Swan Song

Swan Song Page 4

Blisters rose and fell on her face, arms and legs. She stopped and sat down for a while to rest, her lungs wheezing in the heavy air. There were no sounds of subway trains or cars or burning sinners. Something terrible's happened up there, she thought. Not the Rapture, not the Second Coming - something terrible.

Sister Creep forced herself onward. One step at a time. One step and then the next.

She found another ladder and looked up. about twenty feet above, at the top of the shaft, was a half moon of murky light. She climbed up until she was near enough to touch a manhole cover, shaken two inches out of its socket by the same shock wave that had made the tunnel vibrate. She got the fingers of one hand in between the iron and the concrete and shoved the manhole cover out of the way.

The light was the color of dried blood, and as hazy as if filtered through layers of thick gauze. Still, she had to squint until her eyes were used to light again.

She was looking up at the sky, but a kind of sky she'd never seen before: dirty brown clouds were spinning over Manhattan, and flickers of blue lightning crackled out of them. a hot, bitter wind swirled into her face, the force of it almost knocking her loose from the ladder. In the distance there was the rumble of thunder, but a different kind of thunder than she'd ever heard - this sounded like a sledgehammer banging iron. The wind made a howling noise as it swept into the manhole, pushing her backward, but she pulled herself and her bag up the last two rungs of the ladder and crawled into the outside world again.

The wind blew a storm of grit into her face, and she was blinded for a few seconds. When her vision cleared again, she saw that she had come out of the tunnel into what looked like a junkyard.

around her were the crushed hulks of cars, taxis and trucks, some of them melted together to form strange sculptures of metal. The tires on some of the vehicles were still smoking, while others had dissolved into black puddles. Gaping fissures had burst open in the pavement, some of them five and six feet wide; through many of the cracks came gouts of steam or water like gushing geysers. She looked around, dazed and uncomprehending, her eyes slitted against the gritty wind. In some places the earth had collapsed, and in others there were mountains of rubble, miniature Everests of metal, stone and glass. Between them the wind shrieked and turned, spun and rose around the fragments of buildings, many of which had been shaken apart right to their steel skeletons, which in turn were warped and bent like licorice sticks. Curtains of dense smoke from burning buildings and heaps of debris flapped before the rushing wind, and lightning streaked to earth from the black heart of roiling, immense clouds. She couldn't see the sun, couldn't even tell where it lay in the turbulent sky. She looked for the Empire State Building, but there were no more skyscrapers; all the buildings she could see had been sheared off, though she couldn't tell if the Empire State was still standing or not because of the smoke and dust. It was not Manhattan anymore, but a ravaged junkyard of rubble mountains and smoke-filled ravines.

Judgment of God, she thought. God has struck down an evil city, has swept all the sinners down to burn in Hell forever! Crazy laughter rang out inside her, and as she lifted her face toward the dirty clouds the fluids of burst blisters streamed down her cheeks.

a spear of lightning hit the exposed framework of a nearby building, and sparks danced madly in the air. Beyond the rise of a huge mountain of debris, Sister Creep could see the funnel of a tornado in the distance, and another one writhing to the right. Up in the clouds, fiery things were being tossed like red balls in the hands of a juggler. all gone, all destroyed, she thought. The end of the world. Praise God! Praise blessed Jesus! The end of the world, and all the sinners burning in -

She clasped her hands over her ears and screamed. Something inside her brain cracked like a funhouse mirror that existed only to reflect a distorted world, and as the fragments of the funhouse mirror fell apart other images were revealed behind it: herself as a younger, more attractive woman, pushing a stroller in a shopping mall; a suburban brick house with a small green yard and a station wagon in the driveway; a town with a main street and a statue in the square; faces, some of them dark and indistinct, others just on the edge of memory; and then the blue flashing lights and the rain and the demon in a yellow raincoat, reaching out and saying, "Give her to me, lady. It's okay, just give her to me now..."

all gone, all destroyed! Judgment of God! Praise Jesus!

"Just give her to me now..."

No, she thought. No!

all gone, all destroyed! all the sinners, burning in Hell!

No! No! No!

and then she opened her mouth and shrieked because everything was gone and destroyed in fire and ruin, and in that instant she realized no God of Creation would destroy His masterpiece in one fit of flame like a petulant child. This was not Judgment Day, or Rapture, or the Second Coming - this had nothing to do with God; this was utter, evil destruction without sense or purpose or sanity.

For the first time since crawling out of the manhole Sister Creep looked at her blistered hands and arms, at the tattered rags of her clothing. Her skin was splotched with angry red burns, the blisters stretched tight with yellow fluid. Her bag was just barely held together by scraps of canvas, her belongings spilling out through burned holes. and then around her, in the pall of dust and smoke, she saw other things that at first her mind had not let her see: flattened, charred things that could only remotely be recognized as human remains. a pile of them lay almost at her feet, as if heaped there by someone sweeping out a coal scuttle. They Uttered the street, lay half in and half out of the crushed cars and taxis; here was one wrapped around the remnants of a bicycle, there was another with its teeth showing startlingly white against the crisped, featureless face. Hundreds of them lay around her, their bones melded into shapes of surrealistic horror.

Lightning flashed, and the wind wailed with a banshee voice of the dead around Sister Creep's ears.

She ran.

The wind whipped into her face, blinding her with smoke, dust and ashes. She ducked her head, hobbling up the side of a rubble mountain, and she realized she'd left her bag behind but she couldn't bear returning to that valley of the dead. She tripped over debris, dislodging an avalanche of junk that cascaded around her legs - shattered television sets and stereo equipment, the melted mess of home computers, ghetto blasters, radios, the burned rags of men's silk suits and women's designer dresses, broken fragments of fine furniture, charred books, antique silverware reduced to chunks of metal. and everywhere there were more smashed vehicles and bodies buried in the wreckage - hundreds of bodies and pieces of bodies, arms and legs protruding from the debris as stiffly as those of department store mannequins. She reached the top of the mountain, where the hot wind was so fierce she had to fall to her knees to keep from being thrown off. Looking in all directions, she saw the full extent of the disaster: To the north, the few remaining trees in Central Park were burning, and fires extended all along what had been Eighth avenue, glowing like blood-red rubies behind the curtain of smoke; to the east, there was no sign of Rockefeller Center or Grand Central Station, just shattered structures rising up like rotten teeth from a diseased jaw; to the south, the Empire State Building seemed to be gone, too, and the funnel of a tornado danced near Wall Street; to the west, ridges of debris marched all the way to the Hudson River. The panorama of destruction was both a pinnacle of horror and a numbing of it, because her mind reached the limit of its ability to accept and process shock and began flipping out memories of cartoons and comedies she'd seen as a child: Jetsons, Huckleberry Hound, Mighty Mouse and Three Stooges. She crouched at the top of the mountain in the grip of a shrieking wind and stared dumbly out at the ruins while a hideous fixed smile stretched her mouth, and only one sane thought got through: Oh my Jesus, what's happened to the magic placei

and the answer was: all gone, all destroyed.

