Ghostlands mt-3

by Marc Scott Zicree

  “Thought my pal with the hammer was greased lightning…but you put him to shame.”

  He whirled at the sound of the voice.

  It was the old woman, Shango’s odd traveling companion, the flinty, sun-weathered one who called herself Mama Diamond, near the doorway that opened onto the stairs. She stood with her back to the steel frame of the ventilator outlet, a faint smile on her lips.

  Cal realized his right hand had arced the sword instinctively around to aim at her heart. Vaguely ashamed, he let it drop. “You appear out of thin air?”

  “Remember when questions like that used to be rhetorical? No, I just walk light. Heard you cutting capers up here, saw you from the street. Decided I’d pay a call.”

  Cal didn’t ask how her aged eyes had spied him in the dark, her creased old ears had caught the sound. Let her have her secrets, for now.

  The blade lost its willfulness and felt heavy again. He returned it to its scabbard. Tonight he would oil it to preserve the metal against corrosion.

  “Cold time to be out walking,” he observed.

  “Sleep and me, we’re only sometimes on speaking terms,” Mama Diamond replied, a cold wind gusting up to ruffle her short hair. Cal wondered idly how many people this reedy, self-reliant woman might be on speaking terms with, as well. She had the feel of someone folded in on herself; if not antisocial exactly, then not needful of society.

  “It’s different at night,” Mama Diamond said. “The town, I mean.”

  Cal followed her gaze to the big autumn moon, grand as a sailing ship up there in the ebony ocean, its pale face as cool and eternal as the face of God. A silhouette fluttered across it, and was gone. A bat, Cal thought. Or maybe the cold shadow of a dragon.

  An eerie sound wafted through the air to them, so distant and forlorn it almost wasn’t a sound but merely a remembrance. Still, it made Cal’s hackles rise.

  “It’s not Stern,” Mama Diamond said with assurance. “I know his call.”

  “So do I,” said Cal. Or at least, I thought I did. Today’s revelations had shaken his conviction.

  Stern had stolen Mama Diamond’s gems, had brought them here, apparently under orders from whatever dwelled at the Source, whatever now held Cal’s sister captive, if indeed she were still alive.

  (But she was, Cal’s heart insisted, she must be….)

  Stern had traveled from New York to Chicago to Mama Diamond’s shop, and then here to Atherton.

  Ahead of them, always ahead.

  Stern had drawn Mama Diamond and Shango here. And, Cal thought, wondering about the grunter boy Inigo, perhaps himself and his companions, too.

  Whose lives Stern had chosen to save…

  Cal was suddenly conscious of the heft of his sword in its scabbard, of the singing ache in his arms and shoulders and legs, of the pathetic limitations of his humanity.

  The dark road ahead stretched off to an unknown future…under a shadow from above.

  Am I leading anyone, or merely being led?

  Cal saw that Mama Diamond was scrutinizing him, far more closely than she had studied the moon. “You look like a man with a question.”

  “It’s not one you can answer,” Cal replied.

  Mama Diamond walked to the edge of the roof, held her face immobile in the frigid wind.

  “I had a man once, Danny,” she said, not looking at Cal. “We kept company, for a time. Then he was gone. I truly cannot say why he did a single thing he did, beginning to end…. I don’t think he could, either.”

  She turned to Cal, and her eyes were hard and clear. “Most of what happens just happens, and most everyone’s plans go bust, one way or another.

  “And maybe, just maybe,” Mama Diamond said, her cracked voice so quiet it was like the wind rubbing against itself, “every now and then, a bad heart can do good….”

  Another cry came on the wind, a different one, close to the ground and high-pitched.

  “Coyote,” Mama Diamond said. “He’s just found some pizza in a Dumpster.”

  “You say that like you know.”

  She gave him a Mona Lisa smile, and rubbed her arms against the cold, like sticks trying to start a fire.

  “I ran into that pal of yours,” Mama Diamond said, seemingly changing the subject. “The one with the shirts that are a conversation all by themselves.”

  That would be Goldie, of course.

