Swan Song (25 page)

Twenty-Nine - [Wheel of Fortune

Turning]

Josh Hutchins stared, squinted and blinked. “Light,” he said, the walls of the tunnel pressing against his shoulders and back. “I see light!”

Behind him, about thirty feet away in the basement, Swan called, “How far is it?” She was utterly filthy, and there seemed to be so much dirt up her nostrils that they might sprout gardens, too. The thought had made her giggle a few times, a sound she’d never believed she’d make again.

“Maybe ten or twelve feet,” he answered, and he continued digging with his hands and pushing the dirt behind him, then pushing it further back with his feet. The pickaxe and shovel approach had been a valiant effort, but after three days of working they’d realized the best tools were their hands. Now, as he squeezed his shoulders forward to grab more dirt, Josh looked at the weak red glimmer way up at the gopher hole’s entrance and thought it was the most beautiful light he’d ever seen. Swan entered the tunnel behind him and scooped the loose dirt up in a large can, carrying it back to the basement to empty over the slit trench. Her hands, arms, face, nostrils and knees-everything that was covered with dirt-tingled all the way down to her bones. She felt like she had a flame burning in her backbone. Across the basement, the young green shoots were four inches tall.

Josh’s face was plastered with dirt; even his teeth were gritty with it. The soil was heavy, with a thick, gummy consistency, and he had to stop to rest.

“Josh? You all right?” Swan asked.

“Yeah. Just need a minute to get my wind.” His shoulders and forearms ached mercilessly, and the last time he’d been so weary was after a ten-man battle royal in Chattanooga. The light seemed further away than he’d first reckoned, as if the tunnel-which they’d both come to love and hate-was elongating, playing a cruel trick of perception. He felt as if he’d crawled into one of those Chinese tubes that lock your fingers, one stuck into each end, except his whole body was jammed tight as a monk’s jockstrap.

He started again, bringing a double handful of the heavy earth back and underneath him as if he were swimming through dirt. My mama raised herself a gopher, he thought, and he had to grin despite his weariness. His mouth tasted like he’d been dining on mud pies.

Six more inches dug away. One more foot. Was the light closer, or further away? He pushed himself onward, thinking about how his mama used to scold him for not scrubbing behind his ears. Another foot, and another. Behind him, Swan crawled in and carried the loose dirt out again and again, like clockwork. The light was getting closer now; he was sure of it. But now it wasn’t so beautiful. Now it was sickly, not like sunlight at all. Diseased, Josh thought. And maybe deadly, too. But he kept going, one double handful after the next, inching slowly toward the outside world.

Dirt suddenly plopped down on the back of his neck. He lay still, expecting a cave-in, but the tunnel held. For God’s sake, don’t stop now! he told himself, and he reached out for the next handful.

“I’m almost there!” he shouted, but the earth muffled his voice. He didn’t know if Swan had heard or not. “Just a few more feet!”

But just short of the opening, which was not quite as large as Josh’s fist, he had to stop and rest again. Josh lay staring longingly at the light, the hole about three feet away. He could smell the outside now, the bitter aromas of burned earth, scorched cornstalks and alkali. Rousing himself, he pushed onward. The earth was tougher near the surface, full of glazed stones and metallic lumps. The fire had burned the dirt into something resembling pavement. Still he strained upward, his shoulders throbbing, his gaze fixed on the hole of ugly light. And then he was close enough to thrust his hand through it, but before he tried he said, “I’m there, Swan! I’m at the top!” He clawed away dirt, and his hand reached the hole. But the underside of the surface around it felt like pebbled asphalt, and he couldn’t get his fingers through. He balled up his fist, the flesh mottled gray and white, and pushed. Harder. Harder still. Come on, come on, he thought. Push, damn it!

There was a dry, stubborn cracking sound. At first Josh thought it was his arm breaking, but he felt no pain, and he kept pushing as if trying to punch the sky.

The earth cracked again. The hole began to crumble and widen. His fist started going through, and he envisioned what it might look like to someone standing on the surface: the blossoming of a zebra-blotched fist like a strange new flower through the dead earth, the fist opening and fingers stretching petal-like under the weak red light.