"Get up," she said to herself, though the wind swept her voice away. "Get up. You think you're gonna stay herei You can't stay here! Get up, and take one step at a time. One step and then the next gets you where you're going."

But it was a long time before she could move again, and she stumbled down the far side of the rubble mountain like an old woman, muttering to herself.

She didn't know where she was going, nor did she particularly care. The intensity of the lightning increased, and thunder shook the ground; a black, nasty-looking drizzle began to fall from the clouds, blowing like needles before the howling wind. Sister Creep stumbled from one mountain of wreckage to the next. Off in the distance she thought she heard a woman screaming, and she called out but wasn't answered. The rain fell harder, and the wind blew into her face like a slap.

and then - she didn't know how much longer it was - she came down a ridge of debris and stopped in her tracks beside the crushed remnant of a yellow cab. a street sign stood nearby, bent almost into a knot, and it said Forty-second. Of all the buildings along the street, only one was standing.

The marquee above the Empire State Theater was still blinking, advertising Face of Death, Part Four and Mondo Bizarro. On both sides of the theater building, the structures had been reduced to burned-out shells, but the theater itself wasn't even scorched. She remembered passing that theater the night before, and the brutal shove that had knocked her into the street. Smoke passed between her and the theater, and she expected the building to be gone like a mirage in the next second, but when the smoke whipped on the theater was still there, and the marquee was still blinking merrily.

Turn away, she told herself. Get the hell out of here!

But she took one step toward it, and then the next got her where she was going. She stood in front of the theater doors and smelled buttered popcorn from within. No! she thought. It's not possible!

But it was not possible, either, that the city of New York should be turned into a tornado-swept wasteland in a handful of hours. Staring at those theater doors, Sister Creep knew that the rules of this world had been suddenly and drastically changed by a force she couldn't even begin to understand. "I'm crazy," she told herself. But the theater was real, and so was the aroma of buttered popcorn. She peered into the ticket booth, but it was empty; then she braced herself, touched the crucifix and gemclip chain that hung around her neck, and went through the doors.

There was no one behind the concession counter, but Sister Creep could hear the movie going on in the auditorium behind a faded red curtain; there was the grating sound of a car crash, and then a narrator's voice intoning, "and here before your eyes is the result of a head-on collision at sixty miles an hour."

Sister Creep reached over the counter, grabbed two Hershey bars from the display, and was about to eat one when she heard the snarl of an animal.

The sound rose, reaching the register of a human laugh. But in it Sister Creep heard the squeal of tires on a rain-slick highway and a child's piercing, heartbreaking scream: "Mommy!"

She clapped her hands over her ears until the child's cry was gone, and she stood shivering until all memory of it had faded. The laughter was gone, too, but whoever had made it was still sitting in there, watching a movie in the middle of a destroyed city.

She crammed half a Hershey bar into her mouth, chewed and swallowed it. Behind the red curtain, the narrator was talking about rapes and murders with cool, clinical detachment. The curtain beckoned her. She ate the other half of the Hershey bar and licked her fingers. If that awful laughter swelled again, she thought, she might lose her mind, but she had to see who had made it. She walked to the curtain and slowly, slowly, drew it aside.

On the screen was the bruised, dead face of a young woman, but such a sight held no power to shock Sister Creep anymore. She could see the outline of a head - someone sitting up in the front row, face tilted upward at the screen. The rest of the seats were empty. Sister Creep stared at that head, could not see the face and didn't want to, because whoever - whatever - it was couldn't possibly be human.

The head suddenly swiveled toward her.

Sister Creep drew back. Her legs wanted to run, but she didn't let them go. The figure in the front row was just staring at her as the film continued to show close-ups of people lying on coroners' slabs. and then the figure stood up from the seat, and Sister Creep heard popcorn crunch on the floor beneath its shoes. Run! she screamed inwardly. Get out! But she stood her ground, and the figure stopped before its face was revealed by the light from the concession counter.

"You're all burned up." It was the soft and pleasant voice of a young man. He was thin and tall, about six feet four or five, dressed in a pair of dark green khaki trousers and a yellow T-shirt. On his feet were polished combat boots. "I guess it's over out there by now, isn't iti"

"all gone," she murmured. "all destroyed." She caught a dank chill, the same thing she'd experienced the previous night in front of the theater, and then it was gone. She could see the faintest impression of features on the man's face, and she thought she saw him smile, but it was a terrible smile; his mouth didn't seem to be exactly where it should. "I think... everyone's dead," she told him.

"Not everyone," he corrected. "You're not dead, are youi and I think there are others still alive out there, too. Hiding somewhere, probably. Waiting to die. It won't be long, though. Not long for you, either."

"I'm not dead yet," she said.

"You might as well be." His chest expanded as he drew in a deep breath. "Smell that air! Isn't it sweeti"

Sister Creep started to take a backward step. The man said, almost gently, "No," and she stopped as if the most important - the only important - thing in the world was to obey.

"My best scene's coming up." He motioned toward the screen, where flames shot out of a building and broken bodies were lying on stretchers. "That's me! Standing by the car! Well, I didn't say it was a long scene." His attention drifted back to her. "Oh," he said softly. "I like your necklace." His pale hand with its long, slender fingers slid toward her throat.

She wanted to cringe away because she couldn't bear to be touched by that hand, but she was transfixed by his voice, echoing back and forth in her mind. She flinched as the cold fingers touched the crucifix. He pulled at it, but both the crucifix and the gemclip chain were sealed to her skin.

"It's burned on," the man said. "We'll fix that."

With a quick snap of his wrist he ripped the crucifix and chain off, taking Sister Creep's skin with it. Pain shot through her like an electric shock, at the same time breaking up the echo of the man's command and clearing her head. Tears burned fiery trails down her cheeks.

The man held his hand palm up, the crucifix and chain dangling before Sister Creep's face. He began to sing in the voice of a little boy: "Here we go 'round the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush..."

His palm caught fire, the flames crawling up along his fingers. as the man's hand became a glove of flame the crucifix and chain began to melt and dribble to the floor.

"Here we go 'round the mulberry bush, so early in the morrrrning!"

Sister Creep looked into his face. By the light of the flaming hand she could see the shifting bones, the melting cheeks and lips, eyes of different colors surfacing where there were no sockets.

The last droplet of molten metal spattered to the floor. a mouth opened across the man's chin like a red-rimmed wound. The mouth grinned. "Lights out!" it whispered.

The film stopped, the frame burning away on the screen. The red curtain that Sister Creep was still holding on to burst into flames, and she screamed and jerked her hands away. a wave of sickening heat swept through the theater, the walls drooling fire.

