Marc Zicree - Ghostlands

“Why didn’t you just kill It?” Colleen asked Stern. “I mean, Judas Escariot, you’re the one who can breathe fire.”

“It never let me close enough,” Stern replied, with a hint of ire. “I dealt solely with Its projections, all those images that look human. I saw It once, you know-what It really is, just for a second.” Stern shuddered then. “Just a blur, I couldn’t say exactly. Then It slammed the lid. But It could have killed me anytime it wanted. It doesn’t suffer fools gladly, or anyone, for that matter.”

“Wouldn’t it have been simpler,” Shango asked, “just to bring Christina back to Griffin, and tell us the whole deal?”

“Did people get stupider while I was away? I told you, It wouldn’t let her go. ”

And maybe, Cal thought, you liked having her to yourself. Sharing her only sporadically with Inigo and Papa Sky; a contained world of four.

“So you brought us here,” said Cal, nodding toward Inigo and Papa Sky. “Using them.”

Inigo began, “I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you-”

Stern cut him off, addressing Cal. “Had to play a close hand, bunky. The Big Bad Thing can get into your mind, read it like the morning paper-particularly little peanut human minds like yours. Couldn’t risk It getting the drop before you got here.”

Doc looked concerned. “But It must have…. After all, It closed the portal behind us.”

“Mm? Nah, that was me. I kicked the shit out of your damping equipment, let the whole thing run wild.”

There was an explosion of outraged protests. Stern shouted them down. “I didn’t kill anyone, all right? And that was a major bitch to manage, believe me.”

Silence settled again, like snow in winter light.

Finally, Papa Sky said, “Let ’em know the rest of it, Ely.”

Stern blew a contemptuous breath from his reptilian nostrils, but surprisingly Cal could detect something like regret in his gravel voice. “There’s what you might call a downside…. We’ve kind of jump-started things. It’s spreading out there in Iowa, the Bad Thing’s power, Its control. Slowly at first, but once It gets a head of steam up, It’ll gobble up everyone and everything.”

Cal was horrified, saw his emotion mirrored on the faces of the others. He thought of the ones he had left in Atherton, the ones who had made their journey here possible-Rafe Dahlquist, Krystee Cott, Mike Kimmel and the rest. To have them subsumed into the Source, crumbled to nothing and destroyed…

Like Goldie.

Despair surged up in him again, the impulse toward hopelessness and defeat. Then his eye caught Mama Diamond’s, and she gave him a wink. He had thought her lost, too, and she had returned. Not every surprise was a bad one, and the Source Entity wasn’t the only one holding a hand of cards that could still be played.

“How long will it take?” he asked Stern.

The dragon shrugged. “Let’s just say if we’re gonna do something, it’d be advisable not to take an extended lunch.”

Cal rounded on him with a sudden fury. “What the hell made you do that?”

“Two reasons,” Stern answered, the regret giving way to cold pragmatism, the lawyer in him. “First, it’s like Hitler with the Russian front. Establishing a second beachhead, gaining dominance, weakens It, takes Its attention and resources. That’s why It couldn’t stop you getting to the Stronghold here. It gives us a window of opportunity.”

“And second?” prompted Shango.

“There’s this Lakota thing called Napesni…”. Stern looked to May Catches the Enemy.

“The No-Flights,” she explained. “Warriors who staked themselves to the ground in battle so they’d have to triumph or die.”

Stern nodded. “I figured, no back door, you’re gonna take it to the max.”

“Lovely,” said Colleen.

“Why us?” Cal asked. “Why me?”

“I’m not a people person,” Stern replied. “You are, cupcake.”

May Catches the Enemy canted her head in apparent agreement. “Folks generally fall to pieces or rise to their best depending on who’s around to lead them.” She turned to Cal. “Way I hear it, you done pretty good on your way here from New York.”

“Besides…” Stern hesitated. “I had this dream.”

He spoke lower now in his sandpaper rasp, and Cal could see the memory shook him. “It’s dark all around, and you’re at the heart of it, holding that damn sword, and everyone’s begging you to do something….”

Cal found he’d broken into a sweat. “And do I?” His voice was barely audible.

“I don’t know,” Stern answered frankly, looking at him with a gentleness, a humanity, Cal had never seen before. “But you’re the only one who can.”

Mama Diamond could see that the others were having a hard time taking this all in, just as she herself had, soon after Ely Stern had plucked her from amidst the buffalo of the living dead and saved her bacon.

Even so, she had learned this was a world that demanded you looked at it for what it was rather than what you thought or wanted it to be.

Whatever he might seem, in the end Stern had been no thief, merely a conservator and strategist, setting a pace that led them all here, and kept them effective and whole.

It was whatever dwelt at the Source that was the real thief, that wanted to steal away not only all they possessed, but their precious selves as well-while the journey Ely Stern had set in motion had served only to bring Mama Diamond to her own true self.

As for what awaited them at the Source, if they succeeded in reaching and confronting It, might It be as different from what Mama Diamond imagined as Stern had turned out to be?

She didn’t know.

On the way here, as Stern had borne her through clouds blown along the frigid eastern winds, the dragon had told her that the strongest person was the one who could look anything in the eye and not blink.

Now, sitting here in the belly of the earth that had enthralled and beguiled her for so long, Mama Diamond prayed for the strength to see (with the unclouded eyes so recently brought to humming clarity by the dragon’s gift) what lay at the Source for what It truly was.

“Let’s recap, shall we?” Colleen said. “We’re trapped in the Badlands with dwindling food, almost no weapons, buried under the ground with a dragon and a bunch of Indians. Yeah, we’re on rails here.”

May Catches the Enemy bristled. “Lady, you could use some spirituality.”

Colleen bulled up to May, getting right in her face. “First, I’m no lady, and second -”

Cal stepped between them before it could escalate into a knife fight. “Drop it,” he said to Colleen.

Cooling, she backed off. Cal took May aside, away from the others, and spoke softly. “You got a problem with any of us, you bring it to me, okay?”

“Yeah, sorry…. Guess I’m not Little Miss Centered all the time.”

Despite the urgency, despite the weight of grief like a stone in him, Cal smiled. “It’s just what you told me. No divisions between people anymore, we don’t have time for it. We want to live, we get over ourselves.”

She smiled back. “You’re a good listener…and a fast learner.” She cocked her head quizzically. “How are you at dancing?”

“Dancing?” he asked, puzzled.

She led him along with the others to a big steamer trunk and unlocked it. Cal saw that it was filled with fringed garments made of leather that were painted white with various markings. She held one up to him.

He knew it for the forbidden thing it had been, had seen one like it in a museum once. Long ago, it had been the last, sad expression of a ravaged, defiant people, and the sorcery it had claimed had been only an empty promise, like a dry wind on parched lands.