Magic Time: Ghostlands

by Marc Scott Zicree

  Obligingly, he switched to “Every Breath You Take,” by the Police.

  Colleen didn’t get the joke, until she looked through the field glasses Doc handed off to her.

  In the garish light of their torches, she could see fifteen hard men riding quickly on big, powerful horses. The riders were weighted down with evil-looking knives, short swords and what looked like spearguns.

  They wore body armor and police helmets.

  But more striking than that—and what chilled Colleen beyond anything the white crystals flurrying around her could—were the three stunted figures scrabbling ahead of the horses, tethered to them by thick lengths of rope.

  She understood now how the trackers had found them.

  The posse had grunters on leashes, and were using them as bloodhounds.

  SIX

  THE PADDYROLLERS

  They stood waiting in the fresh snow outside the glass doors—one shattered, one whole—as the horses thundered to a halt in front of the mall.

  Colleen had her crossbow trained on the lead horseman as he steadied his mount, holding his torch overhead in a big gloved hand. The other men were fanned out behind him on their horses, palms on their weapons. On two of the steeds were big coiled lengths of chain—shackles awaiting use.

  The horses blew out steam from their nostrils, their mouths frothing from the hard ride. The trio of gray, stooped grunters were gasping, too, the vapor in the cold air wreathing them in what looked like veils. Their huge, pallid eyes stared unblinking at Colleen and Doc, Goldie and Cal.

  Cal stepped forward, but said nothing. He held his sword casually, in readiness.

  “I am Hector Perez,” the head man said, speaking each word as if it were a command. “Lieutenant in charge of this duly deputized posse. We are currently pursuing a group of escapees from Stateville Correctional Facility in Joliet, Illinois.”

  “Joliet, huh? Not Unionville?” Colleen asked, with an edge.

  Perez didn’t move his head, but his narrowed eyes slid over to appraise her. “Sorry, ma’am, I didn’t catch your name.”

  “I didn’t give it.”

  Cal stepped between Perez and Colleen. “You were telling us your business,” he prompted.

  “We have reason to believe our fugitives are inside that building.” Perez paused, then added meaningfully, “Our quarrel is not with you, unless you choose to make it one.”

  Cal said, “Give us a minute.”

  Perez nodded assent. Cal drew Colleen and the others close, none of them lowering their weapons or taking their eyes off their adversaries. They spoke in low tones.

  “What do you think?” Cal asked

  “I think they’re full of it,” said Goldie. “Olifiers and the others don’t have a prison vibe—or enough homemade tattoos by half. Plus I can smell eau de police a mile away, and these guys ain’t it. I’m telling you, they may have been regular force once upon a time, but they’re independent contractors now.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Yeah, but what if they’re not?” Colleen whispered hoarsely. “Do we really want to come down on the wrong side of this?”

  Cal mulled it over, took a step back toward the grim rider. “Mr. Perez, much as we’d like to be agreeable, we aren’t convinced of your jurisdiction here.”

  Perez grimaced, looking as if he’d just gotten a piece of nut jammed in a tooth. He shifted on his saddle and spoke solely to Cal. “Let me tell you my working philosophy. I treat everyone with respect. You can’t rob a man of his respect and expect him to act rationally. But there’s a hierarchy of command, and I am committed to that prevailing.”

  “Is that why you have been whipping these people?” Doc asked acidly.

  “We have levels of escalation when we meet with failure to obey, and pain compliance is one of our tools, yes.”

  Recognizing he was gaining no traction, Perez sighed and again addressed them all. “I have seen enough suffering to last me a lifetime. I have seen mothers cook up their own babies in convection ovens. I have seen grown men violate boys not out of nursery school. I’m pleased to tell you those individuals did not survive to face a jury of their peers. Do we comprehend each other?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “Then stand aside.”

  Which was when the screams started.

  In later times, Goldie associated the moment he first really came into his true dark power with that night, and the smell. That terrible, irrevocable instant when the clean, crisp scent of snow was invaded by the iron tang of blood, the air hot and fresh and thick with it, and the knowledge that someone was dying or dead.