Josh shoved his arm through almost to the elbow. Cold wind snapped at his fingertips. That movement of air exhilarated him, jarred him as if from a long somnolence. “We’re out!” he shouted, about to sob with joy. “Swan! We’re out!”

She was behind him, crouched in the tunnel. “Can you see anything?”

“I’m going to put my head through,” he told her. “Here goes.”

He pushed upward, his shoulder following his arm, breaking the hole wider. Then his entire arm was out, and the top of his head was ready to press through. As he pushed he thought of watching his sons being born, their heads straining to enter the world. He felt as giddy and afraid as any infant could possibly be. Behind him, Swan was pushing at him, too, giving him support as he stretched to break free.

The earth parted with a sound like baked clay snapping apart. With a surge of effort, Josh thrust his head through the opening and into a biting, turbulent wind.

“Are you there yet?” Swan asked. “What can you see?”

Josh narrowed his eyes, his hand up to ward off flying grit.

He saw a desolate, grayish-brown landscape, featureless except for what appeared to be the mangled remnants of the Bonneville and Darleen’s Camaro. Overhead was a low sky plated with thick gray clouds. From dead horizon to dead horizon, the clouds were slowly, ponderously rotating, and here and there were quicksilver glints of harsher scarlet. Josh looked over his shoulder. About fifteen feet behind him and to his left was a large dome of dirt, mashed-down cornstalks, pieces of wood and metal from the gas pumps and cars. He realized it was the grave they’d been buried in, and at the same time he knew that if the tons of cornfield dirt hadn’t sealed them in they would have been burned to death. Other than that, and a few drifts of cornstalks and debris, the land was scraped clean.

The wind was blowing into his face. He crawled up out of the hole and sat on his haunches, looking around at the destruction, while Swan emerged from the tunnel. The cold sliced to her bones, and her bloodshot eyes moved incredulously over what had become a desert. “Oh,” she whispered, but the wind stole her voice. “Everything’s… gone…”

Josh hadn’t heard her. He couldn’t get any sense of direction. He knew the nearest town-or what was left of it-was Salina. But which direction was east, and which west? Where was the sun? Flying grit and dust obscured everything beyond twenty yards or so. Where was the highway? “There’s nothing left,” Josh said, mostly to himself. “There’s not a damned thing left!”

Swan saw a familiar object lying nearby. She stood up and walked with an effort against the wind to the small figure. Most of the blue fur had been burned off of it, but its plastic eyes with the little black rolling pupils were intact. Swan reached down and picked it up. The cord with its pull ring dangled from the doll’s back; she yanked it and heard the Cookie Monster ask for more cookies in a slow, distorted voice.

Josh rose to his feet. Well, he thought, now we’re out. Now what the hell do we do? Where do we go? He shook his head in disgust. Maybe there was nowhere to go. Maybe everything, everywhere, was just like this. What was the point of leaving their basement? He looked grimly at the hole they’d just crawled from, and he thought for a moment of shimmying back down there like a big gopher and spending the rest of his days licking out cans and shitting in a slit trench.

Careful, he warned himself. Because that hole back to the basement-back to the grave-was suddenly too appealing. Much, much too appealing. He stepped away from the hole a few paces and tried to think coherently.

His gaze slid toward the child. She was covered with tunnel dirt, her ragged clothes flapping around her. She stared into the distance, her eyes narrowed against the wind, with that dumb doll cradled in her arms. Josh looked at her for a long time.

I could do it, he told himself. Sure. I could make myself do it, because it would be the right thing. Might be the right thing. Wouldn’t it? If everything is like this, what’s the damned point of living, right? Josh opened his hands, closed them again. I could make it quick, he thought. She’d never feel a thing. And then I could just mosey over to that junk pile and find a nice piece of metal with a sharp edge and finish the job on myself, too.

That would be the right thing to do. Wouldn’t it?

