Ghostlands mt-3

by Marc Scott Zicree

  The tapes were of an old radio show, ancient even then, from the thirties. Shango had recognized the voice emanating from the cassette player-it was that old fat dude from the commercials (“No wine before its time…”). But this wasn’t hokey or a fast hustle. It was simply wonderful.

  Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men…

  The Shadow knows.

  A man who could not be bought or swayed or corrupted, who stood for one pure, clear ideal, who could go anywhere, do anything…

  Because he could cloud men’s minds.

  So they couldn’t see him, didn’t know he was even there. Until he struck and struck hard, setting everything right.

  Sometimes it’s just like a penny dropping into a slot, a lightbulb going on…and you know you’ve found that one right thing to give your life over to.

  Shango studied and trained, entered the Naval Academy on an athletic scholarship, busted his ass getting his grades into the stratosphere, spent four years in Naval Intelligence working up to lieutenant commander, brushing up against all manner of government operatives.

  All preamble, so he could apply to the one organization where he truly belonged.

  Why do you want to join the Secret Service? the form had asked. And of course he had not said, Because I want to be the Shadow, stupid.

  What followed had been a grueling year at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Brunswick, Georgia, augmented by specialized training in Beltsville, Maryland. After that, five years’ duty in the New Orleans and Chicago field offices, working criminal investigations, identity theft, protective intelligence, proving himself outstanding, exemplary, without error or peer.

  Until finally, he was selected for the elite, the Presidential Protection Division.

  Where at last Larry Shango could fully become the Shadow.

  The invisible man, the one no one saw, silent as a radio switched off, always-literally-shadowing the Big Man, numero uno, President of what was once laughingly called the United States.

  Not so United anymore, and as for the President, well…if there was a heaven-a belief Shango’s mother had so fervently believed and Shango himself so fervently fled-McKay was there. And if not, at least McKay’s worries were over.

  Which was hardly the case with Larry Shango. Since his moment of decision around the campfire with Cal Griffin and friends, Shango had been visible indeed on his rambling See the USA sojourn, more often than not in someone’s crosshairs. The long highway might as well have been paved with broken bones for all the damage he’d been forced to inflict with that ten-pound sledgehammer slung across his back.

  It was a way to fill the time at least, to sometimes actually convince himself his life had a purpose…or at least hadn’t run out of steam.

  But at night, camped in some high redoubt, his back to the rockface, carefully calculated to be secure against attack, he’d long for even a brief return to what he used to think of (though naturally never actually said) as his Power….

  Funny, because now all sorts of people had all kinds of power, way beyond what that funky old Shadow could ever have cooked up.

  But Shango had stayed achingly unchanged-human, mortal, ordinary. As ordinary as any man who had walked his path and seen what he’d seen.

  Griffin and his companions were probably dead by now, having gotten nowhere near the Source.

  As Shango himself had failed.

  But that was long after their meeting around the campfire. Initially, Shango had ignored Goldman’s warnings. He’d had an obligation-and more than that, a personal need-to verify that his Commander was indeed dead, that Shango had in fact deserted and condemned him (even if McKay himself had ordered Shango away).

  On the grounds of the White House, beside the fountain and rose beds as Goldman had predicted, Shango verified that General Christiansen of the Joint Chiefs had seized power, and that McKay and his wife, Jan, and even their dog, Jimmy, were dead, murdered.

  That had been the second crossroads, as Shango had been forced to choose-vengeance, or some other engine to drive his life. He chose the one remaining task he knew McKay would want him to fulfill-to find and safeguard the life of their son, Evan, if he could.

