Swan Song (73 page)

Blood was trickling from a bullet hole between his eyes. A second bullet hole was black and scorched against the lime-green coat over his heart. As Roland watched, the Savior’s hands suddenly opened and closed in a convulsion. But he was dead. Roland knew very well what a dead man looked like.

Something moved just beyond the light.

Roland aimed his rifle. “Come out. Now. Your hands above your head.”

There was a long pause, and Roland almost squeezed off a few rounds-but then the figure stepped into the light, hands upraised. In one hand was a.45 automatic.

It was Brother Timothy, his face ashen. And Roland knew he’d been right; he was sure the Savior wouldn’t let Brother Timothy very far from his side.

“Drop the gun,” Roland ordered.

Brother Timothy smiled faintly. He brought his hands down, turned the.45’s barrel toward his own temple and squeezed the trigger.

“No!” Roland shouted, already moving forward to stop him.

But the.45 clicked… and clicked… and clicked.

“I was supposed to kill him,” Brother Timothy said as the.45 continued clicking on an empty clip. “He told me to. He said the heathen had won, and that my last act was to deliver him from the hands of the heathen… and then to deliver myself. That’s what he told me. He showed me where to shoot him… in two places.”

“Put it down,” Roland said.

Brother Timothy grinned, and a tear streaked from each eye. “But there were only two bullets in the gun. How was I supposed to deliver myself… if there were only two bullets in the gun?”

He continued clicking the trigger until Roland took the gun, and then he sobbed and crumpled to his knees.

The floor shook as the atrium’s roof, weakened by the flames, seven years of neglect and the tons of water from melted snow, collapsed onto the burning corpses. Most of the gunfire had stopped. The. battle was almost over, and Roland had won his prize.

Seventy-Seven - [A Five-Star

General]

One afternoon, as new snow drifted across Mary’s Rest, a panel truck with a sagging suspension entered town from the north. Its backfiring engine immediately made it the center of attention-but new people were coming in almost every day now, some in beat-up old cars and trucks, some in horse-drawn wagons, and most on foot, with their belongings in cardboard boxes or suitcases, so newcomers didn’t draw the curiosity they once had.

Painted in big red letters on both sides of the truck was THE JUNKMAN. The driver’s name was Vulcevic, and he and his wife, two sons and daughter had been following the pattern of a new society of wanderers-staying in a settlement long enough to find food and water and rest and then realizing there must be a better place somewhere else. Vulcevic was a former bus driver from Milwaukee who’d been laid low with a flu bug the day his city was destroyed, and whether that was good fortune or bad he still hadn’t decided.

For the past two weeks he’d been hearing rumors from people they’d met on the road: Ahead was a town called Mary’s Rest, and in that town there’s a spring with water as sweet as the Fountain of Youth’s. They’ve got a cornfield there, and apples fall from the sky, and they’ve got a newspaper and they’re building a church.

And in that town-so the rumors had gone-there’s a girl named Swan who has the power of life.

Vulcevic and his family had the dark hair, eyes and olive complexions of generations of gypsy blood. His wife was particularly attractive, with a sharply chiseled, proud face, long back hair streaked with gray, and dark brown eyes that seemed to sparkle with light. Less than a week before, the helmet of growths that had covered her face and head had cracked open, and Vulcevic had left a lantern burning for the Virgin Mary in the midst of a snow-shrouded forest.

As Vulcevic drove deeper into town he did indeed see a waterhole, right out in the middle of the road. A bonfire burned just past it, and further along the road people were reconstructing a clapboard building that might have been a church. Vulcevic knew this was the place, and he did what he and his family had done in every settlement they’d come across: He stopped the truck in the road, and then his two boys opened the truck’s sliding rear panel and started hauling out the boxes full of items for sale or trade, among which were many of their father’s own inventions. Vulcevic’s wife and daughter set up tables to display the goods on, and by that time Vulcevic had an old megaphone to his lips and had started his salesman’s spiel: “Come on, folks, don’t be shy! Step right up and see what the Junkman’s brought you! Got handy appliances, tools and gadgets from all across the country! Got toys for the kiddies, antiques from a vanished age, and my own inventions specially designed to aid and delight in this modern age-and God knows we all need a little aid and delight, don’t we? So step right up, come one, come all!”

People began to crowd around the tables, gawking at what the Junkman had brought: gaudy women’s clothing, including spangled party dresses and color-splashed bathing suits; high-heeled shoes, penny loafers, saddle oxfords and jogging sneakers; men’s short-sleeved summer shirts by the boxful, most of them still with their department store tags; can openers, frying pans, toasters, blenders, clocks, transistor radios and television sets; lamps, garden hoses, lawn chairs, umbrellas and bird feeders; yo-yos, hula hoops, boxed games like Monopoly and Risk, stuffed teddy bears, little toy cars and trucks, dolls and model airplane kits. Vulcevic’s own inventions included a shaving razor that ran on the power of wound-up rubber bands, eyeglasses with little rubber-band-powered windshield wipers on the lenses, and a small vacuum cleaner run by a rubber-band-operated motor.

