Ghostlands mt-3

by Marc Scott Zicree

  But then Mama Diamond explained that was due to the boxwork, the odd crystal formations in the ceiling, so-called because they looked like square post office boxes all in rows.

  They didn’t look like that to Inigo, though; they seemed like thousands of bats, just waiting to wake up and swarm down at them. He shuddered and fought to banish the thought.

  “And see that there?” Mama Diamond shouted to him as they thundered on. “That white bumpy stuff’s called cave popcorn, calcium carbonate deposited through limestone pores. And that curtainy stuff hanging down off those high ledges is called drapery, though it always reminded me of Wells’s Martians, fat jellyfish with all those tentacles. Nail-head spar, and dogtooth…It’s just crystal, though, laced with different minerals like iron and manganese.”

  Inigo suspected she was telling him all this because she sensed his apprehension, saw him as just a kid, and was trying to distract him from what lay ahead. It was quaint, courtly even, and it touched him-rather than pissing him off with its condescension, which it normally might have done.

  Hell, they all had to look out for each other any way they could, even with the small stuff.

  “I reckon we must be five hundred feet down, if we’re an inch,” Mama Diamond continued. “And will you look at what’s up ahead….”

  Inigo cast his gaze forward, feeling a hint of trepidation for an instant. But then he saw it, stretching out wide before them….

  A lake, huge and black and serene, showing not even a ripple, save where an occasional droplet of water fell from the vault above. Stern winged above it into the darkness beyond, a perfect dragon reflection skimming below him in the water’s mirror sheen. The wraith horses sped after, their hooves barely kissing the surface, throwing up light, bracing sprays.

  Then they were past it. Inigo looked about him at the walls and ceiling, seeing deep into them with his night-blessed eyes, really studying them for the first time as they flashed by. They were incredibly beautiful, rose and blue and gold sparkling in the quartz, an astonishing array of shapes, spires and projections all honeycombed, with rivulets of water dripping down from fissures in the rock.

  And because he was looking right there, and had the vision to discern it, he saw them first.

  Oozing out of the boxwork, squeezing through, clambering down on the craggy rock face, flowing slick as oil.

  Grunters, baring their snaggly, fanged teeth, glaring down with hungry, crazed faces, coming on fast. The massed, thick smell of them hit him like a blow, that stink of rotted meat and other unclean things; he wondered if it came from what they ate or just from them.

  Inigo let out a shout, waving wildly upward. The others saw now, too, and unsheathed their blades, nocked arrows into bows. Stern swung about in a great arc, beating his black wings and climbing, inhaling deep to unleash the inferno.

  The grunters let out wild, triumphant shrieks and released their holds, dropping down to land among them. Seeing this, Stern clipped off his exhalation; he couldn’t let loose the torrent without claiming them all.

  Cal was shouting orders, and Inigo heard the cries of Shango and Colleen Brooks, too. And something else, weird and creepy, that raised the hackles on his neck, a piercing ululation like nothing a human throat could make. There were words in it, but not English, and Inigo couldn’t make them out.

  Then he saw and understood-it was Crazy Horse, and the other warriors, taking up their war chant, plunging into the mass of writhing, attacking fiends, driving them back with rearing hooves and arrows and spear.

  Abruptly, a body struck Inigo from above, one his own size, wild and hard, hurling him off his horse. He hit the stone floor, the breath knocked out of him, the screaming mad thing atop him ripping and biting. Inigo punched at it, kicked hard, bit into its neck. But more of them leapt on him, holding him down, tearing out flesh and meat.

  Then Cal Griffin was there, driving two away with thrusts of his sword. The third turned on him, knocking the sword aside with a wild blow.

  Cal didn’t dive for the sword, didn’t hesitate. Instead, he bulled into the beast, driving it back, lifting it clear off its feet-and plunging it down onto a crystal stalagmite, impaling it in a fury of cracked bones and screams and gushing hot blood.

  The killing began.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  ANSWERED PRAYERS

  Jeff Arcott felt limitless power surging within him, and it was unspeakable.

