Ghostlands mt-3

by Marc Scott Zicree

Because wanting something, even wanting it with all your soul, almost never made it happen. Because there were lead actors in this world and supporting players, and Theo Siegel knew precisely which category he fell into.

  Even if Jeff Arcott could never love anything as straightforward as a body sharing a concrete bench on a fall morning.

  A memory of an old movie bubbled to the surface of Theo’s mind, of Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson in Key Largo, of Bogart asking Robinson, who was playing Rico the mob boss, if Rico knew what he wanted.

  “More,” Bogart told him. “You want more.”

  Jeff wanted more. More knowledge. More power.

  And what would he do with them when he had them?

  As the Cadillac drew to a halt before them, he and Melissa peered at the faces of the newcomers. Theo spotted the bulky man first, there in the backseat of the El Dorado, looking much as he had in the profile Discover Magazine had run on him last spring before the Change, if a little more care-worn and rough around the edges.

  He gave Melissa a nudge. “That’s him, Dahlquist.”

  So it was true, after all. And it explained why Jeff had allowed all these new arrivals. Hell, for that level of experimental physicist, Arcott would’ve let the entire roll call of the Veterans of Foreign Wars parade into town. Not to mention chew off his own left arm. Or Theo’s, if it came to that.

  Process had never been Arcott’s thing, nor patience. Results were all that mattered, the endgame. Which was a good thing, Theo supposed, if you wanted to have piping hot water and CD players and all the swankest luxuries this extremely post postmodern world could afford.

  Now things could really get moving, in earnest-whatever those things might be. For although Jeff had allowed both Theo and Melissa a glimpse into some of the details of what he was building-the parts he needed them to machine and fabricate, the marching orders he required them to delegate to the rest of the work crew-he was playing a very close hand. No matter how much Arcott tried to conceal his inner workings, however, Theo had detected his frustration at how things were proceeding, knew the new work had grown becalmed, despite all Jeff’s best efforts. But Dahlquist would put an end to that.

  More wonders of the New Science aborning…

  Pandora’s box, slowly cracking open.

  Theo knew that his own curse-beyond that of unrequited love, and loyalty beyond all reason-was an endless, insatiable curiosity to see what precisely would happen next.

  Which, thanks to Jeff Arcott, in recent times and local environs, hadn’t been all that damn bad.

  So why then, watching the big black car roll up like a hearse, did Theo have such a queasy feeling about the next day and the next?

  He shivered, and felt the hairs on his neck rise, felt the cold dark lump under the skin there, the alien object that kept everything in check, that kept him in check.

  Or at least, the him that he knew.

  Theo envisioned all the evils of Pandora’s box flitting off, flying out into the greater world, as the Storm itself had spread. Then he remembered the one thing that had been left in the box when all else had fled.

  Hope.

  Looking now at Cal Griffin (who had literally saved him from the jaws of death, and from its talons, too) as he emerged from behind the steering wheel of the Caddy, Theo Siegel thought he might have just enough faith left in him to believe in something more than Jeff Arcott and Melissa Wade, and the siren call that beckoned them.

  Melissa had bolted up off the bench, and ran to Arcott as he climbed from the passenger side. Now Theo levered himself up, working the crutches the medic had supplied him with as an auxiliary leg.

  “Welcome home, Jeff,” he said. And although he couldn’t really march anymore, not on that twisted, dragon-mangled leg, he waited for his marching orders.

  All the while knowing, too, that soon enough he would seek out Cal Griffin and his companions and have a word with them.

  Virtually the first thing Cal Griffin asked Agent Larry Shango and Mama Diamond when he got them alone was, “What brought you here?”

  And the first thing that astonished him was when they answered, “Ely Stern.”

  The three of them sat in the Insomnia Cafe, along with Colleen Brooks, Herman Goldman and Dr. Viktor Lysenko, sipping lattes and espressos at a table decoupaged with images torn from a Time-Life history of the twentieth century-Hitler and Eleanor Roosevelt, Joseph McCarthy and Mahatma Gandhi. These heroes and villains of the century past, gone, all gone, and their world gone with them….