Protect the child, he thought-and a deep, terrible shame stabbed him. Some protection! he thought. But Jesus Christ, everything’s gone! Everything’s been blown to Hell!

Swan turned her head, and her eyes sought his. She said something, but he couldn’t understand her. She walked closer to him, shivering and bowed against the wind, and she shouted, “What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know!” he shouted back.

“It’s not like this everywhere, is it?” she asked him. “There must be other people somewhere! There must be towns and people!”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Damn, it’s cold!” He trembled; he’d been dressed for a hot July day, and now he hardly had a shirt on.

“We can’t just stand here!” Swan said. “We’ve got to go somewhere!”

“Right. Well, take your choice of directions, little lady. They all look the same to me.”

Swan stared at him for a few seconds more, and again Josh felt shamed. Then she turned in all directions as if trying to choose one. Suddenly her eyes filled with tears, and they stung so much she almost screamed; but she bit her lower lip, bit it until it almost bled. She had wished for a moment that her mama was at her side, to help her and tell her what to do. She needed her mama to guide her, now more than ever. It wasn’t fair that her mama was gone! It wasn’t kind, and it wasn’t right!

But that was thinking like a little girl, she decided. Her mama had gone home, to a peaceful place far from this-and Swan had to make some decisions for herself. Starting right now.

Swan lifted her hand and pointed away from the source of the wind. “That way,” she decided.

“Any particular reason?”

“Yes.” She turned and gave him a look that made him feel like the stupidest clown on earth. “Because the wind’ll be at our backs. It’ll push us, and walking won’t be as hard.”

“Oh,” Josh said meekly. In the distance she’d pointed out was nothing-just swirling dust and utter desolation. He couldn’t see the reason in making his legs move.

Swan sensed he was ready to sit down, and when he did that there was no way she could pry his giant butt up again. “We worked hard to get out of there, didn’t we?” she shouted to him over the wind. He nodded. “We proved we could do something if we really wanted to, didn’t we? You and me? Kind of like a team? We worked hard, and we shouldn’t ought to stop working hard now.”

He nodded dully.

“We’ve got to try!” Swan shouted.

Josh looked down at the hole again. At least it was warm down there. At least they’d had food. What was so wrong with stay-

He sensed movement from the corner of his eye.

The little girl, Cookie Monster doll in arms, had begun to walk off in the direction she’d chosen, the wind pushing her along.

“Hey!” Josh yelled. Swan didn’t stop or slow down. “Hey!” She kept going.

Josh took the first step after her. The wind hit him behind his knees-a clip! Fifteen yards penalty! he thought-and then caught him in the small of the back, staggering him forward. He took a second step, then a third and a fourth. And then he was following her, but the wind was so strong at his back that it seemed more like flying than walking. He caught up with her, walking a few yards off to the side, and again Josh felt a pang of shame at his weakness, because she didn’t even grace him with a glance. She was walking with her chin uplifted, as if in defiance of the bleakness that faced them; Josh thought that she looked like the little queen of a realm that had been stolen from her, a tragic and determined figure.

There’s nothing out there, Swan thought. A deep, terrible sadness wrenched at her, and if the wind hadn’t been pushing so hard she might’ve crumpled to her knees. It’s all gone. All gone.

Two tears ran through the crusted dirt and blisters on her face. Everything can’t be gone, she told herself. There have to be towns and people left somewhere! Maybe a mile ahead. Maybe two. Just through the dust and over the horizon.

She kept going, step after step, and Josh Hutchins walked at her side.

Behind them, the gopher popped his head out of the crater and looked in all directions. Then he made a little chattering sound and disappeared again into the safety of the earth.

Thirty - [Wheel of Fortune Turning]

Two figures trudged slowly along Interstate 80, with the snow-covered Pocono Mountains of eastern Pennsylvania at their backs. The fallen snow was dirty gray, and from it protruded rough rocks like warts growing in leprous flesh. New gray snow was tumbling from the sullen, sickly green and sunless sky, and it hissed softly amid the thousands of leafless black hickories, elms and oaks. The evergreens had turned brown and were losing their needles. From horizon to horizon, as far as Sister and Artie could see, there was no green vegetation, not a green vine or leaf.