  His eyelashes and his cracked, dry lips flashed and snapped with blue-green fire. His hair writhed like severed high-tension lines, and his eyes were glorious suns held nailed within burning sockets. His flesh pulsed with midnight blue and lavender and Sucrets-green pure neon flame. He was hideously, vibrantly alive, abrim, overfull with momentous energy as he reeled across the common in the hell-light that coated everything like a sick sheen of radioactive vomit.

  Like a moth held prisoner in a killing jar, Arcott felt his consciousness immobilized within his body, unable to command the slightest movement.

  Sanrio was moving him, he knew. Sanrio had done all of this; it was what he had planned all along. Arcott had been no equal partner, merely a flunky, a dupe, in service to a distant, uncaring god.

  He prayed only to die.

  But his god was not one given to answering prayers.

  Through blast-furnace eyes, Arcott made out, silhouetted against the glowing, infected surfaces of pavement and adjoining structures, a tenuous figure rushing toward him from off in the distance, floating rather than running, her unshod feet barely grazing the pathway.

  Melissa…

  Plunging headlong toward him, driven by need and love, the twin currencies that motivated her still, despite the inevitable change Arcott could see had finally overtaken her.

  She would reach him in a moment, would embrace him and, he knew, be consumed like an autumn leaf in a bonfire.

  Melissa, no… He tried to shriek, but could utter no sound.

  He was Sanrio’s bitch now. But he’d always been, hadn’t he?

  In the asylum of his mind, Jeff Arcott began to laugh hysterically.

  He saw Melissa slow before she reached him, saw her get a good look at him at last and begin to scream.

  What must he look like?

  Run, Melissa.

  But Sanrio was making him stagger toward her, arms outstretched like some fucking Frankenstein’s monster. He felt Sanrio’s hunger to absorb her power, her light, just as he was eating up everything else in sight, absorbing it and growing strong.

  Melissa was down on her knees, shrieking, shaking her head as he drew near. Funny, he thought, she should be able to fly….

  Maybe she didn’t know that yet. She wouldn’t ever now.

  He reached out to her….

  Suddenly, something hard struck him in the midsection, drove him hurling back.

  There was another agonizing blow to his ribs that threw blazing sparks off his radiant self. He lost his balance and fell.

  Looking up, he saw a hunched form standing over him, wielding a length of metal pipe like a baseball bat. Even though the other was mightily changed, Arcott recognized Theo Siegel.

  Theo’s mouth opened to bare impossibly sharp teeth, and he cried in a voice that was equal parts sob and roar, “Forgive me!”

  As he swung the pipe toward Jeff’s head, Arcott thought, Good for you, Theo.

  OPEN YOUR MOUTH AND SCREAM, the Sanrio-mind commanded him, BURN THE LITTLE WRETCH AWAY.

  No, Arcott protested silently, and fought against the command with every scrap of will he could muster; not enough, he knew, to hold long, only for a moment….

  A latticework of all-consuming nonfire shot out of Arcott’s frame despite his efforts to oppose it, and the disintegrating flood would assuredly have swept Theo into the ranks of the post-living had he not been suddenly yanked sideways by-

  Melissa. Saving him, at the last moment.

  A marionette, damned, Jeff Arcott wheeled to face Theo again, to devastate him.

  B
ut impossibly quickly, Theo regained his balance and sprang full at Jeff, bringing the pipe down on Arcott’s skull. There was a hideous wet crack. Theo shouted with the impact, an anguished cry.

  Arcott staggered back, knowing that the demon energy overflowing him would repair the damage, would not allow him surcease.

  But then another thought intruded from the Sanrio-mind, a desperate, frightened thought not directed at him.

  I/WE ARE ATTACKED, INVADED….

  NEED POWER.

  And all of the dread energy, all the hellacious, diseased light flowed out of Arcott and the streets and the buildings, out of the trees and the grasses, back through the Spirit Portal to South Dakota to fortress the Big Bad Thing, to defend the Sanrio-mind.

  All of this happened in the briefest instant, too swift to register.

  Arcott sank back, his body crackling and crisped as a blackened leaf, relieved, knowing he would have died anyway, but this hastened it.

