Ghostlands

EIGHT

Mama Diamond woke up in bed with her boots on.

She didn’t recall falling asleep. Didn’t recall anything past her meeting with the dark-skinned federal agent, what was his name? Shango. Larry Shango.

She recalled all too vividly her encounter with the dragon Ely Stern and the loss of her gems. The memory made her want to close her eyes and fade back into unconsciousness. It felt like a death, although she knew it wasn’t one, not really. Not like when Katy had nearly lost Samantha in ’73, and Mama Diamond had flown out to be with them, and she and Katy had spent three sleepless days and nights by the infant’s bedside in the ICU at Good Samaritan, listening to the hiss of oxygen and the child’s wet, tortured breaths. Nor even that moment when Mama Diamond thought she’d heard the whisper of the scythe coming for her, when Stern had threatened to take her own cantankerous life-and would have, too, had she given him the least excuse, she felt sure of it; there was the scent of murder in that leathered monstrosity.

Still, the loss of what she’d thought of as her treasure weakened her.

In recent times, even before the Change, Mama Diamond had found herself increasingly choosing isolation, withdrawing from the world of men, insulating herself with inanimate belongings, the glittering offspring of leveled mountain and evaporated sea.

People could leave you, but not possessions; those were truly yours.

And no, Mama Diamond lied to herself, she wasn’t thinking of Danny, who had fleetingly called himself her fiance once in a century gone, when promises were something to be believed and credit given not just to customers but to lovers. Only a memory on the wind now, a faded snapshot locked in the depths of mind and heart.

People left you.

But now her possessions had, too.

And what remained? Only the grinning skulls of Cretaceous and Jurassic dragons, seeming to mock her from their stone matrices in the walls of her home.

She turned her head against the yellowed pillowcase and sighed.

But she couldn’t sleep anymore. She stank of her own sweat. She ached in every part of herself-physical and spiritual.

Besides, she could hear someone moving downstairs, in the shop, what was left of it.

Climbing out of bed was an adventure. What was a body, that it should protest so vigorously a simple motion? Quiet, you bones, you sinews.

Mama Diamond slept above the shop in the same room that housed her antique sofa, her rolltop desk, and a wood-burning stove that vented through the ceiling. Nothing but ashes remained in the stove. The chill of the night lingered. She was glad that whoever had put her to bed-could it have been that stiff-looking Shango? — had been generous with blankets. But it was morning now, the pale November sun glancing through the ivoried roll blinds.

More bumping downstairs. Face the music and dance, Mama Diamond told herself.

She took the stairs slowly, came into the body of the store and was greeted by the smell of hot coffee. It almost took the pain away.

“You’re awake,” Shango said, entering from the back room where Mama Diamond kept her coal stove for cooking.

“And you’re using my kitchen.”

“You mind? You were asleep.”

“I’m often asleep. It’s not an invitation to raid the pantry. But I guess I don’t mind…if you have a cup of java for me.”

“You take it black?”

“As God intended.”

Mama Diamond had lived in and over this shop for thirty years. She had a fully equipped kitchen upstairs, gas stove, refrigerator, microwave, the works. Nothing fancy, but it had more than suited her. All useless, of course, when the natural gas ceased to flow and the AC outlets turned into holes in the wall. Since then, she had fixed most of her meals on this coal stove salvaged from Old West Antiques across the street. She had even set up this little back room with a Formica table and a couple of tattered pipe-and-vinyl chairs. One to sit in, one to put her feet on. She hadn’t expected company.

She eased into the nearest chair while Shango poured coffee.

“There are eggs in the cold corner of the cellar,” she said, “if you’re ambitious.”

Shango looked surprised and more than a little tempted. “You have eggs?”

“Didn’t I just say that? I used to keep chickens, up until a week or so ago. Henhouse out back.”

“What happened?”

“Something broke in and ate the brooders.”

