Magic Time: Ghostlands (11 page)

It was a note that read in a scraggly hand, “Time is of the essence. Send shipment direct.” A return address was printed at the bottom. And the page was signed, “Marcus Sanrio.”

There was no objective way Shango could be certain that this was the information he had traveled so long and hard for, that his friend and fellow agent Jeri Bilmer had died trying to convey. But even so, in his heart, he
knew.

He had found the location of the Source Project, the dark core of it.

He didn’t even wait for sunup. He left immediately.

“Not an easy trip,” Shango told Mama Diamond. “And fifty-three miles from it…” Here his face clouded, and a violent shiver coursed through him like a current. “I was turned away.”

What had it taken, Mama Diamond wondered, to frighten a man like this so badly?

He wouldn’t elaborate.

“But I still had my notebooks. So I tracked the remaining shops, figuring I just might find a back door in….”

Which made him, Mama Diamond thought, not just brave but a very stubborn man.

Shango carried his canvas pack, and he took a bottle of water from it and drank deeply. “There were four addresses left,” he said, “you being the last.”

“Uh-huh.”

“The first retailer had been stripped clean. I didn’t think too much about that at first. Lots of places were looted early on after the Change, and people would steal the damnedest things.”

“Money’s not too useful these days.”

“No, but there was a jewelry store with most of its stock still in place. I can picture somebody wanting a more solid commodity than cash, maybe for trade—but why take garnets and leave diamond rings behind?”

Mama Diamond shrugged. “Like you said, people steal the damnedest things.”

“Still, it struck me as odd. The next place—”

“What place would that be?”

Shango fished his notebook out of his pack and leafed through it. “Corky’s Stones and Minerals, on the North Platte.”

“Corky Foxe’s store. He’s a tightfisted SOB I know him a little.”

“The shop had been burned, but it was obvious it had also been raided. I can’t tell you what happened to Corky. Next, Lightfoot Novelty Imports, Vernal, Utah. Empty. Proprietor MIA.” He glanced again at Mama Diamond.

“It’s okay, I didn’t know the man.”

Shango told her that locals, mostly squatters and scavengers, described a group of crouched, darting figures who had arrived aboard a pitch-black train on abandoned rails—figures glimpsed fleetingly in the darkness, moving certainly, emptying the place without benefit of even moonlight—and the lone eminence that towered over them like a dark god.

“Stern,” said Mama Diamond.

Shango nodded. But was the dragon working for the Source Project? Was his theft of Mama Diamond’s stones part of the larger picture? And if it
was
the Source, did that mean that whatever lurked at its heart was still accruing gems, still had the continuing need of them…or perhaps some new need?

“I don’t know,” Shango said. “All I know is, unless you or your files have something new to tell me, it’s the end of the line.”

Mama Diamond stepped to the cafeteria door, cracked it open. Outside, the wind was buffeting a tattered old newspaper against the rusted iron track. She took a deep breath of the air that was as familiar to her as her own constant, fluttering heartbeat, the ache of years in her bones. The dry sharp cold dried up the mucous membranes in her nose, and the smell of coming snow was clear as a telegram. Maybe not today, but almost certainly tomorrow.

And if she let this man, hard as a piece of volcanic rock, face the blizzard, track that hell-black train into the jaws of night…?

Sometimes you reach the crossroads, Mama Diamond thought, and sometimes it reaches you.

“There’s something I may have heard in a dream,” she told Shango.

Mama Diamond was glad she hadn’t hauled just that heavy bitch of a coal stove from Old West Antiques, but also the dusty framed map of the forty-eight states. As she and Shango scrutinized it on the wall of her back room—with Mama surprised that her creaky old bad eye on the left somehow seemed to be seeing just fine now—it hadn’t taken long to find the eight tiny letters right there in Iowa.

Atherton. Smack dab alongside the black lines that indicated railroad tracks.

“College town, I’ve heard of it,” Shango told Mama Diamond. “Small, but it has one of the best research institutes in the country, or at least it did.”

