Swan Song (39 page)

There was motion on his left. He started to turn, but he knew he was too late.

He screamed as a wolf shape hit him, knocking his legs out from under him. The Magnum went off, jumping out of his hands and sliding away across the ice. A large silver-gray wolf had Steve’s right ankle and started dragging him toward the woods. “Help me!” he shouted. “Help me!”

The old man acted faster than Paul; he took three running steps, lifted the shortwave radio between his hands and smashed it down on the wolf’s skull. The radio burst apart in a confetti spray of wires and transistors, and the wolf released Steve’s ankle. Paul shot it through the ribs, and it, too, was jumped by three more. Steve limped over to get the Magnum, the old man staring horrified at the metallic mess in his hands; then Steve guided him back to the group, and the old man let the last of the radio fall.

Upwards of fifteen wolves were swirling around them, stopping to ravage the dying or wounded. More were coming from the forest. Holy Jesus! Paul thought as the army of wolves circled them. He took aim at the nearest.

A form squirmed out from beneath a car hulk on the side away from his rifle. “Paul!” Sister shrieked-and she saw the wolf leap for him before she could do or say anything else.

He twisted violently around, but he was hit and knocked down under a clawing, snarling weight. The beast’s jaws strained for his throat-and clamped shut on the rifle that Paul had thrown up to guard his face. Sister had to let go of Artie to rush the wolf, and she kicked the thing in the side with all her strength. The wolf released Paul’s rifle, snapped at her foot and tensed to spring at her. She saw its eyes-maddened, defiant, like the eyes of Doyle Halland.

The wolf leaped.

There were two cannonlike explosions, and the bullets from Steve’s Magnum almost tore the wolf in half. Sister dodged aside as the wolf sailed past her, its teeth still snapping and its guts trailing behind it.

She drew a breath, turned toward Artie and saw two wolves hit him at once.

“No!” she shouted as Artie fell. She bashed one of the animals with her duffel bag and knocked it about eight feet across the pavement. The second chewed on his leg and started dragging him.

Mona Ramsey screamed and bolted from the group, running past Steve in the direction they’d come. Steve tried to grab her but missed, and Kevin went after her, caught her around the waist and lifted her off her feet just as a wolf sprang from beneath a wreck and trapped her left foot between its teeth. Kevin and the beast pulled Mona in a deadly tug-of-war as the woman screamed and thrashed and more wolves ran out of the woods. Steve tried to fire, but he feared hitting the man or woman. He hesitated, cold sweat freezing to his face, and he was still in a trance when a seventy-pound wolf hit him in the shoulder like a diesel train. He heard the sound of his shoulder breaking, and he lay writhing in pain as the wolf doubled back and began gnawing at his gun hand.

The things were everywhere now, darting in and leaping. Paul fired, missed, had to duck a shape that came flying at his head. Sister swung her duffel bag at the wolf that had Artie’s leg, struck its skull and drove it back. Kevin Ramsey had lost the tug-of-war; the wolf wrenched Mona out of his grasp and was attacked by another that wanted the same prize. They fought as Mona frantically tried to crawl away.

Paul fired and hit a wolf that was about to jump Sister from behind, and then claws were on his shoulders and he was slammed face first into the pavement. The rifle spun away.

Three wolves converged on Sister and Artie. The old man was kicking wildly at the animal that was attacking Steve’s hand and arm. Sister saw Paul down, his face bleeding and the beast on top of him trying to claw through his leather jacket. She realized they were less than ten yards from the top of the hill, and this was where they were going to die.

She hauled Artie up like a sack of laundry. The three wolves came in slowly, biding their time. Sister braced herself, ready to swing the duffel bag and kick for all she was worth.

Over the snarls and shouts, she heard a deep bass growling noise. She glanced toward the hilltop. The sound was coming from the other side. It must be a horde of wolves racing for their share, she realized-or the monster of all wolves awakened from its lair. “Well, come on!” she shouted at the three who were creeping up on her. They hesitated, perhaps puzzled by her defiance, and she felt craziness pulling at her mind again. “Come on, you motherfu-”

Its engine growling, a yellow snowplow came over the hilltop, its treads crunching over debris. Clinging to the outside of the glass-enclosed cab was a man in a hooded green parka, and he was carrying a rifle with a sniperscope. Following behind the plow was a white Jeep like the kind used by postmen. Its driver zipped the vehicle around the wrecks, and another man with a rifle leaned out the Jeep’s passenger side, shouting and firing into the air. The man riding shotgun on the snowplow carefully aimed and squeezed off a shot. The middle of the three wolves dropped, and the other two turned tail.

