Ghostlands

FIFTEEN

Grunters, dragons, piles of plague victims that appeared and vanished, guns and cars and everything stinking to high heaven.

It had been one cocked-up day, Colleen Brooks told herself, and it was shaping up to be an equally charming night.

At least it wasn’t snowing anymore, and the evening had turned surprisingly mild. But it was small comfort, considering.

The five of them stood edgeways to the Valley of Mystery, the rotting dragon corpse not fifty feet off, the sun sunk beneath the horizon and the moon not yet high enough to be much help.

Colleen had asked that friggin’ undependable Herman Goldman to whistle up some of his glowing blue balls (and no wisecracks here, please) to shed a little light on the situation. But all he’d done was stood staring freakily off down into the valley, even though now you couldn’t see any of the bodies, just still smell them.

So Colleen fetched the ready-made torch from Big-T’s saddleback and fired it up with her Bic. They were still dependable when you could find them, thank the Lord for small favors.

She jammed the torch into the snowy ground beside the dusty El Dorado convertible, where Doc and Cal were loading the groaning newcomer-just now starting to come around-into the backseat.

The grunters they’d saved from that white-trash dragon had all hightailed it into the tall grass-or wherever the hell they came from. But that snarky little tweak Inigo remained.

“I can’t go into town with you,” Inigo told Cal. “I mean, maybe eventually, but not right now. It should be safe, like I told you. Only don’t mention I sent you.”

“Now, that’s a trustworthy statement, if I ever heard one,” Colleen observed acidly. She had the hood open and was inspecting this golden oldie. Internal combustion engine, eight valve-and-piston job, no surprises-if you ignored the big red, green and blue gemstones running along both sides and atop the engine block, solidly bolted to it.

Oh, mama, but did she have a million and one questions…

Cal grabbed the rifle from where he’d cast it aside in the fresh snow. He looked it over, turning it in his hands.

Colleen came up alongside him, studied it more closely. She could see that it was a stock Remington hunting rifle, but one that had been curiously ornamented. The grip was inlaid with what looked like chips of quartz. The area around the firing mechanism was encrusted with beryl and agate; a line of garnets ran up the barrel, and the gunsight had been replaced with a sliver of gleaming opal.

Cal tossed it onto the passenger seat. He fished out the injured guy’s battered wallet, thumbed through the cards.

“Driver’s license…college ID…Domino’s Pizza buy-ten-get-one-free card…”

“Is this guy an optimist or what?” Colleen asked, slamming the hood.

She noticed now that Cal had pulled a folded paper from within some hidden pocket inside the wallet. He opened it to reveal a creased snapshot of a pretty girl with caramel skin and cascading hair the shade of autumn leaves, her brilliant dark eyes guarded but not unfriendly; wounded, perhaps.

The image was arresting, enigmatic, and-given where he had stashed it-something this young man undoubtedly didn’t want to share.

“His name’s Theodore Siegel,” Cal added, slipping the photo back into the wallet, and the wallet into Siegel’s pocket.

“Ring a bell?” Colleen asked Inigo.

Inigo shrugged. “I’m not from around here.”

“Really? And would you care to impart precisely where you are from?”

Inigo was a sphinx.

Cal turned toward Doc. “Care to ride shotgun?”

“When for once it’s actually literal? Certainly, Calvin…Er, in just one moment.” He hotfooted it over to where the dragon carcass lay crumpled in the grass.

Colleen caught the flash of Doc’s lighter flaring up. He held it over the dragon’s body, squinting closely at it. Then she saw the dancing flame glint off the metal blade as Doc pulled out his scaling knife and sawed at the beast’s dead shoulder a moment.

What the flaming blue hell…? Colleen thought.

Doc pulled something free, held it briefly in his palm, then pocketed it. Killing the light, he sidled back.

“Got something for show-and-tell, Viktor?” Colleen asked.

“Question me no questions, Boi Baba,” he said airily.

“All I can say is, it’s a good thing Mr. Pottymouth Lizard’s gone and joined his trailer-park ancestors in the Happy Hunting Ground or you might be in the market for a replacement head, mi amigo.”

“I am the soul of caution, Colleen.”

Colleen snorted so loudly the two of them nearly missed Cal loudly and pointedly clearing his throat.

