Ghostlands

NINE

A guy could get killed this way, Inigo thought, and actually laughed out loud. Not that anyone could hear him over the lunatic shriek of that whistle.

But then a guy-a completely human one, at least-could never have done this at all.

The blasted-rock tunnel walls were twisting serpentine now and rushing at Inigo with alarming speed; in this center-of-the-earth blackness, a normal kid wouldn’t even have been able to see them, let alone press his funky-ass self tight to the cold metal of this impossible train.

The night train, speeding straight out of hell.

Inigo flattened himself along the surface of the roof as the car banged and rattled in its headlong flight, his big, bony fingers with their huge knuckles gripping onto the front edge of the car with all the strength and determination he could muster.

A sudden sharp curve hit him with centrifugal force like a blow and he was nearly thrown clear off. He clutched wildly and managed to pull himself back on top, gasping as the numbing chill air pummeled him.

Trust the Leather Man to come up with a thing like this. He was always full of surprises, and pure mean dangerous, too. You had to do your damnedest to keep on his good side (not that there really was one…). But Papa Sky tried his level best to keep the big cat honest, if such a concept truly existed anymore in this topsy-turvy life.

Still, as Inigo’s dear departed dad always said, When someone offers you work, you take it.

Of course, his mother had always said wear your rubbers, and look both ways before you cross the street, and don’t ever do anything that might cause you to wake up one morning seriously stone-cold dead.

But then, she was gone, and this freaky world was here, and he was forced to do a lot of things differently.

His teeth chattered from the cold and the vibration, and he fought to still them. To distract himself, he ruminated on what function this channel through the rock must have held before the Storm-certainly not a subway tunnel, not in this part of the country. No, it must’ve been a mine, and the narrow tracks sliding beneath laid for ore cars years and years back, maybe even when Custer and his marauding blue boys came whooping through these parts.

Papa Sky had told him true: The hell train was an adaptable beast, able to negotiate narrow gauge and wide, gobbling up the miles as it drove through the belly of the earth. Because not every place could be gotten to via the shortcut portals that some could open between here and there; sometimes you could only get approximately from one place to another, and then you had to cover ground the old-fashioned way, foot by foot and yard by yard, and so you needed freight cars to haul the cargo…and carry the crew to load it.

Hanging on for dear life, his long, wiry arms aching like a sonofabitch from the effort and the cold, Inigo could feel the skin of the train under him vibrate from more than its furious speed. It pulsed and moved as if alive, with a creepy, itchy feeling he could discern even through thick layers of jacket and sweatshirt and pants. Like black beetles surging over each other in their insatiable, endless combinations.

Shuddering and groaning like an irritated sandworm, the train canted upward as the tunnel began a steep climb under the pitiless miles of rock. The air was rank, and Inigo coughed raggedly, his throat burning from the raw smoky fumes roiling at him from the front of the train. He spat aside a phlegmy mass, intently determined not to have it blow back in his face. The train bounced abruptly and he bit his tongue, cried out in surprise and tasted blood.

I don’t need this shit, he thought fiercely. But then in his mind’s eye he saw the Girl in her glowing solemnity, the dancer, Christina, and his rage quieted.

Even so, to be able to ride inside like a regular person, to sink into plush seats, or belly up to some nachos in the dining car…

But those inside this train were far from regular.

Which was the whole point of his riding on the outside.

It was the only way he wouldn’t be detected by his tweaked brothers within, the ones so like him in appearance but so alien in mind, with their white Necco-wafer eyes, gray grub skin, needle teeth…and major Bad Attitude.

He’d seen a pack of them let loose on a bull once, and they’d enveloped it like a school of piranha, slashing it to pieces as it screamed, devouring it before it was dead.

That little Viewmaster reel of 3D images in his mind had given him nightmares for weeks.

And he looked just like one of them.

So why was he different? Because he was twelve, not fully grown? No, that couldn’t be all of it.

Maybe it was because there were variations in the breed; though, clearly, you still needed to be some kind of weirdo outsider to become one in the first place. Inigo knew he’d always been most comfortable keeping more or less to himself; he’d never fitted in, never felt like other folks.

And so now he wasn’t. It was some cosmic kind of justice, or at least a rebalancing. Assuming that there were others like him, that not every other grunter in the universe was a ravening SOB.

He’d sure like to meet those guys, if only for variety….

But regardless of that, he knew down to his gnarly gray toes that if his fellow grunters on the Midnight Special realized he was there, they’d tear him up just like that bull. It got into their minds, the Big Bad Thing, did stuff there, twisted them to its will, made the nasty ones even nastier.

