Finally, Goldie broke the clinch. The girl looked at him dazedly, in that moment of vulnerability seeming far younger than she had. Goldie straightened, and Cal caught the expression of contemplation on his face, as if he were trying to weigh something elusive, as fleetingly insubstantial as…well, a kiss.
But somehow, Cal knew there was nothing the least bit romantic about any of this.
Then the Bitch Queen blinked, and started to come back to herself.
“Uh-oh,” said Goldie. “Time to be moseying on.”
With that, he took off toward Cal-and the door behind him-at a dead run.
The Bitch Queen yelled only one command, which, after Goldie’s grand gesture, was no surprise.
They burst out of the house of the dead with every grunter and his mother on their heels.
“Man oh man, Goldman,” Colleen gasped out, their feet pounding the pavement as they ran through the night-they were passing Tarzan’s treehouse now-“you’ve pulled some weird stunts in your time, but that just took the Emmy.”
“It’s not what you think,” Goldie replied, and, damn him, he seemed utterly calm.
“I don’t know what to think.”
“Well, quit it.”
“Children, children,” Doc interjected, and Colleen recognized that while he might indeed be her ideal of a man, he could also be a patronizing asshole. Such was love. “I would suggest we not bicker at this precise juncture.”
“Oh, I think any time is generally the right time,” she shot back.
Before Doc could reply, if he intended to, she saw Cal stand his ground and stonily start firing at the onrushing horde.
He dropped a good many of them before he ran out of ammo. He hadn’t thought to bring more from the college town, hadn’t suspected he’d be embroiled in this grunter reenactment of the Little Big Horn, with the five of them stand-ins for Custer and his men.
He slung the rifle back over his shoulder and drew his sword. Close encounter time.
Colleen leveled her crossbow and nocked a bolt into it. But just then Inigo darted past her, nose in the air, sniffing. For what? she wondered, and realized it might be for a path devoid of grunters.
“This way!” Inigo yelled, diving into the bushes behind them. What the hell, Colleen thought, and dove after him, with Cal, Doc and Goldie close behind.
She abruptly found herself up to her thighs in frigid, slimy water and saw that she had plunged right into a narrow, twisting waterway. Casting about in the moonlight, she spied a group of boats with ratty awnings clumped at a dock.
“Oh great,” Colleen muttered, “the jungle cruise.”
She could hear the mob of grunters tearing through the foliage, coming after them.
“Here!” Cal cried, and led them running around the bend, keeping to the middle of the shallow river, where they would be harder to track, by smell at least. The grunters were keeping up such a racket they’d be hard pressed to find Cal and company by sound.
On the move, Cal drew alongside Goldie. “Where’s the exit? Get us back to Iowa.”
“No problema, mon capitaine.” Goldie paused, looked about uncertainly. “Only I’ve gotten the teeniest bit turned around.”
“Splendid,” Colleen said. Beyond the massive, vine-strangled face replicating Angkor Wat, she could hear the grunters hotfooting it in the distance. It sounded like they were getting closer, they must have caught the scent. “Tell me, Goldman, was it worth it?”
“I’m not sure yet. I think so.”
“Hey, it was rhetorical.”
“Those are the ones I always make it a point to answer.”
“C’mon!” Cal led them onto the opposite shore, through the dense growth onto the pavement again. “We need some high ground.”
Colleen glanced about, saw the silhouette of a craggy mountain, realized with a postcard shock of recognition that it was the Matterhorn-or a reasonable amusement-park facsimile thereof. But it was clearly too far away to reach, if the caterwauling of their pursuers was any indication.
“There,” Cal said, and she followed his gaze to stairs that led to an overhead track. Not ideal, but the best they could do…
They bounded off at full clip, the grunters right behind like a starving pack of hounds (which wasn’t that far off, if the hounds were rabid and crazy-strong and butt ugly, to boot). As Inigo bolted up the stairway like greased lightning, Cal and Doc on his heels and Goldie behind, Colleen wheeled and fired off a bolt, catching the lead little creep in the throat. He fell like a sack of wet cement and the ones behind him tumbled over him, screeching and yelling in frenzied rage.
