear Sanitizer. Watch-and listen.” He punched his code into the keyboard: AOK.

The mainframes began to spin their data tapes faster. Roland watched, fascinated.

A woman’s voice-soft and seductive, as cool as balm on an open wound-filtered through speakers in the walls: “Hello, Mr. President. I’m waiting for your instructions.”

The voice reminded Sister of a New York social worker who’d politely explained that there was no more room in the Women’s Shelter on a freezing January night.

The President typed, Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks, the lady of situations.

“Here is the man with three staves, and here the wheel,” the disembodied computer voice answered.

“Wow!” Roland breathed.

And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card

“Which is blank, is something he carries on his back”

The President typed, Which I am forbidden to see.

“What are you doing?” Sister shouted, close to panic. Swan squeezed her hand.

I do not find The Hanged Man, the President typed into the black box.

“Fear death by water,” the feminine voice replied. There was a pause, then: “Talons armed, sir. Ten seconds to abort.”

He pressed two letters on the keyboard: No.

“Initial abort sequence denied. Talons firing procedure activated, sir.” The voice was as cool as the memory of lemonade on a scorching August afternoon. “Talons will be in target range in thirteen minutes and forty-eight seconds.” Then the computer voice was silent.

“What’s happened?” Friend was keenly interested. “What’d you do?”

“In thirteen minutes and forty-eight seconds,” the President said, “two satellites will enter the atmosphere over the North Pole and Antarctica. Those satellites are nuclear missile platforms that will each fire thirty twenty-five-megaton warheads into the ice caps.” He glanced over at Swan and looked quickly away, because her beauty made him yearn. “The blasts will throw the earth off its axis and melt the ice. The world will be cleansed, don’t you see? All the evil will be washed away by the talons of Heaven-and someday things will start over again, and they’ll be good, like they used to be.” His face wrinkled with pain. “We lost the war,” he said. “We lost-and now we have to start all over again.”

“A… Doomsday machine,” Friend whispered, and a grin skittered across his mouth. The grin stretched into a laugh, and the eyes danced with malignant glee. “A Doomsday machine!” he shouted. “Oh, yes! The world must be cleansed! All the Evil must be washed away! Like her!” He pointed a finger at Swan.

“The last of the Good must die with the Evil,” the President replied. “Must die, so the world can be reborn.”

“No… no…” Macklin croaked, clutching at his bruised throat.

Friend laughed, and he directed his attention to Sister, though he really spoke to Swan. “I told you!” he crowed. “I told you I’d make a human hand do the work!”

The cool feminine voice said, “Thirteen minutes to detonation.”

Ninety-Three - [Prayer For the

Final Hour]

Josh and Robin came upon the dead soldier at the broken-open gate, and Josh bent down beside the corpse. Robin heard a hissing, sputtering noise but couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. He reached out to touch the chain link fence.

“No!” Josh said sharply-and Robin’s fingers stopped just short of the metal mesh. “Look at this.” Josh opened the dead man’s right hand, and Robin could see the chain link design burned into the corpse’s flesh.

They went through the opening where the gate had been, while the fence’s broken connections hissed like a nest of vipers. It was raining harder, and gray sheets of water whipped through the dead trees on either side of the road. Both of them were drenched and shivering, and the torn-up surface beneath them alternately gripped their boots in mud and then skidded them over icy patches. They moved as fast as they could, because both of them knew that Swan and Sister were somewhere ahead, at the mercy of the man with the scarlet eye, and they sensed time ticking rapidly toward the final hour.

Coming around a curve, Josh stopped, and Robin heard him say, “Damn it!”

Three soldiers, all but obscured by the rain, were descending the road and heading right at them. Two of them saw Josh and Robin and stopped less than ten yards away; the third kept going a few more steps until he stopped as well and gaped stupidly at the two figures in front of him.

Perhaps four seconds passed, and Josh thought he and the others had frozen into lead-boned statues. He couldn’t figure out what to do-and suddenly the choice was made for him.

Like two bands of rival gunfighters meeting on a street at high noon, they started shooting without taking aim, and the next few seconds were a blur of motion, nerve-frazzling panic and flashes of gunfire as bullets screamed toward their targets.

“Ten minutes to detonation,” the voice announced, and it struck Sister that the woman who’d made that tape was probably long dead.

“Stop it,” Swan said to the scarred man who’d once been the President of the United States. “Please.” Her face was calm but for the rapid beating of a pulse at her temple. “You’re wrong. Evil hasn’t won.”

The President was sitting on the floor, his legs crossed beneath him and his eyes closed. Colonel Macklin had gotten to his feet and was beating weakly at the steel door, while Roland Croninger walked amid the computers, babbling to himself about being a King’s Knight and lovingly running his fingers over the mainframes.

“Evil doesn’t win unless you let it,” Swan said quietly. “People still have a chance. They could bring things back. They could learn to live with what they have. If you let this thing happen-then evil will win.”

