Ghostlands mt-3

by Marc Scott Zicree

  Then it all went south.

  Perez was nearly free of the smoldering net. He screamed at a twisted little man atop a black mare, a man who had hung back out of the action and said nothing.

  “Eddie!”

  Eddie just nodded and raised his head-which Goldie could see, even from this distance in the torchlight and moonbeams bouncing off the fresh-fallen snow, was cadaver-thin with shiny black hair pasted down like a coat of shellac. He fixed his gaze on them.

  It was just as though a big invisible hand grabbed up Colleen and lifted her high into the air, flinging her toward the little man. She cried out, dropping her crossbow.

  Eddie angled his head, as if drawing her toward him with an unseen tether, reeling her in. Colleen hovered ten feet away from him and ten feet up. Her arms pressed down into her sides and she grunted, as if the invisible hand was squeezing her.

  “Stand down!” Perez, free of the mesh now, shouted at Cal and the others. “Stand down or she dies!”

  “You do that and I will be so pissed!” Colleen yelled at them. But then Eddie frowned, and they could all see she was being pressed even harder, and she cried out.

  And Goldie thought of Douglas Brattle, the fear caster who had attacked him and Larry Shango along that shallow creekbed in Albermarle County, and of Primal in the dark core of Chicago, who had seized Magritte-beautiful, soul-sick Magritte-and drained her of her life like a man would suck the juice out of an orange.

  And the anguish and grief and rage were upon him again-and with them the screaming, cacophonous blood-choir song of the Source that was always there and not there-and this time he didn’t stuff it back down and away but instead opened himself up to the tearing out of his own lungs and guts and heart.

  You open yourself to it and fall away….

  In his peripheral vision, Goldie could see Cal hesitating, starting to lower his sword, and Doc his blade.

  But Goldie-the pure, yes, primal fire that was Goldie, or what was left of his mind and self-had no such thought, no hesitance; instead, he reached out with both hands, fingers spreading like a flower blossoming to a bee.

  The sheer force rippled through the night like a shock wave, you could see it distorting the air, pulverizing the falling snowflakes, blasting them apart and aside as it plowed ahead. It reached Eddie’s steed, knocked the horse brutally back, drove it to its knees with a strangled, terrified groan.

  Eddie took the brunt of the force wave. It slammed into him and hurled him back off the horse, sent him cartwheeling helplessly through the air.

  The invisible cord severed, Colleen dropped onto the soft snow, the breath knocked from her but otherwise unharmed.

  Not so with Eddie, who struck a big cedar with a hideous impact that shook the tree as if a rampaging bull had run full tilt into it. Then-incredibly-he was gone, vanished clean away. The extremities of the tree, it’s bare branches, burst into flame with a sudden whoosh of ignition, lighter fluid on a barbecue. It blazed like a tiki torch.

  Seeing this, everyone on both sides of the fray was stilled to shocked silence.

  Cal recovered first, said to Goldie, “How did you do that?”

  “I don’t know,” Goldie said, equally stunned.

  “Where did he go? Did you send him away?”

  A whisper now, “I don’t know….”

  (But in a savage rush of emotion, Goldie realized he hungered to do more of this…and needed to learn more to be able to do so.)

  “Take them!” Perez was yelling at his men. “Dammit, take them!” But they were reluctant now, all the fight drained out of them by the appalling miracle they had just witnessed.

  The topmost parts of the cedar, blackened and burning furiously, cracked off the tree and fell crashing to earth, throwing angry sparks up into the night.

  Goldie shot out his hands again-whether a bluff or not, no one could tell, least of all himself. The attackers wheeled their horses around and took off for the hills at a mad gallop.

  Seeing he was alone against them, Perez threw aside his torch and, with an expletive, reined his horse about to race after his men.

  But at the last moment, he drew the speargun from its holster on the saddle and fired one killing bolt back at Cal.