The animal on Paul’s back looked up, saw the oncoming vehicles and fled. Another rifle shot sang off the pavement near the two fighting over Mona Ramsey, and they ran for the forest as well. Mona reached her husband and flung her arms around him. The wolf that had made a bloody mess of Steve’s arm gave it one last shake and ran as a bullet zipped past its skull. Steve sat up, shouting, “Fuckers! You fuckers!” in a high, hysterical voice.

The white Jeep skidded to a halt in front of Paul, who was still struggling to get the air back in his lungs. He got to his knees, his jaw and forehead scraped raw and his nose broken, gushing blood. The driver and the man with the rifle stepped out of the postman’s Jeep. On the snowplow, the sharpshooter was still popping off bullets at the wolves heading into the woods, and he hit three of them before the highway was cleared of living animals.

The Jeep’s driver was a tall, ruddy-cheeked man who wore dungarees under a fleece-lined coat. On his head was a cap that advertised Stroh’s beer. His dark brown eyes shifted back and forth over the tattered group of survivors. He looked at all the dead and dying wolves, and he grunted. Then he reached work-weathered fingers into a pocket of his dungarees, withdrew something and offered it to Paul Thorson. “Gum?” he asked. Paul looked at the pack of Wrigley’s Spearmint and had to laugh.

Sister was stunned. She walked past the white Jeep, still bearing Artie’s weight on her shoulder. Artie’s shoes scraped on the pavement. She walked past the snow plow and reached the top of the hill.

Off to the right, through dead trees, smoke was rising from the chimneys of wood-framed houses on the streets of a small village. She saw the steeple of a church, saw United States Army trucks parked on a softball field, saw a Red Cross banner hanging from the side of a building, saw tents and cars and campers by the thousands, scattered in the village streets and through the hills around it. A roadside sign just over the hilltop announced Homewood Next Exit.

Artie’s body began to slide to the ground. “No,” she said, very firmly, and she held him standing with all her strength.

She was still holding him up when they came to help her to the white Jeep.

Forty-Four - [Thinking About

Tomorrow]

By the light of an oil lamp, Colonel Macklin admired himself in the mirror of the Airstream trailer’s bathroom.

The gray-green Nazi uniform was a bit tight around the chest and midsection, but the sleeves and trouser legs were long enough. At his waist was a black leather holster and a loaded Luger. On his feet were Nazi hobnailed boots-again, just a bit too small, but Macklin was determined to make them do. Medals and ribbons adorned the uniform’s jacket, and though Macklin didn’t know what any of them were for, he thought they looked very impressive.

The closet in the pigsty of the late Freddie Kempka’s bedroom had been full of Nazi uniforms, flak jackets, boots, holsters and the like. A Nazi flag was fixed to the wall over the bed, and a bookcase held volumes such as The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Military Strategy and Maneuver, Medieval Warfare, and A History of Torture. Roland had gotten hold of the books and had been devouring them with pure passion. Sheila Fontana slept in the other bedroom, staying mostly to herself except when Macklin needed her; she seemed content to do her duty, though she lay cold and unmoving, and several times Macklin had heard her cry out in the night, as if waking up from a dark dream.

During the few days they’d occupied the trailer, Macklin had made a thorough inventory of what Freddie Kempka had collected: There was enough junk food and soft drinks to feed an army, plenty of bottled water and canned food as well-but Macklin and Roland were most interested in the weapons. Kempka’s bedroom was an arsenal of machine guns, rifles, pistols, a crate of flares, smoke grenades and fragmentation grenades, and boxes and bags and clips of ammunition scattered around like gold in a royal treasure house. The Shadow Soldier didn’t have to tell Macklin that he had found paradise.

Macklin regarded his face in the mirror. His beard was growing out, but it was so gray it made him look old. Kempka had left a straight razor behind, and Macklin decided he would give himself a shave. Also, his hair was too long and scraggly; he preferred the close-cropped military look. Kempka had also left a pair of scissors that would do the job very well.

He leaned forward, staring into his own eyes. They were still deep-sunken and bore the memory of the pain that had ripped through his wound in the Great Salt Lake-a pain so soul-shattering that it had sloughed away the old dead skin that had confined him for so long. He felt new, reborn and alive again-and in his icy blue eyes he saw the Jimbo Macklin that used to be, back in the days when he was young and fast. He knew the Shadow Soldier was proud of him, because he was a whole man again.

He did miss his right hand, but he was going to learn how to use a machine gun or rifle just as effectively with the left. After all, he had all the time in the world. The wound was bound up with strips of bedsheet, and it was still draining, but the heaviness was gone. Macklin knew the salt water had burned the infection out.