  He could move his body again, a little, and tried to speak. He motioned Theo closer.

  But if Theo Siegel heard him, Jeff Arcott never knew.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  THE IRON ROAD

  I’ve fought them dead before, Cal Griffin thought, cursing.

  But at least last time, they stayed dead awhile.

  He was swinging his blade wide, sweat coursing down him despite the chill of the cave.

  In Boone’s Gap, outside the barricaded Wishart home, the gluey, fragmented corpses of the decomposing grunters had risen to battle them, only staying down when their feet and hands were severed clean through.

  Not so now. Cal could see in stolen, quick glances, where Shango was flailing his hammer, Colleen wielding her crossbow and Doc his machete, that the moment the loathsome curs were run through or bludgeoned, or otherwise had their clocks thoroughly cleaned, the light would go out in their eyes but this would stop them only momentarily.

  Then, as if an unseen puppet master had taken over (which, Cal recognized, was exactly what was occurring), each grunter would shudder like a dog waking from a bad dream and resume the attack with even greater frenzy.

  Fleetingly, he caught sight of May Catches the Enemy amid a group of the fiends. She was a wonder of motion, seemingly effortless, throwing, spinning, leaping, stabbing. Drawing knives from a multiplicity of sheathes and hiding places in the folds of her clothing, she slowed her attackers, pushing them back, living, dead and dying alike. Cal saw that Inigo kept close to her now, that she was shielding him even as he attempted to tear at the monsters himself.

  At the same time, Enid and Howard Russo were flanking Papa Sky, keeping the attackers at bay as best they could. Christina, too, was driving a group of them back with the force of her light, and Stern was smashing, crushing and squashing as many as he could reach as he stalked forward.

  Crazy Horse and his phantom warriors, still mounted on their war ponies, were faring even better, the power of their spectral weapons causing the dead things to stiffen as if electrified and then dust away to nothing.

  “Aw shit, Rory…”

  Cal looked over to see that Colleen was gaping at a little gray brute she’d just shot with a crossbow bolt to the head. He stood staring blank dead eyes at her, the shaft protruding from a point just above his eyes, black blood leaking down. He was in tatters, mere remnants of clothes, but even in the weak light Cal could make out the brown bomber jacket, filthy, faded jeans and “I ¦ NY” T-shirt that hung on his shrunken frame.

  It was Colleen’s old boyfriend, who had lurked in the dark confines of the Manhattan apartment he and Colleen had shared, then disappeared down a manhole into the sewers below…only to emerge here.

  Rory gave a liquid gurgle and lurched toward her, arms splayed, mouth in a hideous, vacant grin, spittle and blood and bile bubbling out.

  Without thinking, Cal leapt for him, tackled him, took him down to the unyielding stone floor. The dead grunter let out a deafening high screech of pure agony, flared like a moth immolating itself on a hot bulb, and vanished.

  Cal stood shakily, he and Colleen staring at each other in puzzlement. Then Cal understood-

  “The shirts! The Ghost Shirts!” he shouted to Doc and Colleen, Mama Diamond and Shango and the others, grabbing up another dead, flailing grunter and hugging it close to his chest. Like Rory, it screamed and evaporated.

  The others got the hint, wading through the howling, writhing mass, grabbing them, drawing them close. One by one, the creatures sparked like strings of firecrackers, wailing, and were gone.

  But there were still a hell of a lot of them….

  Just then, Cal spied a shadowy figure on the periphery, emerging out of the depths of a branching passageway coming off the main, stepping toward them. The sea of grunters parted to let him pass.

  “Stop your fighting, friends,” the figure called out to Cal and the rest, and even though there was something under the words, an indefinable quality that was not quite, well, human, Cal recognized the voice even before Christina’s glow revealed his face.

  It was Goldie.

  Cal shot a questioning look Christina’s way. Slowly, she shook her head. Cal looked to Stern, who caught his meaning.