  Cal had no time to even register it, for a vast figure surged up behind him from out of the doorway and threw him down into the drift. He heard the whip-crack of the spear flying above him, then the hard wet-meat noise of it connecting with the body of the one who had saved him.

  There was the smell of blood, and Mike Olifiers fell beside Cal, the spear through his neck.

  Cal staggered to him as Olifiers pumped out his life, red onto the snow. Doc was there, too, now, as were Colleen and Goldie, but there was nothing he could do.

  Olifiers was drowning, choking on his blood, struggling to gasp something out to Cal.

  “Why?” Cal asked, tortured, wanting to turn back time, to take the spear that had been meant for him, not Olifiers. “Why did you do that?”

  “They,” Olifiers gurgled, “need…” He reached up a big meaty hand, wet with blood, and grabbed Cal’s shoulder hard as Cal bent over him. His eyes were fierce as they sought out the younger man.

  He didn’t need to say the rest.

  They need you.

  Olifiers fell back, and was gone.

  Perez had followed his men-the ones who were still alive, who could still ride-away into the night, across the flatlands.

  They didn’t come back.

  The three grunters still crouched nearby, not moving, eyes huge and wary, staring at the big dead man, and the four beside him.

  “Go on,” Cal told them. “Go where you like. You’re free.”

  Two of them fled into the darkness that so suited them. But the other remained, drew timidly up to Cal.

  “Want…” it said tentatively, “to follow you.” Its eyes moved from Cal down to the body beside him, awash in its own blood, then back to Cal.

  Cal weighed the offer, and then said, “What’s your name?”

  The grunter-whose name was Brian Forbes, and who had been a man once in Detroit-followed silently on padded feet as they carried Olifiers back into the mall.

  SEVEN

  THE CITY AND DEVINE

  In the years to come, those who were there would tell their children and grandchildren what they saw, and call her Lady Blade. But her real name was May.

  The wind off Lake Michigan was a knife that hard near-winter day, cutting through the passersby as they hurried on, driven by the cold and the fear of the streets that were a hunting ground, now that Chicago was no longer the Ruby City and Primal was dethroned and destroyed, and his palace in shambles around him.

  The city had reconstituted itself, in a fashion, devolved or at least returned to something of its former power structure, the old Party Machine, in this world where machines no longer ran but power and politics and greed held the whip hand, as they always had.

  May felt nothing of the wind, tuned only to the still certainty within her that she had found the terminus of a search that had drawn her across many long miles and through many black places.

  She stood at the corner of Randolph and Dearborn, cloud shadows painting her light and dark as they moved, studying the twisted metal framework that speared into the sky like the flayed fingers of giants. The rubble was piled high at its base, big scorched stones, a testament to rage and chaos and, perhaps, the inevitability of ruin.

  Tons of stone and insulation, wiring and furniture, pipe and cement-fifty stories’ worth-thrown into a blender to spray out over the terrain. Left here to the snow and sun and rain, to wear away like a mountain of pride torn down. No one in Chicago had the equipment anymore to haul all that debris away, nor the inclination, she supposed. Better to leave it as a monument, or unmarked grave, or abandoned killing ground. She noted that the men and women hurrying by averted their eyes as they passed, shied to the other side of the street, pretended it wasn’t there.

  But May could l
ook it straight in the face; it was hardly the worst she had seen, or been forced to endure.

  Once the structure had been the Chicago Media Building, home to Primal Records, punching up off the pavement five hundred feet in its assurance and arrogance. Then it had transformed, mutated as so much had mutated in this spinning world, into something far grander and more terrible, into cathedral and fortress and keep, where a demigod Beast held sway, a demon who had beaten back the Storm and granted safe haven to some, the privileged, for a time.

  But May knew that it had been no haven for him, whatever largesse he had bestowed, for in the secret place of his soul he was lost.

  Those here who had served and feared him and lived by his whim called him Primal, but they had not known him, not like she had.