Doc got the message. He slid in on the passenger side of the El Dorado, resting the rifle on his lap.

Goldman was still staring down into the valley, not moving a muscle, as if waiting to see who would blink first (and it sure as hell wouldn’t be him). Colleen nudged him in the ribs. “Wake up, Sleeping Beauty. Into the Valley of-”

“No, Colleen,” Cal said. “You two go back to the silo, see how the others are doing.”

“In a pig’s knuckle, Cal.”

“I mean it. We don’t want to go down there en masse and be perceived as a threat.”

“Oh, I think we very much want to be perceived as a threat.” She thought of the late, definitely-not-lamented reptile on the wing they had just recently dispatched. Better than being perceived as an in-flight snack.

Cal unbuckled his sword and laid it in the passenger well beside Doc. He climbed in behind the wheel, nodded toward the folded, nearly spindled and somewhat mutilated Mr. Siegel. “We just saved their homeboy here. Hopefully they’ll see us as allies.”

“And if they don’t?” Colleen asked. “Are we supposed to bake a file into a cake? Or maybe just carve the headstone?”

And just what would that tombstone say? I’d rather be in Philadelphia? They’d passed by Philadelphia, and it was definitely a place you wouldn’t rather be.

She shot Doc an imploring look-C’mon, Viktor, don’t be the stalwart physician here, come down on my side, for God’s sake. But he was tending to Siegel, murmuring low words, urging him to stay awake.

“Hey, when the man’s right, he’s right, Colleen,” Goldman said. He had snapped out of his swami trance just at this inopportune moment, darn his big brown eyes. “Two’s company, four’s a convention. We’d just futz things up.”

“And what about Haley Joel grunter here?” Colleen snapped. She meant Inigo, but he had that spooky look that kid from The Sixth Sense had, when he was lit from beneath and the frosty breath was curling out of his mouth, right before the ghosts came by.

“You’ll go back with them and stick around till we return, right?” Cal asked Inigo.

“Sure,” the boy assured him, but Colleen could tell by the way his eyes avoided Cal’s that he was lying his little gray ass off.

She was gonna stick to him like leeches to Bogart in that movie with the African boat, like something superglued to a finger that you had to make a trip to the emergency room to separate.

And if anything happens to Cal or Viktor… She fingered the hilt of the brass-knuckle-grip, Eviscerator Three Special Superknife that Rory had bought at Hunter’s Heaven in Greenwich Village back in the life before, and which she had brought along and worn at her belt in her travels since-figuring now that Rory was MIA and not quite human anymore, he wouldn’t exactly be needing it. Whereas Colleen had had to protect a man or two that she’d grown particularly fond of lately. And yeah, dammit, all right, she’d admit it, Goldman, too.

Inigo was watching her intently, caught the motion with the knife. He swallowed hard.

Good, the duplicitous puny little tweak was nervous. She’d keep him that way.

“Here goes nothing,” Cal said, and turned the key in the ignition. The big V-8 engine roared to life like a dinosaur in the jungle. Now, wasn’t that an amazing sound?

On sudden impulse, Colleen ran around to the passenger side, leaned in through the open window and kissed Doc. “Don’t do anything stupid,” she said.

He opened his mouth to make a joke, then thought better of it. “I’ll endeavor not to.” They looked deeply into each other’s eyes; she found some comfort there, a fact that no longer made her feel screechingly vulnerable.

He reached out and withdrew the chain from its place beneath her shirt, fingered the leather charm.

“If I may borrow this, for a short while. It may prove of use.”

“If you think so,” she responded, taking the length from around her neck.

“I think so.” Delicately, he unhooked the charm, removed the rough triangle of iridescent leather, then returned the chain with its Russian cross and dog tags to her.

Cal gave them their moment, let the engine idle, warming up. Inigo sidled up alongside the driver’s window.

“When you get down there, don’t believe everything they say,” he advised Cal. “And don’t let ’em dazzle you. Just keep an eye out for what you really need.”

“That your shopper’s tip for the day?” Cal asked.

“Nah, not mine,” Inigo murmured, and from the way he said it, Cal understood he could have added, It’s what I’ve been told to say.

Inigo bent his oversized head in the direction of the dead dragon. “You did good back there. You have a knack for saving people.”

