Marc Zicree - Ghostlands

“Makes no nevermind if we reach the borderland,” Papa Sky added in his smoky cigarette rasp, lifting his lips from the bamboo reed set in the mouthpiece of his gleaming alto sax. “You try to pass through it into the world outside, why, it’ll just burn you clean away.”

Mama Diamond saw that the boy Inigo was nodding somberly in agreement.

“And how exactly did you get here?” Cal asked Papa Sky, but Papa only smiled inscrutably and would speak no further regarding his travels here, nor any possible companions, human or otherwise.

Cal sighed, and let it go. “We can’t stay here, that’s for sure.” He let out a slow, considered breath. “Mary McCrae’s Preserve was in the Olentangy Indian Caverns of Ohio. A sacred site, that helped lend it its power. Now, the Source Project might hold sway here, but it’s smack dab in middle of the Black Hills-”

Mama Diamond nodded; she knew the lore well. “The granddaddy of all sacred sites.”

“That’s right,” Cal said. “So odds are it should have a power all its own, too.”

“In theory,” Doc said. But theory was all they had now.

They fell silent then, the only sound the fusillade of debris continuing to batter their defenses.

Finally, Papa Sky spoke, his ancient, musky voice barely audible. “There’s a place I know…. Least, I heard tell of it. Rumor is some folks tried to get there once, long time back, old men, women, children…It’s called the Stronghold.”

“Tell me it’s fifty feet from here,” Colleen said.

“More like fifty miles,” he replied. Colleen groaned.

“Where?” Cal asked Papa Sky.

“A tableland just past the Black Hills…in the Badlands.”

“Well?” Cal asked the others.

Mama Diamond felt she really shouldn’t have a vote. After all, despite the conviction she had felt that the others would need her along, thus far she’d been little more than baggage. She saw the others nodding their assent (reluctantly, of course; it would be fifty miles of long, hard road, a royal sonofabitch, and no two ways about it) and added her own.

Cal took this in and rose, Mama Diamond and the others following suit. Slowly, fighting the whole wide world every inch of the way, they journeyed past the melted pillars and out through the parking lot, to the twisting roadway leading down to the Badlands.

Enid Blindman and Papa Sky continued playing all the while. As they made their tortuous way, Mama Diamond touched Papa on the arm. “Those folks who tried to get there, a long time back, what happened to them?”

Papa Sky stopped playing, and his face was gray under its cherrywood sheen.

“They were on the run,” he said, looking out at her with troubled, unseeing eyes. “A whole lot of them got rubbed out. At a place called Wounded Knee…”

Farther down the slope of the mountains, they found the terrain less ravaged than at its apogee, or rather ravaged by the natural sweep of earth and time; the flow and retreat of ocean, the exhalation of molten rock, the layers of stone that had rippled and overturned like blankets on a restless sleeper.

All under a storm-wracked sky that held little sympathy, and a great deal of threat.

The ponderosa pines were thicker here, and green-needled once more, the aspens speckled white and brown, not charred as by a dragon’s breath. The air presented a fitful, elusive intensity of humid heat radiating off the mountainside behind them; a whisper of the Source. But for the most part, the wind wore its winter coat, and chilled them despite their heavy clothes. Icy rain pelted at them, alternating with flurries of snow. Their legs felt leaden; Colleen longed for Big-T, her redoubtable steed whom they’d left stabled back in Atherton, and for Cal’s Sooner and Doc’s Koshka. She thought then of Goldie’s horse Jayhawk-whom he had renamed Later, in a predictable fit of Goldie-ness-and it brought her a fresh pang of grief and regret.

As the afternoon waned, the assaults on them from all directions (rail fences flying at them, barbed wire coiling and springing like pythons) grew less determined and more sporadic, until they ceased altogether. Cal directed Christina to conserve her energies; in answer, her aura withdrew from about them until it encompassed only the pale, hovering girl herself. Papa Sky and Enid continued to play, but more softly, Doc leading the sightless old man with a gentle touch on his arm.

Walking alongside Cal, Colleen could sense his wariness. The cessation of attacks hadn’t lessened his anxiety; rather, it had served only to increase it. Colleen shared his concern. She had learned on her father’s knee that you pull back your ground forces to make room for the artillery bombardment.

As their boots crunched on the newly fallen snow, she wondered what new hell they would soon face.

She didn’t have long to wait for the answer.

Descending, rounding a bend in the cracked highway amidst towering granite needles that (as Mama Diamond coolly informed them, as if they were nothing more than a nomadic tour group and she their seasoned guide) had been thrust out of the earth two and half billion years ago, they hit a level patch, a shelf on the slanting hillside.

Cal drew to an abrupt halt, motioning the others to stillness.

They were not alone.

Cal drew his sword from its scabbard, and Colleen unslung her crossbow and nocked a bolt into it soundlessly. She saw the others readying themselves, too, although she felt certain they knew as well as she did that they had about as much chance as a canary at a cat convention.

There were hundreds of them, arrayed along the hillside in the tall grass, amid the thick pines, snorting blasts of steamy breath from big nostrils, the snow like powdered sugar on their massive shoulders and heads. Some still grazed on the wheatgrass and bluestem, tearing up great hunks of sod, with blunt sounds like great machines gouging out the earth.

Blood dripped from their diminutive mouths, and ran from their fathomless black eyes like crimson tears beneath vast horns like polished granite, black speckled in gray. Great gashes in their hides showed glistening meat with marbled fat and bone beneath; violence had been done to them, wantonly and on a grand scale.

They were dead, of course, but had been called forth from the womb of the earth to face them now with blank malevolence.

The buffalo covered the land, and hungered for their blood.

I’m a science geek, not an English major, Theo Siegel thought as he fled bearing Melissa Wade from the shattered ruin of the Nils Bohr Applied Physics Building, on the campus at Atherton. He knew he would never adequately be able to describe the shining, avaricious mass that oozed from the wrecked building and began its inexorable advance on the town. Its aurora glow of purple and blue and green was something like the night-washed waves pounding the shore along the Sea of Cortez, where his late father (a geek, too, from a long line of geeks) had taken him and his girl cousins back when he was a kid. But it was also like some sickly mold on a basement-damp orange, like something repulsive coming off a gone-to-liquid corpse.

However you described it, though, you sure as hell wouldn’t want to touch it, or have it touch you.

As he staggered away, trying to put as much distance as possible between them and that freakin’ portal (which he knew as surely as the waist size on his jockey shorts was continuing to pour fiendish energy like water from a gut-burst dam), he saw townies and college gits alike disgorge from buildings on all sides, gape at the shining crud coming off the physics quad, then take to their heels getting the hell away; clear out of town, if they knew what was good for them. Word was spreading, and fast, which was a damn good thing. ’Cause what didn’t get out got ate. Theo felt that one right on down to his Converse All-Stars.