Colleen turned and clambered up the stairs. By now, Cal had found handrails to climb onto the roof of the aluminum train that sat silent and stilled and remarkably unworn.
It was the highest point around, and it allowed them, cursing and firing and swinging their metal cutting blades, to drive the monsters back, to hurl the demonic little brutes screaming down to smash on the hard walkway below.
Not a purpose its designers had ever envisioned, but hell, all things considered, just about now it was a damn good use for a monorail.
Suddenly, a piercing whistle rent the air and the grunters fell back, vanishing into the night.
Colleen heard the shuffling odd footsteps first, before she saw their owners.
“Bozhyeh moy,” Doc whispered, and crossed himself.
It was that punk bitch, that crazy queen in her haunted mansion, who’d done this, just like she’d summoned those ghosts that throttled Goldman.
The army of the undead-or more accurately, the automaton non-living-shuffled slowly forward on metal feet. The pirates, the spooks, the smiling children of foreign lands.
And at the front, leading them on, Abraham Lincoln.
Colleen hadn’t had a night to match this one since her prom.
And like that ghastly, long-ago night-in fact, exactly like it-she knew by the end she’d be covered in mud and blood and oil.
TWENTY-THREE
THE DOOR IN THE AIR
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Colleen Brooks hissed when she returned limping and bloodied along with Cal Griffin and his companions to the Iowa grain silo where Krystee Cott and the other refugees waited breathlessly for their return.
Al Watt noticed Herman Goldman carrying a battered black stovepipe hat. “What’s up with that?”
“Two ears and a tail,” Goldie replied, and would say no more. He tossed it onto his bedroll and moved off from the others, back out into the night, to where he could be alone with his thoughts.
Rafe Dahlquist approached Griffin, who was just pulling some jerky from his pack, handing a bit off to the grunter boy Inigo. Jeff Arcott accompanied Dahlquist. Under his arm, Arcott carried the rolled schematics he’d brought from Atherton, the plans for his dearest, most secret project.
“It’s incredibly ambitious,” Dahlquist confided. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“What exactly is it?” Cal asked.
“A communications device,” Arcott jumped in. “Let us say on rather a grand scale. I have to be rather cagey at this point, sorry about that.” He cast an eye at Dahlquist. “And I would need to require your discretion, too, Doctor.”
Cal glanced over at Dahlquist. “It’s your call.”
“I’d like to pursue this, yes. I think I can help them get it up and running.”
Cal considered, spied Inigo staring at him. The boy had led them here, had said Cal would find what he sought in Atherton….
And who was to say that this project might not be the door to the very thing he sought?
“You want him, you let them all come,” Cal insisted of Arcott, the sweep of his arm taking in the men and women dozing, mending clothes, speaking quietly about the room. “They could use a hot shower, a warm meal, clean bed.”
“Sure. Anything else?”
“I keep this,” Cal said, unslinging the rifle. He thought to add, And you give me more ammo. A lot more.
He would get what he required, and go where he had to.
Through Atherton to the bloody heart of the Source Project, whether helped or hindered by anyone in this hellish, miraculous world.
Arcott nodded his agreement. Satisfied, Cal looked back toward Inigo.
But the boy was gone.
Herman Goldman stood in the night on the periphery of the derelict farm, the fierce wind off the prairie grasses making his teeth chatter, blowing clean through his many layers of clothes, chilling him to the bone. The freezing awareness of his own armature made him regard himself as a living skeleton, barely wrapped in gristle and flesh, as much a ghost as the phantoms that had attacked him in the haunted mansion out California way; more so.
Every part of him ached. Lord, he was tired. He longed to curl up in his bedroll and sleep for about twenty hours or so, the sleep of the dead, of the just or unjust, it didn’t matter, so long as it was without dreams-please, for pity’s sake, no dreams.
