Marc Zicree - Ghostlands

The bloated dead lay directly in their path. And by God, they looked real.

I see the town completely undamaged, Colleen had said. Well, there was only one way to really test that theory.

“Buckle your seat belts,” Cal said. Doc pulled his shoulder belt and snapped it in, then helped Siegel with his.

Cal floored it. With a roar, the El Dorado’s big tires shimmied laterally, then gained traction, screeching. The car surged forward.

They sped toward the grotesque heaped bodies of men, women, children. And then…

Nothing.

It was like passing through the surface of a mirror, if the mirror were insubstantial as smoke, and suddenly seeing the reflection wasn’t real at all.

“Bozhyeh moy,” Doc muttered under his breath.

“You can say that again,” said Cal.

For in the valley spread out ahead of them, the cloud-wrack opened and the pale moon raked cleared, pristine fields of what might recently have been rows of wheat and corn. The adjacent farmhouse had smoke curling complacently up out of the chimney, and brilliant, unwavering lights blazing within. Sound echoed from inside, vibrating through the keen night air toward them, lush orchestrations, and words, impossible words, and familiar.

“Hide the ring, Frodo. Keep it safe!”

“Jesus H. Christ,” Cal whispered. There were only two possibilities: either Sir Ian McKellen himself had dropped by and was reciting his number one hits…

Or someone was watching The Lord of the Rings.

A working television, working VCR or DVD player, and electric lights.

Beyond the farmhouse was the town itself, the buildings upright and intact, night settling down snug around a scattering of lights, amber streetlamps, astonishing dependable current humming through them, a carpet of them tucked into the gentle river valley, twinkling. People strolled the main street and lingered in the gazeboed park as if they hadn’t a care in the world, as if there had never been a Change or a Storm or a Darkness to make them shed a single tear.

Cal understood now just what the people here had to protect.

A safe haven, a hiding place…

Sanctuary.

The first such town Cal and his companions had come to on their winding pilgrimage was Stansbury, near the banks of the Patuxent, where Lola Johnson, that laughing, wise Earth Mother, somehow managed to plant the suggestion to marauding passersby that they not see the town at all.

Mary McCrae used concealing fog and portals only a very few could open to keep her Preserve enclosed.

Fred Wishart had done the same with Boone’s Gap for a time, and conjured monsters.

The folks here used plague, the illusion of it, to summon up terror and keep visitors away.

“Where should we drop you, Mr. Siegel?” Cal asked their passenger.

“Call me Theo.” He was sitting up straighter now, propping himself up with a hand on the back of Doc’s bucket seat. “Left at the stoplight, it’s the only one.”

Cal made the turn and saw that laid out ahead of them were the homey brick structures of a college. A row of wire-strung power poles stood evenly spaced on either side of the street, fanning out from the campus to the rest of the town. Closer now, Cal could see that each of the poles was arrayed-like the rifle Theo had wielded, like the engine of the El Dorado-with gleaming bright gemstones. They glimmered in the illumination from the lamps overhead, and cast multihued refractions.

Cal pulled up to the Student Union.

“Thanks,” Theo said. “Hey, listen, how ’bout you come in a minute? There’s a couple friends I’d like you to meet.”

Doc shot Cal a questioning look. Cal nodded confirmation. The two of them climbed out of the big boat of a car and helped the pale young man shakily to his feet. Cal’s hand brushed the back of Theo’s neck, and he was surprised to feel a hard bump under the skin.

It was just about exactly the size and shape of one of those stones lining the streetlamps.

Theo, trying to put weight on his left leg, cried out in pain.

“Broken, in all possibility, or badly sprained,” Doc said. “What I would give for a-” Then a remarkable look dawned on his face, as he cast his eyes on all the streetlights ablaze.

“You would not by chance have a medical center?” Doc asked, and Cal caught the tentative eagerness under the words.

Supported by them on either side, hobbling all the way, Theo led them there. But not before Cal retrieved his sword from the Cadillac, buckled it around his waist, and handed Doc the rifle.

It made Inigo’s stomach hurt having to lie to Christina’s brother. But if he hadn’t, Cal Griffin would never have left him to go into town.

Still, Inigo’s mother had told him never to lie. But then, she had said she was only leaving him for a week or two, that he would be perfectly safe with Agnes Wu (make that Dr. Wu, if you please, though it had always seemed odd to Inigo that someone who pushed elemental particles around had the same title as a guy who gave you a tetanus shot), that she would be back before he knew she was gone.

And that had all been a lie.

So where did that leave him?

Telling Cal Griffin he would stay put, when that would be the most dangerous thing he could do for any of them.

No, he had to be in and out, before the Big Bad Thing got a whiff of it, in plenty of time to watch Christina dance on the corner again, to listen to Papa Sky belt out those mournful blues, to have the Leather Man not say a word or bat an eye.

Because shit, if you crossed that crazy dude, he’d say more than a word and bat more than an eye.

That scary lady with the crossbow and the knives hauled him up on her horse-Big-T it was named, was that some kinda joke, like Tyrannosaurus or what? — and held tight to him all the way to the towering grain silo where the other happy campers were stowed. That funny, schizzy guy with the black curls rode alongside them on his buckskin horse, staring at him all the way, without ever looking directly at him.

Creepy, that.

Even when they got to the silo, Xena Warrior Princess kept him walking ahead of her, breathing down his neck, never letting him get so much as a yard away.

Oh brother, they were making him work….

Once inside, though, things took a serious upswing. Biker Girl and Hippie started talking to the rest of the gang, making sure they were warm, the fires well stoked, everybody with enough food in their gut and no grumbling from anybody. Plus they had to hip them to what Cal and Dr. Russian were up to.

A lot of ground to cover, chores to attend to. And finally, finally neither Goldie nor Colleen was watching him, and Inigo was able to slip out the door and into the night.

To where the other silo was waiting.

Since his transformation-and long before that, actually-Inigo could move on swift cat feet, covering a ton of ground making no sound at all, like wind rippling on the air, and nobody, not even an owl or a wood mouse, getting the least hint he was there.

He was a good way from the grain silo now; it was the barest silhouette against the night sky. The terrain spread out before him was a featureless expanse of mottled snow and high grass.

In the normal scheme of things, he wouldn’t have been able to see anything at all, wouldn’t have been able to find the hatch set flat in the ground. But this was far from the normal scheme of things, and he wasn’t a normal anything anymore.

Generally, he hated being the stunted, twisted freak he was-the bonsai distortions the Storm had laid on him made him studiously avoid mirrors. But for once, he was thankful for the milky, big, egg-membrane eyes of his that could pierce the darkness like a night-vision scope and better. It was a snap finding the big steel hatch, lifting it effortlessly with those long, lean superhuman arm muscles of his.