He was silent, like a brooding idol. Then he said, with his eyes still closed, “It used to be… such a beautiful world. I know. I saw it from the great dark void, and it was good. I know what it used to be. I know what it is now. Evil will perish in the final hour, child. All the world will be made clean again by the talons of Heaven.”

“Killing everyone won’t make the world clean. It’ll just make you part of the Evil.”

The President didn’t move or speak. Finally, his mouth opened to say something, but then it closed again, as it the thought had submerged itself.

“Nine minutes to detonation,” the voice of a dead woman said.

“Please stop it.” Swan knelt beside the man. Her heart was pounding, and the cold claws of panic gripped the back of her neck. But she could also feel the man with the scarlet eye watching her, and she knew she must not give him the satisfaction of seeing her break. “There are people outside who want to live. Please”-she touched the thin shoulder of his withered arm-“please give them the chance.”

His eyes opened.

“People can tell the difference between Good and Evil,” Swan said. “Machines can’t. Don’t let these machines make the decision, because it’s going to be the wrong one. If you can… please stop the machines.”

He was silent, staring at her with dead, hopeless eyes.

“Can you?” she asked him.

He closed his eyes. Opened them again, and stared into hers. He nodded.

“How?”

“Codeword,” he answered. “Codeword… ends the prayer. But… Evil must be destroyed. The world must be cleansed. Codeword can stop the detonation… but I won’t speak it, because the talons of Heaven must be released. I won’t speak it. I can’t.”

“You can. If you don’t want to be part of the Evil, you have to.”

His face seemed to be contorted from within by currents of pressure. For an instant Swan saw a flicker of light in the dark craters of his eyes and thought he was going to stand up, go to that keyboard and type in the codeword-but then the light died, and he was insane again. “I can’t,” he said, “Not even… for someone as beautiful as you.”

The computer voice said: “Eight minutes to detonation.”

Across the room, Friend waited for Swan to crack.

“The power source,” Roland said, part of his mind comprehending what was about to happen and shunting it aside, another part repeating over and over that he was a King’s Knight and that he had finally, at long last, come to the end of an arduous journey. But he was with the true King, and he was happy. “Where’s the power source for all this?”

The President stood up. “I’ll show you.” He motioned toward another door on the far side of the chamber. It was unlocked, and he led Roland through. As the door opened Swan heard the roaring sound of water, and she went through to see what lay beyond it.

A passageway led to a concrete platform with a waist-high metal railing, which stood about twenty feet over an underground river. The water rushed from a tunnel along a concrete-lined spillway, dropped off a sloping embankment and turned a large electric turbine before it streamed away through another tunnel cut into solid rock. The turbine was connected by a network of cables to two electric generators that hummed with power, and the air smelled of ozone.

“Seven minutes to detonation,” the voice echoed from the other chamber.

Roland leaned over the railing and watched the turbine going around. He could hear the crackling of power through the cables, and he knew that the underground river supplied an inexhaustible source of electricity-plenty to drive the computers, the lights and the electric fence.

“The miners found this river a long time ago,” the President said. “That’s why the complex was built here.” He cocked his head, listening to the river’s noise. “It sounds so clean, doesn’t it? I knew it was here. I remembered, after I fell from Heaven. Fear death by water.” He nodded, lost in his memories. “Yes. Fear death by water.”

Swan was about to ask him to type in the codeword again-but she saw his blank expression, and she knew it was useless. There was a movement from the corner of her eye, and the grinning monster in a human mask came through the doorway onto the platform.

“God?” Friend called, and the President turned from the railing. “There’s no other way to stop the satellites, is there? You’re the only one who could-if you wanted to. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” Friend lifted the machine gun and fired a burst of bullets, the sound deafening in the cavernlike room. The slugs marched up the President’s stomach and chest and knocked him back against the railing, where he clawed at the air and danced to the gun’s deadly rhythm. As Swan put her hands to her ears she saw the bullets slam into the man’s head and knock him off his feet. He toppled over the railing as Roland Croninger gave a scream of hysterical laughter. The machine gun choked on an empty clip, and the President hit the water and was swept into the tunnel and out of sight.

“Bang bang!” Roland shouted merrily, leaning over the blood-spattered railing. “Bang bang!”

Tears burned Swan’s eyes. He was gone, and so was the last hope of halting the prayer for the final hour.

The man with the scarlet eye tossed the useless weapon over the railing into the water and left the platform.

“Six minutes to detonation,” the voice echoed.

“Keep your head down!” Josh shouted. A bullet had just ricocheted off the tree Robin crouched behind. Josh fired across the road at the other two soldiers, but his shot went wild. The third soldier lay on the road, writhing in pain, his hands clenched around a stomach wound.

Josh could hardly see anything through the rain. A bullet had plucked at his sleeve as he dove for cover, and he thought he’d wet his pants, but he wasn’t sure because he was already so wet; he didn’t know, either, if he or Robin had shot the third soldier down. For a few seconds bullets had been whizzing past as thick as flies at a garbage men’s convention. But then he’d leapt into the woods, and Robin had followed an instant later as a ricocheting slug grazed his left hand.