  So Shango set off for Bar Harbor, Maine, where the boy had been vacationing with his uncle and cousins and a detachment of Secret Service agents. That had been one hairy journey, traveling overland through some of the densest and most desperate regions of the eastern seaboard. Factionalism had run riot. Rumors abounded that the President was dead, and it really hadn’t been possible to keep that soundbite a dirty little secret (even in a world that no longer had sound-bites). No one seemed to know the whereabouts and condition above- or belowground of the Vice President, so the position of head of state devolved to the Speaker of the House. Christiansen had somehow managed to sew up-or lock down-Senator Mader’s allegiance, or at least compliance, and thus declare martial law. But it was hotly disputed, and various National Guard units recognized widely divergent authority-if any at all. Pockets of civil war, civil disobedience and uncivil acts of every stripe were the order of the day.

  The only thing to be thankful for-and it was precious little-was that munitions no longer worked.

  But on the other hand, dragons flew and could shoot fire.

  Shango arrived at Bar Harbor ten days late, to find that a contingent of Christiansen’s men had already tried to kill the boy there, as if he were the lost Dauphin or Anastasia or Bonnie Prince Charlie. The team of Special Forces assassins had overpowered and dispatched Jan McKay’s brother, her nieces and nephew, and all but one of the Secret Service agents.

  Although bleeding her life out from internal injuries, agent Jaime Mintun had gotten the boy as far as Bangor, where a sympathetic older man and his wife had kept the boy hidden in a big sprawling mansion behind a spiderweb iron gate until Shango had arrived and convinced them of his friendly intentions.

  Mama Diamond and Shango came to the decaying railway depot, and she led him into the equally decrepit cafeteria-refurbished for tourists once long ago-where they sat at a dusty table.

  Mama Diamond had cleaned out the kitchen here shortly after the Change, had dumped the rotting perishables into an arroyo well out of town and swabbed the floors and walls with ammonia to kill the stench. With the doors closed against the breeze, it was another pleasant place to spend time. Or at least it had been. The black train, the dragon, had tainted it.

  “Where’s the boy now?” asked Mama Diamond.

  “With my aunts and sisters and cousins outside New Orleans,” Shango replied. “Oh, he’s got a different name now and looks a whole lot different. If any of Christiansen’s men decide to come after him, well, those old swamp-rat relations of mine know how to vanish into the bayou. And I suspect not even black-op hit men-or dragons themselves, come to mention it-would go in there without considerable trepidation.”

  “But that put you back at square one,” Mama Diamond noted.

  Shango nodded. “I could wall myself behind some fortress and spend the rest of my days raising turnips and fighting off monsters. Or I could put myself in the middle of it, like those folks I met, Griffin and the rest. Head for the Source and see if I could undo some of the badness…or at least learn if McKay’s suspicions were right, if it really was the origin of all this misery and upheaval.”

  Shango was looking straight ahead, talking to himself as much as to Mama Diamond. “All I had was that rain-spoiled list of scientists’ names….”

  But it was a start.

  At the Latter Memorial Library on St. Charles in New Orleans, remarkably still intact and in full operation, Shango researched the names. He discovered that a preponderance of them were in allied fields of chemistry, molecular engineering and-most particularly-analysis and application of gemstones for use in laser technology and quantum physics research.

  Specifically, Shango found that a number of the Source scientists were previously engaged in studies utilizing a variety of gemstones to
focus energy and alter its proton and electron signatures, with the aim of splitting and recombining it in fierce new forms. One obscure article even hinted at the theoretical notion of exploiting these properties to harness great amorphous energies from other dimensions in space-time.

  What enormous quantity of gems-and what bottomless purchasing power-might it have taken to accomplish this, Shango wondered, if indeed those at the Source Project were responsible for summoning the raging forces that had punched into this world and overwhelmed the planet?

  McKay, in the brief interview by the fountain that sweltering summer day right after the Change, mentioned that the Source Project had been kept hidden even from him, a black box operation whose existence and funding were squirreled away in any number of secret cubbyholes, spread out between CIA, DoD, NSA….

  Returning to the environs of D.C.-or what was left of it-Shango paid a call on Reynolds Darden, an old friend in accounts receivable at the sprawling National Security Agency complex at Fort George Meade, Maryland. Childhood friends since the frenetic days in the New Orleans projects, Shango had done him a favor once, engaging in a brief conversation with a boyfriend of Darden’s sister, a man with a past full of wreckage and excuses. After that little talk with Shango, Mr. Significant Other booked a flight to Adelaide and didn’t come back.

