Magic Time: Ghostlands (25 page)

DRAGON SKIN

“I
want you to take a look at this,” Doc Lysenko said.

They stood beside him in the morgue, Cal and Colleen and Goldie, in the hour before dawn, on their second night in Atherton. (Mama Diamond and Larry Shango were still getting some shut-eye up in their separate rooms in what had formerly been the Ramada.)

When they made their delivery here, the work crew had been forced to improvise, shoving twelve tables together and rigging a block and tackle to hoist the big carcass up onto their surface.

But then, nobody had said this would be easy.

Observing him now, dressed in hospital blues, covered from head to toe in blood, Colleen Brooks reflected that her lover looked in all his equanimity like some maniac physician in a splatter movie—Dr. Bloodhappy, or Surgeon Kill-Scalpel, or something equally sanguinary.

In reality, though, he’d merely been following a line of inquiry…which, among other things, just happened to involve taking a chainsaw to a dead dragon.

Fortunately, Dr. Waxman and the rest of staff at the college Med Center, the nurses and interns and student volunteers, had been all too happy to provide Doc with the equipment and elbow room necessary to perform this most
singular operation—or autopsy, to be more accurate—although the brute strength required to open up the body and heft the organs seemed more befitting butchers at work on a steer, or even some Hemingwayesque safari taking souvenirs off a fallen bull elephant, than your standard sawbones examining a cadaver.

When Doc had first set about cracking open the rib cage and extracting and weighing the internal organs, the room had been filled to the rafters, SRO with medical staff and the panoply of grads and undergrads who had heard what was going on in the subbasement. It was the first such autopsy ever performed at this facility; possibly performed anywhere in the world, because dragons were rare as hen’s teeth and one gave them a wide berth when crossing their shadow. Besides, no one—not a man nor woman in attendance there as the bone and fluids, scales and gristle flew under the screaming metal blades wielded by the surprisingly serene Russian—had ever seen one of the big flying reptiles dead, or met anyone who had killed one. Incredibly, examples of both were in their town tonight, two miraculous visitations at once.

Now, many hours later, the component parts had been disassembled and notated, placed in their separate receptacles of glass and metal and plastic. Young and old, accomplished and callow, hardened and untried, the observers had found themselves hushed and wide-eyed…and finally, one by one, had drifted away to pursuits less gaudy and brutal.

Until Doc, alone and sure now, summoned his friends.

He gestured at the enormous fretwork of the skeleton atop the joined tables. “Truly a remarkable structure, an edifice as elegant and durable as a Gothic cathedral.”

“Yeah,” Colleen said, “but a cathedral rarely tries to bite your head off and swallow you whole.”

“Only some of the clergy within do,” Goldie commented, but no one rose to the barb.

“So what have you got for us?” Cal asked Doc.

“Some preliminary data, Calvin, and some educated guesses. Upon close inspection, I verified several long-
standing suspicions. See this structure, and this one here? They are human in their lineage, undeniably so. Oh, amended and built upon and added to; in some cases to an astonishing degree. But any knowledgeable scrutiny reveals that this is, in fact, a man—changed, most assuredly, capable of much a normal human being could not do. But still a man.”

Doc leaned back against the wall and rubbed weary eyes. “The organs bear this out, too. And I feel certain the DNA resequencing I’m having performed will again verify these findings, down to the molecular level…. It confirms what we ourselves have seen firsthand, and although one must be cautious when drawing conclusions from only one sample, I would express a conviction that were we to cross-section another dragon, or any of the grunters”—and here Doc’s voice dropped down and grew more gentle, eyeing Cal—“or the flares, they would all be clearly derived from human beings; would, in the truest sense, still
be
human.”

None of them spoke for a long moment, then Colleen said, “Okay, so that’s reasonably creepy…. Where does it get us?”

“Do you recall the devices set into the ground at the edge of town? The ones we encountered when we returned and found Mr. Shango and his lady companion? They told me of their belief that these were the instruments that projected the appalling false landscape of corpses and plague.”

