Ghostlands mt-3
Page 36
At last, at long last, Mama Diamond knew just what she was here for.
“Out of my way, boys and girls,” she said to Griffin and the others as she strode to the head of the group, confidence filling her like wind in a clipper ship’s sails.
They were the last words she said in the tongue of man.
The lead buffalo tilted its head to look at her with its dead black eyes, sniffed at her with its broad, flat nose, incarnadined with shiny, black blood. Behind it, the others of the herd regarded her, waiting, lethal.
“Ho there, Grass Eater!” Mama Diamond called to the leader, in the dragon tongue she knew it would comprehend, her voice booming out so all would hear. “You Dead Thing, you Killer of Flies!”
(From her peripheral vision, Mama Diamond spied Colleen starting to pipe up, saw Cal grab her arm, commanding her to silence. Sharp boy, that one, quick on the uptake. He’d know how to play this out, without Mama having to draw him pictures-a damn good thing, seeing as how Mama Diamond felt sure she wasn’t going to have spare time to haul out pencil and paper….)
“You’re insolent for such a small thing,” Old King Buffalo replied to Mama Diamond, then added, “It will be a pleasure to rip you apart.”
“Listen to Old Cow brag! Did you boast that way when man and horse ran you down, when they laid you low? They should have cut out your tongue, too, Braggart Cow!”
King Buffalo was shifting his weight from side to side, still readying himself but with the slightest hint of hesitation, made unsure by Mama Diamond’s belligerence, her lack of caution.
“Old Cow doubting himself? Lie down, Old Cow, you and your sheep herd with you! Back to earth and worms with you! And bother no more your betters!”
That last jibe hit home; Old King Buffalo lowered his head; his breath was coming in short, enraged grunts.
Let it be now, Mama Diamond thought, reaching down into herself, summoning every bit of resolve and conviction from the deep dragon part of her. And the human part, too, the part that had scratched treasures out of the earth and dispensed their gleaming delights to Native boys and passing travelers alike.
That had left her family behind without a glance.
That had been loved by a boy named Danny once, and lost him to the wider world that had so scared her.
Well, she was in that wide world, now.
With a roar that echoed to the sky, Old King Buffalo charged, and the rest of his herd with him, thundering the earth, the cracked road and ground trembling, their hooves throwing up great clots of snow and grass and dirt.
“BURN!” Mama Diamond screamed and felt herself ignite like the world bursting alight. She extended her arms and willed herself outward in an expression of blaze and consumption.
And this time, her utter surety in the unwavering fact of it made her see it:
Gouts of blue and red and white-hot flame spewed from her and struck King Buffalo, knocking him backward into the others as he screamed and burned. The others were on fire now, too, and the trees and grasses, too. The buffalo plunged aside, bellowing in their terror, dead as they were, some plunging off the cliffside, flipping down and away, screaming, while others stampeded blindly away, shearing off tree trunks and stones in their blind panic.
Mama Diamond risked a glance at her companions, and from their puzzlement it was clear they saw none of the flames, had no understanding why the beasts had rioted and parted. But none of that mattered. Mama Diamond could feel her power ebbing, starting to falter….
“Run!” she cried to the others, and could not say whether she said it in the dragon tongue or not.
But Cal Griffin didn’t need more. He took off at a run, the others following, bolting down the roadway in the opening she’d made for them as the corpse buffalo shrieked and rolled in the dirt and fled.
Mama Diamond stumbled after them, but her legs were watery under her, she had no oomph left, as she continued to fire the stream of flame at the brutes, this way and that, keeping the path open as long as she could.
And maybe the flames were just an illusion, Mama Diamond knew, no more real than a lonely girl’s wish on a summer’s night, but how real were these dead things? (Real enough to kill, she knew that.) The scorched ones were staying scorched, the shredded remnants of their fur and skin and the muscle beneath smoking and filling the winter air with the smell of charred meat.
With a phht! Mama Diamond’s flames abruptly cut out, and her body was intact and cold and frightfully mortal once more as she shivered there.
