Swan Song by Robert R. McCammon

Author:Robert R. McCammon [McCammon, Robert R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 978-1-4532-3152-4
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Published: 2011-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

47

THE BICYCLE’S TIRES MADE a singing sound in the dark. Every so often they thumped over a corpse or veered around a wrecked car, but the legs that powered them had places to go.

Two-toned shoes on the pedals, the man leaned forward and pumped along Interstate 80, about twelve miles east of the Ohio line. The ashes of Pittsburgh flecked his suit. He’d spent two days amid the ruins, had found a group of survivors there and looked into their minds for the face of the woman with the circle of glass. But it wasn’t in any of their heads, and before he’d left he’d convinced them all that eating the burned meat of dead bodies was a cure for radiation poisoning. He’d even helped them start on the first one.

Bon appetit, he thought. Below him, his legs pumped like pistons.

Where are you? he wondered. You can’t have come this far! Not yet! Unless you’re running day and night because you know I’m on your ass.

When the wolves had come out to first snap and then fawn at his heels, he’d thought they had gotten her, way back in eastern Pennsylvania. But if that were so, where was the leather bag? Her face hadn’t been in the minds of the sentries back at Homewood, either, and if she’d been there, they would be the ones to know. So where was she? And—most importantly—where was the glass thing?

He didn’t like the idea of its being out there somewhere. Didn’t know what it was, or why it had come to be, but whatever it was, he wanted to smash it beneath his shoes. Wanted to break it into tiny fragments and grind those pieces into the woman’s face.

Sister, he thought, and he sneered.

His fingers clenched the handlebars. The glass circle had to be found. Had to be. This was his party now, and such things were not allowed. He didn’t like the way the woman had looked at it—and he didn’t like the way she’d fought for it, either. It gave her false hope. So it was a humane thing, really, to find the glass circle and smash it and make her eat the shards. There was no telling how many others she could infect if she wasn’t stopped.

Maybe she was already dead. Maybe one of her own kind had killed her and stolen her bag. Maybe, maybe, maybe ...

There were too many maybes. But no matter who had it, or where it was, he had to find the glass circle, because such a thing as that should not be, and when it had gone dark and cold in his grip he’d known it was reading his soul.

“This is my party!” he shouted, and he drove over a dead man lying in his path.

But there were so many places to search, so many highways to follow. She must have turned off I-80 before she’d reached Homewood. But why would she? He remembered her saying, “We keep going west.” And she would follow

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