Colleen shuddered, remembering the ghastly landscape that had nearly driven them away from this place before they had learned the wonders it held (which, of course, had been the whole idea); and she thought of her amulet, the dragon scale she wore, that had allowed her to pierce the illusion and behold the truth.

“Dr. Waxman was kind enough to substantiate that this was indeed their purpose, and that there was a spare apparatus being stored at a facility nearby. A new friend of mine, an intern named Lewis, was good enough to fetch it back here. And I removed
this
from it.” He opened a drawer and withdrew a dark object, held it out in his open palm.

Colleen recognized it instantly, knew it as well as she knew the feel of what rested on its chain against the soft place at the base of her throat.

It was a dragon scale.

“Dr. Waxman tells me that each of the devices has one of these scales embedded in it,” Doc continued, “along with the gemstones that focus its power.” He glanced at Colleen, and there was tenderness there. “I have examined it under the electron microscope, and it appears a match with the one you wear around your neck. Again, DNA analysis would confirm this.”

Cal’s face was grave. “If I understand you correctly, Doc, you’re saying that the scale that saved us back in Chicago, and the ones in the devices here…are from the same dragon.”

“Yes, that’s a strong likelihood.” He nodded at the dragon bones on the tables. “And a different individual from this gentleman here.”

Colleen had only known one dragon up close and personal (where they’d actually had a word or two, between the bastard’s attempts to incinerate her), and that was Ely Stern. She herself had seen Cal put a sword clean through him, seen the monstrous lizard plummet a thousand feet to the New York pavement, to an almost certain and grisly end.

But Mama Diamond had told them only yesterday that Stern had not stayed put. He’d survived and hit the road….

“It’s Stern,” Cal said coolly, and Colleen somehow knew in her bones it was so. “Shango and Mama Diamond followed him here. He stole her gems and brought them to Atherton.” Cal took the leather scale from Doc, weighed it in his hand. “It’s a reasonable bet he left these behind, too.”

“Yes,” Doc agreed. “But then, that would mean—”

Cal finished it. “That he tried to kill us in New York, then saved our lives in Chicago.”

They fell silent, meditating on the imponderable flow of events. Like so many things down these crazy long days, it was impossible…but that didn’t mean it wasn’t so.

And how did Papa Sky fit into all this? Colleen wondered. The mysterious jazzman who had given her the scale
in the smoky thick atmosphere of the Legends club in Chicago. Where might that old blind man be, if he wasn’t dead by now?

Still hanging with dragons, or one dragon in particular…?

“But why would Stern
do
that?” Colleen asked. “I mean, I can’t see him particularly giving two rats’ asses about saving our bacon. So was it to bring down Primal, so the Source could get at all those flares he was protecting?”

“I don’t know,” Cal said simply. “It’s possible he was serving the Source there, and here, too.”

“Lovely,” Colleen said. And yet, something didn’t sit right. Stern was a rotter through and through, it didn’t take a degree in advanced physics to figure
that
out, but she hadn’t gotten that vibe off Papa Sky, not at all. And for all her flaws, Colleen prided herself that she usually read people pretty right (despite her choices in men).

So why would Papa Sky be helping Stern?

Questions, with no answers…

What else was new?

Cal handed the scale back to Doc. “Tell me everything you’ve learned about this.”

That was the lawyer part of him, the pragmatist, Colleen thought admiringly. File away what you can’t deal with now, and get on with business.

“It would appear to have several unique properties,” Doc noted, “whether on the living dragon or not. First, as we witnessed when Colleen utilized it against Clayton Devine in Primal’s palace, it has the capability of repelling both the flares and the powers they wield.

“Secondly, given the way Colleen’s charm allowed her to pierce the illusory tableau outside of town, I would venture that the dragon scales have the power both to project an illusion…and let one see through it.”

“Any notions on how we might apply this knowledge?” Cal asked.

