Swan Song

Swan Song Page 16

"Hold on." Sly looked at Rusty. "I thought you said you were with two friends."

"I did. There's a girl travelin' with us. She's..." He glanced quickly at Josh, then back to Sly. "She's out in the barn."

"a girli Well, Christ a'mighty, fella! Bring her in here and let her get some hot food!"

"Uh... I don't think - "

"Go on and get her!" he insisted. "Barn ain't no place for a girl!"

"Rustyi" Josh was peering out the window. Night was fast descending, but he could still see the last apple tree and the figure that stood beneath it. "Come here for a minute."

Outside, Swan held the blanket around her head and shoulders like a cape and looked up at the branches of the spindly apple tree; Killer ran a couple of rings around the tree and then barked halfheartedly, wanting to get back to the barn. above Swan's head, the branches moved like skinny, searching arms.

She walked forward, her boots sinking through five inches of snow, and placed her bare hand against the tree's trunk.

It was cold beneath her fingers. Cold and long dead.

Just like everything else, she thought. all the trees, the grass, the flowers - everything scorched lifeless by radiation many years ago.

But it was a pretty tree, she decided. It was dignified, like a monument, and it did not deserve to be surrounded by the ugly stumps of what had been. She knew that the hurting sound in this place must have been a long wail of agony.

Her hand moved lightly across the wood. Even in death, there was something proud about the tree, something defiant and elemental - a wild spirit, like the heart of a flame that could never be totally extinguished.

Killer yapped at her feet, urging her to hurry whatever she was doing. Swan said, "all right, I'm rea - "

She stopped speaking. The wind whirled around her, tugging at her clothes.

Could it bei she wondered. I'm not dreaming this... am Ii

Her fingers were tingling. Just barely enough to register through the cold.

She placed her palm against the wood. a prickling, pins-and-needles sensation coursed through her hand - still faint, but growing, getting stronger.

Her heart leaped. Life, she realized. There was life there yet, deep in the tree. It had been so long - so very long - since she'd felt the stirring of life beneath her fingers. The feeling was almost new to her again, and she realized how much she'd missed it. Now what felt like a mild electric current seemed to be rising up from the earth through the soles of her boots, moving up her backbone, along her arm and out her hand into the wood. When she drew her hand away, the tingling ceased. She pressed her fingers to the tree again, her heart pounding, and there was a shock so powerful it felt as if fire had shot up her spine.

Her body trembled. The sensation was steadily getting stronger, almost painful now, her bones aching with the pulse of energy passing through her and into the tree. When she could stand it no longer, she pulled her hand back. Her fingers continued to prickle.

But she wasn't finished yet. On an impulse, she extended her index finger and traced letters across the tree trunk: S... W... a... N.

"Swan!" The voice came from the house, startling her. She turned toward the sound, and as she did the wind ripped at her makeshift cape and flung it back from her shoulders and head.

Sly Moody was standing between Josh and Rusty, holding a lantern. By its yellow light, he saw that the figure under the apple tree had no face.

Her head was covered by gray growths that had begun as small black warts, had thickened and spread over the passage of years, had connected with gray tendrils like groping, intertwining vines. The growths had covered her skull like a knotty helmet, had enclosed her facial features and sealed them up except for a small slit at her left eye and a ragged hole over her mouth through which she breathed and ate.

Behind Sly, Carla screamed. Sly whispered, "Oh... my Jesus..."

The faceless figure grabbed the blanket and shrouded her head, and Josh heard her heartbreaking cry as she raced to the barn.  

Forty-nine

Darkness fell over the snow-covered buildings and houses of what had been Broken Bow, Nebraska. Barbed wire surrounded the town, and here and there bits of timber and rags burned in empty oil cans, the wind sending orange sparks spiraling into the sky. On the curving northwest arc of Highway 2, dozens of corpses lay frozen where they'd fallen, and the hulks of charred vehicles still spat flame.

In the fortress that Broken Bow had been for the last two days, three hundred and seventeen sick and injured men, women and children were trying desperately to keep warm around a huge central bonfire. The houses of Broken Bow were being torn apart and fed to the flames. another two hundred and sixty-four men and women armed with rifles, pistols, axes, hammers and knives crouched in trenches hastily hacked in the earth along the barbed wire at the western rim of town. Their faces were turned westward, into the shrilling subzero wind that had killed so many. They shivered in their ragged coats, and tonight they dreaded a different kind of death.

"There!" a man with an ice-crusted bandage around his head shouted. He pointed into the distance. "There! They're coming!"

a chorus of shouts and warnings moved along the trench. Rifles and pistols were quickly checked. The trench vibrated with nervous motion, and the breath of human beings whirled through the air tike diamond dust.

They saw the headlights weaving slowly through the carnage on the highway. Then the music drifted to them on the stinging wind. It was carnival music, and as the headlights grew nearer a skinny, hollow-eyed man in a heavy sheepskin coat stood up at the center of the trench and trained a pair of binoculars at the oncoming vehicle. His face was streaked with dark brown keloids.

He put the binoculars down before the cold could seal the eyecups to his face. "Hold your fire!" he shouted to the left. "Pass it down!" The message began to go down the line. He looked to the right and shouted the same order, and then he waited, one gloved hand on the Ingram machine gun under his coat.

The vehicle passed a burning car, and the red glare revealed it to be a truck with the remnants of paint on its sides advertising different flavors of ice cream. Two loudspeakers were mounted atop the truck's cab, and the windshield had been replaced with a metal plate that had two narrow slits cut for the driver and passengers to see through. The front fender and radiator grille were shielded with metal, and from the armor protruded jagged metal spikes about two feet long. The glass of both headlights was reinforced with heavy tape and covered with wire mesh. On both sides of the truck were gunslits, and atop the truck was a crude sheet-metal turret and the snout of a heavy machine gun.

The armored Good Humor truck, its modified engine snorting, rolled with chain-covered tires over the carcass of a horse and stopped about fifty yards from the barbed wire. The merry, tape-recorded calliope music continued for perhaps another two minutes - and then there was silence.

