Magic Time: Ghostlands

by Marc Scott Zicree

  With its wings drawn up behind it like lateen sails, it arrowed down some invisible arc of the wind.

  Cal raised his sword and darted forward, Doc close behind, running hard. But it was futile—the grunter child was a dozen yards away.

  Cal glanced back and saw Colleen fighting the bolt that had become jammed in the cradle of her crossbow. Goldie—

  Goldie stood upright and raised his hands. Balls of fierce turquoise light arced from his palms and flew toward the plunging dragon.

  The light was brighter than the glare of the setting sun, and the grunter child looked back to see the source of these sudden shadows. When he saw the dragon dropping toward him, he stumbled and fell—which might have saved his life, Cal thought. The dragon overshot its prey. Goldie’s fireballs overshot their target, too, but the dragon was forced to curve low to avoid them. It folded its wings and struck the tarmac of the highway, rolled a few times before it stood upright.

  “Motherfucker!” the dragon howled, its voice like stone grinding stone in some fetid cavern. “I’m gonna fuck you up, you fucking fucks!”

  “Aw, geez,” Colleen muttered to herself. “White-trash dragons, yet.”

  The dragon on the ground was no less threatening, no less lethal, than it had been in the air. At its full height it towered over the grunter child. For that matter, it towered over Cal, who arrived between the child and the dragon and held his sword at point.

  “Run!” he told the child. “Get out of here, find a place to hide.” But the grunter only stared at him, paralyzed.

  The dragon grinned.

  The dragon’s grin was terrible, resplendent with tooth and fang. Cal raised his sword. The dragon’s eyes followed the bright steel.

  Colleen chose that moment to fire her crossbow. The bolt sped past Cal and embedded itself in the dragon’s shoulder—not deeply, because the dragon’s pebbled skin was as dense as leather. But deep enough that the dragon screamed.

  The scream—an eardrum-rattling roar, animal pain aligned with human rage—seemed to set the grunter child free. He turned and ran for the tall grass while Colleen nocked another bolt. Cal steadied himself in case the dragon leapt at him. And the dragon did leap, but directly upward, rowing the air in an effort to heave himself aloft. Cal was thrown to the ground by the wind rush and almost deafened by the kettledrum beat of the vast black-red wings. The dragon flashed over his head, diving once more toward the grunter child. The child had begun to scream, long hooting screams that erupted from his larynx like hiccups. And there was another sound—

  Another sound, familiar and yet exotic.

  The rumble of an automobile engine, the grinding of tires on gritty tarmac.

  Which was, of course, impossible.

  Colleen was distracted by the arrival of the vehicle. Her second shot went wide, the bolt passing the dragon’s left wing like an errant torpedo.

  The child continued to scream. But even the dragon seemed to hesitate in the air at the sight of this new arrival.

  Here was a miracle.

  It didn’t look much like a miracle. It looked like an old Cadillac El Dorado, dusty black, with a cracked windshield and a rust-spattered scratch running down the passenger door like a lightning bolt. But it was moving under its own power.

  Everything Cal had learned since the Change made this a miracle. Automobiles were useless; engines were useless. Since that watershed day in July, no one on earth—to Cal’s knowledge—had been able to run a motor or plug in an appliance. That was the essence of the Change. There was no clause exempting late-model Caddies. It was as if a living mastodon had wandered down the road—more surprising in fact; the Change might well have revived a few mastodons, but the automobile should have been irrevocably extinct.

  The dragon lost interest in the grunter child and spiraled upward, sculling for altitude.

  Tom came running out of the high grass, grabbed the child up in his arms and dashed back to hiding.

  The automobile crunched to a stop. The driver’s door flew open and a young man stepped out.

  The driver appeared to be in his twenties, a short, amiable-looking guy with glasses, thinning black hair and a bristle-length goatee framing his mouth. He wore a black T-shirt under a Day-Glo orange vest. At the sight of the dragon, his expression betrayed shock and surprise. Whatever he’d come here for, it wasn’t this.

  He reached into the car, grabbed up something from the backseat.