“I thought to design this.” From the same drawer, Doc pulled out a strip of yellowish, translucent material, about the thickness and texture of parchment.

“I will not tell you which part of our friend here I obtained this from.” Doc held it up before his face; Colleen could make out his eyes blurry behind it. “I tested it myself on the loathsome panorama. It dissolved like a tissue of lies in a cleansing flood.”

Cal pondered it solemnly. “So you think we might be able to avail ourselves of that ability, and the other properties, too—”

“Yes, exactly,” Doc responded. He strolled over to a big vat immediately adjacent to the skeleton. “Although it will require us to set aside any qualms we might have.”

Walking after him, Colleen saw that its label read
EPI
-
DERMAL TISSUE
.
Oh brother…

“Let me see if I’ve got this right,” Colleen said, facing Doc. “You’ve just said this monster on the slab is actually a human being…then you’re proposing we cut him up and use his skin.”

“Not precisely how I might word it, but that is the gist of it, yes.”

“Okay, I just wanted to be sure,” she said, and tried to make it sound light. Because she knew there was no room in the future that laid itself out before them for anyone to be squeamish, or allow false scruples to deny them a tool that might give them the edge, tilt the balance enough for them to do some good (she wouldn’t allow herself the luxury to add, even in her thoughts,
And maybe just save our lives
).

But in the turmoil of her thoughts, in the craggy inner landscape of her mind, she wondered which of them—Ely Stern in his fierce, unfathomable actions, or the dead thing on the slab, or she and her friends standing around discussing its cannibalization—were truly the monsters.

Doc replaced both the scale and the parchment strip in the drawer, slid it shut. “An effective material,” he said, “and they’ve put it to remarkable use here. Which gives me pause.”

“How so?” Cal asked.

Doc sighed. “Perhaps when Ely Stern delivered his in
ventory of gems, he informed Jeff Arcott of his ability to repel energy, to cast illusion. But to design an instrument to project an illusion such as we witnessed…?”

Cal understood. “Stern’s no scientist.”

“No,” Doc concurred, “and it’s not plausible to believe the physicists here in Atherton were embarked on such a line of research prior to the Change. It’s a true melding of the old science and the new.”

“Arcott spoke of a new physics,” Cal said.

“A convenient turn of phrase, Calvin, but truly there has not been sufficient time for such a thorough melding of theory and application to have arisen—not within the scope of human research and development, at least.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that Jeff Arcott is…how do you say it? Talking through his buttocks.”

Colleen snorted (which was something she
really
hated to do). “Do you possibly mean talking out of his ass?”

“Out of his ass, yes.”

“You mean lying,” Cal added.

“Indeed.”

“So who’s the man behind the curtain?” Colleen asked. “The guys at the Source Project? I mean, assuming they
are
guys, and not…” She mimed something with tentacles.

Doc shrugged. “What would they have to gain?”

“Depends on what Arcott’s working on now,” Cal said. “That supersecret project of his.” He gestured at the overhead bank of lights, the refrigeration equipment and, by extension, all the restored machinery in the town. “The reason for all this preamble.”

“I suppose we might ask him,” Doc offered.

“Yeah,” Colleen said. “And his security goons might dance the
Nutcracker.
”

“Mm.” Doc agreed. “Of course, we can presume he has allowed Dr. Dahlquist into his confidence, if only for expediency’s sake, to get the project completed.”

“Maybe so,” Cal said. “But we’re not going to know anything till we find some way past Arcott’s guards.”

Which seemed like a perfectly good occasion for Goldie—who had not said a word for a good deal of this—to reveal just what nifty little knack his lip-lock with the Bitch Queen in the magic kingdom had given him.

THE HOLE IN THE WALL

R
afe Dahlquist was having the dream about Neville Chamberlain and Anna Paquin again, when a sound startled him awake.

He opened his eyes just in time to see the door in the air appear and Herman Goldman step through.

