There was an explosion of outraged protests. Stern shouted them down. “I didn’t kill anyone, all right? And that was a major bitch to manage, believe me.”
Silence settled again, like snow in winter light.
Finally, Papa Sky said, “Let ’em know the rest of it, Ely.”
Stern blew a contemptuous breath from his reptilian nostrils, but surprisingly Cal could detect something like regret in his gravel voice. “There’s what you might call a downside…. We’ve kind of jump-started things. It’s spreading out there in Iowa, the Bad Thing’s power, Its control. Slowly at first, but once It gets a head of steam up, It’ll gobble up everyone and everything.”
Cal was horrified, saw his emotion mirrored on the faces of the others. He thought of the ones he had left in Atherton, the ones who had made their journey here possible—Rafe Dahlquist, Krystee Cott, Mike Kimmel and the rest. To have them subsumed into the Source, crumbled to nothing and destroyed…
Like Goldie.
Despair surged up in him again, the impulse toward hopelessness and defeat. Then his eye caught Mama Diamond’s, and she gave him a wink. He had thought her lost, too, and she had returned. Not every surprise was a bad one, and the Source Entity wasn’t the only one holding a hand of cards that could still be played.
“How long will it take?” he asked Stern.
The dragon shrugged. “Let’s just say if we’re gonna do something, it’d be advisable not to take an extended lunch.”
Cal rounded on him with a sudden fury. “What the hell made you do that?”
“Two reasons,” Stern answered, the regret giving way to cold pragmatism, the lawyer in him. “First, it’s like Hitler with the Russian front. Establishing a second beachhead, gaining dominance, weakens It, takes Its attention and resources. That’s why It couldn’t stop you getting to the Stronghold here. It gives us a window of opportunity.”
“And second?” prompted Shango.
“There’s this Lakota thing called Napesni…”. Stern looked to May Catches the Enemy.
“The No-Flights,” she explained. “Warriors who staked themselves to the ground in battle so they’d have to triumph or die.”
Stern nodded. “I figured, no back door, you’re gonna take it to the max.”
“Lovely,” said Colleen.
“Why us?” Cal asked. “Why me?”
“I’m not a people person,” Stern replied. “You are, cupcake.”
May Catches the Enemy canted her head in apparent agreement. “Folks generally fall to pieces or rise to their best depending on who’s around to lead them.” She turned to Cal. “Way I hear it, you done pretty good on your way here from New York.”
“Besides…” Stern hesitated. “I had this dream.”
He spoke lower now in his sandpaper rasp, and Cal could see the memory shook him. “It’s dark all around, and you’re at the heart of it, holding that damn sword, and everyone’s begging you to do something….”
Cal found he’d broken into a sweat. “And do I?” His voice was barely audible.
“I don’t know,” Stern answered frankly, looking at him with a gentleness, a humanity, Cal had never seen before. “But you’re the only one who can.”
Mama Diamond could see that the others were having a hard time taking this all in, just as she herself had, soon after Ely Stern had plucked her from amidst the buffalo of the living dead and saved her bacon.
Even so, she had learned this was a world that demanded you looked at it for what it was rather than what you thought or wanted it to be.
Whatever he might seem, in the end Stern had been no thief, merely a conservator and strategist, setting a pace that led them all here, and kept them effective and whole.
It was whatever dwelt at the Source that was the real thief, that wanted to steal away not only all they possessed, but their precious selves as well—while the journey Ely Stern had set in motion had served only to bring Mama Diamond to her own true self.
As for what awaited them at the Source, if they succeeded in reaching and confronting It, might It be as different from what Mama Diamond imagined as Stern had turned out to be?
She didn’t know.
On the way here, as Stern had borne her through clouds blown along the frigid eastern winds, the dragon had told her that the strongest person was the one who could look anything in the eye and not blink.