The silence stretched. a man's voice came through the loudspeakers: "Franklin Hayes! are you listening, Franklin Hayesi"

The skinny, weary man in the sheepskin coat narrowed his eyes but said nothing.

"Franklin Hayes!" the voice continued, with a mocking, lilting note. "You've given us a good fight, Franklin Hayes! The army of Excellence salutes you!"

"Fuck you," a middle-aged, shivering woman said softly in the trench beside Hayes. She had a knife at her belt and a pistol in her hand, and a green keloid covered most of her face in the shape of a lily pad.

"You're a fine commander, Franklin Hayes! We didn't think you had the strength to get away from us at Dunning. We thought you'd die on the highway. How many of you are left, Franklin Hayesi Four hundredi Five hundredi and how many are able to keep fightingi Maybe half that numberi The army of Excellence has over four thousand healthy soldiers, Franklin Hayes! Some of those used to suffer for you, but they decided to save their lives and cross over to our side!"

Someone in the trench to the left fired a rifle, and several other shots followed. Hayes shouted, "Don't waste your bullets, damn it!" The firing dwindled, then ceased.

"Your soldiers are nervous, Franklin Hayes!" the voice taunted. "They know they're about to die."

"We're not soldiers," Hayes whispered to himself. "You crazy fucker, we're not soldiers!" How his community of survivors - once numbering over a thousand people trying to rebuild the town of Scottsbluff - had gotten embroiled in this insane "war" he didn't know. a van driven by a husky red-bearded man had come into Scottsbluff, and out had stepped another, frail-figured man with bandages wrapping his face - all except his eyes, which were covered with goggles. The bandaged man had spoken in a high, young voice, had said that he'd been badly burned a long time ago; he'd asked for water and a place to spend the night, but he wouldn't let Dr. Gardner even touch his bandages. Hayes himself, as mayor of Scottsbluff, had taken the young man on a walking tour of the structures they were rebuilding. Sometime during the night the two men had driven away, and three days later Scottsbluff was attacked and burned to the ground. The screams of his wife and son still reverberated in Hayes's mind. Then Hayes had started leading the survivors east to escape the maniacs that pursued them - but the "army of Excellence" had more trucks, cars, horses, trailers and gasoline, more weapons and bullets and "soldiers," and the group that followed Hayes had left hundreds of corpses in its wake.

This was an insane nightmare with no end, Hayes realized. Once he'd been an eminent professor of economics at the University of Wyoming, and now he felt like a trapped rat.

The headlights of the armored Good Humor truck burned like two malevolent eyes. "The army of Excellence invites all able-bodied men, women and children who don't want to suffer anymore to join us," the amplified voice said. "Just cross the wire and keep walking west, and you'll be well taken care of - hot food, a warm bed, shelter and protection. Bring your weapons and ammunition with you, but keep the barrels of your guns pointed to the ground. If you are healthy and sound of mind, and if you are unblemished by the mark of Cain, we invite you with love and open arms. You have five minutes to decide."

The mark of Cain, Hayes thought grimly. He'd heard that phrase through those damned speakers before, and he knew they meant either the keloids or the growths that covered the faces of many people. They only wanted those "unblemished" and "sound of mind." But he wondered about the young man with the eye goggles and the bandaged face. Why had he been wearing those bandages, if he himself had not been "blemished" by the "mark of Cain"i

Whoever was guiding that mob of ravagers and rapists was beyond all humanity. Somehow he - or she - had drilled bloodlust into the brains of over four thousand followers, and now they were killing, looting and burning struggling communities for the sheer thrill of it.

There was a shout to the right. Two men were struggling over the barbed wire; they got across, snagging their coats and trousers but pulling free, and started running west with their rifles pointed to the ground. "Cowards!" someone shouted. "You dirty cowards!" But the two men did not look back.

a woman went across, followed by another man. Then a man, a woman and a young boy escaped the trench and fled to the west, all carrying guns and ammunition. angry shouts and curses were flung at their backs, but Hayes didn't blame them. None of them bore keloids; why should they stay and be slaughteredi

"Come home," the voice intoned over the loudspeakers, like the silken drone of a revival preacher. "Come home to love and open arms. Flee the mark of Cain, and come home... come home... come home."

More people were going over the wire. They vanished westward into the darkness.

"Don't suffer with the unclean! Come home, flee the mark of Cain!"

a gunshot rang out, and one of the truck's headlights shattered, but the mesh deflected the slug and the light continued to burn. Still, people climbed over the fence and scurried west.

"I ain't goin' nowhere," the woman with the lily pad keloid told Hayes. "I'm set and stayin'."

The last to go was a teen-age boy with a shotgun, his overcoat pockets stuffed with shells.

"It's time, Franklin Hayes!" the voice called.

He took out the Ingram gun and pushed the safety off.

"It's time!" the voice roared - and the roar was joined by other roars, rising together, mixing and mingling like a single, inhuman battle cry. But they were the roars of engines firing, popping and sputtering, blasting to full-throated life. and then the headlights came on - dozens of headlights, hundreds of headlights that curved in an arc on both sides of Highway 2, facing the trench. Hayes realized with numb terror that the other armored trucks, tractor-trailer rigs, and monster machines had been silently pushed almost to the barbed-wire barrier while the Good Humor truck had kept their attention. The headlights speared into the faces of those in the trenches as engines were gunned and chained tires crunched forward across snow and frozen bodies.

Hayes stood up to yell "Fire!" but the shooting had already started. Sparks of gunfire rippled up and down the trench; bullets whined off metal tire guards, radiator shields and iron turrets. Still the battle wagons came on, almost leisurely, and the army of Excellence held their fire. Then Hayes screamed, "Use the bombs!" but he was not heard over the tumult. The trench fighters didn't have to be told to crouch down, pick up one of the three gasoline-filled bottles they'd all been supplied with, touch the rag wicks to the flames from oil barrels and throw the homemade bombs.