Shango retrieved the eggs and cracked three of them into an iron skillet. Mama Diamond didn’t care for people who intruded on her privacy, but yesterday’s encounter with Ely Stern made Shango’s sleepover seem like a courtesy call. Why should she trust Shango? Did she trust Shango? Mama Diamond didn’t share the grudge so many of her neighbors had seemed to hold against Washington, D.C.-perhaps because her taxes had never been audited-but neither did a federal ID card render a person automatically trustworthy.

Still, there was something to be said for a man who would fry her an egg when she ached in every joint and ligature.

Shango looked hungry but waited for Mama Diamond’s invitation before he added a couple of eggs for himself. Mama Diamond let the inevitable questions wait until breakfast was finished. Then, over a second cup of coffee, she cleared her throat. “I hope it won’t offend you if I find it hard to believe that the U.S. government is still in business, much less that you’re interested in preventing petty burglary. I expect, over much of this great land of ours, petty theft has become a fairly common pastime.”

“I don’t know about the government,” Shango said. “I hope there are enough good people left that our government may yet recover itself, when this is finished.”

“When what’s finished?”

“The Change, I’ve heard it called. The Storm, as well.”

“You see that coming to an end soon?”

Shango’s mouth tightened and something roiled around in his eyes, but he said nothing.

“Is that the business you’re about?”

Again, nothing.

Mama Diamond sighed. She understood how a man might be reluctant to talk about himself in this day and age. But, dammit, those eggs should have earned her at least a little conversation.

She tried a different approach. “You seem to understand what happened here.”

Nothing.

“So is it the dragon you’re after, or me?”

“The dragon,” Shango ventured at last. “But I know a little bit about you, too.” He pulled a tattered blue notebook from the weathered backpack stowed in the corner. He found a page and read from it: “The Stone and Bone. Judith Kuriyama, AKA Mama Diamond, proprietor.”

“Uh-huh,” Mama Diamond said, unenlightened and a little miffed to hear her old name from this man’s mouth.

Shango said, “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to be obtuse. But maybe if I could ask you a couple of questions, it’ll be easier when I try to explain why I’m here. How’s that sound?”

“All right, I suppose.” If you’re a man of your word.

“Okay. Miss Kuriyama-”

“Might as well just call me Mama Diamond.” That other name was long ago, far away.

“Mama Diamond, you’re obviously a gem merchant.”

“Semiprecious stones and minerals.” Not to mention fossils from the Devonian to the most recent Ice Age, but that wasn’t what this was about, what it had ever been about.

“Right. When you were in business, did you keep records?”

“My Christ, this is an audit!”

“Obviously not.”

“Is anything obvious anymore? Yeah, I kept business records.”

“On paper or computer?”

“You’d think an old bone like me would be ignorant of computers, wouldn’t you? Well, that’s not strictly the case. I had a very fine IBM machine only a little out of date when the electricity stopped. Had my own website. Doubled my business over the old mail-order catalogue, too. Orders in and out the same day, MasterCard, Visa, PayPal…Did I keep the books on the computer, too? Yeah, but I printed copies of everything just in case the IRS came calling. Are you sure you’re not the IRS?”

“Not even close. You still have those records in your possession?”

“I believe so.”

“May I look at them? I need customer transactions, mail orders in the last twelve months before the Change, especially any large-value orders that might have come through, or big repeat orders.”

“I don’t deal in large volumes but I guess you can see the records. Lucky I didn’t burn ’em for heat. Will this get me my stock back?”

“In all likelihood, no.”

“Well,” Mama Diamond said, “at least the man is honest.”

It pained her, and not just physically, to walk through the emptied store. Without its mineral cargo, the Stone and Bone was just one more looted storefront. She led Shango upstairs to the room Mama Diamond had once called her office.

“I keep my sale records in chronological order here,” she said, indicating a battered file drawer, “most recent at the front.”

Shango opened the drawer, surveyed the contents, then began to page through the files systematically.

