Magic Time: Ghostlands

by Marc Scott Zicree

  Doc smiled gently. “No, Colleen, you are educated in the skills that are most useful of all. The rest of us have simply accumulated a magpie collection of mostly useless facts.”

  Colleen grimaced. “God, Viktor, I hate it when you’re charming.” But her eyes were smiling. “Paddyrollers, huh?” She contemplated Olifiers and the group of footsore men and women gamely bringing up the rear.

  “Or something with an alternate name but the same enchanting job description,” Goldie noted.

  “It may be a new world,” Cal said, sorrow welling in his voice, “but it’s a whole lot like the one that came before it.”

  Colleen let out a slow breath, considering. “If they’ve got a good tracker, or anyone with a map ability like yours—” She nodded toward Cal.

  “Like I used to have, you mean.”

  “Whatever. We’re in for a hell of a ride.”

  “An E-ticket ride, if I might elaborate,” muttered Goldie.

  “Yeah,” Colleen said. “And no one would know what the hell you’re elaborating about, as usual.”

  “Oops, sorry, I always forget you’re of a generation without cultural grounding.” Goldie plucked one of the five aces from his hat, toyed with it between his fingers. “Second vocabulary term of the day. It’s an old thing from Disneyland—back when there was a Disneyland, I suppose. My esteemed mother and father took me there, a little side trip from a couple of symposia they were attending.” A flick of his fingers and the ace was gone…appearing back in the brim with the other cards. “They didn’t just use to have one pass where you’d enter and ride all the attractions. There were tickets with letter grades—A, B, C, D and E. The A tickets were really lame—trolley rides on Main Street, that sort of thing. But the E-ticket rides, now that was real magic, the monorail, jungle cruise, haunted mansion…. It was the highest you could go, the best.”

  “Thanks as usual for telling me more than I’d ever need to know,” Colleen huffed. “Anyhow, if you’re right about that paddyroller stuff, what’s coming down the pike won’t be the best of anything. It’ll be a royal ass-kicking, and I’d just as soon it not be us on the receiving end.”

  “Ducking out on a fight?” Cal grinned devilishly. “That doesn’t sound like the Colleen Brooks I know.”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not Russell Crowe in Gladiator.” Answering their looks, she added. “Okay, okay, maybe I am Russell Crowe in Gladiator, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it…at least, not all the time.” Another glance back at Olifiers and his group. “All I’m saying is, just because these folks are charter members of the Cal Griffin fan club doesn’t mean we should run interference for them till spring thaw.”

  “So what would you have them do, Colleen?” Doc asked. “Return to the life they so recently fled?”

  “They claim they fled. Honestly, Viktor, we don’t have to believe everything Joe Apocalypse and his brother tells us. I mean, look at the mess it got us into back in Chicago.”

  Anguish blossomed in Goldie’s eyes, was quickly suppressed.

  Colleen was instantly repentant. “Oh God, Goldman, I’m sorry…. I use my mouth like most people use a sledgehammer.”

  For the briefest moment, Cal flashed again on Agent Larry Shango, whom he’d seen use a hammer like that most effectively, and fortuitously, when Shango had entered the fray at a deserted creekbed in Albermarle County and saved Herman Goldman from paramilitary raiders; before Shango had shared the secret list naming the scientists of the Source Project with them. He wondered on what path that fierce, self-contained traveler might now be embarked.

  Cal forced his mind back to the here and now, to doing what he did best…smoothing the rough edges, binding the four of them back together, keeping them on track.

  “We’re all worn to the nub,” Cal said. “Let’s get these folks bedded down for the night. Then we can recharge, get some perspective.”

  Goldie nodded, urged his horse forward. But for the rest of their ride, he was silent.

  TWO

  OUTSIDE MEDICINE BOW, WYOMING

  Mama Diamond was alone in her house of rock and bone when she heard the whistle far down the tracks and over the horizon, and mistook it for a memory.