Coming aware that there was no further threat, the buffalo slowed in their headlong, chaotic rush, turned back toward her again, those that hadn’t plummeted clean off the mountain.
Slowly, cautiously, they drew near, circling her, their crisped hooves crunching the grasses and snow and asphalt. Over their heads, Mama Diamond could discern Griffin and the others clear of them, safe now, just slowing and glancing back, seeing to their dismay that she was not right behind them, that she was cut off and trapped.
Nothing in the world they could do, nothing at all, Mama Diamond reflected, and that was all right. Or at least, it would have to be.
Utterly spent, she sank to her knees in the fresh snow, no longer able to stand, to do anything. A ludicrous phrase came to mind, something from her childhood, from a lesson on writing, of all things. Vomit, then mop. Well, she’d vomited out all that flame, but she didn’t have a lick of energy to mop now, not no way, not nohow.
She saw Old King Buffalo had righted himself and gained his feet, every bit of him black now, burnt clear down to the skeleton. He approached her, was scant feet away.
“You got a bone to pick, Old Cow?” Mama Diamond croaked, and she laughed, although it wasn’t really funny.
Old King Buffalo shrieked like all the damned souls echoing up from the mouth of hell and charged, the rest of them coming on, too.
Mama Diamond closed her eyes, the hammering of their footfalls all the sound in the world, knowing it would not be long now.
Then she felt a hurricane beating of wind surge from above her, and heard angry, rasping words that cut through the din.
“Leave her-she’s mine.”
Mama Diamond opened her eyes and looked up, but all she could see was a vortex of whirling black cloud whipping down out of the storm roof, something winged and dark within, hauling the tempest down with itself as it dropped.
Enormous, taloned fingers wrapped about her midsection and yanked her high into the storm.
In the moment before consciousness left her and she knew no more than the stones in the earth, Mama Diamond put a name to the voice.
It was Ely Stern.
FORTY-SIX
THE MORLOCK AND THE MOORE
Since the time he was ten, Theo Siegel’s favorite book had been The Time Machine, and its most harrowing chapter the sequence where the Time Traveler lost his beloved Weena to the burning woods and the Morlocks.
(Not that Theo ever suspected he himself would someday be a Morlock…)
Now he ran wildly about for a time, calling frantically for Melissa, peering in the shelter of trees and any dark vacancy she may have crept into in search of solitude and clemency. He stayed mostly to the rolling expanse of the Sculpture Garden, knowing full well that in her weakened, transmutative state she could not get far.
He found no one. Finally becoming mindful of his own danger, he looked out to see that the onrushing tide of foul, purple-blue-green moldlight was almost upon him. From his vantage point on a grassy rise, he saw to his alarm that the crashing waves of luminance had encircled his position, that he was trapped, with no way out. Living and conscious-no, he corrected himself, with some nameless consciousness driving it-it swept up splashing, stretching toward him, his small realm of greenery shrinking rapidly as it encroached.
Casting desperately about, he peered back and saw the grouping of glowing, diseased structures on North Campus, the physics and other natural science buildings, all engulfed, devoured, transformed.
A holding place, a nest…
Theo knew where Melissa was.
Hundreds of yards off, impossibly away, across the undulating sea of devil light.
Just then, the gleaming blue tendrils surged up and grabbed him. He cried out, it stung hot like burning cold ice, shooting all the way up his arm into his cheekbones and the sockets of his eyes. He pulled free and scampered away from it, scurried up into the canopy of the lone, untouched tree standing sentinel at the peak of the rise.
Aw man, this is just not my day, Theo thought, and barked out a frenzied laugh as it occurred to him how much he looked like a newspaper cartoon at that moment.
He quieted abruptly as he heard the sound of metal creaking and distorting. From on high in the damp gleaming, he could see the sculptures, Rodin’s Walking Man and Degas’s Little Dancer Aged Fourteen and that funky thing with arms like a windmill, all suffused, inundated with hell-light, coming to life and crunching toward him, with a racket like a demolition derby.