  He pulled it out, wheeled around with it, braced himself against the roof of the El Dorado.

  The dragon screeched and whirled, red eyes flashing.

  The newcomer fired his rifle—

  And that was impossible, too. Cal had seen people attempting to use firearms in the immediate aftermath of the Change. The result was a slow fizzle at best, as if the gunpowder were burning at an inhibited speed. No bang, no bullet.

  But the stranger’s rifle—which was decorated, oddly, with what looked like garnets or rubies—barked and kicked.

  The bullet went wide.

  “You son-of-a-fuckin’ bitch!” Enraged, the dragon dove at the stranger, batted the gun aside. It seized him by the shoulders, thorny yellow claws digging deep into his nylon vest, clenching the muscles beneath so tightly that the young man’s arms involuntarily stuck out from his sides. His eyes rolled with pain, and he screamed as the dragon flew up with him into the dazzling sky.

  It hovered there, clutching him tightly—and drew the knife-blade talons of its free paw forward to eviscerate him.

  But by now Cal had reached the car and grabbed up the rifle. He pumped another shell into the chamber. God, let this miracle work again. He aimed and fired.

  The dragon screamed, dropping its captive, who fell the dozen or so feet to the ground, landing with a cushioned whoomph in the high grass.

  Its enormous wings reduced to limp fabric on a sagging frame, the dragon plummeted to earth, hitting the highway with a satisfying thud.

  Its body twitched once and fell silent, conspicuously dead, the iron stench of its blood thick on the air.

  The grunters, terrified, had vanished.

  Cal lowered the still-smoking gun. The acrid tang of gunpowder was in the air; Cal loved that smell, had loved it since he’d been a kid with cap guns.

  Colleen sidled up alongside him, impressed. “Pretty slick shooting, ace.”

  “Yeah, well, my dad made me go to firing ranges when I was a kid.” How Cal had hated those excursions, his father’s attempts to make him a “real man”—when Dad hadn’t the least notion that being a real man had nothing to do with the way one handled a gun and everything to do with the way one handled life. “Turns out I had a knack.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind, next time we have the need.”

  By now, Doc was crouching beside the fallen newcomer. Cal and Colleen joined him. The stranger moaned, half conscious.

  “No obvious broken bones,” Doc remarked. “Under ideal conditions, I wouldn’t think of moving him.” He cast a glance at the dragon carcass in the tall grass, and at the sky. “But getting him to his people would not be inadvisable.”

  Inigo spoke from behind him. “He came from back there.”

  Cal saw he was gesturing toward the valley. And the town.

  “What do you want to do, Cal?” Colleen asked.

  Cal took a deep breath, and the icy air filled him. They were looking to him, it was his call. They, along with the strangers back at the grain silo who now folded their lives in with him, would follow wherever he might lead. He looked at the dead thing in the grass, this thing that had been a man once (though, if Stern was any indication, not a very estimable one), then turned to look at the way they had come, the long, shadowed land behind them and then the valley ahead, with its hideous phantom of plague and decay—if Colleen’s talisman could be trusted.

  The talisman the enigmatic old black man Papa Sky had given them in Chicago, the talisman that had saved them from Primal when the chips were down.

  Then
he looked at the boy, the grunter boy who had brought them here, to this place of faux plague and real dragons and jeweled guns that worked.

  Inigo.

  My name is Inigo Montoya…. Prepare to die.

  Real or Memorex?

  You go with what you know.

  And when you don’t know, you go with your gut.

  A leader leads, and a lawyer searches for expedience and loopholes. He figured this was as good a time as any to be both.

  “Let’s take him home,” Cal said.

  II

  Diamond and Sky

  It is in the darkness of their eyes that men get lost.

  —Black Elk

  FOURTEEN

  THE ZEN OF HORSES

  Mama Diamond was quiet for the next couple of days’ traveling, riding one horse and leading the other as Shango pedaled his ridiculous rail bike. The land was flat now, scrub prairie, the skies by daylight as blue as Dresden china. It was brutally cold, though, as they tended east. Mama Diamond had unpacked a fleece vest and wore it over her flannel shirt and under her leather overcoat with the elk buttons and rabbit lining. She wore a woolen cap to keep the breeze from biting at her ears.

