Ghostlands mt-3

by Marc Scott Zicree

  He was a stubborn man. Well, Mama Diamond thought, that figured. Shango was a man on a quest, stubborn almost by definition.

  Her fourth day out, Mama Diamond spent too much time stalking an elusive antelope. In the end the animal outmaneuvered her and she wasted an arrow on the prairie grass. By the time she had ranged back to the railway tracks, night had fallen. A fingernail moon shimmered through faint, high clouds. The old moon in the arms of the new, she had heard it called.

  Missed dinner, she thought, riding alongside the moon-silvered rails, and the night was darker than she would have preferred for this kind of traveling. She didn’t want Marsh or Cope to step in a gopher hole and break a leg. She would have preferred to have them watered and resting by now. Stupid old woman, she had miscalculated the time….

  But at the next turn of the breeze, she smelled dinner ahead. Pork and beans, wafted on a southerly wind. She was surprisingly hungry. She had not had an appetite so voracious since she was a much younger woman-Mama Diamond had been a picky eater for at least a decade. Her appetite had come back to her on this trip like a welcome if demanding guest.

  Then she saw Shango’s campfire flickering ahead of her, and she smelled something new, something she didn’t like, something akin to the reek of burning hair.

  Distantly, she heard Larry Shango shouting. Mama Diamond urged Marsh to a trot, pulled her bow from her shoulder and nocked an arrow. A gust of howling and barking came to her on the wind.

  The wolf, Mama Diamond thought. That damned Old Dog!

  The rank smell was the stink of singed fur.

  Closer now, she saw that Shango, under siege, had thrown one animal into the fire. The government man circled the campfire warily, as if waiting for the next attack. He carried a weapon: a huge hammer, presumably liberated from his travel gear.

  The burned wolf had escaped the flames and rolled in a patch of dust outside the circle of firelight. It howled its pain. The boss wolf-and it was indeed the Old Dog she had met in the train tunnel-stood bristling but silent at the front of a pack of some ten or fifteen other animals.

  That wasn’t the whole story, however. The Old Dog wasn’t in charge tonight. Something else prowled the shadows, half seen, silkily invisible except for its motion. Something large, sleek and self-confident. Something that made the horses tremble and dance. Mama Diamond climbed down from the saddle feeling frightened but oddly elated, energy coursing through her from her fingertips to the sockets of her eyes. She planted her feet firmly and said, “Stand back, you Beast!”

  Her voiced boomed out of her, so loud and so resonant that it sounded alien even to her own ears. All that air, she thought; how had she drawn all that air into the leathery old marble-sacks that passed for her lungs?

  The pack turned toward her, dozens of glowing yellow eyes. Shango, gap-jawed, also stared.

  But in the shadows the Boss Beast prowled on, unimpressed.

  Mama Diamond strode forward, fearless and ecstatic. Wolves fell back from her heels. She said:

  “Carrion eaters, you! Kitten stealers! Leave this man alone! He’s a good man! Back away, mouse biters! Stand down, you louse-furred scavengers!”

  The wolves whimpered and backed away.

  “Good God,” Shango whispered, “is that you?”

  His speech was nearly unintelligible to Mama Diamond’s ears.

  Even the alpha wolf, Old Dog, ducked and drooled and moved muttering from her path. That prowling, pacing shadow, however-

  “Behind you,” Shango said.

  Mama Diamond turned.

  This was no wolf.

  This one was-a cat. A big one.

  A black one.

  “You’re not native to these parts,” Mama Diamond said, her confidence flagging at the sight of bared, bright teeth. The big cat stepped into the firelight, its eyes giving back the fire, its coat as black as a starless night.

  A panther.

  Escaped from some zoo? Liberated by the Change? Liberated and, worse, somehow altered? Those eyes were not merely bright. They were intelligent, uncanny.

  “So you’re the one behind this,” Mama Diamond said.

  Give us your friend, the panther said. Give us your friend, or be our dinner with him.

