Ghostlands mt-3

by Marc Scott Zicree

  “We are still within the Source Project’s sphere of influence,” commented Doc.

  “I’d say you’re not gonna lose any bonus points on that one, Viktor,” said Colleen.

  “What the hell is the Source Project doing inside Mount Rushmore?” Howie piped up.

  “Originally Rushmore was conceived as a far grander project,” said Cal. “The Presidents were supposed to be full figures, not just faces, and there was going to be a huge museum and repository carved out of the inside of the mountain.”

  “How in the name of fried green tomatoes do you know all that?” asked Colleen.

  Cal shrugged. “Tina did a social studies paper once. Anyway, supposedly all they ever actually blasted out was the Hall of Records.”

  “That tunnel with the porcelain plaques,” said Doc.

  “Yes,” Cal answered. “But in actuality they must’ve carved out the rest of the mountain secretly…and put in the Source Project.”

  “Let’s hear it for American ingenuity,” said Colleen.

  “How far to the periphery?” Cal asked Shango.

  “I’d reckon fifty miles, as the crow flies.”

  “I hate to break this to you, Larry, but we’re not crows.” Colleen had to shout now over the din of the rocks and glass and metal crashing against the barrier. “More like paper targets, or soon to be chalk outlines.”

  “Really, Colleen,” Doc chided, “I wish you would try to be more positive.” His eyes smiled, and Mama Diamond saw some of the tension ease out of Colleen’s shoulders as she accepted the taunt.

  “Makes no nevermind if we reach the borderland,” Papa Sky added in his smoky cigarette rasp, lifting his lips from the bamboo reed set in the mouthpiece of his gleaming alto sax. “You try to pass through it into the world outside, why, it’ll just burn you clean away.”

  Mama Diamond saw that the boy Inigo was nodding somberly in agreement.

  “And how exactly did you get here?” Cal asked Papa Sky, but Papa only smiled inscrutably and would speak no further regarding his travels here, nor any possible companions, human or otherwise.

  Cal sighed, and let it go. “We can’t stay here, that’s for sure.” He let out a slow, considered breath. “Mary McCrae’s Preserve was in the Olentangy Indian Caverns of Ohio. A sacred site, that helped lend it its power. Now, the Source Project might hold sway here, but it’s smack dab in middle of the Black Hills-”

  Mama Diamond nodded; she knew the lore well. “The granddaddy of all sacred sites.”

  “That’s right,” Cal said. “So odds are it should have a power all its own, too.”

  “In theory,” Doc said. But theory was all they had now.

  They fell silent then, the only sound the fusillade of debris continuing to batter their defenses.

  Finally, Papa Sky spoke, his ancient, musky voice barely audible. “There’s a place I know…. Least, I heard tell of it. Rumor is some folks tried to get there once, long time back, old men, women, children…It’s called the Stronghold.”

  “Tell me it’s fifty feet from here,” Colleen said.

  “More like fifty miles,” he replied. Colleen groaned.

  “Where?” Cal asked Papa Sky.

  “A tableland just past the Black Hills…in the Badlands.”

  “Well?” Cal asked the others.

  Mama Diamond felt she really shouldn’t have a vote. After all, despite the conviction she had felt that the others would need her along, thus far she’d been little more than baggage. She saw the others nodding their assent (reluctantly, of course; it would be fifty miles of long, hard road, a royal sonofabitch, and no two ways about it) and added her own.

  Cal took this in and rose, Mama Diamond and the others following suit. Slowly, fighting the whole wide world every inch of the way, they journeyed past the melted pillars and out through the parking lot, to the twisting roadway leading down to the Badlands.

  Enid Blindman and Papa Sky continued playing all the while. As they made their tortuous way, Mama Diamond touched Papa on the arm. “Those folks who tried to get there, a long time back, what happened to them?”

  Papa Sky stopped playing, and his face was gray under its cherrywood sheen.