The two soldiers fired repeatedly, and both Josh and Robin stayed under cover. Robin finally dared to lift his head. One of the men was running to the left to reach higher ground. He wiped rain from his eyes, took careful aim and squeezed off his last two shots. The soldier grabbed at his ribs, spun like a top and fell.

Josh shot at the remaining man, who returned the fire and then leapt to his feet, sprinting wildly along the edge of the road toward the electrified fence. “Don’t shoot!” he screamed. “Don’t shoot!” Josh aimed at his back, had a clear and killing shot-but he held his fire. He’d never shot a man in the back-not even an Army of Excellence trooper-and he was damned if he’d start now. He let the man go, and in another moment he stood up and motioned Robin on. They started up the road again.

Sister closed her eyes as the voice announced five minutes to detonation. She was dizzy, and she reached out to the wall for support, but Swan grasped her arm and held her steady.

“It’s finished,” Sister rasped. “Oh, my God… everyone’s going to die. It’s finished.” Her knees started to buckle, and she wanted to slide down to the floor, but Swan wouldn’t let her.

“Stand up.” Still the other woman’s body sagged. “Stand up, damn it!” Swan said angrily, and she pulled her up. Sister looked blankly at her and felt the twilight haze that she’d lived in as Sister Creep beginning to close around her.

“Oh, let her fall,” the man with the scarlet eye said, standing across the chamber. “You’ll die all the same, whether you’re on your knees or your feet. Do you wonder how it’ll happen?”

Swan didn’t give him the satisfaction of answering.

“I do,” he went on. “Maybe the whole world’ll split apart and go spinning off in pieces, or maybe it’ll be as quiet as a gasp. Maybe the atmosphere’ll rip like an old sheet, and everything-mountains, forests, rivers, what’s left of cities-will be flung off like dust. Or maybe gravity’ll smash everything flat.” He crossed his arms and leaned casually against the wall. “Maybe it’ll shrivel and burn, and only a cinder will be left. Well, nobody can live forever!”

“How about you?” she had to ask. “Can you live forever?”

He laughed, softly this time. “I am forever.”

“Four minutes to detonation,” the cool voice promised.

Macklin was crouched on the floor, breathing like an animal. As the four minute mark was passed a terrible, mournful moan came from his injured throat.

“There’s your death knell, Swan,” the man with the scarlet eye said. “Do you still forgive me?”

“Why are you so afraid of me? I can’t do anything to hurt you.”

He didn’t reply for a few seconds, and when he spoke his eyes were fathomless. “Hope hurts me,” he said. “It’s a disease, and you’re the germ that spreads it. We can’t have disease at my party. Oh, no. It won’t be allowed.” He was silent, staring at the floor-and then a smile skittered across his mouth as the computer voice said, “Three minutes to detonation.”

Rain smashed against the aluminum roof as Josh and Robin reached the long shedlike structure. They’d passed the Jeeps and the corpse of Brother Timothy, and now they saw the entrance to the mine shaft in the dim yellow light. Robin ran ahead up the steps and along the catwalk while Josh followed. Just before Josh got to the shaft, he heard a thunder of what sounded like baseball-sized hailstones slamming on the roof, and he thought the whole damned place was about to cave in.

But the din abruptly ceased, as if a mechanism had been switched off. It was so silent Josh could hear the shriek of the wind outside the walls.

Robin looked down the slanting mine shaft and saw the tracks. Some kind of conveyance was at the bottom. He looked around and found the metal plate with the red and green buttons; he pressed the red one, but nothing happened. A touch of the green button, and at once machinery rumbled in the walls.

The long metal cable that stretched down the tracks began to reel itself up.

“Two minutes to detonation.”

Colonel James B. Macklin heard himself whimper. The walls of the pit were closing around him, and from far away he thought he heard the Shadow Soldier laughing; but no, no-he had the face of the Shadow Soldier now, and he and the Shadow Soldier were one and the same, and if anyone was laughing, it was either Roland Croninger or the monster who called himself Friend.

He clenched his left fist and beat against the sealed door-and there, in the stainless steel, he saw the skull staring back.

In that instant he clearly saw the face of his soul, and he teetered on the edge of madness. He hammered at that face, trying to smash it and make it go away, but it did not. The frozen fields where dead soldiers lay heaped and broken moved through his mind in a grisly panorama. The smoldering rums of towns, burning vehicles and charred bodies lay before him like an offering on the altar of Hades, and he knew in that moment what the legacy of his life would be, and where it had led him. He’d escaped from the pit in Vietnam, had left his hand in the pit in Earth House, had lost his soul in the pit carved into the dirtwart land, and now would lose his life in this four-walled pit. And instead of crawling from the mud and standing on his feet after the seventeenth of July, he’d chosen to wallow in filth, to live from pit to pit, while the greatest and most hideous pit of all opened within himself and consumed him.