  “I’m no dinner for the likes of you, Shiny Flanks. Nor is my friend.”

  We don’t care. He was given to us.

  “Given? By whom?” The panther blinked but did not answer. Its muscles, Mama Diamond saw, were tight as steel springs. “What makes a big cat like you travel with a pack of stinking dogs? Who is it that gives you men to eat? It wouldn’t be some dragon, would it? Some big smelly red-eyed batwing dragon?”

  Stern, she thought. But she detected something fleeting in the big cat’s eye-lack of recognition? — then it was gone, replaced by naked, brute ferocity.

  Stand out of our way.

  “I will not! You heed me, you Barnum and Bailey castoff!”

  The panther pounced.

  Mama Diamond ducked aside, faster than she had imagined possible. Nonetheless she felt hot air as the cat flashed past her face, smelled the burnt-wood smell of its fur a fraction of a second before it landed foursquare, beyond the campfire, and swiveled to face her once more, eyes glittering like furious opals.

  Reflexively, Mama Diamond snatched up a cottonwood branch from the perimeter of Shango’s crude fire. The stick was not alight, merely smoldering at the far end. She brandished it at the monstrous cat, feeling the ludicrous inadequacy of it.

  But then a word formed on her lips, and Mama Diamond couldn’t say that she intended it before it was said.

  “Fire.”

  Nothing changed, really, not that she or Shango could observe. Looking down at her arm, she saw that the blackened branch remained the same.

  But in the huge eyes of the cat, her reflection told a different story. There, the branch burst instantly alight. Blue flame, like the subtle fire of an alcohol lamp, scuttled up the branch to the mirrored image of Mama Diamond’s hand, then her arm, then all of her.

  It occurred to Mama Diamond that this must be something akin to the trick Stern had first played on her when he had emerged from the death-black train, when he had appeared human for a moment.

  I couldn’t decide what to wear…so I thought I’d give you a choice.

  A trick of the eye. Or, more appropriately in this case, the voice.

  Mama Diamond suddenly remembered that moment in her shop, when Stern reached out to her and that spark of blue devil flame leapt from his hand to her shoulder and filled her with renegade lightning. Just what in the name of creation had happened there?

  Creation, indeed. It seemed to shock them both, most particularly because it suggested a kinship, an intimacy that neither courted. Could it be, Mama wondered, that the calling she had recognized long ago within her, the humming resonance in her core that had drawn her across the world in search of those ancient, thundering bones…

  Was her dragon soul.

  It was as if Mama Diamond had opened a door in a familiar house only to discover a whole new room beyond it. Known, yet not known.

  The cat’s eyes narrowed against the incandescent holy glare of her. It backed up a pace, and then another.

  Mama Diamond began to feel her powers draining from the exertion, the way the last water drains from an emptying cup, exhaustion rising from the marrow of her bones.

  Just a bit longer, Mama Diamond willed.

  The wolves turned tail and scattered. They must see the same heat mirage, Mama Diamond thought, these dark hunters, these predators.

  “That’s right,” she said, “back off, Black Cat. You’re in over your head, you Night Animal. Look at me and go blind.”

  The panther stood a moment-displaying a courage Mama Diamond was forced to admire-then howled and bounded into the darkness.

  The wolves took their cue and ran like the dogs they were, tails tucked behind them.

  Mama Diamond exhaled (had she been holding her breath?) and felt th
e power of illusion fade from her. The sensation was like stepping out of a warm shower into a chilly bathroom. She was suddenly cold and vulnerable. She shivered.

  She looked down at her body with sudden fear, abruptly unsure that what she had seen in the cat’s looking-glass eyes was only an illusion and not the reality. But she wasn’t burned. She wasn’t hurt. She was only, suddenly, quite tired.

  “I think I have to sit down,” she told Shango.

  Shango struggled with words but finally managed, “Be my guest.”

  “I’m sorry to disturb your meal,” Mama Diamond said, knowing even as she said it the absurdity of it, knowing it showed how rattled she was.