Soon enough, he found the invoices with the familiar place names, the Xeroxes of checks that could be cashed just as readily as if the signatures on them belonged to people who had actually existed. There were twelve different shell companies named (elsewhere, Shango had found as many as thirty), but most of the bulk of them were from a location in New Jersey.

“Tell me about these,” Shango asked Mama Diamond, although he already knew the answer.

Mama Diamond remembered this group of orders because of the cryptic letters and the extravagant offers they had contained.

The first one-she found it for Shango-had been innocuous enough, an order form printed from her website requesting a number of fine garnets and inquiring about volume orders and discounts.

“Signed by Anthony St. Rivers,” Shango observed, as if this were significant.

Mama Diamond filled the order and wrote to Mr. St. Rivers advising him that she didn’t ordinarily fill high-volume orders-she was a retailer, not a distributor; her stock was carefully assembled to meet the average needs of her typical customers, and she was reluctant to draw down too much inventory for fear of disappointing her regulars. (She could, of course, have accepted St. Rivers’s orders and simply filled them through a distributor at some extraordinary markup and after a long delay…but that didn’t seem quite honest.)

She had gotten back a nice note from St. Rivers, mentioning he would refer her to his other friends and compatriots across the country. St. Rivers had further ordered a modest selection of raw and cut stones-opals, tourmalines, more garnets-and thanked Mama Diamond in a courteous fashion.

The orders continued to arrive with some regularity from St. Rivers and his well-heeled friends. Mama Diamond was intrigued enough that she’d mentioned St. Rivers to an importer, Bob Skarrow, at a gem-and-mineral trade show in Phoenix.

Skarrow rolled his eyes at the mention of the name. St. Rivers had contacted him, too, and when he couldn’t fill his entire order-“It was frickin’ ridiculous in volume alone”-St. Rivers and company had gone in turn to Skarrow’s sources, and it was skewing the entire market in semiprecious stones, driving up prices and creating spot shortages.

“What do they do with all these stones?” Mama Diamond had asked.

But Skarrow didn’t know. He’d had a couple of phone conversations with this St. Rivers (always with St. Rivers, not Skarrow, placing the call, the number invariably blocked), but St. Rivers wouldn’t say anything about that.

Skarrow said the man’s voice was papery thin and cultured, an old man’s voice, with the faintest wisp of an accent, Spanish maybe or Mexican or Cuban, as if he’d planted roots here a long time but had hailed once from an alien land.

“Best guess in the trade is, they’re working on some kind of optical device,” Skarrow had concluded. “Like they used to use rubies for lasers. But that’s just speculation.”

Mama Diamond had let it go at that. Shortages, price-gouging, and overblown crises were an unavoidable part of the gem trade. “Apart from regular small orders from St. Rivers,” she told Shango, “that’s the whole story.”

Shango nodded thoughtfully.

“Now,” Mama Diamond said, “suppose you answer me some questions.”

Shango asked Mama Diamond if she would be willing to walk with him to the train depot-if she felt well enough.

Oddly enough, she did feel well enough. She had this hazy, dreamlike memory that Stern had press-ganged her into a great deal of unwilling physical labor alongside the corpse-gray, distorted little men who made up his work crew. The pain was still there, throbbing in every joint. But she felt a peculiar energy, too. All that adrenaline flowing in her veins, she supposed. The giddy aftermath of fear.

And at the very last, amidst the steam hiss of the soul-damned train firing up again, Stern’s words coming distant and watery to Mama Diamond in memory or imagination.

“Home…then Atherton.”

Emerging with Shango from her dinosaur-bone house onto the porch, Mama Diamond spied her bent-birch rocker, the Tom Clancy novel still there under the canteen, pages restless in a dry wind. It can stay where it is, Mama Diamond thought. I’m through with that book.

They walked together slowly on the unshaded side of the street. The wind was brutal again today, bulling down the cross lanes like the propwash from an old DC-3. Mama Diamond wore her old slouch hat to keep her head warm, atop the pageboy she had affected since she was five (hell, one hairstyle should last a lifetime). Shango, God bless him, wore a fedora.

