Marc Zicree - Ghostlands

But it was a start.

At the Latter Memorial Library on St. Charles in New Orleans, remarkably still intact and in full operation, Shango researched the names. He discovered that a preponderance of them were in allied fields of chemistry, molecular engineering and-most particularly-analysis and application of gemstones for use in laser technology and quantum physics research.

Specifically, Shango found that a number of the Source scientists were previously engaged in studies utilizing a variety of gemstones to focus energy and alter its proton and electron signatures, with the aim of splitting and recombining it in fierce new forms. One obscure article even hinted at the theoretical notion of exploiting these properties to harness great amorphous energies from other dimensions in space-time.

What enormous quantity of gems-and what bottomless purchasing power-might it have taken to accomplish this, Shango wondered, if indeed those at the Source Project were responsible for summoning the raging forces that had punched into this world and overwhelmed the planet?

McKay, in the brief interview by the fountain that sweltering summer day right after the Change, mentioned that the Source Project had been kept hidden even from him, a black box operation whose existence and funding were squirreled away in any number of secret cubbyholes, spread out between CIA, DoD, NSA….

Returning to the environs of D.C.-or what was left of it-Shango paid a call on Reynolds Darden, an old friend in accounts receivable at the sprawling National Security Agency complex at Fort George Meade, Maryland. Childhood friends since the frenetic days in the New Orleans projects, Shango had done him a favor once, engaging in a brief conversation with a boyfriend of Darden’s sister, a man with a past full of wreckage and excuses. After that little talk with Shango, Mr. Significant Other booked a flight to Adelaide and didn’t come back.

“What’re you looking for?” Darden asked, eyes glinting behind owlish bifocals.

“I’ll know it when I see it,” Shango said. But he knew where to start-with any purchase order that bore the name-or anagram of the name, or false name derived from some biographical detail-of any of the Source Project scientists.

It had taken weeks of grueling, tedious effort, but at long last Shango found it: a list of purchase orders from a number of gem shops scattered across the middle of the country. No single quantity large enough to raise eyebrows, but in the aggregate one shitload of semiprecious stones…

The majority of the orders were from Anthony St. Rivers, who naturally proved not to be on any department’s payroll records. But applying certain historical allusions and a little creative translation, Shango found he could resolve the name readily enough into…

Marcus Sanrio.

Of course, he knew that didn’t make it so.

In the old world, the one with the Internet and cordless phones, the next step would have been a snap. But in the new one…

Shango hit the road again to talk to the rock hounds, find where they had shipped the purchases. When he found the shops still standing, their owners in residence, he perused their files, and learned that most of the purchases were sent to various letter drops, P.O. boxes, elusory safe houses designed to make the path circuitous, impossible to trace.

And none on any flight path Bilmer had flown.

But in a scrubby little shop outside Middleburg Heights, Ohio, Shango found one scrap that somehow had missed the cloaking device of smoke and mirrors the Source Project was so adept at erecting.

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.