  “What’re you looking for?” Darden asked, eyes glinting behind owlish bifocals.

  “I’ll know it when I see it,” Shango said. But he knew where to start-with any purchase order that bore the name-or anagram of the name, or false name derived from some biographical detail-of any of the Source Project scientists.

  It had taken weeks of grueling, tedious effort, but at long last Shango found it: a list of purchase orders from a number of gem shops scattered across the middle of the country. No single quantity large enough to raise eyebrows, but in the aggregate one shitload of semiprecious stones…

  The majority of the orders were from Anthony St. Rivers, who naturally proved not to be on any department’s payroll records. But applying certain historical allusions and a little creative translation, Shango found he could resolve the name readily enough into…

  Marcus Sanrio.

  Of course, he knew that didn’t make it so.

  In the old world, the one with the Internet and cordless phones, the next step would have been a snap. But in the new one…

  Shango hit the road again to talk to the rock hounds, find where they had shipped the purchases. When he found the shops still standing, their owners in residence, he perused their files, and learned that most of the purchases were sent to various letter drops, P.O. boxes, elusory safe houses designed to make the path circuitous, impossible to trace.

  And none on any flight path Bilmer had flown.

  But in a scrubby little shop outside Middleburg Heights, Ohio, Shango found one scrap that somehow had missed the cloaking device of smoke and mirrors the Source Project was so adept at erecting.

  It was a note that read in a scraggly hand, “Time is of the essence. Send shipment direct.” A return address was printed at the bottom. And the page was signed, “Marcus Sanrio.”

  There was no objective way Shango could be certain that this was the information he had traveled so long and hard for, that his friend and fellow agent Jeri Bilmer had died trying to convey. But even so, in his heart, he knew.

  He had found the location of the Source Project, the dark core of it.

  He didn’t even wait for sunup. He left immediately.

  “Not an easy trip,” Shango told Mama Diamond. “And fifty-three miles from it…” Here his face clouded, and a violent shiver coursed through him like a current. “I was turned away.”

  What had it taken, Mama Diamond wondered, to frighten a man like this so badly?

  He wouldn’t elaborate.

  “But I still had my notebooks. So I tracked the remaining shops, figuring I just might find a back door in….”

  Which made him, Mama Diamond thought, not just brave but a very stubborn man.

  Shango carried his canvas pack, and he took a bottle of water from it and drank deeply. “There were four addresses left,” he said, “you being the last.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “The first retailer had been stripped clean. I didn’t think too much about that at first. Lots of places were looted early on after the Change, and people would steal the damnedest things.”

  “Money’s not too useful these days.”

  “No, but there was a jewelry store with most of its stock still in place. I can picture somebody wanting a more solid commodity than cash, maybe for trade-but why take garnets and leave diamond rings behind?”

  Mama Diamond shrugged. “Like you said, people steal the damnedest things.”

  “Still, it struck me as odd. The next place-”

  “What place would that be?”

  Shango fished his notebook out of his pack and leafed through it. “Corky’s Stones and Minerals, on the North Platte.”

  “Corky Foxe’s store. He’s a tightfisted SOB I know him a little.”

  “The shop had been burned, but it was obvious it had also been raided. I can’t tell you what happened to Corky. Next, Lightfoot Novelty Imports, Vernal, Utah. Empty. Proprietor MIA.” He glanced again at Mama Diamond.

  “It’s okay, I didn’t know the man.”

  Shango told her that locals, mostly squatters and scavengers, described a group of crouched, darting figures who had arrived aboard a pitch-black train on abandoned rails-figures glimpsed fleetingly in the darkness, moving certainly, emptying the place without benefit of even moonlight-and the lone eminence that towered over them like a dark god.

  “Stern,” said Mama Diamond.