"Tick tock tick tock!" the man's voice continued, in a merry singsong rhythm. "Nothing ever stops the clock!"

The ceiling blazed and buckled. Sister Creep shielded her head with her arms and staggered backward through the fiery curtains as he advanced on her. Streams of chocolate ran from the concession counter. She ran toward the door, and the thing behind her brayed, "Run! Run, you pig!"

She was three strides out the door before it became a sheet of fire, and then she was running madly through the ruins of Forty-second Street. When she dared to look back, she saw the entire theater bellowing flame, the building's roof imploding as if driven down by a brutal fist.

She flung herself behind a block of stone as a storm of glass and bricks hurtled around her. It was all over in a few seconds, but Sister Creep stayed huddled up, shivering with terror, until all the bricks had stopped falling. She peered out from behind her shelter.

Now the ruins of the theater were indistinguishable from any of the other piles of ash. The theater was gone, and so - thankfully - was the thing with the flaming hand.

She touched the raw circle of flesh that ringed her throat, and her fingers came away bloody. It took another moment for her to grasp that the crucifix and chain were really gone. She couldn't remember where she'd gotten it from, but it was something she'd been proud of. She'd thought that it protected her, too, and now she felt naked and defenseless.

She knew she'd looked into the face of evil there in that cheap theater.

The Hack rain was falling harder. Sister Creep curled up, her hand pressed to her bleeding throat, and she closed her eyes and prayed for death.

Jesus Christ was not coming in His flying saucer after all, she realized. Judgment Day had destroyed the innocent in the same flames that killed the guilty, and the Rapture was a lunatic's dream.

a sob of anguish broke from her throat. She prayed, Please, Jesus, take me home, please, right now, this minute, please, please...

But when she opened her eyes the black rain was still falling.

The wind was getting stronger, and now it carried a winter's chill. She was drenched, sick to her stomach, and her teeth were chattering.

Wearily, she sat up. Jesus was not coming today. She would have to die later, she decided. There was no use lying out here like a fool in the rain.

One step, she thought. One step and then the next gets you where you're going.

Where that was, she didn't know, but from now on she'd have to be very careful, because that evil thing with no face and all faces could be lurking anywhere. anywhere. The rules had changed. The Promised Land was a boneyard, and Hell itself had broken through the earth's surface.

She had no idea what had caused such destruction, but a terrible thing occurred to her: What if everywhere was like thisi She let the thought go before it burned into her brain, and she struggled to her feet.

The wind staggered her. The rain was falling so heavily that she couldn't see beyond four feet in any direction. She decided to go toward what she thought was north, because there might be a tree left to rest under in Central Park.

Her back bowed against the elements, she started with one step.  

Thirteen

"House fell in, Mama!" Josh Hutchins yelled as he struggled free of the dirt, rubble and pieces of snapped timbers that covered his back. "Twister's done gone!" His mother didn't answer, but he could hear her crying. "It's all right, Mama! We're gonna be..."

The memory of an alabama tornado that had driven Josh, his sister and his mother into the basement of their home when he was seven years old suddenly broke and whirled apart. The cornfield, the burning spears and the tornado of fire came back to him with horrifying clarity, and he realized the crying woman was the little girl's mother.

It was dark. a weight still bore down on Josh, and as he fought against it a mound of rubble, mostly the dirt and broken wood, slid off him. He sat upright, his body throbbing with dull pain.

His face felt funny - so tight it was about to rip. He lifted his fingers to touch his forehead, and a dozen blisters broke, the fluids oozing down his face. More blisters burst on his cheeks and jaw; he touched the flesh around his eyes and found they were swollen into slits. The pain was getting sharper, and his back felt as if it had been splashed with boiling water. Burned, he thought. Burned to hell and back. He smelled the odor of fried bacon, and he almost puked but he was too intent on finding out the extent of his injuries. at his right ear there was a different kind of pain. He gently touched it. His fingers grazed a stub of flesh and crusted blood where his ear had been. He remembered the explosion of the pumps, and he figured that a hot sliver of metal had sliced most of his ear clean off.

I'm in fine shape, he thought, and he almost laughed out loud. Ready to take on the world! He knew that if he ever stepped into a wrestling ring again, he wouldn't need a Frankenstein mask to resemble a monster.

and then he did throw up, his body heaving and shuddering, the fried bacon smell thick in his nostrils. When his sickness had passed, he crawled away from the mess. Under his hands were loose dirt, timbers, broken glass, dented cans and cornstalks.

He heard a man moaning, remembered PawPaw's burning eyeballs, and figured that the man was lying somewhere to his right, though his ear on that side was clogged up. The woman's sobbing would put her a few feet in front of him; the little girl, if she was still alive, was silent. The air was still warm, but at least it was breathable. Josh's fingers closed on a wooden shaft, and he followed it to the end of a garden hoe. Digging into the dirt around him, he found a variety of objects: can after can, some of them broken open and leaking; a couple of melted things that might have once been plastic milk jugs; a hammer; some charred magazines and packs of cigarettes. The entire grocery store had caved in on top of them, spilling everything into PawPaw's fallout shelter. and that's surely what it was, Josh reasoned. The underground boys must have known he might need it someday.

Josh tried to stand, but he bumped his head before he could straighten up from a crouch. He felt a ceiling of hard-packed dirt, planks and possibly hundreds of rough cornstalks jammed together about four and a half feet off the basement floor. Oh, Jesus! Josh thought. There must be tons of earth right over our heads! He figured they had nothing more than a pocket of air down here, and when that was gone...

"Stop crying, lady," he said. "The old man's hurt worse than you are."

She gasped, as if she hadn't realized anyone else was alive.

"Where's the little girli She okayi" Blisters popped on Josh's lips.

"Swan!" Darleen shouted. She searched for Sue Wanda through the dirt. "I can't find her! Where's my babyi Where's Swani" Then her left hand touched a small arm. It was still warm. "Here she is! Oh, God, she's buried!" Darleen started digging frantically.

Josh crawled to her side and made out the child's body with his hands. But only her legs and left arm were buried; her face was free, and she was breathing. Josh got the child's legs uncovered, and Darleen embraced her daughter. "Swan, you okayi Say somethin', Swan! Come on now! Talk to Mama!" She shook the child until one of Swan's hands came up and pushed weakly at her.

"Quit." Swan's voice was a hoarse, slurred whisper. "Wanna sleep... till we get there."

Josh crawled toward the man's moaning. He found PawPaw curled up and half buried. Carefully, Josh dug him out. PawPaw's hand caught in the shreds of Josh's shirt, and the old man muttered something that Josh couldn't understand. He said, "Whati" and bent his head closer.

"The sun," PawPaw repeated. "Oh, Lord... I saw the sun blow up." He started muttering again, something about his bedroom slippers. Josh knew he couldn't last much longer and went back to Darleen and Swan.