  But in that moment when the screaming began, all that was immediately clear was that Perez and his men were not alone.

  Miles back, Perez had divided his force—which turned out to be not fifteen men, but forty—into three contingents. The middle group, the ones with torches, the decoys, rode straight on. The others came in fast and low on foot, silently and shrouded in darkness, flanking the building.

  Fortunately, as Goldie might well have observed, Cal Griffin was a lawyer, and thus well used to misdirection, treachery and betrayal.

  So when these intruders came on hard and fast and furious, they discovered Cal had secreted fully half of Olifiers’s thirty-three men and women in the cars and trucks and Winnebagos that had up and died in and around the parking lot that fateful day when the Storm moved in.

  These ravaged men and women surged out of hiding, screaming their lungs out, armed to the teeth with the pipes and branches and stones they’d brought to the party, not to mention the knives and swords and crossbows Cal and company had picked up along the way and augmented them with.

  Like a director setting up a crowd scene, Cal questioned each and every one of them beforehand, discerning their skills and temperament, giving each his or her task.

  He’d requested they not harm the paddyrollers any more than they needed to.

  But hell—not to put too fine a point on it—it was payback time.

  The screams didn’t surprise Perez. However, the sudden loud release of a very large spring from the roof of the mall building did.

  Perez looked up at the sound from above, but wasn’t fast enough to get out of the way.

  The weighted net—Goldie’s “security device,” hauled all the way from New York City—was catapulted off the roof of the mall building and landed squarely atop him and his horse, snaring them both. Perez let out a curse, the horse flailed wildly and shrieked, but the strong fibers held them fast.

  Perez was an old hand, however, and managed to hold on to his torch in spite of everything. The cords began to sizzle and smoke where he worked to burn through them.

  The three grunters tethered to Perez’s horse were clear of the net, but still bound to the steed. They pulled frantically, blindly, as if to get away but curiously did nothing to bite or tear away the ropes.

  Cal cut their bonds, and they scampered away.

  The other horsemen charged, and Cal, Colleen, Doc and Goldie had their hands full. But this was not the ragtag quartet that had driven a rioting mob back when Ely Stern had led it rampaging down Eighty-first. The four of them had been practicing their fighting skills every day since, and now they moved with a flow and effortless teamwork that rivaled the best basketball squad. Parry, thrust, slash, fire, fall back, regroup, attack again. And all the while Goldie dazzling the enemy with his harmless fireworks—not that they knew that—driving the attackers back.

  Then it all went south.

  Perez was nearly free of the smoldering net. He screamed at a twisted little man atop a black mare, a man who had hung back out of the action and said nothing.

  “Eddie!”

  Eddie just nodded and raised his head—which Goldie could see, even from this distance in the torchlight and moonbeams bouncing off the fresh-fallen snow, was cadaver-thin with shiny black hair pasted down like a coat of shellac. He fixed his gaze on them.

  It was just as though a big invisi
ble hand grabbed up Colleen and lifted her high into the air, flinging her toward the little man. She cried out, dropping her crossbow.

  Eddie angled his head, as if drawing her toward him with an unseen tether, reeling her in. Colleen hovered ten feet away from him and ten feet up. Her arms pressed down into her sides and she grunted, as if the invisible hand was squeezing her.

  “Stand down!” Perez, free of the mesh now, shouted at Cal and the others. “Stand down or she dies!”

  “You do that and I will be so pissed!” Colleen yelled at them. But then Eddie frowned, and they could all see she was being pressed even harder, and she cried out.

  And Goldie thought of Douglas Brattle, the fear caster who had attacked him and Larry Shango along that shallow creekbed in Albermarle County, and of Primal in the dark core of Chicago, who had seized Magritte—beautiful, soul-sick Magritte—and drained her of her life like a man would suck the juice out of an orange.