The bottles exploded, sending flaming gasoline shooting across the snow, but in the leaping red light the monsters came on, unscathed, and now some of them were rolling over the barbed wire less than twenty feet from the trench. One bottle scored a direct hit on the viewslit of a Pinto's armored windshield; it shattered and sprayed fiery gas. The driver tumbled out screaming, his face aflame. He staggered toward the wire, and Franklin Hayes shot him dead with the Ingram gun. The Pinto kept going, tore through the barricade and crushed four people before they could scramble from the trench.

The vehicles tore the barbed-wire barricade to shreds, and suddenly their crude turrets and gunports erupted with rifle, pistol and machine-gun fire that swept across the trench as Hayes's followers tried to run. Dozens slithered back in or lay motionless in the dirty, blood-streaked snow. One of the burning oil cans went over, touching off unused bombs that began exploding in the trench. Everywhere was fire and streaking bullets, writhing bodies, screams and a blur of confusion. "Move back!" Franklin Hayes yelled. The defenders fled toward the second barrier about fifty yards behind - a five-foot-high wall of bricks, timbers and frozen bodies of their friends and families stacked up like cordwood.

Franklin Hayes saw soldiers on foot, fast approaching behind the first wave of vehicles. The trench was wide enough to catch any car or truck that tried to pass, but the army of Excellence's infantry would soon swarm across - and through the smoke and blowing snow there seemed to be thousands. He heard their war cry - a low, animalish moan that almost shook the earth.

Then the armored radiator of a truck was staring him in the face, and he scrambled out of the trench as the vehicle stopped two feet short. a bullet whined past his head, and he stumbled over the body of the woman with the lily pad keloid. Then he was up and running, and bullets thunked into the snow all around him, and he clambered up over the wall of bricks and bodies and turned again to face the attackers.

Explosions started blasting the wall apart, metal shrapnel flying. Hayes realized they were using hand grenades - something they'd saved until now - and he kept firing at running figures until the Ingram gun blistered his hands.

"They've broken through on the right!" somebody shouted. "They're comin' in!"

Swarms of men were running in all directions. Hayes fumbled in his pocket, found another clip and reloaded. One of the enemy soldiers leapt over the wall, and Hayes had time to see that his face was daubed with what looked like Indian warpaint before the man spun and drove a knife into the side of a woman fighting a few feet away. Hayes shot him through the head, kept shooting as the soldier jerked and fell.

"Run! Get back!" somebody yelled. Other voices, other screams pierced the wail of noise: "We can't hold 'em! They're breakin' through!"

a man with blood streaming down his face grasped Hayes's arm. "Mr. Hayes!" he shouted. "They're breaking through! We can't hold them back any - "

He was interrupted by the blade of an axe sinking into his skull.

Hayes staggered back. The Ingram gun dropped from his hands, and he sank down to his knees.

The axe was pulled loose, and the corpse fell to the snow.

"Franklin Hayesi" a soft, almost gentle voice asked.

He saw a long-haired figure standing over him, couldn't make out the face. He was tired, all used up. "Yes," he replied.

"Time to go to sleep," the man said, and he lifted his axe.

When it fell, a dwarf who had crouched atop the broken wall jumped up and clapped his hands.  

Fifty

a battered Jeep with one good headlight emerged from the snow on Missouri Highway 63 and entered what had once been a town. Lanterns glowed within a few of the clapboard houses, but otherwise darkness ruled the streets.

"Stop there." Sister motioned toward a brick structure on the right. The building's windows were boarded up, but crowded around it in the gravel parking lot were several old cars and pickup trucks. as Paul Thorson guided the Jeep into the lot the single headlight washed over a sign painted in red on one of the boarded windows: Bucket of Blood Tavern.

"Uh... you sure you want to stop at this particular placei" Paul inquired.

She nodded, her head cowled by the hood of a dark blue parka. "Where there're cars, somebody ought to know where to find gas." She glanced at the fuel gauge. The needle hovered near Empty. "Maybe we can find out where the hell we are, too."

Paul turned off the heater, then the single headlight and the engine. He was wearing his old reliable leather jacket over a red woolen sweater, with a scarf around his neck and a brown woolen cap pulled over his skull. His beard was ashen-gray, as was much of his hair, but his eyes were still a powerful, undimmed electric blue against the heavily lined, windburned skin of his face. He glanced uneasily at the sign on the boards and climbed out of the Jeep. Sister reached into the rear compartment, where an assortment of canvas bags, cardboard boxes and crates were secured with a chain and padlock. Right behind her seat was a beat-up brown leather satchel, which she picked up with one gloved hand and took with her.

From beyond the door came the noise of off-key piano music and a burst of raucous male laughter. Paul braced himself and pushed it open, walking in with Sister at his heels. The door, fixed to the wall with tight springs, snapped shut behind them.

Instantly, the music and laughter ceased. Suspicious eyes glared at the new arrivals.

at the room's center, next to a free-standing cast-iron stove, six men had been playing cards around a table. a haze of yellow smoke from hand-rolled cigarettes hung in the air, diffusing the light of several lanterns that dangled from wall hooks. Other tables were occupied by two or three men and some rough-looking women. a bartender in a fringed leather jacket stood behind a long bar that Paul noted was pocked with bullet holes. Blazing logs popped red sparks from a fireplace in the rear wall, and at the piano sat a chunky young woman with long black hair and a violet keloid that covered the lower half of her face and exposed throat.

Both Sister and Paul had seen that most of the men wore guns in holsters at their waists and had rifles propped against their chairs.

The floor was an inch deep in sawdust, and the tavern smelled of unwashed bodies. There was a sharp ping! as one of the men at the center table spat tobacco juice into a pail.

"We're lost," Paul said. "What town is thisi"

a man laughed. He had greasy black hair and was wearing what looked like a dogskin coat. He blew smoke into the air from a brown cigarette. "What town you tryin' to get to, fellai"

"We're just traveling. Is this place on the mapi"

The men exchanged amused glances, and now the laughter spread. "What map do you meani" the one with greasy hair asked. "Drawn up before the seventeenth of July, or afteri"

"Before."

"The before maps ain't no fuckin' good," another man said. He had a bony face and was shaved almost bald. Four fishhooks dangled from his left earlobe, and he wore a leather vest over a red-checked shirt. at his skinny waist were a holster and pistol. "Everything's changed. Towns are graveyards. Rivers flooded over, changed course and froze. Lakes dried up. What was woods is desert. So the before maps ain't no fuckin' good."