“Suppose you start,” Mama Diamond suggested, “by telling me how you came to be here.”

“That’s a long story.”

“I have time on my hands.”

Shango began with stark simplicity: how he had come out of the navy to work for the Secret Service; his role at the White House before the Change; how President McKay had confided to him the likelihood that the clandestine Source Project was the root and center of the Change; how McKay had sent Shango along with Deputy Chief of Staff Steve Czernas to find the lost agent Jeri Bilmer, who might just have had the key to it all.

Then things got really interesting.

Later, upon reflection, Shango told himself it was because Mama Diamond comported herself like a woman who’d had no company but her own for far too long. Shango understood about that. He’d had more experience with loneliness than most folks.

But he had unburdened himself like a Mafia don at last confession.

Before his return to Washington, Shango told Mama, he had found the pitiful remains of Jeri Bilmer and her even more pitiful list, the roster that told nothing more than the names and former addresses of the scientists at the Source Project-perhaps complete, probably not, certainly not including the support personnel who might or might not have been dead by that time.

Shango had not succeeded on his own in achieving this objective. He had been helped at the end by the odd quartet of travelers from New York whom he had chanced upon when he had helped save the most erratic of the four from murderous attack. Herman Goldman, whom Shango had rescued and who in turn had used his remarkable powers to help Shango locate Bilmer’s remains…and then reveal to him that President McKay was dead.

Was it that knowledge that finally coaxed Shango to violate his oath of office, to reveal what he had sworn only to share with McKay? Or was it rather a growing empathy with the band’s leader, Cal Griffin, on his quixotic mission to save his abducted sister and challenge a force that had only overturned an entire planet?

Fools’ errands were something Shango understood, too.

Whatever the motive, Shango had shared all he knew about the Source Project with them, in the hope-probably equally foolish-that it might turn the tables just enough to save their lives.

Shango knew full well he had come to the crossroads and chosen. To turn his back on what he had been, what he had prided himself on being. To become visible again.

For eight years, Shango had worn a black suit like his personal armor, earpiece wire coiling off into his collar, wrist handcuffed to the briefcase that would fall away to an Uzi at a moment’s notice.

But most of all, he remembered that feeling….

Unseen, unobserved, unremarked upon.

Clouding men’s minds.

One time, when Shango was just a beanpole of a kid in a tumbledown, squalid neighborhood of New Orleans where no Nielsen company or Harris Poll ever asked anyone’s opinion, his father had brought home some beaten-up cassettes he’d scored at a swap meet-odd behavior, to be sure, for the old bastard usually hoarded every penny for beer and escape. But it turned out this was release of a different kind, for when Dad himself had been a kid he had fled not into liquor and a feigned, desperate gaiety but rather the deco dreams issuing from the hand-tooled fine oak cabinet and glowing amber eye of the Atwater Kent. Now he wanted to relive it and-incredibly, uniquely-share it with his children.

The tapes were of an old radio show, ancient even then, from the thirties. Shango had recognized the voice emanating from the cassette player-it was that old fat dude from the commercials (“No wine before its time…”). But this wasn’t hokey or a fast hustle. It was simply wonderful.

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men…

The Shadow knows.

A man who could not be bought or swayed or corrupted, who stood for one pure, clear ideal, who could go anywhere, do anything…

Because he could cloud men’s minds.

So they couldn’t see him, didn’t know he was even there. Until he struck and struck hard, setting everything right.

Sometimes it’s just like a penny dropping into a slot, a lightbulb going on…and you know you’ve found that one right thing to give your life over to.

Shango studied and trained, entered the Naval Academy on an athletic scholarship, busted his ass getting his grades into the stratosphere, spent four years in Naval Intelligence working up to lieutenant commander, brushing up against all manner of government operatives.

All preamble, so he could apply to the one organization where he truly belonged.

Why do you want to join the Secret Service? the form had asked. And of course he had not said, Because I want to be the Shadow, stupid.