The wind whipped past them, blowing the ashy snow into their faces. Both of them were bundled up with layers of clothes they’d been able to scavenge in the twenty-one days since they’d escaped from the monster that called itself Doyle Halland. They’d found a looted Sears department store on the outskirts of Paterson, New Jersey, but almost everything had been carried out of it except for some merchandise at the back, under a big sign with painted icicles that read WINTER IN JULY SALE! SAVE THE SEARS WAY!

The racks and tables had been untouched, and they yielded up heavy herringbone overcoats, plaid mufflers, wool caps and gloves lined with rabbit fur. There was even thermal underwear and a supply of boots, which Artie praised as being high-quality merchandise. Now, after more than one hundred miles, the boots were supple but their feet were bloody, wrapped in rags and newspapers after their socks had fallen apart.

Both of them carried knapsacks on their backs, laden with other scavenged objects: cans of food, a can opener, a couple of sharp all-purpose knives, some kitchen matches, a flashlight and extra batteries, and the lucky find of a six-pack of Olympia beer. Around her shoulder, as well, Sister supported a dark green duffel bag from the Paterson Army-Navy surplus store, which had taken the place of the smaller Gucci bag and held a thermal blanket, some bottles of Perrier and a few items of packaged cold cuts found in an almost-empty grocery store. At the bottom of the duffel bag was the glass circle, placed so Sister could feel it through the canvas whenever she wanted to.

A red plaid muffler and an electric green woolen cap protected Sister’s face and head from the wind, and she was wrapped in a woolen coat over two sweaters. Baggy brown corduroy pants and leather gloves completed her wardrobe, and she moved slowly through the snow with the weight that pressed on her, but at least she was warm. Artie, too, was burdened with a heavy coat, a blue muffler and two caps, one over the other. Only the area around their eyes was exposed to the blowing snow, the flesh raw and windburned. The gray, ugly snow swirled about them; the interstate pavement was covered to a depth of about four inches, and higher drifts grew amid the denuded forest and deep ravines on either side.

Walking a few yards in front of Artie, Sister lifted her hand and pointed to the right. She trudged over to four dark clumps lying in the snow, and she peered down at the frozen corpses of a man, a woman and two children. All were wearing summer clothes: short-sleeved shirts and light pants. The man and woman had died holding hands. Except the third finger of the woman’s left hand had been chopped off. Her wedding ring, Sister thought. Somebody had cut the whole finger off to get it. The man’s shoes were gone, and his feet were black. His sunken eyes glistened with gray ice. Sister turned away.

Since crossing over into Pennsylvania, passing a big green sign that said WELCOME TO PENNSYLVANIA, THE KEYSTONE STATE about thirty miles and seven days ago, they had found almost three hundred frozen bodies on Interstate 80. They’d sheltered for a while in a town called Stroudsburg, which had been decimated by a tornado. The houses and buildings lay scattered under the filthy snow like the broken toys of a mad giant, and there’d been plenty of corpses, too. Sister and Artie had found a pickup truck-the tank drained of gas-on the town’s main thoroughfare and had slept in the cab. Then it was back onto the interstate again, heading west in their supple, blood-filled boots, passing more carnage, wrecked cars and overturned trailers that must have been caught in a crush of traffic fleeing westward.

The going was rough. They could make, at the most, five miles a day before they had to find shelter-the remnants of a house, a barn, a wrecked car-anything to hold back the wind. In twenty-one days of traveling they’d seen only three other living people; two of those were raving mad, and the third had fled wildly into the woods when he’d seen them coming. Both Sister and Artie had been sick for a while, had coughed and thrown up blood and suffered splitting headaches. Sister had thought she was going to die, and they’d slept huddled together, each of them breathing like a bellows; but the worst of the sickness and weak, feverish dizziness had gone, and though they both sometimes still coughed uncontrollably and vomited up a little blood, their strength had returned, and they had no more headaches.