“Thanks,” Cal said.

And though neither of them knew it, or truly knew each other yet, in that moment they had an identical hope, and the same thought.

Of Tina.

The road started out lousy, full of ruts and fissures Cal had to swerve wide to avoid. But as they continued down into the valley, it got better tended.

The bloated dead lay directly in their path. And by God, they looked real.

I see the town completely undamaged, Colleen had said. Well, there was only one way to really test that theory.

“Buckle your seat belts,” Cal said. Doc pulled his shoulder belt and snapped it in, then helped Siegel with his.

Cal floored it. With a roar, the El Dorado’s big tires shimmied laterally, then gained traction, screeching. The car surged forward.

They sped toward the grotesque heaped bodies of men, women, children. And then…

Nothing.

It was like passing through the surface of a mirror, if the mirror were insubstantial as smoke, and suddenly seeing the reflection wasn’t real at all.

“Bozhyeh moy,” Doc muttered under his breath.

“You can say that again,” said Cal.

For in the valley spread out ahead of them, the cloud-wrack opened and the pale moon raked cleared, pristine fields of what might recently have been rows of wheat and corn. The adjacent farmhouse had smoke curling complacently up out of the chimney, and brilliant, unwavering lights blazing within. Sound echoed from inside, vibrating through the keen night air toward them, lush orchestrations, and words, impossible words, and familiar.

“Hide the ring, Frodo. Keep it safe!”

“Jesus H. Christ,” Cal whispered. There were only two possibilities: either Sir Ian McKellen himself had dropped by and was reciting his number one hits…

Or someone was watching The Lord of the Rings.

A working television, working VCR or DVD player, and electric lights.

Beyond the farmhouse was the town itself, the buildings upright and intact, night settling down snug around a scattering of lights, amber streetlamps, astonishing dependable current humming through them, a carpet of them tucked into the gentle river valley, twinkling. People strolled the main street and lingered in the gazeboed park as if they hadn’t a care in the world, as if there had never been a Change or a Storm or a Darkness to make them shed a single tear.

Cal understood now just what the people here had to protect.

A safe haven, a hiding place…

Sanctuary.

The first such town Cal and his companions had come to on their winding pilgrimage was Stansbury, near the banks of the Patuxent, where Lola Johnson, that laughing, wise Earth Mother, somehow managed to plant the suggestion to marauding passersby that they not see the town at all.

Mary McCrae used concealing fog and portals only a very few could open to keep her Preserve enclosed.

Fred Wishart had done the same with Boone’s Gap for a time, and conjured monsters.

The folks here used plague, the illusion of it, to summon up terror and keep visitors away.

“Where should we drop you, Mr. Siegel?” Cal asked their passenger.

“Call me Theo.” He was sitting up straighter now, propping himself up with a hand on the back of Doc’s bucket seat. “Left at the stoplight, it’s the only one.”

Cal made the turn and saw that laid out ahead of them were the homey brick structures of a college. A row of wire-strung power poles stood evenly spaced on either side of the street, fanning out from the campus to the rest of the town. Closer now, Cal could see that each of the poles was arrayed-like the rifle Theo had wielded, like the engine of the El Dorado-with gleaming bright gemstones. They glimmered in the illumination from the lamps overhead, and cast multihued refractions.

Cal pulled up to the Student Union.

“Thanks,” Theo said. “Hey, listen, how ’bout you come in a minute? There’s a couple friends I’d like you to meet.”

Doc shot Cal a questioning look. Cal nodded confirmation. The two of them climbed out of the big boat of a car and helped the pale young man shakily to his feet. Cal’s hand brushed the back of Theo’s neck, and he was surprised to feel a hard bump under the skin.

It was just about exactly the size and shape of one of those stones lining the streetlamps.

Theo, trying to put weight on his left leg, cried out in pain.

“Broken, in all possibility, or badly sprained,” Doc said. “What I would give for a-” Then a remarkable look dawned on his face, as he cast his eyes on all the streetlights ablaze.

“You would not by chance have a medical center?” Doc asked, and Cal caught the tentative eagerness under the words.

Supported by them on either side, hobbling all the way, Theo led them there. But not before Cal retrieved his sword from the Cadillac, buckled it around his waist, and handed Doc the rifle.