  “They were on the run,” he said, looking out at her with troubled, unseeing eyes. “A whole lot of them got rubbed out. At a place called Wounded Knee…”

  Farther down the slope of the mountains, they found the terrain less ravaged than at its apogee, or rather ravaged by the natural sweep of earth and time; the flow and retreat of ocean, the exhalation of molten rock, the layers of stone that had rippled and overturned like blankets on a restless sleeper.

  All under a storm-wracked sky that held little sympathy, and a great deal of threat.

  The ponderosa pines were thicker here, and green-needled once more, the aspens speckled white and brown, not charred as by a dragon’s breath. The air presented a fitful, elusive intensity of humid heat radiating off the mountainside behind them; a whisper of the Source. But for the most part, the wind wore its winter coat, and chilled them despite their heavy clothes. Icy rain pelted at them, alternating with flurries of snow. Their legs felt leaden; Colleen longed for Big-T, her redoubtable steed whom they’d left stabled back in Atherton, and for Cal’s Sooner and Doc’s Koshka. She thought then of Goldie’s horse Jayhawk-whom he had renamed Later, in a predictable fit of Goldie-ness-and it brought her a fresh pang of grief and regret.

  As the afternoon waned, the assaults on them from all directions (rail fences flying at them, barbed wire coiling and springing like pythons) grew less determined and more sporadic, until they ceased altogether. Cal directed Christina to conserve her energies; in answer, her aura withdrew from about them until it encompassed only the pale, hovering girl herself. Papa Sky and Enid continued to play, but more softly, Doc leading the sightless old man with a gentle touch on his arm.

  Walking alongside Cal, Colleen could sense his wariness. The cessation of attacks hadn’t lessened his anxiety; rather, it had served only to increase it. Colleen shared his concern. She had learned on her father’s knee that you pull back your ground forces to make room for the artillery bombardment.

  As their boots crunched on the newly fallen snow, she wondered what new hell they would soon face.

  She didn’t have long to wait for the answer.

  Descending, rounding a bend in the cracked highway amidst towering granite needles that (as Mama Diamond coolly informed them, as if they were nothing more than a nomadic tour group and she their seasoned guide) had been thrust out of the earth two and half billion years ago, they hit a level patch, a shelf on the slanting hillside.

  Cal drew to an abrupt halt, motioning the others to stillness.

  They were not alone.

  Cal drew his sword from its scabbard, and Colleen unslung her crossbow and nocked a bolt into it soundlessly. She saw the others readying themselves, too, although she felt certain they knew as well as she did that they had about as much chance as a canary at a cat convention.

  There were hundreds of them, arrayed along the hillside in the tall grass, amid the thick pines, snorting blasts of steamy breath from big nostrils, the snow like powdered sugar on their massive shoulders and heads. Some still grazed on the wheatgrass and bluestem, tearing up great hunks of sod, with blunt sounds like great machines gouging out the earth.

  Blood dripped from their diminutive mouths, and ran from their fathomless black eyes like crimson tears beneath vast horns like polished granite, black speckled in gray. Great gashes in their hides showed glistening meat with marbled fat and bone beneath; violence had been done to them, wantonly and on a grand scale.

  They were dead, of course, but had been called forth from the womb of the earth to face them now with blank malevolence.

  The buffalo covered the land, and hungered for their blood.

  FORTY-FOUR

  THE RING AND THE SEA

  I’m a science geek, not an English major, Theo Siegel thought as he fled bearing Melis
sa Wade from the shattered ruin of the Nils Bohr Applied Physics Building, on the campus at Atherton. He knew he would never adequately be able to describe the shining, avaricious mass that oozed from the wrecked building and began its inexorable advance on the town. Its aurora glow of purple and blue and green was something like the night-washed waves pounding the shore along the Sea of Cortez, where his late father (a geek, too, from a long line of geeks) had taken him and his girl cousins back when he was a kid. But it was also like some sickly mold on a basement-damp orange, like something repulsive coming off a gone-to-liquid corpse.

  However you described it, though, you sure as hell wouldn’t want to touch it, or have it touch you.