The little girl was crying - a quiet, deeply wounded sound. "Shhhh," Darleen said. "Shhhh, honey. They're gonna find us. Don't you worry. They'll get us out of here." She still didn't fully grasp what had happened; everything was hazy and jumbled past the moment when Swan had pointed to the PaWPaW'S sign on the interstate and said she was going to bust if she couldn't go to the bathroom.

"I can't see, Mama," Swan said listlessly.

"We're gonna be all right, honey. They're gonna find us real..." She'd reached up to smooth back her daughter's hair and jerked her hand away. Her fingers had found stubble. "Oh, my God. Oh, Swan, oh, baby..." She was afraid to touch her own hair and face, but she felt nothing more uncomfortable than the pain of a moderate sunburn. I'm okay, she told herself. and Swan's okay, too. Just lost some hair, that's all. We're gonna be just fine!

"Where's PawPawi" Swan asked. "Where's the gianti" She had a toothache all over her body, and she smelled breakfast cooking.

"I'm right here," Josh answered. "The old man's not too far away. We're in the basement, and the whole place caved in on - "

"We're gonna get out!" Darleen interrupted. "It won't be too long before somebody finds us!"

"Lady, that might not be for a while. We're going to have to settle down and save our air."

"Save our airi" Panic flared anew. "We're breathin' okay!"

"Right now, yeah. I don't know how much room we've got in here, but I figure the air's going to get pretty tight. We might have to stay in here for... for a long time," he decided to say.

"You're crazy! Don't you listen to him, honey. I'll bet they're comin' to dig us out right this minute." She began to rock Swan like an infant.

"No, lady." It was pointless to pretend. "I don't think anybody's going to dig us out anytime soon. Those were missiles that came out of that cornfield. Nuclear missiles. I don't know if one of them blew up or what, but there's only one reason those damned things would've gone off. The whole world may be shooting missiles at itself right now."

The woman laughed, the sound edging toward hysteria. "You ain't got the sense God gave a pissant! Somebody had to see all that fire! They'll send help! We gotta get to Blakeman!"

"Right," Josh said. He was tired of talking, and he was using up precious air. He crawled away a few feet and burrowed a place to fit his body into. Intense thirst taunted him, but he had to relieve himself, too. Later, he thought, too tired to move. The pain was getting bad again. His mind began to drift beyond PawPaw's basement, beyond the burned cornfield toward what might remain out there, if, indeed, World War III had started. It might be over by now. The Russians might be invading, or the americans pushing into Russia. He thought of Rose and the boys; were they dead or alivei He might never know. "Oh, God," he whispered in the dark, and he curled his body up to stare at nothing.

"Uh... uh... uh." PawPaw was making a stuttering, choking noise. Then he said loudly, "Gopher's in the hole! amy! Where're my bedroom slippersi"

The little girl made another hurt, sobbing sound, and Josh clenched his teeth to hold back a scream of outrage. Such a pretty child, he thought. and now dying - like all of us are dying. We're already in our graves. already laid out and waiting.

He had the sensation of being pinned to the mat by an opponent he'd not planned to meet. He could almost hear the referee's hand slap the canvas: One... two...

Josh's shoulders shifted. Not yet three. Soon, but not yet.

and he drifted into a tortured sleep with the sound of the child's pain haunting his soul.  

Fourteen

"Discipline and control," the Shadow Soldier said, in a voice like the crack of a belt across a little boy's legs. "That's what makes a man. Remember... remember..."

Colonel James Macklin cowered in the muddy pit. There was only a slit of light, twenty feet above him, between the ground and the edge of the corrugated metal lid that covered the pit. It was enough to let (he flies in, and they buzzed in circles around his face, darting to the piles of filth that surrounded him. He didn't remember how long he'd been down here; he figured the Charlies came once a day, and if that was true then he'd been in the pit for thirty-nine days. But maybe they came twice a day, so his calculations might be wrong. Maybe they skipped a day or two. Maybe they came three times in one day and skipped the next two days. Maybe...

"Discipline and control, Jimbo." The Shadow Soldier was sitting cross-legged against one wall of the pit, about five feet away. The Shadow Soldier was wearing a camouflage uniform, and he had dark green and black camouflage warpaint across his sallow, floating face. "Shape up, soldier."

"Yes," Macklin said. "Shape up." He lifted a skinny hand and waved the flies away.

and then the banging started, and Macklin whimpered and drew himself up tightly against the wall. The Charlies were overhead, hitting the metal with bamboo sticks and billy clubs. The sound echoed, doubled and tripled in the pit, until Macklin put his hands to his ears; the hammering kept on, louder and louder, and Macklin felt a scream about to rip itself from his throat.

"No," the Shadow Soldier warned, his eyes like craters on the face of the moon. "Don't let them hear you scream."

Macklin scooped up a handful of muck and jammed it into his mouth. The Shadow Soldier was right. The Shadow Soldier was always right.

The banging stopped, and the metal lid was pulled to one side. Hazy sunlight stabbed Macklin's eyes; he could see them up there, leaning over the pit, grinning at him. "'Nel Macreen!" one of them called to him. "You hungry, 'Nel Macreeni"

His mouth full of mud and filth, Macklin nodded and sat up like a dog begging for a scrap. "Careful," the Shadow Soldier whispered. "Careful."

"You hungry, 'Nel Macreeni"

"Please," Macklin said, muck running from his mouth. He lifted his emaciated arms toward the light.

"Catch, 'Nel Macreen!" an object fell into the mud a few feet away, near the decaying corpse of an infantryman named Ragsdale. Macklin crawled over the body and picked the object up; it was a cake of oily, fried rice. He began to gnaw at it greedily, tears of joy springing to his eyes. The Charlies above him were laughing. Macklin crawled over the remains of an air force captain the other men had known as "Mississippi" because of his thick drawl; now Mississippi was a silent bundle of cloth and bones. In the far corner was a third corpse - another infantryman, an Oklahoma kid named McGee - slowly moldering in the mud. Macklin crouched by McGee and chewed on the rice, almost sobbing with pleasure.

"Hey, 'Nel Macreen! You a dirty thing! Bath time!"

Macklin whimpered and flinched, hunching his head down between his arms because he knew what was coming.

One of the Charlies overturned a bucket of human waste into the pit, and the sludge streamed down on top of Macklin, running over his back, shoulders and head. The Charlies howled with laughter, but Macklin concentrated on the rice cake. Some of the mess had splattered onto it, and he paused to wipe it off on the tatters of his air force flight jacket.

"There go!" the Charlie who'd dumped the bucket called down. "You creen boy now!"

The flies were rioting around Macklin's head. This was a good meal today, Macklin thought. This one would keep him alive a while longer, and as he chewed it the Shadow Soldier said, "That's right, Jimbo. Eat every bit of it. Every last bit."