Paul was aware of all that. after seven years of traveling a zigzag path across a dozen states, there was very little that shocked him or Sister anymore. "Did this town ever have a namei"

"Moberly," the bartender offered. "Moberly, Missouri. Used to be about fifteen thousand people here. Now I guess we're down to three or four hundred."

"Yeah, but it ain't the nukes that killed 'em!" a wizened woman with red hair and red lips spoke up from another table. "It's the rotgut shit you serve in here, Derwin!" She cackled and raised a mug of oily-looking liquid to her lips while the others laughed and hooted.

"aw, fuck you, Lizzie!" Derwin shot back. "Your gut's been pickled since you was ten years old!"

Sister walked to an empty table and set her satchel atop it. Beneath the hood of her parka, most of her face was covered by a dark gray scarf. Unsnapping the satchel, she removed the tattered, folded and refolded Rand McNally road atlas, which she smoothed out and opened to the map of Missouri. In the dim light, she found the thin red line of Highway 63 and followed it to a dot named Moberly, about seventy-five miles north of what had been Jefferson City. "Here we are," she told Paul, who came over to look.

"Great," he said grimly. "So what does that tell usi What direction do we go from - "

The satchel was suddenly snatched off the table, and Sister looked up, stunned.

The bony-faced man in the leather vest had it and was backing away with a grin on his thin-lipped mouth. "Looky what I got me, boys!" he shouted. "Got me a nice new bag, didn't Ii"

Sister stood very still. "Give that back to me," she said, quietly but firmly.

"Got me somethin' to shit in when it's too cold in the woods!" the man responded, and the others around the table laughed. His small black eyes darted toward Paul, daring him to move.

"Quit fuckin' around, Earl!" Derwin said. "What do you need a bag fori"

"'Cause I do, that's why! Let's see what we got in here!" Earl dug a hand into it and started pulling out pairs of socks, scarves and gloves. and then he reached way down and his hand came up with a ring of glass.

It flared with bloody color in his grip, and he stared at it in open-mouthed wonder.

The tavern was silent but for the popping of fireplace logs.

The red-haired hag slowly rose from her chair. "Sweet Mother of Jaysus," she whispered.

The men around the card table gawked, and the black-haired girl left her piano stool to limp closer.

Earl held the glass ring before his face, watching the colors ebb and swell like blood rushing through arteries. But his grip on the ring produced brutal hues: muddy brown, oily yellow and ebony.

"That belongs to me." Sister's voice was muffled behind the scarf. "Please give it back."

Paul took a forward step. Earl's hand went to the butt of his pistol with a gunfighter's reflexes, and Paul stopped. "Found me a play-pretty, didn't Ii" Earl asked. The ring was pulsing faster, turning darker and uglier by the second. all but two of the spikes had been broken off over the years. "Jewels!" Earl had just realized where the colors were coming from. "This thing must be worth a goddamned fortune!"

"I've asked you to give it back," Sister said.

"Got me a fuckin' fortune!" Earl shouted, his eyes glazed and greedy. "Break this damned glass open and dig them jewels out, I got me a fortune!" He grinned crazily, lifted the ring over his head and began to prance for his friends at the table. "Looky here! I got me a halo, boys!"

Paul took another step, and instantly Earl spun to face him. The pistol was already leaving his holster.

But Sister was ready. The short-barreled shotgun she'd drawn from beneath her parka boomed like a shout from God.

Earl was lifted off the floor and propelled through the air, his body crashing over tables and his own gunshot blasting a chunk from a wooden beam above Sister's head. He landed in a crumpled heap, one hand still gripping the ring. The murky colors pulsed wildly.

The man in the dogskin coat started to rise. Sister pumped another round into the smoking chamber, whirled and pressed the barrel to his throat. "You want some of iti" He shook his head and sank down into his chair again. "Guns on the table," she ordered - and eight pistols were pushed over the grimy cards and coins to the table's center.

Paul had his .357 Magnum cocked and waiting. He caught a movement from the bartender and aimed it at the man's head. Derwin raised his hands. "No trouble, friend," Derwin said nervously. "I want to live, okayi"

The pulsing of the glass ring was beginning to stutter and slow. Paul edged toward the dying man as Sister held her sawed-off riot gun on the others. She'd found the weapon three years earlier in a deserted highway patrol station outside the ruins of Wichita, and it packed enough punch to knock an elephant down. She'd only had to use it a few times, with the same result as now.

Paul tried to avoid all the blood. a fly buzzed past his face and hovered over the ring. It was large and green, an ugly thing, and Paul was taken aback for a few seconds because it had been years since he'd seen a fly; he'd thought they were all dead. a second fly joined the first, and they swirled in the air around the twitching body and the glass circle.

Paul bent down. The ring flared bright red for an instant - and then went black. He worked it from the corpse's grip, and in his hand the rainbow colors returned. Then he shoved it down into the satchel again and covered it over with the socks, scarves and gloves. a fly landed on his cheek, and he jerked his head because the little bastard felt like a freezing nail pressed to his skin.

He returned the road atlas to the satchel. all eyes were on the woman with the shotgun. She took the satchel and retreated slowly toward the door, keeping the weapon aimed at the center of the card table. She told herself she'd had no choice but to kill the man, and that was the end of it; she'd come too far with the glass circle to let some fool break it to pieces.

"Hey," the man in the dogskin coat said. "You ain't gonna go without us buyin' you a drink, are youi"

"Whati"

"Earl wasn't worth a damn," another man volunteered, and he leaned over to spit tobacco into his pail. "Trigger-happy idjit was always killin' people."

"He shot Jimmy Ridgeway dead right here, coupla months ago," Derwin said. "Bastard was too good with that pistol."

"Till now," the other man said. The card players were already dividing the dead man's coins.

"Here y'go." Derwin picked up two glasses and drew oily amber liquid from a keg. "Homemade brew. Tastes kinda funky, but it'll sure get your mind off your troubles." He offered the glasses to Paul and Sister. "On the house."

