Ghostlands

SIXTEEN

It made Inigo’s stomach hurt having to lie to Christina’s brother. But if he hadn’t, Cal Griffin would never have left him to go into town.

Still, Inigo’s mother had told him never to lie. But then, she had said she was only leaving him for a week or two, that he would be perfectly safe with Agnes Wu (make that Dr. Wu, if you please, though it had always seemed odd to Inigo that someone who pushed elemental particles around had the same title as a guy who gave you a tetanus shot), that she would be back before he knew she was gone.

And that had all been a lie.

So where did that leave him?

Telling Cal Griffin he would stay put, when that would be the most dangerous thing he could do for any of them.

No, he had to be in and out, before the Big Bad Thing got a whiff of it, in plenty of time to watch Christina dance on the corner again, to listen to Papa Sky belt out those mournful blues, to have the Leather Man not say a word or bat an eye.

Because shit, if you crossed that crazy dude, he’d say more than a word and bat more than an eye.

That scary lady with the crossbow and the knives hauled him up on her horse-Big-T it was named, was that some kinda joke, like Tyrannosaurus or what? — and held tight to him all the way to the towering grain silo where the other happy campers were stowed. That funny, schizzy guy with the black curls rode alongside them on his buckskin horse, staring at him all the way, without ever looking directly at him.

Creepy, that.

Even when they got to the silo, Xena Warrior Princess kept him walking ahead of her, breathing down his neck, never letting him get so much as a yard away.

Oh brother, they were making him work….

Once inside, though, things took a serious upswing. Biker Girl and Hippie started talking to the rest of the gang, making sure they were warm, the fires well stoked, everybody with enough food in their gut and no grumbling from anybody. Plus they had to hip them to what Cal and Dr. Russian were up to.

A lot of ground to cover, chores to attend to. And finally, finally neither Goldie nor Colleen was watching him, and Inigo was able to slip out the door and into the night.

To where the other silo was waiting.

Since his transformation-and long before that, actually-Inigo could move on swift cat feet, covering a ton of ground making no sound at all, like wind rippling on the air, and nobody, not even an owl or a wood mouse, getting the least hint he was there.

He was a good way from the grain silo now; it was the barest silhouette against the night sky. The terrain spread out before him was a featureless expanse of mottled snow and high grass.

In the normal scheme of things, he wouldn’t have been able to see anything at all, wouldn’t have been able to find the hatch set flat in the ground. But this was far from the normal scheme of things, and he wasn’t a normal anything anymore.

Generally, he hated being the stunted, twisted freak he was-the bonsai distortions the Storm had laid on him made him studiously avoid mirrors. But for once, he was thankful for the milky, big, egg-membrane eyes of his that could pierce the darkness like a night-vision scope and better. It was a snap finding the big steel hatch, lifting it effortlessly with those long, lean superhuman arm muscles of his.

He peered into the deep, black hole. Hot air rushed up out of it like the exhalation of the biggest junkyard dog in the world. Cloaked in the night, Inigo could spy downward with perfect assurance, see the dead elevators, the emergency handholds set at regular intervals in the wall down the endless length of the shaft.

This would be the hardest part of all, harder even than hanging on to that shrieking hell-train as it screamed underground and punched up into the air like the Devil himself being born. But Leather Man had coached Inigo thoroughly, given explicit directions. There’d be a lot of hard traveling, and he’d have to move fast, but if he was really on his toes, kept a sharp lookout, he could find shortcuts, doorways on the fade that hadn’t winked out yet, that he could still squeeze through.

And, of course, he’d have to keep clear of the lurkers in the dark, the smilers with the knives, the dark little men who would cut him open and eat him raw without the least hesitation….

Man, he hated being one of them.

Leather Man would leave that last back door open for him, or else he’d never get back, not in a million years of Sundays-the door that almost nobody else could get through, certainly no human, certainly not Cal Griffin. The Big Bad Thing would sense a thing like that for sure, and crush anyone flat before he so much as drew a breath.

But a little gray guy, particularly under just the right protection and at the right moment, might just slip on by, be taken for one of the ground crew, one of the staff.

Because as Leather Man and Papa Sky had drilled into him and into him…

Grunters It drove crazy (except for him, for the time being), flares It swallowed whole to fuel the furnace, and dragons-

Well, dragons were another thing entirely.

Time to go home. Or at least what had once been home, and now was-

“Hold it right there, you lying little creep.”

The voice came from behind him, stunningly close. Inigo turned around slowly.

Colleen Brooks stood there, not ten feet off, her crossbow aimed right at him.

He hadn’t heard her coming at all.

Damn, she was good…for a human.

“You wanna talk about it?” Colleen glared at him. “No? Suits me just fine, because most sphincters I run into just want to yak and yak. C’mon, we’re heading back.”

Busted. He took just one step toward her, when abruptly someone dashed up from behind and to the right of him, grabbed him hard and threw him down into the snow.

Which was the only thing that saved him, or his hypersensitive sight at least, because right then there was this explosion of light around him, and Colleen Brooks screamed.

When the light cleared enough for him to look up, Inigo thought for one terrible instant that she had been melted to nothing right there on the spot. Then he saw to his relief that she had just dropped to the ground and was rolling around in pain, holding her eyes and cursing, blinded-temporarily, he hoped.

Then whoever it was behind him grabbed him again.

“Move,” the voice said, and shoved him toward the open shaft. The two of them crawled in quickly, hanging from the handholds.

“The hatch, grab the hatch,” the voice commanded.

Inigo grabbed the heavy iron door by its inner wheel, pulled it down secure.

“Now dog it. Hard.”

Inigo twisted it, then gave it an extra turn no ordinary mortal could undo.

The two of them slid down the walls of the shaft like lizards, like the geckos Inigo had seen on Kauai when his folks had taken him on vacation, in the good time before his dad had gotten the security job at the Project.

It seemed to take forever, the two of them descending in silence, but finally they reached bottom. Breathing hard in the echoing blackness, Inigo faced the one who had saved him.

The man reached out a hand palm-up, and a glowing ball appeared in it, a flawless globe of shimmering blue fog. Inigo squinted painfully against the light.

The figure adjusted his straw cowboy hat with the five aces, set it right.

“Now you’re gonna tell me a thing or two,” Goldie said, neither his eyes nor his mouth smiling, in his own way every bit as terrifying as Leather Man could be.

There was nothing funny about him at all.