Ghostlands mt-3

by Marc Scott Zicree

  Gabriel listened in quiet solemnity, then she told him her fitting name.

  In the years to come, those who were there told their children and grandchildren what they saw, and called her Lady Blade. But her real name was May, and for a time she wore the name her husband had borne, which was Devine.

  But she had another name, handed down by her people. In the generations since her great-grandfather had been forced to go to the white boarding school and truncate his name, it had been Catches.

  But in this free and terrible time, May saw that it could at last return it to its full and fitting truth, and so she wore it along with her necklace of porcupine and eagle and bear.

  They called her Lady Blade. But her real name was May Catches the Enemy.

  EIGHT

  LEAVING BURNT STICK

  Mama Diamond woke up in bed with her boots on.

  She didn’t recall falling asleep. Didn’t recall anything past her meeting with the dark-skinned federal agent, what was his name? Shango. Larry Shango.

  She recalled all too vividly her encounter with the dragon Ely Stern and the loss of her gems. The memory made her want to close her eyes and fade back into unconsciousness. It felt like a death, although she knew it wasn’t one, not really. Not like when Katy had nearly lost Samantha in ’73, and Mama Diamond had flown out to be with them, and she and Katy had spent three sleepless days and nights by the infant’s bedside in the ICU at Good Samaritan, listening to the hiss of oxygen and the child’s wet, tortured breaths. Nor even that moment when Mama Diamond thought she’d heard the whisper of the scythe coming for her, when Stern had threatened to take her own cantankerous life-and would have, too, had she given him the least excuse, she felt sure of it; there was the scent of murder in that leathered monstrosity.

  Still, the loss of what she’d thought of as her treasure weakened her.

  In recent times, even before the Change, Mama Diamond had found herself increasingly choosing isolation, withdrawing from the world of men, insulating herself with inanimate belongings, the glittering offspring of leveled mountain and evaporated sea.

  People could leave you, but not possessions; those were truly yours.

  And no, Mama Diamond lied to herself, she wasn’t thinking of Danny, who had fleetingly called himself her fiance once in a century gone, when promises were something to be believed and credit given not just to customers but to lovers. Only a memory on the wind now, a faded snapshot locked in the depths of mind and heart.

  People left you.

  But now her possessions had, too.

  And what remained? Only the grinning skulls of Cretaceous and Jurassic dragons, seeming to mock her from their stone matrices in the walls of her home.

  She turned her head against the yellowed pillowcase and sighed.

  But she couldn’t sleep anymore. She stank of her own sweat. She ached in every part of herself-physical and spiritual.

  Besides, she could hear someone moving downstairs, in the shop, what was left of it.

  Climbing out of bed was an adventure. What was a body, that it should protest so vigorously a simple motion? Quiet, you bones, you sinews.

  Mama Diamond slept above the shop in the same room that housed her antique sofa, her rolltop desk, and a wood-burning stove that vented through the ceiling. Nothing but ashes remained in the stove. The chill of the night lingered. She was glad that whoever had put her to bed-could it have been that stiff-looking Shango? — had been generous with blankets. But it was morning now, the pale November sun glancing through the ivoried roll blinds.

  More bumping downstairs. Face the music and dance, Mama Diamond told herself.

  She took the stairs slowly, came into the body of the store and was greeted by the smell of hot coffee. It almost took the pain away.

  “You’re awake,” Shango said, entering from the back room where Mama Diamond kept her coal stove for cooking.

  “And you’re using my kitchen.”

  “You mind? You were asleep.”

  “I’m often asleep. It’s not an invitation to raid the pantry. But I guess I don’t mind…if you have a cup of java for me.”

  “You take it black?”

  “As God intended.”