They smashed into the tree, battered it, leaving smears of patinaed bronze on its bark, brought it thundering down. Theo flailed through the air, landing square in the midst of the energy pool. He felt it course over him, submerge him.
The pain was like a swarm of wasps adhering to him. But even so, it wasn’t as bad as he thought it would be. For one thing, it wasn’t devouring or absorbing him, somehow wasn’t able to get inside him (although he could dimly sense voices in his head trying to-well, the best description would be mind-fuck him, mess with his thoughts, get an upper hand on his will; but it wasn’t happening, it felt more like a customer in a restaurant shouting for some attention while being roundly ignored).
It can hurt me, but it can’t kill me, he thought, and it gave him an odd, giddy confidence. And he knew something else, too, although he couldn’t have said how-that the part of him it could hurt was the part that was still human, that had not completely changed.
The realization was momentary, fleeting-just before the huge bulk of metal surged up and encased him.
He recognized the piece, could put a name to it, thanks to the modern-art-appreciation class he’d taken to fulfill his breadth requirements, so he would have what the administration deemed a fully rounded education.
This is fucking ridiculous, he thought as the Henry Moore squeezed the life out of him.
With a rush of adrenaline, he felt the inhuman strength pervade him again, pushed with all his might against the crushing, indifferent bronze. He felt it begin to give way.
Shimmying and grunting, he pulled himself clear of the mass of metal, fell and gained his footing and ran through the living light as it whipped at him and stabbed deep with glowing barbs like Portuguese man-of-wars. The pain was screeching at him, filling his universe. Strobing black flashes filled his vision. He knew any moment he’d pass out, and then it would be adios, amigo.
Theo tripped and sat down hard, gasping as the light overwhelmed him. The world fading out and retreating on him, he felt the last reserves of his strength dissipate, eddy out into the larger, glowing sea.
Suddenly, he felt a strong hand grab him by the scruff of the neck and yank him roughly to his feet.
“Jesus, boy, whatcha doin’? Waitin’ for a streetcar?”
The other figure got a firmer grip on him, around the waist with one long, wiry arm, and then leapt almost straight up, grabbing hold of a ledge on an untouched building with his free hand (Theo knew it to be the Aaron Copland Music Building). He dragged Theo along the precipice, then pulled him into an open window.
The room was pretty dark, but Theo found it was getting easier and easier for him to see in almost no light. There were a number of folks there, and he recognized them all-Krystee Cott, Rafe Dahlquist, Al Watt, almost everyone who had been in the plasma lab; relief flooded him at the thought they’d all gotten away.
Except Jeff…
“Christ, son. You look like shit.”
He turned and saw that the speaker was the one who had hauled him up here and saved his bacon. Brian Forbes, the grunter who had joined Cal Griffin’s band of strays in the blood-drenched snows outside the Gateway Mall, gaped at Theo with enormous eyes the color of albino cave fish.
“Yeah, well, you aren’t exactly an American Beauty yourself,” Theo retorted. Then, abashed, he added, “Thanks.”
Forbes shrugged, and nodded.
Theo recalled how the other had moved through the stinging light, seemingly unharmed.
“That energy crap,” Theo ventured, inclining his head toward the open window and the campus beyond, “Did it hurt you to move through it?”
“A little, not much,” Forbes replied. “Gets kinda noisy in your head, but hey, I’ve hadda screen out crazy bad noise my whole life. I’m from Detroit!”
So I’m right about it, Theo thought. The less human he became, the weaker grip it would have on him.
Krystee Cott stepped up to Theo. He saw she had three rifles strapped across her back, along with ammo belts. “We’ve got the horses saddled and waiting on Coulter Street. We’re getting out of here, away from town, while we still can. Then we’ll regroup and formulate a response.”
What kind of response? We got our asses kicked. Thanks to that dragon, the one who had arrived on metal rails and departed on the storm.