They left the four corpses behind and soon came to the wreckage of an exploded Airstream trailer. A scorched Cadillac had smashed into it, and a Subaru had rear-ended the Caddy. Nearby, two other vehicles had locked and burned. Further on, another group of people lay where they’d frozen to death, their bodies curled around one another in a vain search for warmth. Sister passed them without pausing; the face of death was no stranger to her now, but she couldn’t stand to look too closely.

About fifty yards further, Sister stopped abruptly. Just ahead of her, through the tumbling snow, an animal was gnawing at one of two corpses that lay against the right-hand guardrail. The thing looked up and tensed. It was a large dog, Sister saw-maybe a wolf, come down from the mountains to feed. The beast was about the size of a German shepherd, with a long snout and a reddish-gray hide. It had chewed a leg down to the bone, and now it crouched over its prize and stared menacingly at Sister.

If that bastard wants fresh meat, we’re dead, she thought. She stared back at the thing, and they challenged each other for about thirty seconds. Then the animal gave a short, muttering growl and returned to its gnawing. Sister and Artie gave it a wide berth, and they kept looking back until they’d rounded a curve and the thing was out of sight.

Sister shuddered under her freight of clothes. The beast’s eyes had reminded her of Doyle Halland’s.

Her fear of Doyle Halland was worst when darkness fell-and there seemed to be no regularity to the coming of darkness, no twilight or sense of the sun going away. The darkness might fall after two or three hours of gloom, or it might hold off for what seemed like twenty-four hours-but when it did fall, it was absolute. In the dark, every noise was enough to make Sister sit up and listen, her heart pounding and cold sweat popping up on her face. She had something the Doyle Halland-thing wanted, something he didn’t understand-as she certainly did not-but that he’d vowed to follow her to get. And what would he do with the glass ring if he got it? Smash it to pieces? Probably so. She kept looking over her shoulder as she walked, fearful of seeing a dark figure coming up behind her, its face malformed, with jagged teeth showing in a sharklike grin.

“I’ll find you,” he’d promised. “I’ll find you, bitch.”

The day before, they’d sheltered in a broken-down barn and had made a small fire in the hay. Sister had taken the glass ring from her duffel bag. She’d thought of her future-predicting glass eight-ball, and she’d mentally asked: What’s ahead for us?

Of course, there was no little white polyhedron surfacing with all-purpose answers. But the colors of the jewels and their pulsing, steady rhythm had soothed her; she’d felt herself drifting, entranced by the glow of the ring, and then it seemed as if all her attention, all her being, was drawn deeper and deeper into the glass, deeper and deeper, as if into the very heart of fire…

And then she’d gone dreamwalking again, across that barren landscape where the dome of dirt was, and the Cookie Monster doll lay waiting for a lost child. But this time it was different; this time, she’d been dreamwalking toward the dome-with the sensation of her feet not quite touching the earth-when she suddenly stopped and listened.

She thought she’d heard something over the noise of the wind-a muffled sound that might have been a human voice. She listened, strained to hear it again, but could not.

And then she saw a small hole in the baked ground, almost at her feet. As she watched, she imagined that she saw the hole begin to widen, and the earth crack and strain around it. In the next moment… yes, yes, the earth was cracking, and the hole was getting larger, as if something was burrowing underneath it. She stared, both fearful and fascinated, as the sides of the hole crumbled, and she thought, I am not alone.

From the hole came a human hand.

It was splotched with gray and white-a large hand, the hand of a giant-and the thick fingers had clawed upward like those of a dead man digging himself out of a grave.

The sight had startled her so much that she’d jerked backward from the widening hole. She was afraid to see what kind of monster was emerging, and as she ran across the empty plain she’d wished frantically, Take me back, please, I want to go back where I was…

And she was sitting before the small fire in the broken-down barn. Artie was looking at her quizzically, the raw flesh around his eyes like the Lone Ranger’s mask.