  Mama Diamond had lived in and over this shop for thirty years. She had a fully equipped kitchen upstairs, gas stove, refrigerator, microwave, the works. Nothing fancy, but it had more than suited her. All useless, of course, when the natural gas ceased to flow and the AC outlets turned into holes in the wall. Since then, she had fixed most of her meals on this coal stove salvaged from Old West Antiques across the street. She had even set up this little back room with a Formica table and a couple of tattered pipe-and-vinyl chairs. One to sit in, one to put her feet on. She hadn’t expected company.

  She eased into the nearest chair while Shango poured coffee.

  “There are eggs in the cold corner of the cellar,” she said, “if you’re ambitious.”

  Shango looked surprised and more than a little tempted. “You have eggs?”

  “Didn’t I just say that? I used to keep chickens, up until a week or so ago. Henhouse out back.”

  “What happened?”

  “Something broke in and ate the brooders.”

  Shango retrieved the eggs and cracked three of them into an iron skillet. Mama Diamond didn’t care for people who intruded on her privacy, but yesterday’s encounter with Ely Stern made Shango’s sleepover seem like a courtesy call. Why should she trust Shango? Did she trust Shango? Mama Diamond didn’t share the grudge so many of her neighbors had seemed to hold against Washington, D.C.-perhaps because her taxes had never been audited-but neither did a federal ID card render a person automatically trustworthy.

  Still, there was something to be said for a man who would fry her an egg when she ached in every joint and ligature.

  Shango looked hungry but waited for Mama Diamond’s invitation before he added a couple of eggs for himself. Mama Diamond let the inevitable questions wait until breakfast was finished. Then, over a second cup of coffee, she cleared her throat. “I hope it won’t offend you if I find it hard to believe that the U.S. government is still in business, much less that you’re interested in preventing petty burglary. I expect, over much of this great land of ours, petty theft has become a fairly common pastime.”

  “I don’t know about the government,” Shango said. “I hope there are enough good people left that our government may yet recover itself, when this is finished.”

  “When what’s finished?”

  “The Change, I’ve heard it called. The Storm, as well.”

  “You see that coming to an end soon?”

  Shango’s mouth tightened and something roiled around in his eyes, but he said nothing.

  “Is that the business you’re about?”

  Again, nothing.

  Mama Diamond sighed. She understood how a man might be reluctant to talk about himself in this day and age. But, dammit, those eggs should have earned her at least a little conversation.

  She tried a different approach. “You seem to understand what happened here.”

  Nothing.

  “So is it the dragon you’re after, or me?”

  “The dragon,” Shango ventured at last. “But I know a little bit about you, too.” He pulled a tattered blue notebook from the weathered backpack stowed in the corner. He found a page and read from it: “The Stone and Bone. Judith Kuriyama, AKA Mama Diamond, proprietor.”

  “Uh-huh,” Mama Diamond said, unenlightened and a little miffed to hear her old name from this man’s mouth.

  Shango said, “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to be obtuse. But maybe if I could ask you a couple of questions, it’ll be easier when I try to explain why I’m here. How’s that sound?”

  “All right, I suppose.” If you’re a man of your word.

  “Okay. Miss Kuriyama-”

  “Might as well just call me Mama Diamond.” That other name was long ago, far away.

  “Mama Diamond, you’re
obviously a gem merchant.”

  “Semiprecious stones and minerals.” Not to mention fossils from the Devonian to the most recent Ice Age, but that wasn’t what this was about, what it had ever been about.

  “Right. When you were in business, did you keep records?”

  “My Christ, this is an audit!”

  “Obviously not.”

  “Is anything obvious anymore? Yeah, I kept business records.”

  “On paper or computer?”

  “You’d think an old bone like me would be ignorant of computers, wouldn’t you? Well, that’s not strictly the case. I had a very fine IBM machine only a little out of date when the electricity stopped. Had my own website. Doubled my business over the old mail-order catalogue, too. Orders in and out the same day, MasterCard, Visa, PayPal…Did I keep the books on the computer, too? Yeah, but I printed copies of everything just in case the IRS came calling. Are you sure you’re not the IRS?”

  “Not even close. You still have those records in your possession?”