  “Lord, son,” said Mama Diamond, surveying Cal’s ashen face. “You look like someone just walked on your grave.”

  “Not on mine,” Cal murmured, as the past unfurled like a banner bolted onto the present, shifting fiendishly in its weight and measurements.

  He had thought Ely Stern most likely dead and long rotting on a Manhattan pavement, his lungs and hopefully his sadistic heart, too, skewered by the same sword that rested now against Cal’s thigh.

  If anyone had deserved to die, it was certainly Stern, who had left desolation and murder in his wake; who had attempted to spirit away Tina before the Source had at long last succeeded; who had done his level best to kill Colleen and Doc and Goldie-and Cal himself, into the bargain-before he had finally been sent spiraling down into the darkness between the spires of New York.

  Yet why had Stern stolen Tina in the first place? Cal had long wondered about that. True, he had clearly thought she was transforming into the only other one of his kind, but that wasn’t sufficient explanation.

  From what Cal had learned since, it seemed obvious that whatever lived at the Source hungered for the flares’ unearthly power, and so had gathered them in Its net.

  But as for Stern, the reason seemed more personal….

  Upon Cal’s saving her and on the journey southward to Boone’s Gap, Tina had chosen to speak little of it. So Cal could only speculate from what he’d briefly overheard Stern saying to her on that distant rooftop.

  There had been a tone in his voice Cal had never heard before, in all his years working for this pitiless man, before Stern’s dragon self had erupted outward and revealed him for what he truly was.

  His words to Tina had held tenderness…and longing…and loneliness.

  Previously at the office, whenever Stern had spoken in passing of women, it had always been with derision and rage. But here was a new thing, something Cal had only had moments to wonder at before Stern had turned his killing gaze upon him, and Cal had been forced to save himself and destroy Stern.

  Or at least, so he thought.

  Another passing player in Cal’s life, another purveyor of scars, physical and mental, safely relegated to the past, gone but most assuredly not forgotten.

  But Cal knew now that Stern was alive, not a hideous ghost of memory but an active presence just out of sight, no longer in Manhattan but on the move, a restless wandering spirit like themselves….

  But no, Cal corrected, not like themselves, nothing like themselves. He had stolen Mama Diamond’s gems, had brought them here, much the same way-Shango now informed him-that the scientists at the Source Project had coveted and accumulated such stones….

  With Jeff Arcott utilizing the gems that Stern delivered.

  But why? How had this come about, this unlikely alliance, this grand design whose architecture was so elusive?

  And what was in it for Stern, that consummate manipulator of self-advantage? Whose interests was he serving?

  Arcott or the Source…or both?

  Certainly himself, that was always the case. But how, to what end?

  No telling, at least not yet.

  Stern had removed himself to parts unknown. While Jeff Arcott was closeted behind locked doors with his armed guards and his work crew and Rafe Dahlquist, the new resident genius on the scene, all speeding toward their goal.

  While I don’t even know, Cal thought bitterly, where my goal is.

  Until, that was, Agent Shango uttered the second a
stonishing statement that morning.

  “I don’t know how to get there…but I know where the Source Project is.”

  “It’s-you could say it’s an unholy place.” Larry Shango continued, scowling. “I saw things….” Shango’s face clouded with the memory.

  “I was turned away,” he said finally. “I was turned away in a fashion I do not understand.”

  “You tell me where it is,” Cal reassured him, “and we’ll figure out how to get there.”

  “In the Black Hills, beyond the Badlands, outside Rapid City, South Dakota.”

  Cal drew in a sharp breath, glanced over to Herman Goldman, who nodded agreement, sipping his Yogi tea. Hadn’t he once said it might be there, back when they’d been en route to take on Primal in Chicago, to win back Enid Blindman’s contract, and his freedom? But then Goldie had quickly added that he couldn’t be sure, that Radio K-Source was an unreliable font of information. Now they had confirmation, at last.

