Swan Song (74 page)

“How much for this?” he asked Vulcevic. In his hand was a little windup toy monkey, chattering and banging two small cymbals together.

“What do you have?”

The man dug out a pocketknife and handed it over. Vulcevic examined it closely, then nodded. “It’s yours, friend.” The other man smiled and gave the toy to a child who stood beside him, waiting patiently.

“Here,” Josh Hutchins said as he came through the crowd back to the table. In his good hand he was carrying something wrapped up in brown cloth. “How about this?” He put the cloth down on the table, next to the spangled black dress.

Vulcevic opened the cloth and stared numbly at what was inside. “Oh… my God,” he whispered.

Lying in front of him were five ears of golden corn.

“I figured you might want one for each of you,” Josh said. “Is that all right?”

Vulcevic picked one of them up as his wife stared spellbound over his shoulder. He smelled it and said, “It’s real! My God, this is real! It’s so fresh I can still smell the earth on it!”

“Sure. We’ve got a whole field of corn growing not too far from here.”

Vulcevic looked as if he might keel over.

“Well?” Josh asked. “Do we have a deal or not?”

“Yes. Yes. Sure! Take the dress! Take whatever you want. My God! This is fresh corn!” He looked over at the man who wanted the wristwatch. “Take it!” he said. “Hell, take a handful! Hey, lady! You want that scarf? It’s yours! I can’t… I can’t believe this!” He touched Josh’s good arm as Josh carefully picked up Glory’s new dress. “Show me,” he begged. “Please show me. It’s been so long since I’ve seen anything growing! Please!”

“All right. I’ll take you out to the field.” Josh motioned for him to follow.

“Boys! Watch the merchandise!” Vulcevic told his sons. And then he looked around at the faces of the crowd, and he said, “Hell! Give them whatever they want! They can have any of it!” He and his wife and daughter started following Josh out to the field, where the golden corn was ripening by the basketful.

Shaken and nervous, Sister was still aware of the cold presence. She began walking back to Glory’s house, holding the satchel tightly under her arm. She still felt as if she were being watched, and if he was indeed out there somewhere, she wanted to get into the house and away from him.

She was almost at the porch when she heard a shouted “NO!” and, an instant later, the noise of the truck’s engine roaring to life.

She whirled around.

The Junkman’s truck was backing up, running over the tables and smashing the boxes of merchandise. People screamed and fled out of its path. Vulcevic’s two sons were trying to climb up to get at the driver, but one of them stumbled and fell and the other wasn’t quick enough. The truck’s tires ran over a woman who had fallen to the ground, and Sister heard her back break. A child was in the way but was pulled to safety as the truck roared backward along the road. Then the truck swerved and veered, crashing into the front of another shack, and it started to turn around. The tires threw snow and dirt as the vehicle lurched forward, backfired and sped along the road out of Mary’s Rest, heading north.

Sister got her feet moving, running to help some of the people who had fallen and narrowly missed being crushed. The Junkman’s delights, antiques and inventions lay all over the street, and Sister saw things flying out of the rear of the truck as it rocketed away, skidded around a curve and went out of sight.

“He stole my dad’s truck!” one of Vulcevic’s sons was shouting, almost hysterical. “He stole my dad’s truck!” The other boy ran off to get his father.

Sister had a feeling of dread that hit her in the stomach like a punch. She ran to the boy’s side and grabbed his arm. He was still stunned, tears of anger streaming from his dark eyes. “Who was it?” she asked him. “What’d he look like?”

“I don’t know! His face… I don’t know!”

“Did he say anything to you? Think!”

“No.” The boy shook his head. “No. He just… was there. Right in front of me. And… and I saw him smile. Then he picked them up and ran to the truck.”

“Picked them up? Picked what up?”

“The corn,” the boy said. “He stole the corn, too.”

Sister released his arm and stood staring along the road. Staring toward the north.

Where the army was.

“Oh, my God,” Sister said hoarsely.

She held the leather satchel in both hands and felt the circle of glass within it. For the last two weeks she’d gone dream-walking in a nightmare land, where the rivers ran with blood and the sky was the color of open wounds and a skeleton on a skeletal horse reaped a field of humanity.