  The figure was ambling toward them with a crooked half smile on his lips, a twinkle in his eye. Stern drew a deep breath, like a huge bellows being extended fully open, then spit out a projectile maelstrom of flame. It caught the figure dead on, knocked him back and transformed him to a pillar of incandescence. Pure nova, he flared up in Catherine wheels of blue-white energy, spiraling out and extinguishing, leaving no evidence he had been there at all.

  “You sonofabitch!” Colleen cried and dove for Stern. But Cal stepped between them, facing her.

  “It wasn’t him,” he said levelly. “Just a projection, an illusion, like the rest.” Colleen quieted, nodding. Cal turned again to face the grunters.

  But by now, those that were still living had taken to their heels, scrambled up the slippery rock walls, and disappeared back into their hidey-holes and the other dark places that succored them.

  The rest, the cadavers, the undying dead, dropped as if their batteries had been pulled, lay still and wet and broken on the cold hard ground.

  It’s not done with us, Cal realized, this Thing that was Sanrio and the others, this Thing that took Goldie. But then, they had barely started what they were going to do to It.

  “Take me to where you saw It in the flesh,” Cal said to Stern. “Take me to where we can hurt It.”

  “That way,” Stern said, pointing a bloody, taloned hand toward the passageway from which the facsimile of Goldie had appeared.

  The phantom warriors had ridden up alongside them now. Cal saw Colleen and Doc and the others who’d dismounted for the close fighting remount their steeds. He was gratified that all of them were still there; although bruised and bloodstained, none had fallen in battle.

  He moved toward the ethereal pony that had borne him here.

  But before he could reach it, a tremor shuddered up out the mouth of the passage, and an angry roar issued from within.

  Cal was closest to it. His nose caught a sharp tang of creosote and wooden ties, the echoes of foundries long since abandoned, Pennsylvania coal and Pittsburgh steel.

  Like a great black serpent, like a Worm God of night-crawlers and machinery, the helltrain shot out of the tunnel. Driven not by steam or diesel but by an altogether darker power. The engine was driving toward him now, glittering ebony-black, its antique iron cowcatcher arrayed in a demonic grin. Its unholy scream drowned out the shouts of his companions.

  He could feel the envelope of air it was pushing ahead of itself, could smell its sour greasy-iron stench, its momentum and enormous mass.

  “Stand your ground!” Cal wasn’t sure whether Stern had cried it, or he’d heard it in his mind, or both.

  At any rate, it was all happening so fast there wasn’t time to do much else. Cal grasped the hilt of his sword with both hands, braced his toes against the filt
hy rubble mound on which he stood.

  Steel against steel. In the world as it once had been, this would have been futile; more than that, suicide and madness. The sword blade would have cracked or broken, and the train would have sustained little more than a nick, if that, and driven Cal under its wheels, crushed and chewed him up, just as the Thing at the Source was chewing up the world.

  But times had changed, and this sword had never met anything it couldn’t cut.

  The blade bit into the train as if into living, screaming flesh. Cal felt the jolt up the length of both arms; whole rivers of energy flared up him. His heartbeat stuttered in its rhythm. With a sound like glaciers calving, the train opened in a wound.

  And exploded around him.

  He felt steel part under the impact of his blade, felt it continue its lethal momentum.

  Then something sharp struck his face, and something else struck his body, and he dropped away from the impact and rolled aside as the train, severed from the Source, detonated into a hundred thousand parts….

  Not parts of metal, as Cal had expected, but fluttering and buzzing parts, a cloud of them too thick to see through: black beetles, houseflies, bluebottle flies, crows screaming at the unseen moon, ravens….

  The train had been a prison composed of its own captives.

  It lost all resemblance to a train, the way water scattered from a broken cup loses all order and definition. The various crawling and flying things of which it was made beat the rushing air with their wings, soaring up and out and away from the thing they had been constrained to be.

  Some, inevitably, were crushed against the rails or flew headlong into the rock walls and ceiling. Cal smelled broken chitin and the blood of birds. But most of the captives simply scattered.

  Distantly, Cal heard Mama Diamond call out to them, a command in a language he could not comprehend. With a great whoosh the flying mass of them whirled off into the dark unknown like chaff before a storm, and were gone.