"You stay creen, now!" the Charlie said, and the metal lid was pulled back into place, sealing off the sunlight.

"Discipline and control." The Shadow Soldier had crept closer. "That's what makes a man."

"Yes, sir," Macklin answered, and the Shadow Soldier watched him with eyes that burned like napalm in the dark.

"Colonel!"

a faraway voice was calling him. It was hard to concentrate on that voice, because pain was spreading through his bones. Something heavy lay on top of him, almost snapping his spine. a sack of potatoes, he thought. No, no. Heavier than that.

"Colonel Macklin!" the voice persisted.

Go away, Macklin wished. Please go away. He tried to lift his right hand to wave the flies from his face, but when he did a bolt of white-hot agony was driven through his arm and shoulder, and he groaned as it continued into his backbone.

"Colonel! It's Ted Warner! Can you hear mei"

Warner. Teddybear Warner. "Yes," Macklin said. Pain lanced his rib cage. He knew he hadn't spoken loudly enough, so he tried again. "Yes. I can hear you."

"Thank God! I've got a flashlight, Colonel!" a wash of light crept under Macklin's eyelids, and he allowed it to pry them open.

The flashlight's beam probed down from about ten feet above Macklin's head. The rock dust and smoke were still thick, but Macklin could tell he was lying at the bottom of a pit. By slowly turning his head, the pain about to make him pass out again, he saw that the opening was hardly large enough to let a man crawl through; how he'd been compressed into a space like this he didn't know. Macklin's legs were drawn up tightly beneath him, his back bent by the weight, not of a potato sack, but of a human body. a dead man, but who it was Macklin couldn't tell.

Jammed into the pit on top of him was a tangle of cables and broken pipes. He tried to push against the awful weight to at least get his legs some room, but the searing pain leapt at his right hand again. He swiveled his head back around the other way, and with the aid of the light from above he saw what he considered a major problem.

His right hand had disappeared into a crack in the wall. The crack was maybe one inch in width, and rivulets of blood gleamed on the rock.

My hand, he thought numbly. The images of Becker's exploding fingers came to him. He realized his hand must've slipped into a fissure when he fell down there, and then when the rock had shifted again...

He felt nothing beyond the excruciating manacle at his wrist. His hand and fingers were dead meat. Have to learn to be a southpaw, he thought. and then a realization hit him with stunning force: My trigger finger's gone.

"Corporal Prados is up here with me, Colonel!" Warner called down. "He's got a broken leg, but he's conscious. The others are in worse shape - or dead."

"How about youi" Macklin asked.

"My back's wrenched all to hell." Warner sounded as if he were having trouble getting a breath. "Feel like I'd split apart if my balls weren't holding me together. Spitting up some blood, too."

"anybody left to get a damage reporti"

"Intercom's out. Smoke's coming from the vents. I can hear people screaming somewhere, so some of them made it. Jesus, Colonel! The whole mountain must've moved!"

"I've got to get out of here," Macklin said. "My arm's pinned, Teddy." Thinking about the mangled mess of his hand brought the pain up again, and he had to grit his teeth and wait it through. "Can you help me get outi"

"Howi I can't reach you, and if your arm's pinned..."

"My hand's crushed," Macklin told him; his voice was calm, and he felt he was in a dream state, everything floating and unreal. "Get me a knife. The sharpest knife you can find."

"Whati a knifei What fori"

Macklin grinned savagely. "Just do it. Then get a fire going up there and char me a piece of wood." He was oddly dissociated from what he was saying, as if what had to be done concerned the flesh of another man. "The wood has to be red hot, Teddy. Hot enough to cauterize a stump."

"a... stumpi" He paused. Now he was getting the picture. "Maybe we can get you out some other - "

"There's no other way." To get out of this pit, he would have to leave his hand. Call it a pound of flesh, he thought. "Do you understand mei"

"Yes, sir," Warner replied, ever obedient.

Macklin turned his face away from the light.

Warner crawled from the edge of the hole that had opened in the control room's floor. The entire room was tilted at a thirty-degree angle, so he was crawling slightly downhill over broken equipment, fallen rocks and bodies. The flashlight beam caught Corporal Prados, sitting against one cracked and slanting wall; the man's face was disfigured, and bone gleamed wetly from his thigh. Warner continued into what was left of the corridor. Huge holes had ripped open in the ceiling and walls, water pouring from above onto the mess of rocks and pipes. He could still hear screaming in the distance. He was going to have to find someone to help him free Colonel Macklin, because without Macklin's leadership they were all finished. and there was no way his injured back would let him crawl down into the hole where the colonel was trapped. No, he was going to have to find someone else - someone small enough to fit, but tough enough to get the job done. God only knew what he would find when he crawled up to Level One.

The colonel was counting on him, and he would not let the colonel down.

Slowly and painfully, he picked his way over the rubble, crawling in the direction of the screams.  

Fifteen

Roland Croninger was huddled on the crooked floor in the wreckage of what had been Earth House's cafeteria, and over the wailing and screaming he was listening to one grim inner voice that said, a King's Knight... a King's Knight... a King's Knight never cries...

Everything was dark except for occasional tongues of flame that leapt up where the kitchen had been, and the fitful light illuminated fallen rock, broken tables and chairs, and crushed human bodies. Here and there someone staggered in the gloom like a sufferer in the caverns of Hell, and broken bodies jerked under the massive boulders that had crashed through the ceiling.

at first there'd been a tremor that had knocked people out of their chairs; the main lights had gone out, but then the emergency floods had switched on, and Roland was on the floor with his breakfast cereal all over the front of his shirt. His mother and father had sprawled near him, and there were maybe forty other people who'd been eating breakfast at the same time; a few of them were already hollering for help, but most were shocked silent. His mother had looked at him, orange juice dripping from her hair and face, and said, "Next year we go to the beach."

Roland had laughed, and his father was laughing, too; and then his mother began to laugh, and for a moment they were all connected by that laughter. Phil had managed to say, "Thank God I don't handle the insurance on this place! I'd have to sue my own - "

and then he was drowned out by a monstrous roar and the sound of splitting rock, and the floor had heaved and tilted crazily, with such force that Roland was thrown away from his parents and collided with other bodies. a barrage of rocks and ceiling tiles caved in, and something had struck him hard in the head. Now, as he sat with his knees drawn up to his chin, he lifted his hand to his hairline and felt sticky blood. His lower lip was gashed and bleeding, too, and his insides felt deeply bruised, as if his entire body had been stretched like a rubber band and then brutally snapped. He didn't know how long the earthquake had gone on, or how he'd come to be huddled up like a baby, or where his parents were. He wanted to cry, and there were tears in his eyes, but a King's Knight never cries, he told himself; that was in the King's Knight handbook, one of the rules he'd written for the proper conduct of a warrior: a King's Knight never cries - he just gets even.