  “I believe so.”

  “May I look at them? I need customer transactions, mail orders in the last twelve months before the Change, especially any large-value orders that might have come through, or big repeat orders.”

  “I don’t deal in large volumes but I guess you can see the records. Lucky I didn’t burn ’em for heat. Will this get me my stock back?”

  “In all likelihood, no.”

  “Well,” Mama Diamond said, “at least the man is honest.”

  It pained her, and not just physically, to walk through the emptied store. Without its mineral cargo, the Stone and Bone was just one more looted storefront. She led Shango upstairs to the room Mama Diamond had once called her office.

  “I keep my sale records in chronological order here,” she said, indicating a battered file drawer, “most recent at the front.”

  Shango opened the drawer, surveyed the contents, then began to page through the files systematically.

  Soon enough, he found the invoices with the familiar place names, the Xeroxes of checks that could be cashed just as readily as if the signatures on them belonged to people who had actually existed. There were twelve different shell companies named (elsewhere, Shango had found as many as thirty), but most of the bulk of them were from a location in New Jersey.

  “Tell me about these,” Shango asked Mama Diamond, although he already knew the answer.

  Mama Diamond remembered this group of orders because of the cryptic letters and the extravagant offers they had contained.

  The first one-she found it for Shango-had been innocuous enough, an order form printed from her website requesting a number of fine garnets and inquiring about volume orders and discounts.

  “Signed by Anthony St. Rivers,” Shango observed, as if this were significant.

  Mama Diamond filled the order and wrote to Mr. St. Rivers advising him that she didn’t ordinarily fill high-volume orders-she was a retailer, not a distributor; her stock was carefully assembled to meet the average needs of her typical customers, and she was reluctant to draw down too much inventory for fear of disappointing her regulars. (She could, of course, have accepted St. Rivers’s orders and simply filled them through a distributor at some extraordinary markup and after a long delay…but that didn’t seem quite honest.)

  She had gotten back a nice note from St. Rivers, mentioning he would refer her to his other friends and compatriots across the country. St. Rivers had further ordered a modest selection of raw and cut stones-opals, tourmalines, more garnets-and thanked Mama Diamond in a courteous fashion.

  The orders continued to arrive with some regularity from St. Rivers and his well-heeled friends. Mama Diamond was intrigued enough that she’d mentioned St. Rivers to an importer, Bob Skarrow, at a gem-and-mineral trade show in Phoenix.

  Skarrow rolled his eyes at the mention of the name. St. Rivers had contacted him, too, and when he couldn’t fill his entire order-“It was frickin’ ridiculous in volume alone”-St. Rivers and company had gone in turn to Skarrow’s sources, and it was skewing the entire market in semiprecious stones, driving up prices and creating spot shortages.

  “What do they do with all these stones?” Mama Diamond had asked.

  But Skarrow didn’t know. He’d had a couple of phone conversations with this St. Rivers (always with St. Rivers, not Skarrow, placing the call, the number invariably blocked), but St. Rivers wouldn’t say anything about that.

  Skarrow said the man’s voice was papery thin and cultured, an old man’s voice, with the faintest wisp of an accent, Spanish maybe or Mexican or Cuban, as if he’d planted roots here a long time but had hailed once from an alien land.

  “Best guess in the trade is, they’re working on some kind of optical device,” Skarrow had concluded. “Like they used to use rubies for lasers. But that’s just speculation.”

  Mama Diamond had let it go at that. Shortages, price-gouging, and overblown crises were an unavoidable part of the gem trade. “Apart from regular small orders from St. Rivers,” she told Shango, “that’s the whole story.”

  Shango nodded thoughtfully.

  “Now,” Mama Diamond said, “suppose you answer me some questions.”

  Shango asked Mama Diamond if she would be willing to walk with him to the train depot-if she felt well enough.

