Swan Song (11 page)

The computer replied, HERE IS THE MAN WITH THREE STAVES, AND HERE THE WHEEL.

The aircraft was buffeted and tossed. Something scraped along the port side of the jet like fingernails along a blackboard.

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

WHICH IS BLANK, IS SOMETHING HE CARRIES ON HIS BACK, replied the computer.

Which I am forbidden to see, the president typed.

The yellow circle illuminated.

The president took a deep breath, as if about to leap into dark, bottomless water. He typed, I do not find The Hanged Man.

FEAR DEATH BY WATER, came the reply.

The red circle illuminated. Immediately, the screen cleared.

Then the computer reported, TALONS ARMED, SIR. TEN SECONDS TO ABORT.

“God forgive me,” the president whispered, and his finger moved toward the N key.

“Jesus!” the air force captain suddenly said. He was staring through the window, his mouth agape.

The president looked.

Through a tornado of burning houses and chunks of scorched rubble, a fiery shape streaked upward toward the Airborne Command Center like a meteor. It took the president a precious two seconds to comprehend what it was: a crushed, mangled Greyhound bus with burning wheels, and hanging from the broken windows and front windshield were charred corpses.

The destination plate above the windshield said CHARTER.

The pilot must’ve seen it at the same time, because the engines shrieked as they were throttled to their limit and the nose jerked up with such violence that g-forces crushed the president into his seat as if he weighed five hundred pounds. The briefcase and the computer keyboard spun off the captain’s knees, the two plugs wrenching loose; the briefcase fell into the aisle and slid along it, jamming beneath another seat. The president saw the wrecked bus roll on its side, spilling bodies from the windows. They fell like burning leaves. And then the bus hit the starboard wing with a shuddering crash, and the outboard engine exploded.

Half of the wing was sheared raggedly away, the second starboard engine shooting plumes of flame like Roman candles going off. Ripped apart by the impact, pieces of the Greyhound bus fell back into the maelstrom and were sucked downward out of sight.

Crippled, the Airborne Command Center heeled over on its port wing, the two remaining functional engines vibrating, about to burst loose from their bolts under the strain. The president heard himself scream. The aircraft fell out of control for five thousand feet as the pilot battled with straining flaps and rudders. An updraft caught it and flung the jet a thousand feet higher, and then it screamed downward another ten thousand feet. The aircraft spun wing over wrecked wing and finally angled down toward the ruined earth.

The black clouds closed in its wake, and the president of the United States was gone.

Lights Out

’Round the Mulberry Bush /

Not Yet Three /

The Holy Axe/

The World’s Champion Upchucker /

Come a Cropper /

Start With One Step/

Twelve - [Lights Out]

I’m in Hell! Sister Creep thought hysterically. I’m dead and in Hell and burning with the sinners!

Another wave of raw pain crashed over her. “Help me, Jesus!” she tried to scream, but she could only manage a hoarse, animalish moan. She sobbed, clenching her teeth until the pain had ebbed again. She lay in total darkness, and she thought she could hear the screams of the burning shiners from the distant depths of Hell-faint, horrible wailings and shrieks that came floating to her like the odors of brimstone, steam and scorched flesh that had brought her back to consciousness.

Dear Jesus, save me from Hell! she begged. Don’t let me burn forever!

The fierce pain returned, gnawing at her. She contorted into a fetal position, and water sloshed into her face and up her nose. She half sputtered, half screamed and drew a breath of acrid, steamy air. Water, she thought. Water. I’m lying in water. And the memories began to glow in her feverish mind like hot coals at the bottom of a grill.

She sat up, her body heavy and swollen, and when she lifted a hand to her face the blisters on her cheeks and forehead broke, streaming fluids. “I’m not in Hell,” she rasped. “I’m not dead… yet.” She remembered now where she was, but she couldn’t understand what had happened, or where the fire had come from. “I’m not dead,” she repeated, in a louder voice. She heard it echo in the tunnel, and she shouted “I’m not dead!” through her cracked and blistered lips.

Still, agonizing pain continued to course through her. One second she was burning up, and the next she was freezing; she was tired, very tired, and she wanted to lie down in the water again and sleep, but she was afraid that if she did she might not wake up. She reached out in the darkness, seeking her canvas bag, and had a few seconds of panic when she couldn’t find it. Then her hands touched charred and soggy canvas and she drew the bag to her, clutching it as closely as a child.

Sister Creep tried to stand. Her legs gave way almost at once, so she sat in the water enduring the pain and trying to summon up her strength. The blisters on her face were puckering again, tightening her face like a mask. Lifting her hand, she felt along her forehead and then up into her hair; her cap was gone, and her hair felt like the stubbly grass of a lawn that had gone a whole sweltering summer without a drop of rain. I’m burned baldheaded! she thought, and a half giggle, half sob came up from her throat. More blisters burst on her scalp, and she quickly took her hand away because she didn’t want to know any more. She tried to stand again, and this time she made it all the way up.

