Marc Zicree - Ghostlands

Just like Papa Sky could blow his horn on the soft autumn nights and warm summer days, and during wintertime and springtime, too. It was a gift, one both of them had long before any Storm blasted through this old world.

It had been hard, bonechill hard, for Papa Sky to meet up with Enid in Buddy Guy’s club there on the South Side, along with Griffin and the Russian and the rest, and pretend he didn’t know him, act like he was just another stranger, blown in from off the street like a discarded playbill.

But then, Papa Sky supposed he really didn’t know him, not this grown man, three decades down in his life.

No longer a baby, no, whose only music was the soft cooing he made as he lay rocked in loving arms.

The boy walking next to him stopped abruptly. “Why are you crying?” he asked in stunned amazement.

Papa Sky wiped fiercely at the wetness running down the furrows that were like old bark in maple wood. “Just something an old man does,” he said. “Don’t mean nothin’.”

They continued on, the tapping of the cane their sole music now.

All the others were dead now. Pops and Kid Orry and Bix Beiderbecke, Wingy Manone, too. All of them, all but him. But Papa Sky knew there was a reason he was still aboveground. He had something to do.

And before it was done, he would see Enid Blindman again.

It took considerable coaxing and smoothing of feathers to convince the cops (especially the one with the spanking-new, hammer-shaped bruise to the belly) to let the big black guy and his Asian old-lady companion just sashay on into town. But then Cal Griffin put in the word with Jeff Arcott, and Arcott spoke with the cops, and that was all she wrote.

After all, Jeff Arcott was…well, Jeff Arcott.

In the old days, sports heroes and movie stars held sway, but now the one swinging the big stick was the guy who could get things done.

And say what you would about Arcott’s people skills-or notable lack of them-Theo Siegel had to admit that, without him, Atherton would look a whole lot less like it had in the old days and a whole lot more like the far side of the moon. Which was to say, barren and picked clean and utterly devoid of appreciating real estate values.

Even though dawn had come and gone, and he hadn’t gotten a lick of sleep, and his ill-used left leg was screaming like a caffeine-wired blue bastard, Theo Siegel was there waiting for them on the bench in front of the Nils Bohr Applied Physics Building when Arcott and Cal Griffin pulled up in the El Dorado, followed by a road-hardened assortment of men and women, several atop horses and others pulled in a wagon they must have secured from some antique shop or Mennonite farm community along the road in their travels.

Melissa Wade sat beside Theo on the concrete bench. She’d sought him out around seven, brought coffee and fresh bagels, kept him diverted with airy conversation. It had been thoughtful of her, and Theo was glad of it, although as always it left him with a pang of privation, of longing.

Still, she was lovely to behold in the cool morning sun, her hair with its gradients of flame like warm coals glowing, of hammered brass and pale wood, her eyes dark-sparkling as the light sought out their subtleties. Her lips were slightly parted as she looked off lost in thought. She was lush in all the right places, but also fine-boned, delicate and fragile somehow; as always, captivating.

He knew, of course, that as soon as Jeff appeared she would hurry to his side and Theo himself would fade back in her consciousness to a shade, a wisp of memory, if anything at all.

Yet in spite of this, he held an unspoken wish, locked in the stronghold of his heart, alongside all the keepsakes he cherished of her, that Melissa might someday awaken from the spell of Jeff’s brilliance, might look around and see things fresh, things that were right in front of her face.

College romances could be like that, could ignite white-hot then burn out like roadside flares. He’d seen it a million times with his older brothers and sisters (scattered to the winds before the Change, who knew where they were now…).

Why couldn’t it work out that way in this case? Why the hell not?

Because wanting something, even wanting it with all your soul, almost never made it happen. Because there were lead actors in this world and supporting players, and Theo Siegel knew precisely which category he fell into.

Even if Jeff Arcott could never love anything as straightforward as a body sharing a concrete bench on a fall morning.

A memory of an old movie bubbled to the surface of Theo’s mind, of Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson in Key Largo, of Bogart asking Robinson, who was playing Rico the mob boss, if Rico knew what he wanted.

“More,” Bogart told him. “You want more.”

Jeff wanted more. More knowledge. More power.

And what would he do with them when he had them?

As the Cadillac drew to a halt before them, he and Melissa peered at the faces of the newcomers. Theo spotted the bulky man first, there in the backseat of the El Dorado, looking much as he had in the profile Discover Magazine had run on him last spring before the Change, if a little more care-worn and rough around the edges.

He gave Melissa a nudge. “That’s him, Dahlquist.”

So it was true, after all. And it explained why Jeff had allowed all these new arrivals. Hell, for that level of experimental physicist, Arcott would’ve let the entire roll call of the Veterans of Foreign Wars parade into town. Not to mention chew off his own left arm. Or Theo’s, if it came to that.

Process had never been Arcott’s thing, nor patience. Results were all that mattered, the endgame. Which was a good thing, Theo supposed, if you wanted to have piping hot water and CD players and all the swankest luxuries this extremely post postmodern world could afford.

Now things could really get moving, in earnest-whatever those things might be. For although Jeff had allowed both Theo and Melissa a glimpse into some of the details of what he was building-the parts he needed them to machine and fabricate, the marching orders he required them to delegate to the rest of the work crew-he was playing a very close hand. No matter how much Arcott tried to conceal his inner workings, however, Theo had detected his frustration at how things were proceeding, knew the new work had grown becalmed, despite all Jeff’s best efforts. But Dahlquist would put an end to that.

More wonders of the New Science aborning…

Pandora’s box, slowly cracking open.

Theo knew that his own curse-beyond that of unrequited love, and loyalty beyond all reason-was an endless, insatiable curiosity to see what precisely would happen next.

Which, thanks to Jeff Arcott, in recent times and local environs, hadn’t been all that damn bad.

So why then, watching the big black car roll up like a hearse, did Theo have such a queasy feeling about the next day and the next?

He shivered, and felt the hairs on his neck rise, felt the cold dark lump under the skin there, the alien object that kept everything in check, that kept him in check.

Or at least, the him that he knew.

Theo envisioned all the evils of Pandora’s box flitting off, flying out into the greater world, as the Storm itself had spread. Then he remembered the one thing that had been left in the box when all else had fled.

Hope.

Looking now at Cal Griffin (who had literally saved him from the jaws of death, and from its talons, too) as he emerged from behind the steering wheel of the Caddy, Theo Siegel thought he might have just enough faith left in him to believe in something more than Jeff Arcott and Melissa Wade, and the siren call that beckoned them.