“What’ll you take for this?” a woman asked, holding up a glitter-covered scarf.

“Got any rubber bands?” he inquired, but when she shook her head he told her to go home and bring back what she had to trade, and maybe they could do business.

“I’ll trade for whatever you’ve got!” he told the crowd. “Chickens, canned food, combs, boots, wristwatches-you bring ’em and let’s deal!” He caught a fragrant aroma in the air and turned to his wife. “Am I going crazy,” he asked her, “or do I smell apples?”

A woman’s hand took an object off the table in front of Vulcevic. “That’s a one-of-a-kind item right there, lady!” Vulcevic said. “Yes, ma’am! You don’t see craftsmanship like that anymore! Go ahead! Shake it!”

She did. Tiny snowflakes flew over the roofs of a town within the glass ball she held.

“Pretty, huh?” Vulcevic asked.

“Yes,” the woman answered. Her pale blue eyes watched the glittery flakes fall. “How much is it?”

“Oh, I’d say two cans of food at least. But… since you like it so much…” He paused, examining his potential customer. She was square-shouldered and sturdy, and she looked like she could spot a lie a mile off. She had thick gray hair trimmed just above her shoulders and brushed back from a widow’s peak at her forehead. Her skin was smooth and unlined, like a newborn baby’s, and it was hard to judge how old she was. Maybe her hair was prematurely gray, Vulcevic thought-but then again, something about her eyes was old, as if they’d seen and remembered a lifetime of struggle. She was a handsome woman, with even, lovely features-a regal look, Vulcevic decided, and he imagined that before the seventeenth of July she might have worn furs and diamonds and had a mansionful of servants. But there was kindness in her face, too, and he thought in the next second that maybe she’d been a teacher, or a social worker, or maybe a missionary. She held a leather satchel securely under her other arm. A businesswoman, Vulcevic thought. Yeah. That’s what she used to be. Probably owned her own business. “Well,” he said, “what have you got to trade, lady?” He nodded toward the satchel.

She smiled slightly, her eyes meeting his. “You can call me Sister,” she said. “And I’m sorry, but I can’t give up what I’ve got in here.”

“Can’t hold onto things forever,” Vulcevic said, with a shrug. “Got to pass them along. That’s the American way.”

“I guess so,” Sister agreed, but she didn’t loosen her grip on the satchel. She shook the glass ball again and watched the snowflakes whirl. Then she returned it to the table. “Thank you,” she said. “I’m just looking.”

“Well, now!” Someone beside her reached into a box and lifted out a tarnished stethoscope. “Talk about relics!” Hugh Ryan hooked it around his neck. “How do I look?”

“Very professional.”

“I thought so.” Hugh couldn’t help but stare at her new face, though he’d seen it often enough in the last two days. Robin had taken a few men back to the cave after Hugh and the rest of the boys and had brought all of them to live in Mary’s Rest. “What’ll you take for this?” Hugh asked Vulcevic.

“A valuable thing like that… it depends. You know, I might run into a doctor someday who really would need it. I can’t be selling that to just anybody. Uh… what’ll you trade for it?”

“I think I can get you a few rubber bands.”

“Sold.”

A giant figure stepped beside Sister, and Vulcevic looked up at a gnarled, growth-covered face as Hugh moved away. He flinched only a little bit, because he was used to such sights. The giant’s arm was in a sling, and his broken fingers were bandaged and splinted with Popsicle sticks, courtesy of the town’s new physician.

“How about this?” Josh asked Sister, holding up a long black dress covered with shining spangles. “Do you think she’d like it?”

“Oh, yes. She’d look great at the next opera opening.”

“I think Glory would like it,” he decided. “I mean… even if she didn’t, she could use the material, couldn’t she? I’ll take this,” he told Vulcevic, laying the dress across the table. “And this, too.” He picked up a green plastic toy tractor.

“Good choice. Uh… what’ve you got to trade?”

Josh hesitated. Then he said, “Wait a minute. I’ll be right back,” and he walked toward Glory’s shack, limping on his left leg.

Sister watched him go. He was as strong as a bull, but the man with the scarlet eye had almost killed him. He had a badly sprained shoulder, a bruised left kneecap, three broken fingers and a fractured rib, and he was covered with abrasions and cuts that were still healing. Josh was very lucky to be alive. But the man with the scarlet eye had vacated his lair under the burned-out church; by the time Sister had gotten there, along with Paul, Anna and a half-dozen men with rifles and shotguns, the man had gone, and though the hole had been watched around the clock for four days, he had not returned. The hole had been filled up, and work was proceeding on rebuilding the church.