Theo gazed out the window, at the dome that rose above the sea of infection, that gleamed pure in the moonlight.
“I can’t come with you,” he said to the others.
He climbed back out the window, and was lost to the night.
FORTY-SEVEN
THE PARAMETERS OF ABSOLUTION
Stumbling down the mountainside, bitter with the cost of their survival, the winter wind stinging their eyes to slits and icing their lashes, they might all have appeared blind ones to a passing observer, although only one of them truly was.
Do you think there’s forgiveness in this world, Mr. Griffin, or just atonement? Mama Diamond had asked Cal on the moonlit roof of the dormitory back in Atherton.
From the safe distance Mama Diamond’s act of courage had bought them in their confrontation with the butchered, reanimated buffalo, Cal had seen the merciless black shape wrapped in storm cloud swoop out of the darkling sky to seize her up and carry her off into the gale.
Whatever that dark messenger had been, there was no telling where Mama Diamond might be now. Still alive? Cal could only hope. Lost, certainly, to the Storm. Would she forgive him, wherever she was? Could he ever atone for bringing her here?
Or any of those that had followed him: Magritte, Mike Olifiers…
Goldie.
Enid Blindman had been a Pied Piper to lead others to sanctuary, Cal reflected. But what had he led them to? He looked over at his sister, the glowing halo of her floating, changed self casting illumination on the night-dark path ahead.
He knew there was no point in flagellating himself. He had done what he’d had to, as had the rest of them. The world turned every moment, it hurtled through space; stillness was no more than an illusion, a cunning self-deception. Every action, even inaction-especially inaction-was a choice. And the assumption that one held responsibility for all the wild vagaries of the universe was simply arrogance.
I am the captain of my ship, not of the sea….
Cal had listened to the voice within him, and taken the wise counsel of others. It was right to be here, a testament to their tenacity and courage and will-which didn’t lessen the ache of loss in his chest.
Still, he had Christina with him; he had kept that promise, at least. And in doing so, he’d forced changes on himself perhaps even greater than those imposed on his sister, albeit more subtle, less telling to the eye.
He came to an awareness that his sister was scrutinizing him with her strange, opalescent ey
es. He smiled at her, and she gave him the ghost of a smile back.
They had traveled through bleak, uncharted territories, the two of them, both together and alone, and had neither safety nor security now. But then, safety and security were illusions, too; everyone died, that was the way of things.
Gravel and the dust of ages crunching beneath his boots, Cal reflected that if the journey of his life were marked by two ports of call, one of them fear, the other love, he knew at which destination he had arrived.
His sister was beside him, and that was enough.
As they struggled along the looping, switchbacked path of Route 40, thick grasses twined and stretched to grasp at their legs; prairie rattlers and bull snakes uncoiled out of their winter sleeping places to leap snapping at them; slumbering hordes of grasshoppers and mosquitoes and katydids swarmed up to envelop them. The night and land were alive, suffused with a muted, blue St. Elmo’s fire that pulsed and writhed over all that rose to meet them at the bidding of the Thing unseen.
Christina drove them back with her luminosity, Enid and Papa Sky with the heat of their music. And what they couldn’t deflect, Cal and Colleen, Doc and Inigo and Howie and Shango stomped and hacked to bits with boot and sword, machete and knife.
Inch by inch, yard by yard, mile by mile…
How much farther now? Hard to tell in this blackness. Thirty miles? Twenty-five? An infinity.
They were coming down out of the Black Hills onto the Badlands now. The snow, with its odd taste of defilement when it brushed their lips, was abating, giving way to a cruel, unrelenting wind that had teeth in it, that chilled them clean through despite the many layers of clothing they wore. Their teeth chattered, and their limbs shook as they pressed on in grim silence. Tina alone seemed untouched by the cold, serene and enigmatic in her weightlessness.
The attacks appeared to be lessening, becoming more sporadic, less intent. Perhaps whatever lived at the Source drew in upon itself as night came on; perhaps even It needed to sleep sometimes.