  And the anguish and grief and rage were upon him again—and with them the screaming, cacophonous blood-choir song of the Source that was always there and not there—and this time he didn’t stuff it back down and away but instead opened himself up to the tearing out of his own lungs and guts and heart.

  You open yourself to it and fall away….

  In his peripheral vision, Goldie could see Cal hesitating, starting to lower his sword, and Doc his blade.

  But Goldie—the pure, yes, primal fire that was Goldie, or what was left of his mind and self—had no such thought, no hesitance; instead, he reached out with both hands, fingers spreading like a flower blossoming to a bee.

  The sheer force rippled through the night like a shock wave, you could see it distorting the air, pulverizing the falling snowflakes, blasting them apart and aside as it plowed ahead. It reached Eddie’s steed, knocked the horse brutally back, drove it to its knees with a strangled, terrified groan.

  Eddie took the brunt of the force wave. It slammed into him and hurled him back off the horse, sent him cartwheeling helplessly through the air.

  The invisible cord severed, Colleen dropped onto the soft snow, the breath knocked from her but otherwise unharmed.

  Not so with Eddie, who struck a big cedar with a hideous impact that shook the tree as if a rampaging bull had run full tilt into it. Then—incredibly—he was gone, vanished clean away. The extremities of the tree, it’s bare branches, burst into flame with a sudden whoosh of ignition, lighter fluid on a barbecue. It blazed like a tiki torch.

  Seeing this, everyone on both sides of the fray was stilled to shocked silence.

  Cal recovered first, said to Goldie, “How did you do that?”

  “I don’t know,” Goldie said, equally stunned.

  “Where did he go? Did you send him away?”

  A whisper now, “I don’t know….”

  (But in a savage rush of emotion, Goldie realized he hungered to do more of this…and needed to learn more to be able to do so.)

  “Take them!” Perez was yelling at his men. “Dammit, take them!” But they were reluctant now, all the fight drained out of them by the appalling miracle they had just witnessed.

  The topmost parts of the cedar, blackened and burning furiously, cracked off the tree and fell crashing to earth, throwing angry sparks up into the night.

  Goldie shot out his hands again—whether a bluff or not, no one could tell, least of all himself. The attackers wheeled their horses around and took off for the hills at a mad gallop.

  Seeing he was alone against them, Perez threw aside his torch and, with an expletive, reined his horse about to race after his men.

  But at the last moment, he drew the speargun from its holster on the saddle and fired one killing bolt back at Cal.

  Cal had no time to even register it, for a vast figure surged up behind him from out of the doorway and threw him down into the drift. He heard the whip-crack of the spear flying above him, then the hard wet-meat noise of it connecting with the body of the one who had saved him.

  There was the smell of blood, and Mike Olifiers fell beside Cal, the spear through his neck.

  Cal staggered to him as Olifiers pumped out his life, red onto the snow. Doc was there, too, now, as were Colleen and Goldie, but there was nothing he could do.

  Olifiers was drowning, choking on his blood, struggling to gasp something out to Cal.

  “Why?” Cal asked, tortured, wanting to turn back time, to take the spear that had been meant for him, not Olifiers. “Why did you do that?”

  “They,” Olifiers gurgled, “need…” He reached up a big meaty hand, wet with blood, and grabbed Cal’s shoulder hard as Cal bent over him. His eyes were fierce as they sought out the younger man.

  He didn’t need to say the rest.

  They need you.

  Olifiers fell back, and was gone.

  Perez had followed his men—the ones who were still alive, who could still ride—away into the night, across the flatlands.

  They didn’t come back.

  The three grunters still crouched nearby, not moving, eyes huge and wary, staring at the big dead man, and the four beside him.

  “Go on,” Cal told them. “Go where you like. You’re free.”

  Two of them fled into the darkness that so suited them. But the other remained, drew timidly up to Cal.

  “Want…” it said tentatively, “to follow you.” Its eyes moved from Cal down to the body beside him, awash in its own blood, then back to Cal.