“Don’t try this at home,” Goldie said quietly, so as not to alert the two guards just outside. Then he led Dahlquist back through the portal to where his friends waited.

“Arcott calls it a Spirit Radio, but it’s a damn sight more than that,” Rafe Dahlquist told Cal Griffin and the others, as they sat in the kitchen of the cramped lodgings in Married Student Housing, where Melissa Wade had assigned Colleen Brooks and Doc Lysenko.

“What exactly does it do?” Cal asked.

“Not much, at least not yet. We’ve only got it up to about one-ten-thousandth strength. Believe me, that baby takes a mother lode of power, not to mention calibration so exact it could give you hives.”

“What does Arcott
say
it will do?” Cal pressed.

Dahlquist sighed, took a gulp of the Instant Sanka Doc had cooked up in the microwave. “Okay, here’s the official
line…. With broadcasting and telephones down, there’s no way to readily have discussions with anyone beyond your immediate enclave. The world will stay fractured and every city, town and suburb isolated and plunged back to the Middle Ages until we can change that. Hence the Spirit Radio, which will allow two-way communications again. But because it requires such a tremendous outlay of power, they had to get the grid operational first.”

“But the design is…complicated?” Doc inquired.

“Yup,” Dahlquist agreed. “Sorta like the Manhattan Project was complicated.

“I’m not saying this is a nuclear bomb or anything like that,” he added quickly. “It’s just hellishly ornate. It definitely
does
have features of a very powerful receiver.”

“If it’s a radio,” Colleen asked, “doesn’t it need a similar device on the other end?”

Dahlquist nodded. “Arcott says he’s been writing to a sister community, sharing plans and materials. With our help, they should be ready to launch when we are…. Then it should just fan out from there.”

“Where is this community?” Cal asked.

“Supposedly a few hundred miles to the west.”

There was a sudden chill in the air. Cal glanced about, caught the same thought mirrored on the faces of Colleen and Doc and Goldie, felt the familiar heaviness in his gut.

There was far more to the west, he knew, than the Source Project. And yet…

Dahlquist caught the vibe, too, addressed Cal. “You want me to pull the plug on this, boss, say the word. I gotta tell ya, the deeper I sink my elbows in, the worse feeling I get.”

“Why’s that, Rafe?”

“Hell, this thing ain’t no friggin’ radio. I mean, Jesus, it’s just made to
seem
like one.”

“What do you think it is?”

“An access point, an entryway, a transferal device…for Christ’s sake, a
door.
” He shot Goldie a sharp glance. “Not like that fancy little trick you did in my quarters, nothing sweet and benign like
that.
”

He swallowed down the rest of his coffee and shuddered.

“There’s something on the other side, and you turn this hungry beast on, I mean, really rev up the juice, I think it’s gonna bust on through. This precious gizmo is designed to withstand terrific stresses and energies, for long-term duration—so whatever comes, why, it’ll keep right on coming. Just an educated guess, but I gotta tell ya, I’m pretty damn educated.”

Cal considered a moment, then said, “You have any idea what’s on the other end?”

“No,” Dahlquist replied. “But the other day we ran a test, y’know, just minimum strength to get things going. I heard these…
voices
…coming through, sounded like thousands of ’em, all overlapping. Couldn’t make out anything, ’cept one word….”

The word was “Wishart.”

It was a rare thing for Jeff Arcott to propose a toast. But then, it had been a damn satisfying day, no two ways about it. With Rafe Dahlquist stirred into the mix, they were advancing miles at a stretch now, not fucking inches.

Which, of course, Theo Siegel reflected, didn’t say a thing about what they might be advancing
toward….

The hour was late now, and bone-weary from the day’s labors, he was dining with Jeff Arcott and Melissa Wade in what had once been a faculty conference room on the third floor of the Nils Bohr Applied Physics Building, in the college town of Atherton, at a table that seemed too big for just the three of them.