Now, sitting here in the belly of the earth that had enthralled and beguiled her for so long, Mama Diamond prayed for the strength to see (with the unclouded eyes so recently brought to humming clarity by the dragon’s gift) what lay at the Source for what It truly was.
“Let’s recap, shall we?” Colleen said. “We’re trapped in the Badlands with dwindling food, almost no weapons, buried under the ground with a dragon and a bunch of Indians. Yeah, we’re on rails here.”
May Catches the Enemy bristled. “Lady, you could use some spirituality.”
Colleen bulled up to May, getting right in her face. “First, I’m no lady, and second—”
Cal stepped between them before it could escalate into a knife fight. “Drop it,” he said to Colleen.
Cooling, she backed off. Cal took May aside, away from the others, and spoke softly. “You got a problem with any of us, you bring it to me, okay?”
“Yeah, sorry…. Guess I’m not Little Miss Centered all the time.”
Despite the urgency, despite the weight of grief like a stone in him, Cal smiled. “It’s just what you told me. No divisions between people anymore, we don’t have time for it. We want to live, we get over ourselves.”
She smiled back. “You’re a good listener…and a fast learner.” She cocked her head quizzically. “How are you at dancing?”
“Dancing?” he asked, puzzled.
She led him along with the others to a big steamer trunk and unlocked it. Cal saw that it was filled with fringed garments made of leather that were painted white with various markings. She held one up to him.
He knew it for the forbidden thing it had been, had seen one like it in a museum once. Long ago, it had been the last, sad expression of a ravaged, defiant people, and the sorcery it had claimed had been only an empty promise, like a dry wind on parched lands.
But whether May Catches the Enemy thought this was a new world or not, Cal knew the rules of the game had changed greatly…and this garment once made of dreams might hold a very different substance indeed.
It was a Ghost Dance Shirt.
FIFTY-ONE
THE JEWELED RING
Crouching like a gargoyle on the high ledge of the Aaron Copland building under the silent moon, Theo Siegel looked down upon the rolling expanse of malignant light.
I’ve got to get through that, he thought, and I can’t do it like this. I’ve got to speed things up.
And there was only one way he knew that might do that.
His fingernails were growing sharper, becoming almost like claws. With one hand, he reached back to his neck, felt the hard bump under the skin where Jeff had implanted the jeweled ring that had kept him human, that might still be doing what it could to hold on to the remnant of his humanity….
He gritted his teeth, and with one fierce motion, slashed open the skin.
He threw the ring, glinting in the moonlight, far out across the sky.
Then, changing, he set off for the cupola. For Melissa.
All Melissa Wade knew was that she hurt. She hurt, and she burned. And she felt light, as light as a dandelion clock (she’d learned that term from her departed English professor dad, with his love of words and mechanisms; funny that such a delicate thing would have a name that conjured up wheels and gears), almost as light as the air itself.
As in a dream, she’d come here from the Sculpture Garden, to the place she invariably went when she was troubled. Her aerie, she called it. The little observatory on campus.
Sitting on the floor in a litter of sidereal charts and astronomy journals, she heard an echoing, metallic knock, and at first g
lanced foggily at the door. But then she realized the sound had come from above, and looked up.
A figure was peering down at her from around the open lip of the dome beside the telescope, silhouetted against the night sky.
“Melissa?” it rasped, in a guttural voice that sounded somehow familiar. The figure climbed in, began scurrying down the roof of the dome, upside down, like an immense spider.
She felt a distant horror, but could not command herself to move.
But as the creature approached and gazed down at her with immense, gentle eyes, despite the terrible alteration she recognized him.
“Hello, Theo,” she said.
Theo had seen people turn into flares before. Melissa was going through the process at a terribly rapid rate. Already, her skin seemed nearly transparent. She held her hands palm-flat to the floor, as if she were afraid of losing contact with the planet. Her golden eyes were luminous in the shadow of the telescope.
“Melissa,” he said.
Her attention flickered but held.