  Cal weighed the offer, and then said, “What’s your name?”

  The grunter—whose name was Brian Forbes, and who had been a man once in Detroit—followed silently on padded feet as they carried Olifiers back into the mall.

  SEVEN

  THE CITY AND DEVINE

  In the years to come, those who were there would tell their children and grandchildren what they saw, and call her Lady Blade. But her real name was May.

  The wind off Lake Michigan was a knife that hard near-winter day, cutting through the passersby as they hurried on, driven by the cold and the fear of the streets that were a hunting ground, now that Chicago was no longer the Ruby City and Primal was dethroned and destroyed, and his palace in shambles around him.

  The city had reconstituted itself, in a fashion, devolved or at least returned to something of its former power structure, the old Party Machine, in this world where machines no longer ran but power and politics and greed held the whip hand, as they always had.

  May felt nothing of the wind, tuned only to the still certainty within her that she had found the terminus of a search that had drawn her across many long miles and through many black places.

  She stood at the corner of Randolph and Dearborn, cloud shadows painting her light and dark as they moved, studying the twisted metal framework that speared into the sky like the flayed fingers of giants. The rubble was piled high at its base, big scorched stones, a testament to rage and chaos and, perhaps, the inevitability of ruin.

  Tons of stone and insulation, wiring and furniture, pipe and cement—fifty stories’ worth—thrown into a blender to spray out over the terrain. Left here to the snow and sun and rain, to wear away like a mountain of pride torn down. No one in Chicago had the equipment anymore to haul all that debris away, nor the inclination, she supposed. Better to leave it as a monument, or unmarked grave, or abandoned killing ground. She noted that the men and women hurrying by averted their eyes as they passed, shied to the other side of the street, pretended it wasn’t there.

  But May could look it straight in the face; it was hardly the worst she had seen, or been forced to endure.

  Once the structure had been the Chicago Media Building, home to Primal Records, punching up off the pavement five hundred feet in its assurance and arrogance. Then it had transformed, mutated as so much had mutated in this spinning world, into something far grander and more terrible, into cathedral and fortress and keep, where a demigod Beast held sway, a demon who had beaten back the Storm and granted safe haven to some, the privileged,
for a time.

  But May knew that it had been no haven for him, whatever largesse he had bestowed, for in the secret place of his soul he was lost.

  Those here who had served and feared him and lived by his whim called him Primal, but they had not known him, not like she had.

  For in the time before that time, May had called him husband, and known his true name.

  It was not the same as the fitting names her people gave each other, that she herself had, but it bore something of the same intimacy, the same history.

  “Listen,” a nervous voice beside her piped up, “it’s not safe to stay here. We gotta move on.”

  “In a minute,” she said. She looked sidewise at the one who had brought her here, whom she had found at Buddy Guy’s club down on Wabash, who had been brave enough to answer her questions when no one else would meet her gaze or dare speak of the past and what had gone down.

  But Gabe Cordell, with his shining black hair and broadly muscled arms, was a man with spine, even if he was in a wheelchair.

  Rolling at a determined clip she’d had to walk briskly to keep pace with, Gabe had led her out into the night and brought her to a barricaded street of tenements and the home of a furtive man named Wharton, who for a time had been a follower of Primal’s.

  Wharton had cherished the order and safety Primal had secured him; in truth, had loved him. In this day and age, when photographs were hard to come by, Wharton understood that memory could hold only so much, an image that faded with the corrosion of time.

  From its hiding place under the floorboards, he withdrew the metal toolcase that had once held other keepsakes, unlocked it and gently lifted out the plaster cast. He held it up to May, angled it to catch the light of thick candles.

  He had taken the death mask of the broken, ill-used man as he’d lain abandoned and discarded among the wreckage, so much garbage in the dirt.

  The plaster face revealed little of the easy intelligence, the soft sweet eyes, the compassionate, off-center grin that had made her love him. But the round face was there, the delicate features, and May had no doubt. It was Clayton.