  “He told me what’s on the other end of what they’re building…and what you’re gonna try doing with it.”

  Cal felt a momentary flash of irritation, then realized that if Goldie had let Mama Diamond into their confidence, it must be for a reason. His wild airs to the contrary, in certain ways Herman Goldman’s actions were the most deliberate and considered of all of them.

  “What do you think?” Cal asked.

  “That you’re crazy…but it’s a good crazy. Don’t mean it won’t fry you on the griddle, though.”

  “True.”

  “But I’ll tell you this much-you get your foot in the door, you’d best take me with you.”

  Looking at this frail old woman, Cal thought to protest, but the words died in his throat. There was something below the surface in her that belied appearances. Underneath, he sensed, she was hard stone, diamond hard….

  And Cal knew in that moment that it was not Shango’s iron will that had brought them here, but hers.

  What monstrosities would walk the streets were men’s faces as unfinished as their minds, Stern had once said, quoting the philosopher Hoffer.

  But that wasn’t always true. Sometimes the face beneath the mask was finer and stronger than the mask itself.

  “Why do you want to come?” he asked Mama Diamond.

  “Maybe just because I’d like to see what all this has been for.” She smiled, making the lines in her face crinkle up like a paper fan. “And maybe I’d like to meet that little sister of yours.”

  Cal nodded. “I’ll do my best, when the time comes.”

  “Of that, I have no doubt.” Mama Diamond yawned hugely, and stretched. “Time this old night owl went to roost.”

  “Good night, ma’am.”

  Mama Diamond walked slowly and cautiously to the door that led to the stairs. Then abruptly, she turned back.

  “Do you think there’s forgiveness in this world, Mr. Griffin, or just atonement?”

  The question startled him, but he found the answer readily there. “I think every day’s a new one…and we do what we can.”

  She ran back and kissed him on the cheek, surprising them both.

  “You go get some sleep now, son,” Mama Diamond said. “And you have yourself some sweet dreams.”

  Then she was gone, down the stairs.

  Cal peered over the lip of the building, but curfew had come and the streets were dark. He heard Mama Diamond’s steps echo away into the night, and knew she meant for him to hear it, a lullaby and good night.

  His eyes lifted again to the moon, bright as God’s serene, eternal gaze.

  Proficiency was not everything, Cal realized, nor even readiness. Sometimes, he had seen, compassion and consensus and mutual need won the day.

  And sometimes not…

  In the distance, in the night beyond, Cal thought he heard, or only imagined, the sound of wings.

  THIRTY-TWO

  RENDEZVOUS IN LOST PLACES

  Okay, in the old days, the guy with the M-80 leads. It looks like a machine gun and makes a firecracker-type sound that is loud, bright and stuns the senses, basically disorients everyone inside.” Krystee Cott, the former naval munitions expert, had the floor and was educating Cal and the others as to just what “doing things by the book” might mean. “This is a breaching charge and is also used to blast open a window or door, with a train of guys outside waiting to enter.”

  There were close to thirty of them gathered in what had been the rec room in Married Student Housing-Cal, Colleen, Doc and Goldie, plus Shango and Mama Diamond, and the fugitive slaves that had accompanied them to A
therton, those judged not too infirm to lend a hand. Guards were posted on the perimeter to make sure no one overheard them.

  “The M-80 isn’t meant to kill anyone, just blow open the door and stun the enemy,” Larry Shango chimed in. “Basic Navy SEAL advancement on a building. The shooters go in, Command and Control coordinates the guys invading.”

  “Yeah, I get it,” Colleen Brooks said. After all, her dad was Air Force, this was for the most part second nature to her. “But we’ve scouted the town. No heavy firepower at all, just a few reconditioned rifles and handguns.”

  “We work with what we’ve got,” Cal said. “The good news is because whatever’s at the Source is so hot to get the Spirit Radio constructed, they’ve been forced to reveal a fair amount of how the new science works-which is why the guns are working.” He addressed Krystee Cott and Shango. “Think you can rig up some munitions using stuff from the college chem lab?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Krystee answered. “Might be a little twitchy, though.”