She said, “What happened?”
“The Spirit Radio. It won’t turn off, and it’s letting something through.”
“Is that why we’re…changing?”
As if on cue, Theo felt a spasm clench the muscles of his legs as the bones slowly morphed. Tendons coiled, skin flexed and loosened. The persistent itch grew worse. At least the ragged wound at the back of his neck, the self-inflicted gash he’d made, was healing fast. Along with the night vision and superhuman strength, it was one of the perks of his growing nonhuman status.
“We need Jeff to fix us again,” Melissa whispered.
“Melissa…he’s gone.”
“No…”
“Melissa, I saw it. It got him.” Whatever It was…
“He’ll come,” she murmured, half delirious. “He always does.”
True enough on past occasions, for good or ill, and mostly ill. But Theo felt reasonably certain all bets were off now.
At the back of the cupola was a small maintenance room with a window overlooking Philosopher’s Walk and the campus quad.
“Is the window open?” Melissa asked with trepidation.
“No,” Theo said.
With an incredible effort of will, she rose to her feet in a series of halting motions that were painful to watch, and hobbled over to the window.
He understood why Melissa was cautious of the window. She was afraid she would forget about gravity and loft away like a child’s balloon. He pictured her adrift among the stars. One more distant light in the sky.
At the window, she stood with her hands against the sill and her eyes resolutely fixed on the campus. “Hold me down,” she said. “I’m dizzy. Anchor me.”
Tentatively, Theo stood behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist, as he had longed to do on so many days past.
The heat of her was shocking. He pressed himself against her.
She watched through the window for Jeff.
His own pain increased, along with a foggy sleepiness that became irresistible. After a time he slid down to the floor, his arms still loosely wrapped around Melissa’s feverish ankles, and closed his eyes.
When he woke, she was gone.
In his panic, Theo looked to the window. But the window was still sealed. He saw his own reflection in the glass. Saw the whiteness of his eyes, the gray maggot skin, the glinting sharp teeth. The image was mesmerizing, and appalling.
His mind felt blunted, and he wondered with a thrill of fear how much longer he might be able to think.
Even now, words were coming more slowly to his mind, like hieroglyphs carved in sandstone being eroded by the wind. Words fading to a fine, flat geometric plain.
Outside on Philosopher’s Walk, he saw that the glowing sea of infection had settled, muted down to cover each surface like a coating of Christmas flocking on a tree. He spied a figure shambling away from the physics wing, and knew from the shape of him and the familiar way he moved, favoring his right leg, that it was Jeff.
And hurrying to catch him, half running, half floating over the eerie, arc-lit blue of the grass, was Melissa.
As she reached him, he turned to her.
Seeing him fully now at last, she began to scream.
FIFTY-TWO
OUR STRANGE MAN
“Dig it,” Colleen Brooks said balefully, scowling at the Ghost Dance Shirt she held up before her. “I don’t dance.”
Months earlier, May Catches the Enemy had known that if any of them were going to get anywhere at all, she would need some warriors, a few musicians and a natural-born leader.
Now, looking out at Cal Griffin and her other new comrades as they stood on the grassy plateau of Cuny Table, the sky a searing cold blue above them, not a cloud in sight to the end of the world, she knew she had gotten her wish.
The snow had melted off mostly, and the land was a dusty green where foliage grew and cracked brown earth where it didn’t. Minutes before, she had signaled Walter Eagle Elk, a frail elder with a sun-lined face like the Badlands themselves, to open the earth to let them emerge out onto the land.
Which was risky, she explained to them, as it could draw the attention of the Sick Thing at the Source…but vital, nonetheless.
She’d handed each of them—with the exception of Ely Stern and Christina Griffin, who watched from the sidelines—a Ghost Dance Shirt, which she herself now wore, and requested they don them. And they all had done so, even Howard Russo and Inigo, looking like kids trying to wear Daddy’s clothes.
