Magic Time: Ghostlands

by Marc Scott Zicree

  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.

  “Choose one from column A or one from column B,” said Cal. “Goldie, what’s your—”

  And
for the first time since they’d reached the valley, Cal and Doc and Colleen realized Goldie had said nothing all the time they’d been there.

  He stood transfixed staring down at the town, pure terror on his face.

  Raging, red turmoil, something monstrous waiting. Thunder smashing. Blurred streaks like blood smeared on a mirror. Sparks pinwheeling. Slashing into all colors and none, a whirlpool blazing of pure, savage power, screaming, screaming, SCREAMING.

  It went on forever. And that was just the least of it.

  It wasn’t here yet, not yet, not completely or even at all—hey, it was Paradoxes R Us. But it was coming fast down the tracks. And Herman Goldman knew he was not ready for it, not one teeny-weeny bit. If he was a Lincoln penny, this Big Enchilada was mucho dinero.

  And opening to it was like what had happened when he was twenty-three and the Devil had come calling, literally. He’d never told anyone about that—hell, they’d think he was crazy—but he had swooned into that place of insanity and assurance, had lost the world and himself, had become a universe and a god of one.

  That was what this fucker thought It was.

  And Goldie knew that it was what he himself would need to become, that and more, if he was to get justice or vengeance or whatever it was his eviscerated soul cried out for.

  Save your hate for the Source, his love had told him.

  Oh, Magritte…

  Could she have saved him from the Source, from himself?

  It really didn’t matter anymore.

  Herman Goldman was saving up his pennies.

  Now all he had to do find was the right bank.

  “Not good, way not good,” Goldie said, when he finally roused himself to answer their concern, their questions as to what he saw. “Cal, I can’t go down there, at least not right now.”

  “Okay,” Cal said. “Go back and join the others. We’ll see what we can suss out.”

  But before Goldie could mount Later and turn his buckskin back along the road, away from this place of phantoms, of repulsion and beckoning, there was a soft rustle of footsteps behind them.

  They had company.

  THIRTEEN

  SKY AND GRASS AND HIGHWAY

  “These friends of yours?” Cal asked Inigo.

  The tweaked boy slowly shook his head, never taking his creamy huge eyes off the visitors. If anything, he seemed even more disquieted by their arrival than did Cal and the others.

  Grunters.

  Cal wondered where they’d come from on this flat plain with its cracked asphalt highway an enormous arrow pointing clear to the horizon. Certainly not out of the valley; all of them had been looking that way.

  In the fading light of sunset, the clump of huddled figures with their bandy legs, their long bony arms, advanced with seeming timidity, like whipped strays drawn back to the company of men but sorely afraid of it. All were small compared to grown humans, of varying heights, none more than five feet. Cal could see that they had once been women and men, and a few of the shorter ones had a hyper quality that made him think they might have been—might still be—children.

  In his travels, Cal learned that family members never all transformed into one kind of changeling, but that often the altered outcasts and abandoned ones found companions of like mind and form.

  And although these eight twisted beings—with rapper caps pulled tight over bulbous gray heads (either wholly bald or with strands of wispy hair like chick fluff escaping out from under them), capacious Salvation Army jackets and jeans and long, thick-knuckled feet—had no doubt started life with no relationship to one another, now they were family.

  Or at least, a crew, a posse. A pack.

  Cal had seen other grunter packs in a proximity he’d sooner have avoided, been cornered by them in the bleak tunnels under New York and diverse spots along the map, fought tooth and claw to survive. In groups, they were invariably frightful, ravening homunculi with a wild, lithe ferocity.

  But this gathering before him seemed of a wholly different cast, even if in the dimming light he could see they bore the same serrated teeth, the same yellow dirk nails.

  There was none of the cunning, the calculation about them. Nor even the wary alertness of this boy who stood breathing fast beside him.

  Colleen had whipped her crossbow off her back and leveled it. Doc held his machete. But Cal shook his head, motioned their weapons down. He moved toward the group slowly, with a show of calm he hoped was more convincing than he felt (because—despite all this talk about his great instincts as a leader—if he was wrong about these guys…)

  The lead grunter stepped closer, eyeing Cal.

  Cal addressed the newcomer. “My name is Cal Griffin. This is Colleen, Goldie, Doc. And that’s Inigo. What’s your name?”

  The creature frowned spectacularly, and when he spoke, his voice was cracked and high-pitched—he sounded like Andy Devine in one of those ancient Westerns. “My name,” he said, “is Tom.”

  “Just Tom?” Doc asked.