What followed had been a grueling year at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Brunswick, Georgia, augmented by specialized training in Beltsville, Maryland. After that, five years’ duty in the New Orleans and Chicago field offices, working criminal investigations, identity theft, protective intelligence, proving himself outstanding, exemplary, without error or peer.

Until finally, he was selected for the elite, the Presidential Protection Division.

Where at last Larry Shango could fully become the Shadow.

The invisible man, the one no one saw, silent as a radio switched off, always-literally-shadowing the Big Man, numero uno, President of what was once laughingly called the United States.

Not so United anymore, and as for the President, well…if there was a heaven-a belief Shango’s mother had so fervently believed and Shango himself so fervently fled-McKay was there. And if not, at least McKay’s worries were over.

Which was hardly the case with Larry Shango. Since his moment of decision around the campfire with Cal Griffin and friends, Shango had been visible indeed on his rambling See the USA sojourn, more often than not in someone’s crosshairs. The long highway might as well have been paved with broken bones for all the damage he’d been forced to inflict with that ten-pound sledgehammer slung across his back.

It was a way to fill the time at least, to sometimes actually convince himself his life had a purpose…or at least hadn’t run out of steam.

But at night, camped in some high redoubt, his back to the rockface, carefully calculated to be secure against attack, he’d long for even a brief return to what he used to think of (though naturally never actually said) as his Power….

Funny, because now all sorts of people had all kinds of power, way beyond what that funky old Shadow could ever have cooked up.

But Shango had stayed achingly unchanged-human, mortal, ordinary. As ordinary as any man who had walked his path and seen what he’d seen.

Griffin and his companions were probably dead by now, having gotten nowhere near the Source.

As Shango himself had failed.

But that was long after their meeting around the campfire. Initially, Shango had ignored Goldman’s warnings. He’d had an obligation-and more than that, a personal need-to verify that his Commander was indeed dead, that Shango had in fact deserted and condemned him (even if McKay himself had ordered Shango away).

On the grounds of the White House, beside the fountain and rose beds as Goldman had predicted, Shango verified that General Christiansen of the Joint Chiefs had seized power, and that McKay and his wife, Jan, and even their dog, Jimmy, were dead, murdered.

That had been the second crossroads, as Shango had been forced to choose-vengeance, or some other engine to drive his life. He chose the one remaining task he knew McKay would want him to fulfill-to find and safeguard the life of their son, Evan, if he could.

So Shango set off for Bar Harbor, Maine, where the boy had been vacationing with his uncle and cousins and a detachment of Secret Service agents. That had been one hairy journey, traveling overland through some of the densest and most desperate regions of the eastern seaboard. Factionalism had run riot. Rumors abounded that the President was dead, and it really hadn’t been possible to keep that soundbite a dirty little secret (even in a world that no longer had sound-bites). No one seemed to know the whereabouts and condition above- or belowground of the Vice President, so the position of head of state devolved to the Speaker of the House. Christiansen had somehow managed to sew up-or lock down-Senator Mader’s allegiance, or at least compliance, and thus declare martial law. But it was hotly disputed, and various National Guard units recognized widely divergent authority-if any at all. Pockets of civil war, civil disobedience and uncivil acts of every stripe were the order of the day.

The only thing to be thankful for-and it was precious little-was that munitions no longer worked.

But on the other hand, dragons flew and could shoot fire.

Shango arrived at Bar Harbor ten days late, to find that a contingent of Christiansen’s men had already tried to kill the boy there, as if he were the lost Dauphin or Anastasia or Bonnie Prince Charlie. The team of Special Forces assassins had overpowered and dispatched Jan McKay’s brother, her nieces and nephew, and all but one of the Secret Service agents.

Although bleeding her life out from internal injuries, agent Jaime Mintun had gotten the boy as far as Bangor, where a sympathetic older man and his wife had kept the boy hidden in a big sprawling mansion behind a spiderweb iron gate until Shango had arrived and convinced them of his friendly intentions.