  The animal encounters had left her puzzled and disturbed, and she spent much of this time in profound thought.

  Stern, it seemed, had taken something…and left something behind. Something more than the life—her life—he had promised to spare.

  But exactly how had this happened, and why? Stern seemed like a man—a creature—an individual—that rarely if ever did anything by accident; beyond the huge joke-of-fate accident of his own transformation, an event which Mama Diamond felt certain he’d had absolutely no say or choice in.

  As was the case by and large with everyone who had changed or gained some weird power or discovered some uncanny new talent.

  Which now, surprisingly, unexpectedly, included Mama Diamond herself.

  Someone or something—maybe God His Own Self—had rolled the dice with the whole damn world.

  Not that she believed in God, at least not some old white dude with a beard. She wondered what her dead and buried Buddhist parents might have said about all this. Some creaky old Zen parable, undoubtedly. She could never make heads or tails of those. They weren’t like a gemstone or a fossil bone you could hold in your hands, solid, real, undeniable.

  But now so was the fact that Mama Diamond was possessed of a truly distinctive new social skill.

  Not possessed in the Salem inquisitor’s sense of the word. No, when she spoke to the animals, it was she, Mama Diamond, who had done the talking. She felt—knew—that she had spoken from the deepest and truest core of herself, the most authentic part of her, and that was the most unsettling thing.

  Because, if that was the case, Stern hadn’t actually given her this power. It had merely been dormant and, deliberately or inadvertently, he had simply awakened it.

  Sleeping Beauty waiting for her kiss.

  And Stern was the handsome prince? No way, José. Mama Diamond shuddered at the thought. She had sworn off men since Danny, her fiancé of fifteen minutes back in ’62, and at this late date (when, if she was going to be a pinup girl for anything, it would be arthritis) Mama Diamond sure as little green apples wasn’t going to be spliced to some hell-spawned T. rex imitator.

  Still, Mama Diamond didn’t get the feeling she could reject this wild Dr. Doolittle, talk-to-the-animals (or more like screw-with-the animals’-ability-to-discern-reality) facility within her so readily.

  She pondered once more what her parents might have made of this, and it occurred to her it would have astonished them at least as much as it astonished her. Not for what it did, but that Mama Diamond, known to them only as Judy Kuriyama out of San Berdoo, their rebel-without-a-cause tomboy of a little girl, had manifested it.

  This was the kind of spooky crud only a Zen master might pull.

  Did that make her a Zen master?

  Hoo boy, don’t go there, Mama. You get cocky, you end up stepping on the wrong stone and sliding right down that cliff face into an arroyo. End of story. This newfound capacity guaranteed her nada, it was no get-out-of-jail-free card.

  She learned that in a train yard at a junction town outside Sioux Falls, just across the border into Iowa.

  The brittle, clear skies had given way to a raft of cloud, which yielded up, at dusk, a cold and dispiriting drizzle. Shango had told her the name of this town but Mama Diamond had already forgotten it—some largely abandoned town skirting a quartzite quarry, as bleak in the rain as a rusted automobile.

  They camped in the train yard under a tin-roofed shed, the smoke from their campfire rising through a broken skylight to hang in the damp, still air. Marsh and Cope stood tethered in a far corner, restless in the shadows.

  Mama Diamond was restless, too. She had noticed a sooty gas station–cum–general store on the ride in, and she offered to walk there now, maybe scavenge something interesting for dinner.

  Shango agreed. “But be back before dark,” the federal agent admonished, gathering more scrap lumber to feed the fire.

  Of course, the tiny shop had already been looted. All that remained of any interest was a single can of vegetarian chili half hidden under a stockroom shelf. Slim pickings. But Mama Diamond dutifully picked up the can and dusted it off and carried it back through the wet grit and gravel to the train shed.

  She heard voices before she entered and was wise enough to stand a moment in the shadows, icy rain trickling down her collar. Voices. Strangers. Perhaps not friendly.