But whether he’d left Mary’s Rest or not Sister didn’t know. She remembered the message Josh had brought back: “I’ll make a human hand do the work.”

People pushed in around her, examining the items as if they were fragments of an alien culture. Sister browsed through the stuff-junk now, but years ago things no household would have been without. She picked up an egg timer and let it fall back into the box along with rolling pins, cookie molds and kitchen tools. A multicolored cube lay on the table, and she recalled that such things had been known as Rubik’s Cubes. She picked up an old calendar illustrated with a pipe-smoking fisherman flycasting into a blue stream.

“That’s only eight years old,” Vulcevic told her. “You can figure out the dates from it if you count backwards. I like to keep up with the days, myself. Like today-it’s the eleventh of June. Or the twelfth. Anyway, one or the other.”

“Where’d you get all this?”

“Here and there. We’ve been traveling for a long time. Too long, I guess. Hey! Interested in a nice silver locket? See?” He flipped it open, but Sister glanced quickly away from the small yellowed photo of a smiling little girl inside it. “Oh,” Vulcevic said, and he knew his salesmanship had gotten away from him. “Sorry.” He closed the locket. “Maybe I shouldn’t sell this, huh?”

“No. You should bury it.”

“Yeah.” He put it away and regarded the low, dark snow clouds. “Some morning in June, huh?” He gazed around at the shacks while his two sons dealt with the customers. “How many people live here?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe five or six hundred. New people are coming in all the time.”

“I guess so. Looks like you’ve got a good water supply here. The houses aren’t so bad. We’ve seen plenty worse. Know what we heard on the road coming here?” He grinned. “You’ve got a big cornfield, and apples fall out of the sky. Isn’t that the funniest thing you’ve ever heard?”

Sister smiled.

“And there’s supposed to be a girl here, named Swan or something like that, who can make crops grow. Just touch the dirt and they spring up! How about that? I tell you, the whole country would be dead if it wasn’t for imagination.”

“Are you planning on staying here?”

“Yeah, for a few days, at least. It looks okay. I’ll tell you, we wouldn’t go north again-no, ma’am!”

“Why? What’s north?”

“Death,” Vulcevic said; he scowled, shook his head. “Some people have gone off their rockers. We heard that there’s fighting going on up north. There’s some kind of damned army up there, just this side of the Iowa line. Or what used to be Iowa. Anyway, it’s damned dangerous to go north, so we’re heading south.”

“An army?” Sister remembered Hugh Ryan telling her and Paul about the Battlelands. “What kind of army?”

“The kind that kills you, lady! You know, men and guns. Supposed to be two or three thousand soldiers on the march up there, looking for people to kill. I don’t know what the hell they’re doing. Little tin bastards! Crap like that got us in the mess we’re in!”

“Have you seen them?”

Vulcevic’s wife had been listening, and now she stepped to her husband’s side. “No,” she told Sister, “but we saw the lights of their fires one night. They were in the distance, like a burning city. Right after that we found a man on the road-all cut up and half dead. He called himself Brother David, and he told us about the fighting. He said the worst of it was near Lincoln, Nebraska, but that they were still hunting down the Savior’s people-that’s what he said, and he died before we could make sense of it. But we turned south and got out of there.”

“You’d better pray they don’t come through here,” Vulcevic said to Sister. “Little tin bastards!”

Sister nodded, and Vulcevic went over to dicker with somebody about a wristwatch. If an army was indeed on the march this side of the Iowa line, it meant they might be within a hundred miles of Mary’s Rest. My God! she thought. If two or three thousand “soldiers” swept into Mary’s Rest, they’d smash it to the ground! And she thought also of what she’d been seeing lately in the glass ring, and she went cold inside.

Almost at the same instant, she felt a frigid wave of-yes, she thought-of hatred wash over her, and she knew he was behind her, or beside her, or somewhere very near. She felt his stare on her, like a claw poised at the back of her neck. She whirled quickly around, her nerves screaming an alarm.

But all the people around her seemed interested only in what lay on the tables or in the boxes. There was no one staring at her, and now the frigid wave seemed to be ebbing, as if the man with the scarlet eye-wherever and whoever he was-had begun to move away.

Still, his cold presence lingered in the air. He was close… somewhere very close, hidden in the crowd.

She caught a sudden movement to her right, sensed a figure reaching for her. A hand was outstretched, about to touch her face. She turned and saw a man in a dark coat, standing too close for her to escape. She cringed backward-and then the man’s slender arm glided past her face like a snake.