  Shango nodded. But was the dragon working for the Source Project? Was his theft of Mama Diamond’s stones part of the larger picture? And if it was the Source, did that mean that whatever lurked at its heart was still accruing gems, still had the continuing need of them…or perhaps some new need?

  “I don’t know,” Shango said. “All I know is, unless you or your files have something new to tell me, it’s the end of the line.”

  Mama Diamond stepped to the cafeteria door, cracked it open. Outside, the wind was buffeting a tattered old newspaper against the rusted iron track. She took a deep breath of the air that was as familiar to her as her own constant, fluttering heartbeat, the ache of years in her bones. The dry sharp cold dried up the mucous membranes in her nose, and the smell of coming snow was clear as a telegram. Maybe not today, but almost certainly tomorrow.

  And if she let this man, hard as a piece of volcanic rock, face the blizzard, track that hell-black train into the jaws of night…?

  Sometimes you reach the crossroads, Mama Diamond thought, and sometimes it reaches you.

  “There’s something I may have heard in a dream,” she told Shango.

  Mama Diamond was glad she hadn’t hauled just that heavy bitch of a coal stove from Old West Antiques, but also the dusty framed map of the forty-eight states. As she and Shango scrutinized it on the wall of her back room-with Mama surprised that her creaky old bad eye on the left somehow seemed to be seeing just fine now-it hadn’t taken long to find the eight tiny letters right there in Iowa.

  Atherton. Smack dab alongside the black lines that indicated railroad tracks.

  “College town, I’ve heard of it,” Shango told Mama Diamond. “Small, but it has one of the best research institutes in the country, or at least it did.”

  “If that’s what Stern was talking about,” Mama countered. “And not some drinking buddy he likes to hang with after raiding folk’s back stock.”

  Shango shrugged. “I’ll take my chances.” No surprise there, given all he’d said and done.

  Shango went off to gather supplies for the journey, leaving Mama Diamond to the privacy of her thoughts.

  It had been a busy twenty-four hours, that it had, with many a curious visitor. Soon enough, Shango would be gone and the ghost town would settle
back around Mama Diamond like a shroud, with even less in it to remind her she was any different from the parched wood and the dead earth.

  Would she ever know what end of the line Shango reached, what conclusion he arrived at? Probably not.

  People leave you, and possessions, too.

  Mama Diamond walked stiffly to the front of her shop, the lowering sun casting hall-of-mirror reflections off the mostly empty cases. Her fingers trailed the cracked ivory of the mammoth tusk atop the counter.

  She had armored herself against the world in tourmaline and agate, morganite and black opal, just as Shango had once armored himself in a black suit and coiled earpiece. But it was the same difference, really. The world stripped away your armor, that was just how life ran…until it ran out.

  And whether that whisper came here in Burnt Stick or somewhere else along the tracks was not for Mama Diamond to say. It was just for her to say with whom she might be.

  Sometimes you reach the crossroads….

  She mulled over these thoughts until Shango reappeared, lugging cans of vegetables and beans, and more bottled water.

  “You have transportation?” Mama Diamond asked.

  Shango nodded. “Rail bike.”

  “Rail what?”

  “Come on. I’ll show you.”

  Rail bikes, Shango explained, were an obscure form of sporting bicycle, used by hobbyists in Europe and America where abandoned railways lines remained in place. The bike’s modified wheels sat on one rail; an outrigger supported two more passive wheels against the opposite rail. A bicycle modified to fit a railway track, basically. He had not been able to scavenge a true rail bike, but had modified a quality mountain bike in a metalwork shop.

  He had ridden this device up to the depot last night, after Stern had gone and while Mama Diamond was sleeping, and concealed it north of town. The bike was an ugly assemblage of aluminum tubes, ungainly seeming.

  “Going over those hills, you have some pretty steep grades ahead of you,” Mama Diamond said. “Then you’ll hit the Laramie Range.”

  Shango shrugged.

  “And no potable water for a long way. Nor food.”