He thought he looked very handsome, very-yes-kingly in the Nazi uniform. Maybe it had been a German colonel’s uniform, he mused. It was in fine shape, just a few moth holes in the silk lining; Kempka obviously had taken great care of his collection. There seemed to be more lines in his face, but something about that face was wolfish and dangerous. He figured he’d lost twenty-five pounds or more since the disaster at Earth House. Still, there was just one small thing about his face that bothered him…

He lifted his hand and touched what seemed to be a brown scab about the size of a quarter, just under his left eye. He tried to peel it off, but it was melded tightly to the skin. On his forehead were four dime-sized scabs that he had at first taken for warts, but those couldn’t be peeled off either. Maybe it’s skin cancer, he thought. Maybe the radiation caused it. But he’d noticed a similar scablike growth, also the size of a dime, on Roland’s chin. Skin cancer, he thought. Well, he would take the straight razor and slice them off when he shaved, and that would be the end of it. His hide was too tough for skin cancer.

But it was strange, he thought, that the little round scabs were only on his face. Not his hand, or his arms, or anywhere else. Just his face.

He heard a knock on the trailer door, and he left the bathroom to answer it.

Roland and Lawry, both carrying rifles, had returned from the recon mission they’d been on with three other able-bodied soldiers. Last night, one of the perimeter sentries had seen the flicker of lights to the south, three or four miles across the desert.

“Two trailers,” Lawry reported, trying not to stare too hard at the Nazi uniform the colonel wore. Kempka had always been too fat to squirm into it. “Pulled by a Chevy van and a Pontiac. All the vehicles look in pretty good shape.”

“How many people?” Macklin asked, opening one of the jugs of bottled water and offering it to Lawry.

“We saw sixteen people,” Roland told him. “Six women, eight men and two children. They seemed to have plenty of gas, food and water, but all of them are burn-scarred. Two of the men can hardly walk.”

“They have guns?”

“Yes, sir.” Roland took the jug of water from Lawry and drank. He thought the uniform looked wonderful on the King, and he wished there’d been one his size to wear. He couldn’t remember much of what had happened that night with Freddie Kempka, but he recalled having a vivid dream in which he killed Mike Armbruster. “One of the men had a rifle.”

“Just one rifle? Why do you think they haven’t come here? You know they’ve seen our lights.”

“They might be afraid,” Roland said. “They might think we’ll take what they have.”

Macklin took the jug back, recapped it and set it aside. A door opened and closed, and Sheila Fontana walked through the corridor into the room. She stopped short when she saw the uniform. “We could use the trailers and the vehicles,” Macklin decided. “But we don’t need anybody with burn marks. I don’t want anybody with burn marks in our camp.”

“Colonel… there are already about thirty or more people here who were burned in… you know,” Lawry said. “I mean… what does it matter?”

“I’ve thought a lot about this, Corporal Lawry,” he replied-and though he had not, it sounded impressive. “I think people with burn marks-keloids,” he said, remembering the technical name of atomic-induced burns, “are detrimental to the morale of our camp. We don’t need to be reminded of ugliness, do we? And people with burn marks are not going to keep themselves as clean as the rest of us, because they’re ashamed of the way they appear and they’re already demoralized.” He found himself staring at the scab on Roland’s chin. It was the size of a quarter. Hadn’t it been smaller just a few days ago? His gaze shifted. There were three other small scabs at Roland’s hairline. “People with burns are going to be disease spreaders,” he told Corporal Lawry. He looked over Lawry’s face but saw none of the scabs. “We’re going to have enough trouble as it is keeping disease out of our camp. So… in the morning I want you to round up the ones with the burn scars and take them out of the camp. I don’t want them returning. Understand?”

Lawry started to smile, because he thought the Colonel was kidding, but Macklin’s blue eyes bored into him. “Sir… you don’t mean… kill all of them, do you?”

“Yes, that’s what I mean.”

“But… why not just banish them? I mean… tell them to go somewhere else?”

“Because,” Roland Croninger, who saw to the heart of the matter, said, “they won’t go anywhere else. At night they’ll slip back into camp and try to steal food and water. They might help the dirtwarts attack us.”

“Right,” Macklin agreed. “So that’s the new law of this camp: No one is admitted who has burn marks. And you will take those others out in the morning, and they will not come back. Roland’ll go with you.”

“I can do it myself!”

“Roland will go with you,” Macklin said, quietly but firmly, and Judd Lawry looked at the floor. “Now, another thing: I want you to organize a work detail in the morning and distribute some of this to my people.” He nodded toward the cartons of soft drinks, potato chip bags, cookies and cakes. My people, he realized he’d said. “I want them to be happy. Do that after you’ve finished the first duty.”

“What about those people with the trailers out there?”

Macklin deliberated. Oh, he thought, the Shadow Soldier was going to be so proud of him! “How many soldiers do you need to go out and take those vehicles?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe four or five, I guess.”