“I’ll make a human hand do the work,” he’d promised. “A human hand.”

Sister looked back at Glory’s house. Swan was standing on the porch, wearing her patchwork coat of many colors, her gaze also directed to the north. Then Sister started walking toward her to tell her what had happened and what she feared was about to happen when the man with the scarlet eye reached that army and showed them the fresh corn. When he told them about Swan and made them understand that a march of a hundred miles was nothing to find a girl who could grow crops out of dead earth.

Enough crops to feed an army.

Seventy-Eight - [A Five-Star

General]

“Bring him in,” Roland Croninger ordered.

The two sentries escorted the stranger up the steps to Colonel Macklin’s trailer. Roland saw the stranger’s left hand caress one of the demonic faces carved into the wood; in his right hand, the stranger carried something wrapped in brown cloth. Both sentries had their pistols pointed at the stranger’s head, because he refused to give up the package, and he’d already snapped the arm of one soldier who’d tried to take it from him. He’d been stopped two hours before by a sentry on the southern edge of the AOE’s camp and immediately taken to Roland Croninger for questioning. Roland had taken one look at the stranger and realized that he was an extraordinary man; but the stranger had refused to answer any questions, saying that he’d speak only to the army’s leader. Roland couldn’t get the package away from him, and no badgering or threats of torture made any impression on the stranger. Roland doubted that any man who wore nothing but faded jeans, sneakers and a brightly colored, summery short-sleeved shirt in freezing weather would be bothered very much by torture.

Roland stepped aside as they brought the man in. Other armed guards stood around the room, and Macklin had summoned Captains Carr and Wilson, Lieutenant Thatcher, Sergeant Benning and Corporal Mangrim. The colonel sat behind his desk, and there was a chair at the center of the room reserved for the stranger. Next to it was a small table on which rested a burning oil lamp.

“Sit down,” Roland said, and the man obeyed. “I think all of you can see for yourselves why I wanted you to meet this man,” Roland said quietly, the lamplight sparking red in his goggles. “This is exactly what he was wearing when he was found. He says he won’t talk to anybody but Colonel Macklin. Okay, mister,” he told the stranger. “Here’s your chance.”

The stranger glanced around the room, examining each man in turn. His gaze lingered a bit longer on Alvin Mangrim.

“Hey!” Mangrim said. “I know you from somewhere, don’t I?”

“It’s possible.” The stranger had a hoarse, raspy voice. It was the voice of someone just overcoming an illness.

Macklin studied him. The stranger looked to be a young man, maybe twenty-five or thirty. He had curly brown hair and a pleasant blue-eyed face, and he was beardless. On his shirt were green parrots and red palm trees. Macklin hadn’t seen a shirt like that since the day the bombs fell. It was a shirt made for a tropical beach, not for a thirty-degree afternoon. “Where the hell did you come from?” Macklin asked him.

The young man’s eyes found his. “Oh, yes,” he said. “You’d be in charge, wouldn’t you?”

“I asked you a question.”

“I’ve brought you something.” The young man suddenly tossed his present toward Macklin’s desk, and at once two guards were sticking rifle barrels in his face. Macklin cringed, had a mental image of a bomb ripping him apart and started to dive to the floor-but the package hit the desktop and came open.

What was inside rolled over his maps of Missouri.

Macklin was silent, staring at the five ears of corn. Roland crossed the room and picked one of them up, and a couple of the other officers crowded around as well.

“Get those out of my face,” the young man told the guards, but they hesitated until Roland ordered them to lower their rifles.

“Where’d you get these?” Roland demanded. He could still smell the dirt on the ear of corn in his hand.

“You’ve asked me enough questions. Now it’s my turn. How many men are out there?” He nodded toward the trailer’s wall, beyond which sprawled the camp and its dozens of bonfires. Neither Roland nor the colonel answered him. “If you’re going to play games with me,” the stranger said, smiling thinly, “I’ll take my toys and go home. You don’t really want me to do that, do you?”

