Magic Time: Ghostlands (35 page)

VOMIT, THEN MOP

W
ell now, that’s a relief,
Mama Diamond thought, even as she felt a chill run straight from the crown of her head to her little toe. She knew, too, that no one else in her party was thinking anything even
remotely
like it.

But then, the rest of them hadn’t been feeling particularly like a fifth (or in this case, tenth) wheel, and wondering if their insistence on accompanying this little expeditionary force into the mouth of hell hadn’t been merely the first cranky expression of a nascent second childhood raising its senile voice.

Which was merely a roundabout way of saying that Mama Diamond had been doubting her finely honed instincts right along about now.

But hotfooting it in the snowfall paralleling Highway 40 out of Rushmore, skirting the deserted, fallen structures of Keystone and its blasted, twisted billboards touting the Flying T Chuckwagon Supper and Show, Old MacDonald’s Petting Farm, the Reptile Gardens and the National Presidential Wax Museum (not to mention the Holy Terror Mine—and if
that
description didn’t fit the whole damn area nowadays, Mama Diamond didn’t know what did), Mr. Cal Griffin and his stalwart band of adventurers had come upon a whole herd of rusticating herbivores that might have been
candidates for a petting zoo themselves if not for a little thing or two.

Namely, that they were dead, skinned and in a
real
bad mood…

The bitter cold wind was lifting low off the ground now, and it carried to Mama Diamond the sticky iron blood smell of the beasts, a stink that seemed to weight the air, make it hard to breathe in. There was another smell, too, the musty odor of their thick winter coats; the parts of their carcasses that still had coats on them, that was, that hadn’t been cut away by the long-departed buffalo men who were bones and dust as ancient as these animals themselves.

As if they all abruptly heard some call on the air beyond the range of human hearing (and who was to say they didn’t), the brutes raised their heads as one and appraised the interlopers with clear challenge, and imminent threat. The lead bull was grunting his displeasure with throaty deep exclamations, blowing puffs of pungent air from his nostrils. He tensed his huge shoulders and raised his tuft of tail, readying to charge.

Out of the corner of her eye—never taking her gaze off the lead buffalo—Mama Diamond could see Griffin gesturing the rest of his band closer together, keeping himself at the forefront, all of them hefting their varied assortment of absurd weaponry.

Weaponry that would no more dispatch this enormous collection of tainted meat on the hoof than a rolled newspaper. Which was, Mama Diamond felt, just what Dr. Marcus Sanrio and his ghastly inhuman buddies back in their mountain fastness had counted on.

But these hideous rejects from a meat market studding the landscape ahead as far as the eye could see weren’t the only things that had been called here—Mama Diamond herself had, too, though by a different, unknown agency and for a far different purpose. She had been touched by a dragon, and it had left its mark, awakened the dragon part within her. She understood now that her journey from Burnt Stick to Atherton to this lonely, cold highway outside Keystone, South Dakota—and for that matter, the entirety of her rov
ing, long life, from San Bernardino to Manzanar and the fossil beds beyond—had been aimed to arrive her at this precise moment; the trajectory of her life like a toy arrow fired at a guard shack.

She realized, too, that her parlays with the horses and wolves and panther had been no more, really, than practice sessions.

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.

THE MORLOCK AND THE MOORE

S
ince 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.

All save one; although its base was roiling and shimmering with the Source corruption, its domed crown was unsullied, intact. Almost as though the Mind behind the invasion was deliberately keeping it separate, as—what?

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.