“Good. Then go out and bring them back-but not the people. We don’t need people who aren’t healthy.”

“What do we need the trailers for?” Sheila asked. “We’re okay as we are!” She couldn’t bear to look at Judd Lawry’s face, because he haunted her nightmares along with an infant that kept crying. A decayed corpse named Rudy crawled through the dust in her dreams, right up into her bed, and she thought she was going crazy.

“Because,” Macklin said, turning toward her, “we’re not going to stay here forever. As soon as we get organized and healthy, as soon as we get our morale high, we’re moving out.”

“Moving out?” She laughed. “Moving to where, war hero? The fucking moon?” “No. Across the country. Maybe east. We can forage as we go.”

“You mean… everybody moving east? What the hell for? Where is there to go?”

“The cities,” Macklin answered. “Or what’s left of them. The towns. The villages. We can build our own cities, if we please. We can start to put things back together again, like they should’ve been in the first place, before this shit happened.”

“You’ve cracked, friend,” Sheila said. “It’s over. Can’t you dig it?”

“It’s not over. It’s just beginning. We can build things back, but better than they were. We can have law and order, and we can enforce the laws-”

“What laws? Yours? The kid’s? Who’s going to make the laws?”

“The man with the most guns,” Roland said.

Colonel Macklin turned his attention back to Judd Lawry. “You’re dismissed,” he said. “Have the trailers here within two hours.”

Lawry left the trailer. Outside, he grinned at the night sky and shook his head. The soldier shit had gone to the Colonel’s brain-but maybe he was right about getting rid of everybody who had burn scars. Lawry didn’t like looking at those burns and being reminded of the holocaust, anyway. The burn marks were ugly. Keep America Beautiful, he thought, Kill a Scarface Today.

He walked on into the camp to select four men for the mission, but he knew it would be a piece of cake. He’d never felt so important in his life; before the disaster, he’d just been a clerk in a gun store, and now he was a corporal in Colonel Macklin’s army! This was like waking up in a new skin. “It’s not over,” Colonel Macklin had said. “It’s just beginning.” Lawry liked the ring of that.

In the Airstream trailer, Sheila Fontana approached Macklin and looked him up and down. She saw the Nazi swastika on several of the badges he was wearing. “What are we going to start calling you? Adolf?”

Macklin’s hand came out and caught her chin. His eyes flared angrily, and she realized she’d gone too far. The strength in that hand felt like it was about to crack her jaw. “If you don’t like something here,” he told her quietly, “you know where the door is. And if you don’t watch your mouth, I’ll throw you to the dirtwarts. Oh, I’m sure they’d love to have company. Aren’t you, Roland?”

Roland shrugged. He could see that the King was hurting Sheila, and that bothered him.

Macklin released her. “You’re a fool,” he said. “You don’t see what could be, do you?”

Sheila rubbed her jaw. “Man, the game is done! You’re talking rebuilding and all that crap-we’re lucky to have a pot to piss in!”

“You’ll see.” His gaze searched her face for the small scabs. “I’ve got plans. Important plans. You’ll see.” He found no evidence of the cancers on Sheila’s face.

She’d noted his roving eyes. “What’s wrong? I washed my hair yesterday.”

“Wash it again,” he said. “It stinks.” He looked at Roland. A sudden inspiration struck him. “The Army of Excellence,” he said. “How does that sound?”

“Fine.” Roland liked it. There was a sweeping, grand, Napoleonic sound to it. “It’s good.”

“The Army of Excellence,” Macklin repeated. “We’ve got a long way to go. We’re going to have to find more able-bodied men-and women. We’ll need more vehicles, and we’ll have to carry our food and water with us. We can do it if we put our minds and our muscle to the job!” His voice rose with excitement. “We can build things back, but better than they ever were!”

Sheila thought he was off his bird. The Army of Excellence, my ass! But she held her tongue, figuring it was best to just let Macklin blow off steam.

“People will follow me,” he continued. “As long as I give them food and protection, they’ll follow me, and they’ll do whatever I say. They don’t have to love me-they don’t even have to like me. But they’ll follow me all the same, because they’ll respect me. Isn’t that right?” he asked Roland.

“Yes, sir,” the boy answered. “People want to be told what to do. They don’t want to make the decisions.” Behind his goggles, Roland’s eyes had begun to glint with excitement as well. He could see the vast picture the King was painting-a massive Army of Excellence moving across the land on foot, in cars and in trailers, overrunning and absorbing other encampments and communities, swelling stronger-but only with healthy, unmarked men and women who were willing to rebuild America. He grinned; oh, what a game of King’s Knight this had turned out to be!