  As he staggered away, trying to put as much distance as possible between them and that freakin’ portal (which he knew as surely as the waist size on his jockey shorts was continuing to pour fiendish energy like water from a gut-burst dam), he saw townies and college gits alike disgorge from buildings on all sides, gape at the shining crud coming off the physics quad, then take to their heels getting the hell away; clear out of town, if they knew what was good for them. Word was spreading, and fast, which was a damn good thing. ’Cause what didn’t get out got ate. Theo felt that one right on down to his Converse All-Stars.

  The sky above him was dark, apart from fitful light reflected from a passing cloud; the moon was down. But the weird, expanding glow illuminated the streets and buildings, too. They didn’t need Jeff’s streetlights-dead as Mussolini now-to see which way the wind blew.

  Melissa seemed to gain substance as he carried her farther from the portal and perhaps, therefore, from the Source. But substance wasn’t health. Although she felt heavier, less ethereal, she was clearly sick. He could see a pallid sheen like fevered moonlight on her face, her eyes swept closed. Unconscious, she spasmed in her sleep, and one particularly violent convulsion threatened to shake her out of his arms altogether.

  Even in the pulsing, cold dimness he could observe that her hair was starting to blanch, her face grow thin, the cheeks more pronounced.

  He knew what was happening to her; it didn’t take a rocket scientist (or even a physics grad) to figure that out.

  Somehow, that eruption of bad news, of pure evil crud vomiting out from the Source, had rendered the stone in Melissa’s neck null and void; it was no longer stopping her transformation.

  She was changing, transmuting into what Jeff Arcott had been able to defer only for a time, the gates of the portal swinging wide now serving to unleash it.

  Melissa burned hot in his grasp. His arms were heavy with fatigue, they ached dreadfully. But then, so did his legs and neck and back; his entire musculature, in fact, and skeleton, too. It felt to him paradoxically as if he were both lengthening and compressing, and the dread that filled him made him want to tear open his chest with bloody fingers and let loose a scream beyond anything his voice could proclaim.

  I’m changing, too.

  He knew it for a certainty, in the shivers that cascaded along his flesh, the agony that drove like a railway spike through his skull.

  But this time, there would be no reprieve. Because there in the physics lab, Theo had seen Jeff Arcott consumed by the result of what he himself had built.

  Jeff, who had not previously transformed into anything, who had stayed completely human…

  Jeff had fixed them once upon a time, he and Melissa, had cured them. That had been shortly after the Change, when Atherton was still dark and increasingly empty as the population drifted away in search of some better place or succumbed to personal transformation, became drifters and refugees, and grunters and flares and the occasional hulking dragon, and other nameless things.

  It had been a breathless, perfect evening in late summer, Theo recalled. Jeff had just gotten his first great brainstorm, had begun feverishly working on the set of wonders that would restore the town. They had been picnicking, the three of them, when Melissa took a chill and grew wan. Theo recognized the signs; he had seen it happen to others.

  She was turning into a flare.

  It was he who had thrown a blanket over her, hustled her with Jeff to Medical Sciences and put her on a gurney. They’d wheeled her to a room where, by candlelight and without benefit of anesthetic, Jeff had opened a flap of skin at the back of her neck above her spine and inserted a ring of sterilized garnets and amethysts, then sewn the skin together again with a surgical needle and lengths of coarse black suture.

  For Melissa, all this had passed as in a fever dream. But when she woke, the fever had broken, the pain was gone, and the curious lightness she felt had yielded to the familiar sumptuous draw of gravity.

  Jeff would never explain how he had known what to do, how the gems had conserved her humanity (or Theo’s, when soon after it had seemed inevitable that he would become one more grunter).

  It was only much later that Theo tracked Jeff along the shadows to the railroad siding outside of town, discovered the black train and its towering master, its crew of deformed curs who were what he himself would have become…and learned from just where Jeff got his inspiration.

  At the time, however, Jeff had claimed he’d simply known. Just as he had known how to revive Atherton from its extinction, give it back some semblance of normalcy.

  The normalcy that had been mockery, mere illusion, now shredded and cast away.