“If that’s what Stern was talking about,” Mama countered. “And not some drinking buddy he likes to hang with after raiding folk’s back stock.”

Shango shrugged. “I’ll take my chances.” No surprise there, given all he’d said and done.

Shango went off to gather supplies for the journey, leaving Mama Diamond to the privacy of her thoughts.

It had been a busy twenty-four hours, that it had, with
many a curious visitor. Soon enough, Shango would be gone and the ghost town would settle back around Mama Diamond like a shroud, with even less in it to remind her she was any different from the parched wood and the dead earth.

Would she ever know what end of the line Shango reached, what conclusion he arrived at? Probably not.

People leave you, and possessions, too.

Mama Diamond walked stiffly to the front of her shop, the lowering sun casting hall-of-mirror reflections off the mostly empty cases. Her fingers trailed the cracked ivory of the mammoth tusk atop the counter.

She had armored herself against the world in tourmaline and agate, morganite and black opal, just as Shango had once armored himself in a black suit and coiled earpiece. But it was the same difference, really. The world stripped away your armor, that was just how life ran…until it ran out.

And whether that whisper came here in Burnt Stick or somewhere else along the tracks was not for Mama Diamond to say. It was just for her to say with whom she might be.

Sometimes you reach the crossroads….

She mulled over these thoughts until Shango reappeared, lugging cans of vegetables and beans, and more bottled water.

“You have transportation?” Mama Diamond asked.

Shango nodded. “Rail bike.”

“Rail
what
?”

“Come on. I’ll show you.”

Rail bikes, Shango explained, were an obscure form of sporting bicycle, used by hobbyists in Europe and America where abandoned railways lines remained in place. The bike’s modified wheels sat on one rail; an outrigger supported two more passive wheels against the opposite rail. A bicycle modified to fit a railway track, basically. He had not been able to scavenge a true rail bike, but had modified a quality mountain bike in a metalwork shop.

He had ridden this device up to the depot last night, after Stern had gone and while Mama Diamond was sleeping, and
concealed it north of town. The bike was an ugly assemblage of aluminum tubes, ungainly seeming.

“Going over those hills, you have some pretty steep grades ahead of you,” Mama Diamond said. “Then you’ll hit the Laramie Range.”

Shango shrugged.

“And no potable water for a long way. Nor food.”

“I’ll manage.”

“You want company?”

That provoked a surprised look. “Ma’am, much as I appreciate—”

“I’m serious. If there’s a chance of getting back my property…” Without benefit of a vocabulary of feelings for a good many years, Mama Diamond thought it best to leave it at that.

“I’m sorry,” Shango said, “I don’t mean to be rude, but at your age—”

“I thought maybe I could help. Well, never mind. You heading up into the hills tonight?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll see how far you get.”

“What?”

“I mean, good luck.”

“Right. Thank you,” Shango said. “I don’t meet a lot of decent people, not these days, not since…”

He trailed off.

“Since the world ended,” Mama Diamond supplied.

At dusk, while the sky was still a vivid and radiant blue, Mama Diamond watched Shango peddle away from Burnt Stick on his ridiculous rail bike. He looked, Mama Diamond thought, like one of those shabby bicycle-riding bears out of some Eastern European circus.

Mama Diamond suppressed a smile.

Then she walked back to her shop—to the makeshift stalls behind the shop, in back of the empty chicken coops.

Achy as she was, exhausted as she was, she knew it would take her some time to saddle and pack the horses.
They needed to be fed and watered, too. She had neglected them today. “Settle down, Marsh,” she told the black stallion. “Settle down, Cope,” she told the mare.

Stars filled the sky, gemlike in their indifferent glitter, and the still air grew colder around her.

INIGO ON THE TRAIN

A
guy could get killed this way,
Inigo thought, and actually laughed out loud. Not that anyone could hear him over the lunatic shriek of that whistle.

But then a guy—a completely human one, at least—could never have done this at all.