It had been months since Paul's last sip of alcohol. The strong, woody smell of the stuff drifted to him like a siren's perfume. His insides were quaking; he'd never used the Magnum on a human being before, and he prayed that he'd never have to. Paul accepted the glass and thought the fumes might sear off his eyebrows, but he took a drink anyway.

It was like gargling molten metal. Tears popped from his eyes. He coughed, sputtered and gasped as the moonshine - fermented out of God only knew what - slashed down his throat. The red-haired hag cackled like a crow, and some of the men in the back guffawed as well.

as Paul tried to regain his breath Sister set the satchel aside - not too far - and raised the second glass. The bartender said, "Yeah, you did ol' Earl Hocutt a good deed. He's been wantin' somebody to kill him ever since his wife and little girl died of the fever last year."

"Is that soi" she asked as she pulled the scarf away from her face. She lifted the glass to her deformed lips and drank without a flinch.

Derwin's eyes widened, and he backed away so fast he knocked a shelf of glasses and mugs to the floor.  

Fifty-one

Sister was prepared for the reaction. She'd seen it many times before. She sipped the moonshine again, found it no better or worse than many bottles she'd drunk from on the streets of Manhattan, and sensed everyone in the bar watching her. Want a good looki she thought. Want a real good looki She put the glass down and turned to let them all see.

The red-haired hag stopped cackling as abruptly as if she'd been kicked in the throat.

"Good God a'mighty," the tobacco chewer managed to say, after he'd swallowed his chaw.

The lower half of Sister's face was a mass of gray growths, knotty tendrils twisted and intertwined over her chin, jaw and cheeks. The hard growths had pulled Sister's mouth slightly to the left, giving her a sardonic smile. Under the hood of her parka, her skull was a scabby crust; the growths had completely enclosed her scalp and were now beginning to send out tough gray tendrils across her forehead and over both ears.

"a leper!" One of the card players scrambled to his feet. "She's got leprosy!"

The mention of that dreaded disease made the others leap up, forgetting guns, cards and coins, and back across the tavern. "Get outta here!" another one yelled. "Don't give that shit to us!"

"Leper! Leper!" the red-haired hag shrieked, picking up a mug to throw at Sister. There were other shouts and threats, but Sister was unperturbed. This was a common scene wherever she was forced to expose her face.

Over the cacophony of voices there came a sharp, insistent crack!... crack!... crack!

Silhouetted by light from the fireplace, a thin figure stood against the far wall, methodically beating a wooden staff over one of the tabletops. The noise gradually won out, until an uneasy silence remained.

"Gentlemen... and ladies," the man with the wooden staff said in a ravaged voice, "I can assure you that our friend's affliction is not leprosy. as a matter of fact, I don't think it's the least bit contagious - so you don't have to ruin your underdrawers."

"What the hell do you know, scumbagi" the man in the dogskin coat challenged.

The other figure paused, then positioned the staff under his left armpit. He began to shuffle forward, his left trouser leg pinned up just above the knee. He wore a ragged dark brown coat over a dirty beige cardigan sweater, and on his hands were gloves so well worn the fingers were poking through.

Lamplight touched his face. Silver hair cascaded around his shoulders, though the crown of his scalp was bald and mottled with brown keloids. He had a short, grizzled gray beard and finely chiseled facial features, his nose thin and elegant. Sister thought he might have been handsome but for the bright crimson keloid that covered one side of his face like a port-wine stain. He stopped, standing between Sister, Paul and the others. "My name is not scumbag," he said, with an air of ruined royalty. His deep-set, tormented gray eyes shifted toward the man in the dogskin coat. "I used to be Hugh Ryan. Doctor Hugh Ryan, surgeon in residence at amarillo Medical Center in amarillo, Texas."

"You a doctori" the other man countered. "Bullshit!"

"My current living standards make these gentlemen think I was born terminally thirsty," he told Sister, and he lifted one palsied hand. "Of course, I'm not suited for a scalpel anymore. But then again, who isi" He approached Sister and touched her face. The odor of his unwashed body almost knocked her down, but she'd smelled worse. "This is not leprosy," he repeated. "This is a mass of fibrous tissue originating from a subcutaneous source. How deep the fibroid layer penetrates, I don't know - but I've seen this condition many times before, and in my opinion it's not contagious."

"We've seen other people with it, too," Paul said. He was used to the way Sister looked because it had happened so gradually, beginning with the black warts on her face. He'd examined his own head and face for them, but so far he was unaffected. "What causes iti"

Hugh Ryan shrugged, still pressing at the growths. "Possibly the skin's reaction to radiation, pollutants, lack of sunshine for so long - who knowsi Oh, I've seen maybe a hundred or more people with it, in many different stages. Fortunately, there seems to remain a small breathing and eating space no matter how severe the condition becomes."

"It's leprosy, I say!" the red-haired hag contended, but the men were settling down again, returning to their table. a few of them left the tavern, and the others continued to stare at Sister with a sickened fascination.

"It itches like hell, and sometimes my head aches like it's about to split open," Sister admitted. "How do I get rid of iti"

"That, unfortunately, I can't say. I've never seen Job's Mask regress - but then, I only saw most of the cases in passing."

"Job's Maski Is that what it's calledi"

"Well, that's what I call it. Seems appropriate, doesn't iti"

Sister grunted. She and Paul had seen dozens of people with "Job's Mask" scattered across the nine states they'd traveled through. In Kansas, they'd come upon a colony of forty afflicted people who'd been forced out of a nearby settlement by their own families; in Iowa, Sister had seen a man whose head was so encrusted he was unable to hold it upright. Job's Mask afflicted men and women with equal savagery, and Sister had even seen a few teenagers with it, but children younger than seven or eight seemed to be immune - or at least, Sister had never seen any babies or young children with it, though both parents might be horribly deformed. "Will I have this for the rest of my lifei"

Hugh shrugged again, unable to help any further. His eyes locked with hungry need on Sister's glass of moonshine, still atop the bar. She said, "Be my guest," and he drank it down as if it were iced tea on a hot august afternoon.