  “Aren’t we all?” said Goldie. That got a nervous laugh.

  “Let’s talk about manpower,” Cal said.

  “There are two forces,” Shango explained. “The blocking force isolates the building, delta force goes inside.”

  “So we have one group keeping the portal open while the other goes in,” Cal said. “Now, we’re not going to know what’s on the other side till we get there, so we want to get in, see what’s up”-Cal didn’t say, Hopefully get Tina, he didn’t need to-“and get back out again quick, shut everything down. The second assault can be more prepared, utilizing what we learn first time out.”

  Cal spoke with assurance, knowing what was required of him. He wasn’t fooling anyone, that wasn’t the point. They were all volunteers here, knew full well what a rickety structure this was, how prone to disaster.

  Still, in creating the illusion of confidence, Cal understood it increased their chances, gave them renewed hope…including, he was surprised to realize, himself.

  Print the legend….

  Which was, he supposed, how legends got started in the first place.

  Cal then asked Rafe Dahlquist to describe the modifications secretly being made to the device, which might contain the whirlwind, if only for a time. Then Doc explained the outre accoutrements he was stitching together.

  Which didn’t exactly make anyone want to order lunch.

  “Any questions?” Cal asked. “No?”

  There would be soon enough. He called the meeting to a close, and everyone dispersed to their various assignments.

  Emerging out into the brisk coming-winter day, Cal took the steps to the sidewalk two at a time, kicking the golden-red leaves aside, sending them flying.

  We just covered the what, Cal thought worriedly, but not the who.

  What intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic would be waiting on the other side of that door?

  He and Shango had both met one of them, Fred Wishart, who was no longer a man, but who still had some buried part of him that felt human emotions, that could be reached if one knew the key.

  Cal had utilized that knowledge back in Boone’s Gap, when he had played upon Fred’s love of his twin brother, Bob, to get him to relent, if only momentarily, in his ferocious attack on Tina and Cal himself.

  In the autopsy room here in Atherton, Doc had said that the dragons and grunters and flares were all in some fundamental way still human. And Wishart had been, too; at least, enough to be reminded of the loss he had sustained, to summon up a longing that could be transmuted to empathy, to compassion.

  What else waited at the Source Project?

  Something incredibly powerful, a force of will that had yanked Wishart back to its core, and drawn flares mercilessly from wherever they lacked a sufficiently armored protector.

  What lurked at the Source was unimaginably strong, and growing stronger every day. Cal knew he had pitifully little with which to oppose it…except perhaps knowledge of what that power might have secreted unknowing within itself.

  In the aftermath of their battle at Boone’s Gap, Fred Wishart’s brother Bob told Cal that the consciousness at the Source made a mistake in seizing Fred back, that now Fred was a virus, perhaps one that Cal might trigger, awakening his humanity once more.

  Fear and brutality reigned at the Source; Cal had seen the result of it spread over the land like ink spilling across a map.

  But if Fred Wishart was a virus, it was because there was more to his nature than brutality and fear, despite the havoc he had wreaked upon Boone’s Gap; gentler impulses that his human soul might bring into play.

  And he might not be alone.

  So perhaps the question Cal needed to ask was not what lurked at the Source, but rather who….

  In his pocket, Cal could feel the crumpled paper he’d carried with him since copying it from the list Shango had shown him in the woods of Albermarle County.

  On the fifth floor of the Atherton University Research Library, nestled among dusty tomes, Cal found the volume he was searching for. He withdrew it from its place on the shelf, and settled at a desk beside a window to read.

  To some, Who’s Who in Applied and Molecular Physics, eighth revised edition, might have seemed the next best sleep aid to a Steven Seagal film festival. But to Cal, it was utterly enthralling.

  Including, as it did, virtually every scientist at the Source Project.