Mama Diamond and Shango came to the decaying railway depot, and she led him into the equally decrepit cafeteria-refurbished for tourists once long ago-where they sat at a dusty table.

Mama Diamond had cleaned out the kitchen here shortly after the Change, had dumped the rotting perishables into an arroyo well out of town and swabbed the floors and walls with ammonia to kill the stench. With the doors closed against the breeze, it was another pleasant place to spend time. Or at least it had been. The black train, the dragon, had tainted it.

“Where’s the boy now?” asked Mama Diamond.

“With my aunts and sisters and cousins outside New Orleans,” Shango replied. “Oh, he’s got a different name now and looks a whole lot different. If any of Christiansen’s men decide to come after him, well, those old swamp-rat relations of mine know how to vanish into the bayou. And I suspect not even black-op hit men-or dragons themselves, come to mention it-would go in there without considerable trepidation.”

“But that put you back at square one,” Mama Diamond noted.

Shango nodded. “I could wall myself behind some fortress and spend the rest of my days raising turnips and fighting off monsters. Or I could put myself in the middle of it, like those folks I met, Griffin and the rest. Head for the Source and see if I could undo some of the badness…or at least learn if McKay’s suspicions were right, if it really was the origin of all this misery and upheaval.”

Shango was looking straight ahead, talking to himself as much as to Mama Diamond. “All I had was that rain-spoiled list of scientists’ names….”

But it was a start.

At the Latter Memorial Library on St. Charles in New Orleans, remarkably still intact and in full operation, Shango researched the names. He discovered that a preponderance of them were in allied fields of chemistry, molecular engineering and-most particularly-analysis and application of gemstones for use in laser technology and quantum physics research.

Specifically, Shango found that a number of the Source scientists were previously engaged in studies utilizing a variety of gemstones to focus energy and alter its proton and electron signatures, with the aim of splitting and recombining it in fierce new forms. One obscure article even hinted at the theoretical notion of exploiting these properties to harness great amorphous energies from other dimensions in space-time.

What enormous quantity of gems-and what bottomless purchasing power-might it have taken to accomplish this, Shango wondered, if indeed those at the Source Project were responsible for summoning the raging forces that had punched into this world and overwhelmed the planet?

McKay, in the brief interview by the fountain that sweltering summer day right after the Change, mentioned that the Source Project had been kept hidden even from him, a black box operation whose existence and funding were squirreled away in any number of secret cubbyholes, spread out between CIA, DoD, NSA….

Returning to the environs of D.C.-or what was left of it-Shango paid a call on Reynolds Darden, an old friend in accounts receivable at the sprawling National Security Agency complex at Fort George Meade, Maryland. Childhood friends since the frenetic days in the New Orleans projects, Shango had done him a favor once, engaging in a brief conversation with a boyfriend of Darden’s sister, a man with a past full of wreckage and excuses. After that little talk with Shango, Mr. Significant Other booked a flight to Adelaide and didn’t come back.

“What’re you looking for?” Darden asked, eyes glinting behind owlish bifocals.

“I’ll know it when I see it,” Shango said. But he knew where to start-with any purchase order that bore the name-or anagram of the name, or false name derived from some biographical detail-of any of the Source Project scientists.

It had taken weeks of grueling, tedious effort, but at long last Shango found it: a list of purchase orders from a number of gem shops scattered across the middle of the country. No single quantity large enough to raise eyebrows, but in the aggregate one shitload of semiprecious stones…

The majority of the orders were from Anthony St. Rivers, who naturally proved not to be on any department’s payroll records. But applying certain historical allusions and a little creative translation, Shango found he could resolve the name readily enough into…

Marcus Sanrio.

Of course, he knew that didn’t make it so.

In the old world, the one with the Internet and cordless phones, the next step would have been a snap. But in the new one…

Shango hit the road again to talk to the rock hounds, find where they had shipped the purchases. When he found the shops still standing, their owners in residence, he perused their files, and learned that most of the purchases were sent to various letter drops, P.O. boxes, elusory safe houses designed to make the path circuitous, impossible to trace.