  “Think, uh, nothing of it.” Still staring, the federal agent added, “You want something to eat? I kind of lost my appetite, myself.”

  “Thank you, but I think what I really need is to sleep. Will you still be here in the morning?”

  “Yes-I believe I will.”

  “You’re willing to let me travel with you?”

  “I have a feeling I’d be stupid to say no.”

  “You were stupid the first time you said no. Will you fetch me my sleeping bag, Mr. Shango? My legs don’t want to carry me right now.”

  TWELVE

  PLAGUE TOWN

  “This can’t be right,” Cal Griffin said. The stench wafting off the valley was the worst he’d ever smelled. And that was saying a lot, considering all the dark places he’d been. The snow on the ground wasn’t yet thick enough to hide the evidence of what must have happened here. But clearly, the cold weather had preserved it a lot longer than if it were the summer months.

  Cal was glad he had instructed Flo Speakman and the rest of her group to stay sheltered in the abandoned grain silo they had encountered three miles back, just off the 113 toward Des Moines. After all they’d been through, they didn’t need more nightmares.

  Not that he particularly did, either. But a leader leads…and a lawyer searches for expedience and loopholes. He had been the latter in his old life, a reluctant if effective one, serving Ely Stern’s cold-eyed “pragmatism”-nothing more than an excuse for heartlessness and moral absenteeism, really. Now he was trying to be the former, to rise to the challenges so evident before him, to get good enough at it to be of some earthly use in the time they had left….

  And also just maybe to utilize some of what he’d learned under Stern, to turn it at last to good use.

  He’d made the choice to trust this grunter boy-so unlike the others of his kind Cal had met, so keen and articulate, if evasive-and had led those who followed him to this detour, this frigid place that might avail them of information or resources or…something.

  Still, what benefit could they possibly glean from this scene of horror?

  “It’s not what you think,” the grunter boy Inigo said, trying to sound confident but uneasiness leeching it away. It was the first time he’d seen it, too, at least in the day. And it was truly awful…which of course was the whole point.

  “Yeah?” Colleen shot back. “So what would you call it? Hitler’s birthday party?”

  From where the five of them stood on the lip of the valley, they could see the town hadn’t been particularly large, but it had held thousands, before it had been broken and burned and razed, not one of its modest buildings left standing.

  It looked like most of the residents were still there, however, right out in the open, strewn about like so many dead Dorothy Gales deposited by a cyclone, or piled high in massive heaps of rotted flesh and sad, ragged clothing.

  Something had been at them afterward, too-a lot of somethings, if the scraped bones and torn meat of the bodies were any indication.

  Cal turned his face away from the wind that blew up from the valley floor. The stink was the pungence of death he had come to know in those black, appalling days after the Change in New York and the journey down the eastern arm of the country to Boone’s Gap. And, most particularly, in the fetid breath of the grunters who had cashed out their lives flinging themselves futilely at the Wishart house, then-still driven by the merciless will of the Source Consciousness-had risen dead to attack Cal and his friends.

  The smell of blood and fat and excrement, a smell that you couldn’t get out of your nostrils, that settled into your skin and hair, that you couldn’t wash away.

  That was the stench coming off this dreadful valley now, that and the gritty smell of burnt wood and meat and plastic….

  And something else, an even more frightful reek that drove sharp claws into Cal’s gut, that wanted to make him run screaming back the way they’d come and never venture here again.

  The horses caught it, too, whinnied nervously, tried to shy away. Cal held Sooner’s reins tightly, and he could hear Colleen whispering reassurance to Big-T.

  Decay, and sickness…

  Doc was squinting down at the valley through the field glasses he’d taken from his pack. He handed them off to Cal.

  “Observe on some of them, Calvin, the growths under the arms and at the neck and groin, the black and purple eruptions….”

  Doc was silent for a time, considering, then shook his head grimly. “I would need closer inspection to absolutely verify it, but I don’t think there can really be doubt. It’s bubonic plague.”