She touched the edge of the tunnel floor, at a level just above her stomach’s bulge. She was going to have to pull herself out by sheer strength. Her shoulders were still throbbing from the effort of tearing the grate loose, but that pain was nothing compared to the suffering of her blistered skin. Sister Creep tossed the canvas bag up; sooner or later she’d have to force herself to climb out and get it. She placed her palms on the concrete and tensed herself to push upward, but her willpower evaporated, and she stood there thinking that some maintenance man was going to come down here in a year or two and find a skeleton where a living woman had once been.

She pushed upward. The strained muscles of her shoulders shrieked with pain, and one elbow threatened to give way. But as she started to topple backward into the hole she brought a knee up and got it on the edge, then got the other knee up. Blisters burst on her arms and legs with little wet popping sounds. She scrabbled over the edge like a crab and lay on her stomach on the tunnel floor, dizzy and breathing heavily, her hands again clutching the bag.

Get up, she thought. Get moving, you slob bucket, or you’re going to die here.

She stood up, holding her bag protectively in front of her, and began to stumble through the darkness; her legs were stiff as chunks of wood, and several times she fell over rubble or broken cables. But she paused only long enough to catch her breath and fight back the pain, and then she struggled to her feet and went on.

She bumped into a ladder and climbed it, but the shaft was blocked by cables, chunks of concrete and pipe; she returned to the tunnel and kept going in search of a way out. In some places the air was hot and thin, and she took little gulps of breath to keep from passing out. She felt her way along the tunnel, came to dead ends of jumbled debris and had to retrace her path, found other ladders that ascended to blocked shafts or manhole covers that refused to be budged. Her mind battered back and forth like a caged animal. One step at a time, she told herself. One step and then the next gets you where you’re going.

Blisters rose and fell on her face, arms and legs. She stopped and sat down for a while to rest, her lungs wheezing in the heavy air. There were no sounds of subway trains or cars or burning sinners. Something terrible’s happened up there, she thought. Not the Rapture, not the Second Coming-something terrible.

Sister Creep forced herself onward. One step at a time. One step and then the next.

She found another ladder and looked up. About twenty feet above, at the top of the shaft, was a half moon of murky light. She climbed up until she was near enough to touch a manhole cover, shaken two inches out of its socket by the same shock wave that had made the tunnel vibrate. She got the fingers of one hand in between the iron and the concrete and shoved the manhole cover out of the way.

The light was the color of dried blood, and as hazy as if filtered through layers of thick gauze. Still, she had to squint until her eyes were used to light again.

She was looking up at the sky, but a kind of sky she’d never seen before: dirty brown clouds were spinning over Manhattan, and flickers of blue lightning crackled out of them. A hot, bitter wind swirled into her face, the force of it almost knocking her loose from the ladder. In the distance there was the rumble of thunder, but a different kind of thunder than she’d ever heard-this sounded like a sledgehammer banging iron. The wind made a howling noise as it swept into the manhole, pushing her backward, but she pulled herself and her bag up the last two rungs of the ladder and crawled into the outside world again.

The wind blew a storm of grit into her face, and she was blinded for a few seconds. When her vision cleared again, she saw that she had come out of the tunnel into what looked like a junkyard.

Around her were the crushed hulks of cars, taxis and trucks, some of them melted together to form strange sculptures of metal. The tires on some of the vehicles were still smoking, while others had dissolved into black puddles. Gaping fissures had burst open in the pavement, some of them five and six feet wide; through many of the cracks came gouts of steam or water like gushing geysers. She looked around, dazed and uncomprehending, her eyes slitted against the gritty wind. In some places the earth had collapsed, and in others there were mountains of rubble, miniature Everests of metal, stone and glass. Between them the wind shrieked and turned, spun and rose around the fragments of buildings, many of which had been shaken apart right to their steel skeletons, which in turn were warped and bent like licorice sticks. Curtains of dense smoke from burning buildings and heaps of debris flapped before the rushing wind, and lightning streaked to earth from the black heart of roiling, immense clouds. She couldn’t see the sun, couldn’t even tell where it lay in the turbulent sky. She looked for the Empire State Building, but there were no more skyscrapers; all the buildings she could see had been sheared off, though she couldn’t tell if the Empire State was still standing or not because of the smoke and dust. It was not Manhattan anymore, but a ravaged junkyard of rubble mountains and smoke-filled ravines.

Judgment of God, she thought. God has struck down an evil city, has swept all the sinners down to burn in Hell forever! Crazy laughter rang out inside her, and as she lifted her face toward the dirty clouds the fluids of burst blisters streamed down her cheeks.