  Tom shrugged, as if at an irrelevancy.

  Doc leaned in close to Cal, whispered, “Even for a grunter, he appears rather—”

  “Dim?” Cal finished in a whisper.

  “Let’s just say I would not hold out for an Ivy League college if I were him.”

  “What’s your take on this?” Cal asked Inigo, who continued to stare at his fellow trogs perplexedly. But the boy had nothing to offer; he’d never seen anything quite like them, either.

  “Guys,” Colleen put in, “we don’t have time for this.”

  But Cal had a feeling it was all connected somehow, that this was in some way a part of the larger mystery.

  “It’s like a tumor,” Goldie suggested at last. “You know, some are malignant, some are benign.” Then he added, to Inigo, “No offense, my man. I’m talking groups larger than one, when that utterly delovely mob mentality kicks in.” And the way he said it brought home freshly to Cal that Goldie had seen in his desultory ramblings the worst the world had to offer…and not just from grunters.

  Tom regarded them indifferently during this exchange, and then croaked, “You brought us food? You brought us blankets?”

  “Well,” Cal said, surprised, “we have very little of those things ourselves.”

  Tom looked suddenly, grievously disappointed. Cal wondered whether the creature might actually begin to weep.

  “No blankets to spare,” Cal hurried on. “As for food—”

  He walked to Sooner’s saddlebag, pulled out a can of creamed corn. “You can have this, if you like.”

  Tom apparently did like, very much; he scuttled over to Cal and snatched the heavy can from him with the cupidity of a hungry goat in a petting zoo.

  Cal stepped back, appalled by the smell of the creature, which cut through the horrendous stench of the valley like a knife blade. While Inigo had a smell like damp soil, earthy but not unpleasing, Tom reeked like a wet dog that had rolled in something, or an unwashed stable, or rotting hay—or some combination of all three. Tom grinned, bearing his big prognathous teeth. His breath was bad, too.

  “It’s as if he expects it,” Doc said. “As if he’s done this before.”

  “So?” Colleen added. “Any beggar in Times Square has done the same thing. And they have better patter.”

  Tom blinked at this exchange—maybe confused, Cal thought, but essentially indifferent.

  Cal said, “Is it true, Tom? Have you done this before? Have other people given you food?”

  “People from the lights,” Tom said. His speech was obviously painful and truncated, but there was nothing unusual about his accent, Cal thought. When he squeaked People from the lights, he squeaked it with a hint of a broad Midwestern twang. What had this man been before the Change overtook him? A counter clerk, a plumber, a computer programmer? Someone you’d pass in the street without looking twice.

  Now he was bent and malformed and had difficulty mustering the intricacies of a simple declarative sentence.

  “People
from the lights?” Cal asked.

  Tom seemed to reconsider his position, began to look vaguely frightened. He clasped the can of creamed corn to his chest and backed away a step.

  “Hang on,” Cal said.

  “No…” Goldie said faintly. Cal glanced over to him. His expression had gone vague, eyes wide and distant, and Cal understood with a sudden quickening of the pulse that Goldie wasn’t referring to the grunters.

  Inigo caught the vibe, too, on the air, the night wind. “Something’s coming,” he murmured.

  Reflexively, Cal shot a hand to the hilt of his sword.

  Now the rest of his brood noticed it, too. They stood upright, turned their heads to the south.

  A distant drone, achingly familiar, resolving as it drew rapidly closer into—

  The rattle and sigh of leather stretched by wind.

  “Shit!” Colleen cried out, dropping down, swiveling her crossbow up high.

  The dragon came low out of the setting sun, out of the flame-streaked clouds.

  Hunting.

  With a cry, Tom and his brood took off at a wild, loping run, back the way they’d come, in a desperate attempt perhaps to reach whatever hidey-hole they’d emerged from.

  But the dragon swooped down on them, big jaws snapping, missing one by inches. The grunters screamed and scattered, a number of them falling aside roughly and rolling, crab-crawling into the tall grass in an attempt to hide.

  But the smallest of the bunch, one Cal thought to be a child, bolted away from the others in blind terror, shrieking, toward a bare patch of earth with no hint of cover.

  Cal saw the dragon wasn’t Stern but rather another grotesque, bands of green and red rippling along its rough, scarred body. It hovered at the apogee of its ascent, huge wings angling against the wind, ridged head swiveling as it scanned the ground with eager, fierce eyes. In the fiery dark sky, its outstretched wings were almost translucent, the color of port wine.

  Its eyes fixed on the grunter child.