  Theo found his breaths were coming in short gasps; he couldn’t get enough air into his lungs. He reached the periphery of the Sculpture Garden, stumbled onto its grassy rise and set Melissa on an iron bench.

  Only for a minute, he told himself, to regroup, get a second wind. We can’t let that shit catch up to us.

  He ran a hand over what had been his injured leg, felt wonderingly that it was completely healed. True, it might ache like a Tin Woodman left to rust a million years, but say what you like, this metamorphosis crap sure beat major medical.

  Curled in on herself there on the bench, Melissa looked like a child in an iron casket. Theo shuddered, and chased the thought from his mind.

  He gazed back toward the physics building. The radiance was brighter now, surging in all directions, picking up speed as it gained assurance. Time for us to be making tracks, Theo realized, no matter how crappy he felt.

  But when he turned back, Melissa was gone.

  FORTY-FIVE

  VOMIT, THEN MOP

  Well now, that’s a relief, Mama Diamond thought, even as she felt a chill run straight from the crown of her head to her little toe. She knew, too, that no one else in her party was thinking anything even remotely like it.

  But then, the rest of them hadn’t been feeling particularly like a fifth (or in this case, tenth) wheel, and wondering if their insistence on accompanying this little expeditionary force into the mouth of hell hadn’t been merely the first cranky expression of a nascent second childhood raising its senile voice.

  Which was merely a roundabout way of saying that Mama Diamond had been doubting her finely honed instincts right along about now.

  But hotfooting it in the snowfall paralleling Highway 40 out of Rushmore, skirting the deserted, fallen structures of Keystone and its blasted, twisted billboards touting the Flying T Chuckwagon Supper and Show, Old MacDonald’s Petting Farm, the Reptile Gardens and the National Presidential Wax Museum (not to mention the Holy Terror Mine-and if that description didn’t fit the whole damn area nowadays, Mama Diamond didn’t know what did), Mr. Cal Griffin and his stalwart band of adventurers had come upon a whole herd of rusticating herbivores that might have been candidates for a petting zoo themselves if not for a little thing or two.

  Namely, that they were dead, skinned and in a real bad mood…

  The bitter cold wind was lifting low off the ground now, and it carried to Mama Diamond the sticky iron blood smell of the beasts, a stink that seemed to weight the air, make it hard to breathe in. There was another smell, too, the musty odor of their thick winter coats; the parts of their carcasses that still had coats on them, that was, tha
t hadn’t been cut away by the long-departed buffalo men who were bones and dust as ancient as these animals themselves.

  As if they all abruptly heard some call on the air beyond the range of human hearing (and who was to say they didn’t), the brutes raised their heads as one and appraised the interlopers with clear challenge, and imminent threat. The lead bull was grunting his displeasure with throaty deep exclamations, blowing puffs of pungent air from his nostrils. He tensed his huge shoulders and raised his tuft of tail, readying to charge.

  Out of the corner of her eye-never taking her gaze off the lead buffalo-Mama Diamond could see Griffin gesturing the rest of his band closer together, keeping himself at the forefront, all of them hefting their varied assortment of absurd weaponry.

  Weaponry that would no more dispatch this enormous collection of tainted meat on the hoof than a rolled newspaper. Which was, Mama Diamond felt, just what Dr. Marcus Sanrio and his ghastly inhuman buddies back in their mountain fastness had counted on.

  But these hideous rejects from a meat market studding the landscape ahead as far as the eye could see weren’t the only things that had been called here-Mama Diamond herself had, too, though by a different, unknown agency and for a far different purpose. She had been touched by a dragon, and it had left its mark, awakened the dragon part within her. She understood now that her journey from Burnt Stick to Atherton to this lonely, cold highway outside Keystone, South Dakota-and for that matter, the entirety of her roving, long life, from San Bernardino to Manzanar and the fossil beds beyond-had been aimed to arrive her at this precise moment; the trajectory of her life like a toy arrow fired at a guard shack.

  She realized, too, that her parlays with the horses and wolves and panther had been no more, really, than practice sessions.