The blasted-rock tunnel walls were twisting serpentine now and rushing at Inigo with alarming speed; in this center-of-the-earth blackness, a normal kid wouldn’t even have been able to
see
them, let alone press his funky-ass self tight to the cold metal of this impossible train.

The night train, speeding straight out of hell.

Inigo flattened himself along the surface of the roof as the car banged and rattled in its headlong flight, his big, bony fingers with their huge knuckles gripping onto the front edge of the car with all the strength and determination he could muster.

A sudden sharp curve hit him with centrifugal force like a blow and he was nearly thrown clear off. He clutched wildly and managed to pull himself back on top, gasping as the numbing chill air pummeled him.

Trust the Leather Man to come up with a thing like this. He was always full of surprises, and pure mean dangerous, too. You had to do your damnedest to keep on his good side
(not that there really
was
one…). But Papa Sky tried his level best to keep the big cat honest, if such a concept truly existed anymore in this topsy-turvy life.

Still, as Inigo’s dear departed dad always said,
When someone offers you work, you take it.

Of course, his mother had always said wear your rubbers, and look both ways before you cross the street, and don’t
ever
do anything that might cause you to wake up one morning seriously stone-cold dead.

But then, she was gone, and this freaky world was here, and he was forced to do a lot of things differently.

His teeth chattered from the cold and the vibration, and he fought to still them. To distract himself, he ruminated on what function this channel through the rock must have held before the Storm—certainly not a subway tunnel, not in this part of the country. No, it must’ve been a mine, and the narrow tracks sliding beneath laid for ore cars years and years back, maybe even when Custer and his marauding blue boys came whooping through these parts.

Papa Sky had told him true: The hell train was an adaptable beast, able to negotiate narrow gauge and wide, gobbling up the miles as it drove through the belly of the earth. Because not every place could be gotten to via the shortcut portals that some could open between here and there; sometimes you could only get
approximately
from one place to another, and then you had to cover ground the old-fashioned way, foot by foot and yard by yard, and so you needed freight cars to haul the cargo…and carry the crew to load it.

Hanging on for dear life, his long, wiry arms aching like a sonofabitch from the effort and the cold, Inigo could feel the skin of the train under him vibrate from more than its furious speed. It pulsed and moved as if alive, with a creepy, itchy feeling he could discern even through thick layers of jacket and sweatshirt and pants. Like black beetles surging over each other in their insatiable, endless combinations.

Shuddering and groaning like an irritated sandworm, the train canted upward as the tunnel began a steep climb under the pitiless miles of rock. The air was rank, and Inigo coughed raggedly, his throat burning from the raw smoky
fumes roiling at him from the front of the train. He spat aside a phlegmy mass, intently determined not to have it blow back in his face. The train bounced abruptly and he bit his tongue, cried out in surprise and tasted blood.

I don’t need this shit,
he thought fiercely. But then in his mind’s eye he saw the Girl in her glowing solemnity, the dancer, Christina, and his rage quieted.

Even so, to be able to ride inside like a regular person, to sink into plush seats, or belly up to some nachos in the dining car…

But those inside
this
train were far from regular.

Which was the whole point of his riding on the outside.

It was the only way he wouldn’t be detected by his tweaked brothers within, the ones so like him in appearance but so alien in mind, with their white Necco-wafer eyes, gray grub skin, needle teeth…and major Bad Attitude.

He’d seen a pack of them let loose on a bull once, and they’d enveloped it like a school of piranha, slashing it to pieces as it screamed, devouring it before it was dead.

That little Viewmaster reel of 3D images in his mind had given him nightmares for weeks.

And he looked just like one of them.

So why was
he
different? Because he was twelve, not fully grown? No, that couldn’t be all of it.

Maybe it was because there were variations in the breed; though, clearly, you still needed to be some kind of weirdo outsider to become one in the first place. Inigo knew he’d always been most comfortable keeping more or less to himself; he’d never fitted in, never felt like other folks.