There was something clenched in his right fist, and he opened it: his glasses, the left lens cracked and the right one completely gone. He thought he remembered taking them off, when he was lying under the table, to clean the milk off the lenses. He put them on and tried to stand, but it took a moment to coordinate his legs. When he did stand up, he bumped his head against a buckled ceiling that had been at least seven feet high before the tremors had started. Now he had to crouch to avoid dangling cables and pipes and snapped iron reinforcement rods. "Mom! Dad!" he shouted, but he heard no answer over the cries of the injured. Roland stumbled through the debris calling for his parents, and he stepped on something that gave like a wet sponge. He looked down at what might've been a huge starfish caught between two slabs of rock; the body bore no resemblance to anything remotely human, except it did wear the tatters of a bloody shirt.

Roland stepped over other bodies; he'd seen corpses only in the pictures of his father's mercenary soldier magazines, but these were different. These were battered featureless and sexless but for the rags of clothes. But none of them were his mother and father, Roland decided; no, his mom and dad were alive, somewhere. He knew they were, and he kept searching. In another moment he stopped just short of plunging into a jagged chasm that had split the cafeteria in two, and he peered into it but saw no bottom. "Mom! Dad!" he shouted to the other side of the room, but again there was no reply.

Roland stood on the edge of the chasm, his body trembling. One part of him was dumbstruck with terror, but another, deeper part seemed to be strengthening, surging toward the surface, shivering not with fear but with a pure, cold excitement that was beyond anything he'd ever felt before. Surrounded by death, he experienced the pounding of life in his veins with a force that made him feel lightheaded and drunk.

I'm alive, he thought. alive.

and suddenly the wreckage of the Earth House cafeteria seemed to ripple and change; he was standing in the midst of a battlefield strewn with the dead, and fire licked up in the distance from the burning enemy fortress. He was carrying a dented shield and a bloody sword, and he was about to go over the edge into shock, but he was still standing and still alive after the holocaust of battle. He had led a legion of knights into war on this rubbled field, and now he stood alone because he was the last King's Knight left.

One of the battered warriors at his feet reached out and grasped his ankle. "Please," the bloody mouth rasped. "Please help me..."

Roland blinked, stunned. He was looking down at a middle-aged woman, the lower half of her body caught under a slab of rock. "Please help me," she begged. "My legs... oh... my legs..."

a woman wasn't supposed to be on the battlefield, Roland thought. Oh, no! But then he looked around himself and remembered where he was, and he pulled his ankle free and moved away from the chasm's edge.

He kept searching, but he couldn't find his father or mother. Maybe they were buried, he realized - or maybe they'd gone down into that chasm, down into the darkness below. Maybe he'd seen their bodies but couldn't recognize them. "Mom! Dad!" he yelled. "Where are youi" No reply, only the sound of someone sobbing and voices in keening agony.

a light glinted through the smoke and found his face.

"You," someone said, in a pained whisper. "What's your namei"

"Roland," he replied. What was his last namei He couldn't remember it for a few seconds. Then, "Roland Croninger."

"I need your help, Roland," the man with the flashlight said. "are you able to walk okayi"

Roland nodded.

"Colonel Macklin's trapped down below, in the control room. What's left of the control room," Teddybear Warner amended. He was drawn up like a hunchback. He leaned on a piece of reinforcement rod that he was using as a walking stick. Some of the passageways had been completely blocked by rockslides, while others slanted at crazy angles or were split by gaping fissures. Screams and cries for God echoed through Earth House, and some of the walls were bloody where bodies had been battered to death by the shock waves. He had found only a half-dozen able-bodied civilians in the wreckage, and of those only two - an old man and a little girl - weren't raving mad; but the old man had a snapped wrist through which the bones protruded, and the little girl wouldn't leave the area where her father had disappeared. So Warner had continued to the cafeteria, looking for someone to help him, and also figuring that the kitchen would hold a useful assortment of knives.

Now Warner played the beam over Roland's face. The boy's forehead was gashed and his eyes were swimming with shock, but he seemed to have escaped major injury. Except for the blood, the boy's face was pallid and dusty, and his dark blue cotton shirt was ripped and showing more gashes across his sallow, skinny chest. He's not much, Warner thought, but he'll have to do.

"Where're your folksi" Warner asked, and Roland shook his head. "Okay, listen to me: We've been nuked. The whole fucking country's been nuked. I don't know how many are dead in here, but we're alive, and so is Colonel Macklin. But to stay alive, we've got to get things in order as much as we can, and we've got to help the colonel. Do you understand what I'm sayingi"

"I think so," Roland replied. Nuked, he thought. Nuked... nuked... nuked. His senses reeled; in a few minutes, he thought, he'd wake up in bed in arizona.

"Okay. Now I want you to stick with me, Roland. We're going back into the kitchen, and we're going to find something sharp: a butcher knife, a meat cleaver - whatever. Then we're going back to the control room." If I can find my way back, Warner thought - but he didn't dare say it.

"My mom and dad," Roland said weakly. "They're here... somewhere."

"They're not going anywhere. Right now Colonel Macklin needs you more than they do. Understandi"

Roland nodded. King's Knight! he thought. The King was trapped in a dungeon and needed his help! His parents were gone, swept away in the cataclysm, and the King's fortress had been nuked. But I'm alive, Roland thought. I'm alive, and I'm a King's Knight. He squinted into the flashlight beam. "Do I get to be a soldieri" he asked the man.

"Sure. Now stay close to me. We're going to find a way into the kitchen."

Warner had to move slowly, leaning all his weight on the iron rod. They picked their way into the kitchen, where pockets of fire still burned voraciously. Warner realized that what was afire was the remains of the food pantry; dozens of cans had exploded, and the burned mess clung to the walls. Everything was gone - powdered milk, eggs, bacon and ham, everything. But there was still the emergency food storeroom, Warner knew - and his guts tightened at the thought that they could've been trapped down here in the dark without food or water.

Utensils were scattered everywhere, blown out of the kitchen equipment pantry by the shock. Warner uncovered a meat cleaver with the tip of his makeshift cane. The blade was serrated. "Get that," he told the boy, and Roland picked it up.

They left the kitchen and cafeteria, and Warner led Roland to the ruins of the Town Square. Slabs of stone had crashed from above, and the entire area was off-balance and riddled with deep cracks. The video arcade was still burning, the air dense with smoke. "Here," Warner said, motioning with his light toward the infirmary. They went inside, finding most of the equipment smashed and useless, but Warner kept searching until he discovered a box of tourniquets and a plastic bottle of rubbing alcohol. He told Roland to take one of the tourniquets and the bottle, and then he picked through the shattered drug cabinet. Pills and capsules crunched underfoot like popcorn. Warner's light fell upon the dead face of one of the nurses, crushed by a piece of rock the size of an anvil. There was no sign of Dr. Lang, Earth House's resident physician. Warner's cane uncovered unbroken vials of Demerol and Percodan, and these he asked Roland to pick up for him; Warner stuffed them in his pockets to take back to the colonel.