But he was here for a reason. He had to find something out, or all his adventures down this long night that seemed without end were for nothing.
Colleen had largely dropped her uppers when he’d kissed that Bitch Queen; hell, they all had, regardless of their human or inhuman status. But all of them had totally missed the point of his actions; the last thing he had in mind was romance (although now that he was safely several thousand kilometers out of her homicidal clutches, he had to admit-at least, in retrospect-that she was fairly hot).
Back in the Preserve, and later in Chicago, he had learned that on occasion he could summon up a talent, an ability to drain off, absorb the abilities of others. Not always, it was hit-or-miss, as was virtually everything on this loony tunes planet since the advent of the Megillah.
But when it worked…brother, hold on to your hat.
So when Herman Goldman lip-locked that Empress of toothy grays and not-so-amusing windup toys, he had utterly no delusions that he was Tom Cruise or Antonio Banderas.
He wasn’t trying to get into her pants, he was trying to get into her powers.
And in that moment of intense, electric contact, he’d definitely felt as if something were being transferred. (He had also felt, absurdly, ashamedly, that he was betraying Magritte in this act, but he pushed this aside, submerged it; beyond anything, this was in service to her, to her memory.)
Now it was time to see how well he’d done….
The harpy wind was banging a metal sign on the side of the road back and forth into its crossbeam, causing it to warble eerily like a demented musical saw. Goldie extended a hand out toward it and thought, Stop that.
It did absolutely nothing.
Under the pale starlight and dipping moon, he then tried similarly to animate a tractor, then a harvester, then-more modestly-the ragged remains of a scarecrow (whose purpose, he supposed, had originally been more rustically ornamental than practical).
Gutter ball.
It was a humbling experience.
All right, then, power deux. Portals, and the opening thereof…
He already possessed the ability to resummon one recently cracked by another, more skillful practitioner, or to create a transport between two sacred points, like the Adena burial mounds and Olentangy Indian Caverns.
But peering off to the black horizon where the moon was just now setting, Goldie realized he was damn short of practitioner or sacred site at this given moment.
Nothing but grass and dirt and air.
“Oh, what the hell.” He made a broad round motion with his hand at the empty, cold air. “Open,” he said.
And damned if it didn’t.
The door in the air glowed purple along its periphery of mute flame, and a vista beyond showed daylight.
Herman Goldman stepped through, to see what he could see.
It turned out to be Albany, New York.
He stepped back into Iowa, then made holes to San Simeon, and Dubuque, and Alberta, Canada.
But, as the Bitch Queen had said of the warp and woof of her own special abilities, he found he couldn’t summon portals to a location across the sea, or anywhere near the place to the west the dark siren call of the Source summoned him.
They would still have to find another way there.
And there might well be any number of other limitations, hiccups in his range and reliability.
Even so, he felt sure this borrowed-all right, stolen-gift would come in mighty handy.
The sound of horses whinnying behind him turned him around.
Cal stood with Colleen and Doc and the others from camp, all packed up and ready for bear. He saw his friends had let those who had sustained the roughest handling back at the mall ride the horses. Only one of their team members was missing, the grunter Inigo, and it felt right somehow that he was not among them; perhaps at last he had returned to the track Goldie had shunted him from earlier this evening.
“We’re pulling up stakes,” Cal said. “Heading back to Atherton. You game?”
He was indeed.
The town would be the same, wrapped in the chaos he alone could sense.
But better the Devil you know than the one you don’t. And Herman Goldman had known the Devil, that carrion eater, that deliverer of chaos, when the scarlet gent had paid a call on him in grad school. And then again, if more subtly, when the Change had come, and when it had taken Magritte from him.
He would let the chaos that engulfed the town engulf him now. He wanted it, as he wanted other chaoses, other destructions that beckoned to him down the far road of the future.