And so now he wasn’t. It was some cosmic kind of justice, or at least a rebalancing. Assuming that there
were
others like him, that not every other grunter in the universe was a ravening SOB.

He’d sure like to meet those guys, if only for variety….

But regardless of that, he knew down to his gnarly gray toes that if his fellow grunters on the Midnight Special realized he was there, they’d tear him up just like that bull. It got into their minds, the Big Bad Thing, did stuff there, twisted them to its will, made the nasty ones even nastier.

It hadn’t gotten into
his
mind, though, maybe because of the Leather Man, or Papa Sky, or the Dancer Girl. Because maybe he was under their protection…

Abruptly, the train
rippled
like muscles on a big cat stretching, and it began to shift, to take on a more complicated shape, with all sorts of black protrusions. His fingers felt the front of the roof edge rise up into an ornate lip ahead of him.

The train was picking up speed now, a holy terror. The inhuman screech of the whistle changed timber, not echoing in the open passage anymore, but flattening out as if screaming toward a hard, blank wall.

Papa Sky had told him of this, had warned it would be the worst part, and Inigo scrunched down further, pressed his head behind the lip of the car, exhaling every last bit of breath and holding it.

The whistle howled its rage at the universe, shrieked louder and louder until it seemed it had leeched every sound out of the entire planet.

There was an impact like nothing Inigo had ever known. Big clots of earth blasted back at him, bouncing off the lip, smashing like rocks caroming off each other in an asteroid belt.

It took every ounce of his will to hold on, to not be swept away. He gritted his teeth and closed his eyes and focused every bit of attention on his fingertips, on keeping his hands tight to the shifting black metal.

The train was actually erupting from the earth.

Then Inigo felt the kiss of the cold night air, and the train came down flat and hard on wide rusty tracks and kept right on going, screaming like a banshee through the night and over the flat prairie land.

“Welcome to Iowa,” the boy said to nothing and no one in particular—blessedly still alive, even if he wasn’t normal or regular or human.

And he laughed out loud for the second time that night.

Jeffrey Arcott walked westward, away from the town and up toward the lip of the valley and the flatland beyond the high
way, where a subdivision had been under construction when the Change came. He followed a dead-end crescent, the half-built houses on each side of him skeletal and black in the light of a rising moon. Beyond the skeleton houses there was a stand of scrub woods grown back since the fires of 1978, low and patchy wild oaks and knee-deep brambles. In the summer you could find wild mulberries here, but the vines had withered with the hard onset of coming winter.

Near the top of the slope, in the clearance under an unused microwave relay tower, he paused and looked back at the town.

The frigid wind bit through his jeans, curled in along the neck of his leather jacket, but he felt powerful here, invisible in the shadows, gazing from a height at the town he had almost single-handedly resurrected from the nightmare of the Change.

He checked his watch, a retro Hamilton Futura with cut garnets set into the rim at precise intervals. It was nearly ten o’clock, almost curfew, power-saving time. He wrapped his arms around himself, cold, waiting.

Time. He imagined generators—
his
generators, inlaid with quartzite dodecahedrons, coils wrapped on ruby cores—slowing, stopping, their hum diminishing to silence. Bedtime for the dynamos. Ah:
there.

The grid of streetlights, the whole valley full of fairy-light, gave way to darkness.

Darkness and moonlight and bitter, unseasonable cold. Last year at this time, he had walked the hills in the kind of cool his mom had called “sweater weather,” listening to the clicking of autumn insects. They were silent now, pounced upon by this stealthy, unnatural winter.

The moon and stars took charge of the sky as Arcott turned away, toward the greater darkness beyond this low ridge. To the old railway tracks alongside Willow Neck Creek, where there should have been nothing at all; but where, just now, he anticipated—or could he actually hear?—the ancient tracks rattling to an unaccustomed presence.

His own private special delivery was out there, hurtling through the night, off in the darkness, still unseen.