The walls were decorated with framed NASA photographs: the earth from geosynchronous orbit; the
Mars Pathfinder
on the ancient floodplain of Ares Vallis; the International Space Station. Icons of a lost age. Was the ISS still in orbit, Theo wondered, or had it come plummeting down through the atmosphere, to impact, perhaps, on a newly medievalized Europe or Japan, startling the serfs and the samurai?

Melissa had done the cooking, had cadged together the ingredients for chicken pasta with tequila cream sauce and a side salad of field greens, candied walnuts and gorgonzola.
It was incredible, like everything she set her mind to, remarkable; she must have been striking bargains all over town, even after logging in her own full day on Jeff’s grand mechanism, his Infernal Device.

Theo savored every bite, filled with gratitude…all the while knowing that Melissa had offered up this delectable sacrifice to Jeff, with Theo himself merely a collateral beneficiary, a side effect.

As with so many of their meals together, Theo recognized that, for himself at least, sour grapes was invariably on the menu.

He willed himself to let it go, as much as he could. In this life, the road went a whole lot smoother if you resigned yourself to what was rather than what you’d like it to be, or supposed it should be.

Particularly since the Change had locked its jaws on the planet. A whole hell of a lot came down that you had precious little say in: where you’d live; what you’d do….

Even whether you’d be human or not.

That’s when it really counted who your friends were.

Theo looked about at Melissa and Jeff, and reflected that it wasn’t such a bad bargain after all, compared to what might have been, what he might have become.

He shuddered, remembering the convulsive curvature of his spine that been mere terrifying preamble, just as Melissa no doubt recalled her fevers, her lightening body.

If Theo reached behind his neck, he could feel the small lump where Arcott had sutured a garnet into a pocket of his skin. Melissa, he knew, possessed a similar lump.

Of all those resident in town when calamity had struck, only they two had been granted reprieve, Jeff’s godly dispensation. Of the rest, the luckless ones, the glowing changelings siphoned away by the Storm, the disfigured wretches condemned to hide in shadow and belowground, Jeff hadn’t lifted a finger to avert their fate.

He rescued us because we were his friends. And so we remain his friends.

Or perhaps it was merely because he’d had continuing need of them….

Jeff himself had required no such intervention. He had remained resolutely unchanged, utterly human—at least, as human as he’d been to begin with; incandescent, elusive, cryptic.

How had he known to perform this service upon them? The same way he had known to reelectrify the town, to mount this blazing fresh project that now consumed all three of them. Like everything with Jeff, it stemmed from his brilliance…and from the secrets borne to him on the night winds.

Melissa had been talking about the visitors. “I don’t know,” she said, sighing. “They seem like good people, but this Griffin guy definitely has an agenda, and he’s being cagey about his ultimate goals.”

Jeff Arcott swirled his glass of wine thoughtfully.

“They make a good argument, though,” Theo said. “I talked to the woman, Colleen. Her attitude is, we have this new tech, why don’t we share it?”

“And what did you tell her?” Jeff inquired.

“That it’s all luck and trial-and-error, and we don’t even pretend to understand it ourselves.”

“That’s good,” Arcott said. “It’s even true, more or less.”

“It felt like a lie.”

“What would you have us tell them?”

“Everything. Why not?”

“
Everything
is a pretty tall order.”

Theo could feel his expression growing icy. Then Melissa stepped in.

“We’re not unsympathetic, Theo,” she said, with that voice like music, like wind chimes, and he felt himself warming again, even knowing that, while she claimed she and Arcott sympathized, she was really the only one who did.

“It would be wonderful to be able to share everything,” Melissa added. “But things are still precarious here. If you signed on to a hunting party sometime, you’d see how hard it is to keep all this going.”

Melissa herself had put in some scavenging duty, Theo recalled. The Atherton “hunting parties” hunted gemstones,
not animals. In the early days they had raided the town itself, ransacking abandoned homes for jewelry—a macabre exercise, Theo thought, like plucking gold from a corpse’s teeth. Over the course of more recent months, the search had been expanded to nearby towns. And word was out on the trading routes that some wandering “gypsies” would pay handsomely in dry goods and matches for otherwise useless decorative stones. This was both good and bad: it increased the supply but also drove up the price.