It was Colonel Macklin who finally broke the silence. “We’ve… got about three thousand. We lost a lot of soldiers back in Nebraska.”

“All those three thousand are able-bodied men?”

“Who are you?” Macklin asked. He was very cold, and he noted Captain Carr blowing into his hands to warm them.

“Are those three thousand able to fight?”

“No. We’ve got about four hundred sick or wounded. And we’re carrying maybe a thousand women and children.”

“So you’ve only got sixteen hundred soldiers?” The young man clenched the chair’s armrests. Macklin saw something change about him, something almost imperceptible-and then he realized the young man’s left eye was turning brown. “I thought this was an army, not a boy scout troop!”

“You’re talking to officers of the Army of Excellence,” Roland said, quietly but menacingly. “I don’t give a shit who you-” And then he saw the brown eye, too, and his throat seized up.

“Some great army!” the other man sneered. “Fucking great!” His complexion was reddening, and his jowls seemed to be swelling up. “You’ve got a few guns and trucks, and you think you’re soldiers? You’re shit!” He almost screamed it, and the single blue eye bled pallid gray. “What’s your rank?” he asked Macklin.

Everyone was silent, because they’d seen, too. And then Alvin Mangrim, smiling and cheerful and already in love with the stranger, said, “He’s a colonel!”

“A colonel,” the stranger echoed. “Well, Colonel, I think the time has come for the Army of Excellence to be led by a five-star general.” A streak of black rippled through his hair.

Alvin Mangrim laughed and clapped his hands.

“What are you feeding your sixteen hundred soldiers?” The stranger stood up, and the men around Macklin’s desk retreated, bumping into one another. He snapped his fingers when Macklin didn’t reply fast enough. “Speak!”

Macklin was dumbfounded. No one but the Cong guards at the prison camp a lifetime ago had ever dared to speak to him like this. Ordinarily he would have slashed the offender to shreds for this kind of disrespect, but he could not argue with a man who had a face like a molting chameleon and wore a short-sleeved shirt when others were shivering in fleece-lined overcoats. He felt suddenly weakened, as if this young stranger was sucking the energy and willpower right out of him. The stranger commanded his attention like a magnet, and his presence filled the room with waves of cold that had begun to crisscross like frigid tides. He looked around for some kind of help from the others but saw that they were mesmerized and impotent, too-and even Roland had backed away, his fists clenched at his sides.

The young stranger lowered his head. He remained that way for about thirty seconds. When he lifted his face again, it was pleasant, and both eyes were blue once more. But the black streak remained in his curly brown hair. “I’m sorry,” he said, with a disarming smile. “I’m not myself today. Really, though, I’d like to know: What are you feeding your troops?”

“We… we captured some canned food… from the American Allegiance,” Macklin said at last. “Some cases of canned soup and stew… some canned vegetables and fruit.”

“How long will that supply last? A week? Two weeks?”

“We’re marching east,” Roland told him, getting himself under control. “To West Virginia. We’ll raid other settlements on the way.”

“To West Virginia? What’s in West Virginia?”

“A mountain… where God lives,” Roland said. “The black box and the silver key. Brother Timothy’s going to lead us.” Brother Timothy had been tough, but he’d cracked under Roland’s attentions in the black trailer. According to Brother Timothy, God had a silver key that he had inserted into a black box, and a doorway had opened in solid stone. Within Warwick Mountain-so Brother Timothy had said-were corridors and electric lights and humming machines that made spools of tape spin around, and the machines had spoken to God, reading off numbers and facts that had been way over Brother Timothy’s head. And the more Roland had thought about that story, the more he’d come to believe a very interesting thing: that the man who called himself God had shown Brother Timothy a roomful of mainframe computers still hooked up to a power source.

And if there were mainframe computers still in operation under Warwick Mountain, West Virginia, Roland wanted to find out why they were there, what information they held-and why somebody had made sure they’d keep functioning even after a total nuclear holocaust.

“A mountain where God lives,” the stranger repeated. “Well. I’d like to see that mountain myself.” He blinked, and his right eye was green.

