Marc Zicree - Ghostlands

But now, she knew them for what they were, understood that beyond the inner side door would be a long hall with tiny, unadorned rooms like monks’ cells, a narrow, worn bed in each.

Pick a number, just like a deli, she thought with distaste.

It was the same, exactly the same as she remembered it. But then she saw the one thing different, the dissonance that made the sweat on her skin go clammy, made her heart skip a beat.

There was an old woman, an old Asian woman, sitting dead center on the middle tier among all the others, the bored ones waiting to be picked, if only for the variety, the change in the tedium.

She hadn’t been here before, not the first time around, Colleen was sure of it- and the woman was looking dead at her.

Although she was about the age of Mama Diamond, of her race and coloring, with eyes that held a similar alertness, this woman had none of the other’s kindness nor regard. She was all hard edges and coldness. She rose from her place on the tier, took several small, precise steps to floor level and approached.

Colleen felt the hairs on her neck rise, felt the jolt of adrenaline hit her heart, her pulse quicken. She felt the strong urge to run, but instead drew her machete. When it came to fight or flight, she generally found herself of the fight variety.

Let’s see how dumb a decision that is this time.

The Asian woman drew near within the room, reached the door and, rather than opening it, was suddenly just on the other side, out in the sticky night air.

“You shouldn’t be here, little girl,” the woman said with a lightness that made it all the more ominous.

“Who are you?” Colleen replied, and fought to keep her voice even. “I don’t know you.”

Up close, she could see that the texture of the old woman’s lined parchment skin was odd, composed of a subtle, transient energy that flickered like galaxies of stars blinking on and off, endlessly extinguished and reborn.

“Funny…” the old woman said absently, glancing about at the street rather than at Colleen. “I-we-I”-she seemed to be having trouble with pronouns-“was actually here, you know, at about this period. I fled the Cultural Revolution…dreadful times, the savagery, the destruction…. My own father was beheaded by the white-boned demon.”

There was a sense of all this being said distantly-mere ghosts of memory, shreds of feeling and expression-an old tape playing, not the least connected to how this women (or whatever she truly was) existed now.

Then the old woman focused on Colleen and, for the briefest moment, Colleen thought she could discern sympathy in those eyes, the fleeting scrutiny of someone both kindly and human.

“Fear is what drives this world, my dear,” the apparition whispered, “fear and the remorseless need for security….”

Her eyes slid away and all emotion drained, replaced by that dreamy, distant quality.

“I came to this sewer,” the woman-thing said. “I did what I had to, I survived. ” She said this last with the faintest echo of defensiveness, guiltily, as if Colleen might well have grounds to accuse her.

“Who are you?” Colleen repeated.

“Agnes Wu,” the old woman responded. But once more, she seemed to be speaking by rote, as though the answer held no meaning, the syllables in an unknown language, mere nonsense sounds.

Colleen recognized the name. It was on the list of Source scientists Cal carried with him, copied off the one Larry Shango had shown them, that Shango had found hidden alongside the corpse of Jeri Bilmer.

So now I’ve met two of the bigwigs who fucked up the world, Colleen thought, Wu here and Fred Wishart back in Boone’s Gap-and neither of them human anymore. Wishart must be around here somewhere, too, and how many of those other clowns?

Beyond that, and far more important to her, Doc and Cal and dammit even fucking irritating Herman Goldman, too, not to mention Enid and Howie, Shango and Mama Diamond, somewhere nearby, she knew it. But how to find them in this maze of conjured memory, this shell game of misdirection and illusion?

“You’re in a bit of a predicament, my dear,” Agnes Wu said with the cool aplomb of a Bengal tiger stalking a gazelle. “Can’t go forward, and can’t go back.”

“So where’s that leave me?” Colleen asked, her hand tightening on the machete.

“Where does that leave anyone?” Agnes Wu asked philosophically.

The clamorous Thai music from within shifted to a throbbing disco beat, and the words blared out through the glass. “Stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive…”

Agnes Wu’s placid features twisted into a mask of rage that for a moment was another face, an old man’s face Colleen did not recognize, pale and thin, with sightless eyes blank as eggshell.

“I hate that song!” the Agnes Wu thing spat, and reached out to Colleen with a hand that was a hand no longer but instead a churning mass of multihued energy, a vortex of will and nothingness that Colleen could feel pulling her toward it, inhaling her like a drowning man breaching the surface of the sea.

And in the midst of this, in some distant-observer part of her mind, Colleen got a visceral flash, an instant-message comprehension, that while the memories presented might be Agnes Wu-at least drawn from her consciousness-the homicidal rage erupting from behind the facade seemed dissonantly someone else . That pallid blind man perhaps, in all or part; if not a puppet master, a dominant awareness…

With a cry, Colleen grasped her machete in both hands and brought it down hard across Agnes Wu, hacking her from shoulder to hip in a move that would have sundered her in two had she been composed of meat and bone and blood, or any material that could be so affected.

But it was like trying to cut lightning, like severing smoke. It had no effect at all, except possibly pissing off the thing that was Agnes Wu-or was composed partially of her-even more than she was previously.

The abomination gave a hideous, deafening roar that shook the ground and sky and all its stars. Its force hurled Colleen windmilling back, struggling to maintain her balance-which is what saved her ass, in the long run. For as she flailed wildly to stay on her feet as she was driven backward, her arm glanced against a wall, which shrieked and flinched away.

Now, that’s interesting, Colleen reflected.

Agnes Wu was striding toward her and she didn’t really look human anymore, unless humans were made of the molten hearts of suns, made of reactor cores in full meltdown. Colleen could feel her skin sunburning as she faced her, her eyes crisping like she was peering into the fires of hell. She turned quickly away and plunged her arm again into the wall. Her bare hand hit blunt stone, was turned aside, but where her arm glanced the wall, the brick surface rippled and screamed and irised away.

It’s the armor, Colleen realized, the armor of dragon skin that Doc, Lord bless him, had made for her and Cal and Shango. Just like the scale that had burnt Clayton Devine, that crazed, homicidal half-flare, back in Chicago when Colleen had pressed it into his flesh, the armor was doing the exact same thing here.

Because-as that bloody, horrific explosion had so clearly demonstrated just minutes before- the walls and doors and everything else here were made of flares.

With the possible-no, make that probable -exception of Dr. Agnes Wu, who was bearing down on her right about now with all the loving tenderness of a rabid Mack truck.

Not wanting to test the proposition at this juncture, not in the least, not one little bit, thank you very much, Colleen finally chose the flight side of the equation and threw herself bodily at the wall. As the armor encasing her legs and torso connected with the hard brick, the wall let out a wail of pain and opened up. She passed clean through like a knife through butter, like a B-52 through a cloudy sky, and was gone. It sealed up behind her, a fast-healing wound.