With his new power humming in his veins like myriad voices along a telephone wire, Herman Goldman felt utterly sure he would get exactly what he wanted.
Just before the sun rose, as their party neared the slope that led down into Atherton, Doc Lysenko spied the bulk of the dead dragon that lay silhouetted amid the singed grasses.
He grew thoughtful and said to Cal, “I would very much like that brought into town, to where I might perform an autopsy.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Cal responded, and moved off to speak with Jeff Arcott.
In the end, it took Arcott sending out a flatbed with a full work crew to hoist the carcass and transport it to town, to the hospital morgue where Doc awaited it with gleaming knives.
And while Doc’s tender ministrations ultimately proved more butchery than autopsy, no one could deny that the dragon turned out considerably more useful in death than he had ever been in life.
TWENTY-FOUR
THE SCALE AND THE STONES
The horses were shrieking, to begin with.
Mama Diamond spoke to them low in their own tongue, coaxing, reassuring.
“It’s not real, Fine Stallion. It’s not real, Brave Mare….”
Just the same as you’d calm a child, waking screaming from a bad dream. Only this was a nightmare that went on and on, and you were in it right along with them.
The only difference being that Mama Diamond could see it was an illusion, nothing to be scared of-at least, as far as she was concerned.
But to a horse held in its snare, or a man…
Even a man made of metal as hard-forged as Larry Shango.
He sat atop Cope, and Mama Diamond atop Marsh, as they rode down the gentle slope of valley into the college town of Atherton, Iowa. Glancing over at him in the moonlight, Mama Diamond could see from the set of his jaw and the shining grimness in his eyes that it was taking all he had not to be screaming, too. Frosty breath blew from his nostrils like steam off a locomotive, as he kept his mouth clamped tight.
Mama Diamond thought of the quiet efficiency with which Shango had wielded his hammer against the wolves around his campfire, the way he’d used fist and boot and knee to lay waste to the men who’d had the arrogance and naivete to rise up against him in that nameless town far behind them on their road east.
Wh
at you see ahead of you doesn’t just summon up old, bad dreams, my friend. Mama Diamond felt sure the nightmares it stirred in Shango’s memory were all too real, rivers of blood he’d waded through on this broad continent or another, bound by unwavering commands that brooked no direction but forward. And she felt equally certain he had been as silent then as now.
Not a man to complain, no matter how grueling the journey, how much it shredded one’s soul, tore at body and mind and heart. Mama Diamond thought back on the few words Shango had said when telling her of his ordeal in the Badlands trying to reach the Source Project.
Not an easy trip. And fifty-three miles from it…I was turned away. Not a word more, nothing of his feelings, nor what he’d suffered alone under the gaze of those granite spires.
Was he thinking of that time now, of the nameless horrors the Storm had thrown against him?
Whether he was or not, Mama Diamond knew Shango needed no soothing words, no comforting tone. He was a man on a track, headed in one direction…no matter how vile the smell or appalling the sight, how real or unreal the monsters.
Mama Diamond smiled then, a flinty smile, and nudged Marsh forward. She realized that just as she spoke the language of wolf and horse and cat, she spoke Shango’s language, too.
The language of silence and patience and endurance.
She had learned it from her parents at Manzanar, during the time when waiting for those barbed-wire gates to swing open on that desert land, and from her brother Harry, dead sixty years and more now, who had gone on to Heart Mountain, then to the 100th Infantry Battalion and a grave outside Genoa.
Where had Shango learned this language? she wondered.
The horses were quieting now under Mama Diamond’s coaxing, edging ahead reluctantly but trusting her, as surely as they had through long days of drought and Storm. They had been her steady companions for decades now, as she’d pried gem and bone from the eternal mountains, as she’d watched civilization come and go.
Focusing her mind as if switching stations on a radio, Mama Diamond found she could perceive what the horses and Shango were seeing-the rotted, scabrous bodies, ravaged, distorted, grotesque. Men, women, children, infant babes, a tableau of pestilence and death.
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