  Mama Diamond was old. She was thin as chicken bones, and a cataract had clouded much of the vision in her left eye. She wore rings on her fingers, the rings fixed in place by swollen knuckles, a part of her now. The rings were cheap silver melted down from old forks and spoons, set with garnet and turquoise. She had made them herself, back when her lapidary and fossil business just off the juncture of highways 30 and 487 was a going concern, here at the foot of Como Bluff. One of the richest fossil beds in the world, it was a perfect spot for tourists to wile away an hour or two on the drive from Laramie to Casper, just a long shout out of Medicine Bow in the flyspeck little town of Burnt Stick. She was Japanese-American, but the tourists took her for Blackfoot. She made no effort to disabuse them of the notion; it was good for business.

  But now there were no more tourists, only wanderers and marauders and crazy, lost pilgrims on the way from somewhere to nowhere or back again.

  Mama herself was a long way from the place she’d once called home in the San Bernardino Mountains of California. There she’d had a different name, been called Nisei among other things, and had parents who told her bedtime stories of their growing times in Osaka and San Francisco, at least in the days before she and her family had been gathered up like raw cotton in a sack and carted off to the internment camps at Manzanar and Heart Mountain.

  So she had set off on her own journey long years ago, been a wanderer and a pilgrim herself, traversing the Utah, Colorado and Montana ranges and even the far-flung Gobi, until she had come at last to Wyoming, to this place of long skies and fierce winters. She liked living in a place with hard weather and harder people, in the shadow of the mountains that told the truth of the land. Folks said America was a young country, but those granite spires put the lie to that. It was a realm like everywhere else in this old world, with layer upon ancient layer, and the history there in the rock if you just took the time to listen for it. The stones and bones of the buried past beckoning to be discovered, prized out, dusted and shined and revealed in their true glory.

  She sat now on the porch of her old house in the bent-birch rocker, bundled against the gray noon wind in her weathered leather overcoat with the elk buttons and rabbit lining. Winter was coming on, she could feel it in the late November bite of the air, and she wondered if it would be harsh—where one ran a rope from building to building so as not to get lost in the demon-breath of blizzard—or the milder variety of the past few years. Since the Change, there was no telling what the future might bring.

  Only the likelihood that today would be like yesterday and the day before. Forecast: solitude, with more of the same.

  She liked to sit on her porch and read in the afternoon, now that Burnt Stick was a ghost town.

  Or at least “depopulated.” All the people had gone away, or died, after the Change. Without pumped water, Burnt Stick was simply too dry in the hotter months to keep a population. These days, you had to know how to find water, how to carry it, how to store the rainfall—skills only a scavenger rat like Mama Diamond readily possessed. She was not exactly the only living thing in Burnt Stick—she had seen coyotes in packs, pronghorn, mule deer, and those things, not quite human, that shambled through the streets now and again after dark. The only living ordinary human person, that she was. Well, maybe not “ordinary” in the old sense. But un-Changed. Human flesh. All too.

  She lifted her canteen, sipped tepid water, squinted her good eye at the book she’d carried out. It was a Tom Clancy novel from the Benteen Avenue lending library, more pages than pebbles in a quarry. It would last her a good long time. There were no new books anymore. But Mama Diamond didn’t figure she would run out of books, not before her eyesight failed altogether.

  The pace of the novel was slacking now. Everybody was lecturi
ng the President about some crisis. Boys, Mama Diamond thought, you didn’t know a crisis from a wood louse.

  In these silly, diverting books that wiled away the time, virile men were always saving the world. But her dusty long experience had taught her that no one ever saved the whole world, not really, only their own little part of it. And truth to tell, it was more often the women doing the saving than the men, whatever the history books said.

  All those submarines and aircraft carriers must have shut down at the Change, just like the TV stations and the automobiles. Maybe there were aircraft carriers still floating at sea, all the sailors long since starved to death. Had they taken to cannibalism as a last resort? Or would they have scattered to open boats and made for land, trusting themselves to the whims of wind and fate? As everyone now had, really. Amy Hutchins, who used to run the grocery store across the street, had had a boy in the navy. Amy was long gone now, of course. Everybody was gone.

  The train whistle sounded again.