  Shango noted that Herman Goldman had changed little in the months since he had last seen him; outwardly, at least. There was something much altered beneath, he could sense though not define it, a hardness there.

  He noted, too, the new thing between Colleen Brooks and Dr. Lysenko, the relationship that had grown like a fresh sapling following the winter chill. A good thing that, something for them to hold on to.

  And what of Cal Griffin? He’d retained all the qualities Shango had admired on their first meeting, that so reminded him of President McKay, the calm and the wariness, the qualities of leadership that could be honed but not acquired. He was, if anything, more impressive now that he was this much farther along his road; he wore his responsibilities with less doubt.

  Griffin had sent his other acolytes to their new housing and to grab some food, leaving just his core of lieutenants to compare notes around the table.

  With one addition-Mama Diamond looked about her at these warriors Larry Shango had told her about back in Burnt Stick and during their long journey here-when they weren’t fighting off wolves and panthers and marauders and cops, that was. It was clear from the old prairie rat’s expression that she found them far less formidable than his descriptions had led her to believe. But she’d learn soon enough, he knew. Not everyone was as mild as their appearance, as she herself had amply demonstrated.

  Cal Griffin leaned forward, his elbows on the table, and looked deep into Shango’s eyes.

  “I want to know what you saw…and how it turned you back.”

  You cross the path of the Devil in your travels, li’l love, you keep right on walking, Shango’s great-grandmother-whom everybody called Aunt Sally whatever their relation to her-had cautioned him nearly thirty dead years back. He sat on her lap then, small and attentive and anything but intimidating, as she shelled sweet peas with long fingers like hickory branches, the wind coming off the bayou like the hot wet mouth of hell had opened up somewhere in there and was breathing out low and slow.

  “And you don’t tell no one who you met,” she added, her twisted strong hand caressing his cheek, leaving heat trails in his skin. “’Cause he jes might hear you and come right on back….”

  And although Larry Shango knew in the vault of his heart that she was as right as right could be, and though he had never spoken of these things since they had happened, never seen them since but in the shrieking corridors of his dreams…

  He told them everything.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  SHANGO AT THE EDGE

  Larry Shango stood atop Sheep Mountain Table in the Badlands of South Dakota and looked west, into nothingness.

  It had been a long, hard trek under a merciless summer sun that hung nailed in an endless azure sky. The cracked asphalt of Highway 44 heading west had given way to rutted, cantankerous dirt road. A sudden thunderstorm the day before had reduced the path to a slurry of mud, and although it was drying out quickly in this heat, it was still a bloody mess. He’d been forced to set aside his mountain bike and struggle the rest of the way in on foot.

  Frogs heralded his way as he passed remnants of ponds, reeds waving along their perimeter in the small respite of breeze; prairie dogs yipped their echoing calls of alarm to one another like bouncing pings of radar. Amid the tall summer grasses, eroded hillocks of earth fell away, revealing gleaming bits of quartz and the fossil jawbones of departed beasts.

  Shango knew he really needn’t make this climb to see what lay ahead; still, some bullheaded part of him-the part he prized most, the part that had allowed him to stay on this side of the veil this long into his remarkable life-insisted he climb to highest ground to verify what his sight informed him, and his instincts confirmed….

  That a mile or two ahead to the west lay a shifting wall of nonreality that rose up off the land like the flat of God’s hand, stretching straight up into the burning sky as far as he could see.

  It hurt his eyes to look at it, somehow made him feel defiled and unclean. He knew within its borders lay Ellsworth Air Force Base, which he had visited along with the President and his retinue three years back for the dedication of a new bomber. If the B-1Bs and stealth fighters were still there, they were inert as paperweights now.

  On that trip, Shango had struck up an acquaintance with Milt and Jamie Lee, documentarians whose specialty was American Indian music and culture, Milt himself being part Oglala Sioux (“Sioux” being a misnomer from the French; “Lakota” among the preferred names). They’d taken him all over the Badlands and Black Hills on a personalized tour, and he’d marveled at a terrain so different from the homes he’d known in New Orleans and D.C.