"Thank you very much." He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and glanced at the dead man lying in the bloody sawdust. The chunky black-haired girl was eagerly going through the pockets. "There is no right and wrong in this world anymore," he said. "There's only a faster gun and a higher level of violence." He nodded toward the table he'd been occupying, over by the fireplace. "If you pleasei" he asked Sister, with a note of pleading. "It's been so long since I've been able to talk to someone of obvious breeding and intellect."

Sister and Paul were in no hurry. She picked up her satchel, sliding her shotgun into the leather sheath that hung along her hip beneath the parka. Paul returned his Magnum to its holster, and they followed Hugh Ryan.

Derwin finally steeled himself to emerge from behind the bar, and the man in the dogskin coat helped him carry Earl's body out the back door.

as Hugh got his remaining leg propped up on a chair Sister couldn't help but notice the stuffed trophies that adorned the wall around the Bucket of Blood's fireplace: an albino squirrel, a deer's head with three eyes, a boar with a single eye at the center of its forehead, and a two-headed woodchuck. "Derwin's a hunter," Hugh explained. "You can find all sorts of things in the woods around here. amazing what the radiation's done, isn't iti" He admired the trophies for a moment "You don't want to sleep too far from the light," he said, turning his attention back to Paul and Sister. "You really don't." He reached for the half glass of moonshine he'd been drinking before they'd come in. Two green flies buzzed around his head, and Paul watched them circling.

Hugh motioned toward the satchel. "I couldn't help but notice that glass trinket. May I ask what it isi"

"Just something I picked up."

"Wherei a museumi"

"No, I found it in a pile of rubble."

"It's a beautiful thing," he said. "I'd be careful with it, if I were you. I've met people who'd behead you for a piece of bread."

Sister nodded. "That's why I carry the shotgun - and that's why I learned to use it, too."

"Indeed." He swilled down the rest of the moonshine and smacked his lips. "ah! Nectar of the gods!"

"I wouldn't go that far." Paul's throat still felt as if it had been scraped with razors.

"Well, taste is relative, isn't iti" Hugh spent a moment licking the inside of the glass to get the last drops before he put it aside. "I used to be a connoisseur of French brandies. I used to have a wife, three children, and a Spanish villa with a hot tub and a swimming pool." He touched his stump. "I used to have another leg, too. But that's the past, isn't iti and beware of dwelling on the past if you want to keep your sanity." He stared into the fire, then looked across the table at Sister. "So. Where have you been, and where are you goingi"

"Everywhere," she replied. "and nowhere in particular."

For the past seven years, Sister and Paul Thorson had been following a dreamwalk path - a blindman's buff of pictures Sister had seen in the depths of the glass circle. They'd traveled from Pennsylvania to Kansas, had found the town of Matheson - but Matheson had been burned to the ground, the ruins covered with snow. They'd searched Matheson, found only skeletons and destruction, and then they'd reached the parking lot of a burned-out building that might have been a department store or supermarket.

and on that snow-swept parking lot, in the midst of desolation, Sister had heard the whisper of God.

It was a small thing, at first: The toe of Paul's boot had uncovered a card.

"Hey!" Paul had called out. "Look at this!" He'd wiped the dirt and snow from it and handed it to her. The colors were bleached out, but it showed a beautiful woman in violet robes, the sun shining overhead and a lion and lamb at her feet; she held a silver shield with what might have been a flaming phoenix at its center, and she wore a blazing crown. The woman's hair was afire, and she stared courageously into the distance. at the top of the card were the faded letters THE EMPRESS.

"It's a tarot card," Paul had said, and Sister's knees had almost buckled.

More cards, bits of glass, clothes and other debris had been buried under the snow. Sister saw a spot of color, picked it up - and found she was holding an image she recognized: a card with a figure shrouded in black, its face white and masklike. Its eyes were silver and hateful, and in the center of its forehead was a third, scarlet eye. She'd torn that card to pieces rather than add it to her bag along with The Empress.

and then Sister had stepped on something soft, and as she bent down to brush the snow away and saw what it was, tears had filled her eyes.

It was a scorched, blue-furred doll. as she lifted it in her arms she saw the little plastic ring hanging down, and she pulled it. In the cold and snowy silence, a labored voice moaned "Coookieees," and the sound drifted over the lot where skeletons lay dreaming.

The Cookie Monster doll had gone into Sister's bag - and then it had been time to leave Matheson, because there was no child's skeleton in that parking lot, and Sister knew now more than ever that she was searching for a child.

They'd roamed Kansas for more than two years, living in various struggling settlements; they had turned north into Nebraska, east into Iowa, and now south to Missouri. a land of suffering and brutality had unfolded itself to them like a continuing, unescapable hallucination. On many occasions, Sister had peered into the glass circle and caught sight of a hazy human face looking back, as if through a badly discolored mirror. That particular image had remained constant over seven years, and though Sister couldn't tell very much about the face, she thought that it had begun as a young face - that of a child, though whether male or female she couldn't tell - and over the years the face had changed. The last time she'd seen it was four months ago, and Sister had had the impression that the facial features were all but wiped clean. Since then the hazy image had not reappeared.

Sometimes Sister felt sure the next day would bring an answer - but the days had passed, becoming weeks, months and years, and still she continued searching. The roads kept carrying her and Paul across devastated countryside, through deserted towns and around the perimeter of jagged ruins where cities had stood. Many times she'd been discouraged, had thought of giving it up and staying in one of the settlements they'd passed through, but that was before her Job's Mask had gotten so bad. Now she was beginning to think the only place she might be welcome was in a colony of Job's Mask sufferers.

But the truth was that she feared staying in one place too long. She kept looking over her shoulder, afraid that a dark figure with a shifting face had finally found her and was coming up from behind. In her nightmares of Doyle Halland, or Dal Hallmark, or whatever he called himself now, he had a single scarlet eye in his forehead like the grim figure on the tarot card, and it was relentlessly probing for her.

Often, in the years past, Sister had felt her skin prickle as if he was somewhere very near, about to close in on her. at those times, she and Paul had hit the road again, and Sister dreaded crossroads because she knew the wrong turn could lead them to his waiting hands.