It hadn’t gotten into his mind, though, maybe because of the Leather Man, or Papa Sky, or the Dancer Girl. Because maybe he was under their protection…

Abruptly, the train rippled like muscles on a big cat stretching, and it began to shift, to take on a more complicated shape, with all sorts of black protrusions. His fingers felt the front of the roof edge rise up into an ornate lip ahead of him.

The train was picking up speed now, a holy terror. The inhuman screech of the whistle changed timber, not echoing in the open passage anymore, but flattening out as if screaming toward a hard, blank wall.

Papa Sky had told him of this, had warned it would be the worst part, and Inigo scrunched down further, pressed his head behind the lip of the car, exhaling every last bit of breath and holding it.

The whistle howled its rage at the universe, shrieked louder and louder until it seemed it had leeched every sound out of the entire planet.

There was an impact like nothing Inigo had ever known. Big clots of earth blasted back at him, bouncing off the lip, smashing like rocks caroming off each other in an asteroid belt.

It took every ounce of his will to hold on, to not be swept away. He gritted his teeth and closed his eyes and focused every bit of attention on his fingertips, on keeping his hands tight to the shifting black metal.

The train was actually erupting from the earth.

Then Inigo felt the kiss of the cold night air, and the train came down flat and hard on wide rusty tracks and kept right on going, screaming like a banshee through the night and over the flat prairie land.

“Welcome to Iowa,” the boy said to nothing and no one in particular-blessedly still alive, even if he wasn’t normal or regular or human.

And he laughed out loud for the second time that night.

Jeffrey Arcott walked westward, away from the town and up toward the lip of the valley and the flatland beyond the highway, where a subdivision had been under construction when the Change came. He followed a dead-end crescent, the half-built houses on each side of him skeletal and black in the light of a rising moon. Beyond the skeleton houses there was a stand of scrub woods grown back since the fires of 1978, low and patchy wild oaks and knee-deep brambles. In the summer you could find wild mulberries here, but the vines had withered with the hard onset of coming winter.

Near the top of the slope, in the clearance under an unused microwave relay tower, he paused and looked back at the town.

The frigid wind bit through his jeans, curled in along the neck of his leather jacket, but he felt powerful here, invisible in the shadows, gazing from a height at the town he had almost single-handedly resurrected from the nightmare of the Change.

He checked his watch, a retro Hamilton Futura with cut garnets set into the rim at precise intervals. It was nearly ten o’clock, almost curfew, power-saving time. He wrapped his arms around himself, cold, waiting.

Time. He imagined generators-his generators, inlaid with quartzite dodecahedrons, coils wrapped on ruby cores-slowing, stopping, their hum diminishing to silence. Bedtime for the dynamos. Ah: there.

The grid of streetlights, the whole valley full of fairy-light, gave way to darkness.

Darkness and moonlight and bitter, unseasonable cold. Last year at this time, he had walked the hills in the kind of cool his mom had called “sweater weather,” listening to the clicking of autumn insects. They were silent now, pounced upon by this stealthy, unnatural winter.

The moon and stars took charge of the sky as Arcott turned away, toward the greater darkness beyond this low ridge. To the old railway tracks alongside Willow Neck Creek, where there should have been nothing at all; but where, just now, he anticipated-or could he actually hear? — the ancient tracks rattling to an unaccustomed presence.

His own private special delivery was out there, hurtling through the night, off in the darkness, still unseen.

He had stepped into the shadow of the trees along Philosopher’s Walk to avoid being seen on the way here. “Keeping himself to himself,” as his father might have said.

Because he was ashamed?

No. Because there were some things that could not yet be divulged, even to Siegel, even to Wade, his confidants, his lieutenants, his good hands right and left.

Sometimes research had to proceed in secret, or at least with due regard for security. They could know everything else about the operation, but people couldn’t always interpret certain facts correctly.

At least for now, at least until the Radio was on the air…

He followed a footpath to the old concrete railway piers. The trees here were bare of leaves. The railroad stretched toward the dark west like a dry river. Moonlight glinted fitfully on the rust-eaten rails.

He caught himself whistling a tune, something from his father’s jazz collection, a half-forgotten Chet Baker song. Bad idea. The sound would draw attention to himself. Better to remain anonymous, even in the empty night.