All except Colleen Brooks. A real pain in the ass, that gal, and a ballbuster to boot.
But when the chips were down, May reflected, that might not be such a bad thing.
Doc Lysenko sidled up to Colleen, gave her a playful nudge. “Come, Colleen, you don’t want to be a wet blanket, now do you?” The fringe on the arms of the white leather shirt he wore rippled in the breeze.
“Viktor, what the hell are we doing here? I want to kick some Source Project butt—not boogy on down.”
May Catches the Enemy came up to her, gestured at the breathtaking vista about them. “Crazy Horse said, ‘My lands are where my people are buried….’”
“Yeah? And where’s that get us?”
May saw that Cal Griffin was studying her intently, a contemplative expression on his face. “Maybe nowhere,” he murmured. But she could tell from his tone that he intuited what she had in mind.
“We pray for all living things,” May Catches the Enemy said to them all, by way of preamble. “We pray through all the spirits of the world, through the two-legged people and the four-legged people, through the animal people and the bird people and the fish people, and especially the tree people. We pray through them to the Great God Creator. The spirit world is the real world.”
She fixed her gaze on Cal Griffin, and said in a quieter tone, “And when we speak to the dead, we say, ‘We shall see you again….’”
May nodded at Walter Eagle Elk, and to his grandson Ethan, whom he’d been training (the playfriend who, as a child, May had tauntingly called Ethan Ties Shoelaces Together). They began to beat their drums and chant in a mournful, hollow tone that rolled out over the tableland, drawing lilting responses from the cowbirds and meadowlarks, and the wrens who had not fled the brute winter.
And maybe this had once been a dance only for men, May realized, her pulse quickening with hope and excitement, and maybe only men had once been the warriors….
But this was no time for such distinctions.
May Catches the Enemy, who was sometimes called Lady Blade and who had once been May Devine, drew her knives and, circling, began to dance.
One by one, the others followed suit—including, at the last, a grumbling Colleen Brooks.
Griffin’s sister Christina was moving now, too, flowing in the air with deft motions that left streaks of entwined color and light in her wake. May Catches the Enemy found herself staring openmouthed at the fairy girl, knowing that her soul was that of
a dancer.
Watching May and doing what she did, moving to the beat, Cal came up alongside Enid Blindman and Papa Sky. “Play with all you’ve got,” he called to them. “Play to wake the dead.”
They set to it with a will. Their music swirled and spiraled around the drumbeat and voices, gained assurance and majesty, filled up the sky and the land.
And from the Black Hills, from the rotted, cancerous Thing at its core, an answer came.
Angry black clouds spread out like a carpet unrolling, suffocating the sky, and from within them flared blinding flashes like worlds exploding.
The lightning rained down.
Howling, Stern took to the sky, breathing flame up at the heavens, deflecting the raging death strokes. Christina, too, extended her radiance, twisting the sizzling current away from the dancers to scorch prairie grass and barren trees scant yards away.
The lightning bolts increased their fury, pounding down like blazing fists, ravaging the land. Tortured, unthinking animals, summoned by the Mind that could not be denied, streamed out from the hills, shrieking maniacally, launching themselves with fang and claw, to be immolated on this killing ground.
“Keep dancing!” May called out to the others, and Cal took up the cry.
Slowly, barely perceptibly, the lightning began to die off, the clouds took on colors of red and blue and gold within the blackness, moving like the breath of a living thing.
The thunder came.
It boomed out like the universe clearing its throat and issued, not from the sick core of the Hills, but from somewhere deeper, and older still.
“The Thunder People!” May Catches the Enemy shouted over the roar. “The Thunder People summon their children!”
It reverberated through them and went on and on, rattled their bones and teeth, shook the ground beneath their feet, tumbled rocks and raised great plumes of dust into the muted and shrouded air.
“Son of a bitch!” Colleen Brooks exclaimed.
Magic Time: Ghostlands Page 40