No one moved, not even the guards with the rifles.

“Look at the corn,” the stranger urged. “Smell it. It’s fresh, picked right off the stalk a couple of days ago. I know where there’s a whole field of corn growing-and pretty soon there’ll be apple trees growing there, too. Hundreds of them. How long has it been since any of you tasted an apple? Or cornbread? Or smelled corn frying in a pan?” His gaze crept around the circle of men. “I’ll bet way too long.”

“Where?” Macklin’s mouth was watering. “Where’s the field?”

“Oh… about a hundred and twenty miles south of here. In a little town called Mary’s Rest. They’ve got a spring there, too. You can fill up your bottles and kegs with water that tastes like sunshine.” His eyes of different colors glinted, and he walked to the edge of Macklin’s desk. “There’s a girl who lives in that town,” the young man said; he planted his palms on the desk and leaned forward. “Her name is Swan. I’d like you to meet her. Because she’s the one who made that corn grow out of dead earth, and she planted apple seeds, and they’re going to grow, too.” He grinned, but there was rage in it, and dark pigment rose like a birthmark across his cheek. “She can make crops grow. I’ve seen what she can do. And if you had her-then you could feed your army while everybody else starved. Do you see what I mean?”

Macklin shivered from the cold that came off the man’s body, but he couldn’t look away from those gleaming eyes. “Why… are you telling me this? What’s in it for you?”

“Oh… let’s just say I want to be on the winning team.” The dark pigment disappeared.

“We’re marching to Warwick Mountain,” Roland contended. “We can’t go a hundred and twenty miles out of our way-”

“The mountain will wait,” the stranger said softly, still staring at Macklin. “First I’ll take you to get the girl. Then you can go find God, or Samson and Delilah, if you want to. But first the girl-and the food.”

“Yes.” Macklin nodded, his eyes glazed and his jaw sagging. “Yes. First the girl and the food.”

The young man smiled, and slowly his eyes became the same shade of blue. He was feeling so much better now, so much stronger. Fit as a fiddle! he thought. Maybe it was being here, among people he sensed had the right ideas. Yes, war was a good thing! It trimmed the population and made sure only the strong survived, so the next generation would be better. He’d always been an advocate of the humane nature of war. Maybe he was also feeling stronger because he was away from that girl. That damned little bitch was tormenting those poor souls in Mary’s Rest, making them believe their lives were worth living again. And that sort of deception would not be tolerated.

He picked up the map of Missouri with his left hand and held it up before him while his right hand snaked down behind it. Roland saw a blue wisp of smoke rise and smelled a burning candle. And then a scorched circle began to appear on the map, about a hundred and twenty miles south of their present position. When the circle was complete, the stranger let the map slide back onto the desk in front of Macklin; his right hand was clenched into a fist, and a haze of smoke hung around it.

“That’s where we’re going,” he said.

Alvin Mangrim beamed like a happy child. “Right on, bro!”

For the first time in his life, Macklin felt faint. Something had spun out of control; the gears of the great war machine that was the Army of Excellence had begun to turn of their own accord. He realized in that moment that he didn’t really care about the Mark of Cain, or about purifying the human race, or about rebuilding to fight the Russians. All that had been what he’d told the others, to make them believe the AOE had a higher cause. And make himself believe it, too.

Now he knew all he’d ever wanted was to be feared and respected again, like he’d been when he was a younger man fighting in foreign fields, before his reflexes had slowed down. He’d wanted people to call him “sir” and not have a smirk in their eyes when they did it. He wanted to be somebody again, instead of a drone locked in a flabby bag of bones and dreaming of the past.

He realized he’d crossed a point of no return somewhere along the current of time that had swept him and Roland Croninger out of Earth House. There was no going back now-no going back ever.

But part of him, deep inside, suddenly screamed and cowered in a dark hole, waiting for something fearsome to come lift the lid and offer him food.

“Who are you?” he whispered.

The stranger leaned forward until his face was only inches from Macklin’s. Deep in the man’s eyes, Macklin thought he saw slits of scarlet.

The stranger said, “You can call me… Friend.”