“Yes, sir.” Roland felt the holy axe pressed against his stomach. Slowly, he began to work his hand under his body.
“He knows there’s no way in Hell to get to the emergency food, doesn’t he? So he sent you here to get the scraps before anybody else could! You little bastard!” Schorr grabbed his collar and shook him, which helped Roland slide his hand closer to the holy axe.
“The colonel wants to stockpile everything,” Roland said. Buy time! he thought. “He wants to get everybody together and ration out the food and wa—”
“You’re a liar! He wants it all for himself!”
“No! We can still get through to the emergency food.”
“Bullshit!” the man roared, and insanity leaped in his voice. “I heard the rest of Level One fall in! I know they’re all dead! He wants to kill all of us so he can have the food!”
“Finish him, Schorr,” the other man said. “Shoot his balls off.”
“Not yet, not yet. I want to know where Macklin is! Where’s he hiding, and how many weapons does he have?”
Roland’s fingers were almost touching the blade. Closer ... closer. “He’s got ... he’s got a lot of guns. Got a pistol. And another machine gun.” Closer, and closer still. “He’s got a whole arsenal in there.”
“In there? In where?”
“In ... one of the rooms. It’s way down the corridor.” Almost got it!
“What room, you little shit?” Schorr grabbed him again, shook him angrily, and Roland took advantage of the movement; he slid the holy axe out of his waistband and lay on top of it, getting a good, strong grip around the handle. When he decided to strike, it would have to be fast, and if the other two men had guns, he was finished.
Cry! he told himself. He forced a sob. “Please ... please don’t hurt me! I can’t see without my glasses!” He blubbered and shook. “Don’t hurt me!” He made a retching noise—and he felt the Ingram gun’s barrel move away from his skull.
“Little shitter. Little candy-ass shitter! Come on! Stand up like a man!” He grasped Roland’s arm and started to haul him to his feet.
Now, Roland thought—very calmly, very deliberately. A King’s Knight was not afraid of death.
He let the man’s strength pull him up, and then he uncoiled like a spring, twisting around and slashing out with the holy axe that still bore some of the King’s dried blood on its blade.
The flashlight’s beam glinted off the cleaver; the blade sliced into Schorr’s left cheek like it was carving off a piece of Thanksgiving turkey. He was too shocked to react for a second, but then the blood burst out of the wound and his finger jerked involuntarily on the trigger, sending a rattle of bullets whining past Roland’s head. Schorr staggered backward, half his face peeled open to the bone. Roland rushed him, hacking wildly before the man could aim that gun again.
One of the others grabbed Roland’s shoulder, but Roland broke away, tearing the rest of his shirt almost off. He swung again at Schorr and caught the meaty part of his gun arm. Schorr stumbled over a dead body, the Ingram gun clattering to the stones at Roland’s feet.
Roland scooped it up. His face contorted into a savage rictus and he whirled upon the man holding the flashlight. He braced his legs in the firing position the colonel had taught him, aimed and squeezed the trigger.
The gun hummed like a sewing machine, but its recoil knocked him back over the rubble and set him on his ass. As he fell he saw the flashlight explode in the man’s hand, and there was a grunt followed by a shrill cry of pain. Someone whimpered and scrabbled away across the floor. Roland fired into the dark, the red trajectories of tracer bullets ricocheting off the walls. There was another scream that broke into gurgling fragments and grew distant, and Roland thought that one of the men must’ve stepped into a hole in the floor and fallen through. He sprayed the cafeteria with bullets, and then he stopped firing because he knew he was alone again.
He listened; his heart was racing. The sweet aroma of a fired weapon hung in the air. “Come on!” he shouted. “You want some more? Come on!”
But there was only silence. Whether he’d killed them all or not, he didn’t know. He was sure he’d hit at least one. “Bastards,” Roland breathed. “You bastards, next time I’ll kill you.”
He laughed. It startled him, because it didn’t sound like the laughter of anyone he knew. He wished the men would come back. He wanted another chance at killing them.
