Swan Song by Robert McCammon Page B

wear uniforms.”
    “I didn’t even see them,” Elise said, still nervous. “I just looked up and there they were. They were pointing those guns right at us! What if one had gone off?”
    “These people are professionals, hon. They wouldn’t be here if they didn’t know what they were doing, and I’m sure all of them know how to handle guns. That just shows you how secure we’re going to be for the next two weeks. Nobody can get up here who doesn’t belong. Right?”
    “Right!” Roland said. He had experienced a thrill of excitement when he’d looked down the barrels of those two Ingram guns; if they’d wanted to, he thought, they could’ve blown us all away with a single burst. One squeeze of the trigger and zap! The feeling left him amazingly invigorated, as if cold water had been splashed in his face. That was good, he thought. Very good. One of the qualities of a King’s Knight was to take danger in stride.
    “There’s the stop sign,” Phil told them as the headlights hit it, dead ahead. The large sign was affixed to a wall of rough, jagged rock that ended the mountain road. Around them were only dark woods and the rise of more rocky walls; there was no sign of the place they had come from Flagstaff to find.
    “How do you get inside?” Elise asked.
    “You’ll see. This was one of the neatest things they showed me.” Phil had been here in April, after he’d read an advertisement for Earth House in Soldier of Fortune magazine. He slowly guided the Roamer forward until its front tires sank into two grooves in the earth and triggered a pair of latches. Almost immediately, there was a deep rumbling sound-the noise of heavy machinery, gears and chains at work. A crack of fluorescent light appeared at the base of the rock wall; a section of it was smoothly ascending, like the door of the Croninger garage at home.
    But to Roland Croninger it looked like the opening of a massive portal into a medieval fortress. His heart had begun to pound, and the crack of fluorescent light reflected in the lenses of his glasses grew wider and brighter.
    “My God,” Elise said softly. The rock wall was opening to reveal a concrete-floored parking deck, its spaces filled with cars and other recreational vehicles. A row of lights hung from a gridwork of iron beams at the ceiling. In the doorway stood a uniformed soldier, waving Phil to come ahead; he eased forward, the grooves guiding the Roamer down a concrete ramp and onto the parking deck. As soon as the tires had disengaged the latches again, the doorway began to rumble shut.
    The soldier motioned Phil along to a parking place between two other campers and made a gesture with a finger across his throat.
    “What’s that mean?” Elise asked uneasily.
    Phil smiled. “He’s telling us to cut the engine.” He did. “We’re here, gang.”
    The rock doorway closed with a solid, echoing thunk, and the outside world was sealed off.
    “We’re in the army now!” Phil told his son, and the boy’s expression was one of dreamy amazement. As they got out of the Roamer two electric carts pulled up; in the first one was a smiling young man, his hair sandy brown and clipped in a crewcut, wearing a dark blue uniform with the Earth House insignia on his breast pocket. The second cart carried two husky men in dark blue jumpsuits and pulled a flat luggage trailer like those used at airports.
    The smiling young man, whose white teeth seemed to reflect the fluorescent lighting, checked the information on his clipboard to make sure he had the name right. “Hi, folks!” he said cheerfully. “Mr. and Mrs. Philip Croninger?”
    “Right,” Phil said. “And our son, Roland.”
    “Hi, Roland. You folks have a good trip from Flagstaff?”
    “A long trip,” Elise told him; she gawked around at the parking deck, figuring that there were well over two hundred cars. “My God, how many people are here?”
    “We’re about ninety-five percent of capacity, Mrs. Croninger. We figure to