  For in the time before that time, May had called him husband, and known his true name.

  It was not the same as the fitting names her people gave each other, that she herself had, but it bore something of the same intimacy, the same history.

  “Listen,” a nervous voice beside her piped up, “it’s not safe to stay here. We gotta move on.”

  “In a minute,” she said. She looked sidewise at the one who had brought her here, whom she had found at Buddy Guy’s club down on Wabash, who had been brave enough to answer her questions when no one else would meet her gaze or dare speak of the past and what had gone down.

  But Gabe Cordell, with his shining black hair and broadly muscled arms, was a man with spine, even if he was in a wheelchair.

  Rolling at a determined clip she’d had to walk briskly to keep pace with, Gabe had led her out into the night and brought her to a barricaded street of tenements and the home of a furtive man named Wharton, who for a time had been a follower of Primal’s.

  Wharton had cherished the order and safety Primal had secured him; in truth, had loved him. In this day and age, when photographs were hard to come by, Wharton understood that memory could hold only so much, an image that faded with the corrosion of time.

  From its hiding place under the floorboards, he withdrew the metal toolcase that had once held other keepsakes, unlocked it and gently lifted out the plaster cast. He held it up to May, angled it to catch the light of thick candles.

  He had taken the death mask of the broken, ill-used man as he’d lain abandoned and discarded among the wreckage, so much garbage in the dirt.

  The plaster face revealed little of the easy intelligence, the soft sweet eyes, the compassionate, off-center grin that had made her love him. But the round face was there, the delicate features, and May had no doubt. It was Clayton.

  Who had left her, because he’d had to.

  So now she stood at Randolph and Dearborn, alongside Gabe, who at last had brought her the answers she had journeyed so long in search of.

  May reached inside her coat of many pockets, the black leather duster, and withdrew the folded paper she’d carried across three states and nine hundred miles. The wind caught at it and made it flutter like a bird frantic for release, but she held tight to it, strode across the broad street to the pile of stone that had been the final stopping place of the one that had shared her life, in the time before this time, when he had been a man and nothing more.

  She didn’t read the words on the paper, didn’t need to; they were written as surely on her heart, with a knife that had gone deep, the scrawl of words scar tissue within her now.

  May, Clay had written in that queer, spidery hand of his. Baby, I know you won’t understand this, but I’ve gotta get out of here. It’s not you or the kids.

  (How strange it seemed to May that he’d said “kids,” when only their son had survived past infancy. Linda, their delicate storm child, their boy’s adored younger sister, had barely lived past her first year, and then succumbed to the faulty aortic valve that had been her birthday present upon her arrival into this world. She had died literally of a broken heart. May understood broken hearts now, but incredibly, inexplicably to her at the time, she herself had continued on. Once, she recalled, she had come upon something Mark Twain had written in his autobiography. “It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live.” Curious, how Twain could know precisely her life when he had died almost a century before.)

  I love you. Always love you. But something’s happening to me. I don’t understand but it’s happening and I’ve got to go away. They know why it’s happening and I wish I could make them tell me what this is and what it means and if it’s good or bad. One minute I know it’s good and the next I know it’s bad just as hard. It’s power, May. But I don’t think I’m supposed to have it. If they find out I have it I don’t know what they’ll do, so I’ve got to go away. I don’t even know if I should be telling you this.

  So Clay fled east, leaving her and their boy safe behind, or so he thought.

  She had thought it safe, too, and so had left their son in the keeping of her friend Agnes Wu, whom she had met through Clay’s work. She and Agnes had gone to innumerable movies when Clay had pulled graveyard shift; they’d shared their unspoken stories, the wounds of their souls, long into countless nights. Like herself, Agnes felt torn from her nurturing lands, her kin, driven by duty and allegiance to this barren and secretive place. Even worse, the tight security blackout kept Agnes isolated away from the grown children in Ithaca she so loved; perhaps that’s why she’d become so fond of May’s boy-he’d reminded her of her own son.