And none on any flight path Bilmer had flown.

But in a scrubby little shop outside Middleburg Heights, Ohio, Shango found one scrap that somehow had missed the cloaking device of smoke and mirrors the Source Project was so adept at erecting.

It was a note that read in a scraggly hand, “Time is of the essence. Send shipment direct.” A return address was printed at the bottom. And the page was signed, “Marcus Sanrio.”

There was no objective way Shango could be certain that this was the information he had traveled so long and hard for, that his friend and fellow agent Jeri Bilmer had died trying to convey. But even so, in his heart, he knew.

He had found the location of the Source Project, the dark core of it.

He didn’t even wait for sunup. He left immediately.

“Not an easy trip,” Shango told Mama Diamond. “And fifty-three miles from it…” Here his face clouded, and a violent shiver coursed through him like a current. “I was turned away.”

What had it taken, Mama Diamond wondered, to frighten a man like this so badly?

He wouldn’t elaborate.

“But I still had my notebooks. So I tracked the remaining shops, figuring I just might find a back door in….”

Which made him, Mama Diamond thought, not just brave but a very stubborn man.

Shango carried his canvas pack, and he took a bottle of water from it and drank deeply. “There were four addresses left,” he said, “you being the last.”

“Uh-huh.”

“The first retailer had been stripped clean. I didn’t think too much about that at first. Lots of places were looted early on after the Change, and people would steal the damnedest things.”

“Money’s not too useful these days.”

“No, but there was a jewelry store with most of its stock still in place. I can picture somebody wanting a more solid commodity than cash, maybe for trade-but why take garnets and leave diamond rings behind?”

Mama Diamond shrugged. “Like you said, people steal the damnedest things.”

“Still, it struck me as odd. The next place-”

“What place would that be?”

Shango fished his notebook out of his pack and leafed through it. “Corky’s Stones and Minerals, on the North Platte.”

“Corky Foxe’s store. He’s a tightfisted SOB I know him a little.”

“The shop had been burned, but it was obvious it had also been raided. I can’t tell you what happened to Corky. Next, Lightfoot Novelty Imports, Vernal, Utah. Empty. Proprietor MIA.” He glanced again at Mama Diamond.

“It’s okay, I didn’t know the man.”

Shango told her that locals, mostly squatters and scavengers, described a group of crouched, darting figures who had arrived aboard a pitch-black train on abandoned rails-figures glimpsed fleetingly in the darkness, moving certainly, emptying the place without benefit of even moonlight-and the lone eminence that towered over them like a dark god.

“Stern,” said Mama Diamond.

Shango nodded. But was the dragon working for the Source Project? Was his theft of Mama Diamond’s stones part of the larger picture? And if it was the Source, did that mean that whatever lurked at its heart was still accruing gems, still had the continuing need of them…or perhaps some new need?

“I don’t know,” Shango said. “All I know is, unless you or your files have something new to tell me, it’s the end of the line.”

Mama Diamond stepped to the cafeteria door, cracked it open. Outside, the wind was buffeting a tattered old newspaper against the rusted iron track. She took a deep breath of the air that was as familiar to her as her own constant, fluttering heartbeat, the ache of years in her bones. The dry sharp cold dried up the mucous membranes in her nose, and the smell of coming snow was clear as a telegram. Maybe not today, but almost certainly tomorrow.

And if she let this man, hard as a piece of volcanic rock, face the blizzard, track that hell-black train into the jaws of night…?

Sometimes you reach the crossroads, Mama Diamond thought, and sometimes it reaches you.

“There’s something I may have heard in a dream,” she told Shango.

Mama Diamond was glad she hadn’t hauled just that heavy bitch of a coal stove from Old West Antiques, but also the dusty framed map of the forty-eight states. As she and Shango scrutinized it on the wall of her back room-with Mama surprised that her creaky old bad eye on the left somehow seemed to be seeing just fine now-it hadn’t taken long to find the eight tiny letters right there in Iowa.