  Herman Goldman walked in the sunlight, wishing he could empty all the querulous and contrary thoughts from his skull. He was tired of it. Tired of the constant chatter, the nagging self-recrimination and self-justification, all the cacophony of words running in his head like water from a broken faucet. He wanted the frigid sun of waning autumn, like a white circle painted on the dome of the world, to dry it up.

  He walked through town, and the cool wind felt good on his face, fresh and clean and a little sharp. Towering white clouds like mountain peaks skimmed the horizon.

  The day was bright if austere, and the storefronts and dingy brick warehouses by the river gleamed in the sun, grand in their tawdriness, faded and ethereal, trapped in the silvered afternoon like bugs in a gossamer web.

  Like when you were young, Goldie thought, and still going to school, before the madness, but it was a Wednesday and you’d skipped out and all the row houses were unnaturally quiet, as if the neighborhood had declared a holiday from children and all the adults had elected to celebrate with a nap.

  He wanted that isolation and that quiet, away from all the people and their noise; to center and quiet himself, too. It was in that silence and solitude that he could best summon back the sight of her, and the sound, and the smell.

  That he could be with Magritte.

  He let his footsteps follow the river. There was a kind of boardwalk along the riverbank beside some scrubby parkland, some municipal manager’s halfhearted attempt at beautification currently overgrown with devil grass and assorted thistles. Power lines crossed the river here.

  Goldie walked past them, and past the deserted subdivisions now surrendered to weedy fields, past the zoned but undeveloped properties with their sidewalkless streets, past civilization, to a place where the Powdercache River flattened into a silver braid that stitched prairie to prairie. There was duckweed here, and a few faint trails flattened into the tall grass.

  He crouched by the river, plunged his hands into the chilling current, brought forth the cupped and bracing water, and drank. It quenched and burned icily going down, forcibly reminding him of the many things in his foolish life that had sated and brought thirst, soothed and pained him, all at the same time.

  He caught his reflection in the bright surface, and was surprised at the hardness in his eyes, the lines around his mouth that others might have deemed fretfulness but he thought more telling of rage.

  Would Magritte have loved this face, as she had the gentler one he’d worn upon their first meeting? Would she love it still were they to meet again?

  He didn’t believe in s
uch an absurdly sentimental notion as heaven, of course, but he longed for it; Magritte was the first person he had lost with whom he ached to be reunited, the first love he hadn’t severed himself from and fled.

  In the rippling, elusive surface, he thought he could discern her face, a ghost of liquid and light. He wondered if she would approve of the path he had set himself on, the acts he planned in the days ahead.

  Were they for her, for her memory, as he told himself by way of justification…or only for himself?

  He stifled the answer he already knew, and chased the words away.

  It was beautiful here, the long sunlight raking the high yellow grass, the occasional sound of insects, a V of geese subdividing the meridian. He rose and continued walking, the brittle reeds crackling under his feet. This must all be marshland, Goldie thought, when the river runs high.

  The sun, which had seemed fixed and motionless in the sky, was suddenly lower; soon he would be in the dark. Dangerous things were abroad in the land; one shouldn’t be out alone. But along this particular stretch of river, he knew he was the most dangerous creature of all.

  He caught a sound of footsteps behind him, and knew who it was before he turned. In their hajj across the continental United States, they had all of them become accomplished trackers.

  Cal Griffin approached him in the gathering dark, and Goldie saw in his face a mirror of his own, weighted with the future. Cal held out a sheet of paper.

  “There’s some places I’d like you to go,” he said.

  THIRTY-THREE

  ANOTHER NICE MESS

  Waiting had always been the worst part for her, even when she was little and it was the endless anticipation of scanning the horizon for Santa Claus or summer to appear on the glide path coming in on approach.

  Which wasn’t a patch on waiting for some Union of Concerned Scientists, Hearty Man TV-dinner sweet old pencil-pusher-namely, Dr. Rafe Dahlquist-to give you the green light to step over the threshold into hell.

  As the days slid one into the other and winter came on in earnest, Colleen Brooks had to admit that it was her own damnable impatience and not everyone and everything getting on her last nerve that made her want to haul off and kick a puppy.