Roland searched for his glasses. He found the garbage bag, but his glasses were lost. Everything would be blurred from now on, but that was okay; there was no more light, anyway. His hands found warm blood and a body to go with it. He spent a minute or two kicking the dead man’s skull in.
Roland picked up the garbage bag and, keeping the Ingram gun ready, carefully moved across the cafeteria toward where he knew the exit to be; his toes probed for holes in the floor, but he made it safely into the corridor.
He still trembled with excitement. Everything was black and silent but for the slow dripping of water somewhere. He felt his way toward the gymnasium with his bag of booty, eager to tell the King that he’d fought off three tunnel trolls, and that one of them was named Schorr. But there would be more trolls! They wouldn’t give up so easily, and besides, he wasn’t sure if he’d killed the hospitality sergeant or not.
Roland grinned into the darkness, his face and hair damp with cold sweat. He was very, very proud of himself for protecting the King, though he regretted losing the flashlight. In the corridor he stepped on bodies that were swelling like gasbags.
This was turning out to be the greatest game he’d ever played. This beat the computer version by a light-year!
He’d never shot anybody before. And he’d never felt so powerful before, either.
Surrounded by darkness and death and carrying a bagful of scraps and a warm Ingram gun, Roland Croninger knew true ecstasy.
24
A SQUEAKING SOUND COMING FROM a corner of the basement made Josh reach to his side for the flashlight and switch it on. The weak bulb threw a dim yellow spear of light, but Josh guided it toward that corner to find out what was over there.
“What is it?” Swan asked, sitting up a few feet beside him.
“I think we’ve got a rat.” He played the light around, saw only a tangle of timbers, cornstalks and the mound of dirt where Darleen Prescott lay buried. Josh quickly moved the light away from the grave. The child was just now getting her senses back. “Yeah, I think it’s a rat,” Josh decided. “Probably had a nest hidden down here somewhere. Hey, Mr. Rat!” he called. “Mind if we share your basement for a while?”
“He sounds like he’s hurt.”
“He probably thinks we sound pretty bad, too.” He kept the flashlight’s beam away from the little girl; he’d already seen her once in the meager light, and that was enough. Almost all of her beautiful blond hair was burned away, her face a mass of red, watery blisters. Her eyes, which he remembered as being so stunningly blue, were deep-sunken and a cloudy gray. He was aware that the blast hadn’t spared his looks, either; the backwash of the light revealed splotched gray burns that covered his hands and arms. More than that, he didn’t care to know. He was going to wind up looking like a zebra. But at least they were both still alive, and though he had no way of calculating how much time had passed since the explosion, he thought they’d been down here for maybe four or five days. Food was no longer a problem, and they had plenty of canned juices. Air must be entering from somewhere, though the basement remained stuffy. The worst concern Josh had was the latrine’s smell, but that couldn’t be helped right now. Maybe later he’d figure out a neater sanitation system, perhaps using the empty cans and burying those in the dirt.
Something moved in the light’s beam.
“Look!” Swan said. “Over there!”
A small, burned little animal perched on a tiny hillock of dirt. Its head tilted toward Swan and Josh, and then the animal squeaked again and disappeared into the debris.
Josh said, “
That’s not a rat! It’s a—”
“It’s a gopher!” Swan finished for him. “I’ve seen lots of them before, digging out near the trailer park.”
“A gopher,” Josh repeated. He remembered PawPaw’s voice, saying Gopher’s in the hole!
Swan was pleased to see something else alive down here with them. She could hear it sniffing in the dirt, over beyond the light and the mound where ... She let the thought go, because she couldn’t stand it. But her mama wasn’t hurting anymore, and that was a good thing. Swan listened to the gopher snuffling around; she was very familiar with the things, because of all the holes they dug in her garden....
All the holes they dug, she thought.
“Josh?” Swan said.
“Yeah?”