  She didn’t feel much like a Zen master just now. She felt old and wet and a little bit frightened.

  One harsh voice ordered Shango to stand aside and keep his hands away from his body.

  Mama Diamond quietly maneuvered herself to a place where she could see into the enclosure. Three men had gathered around Shango. A fourth stood by the horses and was rummaging through the saddlebags—looking for food and dry goods, probably. He discovered Mama Diamond’s tube of Polident and threw it aside with a snort of disgust.

  The men were seedy-looking, drifter types. Such scavengers had had a relatively easy time of it after the Change, living off the stored fat of civilization. But times were leaner now. Most scavengers had learned to trade for food. Some had resorted to raiding and stealing.

  The three men around Shango, two of them armed with baseball bats, were demanding to know where Shango’s partner had gone.

  “I don’t have a partner,” the federal agent said coolly.

  “So? That’s your fuckin’ Polident, I suppose?”

  “I trade in small goods,” Shango said. “Amazing what people will barter for denture cream, toothpaste, aspirin, hemorrhoid ointment—”

  This was not a cooperative answer. The questioner jabbed Shango’s belly with the handle of his bat. Mama Diamond saw real pain on the government man’s face.

  Enough is enough, Mama Diamond thought. She tried to recall the energy that had risen in her veins back at the wolf encounter. That sense of command. Of seniority, power, wisdom—whatever you wanted to call it.

  How do you summon such a thing?

  She tried. It even seemed to her that she succeeded. But was she truly feeling the energy or just remembering it? Elusive, this skill.

  Nevertheless she stepped forward, until the light of the fire made her plainly visible. “Stop that,” she said.

  It didn’t sound like the voice of command. It sounded like her own customary croak. Worse, it sounded almost timid.

  The thugs looked at her for a long, startled moment. Then the vocal one laughed out loud. “Calm down there, Grandma,” he said. “You’ll pop your dentures.”

  This was not a token of success, but Mama Diamond resolved to keep trying. “Don’t get smart with me,” she said. “If you know what’s good for you—”

  She wasn’t allowed to finish. The scavenger who had been looting her saddlebags took a couple of steps closer and swung at Mama Diamond with a wooden billy
club that had been strapped to his belt.

  Mama Diamond took the blow in the ribs. The pain was agonizing. All her breath went out of her at once, and she fell to the grimy floor like a bag of rocks.

  “There’s no need for that,” Shango said immediately.

  “He speaks,” the chief thug remarked.

  At which his two buddies held Shango’s arms behind him and the chief began to beat him with his fists. Mama Diamond, writhing on the floor, wondered whether all this might be a dream…or whether she had dreamed her conversation with the wolf and the panther.

  Or maybe her skills only worked on animals.

  The scavenger who had clubbed her went back to the saddlebags. He pulled out a pair of Mama Diamond’s long johns and held them up. “Winter drawers,” he remarked. “Shit, I thought these went out with black-and-white TV.”

  Nearer the fire, the beating of Shango continued methodically.

  “Marsh,” Mama Diamond groaned. “Cope.”

  The horses regarded her with rolling, fearful eyes.

  “Help,” she said.

  Cope let out a trumpeting cry—in seeming acknowledgment, or was that wishful thinking?—then lashed out with his rear legs. Both hooves hammered the small of the unsuspecting vandal’s back, propelling him several feet through the air. He landed on his face in an ungraceful sprawl and lay motionless, but still drawing breath.

  He was lucky, Mama Diamond thought. Lucky to be merely unconscious. Lucky to have been standing so near the big horse that the beast’s powerful hind legs hadn’t gotten fully extended.

  It was all the opening the government man needed. Shango did something Mama Diamond could not quite follow—bent and twisted himself free of the men who held him—and delivered two or three kicks of his own, barely less powerful than Cope’s.

  The horses yanked and fought their tethers. “Calm down,” Mama Diamond whispered, struggling to her feet. Her upper body burned like fire, but she didn’t believe any ribs had been broken. That was a mercy.