Marc Zicree - Ghostlands

Creation, indeed. It seemed to shock them both, most particularly because it suggested a kinship, an intimacy that neither courted. Could it be, Mama wondered, that the calling she had recognized long ago within her, the humming resonance in her core that had drawn her across the world in search of those ancient, thundering bones…

Was her dragon soul.

It was as if Mama Diamond had opened a door in a familiar house only to discover a whole new room beyond it. Known, yet not known.

The cat’s eyes narrowed against the incandescent holy glare of her. It backed up a pace, and then another.

Mama Diamond began to feel her powers draining from the exertion, the way the last water drains from an emptying cup, exhaustion rising from the marrow of her bones.

Just a bit longer, Mama Diamond willed.

The wolves turned tail and scattered. They must see the same heat mirage, Mama Diamond thought, these dark hunters, these predators.

“That’s right,” she said, “back off, Black Cat. You’re in over your head, you Night Animal. Look at me and go blind.”

The panther stood a moment-displaying a courage Mama Diamond was forced to admire-then howled and bounded into the darkness.

The wolves took their cue and ran like the dogs they were, tails tucked behind them.

Mama Diamond exhaled (had she been holding her breath?) and felt the power of illusion fade from her. The sensation was like stepping out of a warm shower into a chilly bathroom. She was suddenly cold and vulnerable. She shivered.

She looked down at her body with sudden fear, abruptly unsure that what she had seen in the cat’s looking-glass eyes was only an illusion and not the reality. But she wasn’t burned. She wasn’t hurt. She was only, suddenly, quite tired.

“I think I have to sit down,” she told Shango.

Shango struggled with words but finally managed, “Be my guest.”

“I’m sorry to disturb your meal,” Mama Diamond said, knowing even as she said it the absurdity of it, knowing it showed how rattled she was.

“Think, uh, nothing of it.” Still staring, the federal agent added, “You want something to eat? I kind of lost my appetite, myself.”

“Thank you, but I think what I really need is to sleep. Will you still be here in the morning?”

“Yes-I believe I will.”

“You’re willing to let me travel with you?”

“I have a feeling I’d be stupid to say no.”

“You were stupid the first time you said no. Will you fetch me my sleeping bag, Mr. Shango? My legs don’t want to carry me right now.”

“This can’t be right,” Cal Griffin said. The stench wafting off the valley was the worst he’d ever smelled. And that was saying a lot, considering all the dark places he’d been. The snow on the ground wasn’t yet thick enough to hide the evidence of what must have happened here. But clearly, the cold weather had preserved it a lot longer than if it were the summer months.

Cal was glad he had instructed Flo Speakman and the rest of her group to stay sheltered in the abandoned grain silo they had encountered three miles back, just off the 113 toward Des Moines. After all they’d been through, they didn’t need more nightmares.

Not that he particularly did, either. But a leader leads…and a lawyer searches for expedience and loopholes. He had been the latter in his old life, a reluctant if effective one, serving Ely Stern’s cold-eyed “pragmatism”-nothing more than an excuse for heartlessness and moral absenteeism, really. Now he was trying to be the former, to rise to the challenges so evident before him, to get good enough at it to be of some earthly use in the time they had left….

And also just maybe to utilize some of what he’d learned under Stern, to turn it at last to good use.

He’d made the choice to trust this grunter boy-so unlike the others of his kind Cal had met, so keen and articulate, if evasive-and had led those who followed him to this detour, this frigid place that might avail them of information or resources or…something.

Still, what benefit could they possibly glean from this scene of horror?

“It’s not what you think,” the grunter boy Inigo said, trying to sound confident but uneasiness leeching it away. It was the first time he’d seen it, too, at least in the day. And it was truly awful…which of course was the whole point.

“Yeah?” Colleen shot back. “So what would you call it? Hitler’s birthday party?”

From where the five of them stood on the lip of the valley, they could see the town hadn’t been particularly large, but it had held thousands, before it had been broken and burned and razed, not one of its modest buildings left standing.

It looked like most of the residents were still there, however, right out in the open, strewn about like so many dead Dorothy Gales deposited by a cyclone, or piled high in massive heaps of rotted flesh and sad, ragged clothing.

Something had been at them afterward, too-a lot of somethings, if the scraped bones and torn meat of the bodies were any indication.

Cal turned his face away from the wind that blew up from the valley floor. The stink was the pungence of death he had come to know in those black, appalling days after the Change in New York and the journey down the eastern arm of the country to Boone’s Gap. And, most particularly, in the fetid breath of the grunters who had cashed out their lives flinging themselves futilely at the Wishart house, then-still driven by the merciless will of the Source Consciousness-had risen dead to attack Cal and his friends.

The smell of blood and fat and excrement, a smell that you couldn’t get out of your nostrils, that settled into your skin and hair, that you couldn’t wash away.

That was the stench coming off this dreadful valley now, that and the gritty smell of burnt wood and meat and plastic….

And something else, an even more frightful reek that drove sharp claws into Cal’s gut, that wanted to make him run screaming back the way they’d come and never venture here again.

The horses caught it, too, whinnied nervously, tried to shy away. Cal held Sooner’s reins tightly, and he could hear Colleen whispering reassurance to Big-T.

Decay, and sickness…

Doc was squinting down at the valley through the field glasses he’d taken from his pack. He handed them off to Cal.

“Observe on some of them, Calvin, the growths under the arms and at the neck and groin, the black and purple eruptions….”

Doc was silent for a time, considering, then shook his head grimly. “I would need closer inspection to absolutely verify it, but I don’t think there can really be doubt. It’s bubonic plague.”

Colleen sighed. “You know, what with all we’ve been through, our stress level was getting kind of high, I was thinking maybe a cruise. But this is so much better.”

“You just gotta go down there,” Inigo said. “Believe me, you won’t regret it.”

“I regret it already,” Colleen replied.

Cal turned to the grunter. “I don’t think you’d have gone to the trouble to lead us all the way here just to give us the plague. So what’s waiting down there for us?”

Inigo hesitated a long moment, hunched his shoulders, his eyes darting furtively to the west. He had been warned before his long journey not to talk too specifically, too overtly. The Big Bad Thing had long ears and long eyes-and a long reach, too, for that matter, how well he knew that. But even if he were free to tell every single damn part of it, what would make them believe him?

At last, he said, “I…can’t say.”

“You don’t know, or you can’t tell?” Cal asked, and Inigo was surprised at how kindly his tone was, how patient and sympathetic. He saw Christina’s intelligence and endurance in this young man, but seasoned and even stronger, and he liked him for it.