  A good person to leave her boy with, May reasoned, this brilliant, homesick woman, to stow her son at Agnes’s spacious residence within the outer confines of the Project grounds.

  May had tracked Clay from South Dakota, determined to find him, to help him, following clues, trying to guess just how he was thinking.

  Then the Storm had come, and all bets were off…and she herself came to know a fair portion of what Clayton had felt.

  Clay had been born here in Chicago, had grown up here until he was nine, when that drunken butcher had performed surgery on his mother and she had died drowning in her own blood, and his father, a dead man living, had drowned himself in booze. Clayton had been a castaway then, handed off to relatives in far-flung places, thrown up on barren shores, homeless until he had found a home with her.

  So perhaps he had come to this city because it had once meant security to him, and sanity. He had tried to re-create that sanity, had failed, had died.

  May drew alongside the towering pile of stone, lifted one of the smaller pieces, slid the note into the recess within. She touched a finger to her lips, then to the cold rock. Rest in peace.

  “Okay,” she said, turning back to Gabriel. Time to go home now, back to her son. Then try to catch the trail of the one who had done this, to find his reasons, to bring him to justice, if she could.

  And having come to know a good deal of her nature by now, May felt reasonably certain that she could.

  A rough clatter down the street seized her attention.

  “Uh-oh,” Gabe said. “Outta time.”

  May could see them now, sliding out of windows, oozing out of doorways, coming up from holes in the pavement like angry ghosts.

  “Wreckin’ crew,” said Gabe. “I warned ya about this.”

  The scuzzy men and women were walking junkyards, armed to the teeth with chains, clubs, saws, knives, you name it, and armored with essentially anything that could be bent to that purpose. They were closing in from all sides, and to the silent observers who watched from behind their curtains and window shades it looked like the lady in the long leatherpiece and the guy in the chair-unless they could suddenly levitate-were pretty much toast.

  “Not that I hold a grudge,” Gabe said, “but if you’d like your last words to be an apology, I wouldn’t say no.”

  “In a minute,” May said for the second time, just as the mob let out a hair-raising cry and charged.

  Now, Gabe was a pretty cool customer when it came down to it, and in the moment before they rushed him,
he’d locked his chair and gripped taut in his gloved hands the length of razor wire he’d brought along for just such eventualities. But he had to admit he was pretty well flummoxed that Little Mrs. Primal didn’t even bat an eye.

  She just stood her ground as they came on, noisy as a parade of drunken Shriners, and then she went to work. Spinning, rolling, slashing, throwing-a knife came from every one of those million pockets in her long coat, and she put every one of those gleaming beauties to best use.

  It seemed like forever and no time at all, blood everywhere but amazingly not one of those bastards was killed nor even particularly amputated. They took off screaming, with a good number of new beauty marks to show off to the folks, and before you knew it there were just the two of them, May and Gabe-without a mark on them, except maybe a little sweat from exertion-out there on the street.

  But not for long. The whole neighborhood came pouring out of their makeshift homes and storefronts and businesses cheering, everyone wanting to make them kielbasa.

  May was gracious, but as soon as she could she extricated herself and set off west, leaving behind only a multitude of witnesses to spin the story, and one of her best throwing knives as a thank-you present for Gabe.

  She wasn’t the showy type.

  Just as she was on the outskirts of town, however, Gabriel caught up with her, rolling fast. “You don’t get off that easy, not without you telling me how you pulled that stunt.”

  It was a fair question, he had earned it.

  So May showed him the finely worked necklace of porcupine quills, of eagle talon and bear claw, passed down to her from her mother’s mother, who in turn got it from her own father, who had ridden with and been kin to the one known sometimes as Curly, or Our Strange Man, or Crazy Horse. May had always been pretty fast and alert, but since the coming of the Storm, the attributes had soaked down through her skin, and now she could move and sting and tear like nobody’s business.