He had stepped into the shadow of the trees along Philosopher’s Walk to avoid being seen on the way here. “Keeping himself to himself,” as his father might have said.

Because he was ashamed?

No. Because there were some things that could not yet be divulged, even to Siegel, even to Wade, his confidants, his lieutenants, his good hands right and left.

Sometimes research had to proceed in secret, or at least with due regard for security. They could know everything else about the operation, but people couldn’t always interpret certain facts correctly.

At least for now, at least until the Radio was on the air…

He followed a footpath to the old concrete railway piers. The trees here were bare of leaves. The railroad stretched toward the dark west like a dry river. Moonlight glinted fitfully on the rust-eaten rails.

He caught himself whistling a tune, something from his father’s jazz collection, a half-forgotten Chet Baker song. Bad idea. The sound would draw attention to himself. Better to remain anonymous, even in the empty night.

The cracked concrete piers stood canted at the trackside. These had been loading bays for the gypsum plant that had been abandoned and torn down forty years ago. The slabs, ten feet by fifteen and half as tall as a man, must have been too massive to cart away. Arcott selected the nearest one, hauled himself up onto its abrasive surface, brushed away a layer of fallen leaves, and sat cross-legged. He shivered. His denim pants and cowhide jacket were feeble armor against this graveyard chill.

He saw the train far out on the flatlands. It seemed to grow more substantial, more
material,
as it approached. Such was the nature of things.

Arcott stood up. He hated these encounters. They were unavoidable, obligations of iron necessity, like the church services his father had dragged him to every week, fundamentally unpleasant.

The train was black as night. Blacker. He watched it come, mesmerized. Soon it would glide silently to a stop,
and Arcott would scramble toward it, a little afraid as always, but also trembling with anticipation, imagining the weight of treasure that would soon be his, the cold beauty and clean utility of the stones, raw and cut, all the angles of symmetry, indices of refraction, directions of cleavage, the semiprecious stones gathered from a thousand places….

The gift from the west, from the Ghostlands.

In due time, the train passed through a wavering mist like a night mirage and drew to a stop on the outskirts of a slumbering town. Steam hissed from the locomotive’s ribs like a foul breath, like a killing fog.

(Inigo recalled the fog in London that had killed all those people on a bleak day in the previous century, in the 1950s; his father had related it to him like a fairy tale, stressing the imperative moral of the story—that the world can turn hostile in a moment, that it can kill you.)

From his perch atop the passenger car where he lay silent and still, Inigo watched the man in the long black coat emerge from the front of the train. The other man was waiting for him beside the tracks, younger, with wavy dark hair and bright blue eyes, and the overalertness of the scholar, the intellectual.

Without his heightened senses, Inigo wouldn’t have been able to see him clearly, to make out his smooth olive skin, the faded bomber jacket that gave little protection against the brittle night.

Or to smell the fear and eagerness radiating off him like sweat on a hot summer day.

The man in black strode toward him, and as he crossed the headlight beam of the locomotive like a hellish eye, Inigo saw the man’s silhouette change like a gargantuan black umbrella unfurling. Then he was through the searchlight and his outline was a man again.

Bomber Jacket had seen it, too, and grown pale, taken a shaky step back.

“Jesus, I hope they grade you on a curve,” the man in black said contemptuously, and he laughed.

It made Inigo’s skin crawl even more than the insect feel on the skin of the train.

The man in black canted his head back toward the train, murmured something Inigo couldn’t hear over the hiss of steam.

The big doors on the black passenger cars slid back, and the twisted forms so like Inigo in shape and unlike him in soul began unloading the shipment, the precious cargo Bomber Jacket craved so much that it held him there despite his fear.

The man in black leaned idly against a pillar, lit up a cigarette and stood inhaling the frosty blue smoke, stirring it about on his tongue, then lazily exhaling it. Inigo caught a dusky whiff of the exotic tobacco and was impressed, for he knew despite all appearances that the dread visitor’s smoke was not tobacco, and its source not the illusory “cigarette” but rather the visitor himself.