She’d told him what she’d seen, and he asked her what she thought it meant. Of course, she couldn’t say; of course, it was probably just something plucked from her mind, perhaps a response to seeing all the corpses on the highway. Sister had put the glass ring back in her duffel bag, but the image of that hand stretching upward from the earth was burned into her brain. She could not shake it.

Now, as she trudged through the snow, she touched the ring’s outline in the canvas bag. Just knowing it was there reassured her, and right now that was all the magic she needed.

Her knees locked.

Another wolf or wild dog or whatever it was stood in the road before her, about fifteen feet away. This one was skinny, with raw red sores on its hide. Its eyes bored into hers, and the lips slowly pulled away from the fangs in a snarl.

Oh, shit! was her first reaction. This one looker hungrier and more desperate than the other. And behind it in the gray snow were two or three more, loping to the right and left.

She looked over her shoulder, past Artie. Two more wolf shapes were behind them, half hidden by the snow but near enough that Sister could see their outlines.

Her second reaction was, Our butts are hambur-

Something leapt from the left-a blur of motion-and slammed into Artie’s side. He yelled in pain as he fell, and the beast-which Sister thought might have been the reddish-gray animal they’d seen feasting on a corpse-grabbed part of Artie’s knapsack between its teeth and violently shook its head back and forth, trying to rip the pack off. Sister reached down to grasp Artie’s outstretched hand, but the beast dragged Artie about ten feet through the snow before it let go and darted off just to the edge of visibility. It continued to circle and lick its chops.

She heard a guttural growl and turned just as the skinny animal with the red sores leapt for her. It struck her shoulder and knocked her sprawling, the jaws snapping shut inches from her face with a noise like a bear trap cracking together. She smelled rotted meat on its breath, and then the animal had the right sleeve of her coat and was tearing at it. Another beast feinted in from the left, and a third darted boldly forward and grabbed her right foot, trying to drag her. She thrashed and yelled; the skinny one spooked and ran, but the other one pulled her on her side through the snow. She grasped the duffel bag in both arms and kicked with her left boot, hitting the beast three times in the skull before it yelped and released her.

Behind her, Artie was attacked by two at once, from opposite sides. One caught his wrist, the teeth almost meeting flesh through his heavy coat and sweater, the second snapping at his left shoulder and worrying him with a frenzied surge of strength. “Get off! Get off!” he was screaming as they strained at each other to pull him in different directions.

Sister tried to stand. She slipped in the snow, fell heavily again. Panic hit her like a punch to the gut. She saw Artie being dragged by an animal that held his wrist, and she realized the beasts were trying to separate them, much like they might separate a herd of deer or cattle. As she was struggling up one of the things lunged in and grabbed her ankle, dragging her another few yards from Artie. Now he was just a struggling form, surrounded by the shapes of the circling animals in the swirling gray murk.

“Get away, you bastard!” she shouted. The animal jerked her so hard she thought her leg had popped from its socket. With a scream of rage, Sister swung the duffel bag at it, clipping its snout, and the thing turned tail. But a second later another one was straddling her, its fangs snapping for her throat; she threw her arm up, and the jaws clamped onto it with brutal force. The wolf-dog started shredding the cloth of her coat. She swung her left fist at it, caught it in the ribs and heard it grunt, but it kept tearing through the coat, now reaching the first layer of sweater. Sister knew this sonofabitch wasn’t stopping until he tasted meat. She hit it again and tried to wrench free, but now something had her ankle again and was pulling her in another direction. She had the crazy mental image of saltwater taffy being stretched until it snapped.

She heard a sharp crack! and thought that this time her leg had broken. But the beast that was worrying her shoulder yelped and jumped, running madly off through the snow. There was a second crack! followed closely by a third. The wolf-dog that had her ankle shuddered and shrieked, and Sister saw blood spewing from a hole in its side. The animal let her go and began to spin in a circle, snapping at its tail. A fourth shot rang out-Sister realized the beast had been pierced by a bullet-and she heard an agonized howling over where Artie Wisco lay. Then the others were fleeing, slipping and sliding and crashing into one another in their haste to escape. They were gone from sight within five seconds.