A spear of lightning hit the exposed framework of a nearby building, and sparks danced madly in the air. Beyond the rise of a huge mountain of debris, Sister Creep could see the funnel of a tornado in the distance, and another one writhing to the right. Up in the clouds, fiery things were being tossed like red balls in the hands of a juggler. All gone, all destroyed, she thought. The end of the world. Praise God! Praise blessed Jesus! The end of the world, and all the sinners burning in-

She clasped her hands over her ears and screamed. Something inside her brain cracked like a funhouse mirror that existed only to reflect a distorted world, and as the fragments of the funhouse mirror fell apart other images were revealed behind it: herself as a younger, more attractive woman, pushing a stroller in a shopping mall; a suburban brick house with a small green yard and a station wagon in the driveway; a town with a main street and a statue in the square; faces, some of them dark and indistinct, others just on the edge of memory; and then the blue flashing lights and the rain and the demon in a yellow raincoat, reaching out and saying, “Give her to me, lady. It’s okay, just give her to me now…”

All gone, all destroyed! Judgment of God! Praise Jesus!

“Just give her to me now…”

No, she thought. No!

All gone, all destroyed! All the sinners, burning in Hell!

No! No! No!

And then she opened her mouth and shrieked because everything was gone and destroyed in fire and ruin, and in that instant she realized no God of Creation would destroy His masterpiece in one fit of flame like a petulant child. This was not Judgment Day, or Rapture, or the Second Coming-this had nothing to do with God; this was utter, evil destruction without sense or purpose or sanity.

For the first time since crawling out of the manhole Sister Creep looked at her blistered hands and arms, at the tattered rags of her clothing. Her skin was splotched with angry red burns, the blisters stretched tight with yellow fluid. Her bag was just barely held together by scraps of canvas, her belongings spilling out through burned holes. And then around her, in the pall of dust and smoke, she saw other things that at first her mind had not let her see: flattened, charred things that could only remotely be recognized as human remains. A pile of them lay almost at her feet, as if heaped there by someone sweeping out a coal scuttle. They littered the street, lay half in and half out of the crushed cars and taxis; here was one wrapped around the remnants of a bicycle, there was another with its teeth showing startlingly white against the crisped, featureless face. Hundreds of them lay around her, their bones melded into shapes of surrealistic horror.

Lightning flashed, and the wind wailed with a banshee voice of the dead around Sister Creep’s ears.

She ran.

The wind whipped into her face, blinding her with smoke, dust and ashes. She ducked her head, hobbling up the side of a rubble mountain, and she realized she’d left her bag behind but she couldn’t bear returning to that valley of the dead. She tripped over debris, dislodging an avalanche of junk that cascaded around her legs-shattered television sets and stereo equipment, the melted mess of home computers, ghetto blasters, radios, the burned rags of men’s silk suits and women’s designer dresses, broken fragments of fine furniture, charred books, antique silverware reduced to chunks of metal. And everywhere there were more smashed vehicles and bodies buried in the wreckage-hundreds of bodies and pieces of bodies, arms and legs protruding from the debris as stiffly as those of department store mannequins. She reached the top of the mountain, where the hot wind was so fierce she had to fall to her knees to keep from being thrown off. Looking in all directions, she saw the full extent of the disaster: To the north, the few remaining trees in Central Park were burning, and fires extended all along what had been Eighth Avenue, glowing like blood-red rubies behind the curtain of smoke; to the east, there was no sign of Rockefeller Center or Grand Central Station, just shattered structures rising up like rotten teeth from a diseased jaw; to the south, the Empire State Building seemed to be gone, too, and the funnel of a tornado danced near Wall Street; to the west, ridges of debris marched all the way to the Hudson River. The panorama of destruction was both a pinnacle of horror and a numbing of it, because her mind reached the limit of its ability to accept and process shock and began flipping out memories of cartoons and comedies she’d seen as a child: Jetsons, Huckleberry Hound, Mighty Mouse and Three Stooges. She crouched at the top of the mountain in the grip of a shrieking wind and stared dumbly out at the ruins while a hideous fixed smile stretched her mouth, and only one sane thought got through: Oh my Jesus, what’s happened to the magic place?

And the answer was: All gone, all destroyed.

“Get up,” she said to herself, though the wind swept her voice away. “Get up. You think you’re gonna stay here? You can’t stay here! Get up, and take one step at a time. One step and then the next gets you where you’re going.”

But it was a long time before she could move again, and she stumbled down the far side of the rubble mountain like an old woman, muttering to herself.

She didn’t know where she was going, nor did she particularly care. The intensity of the lightning increased, and thunder shook the ground; a black, nasty-looking drizzle began to fall from the clouds, blowing like needles before the howling wind. Sister Creep stumbled from one mountain of wreckage to the next. Off in the distance she thought she heard a woman screaming, and she called out but wasn’t answered. The rain fell harder, and the wind blew into her face like a slap.