She pushed the memories out of her mind. "How about youi Have you been here longi"

"Eight months. after the seventeenth of July, I went north from amarillo with my family. We lived in a settlement on the Purgatoire River, south of Las animas, Colorado, for three years. a lot of Indians live around there; some of them were Vietnam vets, and they taught us stupid city folks how to build mud huts and stay alive." He smiled painfully. "It's a shock to be living in a million-dollar mansion one month and the next find yourself under a roof of mud and cow dung. anyway, two of our children died the first year - radiation poisoning - but we were warm when the snow started falling, and we felt damned lucky."

"Why didn't you stay therei" Paul asked.

Hugh stared into the fire. It was a long time before he answered. "We... had a community of about two hundred people. We had a supply of corn, some flour and salted beef, and a lot of canned food. The river water wasn't exactly clean, but it was keeping us alive." He rubbed the stump of his leg. "Then they came."

"Theyi Whoi"

"First it was three men and two women. They came in a Jeep and a Buick with an armored windshield. They stopped in Purgatoire Flats - that's what we called our town - and they wanted to buy half our food. Of course, we couldn't sell it, not for any price. We'd starve if we did. Then they threatened us. They said we'd regret not giving them what they wanted. I remember that Curtis Redfeather - he was our mayor, a big Pawnee who'd served in Vietnam - went to his hut and came back with an automatic rifle. He told them to go, and they left." Hugh paused; he slowly clenched his fists atop the table.

"They came back," he said softly. "That night. Oh, yes, they came back - with three hundred armed soldiers and trucks that they'd made into tanks. They started smashing Purgatoire Flats to the ground... and killing everybody. Everybody." His voice cracked, and he couldn't go on for a minute, "People were running, trying to get away," he said. "But the soldiers had machine guns. I ran, with my wife and daughter. I saw Curtis Redfeather shot down and run over by a Jeep. He didn't... he didn't even look like a human being anymore."

Hugh closed his eyes, but there was such torment etched into his face that Sister could not look at him. She watched the fire. "My wife was shot in the back," he continued. "I stopped to help her, and I told my daughter to run for the river. I never saw her again. But... I was picking up my wife when the bullets hit me. Two or three, I think. In the leg. Somebody hit me in the head, and I fell. I remember... I woke up, and the barrel of a rifle was pointed in my face. and someone - a man's voice - said, Tell them the army of Excellence passed this way.' The army of Excellence," he repeated bitterly, and he opened his eyes. They were shocked and bloodshot. "Four or five people were left, and they made a stretcher for me. They carried me more than thirty miles to the north, to another settlement - but that one was ashes, too, by the time we got there. My leg was shattered. It had to come off. I told them how to do it. and I hung on, and we kept going, and that was four years ago." He looked at Sister and leaned slightly forward in his chair. "For God's sake," he said urgently, "don't go west. That's where the Battlelands are."

"The Battlelandsi" Paul asked. "What do you meani"

"I mean they're having war out there - in Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska - the Dakotas, too. Oh, I've met plenty of refugees from the west. They call it the Battlelands because so many armies are fighting out there: the american allegiance, Nolan's Raiders, the army of Excellence, Troop Hydra and maybe five or six others."

"The war's done." Sister frowned. "What the hell are they fighting overi"

"Land. Settlements. Food, guns, gasoline - whatever's left. They're out of their minds; they want to kill somebody, and if it can't be the Russians, they've got to invent enemies. I've heard the army of Excellence is on a rampage against survivors with keloids." He touched the scarlet, upraised scar that covered half his face. "Supposed to be the mark of Satan."

Paul shifted uneasily in his chair. In their travels, he and Sister had heard about settlements being attacked and burned by bands of marauders, but this was the first they'd heard of organized forces. "How big are these armiesi Who's leading themi"

"Maniacs, so-called patriots, military men, you name it," Hugh said. "Last week a man and woman who'd seen the american allegiance passed through here. They said it numbered about four or five thousand, and a crazy preacher from California is leading it. He calls himself the Savior and wants to kill everybody who won't follow him. I've heard Troop Hydra's executing blacks, Hispanics, Orientals, Jews and everybody else they consider foreign. The army of Excellence is supposedly led by an ex-military man - a Vietnam war hero. They're the bastards with the tanks. God help us if those maniacs start moving east."

"all we want is enough gasoline to get to the next town," Paul said. "We're heading south to the Gulf of Mexico." He swatted at a fly that landed on his hand; again, there was a feeling of being pricked by a freezing nail.

Hugh smiled wistfully. "The Gulf of Mexico. My God, I haven't seen the Gulf for a long, long time."

"What's the nearest town from herei" Sister asked.

"I suppose that would be Mary's Rest, south of what used to be Jefferson City. The road's not too good, though. They used to have a big pond at Mary's Rest. anyway, it's not far - about fifty miles."

"How do we get there on an empty tanki"

Hugh glanced over at the bloody sawdust. "Well, Earl Hocutt's truck is parked out front. I doubt he'll need the gasoline anymore, don't youi"

Paul nodded. They had a length of garden hose in the Jeep, and Paul had become very proficient at stealing gas.

a fly landed on the table in front of Hugh. He suddenly upended his moonshine glass over it and trapped the insect. It buzzed angrily around and around, and Hugh watched it circling. "You don't see flies too often," he said. "a few of them stay in here because of the warmth, I guess. and the blood. That one's mad as the Devil, isn't hei"

Sister heard the low hum of another fly as it passed her head. It made a slow circle above the table and shot toward a chink in the wall. "Is there a place we could spend the night herei" she asked Hugh.

"I can find one for you. It won't be much more than a hole in the ground with a lid over it, but you won't freeze to death and you won't get your throats slit." He tapped the glass, and the large green fly tried to attack his finger. "But if I find you a safe place to sleep," he said, "I'd like something in return."

"What's thati"

Hugh smiled. "I'd like to see the Gulf of Mexico."

"Forget it!" Paul told him. "We don't have the room."

"Oh, you'd be surprised what a one-legged old man can squeeze himself into."