"You still with mei" Warner asked.

"Yes, sir." I'll wake up in a few minutes, Roland thought. It'll be a Saturday morning, and I'll get out of bed and turn on the computer.

"We've got a long way to go," Warner told him. "We'll have to crawl part of the way. But stay with me, understandi"

Roland followed him out of the infirmary; he wanted to go back to search for his parents but he knew that the King needed him more. He was a King's Knight, and to be needed like this by the King was a high honor. again, one part of him recoiled at the horror and destruction that lay around him, and shouted Wake up! Wake up! in the whining voice of an anxious schoolboy; but the other part that was getting stronger looked around at the bodies exposed in the flashlight beam and knew that the weak had to die so the strong might live.

They moved into the corridors, stepping over bodies and ignoring the cries of the wounded.

Roland didn't know how long it took them to reach the wrecked control room. He looked at his wristwatch by the light of a burning heap of rubble, but the crystal had cracked and time had stopped at ten thirty-six. Warner crawled uphill to the edge of the pit and shone his light down. "Colonel!" he called. "I've brought help! We're going to get you out!"

Ten feet below, Macklin stirred and turned his sweating face toward the light. "Hurry," he rasped, and then he closed his eyes again.

Roland crawled to the pit's rim. He saw two bodies down there, one lying on top of the other, jammed in a space the size of a coffin. The body on the bottom was breathing, and his hand disappeared into a fissure in the wall. Suddenly Roland knew what the meat cleaver was for; he looked at the weapon, could see his face reflected in the blade by the spill of light - except it was a distorted face, and not the one he remembered. His eyes were wild and shiny, and blood had crusted into a star-shaped pattern on his forehead. His entire face was mottled with bruises and swollen like a toadfrog's, and he looked even worse than the day Mike armbruster had beaten his ass for not letting him cheat off Roland's paper during a chemistry test. "Little queer! Little four-eyed queer!" armbruster had raged, and everyone who ringed them laughed and jeered as Roland tried to escape but was knocked to the dirt again and again. Roland had started to sob, huddled on the ground, and armbruster had bent down and spat in his face.

"Do you know how to tie a tourniqueti" the hunchback with the eye patch asked him. Roland shook his head. "I'll guide you through it when you get down there." He shone his light around and saw several things that would make a good, hot fire - the pieces of a desk, the chairs, the clothes off the corpses. They could get the fire started with the burning rubble they'd passed in the corridor, and Warner still had his lighter in his pocket. "Do you know what's got to be donei"

"I... think so," Roland replied.

"Okay, now pay attention to me. I can't squeeze down into that hole after him. You can. You're going to draw that tourniquet tight around his arm, and then I'm going to pass down the alcohol. Splash it all over his wrist. He'll be ready when you are. His wrist is probably smashed, so it won't be too hard to get the cleaver through the bones. Now listen to me, Roland! I don't want you hacking down there for a fucking five minutes! Do it hard and quick and get it over with, and once you start don't you even think about stopping before it's done. Do you hear mei"

"Yes sir," Roland answered, and he thought, Wake up! I've got to wake up!

"If you've tied the tourniquet right, you'll have time to seal the wound before it starts bleeding. You'll have something to burn the stump with - and you make sure you set fire to it, hear mei If you don't, he'll bleed to death. The way he's jammed in down there, he won't fight you much, and anyway, he knows what has to be done. Look at me, Roland."

Roland looked into the light.

"If you do what you're supposed to, Colonel Macklin will live. If you fuck up, he'll die. Pure and simple. Got iti"

Roland nodded; his head was dizzy, but his heart was pounding. The King's trapped, he thought. and of all the King's Knights, I'm the only one who can set him free! But no, no - this wasn't a game! This was real life, and his mother and father were lying up there somewhere, and Earth House had been nuked, the whole country had been nuked, everything was destroyed -

He put a hand to his bloody forehead and squeezed until the bad thoughts were gone. King's Knight! Sir Roland is my name! and now he was about to go down into the deepest, darkest dungeon to save the King, armed with fire and steel.

Teddybear Warner crawled away to get a fire built, and Roland followed him like an automaton. They piled the pieces of the desk, the chairs and the clothes from the corpses into a corner and used some burning pieces of cable from the hallway to start the fire. Teddybear, moving slowly and in agony, piled on ceiling tiles and added some of the alcohol to the flames. at first there was just a lot of smoke, but then the red glow began to strengthen.

Corporal Prados still sat against the opposite wall, watching them work. His face was damp with sweat, and he kept babbling feverishly, but Warner paid him no attention. Now the pieces of the desk and the chairs were charring, the bitter smoke rising up into the holes and cracks in the ceiling.

Warner hobbled to the edge of the fire and picked up a leg of one of the broken chairs; the other end of it was burning brightly, and the wood had turned from black to ash-gray. He poked it back into the bonfire and turned toward Roland. "Okay," he said. "Let's get it done."

Though he ground his teeth with the pressure that wrenched his back, Warner grasped Roland's hand and helped lower him into the pit. Roland stepped on the dead body. Warner kept the light directed at Macklin's trapped arm and talked Roland through the application of the tourniquet to the colonel's wrist. Roland had to lie in a contorted position on the corpse to reach the injured arm, and he saw that Macklin's wrist had turned black. Macklin suddenly shifted and tried to look up, but he couldn't lift his head. "Tighter," Macklin managed to say. "Tie knots in the bastard!"

It took Roland four tries to get it tight enough. Warner dropped the bottle of alcohol down, and Roland splashed the blackened wrist. Macklin took the bottle with his free hand and finally twisted his head up to look at Roland. "What's your namei"

"Roland Croninger, sir."

Macklin could tell it was a boy from the weight and the voice, but he couldn't make out the face. Something glinted, and he angled his head to look at the meat cleaver the boy held. "Roland," he said, "you and I are going to get to know each other real well in the next couple of minutes. Teddy! Where's the firei"

Warner's light vanished for a minute, and Roland was alone in the dark with the colonel. "Bad day," Macklin said. "Haven't seen any worse, have youi"

"No, sir." Roland's voice shook.

The light returned. Warner was holding the burning chair leg like a torch. "I've got it, Colonel! Roland, I'm going to drop this down to you. Readyi"

Roland caught the torch and leaned over Colonel Macklin again. The colonel, his eyes hazy with pain, saw the boy's face in the flickering light and thought he recognized him from somewhere. "Where are your parents, soni" he asked.

"I don't know. I've lost them."