“Gophers dig holes,” she said.
Josh smiled faintly at what he took to be just a childlike statement—but then his smile froze as what she was getting at struck him. If a gopher had a nest down here, then there might indeed be a hole, leading out! Maybe that was where the air was coming from! Josh’s heart leaped. Maybe PawPaw knew there was a gopher hole somewhere in the basement, and that was the message he’d been trying to relay. A gopher hole could be enlarged to make a tunnel. We’ve got a pickaxe and shovel, he thought. Maybe we can dig ourselves out!
Josh crawled to where the old man lay. “Hey,” Josh said. “Can you hear me?” He touched PawPaw’s arm.
“Oh Lord,” Josh whispered.
The old man’s body was cool. It lay stiffly, the arms rigid by the sides. Josh shone the light into the corpse’s face, saw the mottled scarlet burns like a strange birthmark across the cheeks and nose. The eye sockets were dark brown, gaping holes. PawPaw had been dead for several hours, at least. Josh started to close PawPaw’s eyelids, but there were none; those, too, had been incinerated and vaporized.
The gopher squeaked. Josh turned away from the corpse and crawled toward the noise. Probing into the debris with his light, he found the gopher licking at its burned hind legs. It abruptly darted under a piece of wood wedged into the corner. Josh reached after it, but the wood was stuck tight. As patiently as he could, he began to work it free.
The gopher chattered angrily at the invasion. Slowly, Josh got the splintered piece of timber loose and pulled it away. The light revealed a small round hole in the dirt wall, about three inches off the floor.
“Found it!” Josh exclaimed. He got down on his belly and shone the light up into the hole. About two or three feet out of the basement, it crooked to the left and continued on beyond the range of the light. “This thing’s got to lead to the sutface!” He was as excited as a kid on Christmas morning, and he was able to get his fist up into the hole. The ground was hard-packed and unyielding, burned even at this depth to the solidity of asphalt. Digging through it was going to be an absolute bitch, but following the hole would make the work easier.
One question nagged at him: did they want to get out of the basement anytime soon? The radiation might kill them outright. God only knew what the surface world would be like. Did they dare find out?
Josh heard a noise behind him. It was a hoarse rattling sound, like congested lungs struggling for air.
“Josh?” Swan had heard the noise too, and it made the remaining hairs on the back of her neck stand up; she had sensed something moving in the darkness just a few seconds before.
He turned and shone the light at her. Swan’s blistered face was turned to the right. Again, there came that hideous rattling noise. Josh shifted the light—and what he saw made him feel as if a freezing hand had clenched his throat.
PawPaw’s corpse was shivering, and that awful noise was emanating from it. He’s still alive, Josh thought incredulously; but then: No, no! He was dead when I touched him! He was dead!
The corpse lurched. Slowly, arms still stiff at its sides, the dead man began to sit up. Its head started turning inch by inch, like a clockwork automaton, toward Josh Hutchins, its raw eye sockets seeking the light. The burned face rippled, the mouth straining to open—and Josh thought that if those dead lips parted he would lose whatever marbles he had left right then and there.
With a hiss and rattle of air, the mouth opened.
And from it came a voice like the rush of wind through dried-up reeds. It was at first an unintelligible sound, thin and distant, but it was getting stronger, and it said: “Pro ... tect ...”
The eye sockets faced the beam of light as if there were still eyeballs in them. “Protect,” the awful voice repeated. The mouth with its gray lips seemed to be straining to form words. Josh shrank backward, and the corpse racheted out, “Protect ... the ... child.”
There was a quiet whoosh of air. The corpse’s eye sockets caught fire. Josh was mesmerized, and he heard Swan give a soft, stunned “Oh.” The corpse’s head burst into a fireball, and the fire spread and enveloped the entire body in a writhing, reddish-blue cocoon. An intense wave of heat licked at Josh’s face, and he put up his hand to shield his eyes; when he lowered it again, he saw the corpse dissolving at the center of its fiery shroud. The body remained sitting upright, motionless now, every inch of it ablaze.