  Oddly enough, she did feel well enough. She had this hazy, dreamlike memory that Stern had press-ganged her into a great deal of unwilling physical labor alongside the corpse-gray, distorted little men who made up his work crew. The pain was still there, throbbing in every joint. But she felt a peculiar energy, too. All that adrenaline flowing in her veins, she supposed. The giddy aftermath of fear.

  And at the very last, amidst the steam hiss of the soul-damned train firing up again, Stern’s words coming distant and watery to Mama Diamond in memory or imagination.

  “Home…then Atherton.”

  Emerging with Shango from her dinosaur-bone house onto the porch, Mama Diamond spied her bent-birch rocker, the Tom Clancy novel still there under the canteen, pages restless in a dry wind. It can stay where it is, Mama Diamond thought. I’m through with that book.

  They walked together slowly on the unshaded side of the street. The wind was brutal again today, bulling down the cross lanes like the propwash from an old DC-3. Mama Diamond wore her old slouch hat to keep her head warm, atop the pageboy she had affected since she was five (hell, one hairstyle should last a lifetime). Shango, God bless him, wore a fedora.

  “Suppose you start,” Mama Diamond suggested, “by telling me how you came to be here.”

  “That’s a long story.”

  “I have time on my hands.”

  Shango began with stark simplicity: how he had come out of the navy to work for the Secret Service; his role at the White House before the Change; how President McKay had confided to him the likelihood that the clandestine Source Project was the root and center of the Change; how McKay had sent Shango along with Deputy Chief of Staff Steve Czernas to find the lost agent Jeri Bilmer, who might just have had the key to it all.

  Then things got really interesting.

  Later, upon reflection, Shango told himself it was because Mama Diamond comported herself like a woman who’d had no company but her own for far too long. Shango understood about that. He’d had more experience with loneliness than most folks.

  But he had unburdened himself like a Mafia don at last confession.

  Before his return to Washington, Shango told Mama, he had found the pitiful remains of Jeri Bilmer and her even more pitiful list, the roster that told nothing more than the names and former addresses of the scientists at the Source Project-perhaps complete, probably not, certainly not including the support personnel who might or might not have been dead by that time.

  Shango had not succeeded on his own in achieving this objective. He had been helped at the end by the odd quartet of travelers from New York whom he had chanced upon when he had helped save the most erratic of the fou
r from murderous attack. Herman Goldman, whom Shango had rescued and who in turn had used his remarkable powers to help Shango locate Bilmer’s remains…and then reveal to him that President McKay was dead.

  Was it that knowledge that finally coaxed Shango to violate his oath of office, to reveal what he had sworn only to share with McKay? Or was it rather a growing empathy with the band’s leader, Cal Griffin, on his quixotic mission to save his abducted sister and challenge a force that had only overturned an entire planet?

  Fools’ errands were something Shango understood, too.

  Whatever the motive, Shango had shared all he knew about the Source Project with them, in the hope-probably equally foolish-that it might turn the tables just enough to save their lives.

  Shango knew full well he had come to the crossroads and chosen. To turn his back on what he had been, what he had prided himself on being. To become visible again.

  For eight years, Shango had worn a black suit like his personal armor, earpiece wire coiling off into his collar, wrist handcuffed to the briefcase that would fall away to an Uzi at a moment’s notice.

  But most of all, he remembered that feeling….

  Unseen, unobserved, unremarked upon.

  Clouding men’s minds.

  One time, when Shango was just a beanpole of a kid in a tumbledown, squalid neighborhood of New Orleans where no Nielsen company or Harris Poll ever asked anyone’s opinion, his father had brought home some beaten-up cassettes he’d scored at a swap meet-odd behavior, to be sure, for the old bastard usually hoarded every penny for beer and escape. But it turned out this was release of a different kind, for when Dad himself had been a kid he had fled not into liquor and a feigned, desperate gaiety but rather the deco dreams issuing from the hand-tooled fine oak cabinet and glowing amber eye of the Atwater Kent. Now he wanted to relive it and-incredibly, uniquely-share it with his children.