Macklin watched the burning end of the chair leg and prayed that it would be hot enough to do the job. "You'll be okay," he said. "I'll make sure of that." His gaze moved from the torch and fixed on the meat cleaver's blade. The boy crouched awkwardly over him, straddling the corpse, and stared at Macklin's wrist where it joined the rock wall. "Well," Macklin said, "it's time. Okay, Roland: let's get it done before one of us turns chickenshit. I'm going to try to hang on as much as I can. You readyi"

"He's ready," Teddybear Warner said from the lip of the pit.

Macklin smiled grimly, and a bead of sweat ran down the bridge of his nose. "Make the first lick a hummer, Roland," he urged.

Roland gripped the torch in his left hand and raised his right, with the meat cleaver in it, back over his head. He knew exactly where he was going to strike - right where the blackened skin was swallowed up in the fissure. Do it! he told himself. Do it now! He heard Macklin draw a sharp breath. Roland's hand clenched the cleaver, and it hung at the zenith over his head. Do it now! He felt his arm go as rigid as an iron rod. Do it now!

and he sucked in his breath and brought the cleaver down with all of his strength on Colonel Macklin's wrist.

Bone crunched. Macklin jerked but made no sound. Roland thought the blade had gone all the way through, but he saw with renewed shock that it had only penetrated the man's thick wrist to the depth of an inch.

"Finish it!" Warner shouted.

Roland pulled the cleaver out.

Macklin's eyes, ringed with purple, fluttered closed and then jerked open again. "Finish it," he whispered.

Roland lifted his arm and struck down again. Still the wrist wouldn't part. Roland struck down a third time, and a fourth, harder and harder. He heard the one-eyed hunchback shouting at him to hurry, but Macklin remained silent. Roland pulled the cleaver free and struck a fifth time. There was a lot of blood now, but still the tendons hung together. Roland began to grind the cleaver back and forth; Macklin's face had turned a pasty yellow-white, his lips as gray as graveyard dirt.

It had to be finished before the blood started bursting out like a firehose. When that happened, Roland knew, the King would die. He lifted the cleaver over his head, his shoulder throbbing with the effort - and suddenly it was not a meat cleaver anymore; it was a holy axe, and he was Sir Roland of the Realm, summoned to free the trapped King from this suffocating dungeon. He was the only one in all the kingdom who could do it, and this moment was his. Righteous power pulsed within him, and as he brought the holy axe flashing down he heard himself shout in a hoarse, almost inhuman voice.

The last of the bone cracked. Sinews parted under the power of the holy axe. and then the King was writhing, and a grotesque bleeding thing with a surface like a sponge was thrust up into Roland's face. Blood sprayed over his cheeks and forehead, all but blinding him.

"Burn it!" Warner yelled.

Roland put the torch to the bleeding spongy thing; it jerked away from him, but Roland grabbed and held it while Macklin thrashed wildly. He pressed the torch to the wound where the colonel's hand had been. Roland watched the stump burn with dreadful fascination, saw the wound blacken and pucker, heard the hiss of Macklin's burning blood. Macklin's body was fighting involuntarily, the colonel's eyes rolled back in his head, but Roland hung on to the wounded arm. He smelled blood and burnt flesh, drew it deeply into his lungs like a soul-cleansing incense, and kept searing the wound, pressing fire to flesh. Finally Macklin stopped fighting, and from his mouth came a low, eerie moan, as if from the throat of a wounded beast.

"Okay!" Warner called down. "That's it!"

Roland was hypnotized by the sight of the melting flesh. The torn sleeve of Macklin's jacket was on fire, and smoke whirled around the walls of the pit.

"That's enough!" Warner shouted. The boy wouldn't stop! "Roland! That's enough, damn it!"

This time the man's voice jolted him back to reality. Roland released the colonel's arm and saw that the stump had been burned black and shiny, as if coated with tar. The flames on Macklin's jacket sleeve were gnawing themselves out. It's over, Roland realized. all over. He beat the piece of wood against the pit's wall until the fire was out, and then he dropped it.

"I'm going to try to find some rope to get you out with!" Warner called. "You okayi"

Roland didn't feel like answering. Warner's light moved away, and Roland was left in darkness. He could hear the colonel's harsh breathing, and he crawled backward over the corpse that lay jammed between them until his back was against rock; then he drew his legs up and clutched the holy axe close to his body. a grin was fixed on his blood-flecked face, but his eyes were circles of shock.

The colonel moaned and muttered something that Roland couldn't understand. Then he said it again, his voice tight with pain: "Shape up." a pause, then again, "Shape up... shape up, soldier..." The voice was delirious, getting louder and then fading to a whisper. "Shape up... yes, sir... every bit of it... yes, sir... yes, sir..." Colonel Macklin's voice began to sound like a child, cringing from a whipping. "Yes, sir... please... yes, sir... yes, sir..." He ended with a sound that was half moan, half shuddering sob.

Roland had been listening carefully. That had not been the voice of a triumphant war hero; it had sounded more like a cringing supplicant, and Roland wondered what lived inside the King's mind. a king shouldn't beg, he thought. Not even in his worst nightmares. It was dangerous for a king to show weakness.

Later - how much later Roland didn't know - something prodded his knee. He groped in the dark and touched an arm. Macklin had gained consciousness.

"I owe you," Colonel Macklin said, and now he sounded like the tough war hero again.

Roland didn't reply - but it had dawned on him that he was going to need protection to survive whatever was ahead. His father and mother might be dead - probably were - and their bodies lost forever. He was going to need a shield from the dangers of the future, not only within Earth House but beyond it - that is, he told himself, if they ever saw the outside world again. But he planned on staying close to the King from now on; it might be the only way that he could get out of these dungeons alive.

and, if anything, he wanted to live to see what remained of the world beyond Earth House. One day at a time, he thought - and if he'd lived through the first day, he could make it through the second and the third. He'd always been a survivor - that was part of being a King's Knight - and now he'd do whatever it took to keep himself alive.

The old game's over, he thought. The new game's about to begin! and it might be the greatest game of King's Knight he'd ever experienced, because it was going to be real.

Roland cradled the holy axe and waited for the one-eyed hunchback to return, and he imagined he heard the sound of dice rattling in a cup of bleached bone.  

Sixteen

"Lady, I sure as hell wouldn't drink that if I was you."

Startled by the voice, Sister Creep looked up from the puddle of black water she'd been crouching over.

Standing a few yards away was a short, rotund man wearing the tattered, burned rags of a mink coat. Beneath the rags were red silk pajamas; his birdlike legs were bare, but he had a pair of black wingtips on his feet. His round, pale moon of a face was cratered with burns, and all his hair had been scorched away except for his gray sideburns and eyebrows. His face was badly swollen, his large nose and jowls ballooned up as if he were holding his breath and the blue threads of broken blood vessels were showing. In the slits of his eye sockets, his dark brown eyes moved from Sister Creep's face to the puddle of water and back again. "That shit's poison," he said, pronouncing it pizzen. "Kill you right off."