The burning went on for maybe thirty seconds longer; then the fire began to flicker out, and the last to burn were the soles of PawPaw’s shoes.
But what lingered was white ash, in the shape of a man sitting upright.
The fire went out. The ashen shape crumbled; it was ash through and through, even the bones. It collapsed in a heap on the floor, and what remained of PawPaw Briggs was ready for a shovel.
Josh stared. Ash drifted lazily through the light. I’m going off my bird! he thought. All those body slams’ve caught up with me!
Behind him, Swan bit her lower lip and fought off frightened tears. I won’t cry, she told herself. Not anymore. The urge to sob passed, and she let her shocked eyes drift toward the black giant.
Protect the child. Josh had heard it. But PawPaw Briggs had been dead, he reasoned. Protect the child. Sue Wanda. Swan. Whatever had spoken through the dead man’s lips was gone now; it was just Josh and Swan, alone.
He believed in miracles, but of the biblical version—the parting of the Red Sea, the turning of water to wine, the feeding of the multitude from a basket of bread and fish; up until this moment, he’d thought the age of miracles was long past. But maybe it was a small miracle that they’d both found this grocery store, he realized. It was certainly a miracle that they were still alive, and a corpse that could sit up and speak was not something you saw every day.
Behind him, the gopher scrabbled in the dirt. He smells the food leaking from the cans, Josh figured. Maybe that gopher hole was a small miracle, too. He could not stop staring at the pile of white ashes, and he would hear that reedy voice for the rest of his life—however long that might be.
“You all right?” he asked Swan.
“Yes,” she replied, barely audible.
Josh nodded. If something beyond his ken wanted him to protect the child, he thought, then he was damned well going to protect the child. After a while, when he got his bones thawed out again, he crawled to get the shovel, and then he switched off the light to let it rest. In the darkness, he covered the ashes of PawPaw Briggs with cornfield dirt.
25
“CIGARETTE?”
A pack of Winstons was offered. Sister took one of the cigarettes. Doyle Halland nicked a gold butane lighter with the initials RBR on its side. When the cigarette was lit, Sister drew the smoke deeply into her lungs—no use to fret about cancer now!—and let it trickle through her nostrils.
A fire crackled in the hearth of the small, wood-framed suburban house in which they’d decided to shelter for the night. All the windows were broken out, but they’d been able to trap some heat in the front room due to a fortunate discovery of blankets and a hammer and nails. They’d nailed the blankets up over the largest windows and huddled around the fireplace. The refrigerator yielded up a can of chocolate sauce, some lemonade in a plastic pitcher, and a head of b
rown lettuce. The pantry held only a half-full box of raisin bran and a few other cans and jars of left-behinds. Still, all of it was edible, and Sister put the cans and jars in her bag, which was beginning to bulge with things she’d scavenged. It was soon going to be time to find a second bag.
During the day they had walked a little more than five miles through the silent sprawl of the east Jersey suburbs, heading west along Interstate 280 and crossing the Garden State Parkway. The bitter cold gnawed at their bones, and the sun was no more than an area of gray in a low, muddy brown sky streaked with red. But Sister noted that the further away they got from Manhattan, the more buildings were still intact, though almost every one of them had blasted-out windows, and they leaned as if they’d been knocked off their foundations. Then they reached an area of two-story, close-cramped houses—thousands of them, brooding and broken like little gothic manors—on postage-stamp-sized lawns burned the color of dead leaves. Sister noted that none of the trees or bushes she saw had a scrap of vegetation. Nothing was green anymore; everything was colored in the dun, gray and black of death.
They did see their first cars that weren’t twisted into junk. Abandoned vehicles, their paint blistered off and windshields smashed, stood here and there on the streets, but only one of them had a key, and that one was broken off and wedged in the ignition. They went on, shivering in the cold, as the gray circle of the sun moved across the sky.