The cracked concrete piers stood canted at the trackside. These had been loading bays for the gypsum plant that had been abandoned and torn down forty years ago. The slabs, ten feet by fifteen and half as tall as a man, must have been too massive to cart away. Arcott selected the nearest one, hauled himself up onto its abrasive surface, brushed away a layer of fallen leaves, and sat cross-legged. He shivered. His denim pants and cowhide jacket were feeble armor against this graveyard chill.

He saw the train far out on the flatlands. It seemed to grow more substantial, more material, as it approached. Such was the nature of things.

Arcott stood up. He hated these encounters. They were unavoidable, obligations of iron necessity, like the church services his father had dragged him to every week, fundamentally unpleasant.

The train was black as night. Blacker. He watched it come, mesmerized. Soon it would glide silently to a stop, and Arcott would scramble toward it, a little afraid as always, but also trembling with anticipation, imagining the weight of treasure that would soon be his, the cold beauty and clean utility of the stones, raw and cut, all the angles of symmetry, indices of refraction, directions of cleavage, the semiprecious stones gathered from a thousand places….

The gift from the west, from the Ghostlands.

In due time, the train passed through a wavering mist like a night mirage and drew to a stop on the outskirts of a slumbering town. Steam hissed from the locomotive’s ribs like a foul breath, like a killing fog.

(Inigo recalled the fog in London that had killed all those people on a bleak day in the previous century, in the 1950s; his father had related it to him like a fairy tale, stressing the imperative moral of the story-that the world can turn hostile in a moment, that it can kill you.)

From his perch atop the passenger car where he lay silent and still, Inigo watched the man in the long black coat emerge from the front of the train. The other man was waiting for him beside the tracks, younger, with wavy dark hair and bright blue eyes, and the overalertness of the scholar, the intellectual.

Without his heightened senses, Inigo wouldn’t have been able to see him clearly, to make out his smooth olive skin, the faded bomber jacket that gave little protection against the brittle night.

Or to smell the fear and eagerness radiating off him like sweat on a hot summer day.

The man in black strode toward him, and as he crossed the headlight beam of the locomotive like a hellish eye, Inigo saw the man’s silhouette change like a gargantuan black umbrella unfurling. Then he was through the searchlight and his outline was a man again.

Bomber Jacket had seen it, too, and grown pale, taken a shaky step back.

“Jesus, I hope they grade you on a curve,” the man in black said contemptuously, and he laughed.

It made Inigo’s skin crawl even more than the insect feel on the skin of the train.

The man in black canted his head back toward the train, murmured something Inigo couldn’t hear over the hiss of steam.

The big doors on the black passenger cars slid back, and the twisted forms so like Inigo in shape and unlike him in soul began unloading the shipment, the precious cargo Bomber Jacket craved so much that it held him there despite his fear.

The man in black leaned idly against a pillar, lit up a cigarette and stood inhaling the frosty blue smoke, stirring it about on his tongue, then lazily exhaling it. Inigo caught a dusky whiff of the exotic tobacco and was impressed, for he knew despite all appearances that the dread visitor’s smoke was not tobacco, and its source not the illusory “cigarette” but rather the visitor himself.

Bomber Jacket worked up his courage, and hesitantly approached his deliverer.

“Something to add?” the man that was not a man asked, and in his casualness sounded oh-so-threatening.

“Um, the schematics…they’re clear, but…challenging.”

Smoke eddied about the visitor, the wind whipping it into mist devils, enshrouding him as though he were a phantom paying a call, death on vacation.

“It’s not anything I can’t do-in time.” Fear and nervousness made Bomber Jacket gabble in relentless staccato, machine-gun bursts of words. “But an assistant, a Pretorius, if you will, if one of them could just come out for a day or two, not more, surely not more, to provide some guidance, I mean, just to elucidate some of the physics, untangle a cat’s cradle, a string or two-”

Bomber Jacket stopped abruptly as he caught the low sound coming from the other.

He was chuckling.

The man in black extended a hand palm up and affected a quavering voice that was an obscene mockery of a child’s. “Please, sir, can I have some more?”

Then he dropped the hand, and his voice was his own again. “They could send someone but, trust me, you wouldn’t have the furniture.”

He stepped through his curtain of smoke, brushing it aside, glowering down at the trembling young man. “Hit your mark, say your lines, get off the stage. Now, is that so hard to do?”

“N-no,” Bomber Jacket blurted, backing away. Inigo could tell he didn’t have the foggiest notion what the man in black was talking about.

But then, Leather Man’s message hadn’t been for him.

Unobserved, Inigo slipped off into the night and, within minutes, was miles away.