  It was a train whistle, unmistakably so. The old-fashioned kind, not that bleating honk the freighters made; a whistle that called over the chill range land like a lost love, that brought strange, dark carnivals in its wake and disarranged time.

  Mama Diamond stirred uneasily. She dropped the paperback and stood, bones creaking almost as loudly as the old pine planks. She shuffled down Parkhill Street to the old Burnt Stick railroad station, to where she could get a good long look at the tracks.

  The depot had not been active for twenty-five years. Freight used to come through every couple of days, low-sulfur coal hauled from the Hanna mines in Carbon County. But the freights never even slowed at Burnt Stick. The depot was a relic, all flaking paint, planks and beams bleached by sun and cracked by cold. She guessed it was the smell she liked best. Old wood, wind-whipped, giving up ghosts of pine and creosote.

  The old Union Pacific tracks cut due south into the Medicine Bow Range, north into the gray sage foothills of the Shirley Mountains, then east across the Laramie Range, where ages ago sharks the size of sperm whales had settled down to die, later joined by maiasaurs and T. rex. The call had come echoing off the hills, and Mama Diamond turned, facing their heights, squinting up her good eye against the ruthless slate light. But if there was a train, she couldn’t see it.

  She watched for a time, patient but vaguely alarmed.

  Now came the whistle again, closer, almost taunting (no need, surely, to blow a whistle in all this emptiness). Mama Diamond had the unsettling thought that she should climb down off the platform and paste her ear to the steel track like the Indians in the old matinees. She’d probably pull a muscle if she tried it—get stuck there, and the train (if there was a train) would split her head open like a cleaver splitting a vine-ripened tomato.

  But there was no need to listen to the tracks, because here was the train itself, suddenly visible winding out of the foothills like a black millipede scuttling from a crevice in a basement wall. It was blurred in the distance, so she couldn’t be certain if it had topped the ridge or actually burst out of the earth itself. She tried to resolve the shape of the thing, peering into an ice-breath of wind that made her eyes sting and water, but all she could at first make out was a featureless assemblage of rectangular boxes, like a subway train.

  As it approached, however, it seemed to take on complexity and ornamentation, and she wasn’t sure if her eyes were playing tricks or—crazy thought—the train was actually changing as it drew near, deciding how best to present itself.

  It came chuffing down toward Burnt Stick, and Mama Diamond stepped cautiously back into the shadow of the depot. Her mouth was dry again, but she had left her canteen on the porch, the chill air turning its surface cold as a tombstone as it lay atop the Clancy paperback.

  The train began to slow.

  Sweet Jesus, Mama Diamond thought, what dark miracle is this?

  It was no ordinary train—as if she needed convincing of that, in a world without machines. It now clearly revealed itself as a single engine with a long string of passenger cars. The engine was antique-looking but shiny clean, like a coal-burner dragged out of a museum. The passenger cars were rounded and streamlined like the old transcontinental sleepers. Both the engine and cars were a carapace black, and the passenger windows, too, held the same darkness, no light piercing through. The insides, Mama thought, must be cold as a freezer. And who in their right mind would paint a passenger car that kind of black? If it was paint; the whole thing looked cast in onyx.

  The train slowed, came huffing to a stop like something out of a dream, and Mama Diamond began to wish she had taken the trouble to hide herself, began to wish she had not even come here, that she had stayed inside like a sensible person. Though she suspected there was no hiding from whatever the train carried.

  She thought about how peaceful it had been just a few minutes ago, when she was alone with her book and the sleepy hum of the town.

  The train halted, hissing hot breaths of steam. Mama Diamond tried to get a look at the driver. But the cab windows were blacked as well.

  From within the cars, Mama Diamond discerned a new sound, of movement and bodies, and a burbling of voices that might have been men or beasts or something in between. Her stomach tightened, she felt the bristly, gray-steel hairs on her neck rise.

  A passenger door slid open on the first coach and Mama Diamond jerked her head in that direction.