And no amount of gemstones was enough to feed the voracious appetite of Jeff Arcott, whose experiments sucked up every stone not allotted to transportation or basic support.

But then, Jeff’s supply was far beyond what the hunting parties supplied; he had another source, one he chose not to discuss. Theo had seen him, however, on his late-night forays to the outskirts of town; had watched from hiding as the furtive shadows delivered the vast supplies needed to construct the new device of enigmatic design and purpose.

Theo knew these lurkers were not the benign, timid ones he sometimes drove supplies to out beyond the periphery of town, the grunters that had been eagerly awaiting him when that dragon had swooped down out of the setting sun and nearly filleted him; would have, too, if Cal Griffin hadn’t scooped up that fallen rifle and put paid to it.

No, these were creatures of a supremely nastier stripe. And while Theo sympathized, no, make that empathized—hell, tell the truth,
identified
—with the malformed, sad-sack bastards shivering out in what had once been soy and corn fields beyond town, he didn’t want to even
consider
any similarities between himself and those muttering dark little monsters that did the grunt work (literally) for Arcott under cover of night.

Even though the sight of them moving rapidly on stealthy feet set off some unspoken call within him that screeched like a smoke alarm.

“If it was widely known what we do,” Arcott was continuing, snaring Theo’s attention once more, “we wouldn’t be able to do it. We’d be fighting over resources.”

It was a good excuse, Theo thought, for maintaining a monopoly. It was probably even true.

“Whereas,” Arcott went on, “given a little time, a little understanding, we can maybe learn to synthesize the effect in a way that’s both affordable and exportable.”

Oh, noble dream. This would have been less convincing had it come from anyone other that Jeff. Arcott had been blessed with credibility. He was tall, raven-haired, with dazzling blue eyes, damn near angelic, if a dark angel. He looked utterly guileless in his jeans and ratty bomber jacket.

Theo pushed aside his glass of wine. It was making him surly.

And after that, if he kept drinking, it would make him loquacious, which was the last thing he wanted to be right now. Because Theo Siegel had a secret, one newly minted.

On his way here through the crisp night air, walking behind the dark bulk of Married Student Housing, he had heard the murmuring of a voice that should not be there, should very much be under lock and key elsewhere.

Not that Theo should have been able to hear that voice through so many layers of lath and plaster, and at such a distance. But there were times, fleeting moments, when his hearing was preternaturally sharp, his eyesight and sense of smell uncannily keen. And other times when he felt unusual aches and pains in his muscles and ligaments and bones, brief discomfitures that thankfully passed and left only dread.

He owed Jeff a lot, Theo knew. And Jeff was his friend—or, at least, had taken actions that a friend might take.

But nevertheless, he chose not to tell Jeff Arcott that the man playing hooky, the errant voice he’d overheard, was Rafe Dahlquist, or that Cal Griffin was there with him.

In spite of his history with Jeff, or perhaps more accurately
because
of it, Theo realized he was coming to trust Griffin a good deal more than Jeff.

And down what twisting, divergent path, he wondered, might
that
ultimately lead?

Time would tell, as it always did. Every story had an end
ing, whether good or bad. For now, he would keep mum, and let the newcomers have their secrets.

Still, Theo felt just giddy enough to offer up one further tidbit from his earlier conversation. “The woman Colleen mentioned something called the Source Project.” He paused. “Almost like she wanted to see if I recognized the name. Whether I would flinch or frown or something.”

The way you just did,
he thought, watching Arcott.

“What did you tell her?” Arcott asked.

“That I’d never heard of it.”

“Good,” Jeff Arcott said, but his expression remained thoughtful.

And he kept a careful, sidelong watch on Theo the rest of that night.