  Colleen sighed. “You know, what with all we’ve been through, our stress level was getting kind of high, I was thinking maybe a cruise. But this is so much better.”

  “You just gotta go down there,” Inigo said. “Believe me, you won’t regret it.”

  “I regret it already,” Colleen replied.

  Cal turned to the grunter. “I don’t think you’d have gone to the trouble to lead us all the way here just to give us the plague. So what’s waiting down there for us?”

  Inigo hesitated a long moment, hunched his shoulders, his eyes darting furtively to the west. He had been warned before his long journey not to talk too specifically, too overtly. The Big Bad Thing had long ears and long eyes-and a long reach, too, for that matter, how well he knew that. But even if he were free to tell every single damn part of it, what would make them believe him?

  At last, he said, “I…can’t say.”

  “You don’t know, or you can’t tell?” Cal asked, and Inigo was surprised at how kindly his tone was, how patient and sympathetic. He saw Christina’s intelligence and endurance in this young man, but seasoned and even stronger, and he liked him for it.

  Still, he said nothing.

  “Okay, blue boy,” Colleen was grabbing him by the front of his baggy jacket, yanking him off his feet. “Enough fun and games-”

  Cal stepped between them and extricated Inigo. From past run-ins with the wiry but massively strong creatures, Cal knew the boy could’ve lifted Colleen and flipped her careening into the valley without breaking a sweat-and he’d spied the quick flash of rage in the boy’s eyes.

  Fear or restraint held him, and Cal wasn’t inclined to discover which.

  “Brute force won’t solve anything,” Cal said evenly, aiming it at both of them.

  “Yeah,” Colleen responded, “but it gives you such a warm, fuzzy feeling.”

  Cal didn’t rise to it. “Let’s look at our options-”

  “Okay, sure,” Colleen cut in. “Way I see it, we backtrack and try to make up for lost time, heading wherever the hell it is we’re heading. Or we mosey on down into Hidden Plague Valley-which somehow I don’t think is going to make it as the name of a salad dressing.”

  “Colleen,” Doc tried to mollify. “There’s a Russian saying-”

  “There’s always a Russian saying, Viktor. Geez, didn’t you guys do anything but sit around making up sayings?” She pointed an accusing finger at Inigo. “I don’t think we should have trusted this little rat bastard in the first place.”

  “We’ve all had experiences with grunters, good and bad,” Cal said (not adding that it had been mostly bad).

  “Yeah, but I’m the only one who’s slept with one.” She meant Rory, naturally, her
old boyfriend. He hadn’t been a grunter at the time, but why split hairs?

  “One of you has something…” Inigo began softly.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Colleen snapped. “Why don’t you quit with the elliptical bullshit, okay?” She wheeled on the others. “And yes, I know you’re astonished I said ‘elliptical,’ but hey, I read a book once.”

  “Let him speak, Colleen,” Cal said, and the look he gave her and the firmness under his words finally quieted her.

  “Go on,” he told Inigo.

  “There’s something someone gave you, in Chicago….”

  “What do you know of Chicago?” said Doc, but Cal silenced him with a gesture.

  “You weren’t expecting it,” Inigo said with deliberation, as if coached to speak these words precisely. “But it saved you.”

  Colleen’s face betrayed surprise. Then she pulled the chain from around her neck, revealing again the dog tags from her dead father, the Russian Orthodox cross from Doc…and the iridescent black scale, the charm that had saved her, had saved them all, from Primal.

  She held the piece between thumb and forefinger, waved it in Inigo’s face. “You mean this, kid?” Then she glanced out at the valley, and her jaw dropped.

  “Oh. My. God.”

  “What? What is it?” Cal asked.

  “They’re gone, they’re all gone. The bodies. And-and-” Words failed her.

  It was fucking impossible.

  (Watching this, Inigo nodded to himself. Papa Sky had known what he was talking about telling him to mention that charm, that blade of leather. But then, he always did.)

  “I–I see the town completely undamaged,” said Colleen.

  “Curioser and curioser,” muttered Doc.