Marc Zicree - Ghostlands

Inigo suspected she was telling him all this because she sensed his apprehension, saw him as just a kid, and was trying to distract him from what lay ahead. It was quaint, courtly even, and it touched him-rather than pissing him off with its condescension, which it normally might have done.

Hell, they all had to look out for each other any way they could, even with the small stuff.

“I reckon we must be five hundred feet down, if we’re an inch,” Mama Diamond continued. “And will you look at what’s up ahead….”

Inigo cast his gaze forward, feeling a hint of trepidation for an instant. But then he saw it, stretching out wide before them….

A lake, huge and black and serene, showing not even a ripple, save where an occasional droplet of water fell from the vault above. Stern winged above it into the darkness beyond, a perfect dragon reflection skimming below him in the water’s mirror sheen. The wraith horses sped after, their hooves barely kissing the surface, throwing up light, bracing sprays.

Then they were past it. Inigo looked about him at the walls and ceiling, seeing deep into them with his night-blessed eyes, really studying them for the first time as they flashed by. They were incredibly beautiful, rose and blue and gold sparkling in the quartz, an astonishing array of shapes, spires and projections all honeycombed, with rivulets of water dripping down from fissures in the rock.

And because he was looking right there, and had the vision to discern it, he saw them first.

Oozing out of the boxwork, squeezing through, clambering down on the craggy rock face, flowing slick as oil.

Grunters, baring their snaggly, fanged teeth, glaring down with hungry, crazed faces, coming on fast. The massed, thick smell of them hit him like a blow, that stink of rotted meat and other unclean things; he wondered if it came from what they ate or just from them.

Inigo let out a shout, waving wildly upward. The others saw now, too, and unsheathed their blades, nocked arrows into bows. Stern swung about in a great arc, beating his black wings and climbing, inhaling deep to unleash the inferno.

The grunters let out wild, triumphant shrieks and released their holds, dropping down to land among them. Seeing this, Stern clipped off his exhalation; he couldn’t let loose the torrent without claiming them all.

Cal was shouting orders, and Inigo heard the cries of Shango and Colleen Brooks, too. And something else, weird and creepy, that raised the hackles on his neck, a piercing ululation like nothing a human throat could make. There were words in it, but not English, and Inigo couldn’t make them out.

Then he saw and understood-it was Crazy Horse, and the other warriors, taking up their war chant, plunging into the mass of writhing, attacking fiends, driving them back with rearing hooves and arrows and spear.

Abruptly, a body struck Inigo from above, one his own size, wild and hard, hurling him off his horse. He hit the stone floor, the breath knocked out of him, the screaming mad thing atop him ripping and biting. Inigo punched at it, kicked hard, bit into its neck. But more of them leapt on him, holding him down, tearing out flesh and meat.

Then Cal Griffin was there, driving two away with thrusts of his sword. The third turned on him, knocking the sword aside with a wild blow.

Cal didn’t dive for the sword, didn’t hesitate. Instead, he bulled into the beast, driving it back, lifting it clear off its feet-and plunging it down onto a crystal stalagmite, impaling it in a fury of cracked bones and screams and gushing hot blood.

The killing began.

Jeff Arcott felt limitless power surging within him, and it was unspeakable.

His eyelashes and his cracked, dry lips flashed and snapped with blue-green fire. His hair writhed like severed high-tension lines, and his eyes were glorious suns held nailed within burning sockets. His flesh pulsed with midnight blue and lavender and Sucrets-green pure neon flame. He was hideously, vibrantly alive, abrim, overfull with momentous energy as he reeled across the common in the hell-light that coated everything like a sick sheen of radioactive vomit.

Like a moth held prisoner in a killing jar, Arcott felt his consciousness immobilized within his body, unable to command the slightest movement.

Sanrio was moving him, he knew. Sanrio had done all of this; it was what he had planned all along. Arcott had been no equal partner, merely a flunky, a dupe, in service to a distant, uncaring god.

He prayed only to die.

But his god was not one given to answering prayers.

Through blast-furnace eyes, Arcott made out, silhouetted against the glowing, infected surfaces of pavement and adjoining structures, a tenuous figure rushing toward him from off in the distance, floating rather than running, her unshod feet barely grazing the pathway.

Melissa…

Plunging headlong toward him, driven by need and love, the twin currencies that motivated her still, despite the inevitable change Arcott could see had finally overtaken her.

She would reach him in a moment, would embrace him and, he knew, be consumed like an autumn leaf in a bonfire.

Melissa, no… He tried to shriek, but could utter no sound.

He was Sanrio’s bitch now. But he’d always been, hadn’t he?

In the asylum of his mind, Jeff Arcott began to laugh hysterically.

He saw Melissa slow before she reached him, saw her get a good look at him at last and begin to scream.

What must he look like?

Run, Melissa.

But Sanrio was making him stagger toward her, arms outstretched like some fucking Frankenstein’s monster. He felt Sanrio’s hunger to absorb her power, her light, just as he was eating up everything else in sight, absorbing it and growing strong.

Melissa was down on her knees, shrieking, shaking her head as he drew near. Funny, he thought, she should be able to fly….

Maybe she didn’t know that yet. She wouldn’t ever now.

He reached out to her….

Suddenly, something hard struck him in the midsection, drove him hurling back.

There was another agonizing blow to his ribs that threw blazing sparks off his radiant self. He lost his balance and fell.

Looking up, he saw a hunched form standing over him, wielding a length of metal pipe like a baseball bat. Even though the other was mightily changed, Arcott recognized Theo Siegel.

Theo’s mouth opened to bare impossibly sharp teeth, and he cried in a voice that was equal parts sob and roar, “Forgive me!”

As he swung the pipe toward Jeff’s head, Arcott thought, Good for you, Theo.

OPEN YOUR MOUTH AND SCREAM, the Sanrio-mind commanded him, BURN THE LITTLE WRETCH AWAY.

No, Arcott protested silently, and fought against the command with every scrap of will he could muster; not enough, he knew, to hold long, only for a moment….

A latticework of all-consuming nonfire shot out of Arcott’s frame despite his efforts to oppose it, and the disintegrating flood would assuredly have swept Theo into the ranks of the post-living had he not been suddenly yanked sideways by-

Melissa. Saving him, at the last moment.

A marionette, damned, Jeff Arcott wheeled to face Theo again, to devastate him.

But impossibly quickly, Theo regained his balance and sprang full at Jeff, bringing the pipe down on Arcott’s skull. There was a hideous wet crack. Theo shouted with the impact, an anguished cry.

Arcott staggered back, knowing that the demon energy overflowing him would repair the damage, would not allow him surcease.

But then another thought intruded from the Sanrio-mind, a desperate, frightened thought not directed at him.