Atherton. Smack dab alongside the black lines that indicated railroad tracks.

“College town, I’ve heard of it,” Shango told Mama Diamond. “Small, but it has one of the best research institutes in the country, or at least it did.”

“If that’s what Stern was talking about,” Mama countered. “And not some drinking buddy he likes to hang with after raiding folk’s back stock.”

Shango shrugged. “I’ll take my chances.” No surprise there, given all he’d said and done.

Shango went off to gather supplies for the journey, leaving Mama Diamond to the privacy of her thoughts.

It had been a busy twenty-four hours, that it had, with many a curious visitor. Soon enough, Shango would be gone and the ghost town would settle back around Mama Diamond like a shroud, with even less in it to remind her she was any different from the parched wood and the dead earth.

Would she ever know what end of the line Shango reached, what conclusion he arrived at? Probably not.

People leave you, and possessions, too.

Mama Diamond walked stiffly to the front of her shop, the lowering sun casting hall-of-mirror reflections off the mostly empty cases. Her fingers trailed the cracked ivory of the mammoth tusk atop the counter.

She had armored herself against the world in tourmaline and agate, morganite and black opal, just as Shango had once armored himself in a black suit and coiled earpiece. But it was the same difference, really. The world stripped away your armor, that was just how life ran…until it ran out.

And whether that whisper came here in Burnt Stick or somewhere else along the tracks was not for Mama Diamond to say. It was just for her to say with whom she might be.

Sometimes you reach the crossroads….

She mulled over these thoughts until Shango reappeared, lugging cans of vegetables and beans, and more bottled water.

“You have transportation?” Mama Diamond asked.

Shango nodded. “Rail bike.”

“Rail what?”

“Come on. I’ll show you.”

Rail bikes, Shango explained, were an obscure form of sporting bicycle, used by hobbyists in Europe and America where abandoned railways lines remained in place. The bike’s modified wheels sat on one rail; an outrigger supported two more passive wheels against the opposite rail. A bicycle modified to fit a railway track, basically. He had not been able to scavenge a true rail bike, but had modified a quality mountain bike in a metalwork shop.

He had ridden this device up to the depot last night, after Stern had gone and while Mama Diamond was sleeping, and concealed it north of town. The bike was an ugly assemblage of aluminum tubes, ungainly seeming.

“Going over those hills, you have some pretty steep grades ahead of you,” Mama Diamond said. “Then you’ll hit the Laramie Range.”

Shango shrugged.

“And no potable water for a long way. Nor food.”

“I’ll manage.”

“You want company?”

That provoked a surprised look. “Ma’am, much as I appreciate-”

“I’m serious. If there’s a chance of getting back my property…” Without benefit of a vocabulary of feelings for a good many years, Mama Diamond thought it best to leave it at that.

“I’m sorry,” Shango said, “I don’t mean to be rude, but at your age-”

“I thought maybe I could help. Well, never mind. You heading up into the hills tonight?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll see how far you get.”

“What?”

“I mean, good luck.”

“Right. Thank you,” Shango said. “I don’t meet a lot of decent people, not these days, not since…”

He trailed off.

“Since the world ended,” Mama Diamond supplied.

At dusk, while the sky was still a vivid and radiant blue, Mama Diamond watched Shango peddle away from Burnt Stick on his ridiculous rail bike. He looked, Mama Diamond thought, like one of those shabby bicycle-riding bears out of some Eastern European circus.

Mama Diamond suppressed a smile.

Then she walked back to her shop-to the makeshift stalls behind the shop, in back of the empty chicken coops.

Achy as she was, exhausted as she was, she knew it would take her some time to saddle and pack the horses. They needed to be fed and watered, too. She had neglected them today. “Settle down, Marsh,” she told the black stallion. “Settle down, Cope,” she told the mare.

Stars filled the sky, gemlike in their indifferent glitter, and the still air grew colder around her.