  A man climbed out. A man with long black hair pulled hard back and held by a white-gold clasp, wearing black fathomless shades, black shirt and slacks and belt with a white-gold buckle, his long black coat fanning out behind him. He held a dark cigarette with burning red tip, and smoke curled from his cold thin lips.

  As he walked toward her, Mama Diamond knew this contained, silent man had not been one of the brute voices within. His voice would be as clear and sharp as a stiletto.

  She stood watching as he came near, and in the merciless gray light it seemed as if he suddenly shimmered like ripples on a storm-wracked lake and changed, growing bigger and bonier, like strata shooting up out of a rock face. His black leather cloak altered, too, stretching out long fingers, gaining its own powerful architecture, becoming…

  Wings, leathery wings big as box kites, supported by vast pebbled shoulders, which in turn supported a scaly head, ridge-boned and hard-angled, with eyes set deep in burnished sockets, eyes golden as Kazakhstan amber wrapped around a Jurassic spider. The cigarette was gone from his taloned hand, but a memory of smoke still curled from between his dagger teeth.

  I’m too old to run away, Mama Diamond thought. Probably crack a hip if she tried, and then what? No 911, no ambulance out of the county clinic.

  Anyway, she thought, when Death comes for you with bat wings and golden eyes in a black impossible train, running probably isn’t much of a strategy.

  Her knees trembled. She hoped they wouldn’t buckle on her. The dragon drew up close to her now—slowly, smoothly, with the invisible majesty of great power—and fear bubbled through Mama Diamond like a dizzy drug.

  The dragon-thing, this grotesque that had been a man—no, merely seemed a man—moments ago, stood glaring down at her.

  “I couldn’t decide what to wear…so I thought I’d give you a choice.” His voice, clearly New York/East Coast, held the precision of a keen blade, plus a resonance potent as a boulder rolling down a rocky slope.

  A choice, Mama Diamond thought. Like the train itself, changing as it drew near, somehow taunting, threatening.

  “Which is the truth?” Mama Diamond asked, and was surprised at how level her voice sounded.

  “Both…but this is the latest model.”

  Mama Diamond studied the razor claws, the teeth like a tyrannosaur. “If this is what I have to deal with, I’d just as soon see it.”

  “You’ve got sand,” the dragon said. “Or I could say grit…or stones.” Mama Diamond knew he was toying with her, playing his cruel games as he had no doubt often done even before the world had turned ove
r, before he had become what he’d always been within.

  Mama Diamond said nothing. Silence, she knew, could be a blade, too. Or at least a tool to make folks get to the point.

  “Good of you to meet me,” he said, and even in the gray light of winter coming, his black scales held an iridescence like the peacock pyrites she’d once hawked to city dwellers who’d only seen those colors in grease streaks on tarmac.

  “I have to confess I didn’t know you were coming.”

  “But you did. On some level. We know a lot of things we don’t think we know. You are Judith Kuriyama?”

  Not for a long time, not really. “People call me—”

  “Mama Diamond.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Proprietor, Rock and Bone?”

  “Yes. And you are—?”

  “Ely Stern. Attorney-at-law. Once upon a time.”

  “What do you want, Ely Stern?”

  “We’ll start,” the dragon said, “with a look at your shop.”

  Arnie Sproule, an old friend of Mama Diamond’s, dead since ’92, used to tell this joke:

  What’s the difference between a dead lawyer in the middle of the road and a dead snake in the middle of the road?

  And before you could answer, Arnie would grin and say: There are skid marks in front of the snake.

  An old groaner, and not a particularly funny one. But now here was Ely Stern, combining perhaps the worst aspects of the two, lawyer and serpent. Any skid marks in front of Ely Stern would surely have represented a fevered attempt to brake and flee.

  The worst part, Mama Diamond thought as she slow-walked with the dragon down the main street of Burnt Stick, was how calming his presence was. Not reassuring—oh no, definitely not—but calming the way an oil slick calms a wind-whipped sea; calming the way a dose of Thorazine calms a lunatic. The energy, the madness, is intact, but it can’t be expressed. Something about Ely Stern slowed the heartbeat and thickened the tongue. One was not permitted to panic in his grand and overweening presence.