"More weight means using more gasoline, not to mention food and water. No. Sorry."

"I weigh about as much as a wet feather," Hugh persisted. "and I can carry along my own food and water. If you want payment for taking me with you, perhaps I can interest you in two jugs of moonshine I've kept hidden for an emergency."

Paul was about to say no again, but his lips locked. The moonshine was about the nastiest stuff he'd ever tasted, but it sure had quickened his pulse and kicked on his furnace.

"How about iti" Hugh asked Sister. "Some of the bridges are broken down between here and Mary's Rest. I can do a lot better for you than that antique map you're carrying."

Her first impulse was to agree with Paul, but she saw the suffering in Hugh Ryan's gray eyes; he wore the expression of a once-loyal dog that had been beaten and abandoned by a trusted master.

"Pleasei" he said. "There's nothing for me here. I'd like to see if the waves still roll in like they used to."

Sister thought about it. No doubt the man could scrunch himself up in the back of the Jeep, and they might well need a guide to get to the next town. He was waiting for an answer. "You find us a safe place to spend the night," she said, "and we'll talk about it in the morning. That's the best I can do for now. Deali"

Hugh hesitated, searching Sister's face. Hers was a strong face, he decided, and her eyes weren't dead like those of so many others he'd seen. It was unfortunate that most likely the Job's Mask would eventually seal them shut. "Deal," he said, and they shook on it.

They left the Bucket of Blood to get the gas from the dead man's truck. Behind them, the red-haired hag scuttled over to the table they'd left and watched the fly buzzing around in the upturned glass. She suddenly picked it up and snatched the fly as it tried to escape, and before it could get loose from her hand she shoved the fly into her mouth and crunched her teeth down on it.

Her face contorted. She opened her mouth and spat a small glob of grayish-green into the fire, where it sizzled like acid.

"Nasty!" she said, and she wiped her tongue with sawdust.  

Fifty-two

He was waiting in the dark for them to come home.

The wind was strong. It sang sweetly to his soul of millions dead and the dying not yet done, but when the wind was so strong he couldn't search very far. He sat in the dark, in his new face and his new skin, with the wind shrilling around the shed like a party noisemaker, and thought that maybe - just maybe - it would be tonight.

But he understood the twists and turns of time, and so if it was not tonight, there was always tomorrow. He could be very patient, if he had to be.

Seven years had passed quickly for him; he had traveled the roads, a solitary journeyer, through Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee and arkansas. He had sometimes lodged in struggling settlements, sometimes lived by himself in caves and abandoned cars as the mood struck him. Wherever he passed was darkened by his presence, the settlements sucked dry of hope and compassion and left to blow away as the inhabitants killed one another or themselves. He had the knack of showing them how futile life was, and what the tragedy of false hope could bring about. If your child is hungry, kill it, he urged starving mothers; think of suicide as the noble thing, he told men who asked his advice. He was a fountain of information and wisdom that he was eager to share: all dogs spread cancer and must be killed; people with brown keloids have developed a taste for the flesh of children; there's a new city being built in the wilds of Canada, and that's where you should go; you could get a lot of protein by eating your own fingers - after all, how many do you needi

He was continually astonished by how easy it was to make them believe.

It was a great party. But for one thing, and that one thing gnawed at him day and night.

Where was the ring of glassi

The woman - Sister - was surely dead by now. He didn't care about her, anyway. Where was the glass thing, and who had iti Many times he'd sensed he was close to it, that the next crossroads would take him right to it, but the instincts had always faded, and he was left deciding to try a new direction. He'd searched the mind of everyone he met, but the woman was not in there, and neither was the ring of glass. So he went on. But with the passage of years his traveling had slowed somewhat, because there were so many opportunities in the settlements, and because even if the glass ring was still out there somewhere, it didn't seem to be of any consequence. It wasn't doing anything, was iti It was still his party, and nothing had changed. The threat he'd felt from it, back in the house in New Jersey, still remained with him, but whatever else the glass ring was, it was surely not making a difference in his existence or in the things he saw around him.

No problemo, he thought - but where was iti Who had iti and why had it come to bei

Often he recalled the day he'd turned off Interstate 80 on his French racing bicycle and headed south. He'd sometimes wondered what would have happened if he'd gone back east along I-80. Would he have found the woman and the glass ringi Why hadn't the sentries at that Red Cross station seen her by then, if indeed she was still alivei

But he couldn't see everything, or know everything; he could only see and know what his counterfeit eyes told him, or what he picked from the human mind, or what the searchers brought him back from the dark.

They were coming to him right now. He sensed the mass of them gathering together from all points of the compass and approaching against the wind. He pushed himself toward the door, and the wheels beneath him squeaked.

The first one touched his cheek and was sucked through the flesh as if into an opening vortex.

His eyes rolled back in his head, and he looked inward. Saw dark forest, heard wind shrieking, and nothing more.

another thing that resembled a fly squeezed through a hole in the wall and landed on his forehead, instantly being drawn into the rippling flesh. Two more joined it and were pulled down.

He saw more dark woods, an icy puddle, a small animal of some kind lying dead in the brush. a crow swept in, snapped and spun away.

More flies penetrated his face. More images whirled through him: a woman scrubbing clothes in a lamplit room, two men fighting with knives in an alley, a two-headed boar snuffling in garbage, its four eyes glinting wetly.

The flies crawled over his face, being sucked through the flesh one after the other.

He saw dark houses, heard someone playing a harmonica - badly - and someone else clapping in time; faces around a bonfire, a conversation of what baseball games used to be like on summer nights; a skinny man and woman, entwined on a mattress; hands at work, cleaning a rifle; an explosion of light and a voice saying, "Found me a play-pretty, didn't - "

Stop.

The image of light and the voice froze behind his eyes like a frame of a movie.

He trembled.

Flies were still on his face, but he concentrated on the image of the light. It was just a red flare, and he couldn't tell much about it yet. His hands clenched into fists, his long and dirty nails carving half moons into the skin but drawing no blood.

Forward, he thought, and the film of memory began to unreel.

"... Ii" the voice - a man's voice - said. and then an awestruck whisper: "Jewels!"