  The Black Hills were so named because of the ponderosa pines that covered them, they’d told him, and in a flurry of fresh snow Milt had pulled the van over and peeled off some fresh bark; Shango had inhaled deeply of its perfume, and found it smelled like butterscotch.

  The other predominant sentinels along the way were aspen trees, but Milt told him that too was a misnomer. In reality, a grove of these “trees” was actually one mass entity, its appearance as a group of individuals mere illusion.

  Standing on this high tableland now amid the tall grasses, the song of the meadowlark filling the cloudless air, Shango wondered what had become of the pines and the aspen, and Milt and Jamie, too.

  In the last few weeks, Shango had reconnoitered around this periphery, keeping his distance, seeing how far it reached. As near as he could tell, the protective barrier ringing the Source Project extended fifty-three miles out in all directions, allowing nothing-even a glimpse-to get through. In its voraciousness, it had swallowed up a good chunk of the Badlands and all of the Black Hills, Rapid City and Mystic and Nemo and Custer, all the way up to Deadwood and down to the Pine Ridge Reservation. Johnson Siding and Thunderhead Falls lay grasped within its nameless boundaries, Beautiful Wonderland Cave and Jewel Cave; Wind Cave, too, where some of the Lakota believed their people had originated. Not to mention (as a billboard on the outskirts trumpeted) the Flintstones’ Bedrock City.

  Sacred or profane, ancient or absurdly modern, all were held in thrall to whatever reigned there, brought under its scrutiny and protection.

  And whatever went in did not come out.

  At least, that’s what the few dogged survivors in this abandoned shadowland had told him, the ones who had not fled to all parts east, west, north and south-the dominant concept being away from this realm of mist and fog and silence.

  Most of the ones Shango had encountered as he’d drawn near had been purely mad, hallucinating and delusional. Shango had had no way of knowing whether they’d been driven to this in recent times, or had been always thus and it helped protect them now. Still, for all their crazed pronouncements, there was a kernel of information that stayed consistent from person to person, leading Shango to believe there might be truth there.

  So Shango had kept a respectful distance from the swirling fog that was really nothing like fog at all.

  But now he was determined to walk right up to it. Because, aft
er all, what else was there for him to do?

  Shango had been left with the Source Project as his only objective, a task he had undertaken because no other tasks remained to him.

  For Cal, Colleen, Doc and Goldie, the journey cross-country had been strewn with obstacles and detours-perhaps because the Source had sensed their progress and attempted to obstruct them. If that were so, then Shango had managed to fly under the radar. He had simply walked and bicycled his way doggedly west, trading his strength for food, building stone fences or raising barns or bringing in crops, or simply scavenging his meals as he progressed through the more sparsely populated prairie lands.

  He had come to the Source with no weapons but a pile-driving hammer and his own wits. He had no real idea what he expected to find nor what he could hope to do about it. He was road-crazy at that point, exhausted beyond reason, running on instinct.

  Shango paused and drank from his canteen, swirling the warm water in his mouth. He supposed this was reconnaissance, what he was doing here. But like everywhere else on the perimeter, there was nothing to see.

  So he turned back down the muddy, argumentative road and made his way off the tableland, then swung southwest toward Buffalo Gap (or the unseen region that had been Buffalo Gap), deciding to see just how close he could get.

  But that was the problem, as it turned out.

  At the foot of Sheep Mountain stood a shaded cove of caked earth and stone as tall as two men, projecting from the dry earth like the gnomon of an enormous sundial. Shango ran his hand appreciatively over the cool rock, then abandoned it for the shadeless barrens beyond.

  He had walked, by his estimate, a half mile toward the swirling fog and the Source Project beyond when he found himself standing by another similar outcropping of stone. He rested there a moment, savoring the shade. He drank once more from his canteen. The fog seemed no closer. But distance and perspective were tricky, Shango knew, in places like this.

  Then he looked down at his feet. A scrawny lizard scuttled away from his high boots. But that wasn’t what astounded him. What astounded him were the pressed tracks in the dusty soil.