Ghostlands

TWENTY-FOUR

The horses were shrieking, to begin with.

Mama Diamond spoke to them low in their own tongue, coaxing, reassuring.

“It’s not real, Fine Stallion. It’s not real, Brave Mare….”

Just the same as you’d calm a child, waking screaming from a bad dream. Only this was a nightmare that went on and on, and you were in it right along with them.

The only difference being that Mama Diamond could see it was an illusion, nothing to be scared of-at least, as far as she was concerned.

But to a horse held in its snare, or a man…

Even a man made of metal as hard-forged as Larry Shango.

He sat atop Cope, and Mama Diamond atop Marsh, as they rode down the gentle slope of valley into the college town of Atherton, Iowa. Glancing over at him in the moonlight, Mama Diamond could see from the set of his jaw and the shining grimness in his eyes that it was taking all he had not to be screaming, too. Frosty breath blew from his nostrils like steam off a locomotive, as he kept his mouth clamped tight.

Mama Diamond thought of the quiet efficiency with which Shango had wielded his hammer against the wolves around his campfire, the way he’d used fist and boot and knee to lay waste to the men who’d had the arrogance and naivete to rise up against him in that nameless town far behind them on their road east.

What you see ahead of you doesn’t just summon up old, bad dreams, my friend. Mama Diamond felt sure the nightmares it stirred in Shango’s memory were all too real, rivers of blood he’d waded through on this broad continent or another, bound by unwavering commands that brooked no direction but forward. And she felt equally certain he had been as silent then as now.

Not a man to complain, no matter how grueling the journey, how much it shredded one’s soul, tore at body and mind and heart. Mama Diamond thought back on the few words Shango had said when telling her of his ordeal in the Badlands trying to reach the Source Project.

Not an easy trip. And fifty-three miles from it…I was turned away. Not a word more, nothing of his feelings, nor what he’d suffered alone under the gaze of those granite spires.

Was he thinking of that time now, of the nameless horrors the Storm had thrown against him?

Whether he was or not, Mama Diamond knew Shango needed no soothing words, no comforting tone. He was a man on a track, headed in one direction…no matter how vile the smell or appalling the sight, how real or unreal the monsters.

Mama Diamond smiled then, a flinty smile, and nudged Marsh forward. She realized that just as she spoke the language of wolf and horse and cat, she spoke Shango’s language, too.

The language of silence and patience and endurance.

She had learned it from her parents at Manzanar, during the time when waiting for those barbed-wire gates to swing open on that desert land, and from her brother Harry, dead sixty years and more now, who had gone on to Heart Mountain, then to the 100th Infantry Battalion and a grave outside Genoa.

Where had Shango learned this language? she wondered.

The horses were quieting now under Mama Diamond’s coaxing, edging ahead reluctantly but trusting her, as surely as they had through long days of drought and Storm. They had been her steady companions for decades now, as she’d pried gem and bone from the eternal mountains, as she’d watched civilization come and go.

Focusing her mind as if switching stations on a radio, Mama Diamond found she could perceive what the horses and Shango were seeing-the rotted, scabrous bodies, ravaged, distorted, grotesque. Men, women, children, infant babes, a tableau of pestilence and death.

But looking down on this scene, it seemed to her as if everyone else were errant birds and she alone were human, and could name these gaunt welcomers for what they were.

Scarecrows.

Merely that and nothing more, and even less substantial. For with her dragon eyes and dragon heart, Mama Diamond could see clean through them as if they were tissue paper, or dandelion pollen on the air, or ripples in the water revealing clear hard stone beneath.

What crop were they protecting from marauding eyes, what precious bounty? And could her stolen treasure be part of it?

She could see, far below in the valley, the jeweled fairy-light of the town, and even at this distance could discern that the steady illumination was not wood nor candle nor oil light, but electricity, pure and simple.

Oh, there were mysteries to be revealed….

They closed upon the phantom corpses now, the ghastly sprawled obscenities. The horses drew back, eyes rolling.

“Easy now, my Brave One. Easy, Fair Beauty…”

And then they were through, like clean fresh water coursing from a mountain fissure, and the bodies were gone. The horses steadied, and Shango let out a low, slow breath.

“You certainly know how to show a lady a good time, Mr. Shango,” Mama Diamond said in the common tongue, no longer needing their shared vocabulary of silence.

“Yes, ma’am,” Shango said, and his smile mirrored hers.

Then Mama Diamond spied the glint of the big tourmaline half buried in the dirt, and her smile vanished.

“Is it one of yours?” Larry Shango asked.

Mama Diamond squatted by the big stone and shone her lantern on it, throwing off gemfire from its surface. A good many of her semiprecious rocks were as familiar to her as the creases on her palms, the age spots on her brow. But this one had been reworked and faceted in an odd way, turned to some new purpose.

“I can’t truly say,” she replied.

At first, upon approaching the stone, Mama Diamond thought someone had just buried it here, and not done a very good job. But now she saw it was wired up in an elaborate, curious way to an electronic device of some sort. The whatchamacallit was about the size and shape of a Game Boy (like the one Herbie Ganz always lugged about with him before his folks had up and pulled stakes out of Burnt Stick), the guts of it worked around an odd, triangular piece of what looked like black leather but which gleamed with iridescent highlights of green and red and black.

Mama Diamond shivered; she’d seen hide like that before…or at least something that looked a good deal like it.

And this was not the only such object. It was wired up to dozens virtually identical to it, stretching across the slope of the valley like an electrified fence barring their way. As she held her lamp high, its beam caught answering refractions on each device, like the multihued eyes of watching wolves, but which Mama Diamond knew were gemstones.

She remembered now how the dragon Stern had first looked like a man when he’d stepped off that train-I couldn’t decide what to wear…so I thought I’d give you a choice-and how she herself had cast a false consuming fire that had deceived the wolf pack and its panther king.

A good trick, to fool the eye and ear and nose…

And how different, really, was the illusion of a man or a flame from a landscape of dead bodies? Merely a question of scale.

It was a dragon trick, and did the dragon have to be here to do it?

Or just some pieces of him…?

Mama Diamond faced Shango. “We’re in the right place,” she said.

Which was just when the voice behind her piped up.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” the man with the gun said. “I’ll be asking you to please stand away from that.”

To a casual observer, the scene might have appeared a good deal more challenging than the last altercation in which Agent Larry Shango had found himself. True, there were only three men this time rather than four, but these had guns, oddly jewel-adorned ones, and from the way they hefted them it was a good bet these weapons still worked (even if none anywhere else in the world seemingly did).

But these men made a mistake their predecessors had not: they spoke before they had Shango in hand.

Time did what it always did on these occasions for Larry Shango. It slowed infinitely down to a filament of elongated, elastic moments strung together like the gel-filled beads on a baby’s chew toy. More than enough time, an absurdly generous amount, to observe and plan and act.

Shango’s mind settled into an easy stance, like the low, solidly balanced crouch he assumed at karate and aikido and jujitsu sparring sessions, and all those bone-crushing events in the real world between-from the bare-knuckle brawls in narrow alleyways between mausoleums in French Quarter graveyards when he was a boy to the more recent, polished performances along the waterfronts of D.C. and Bombay, the glittering terraces of the Rue de Rivoli and reeking slums on the outskirts of Rio. Anywhere his Commander-in-Chief might choose to go, and Shango’s duty compel him to follow. In the old days, at least, when that Commander was alive, not abandoned and betrayed.

The three men approached slowly, with caution, clumped together (that was a mistake), weapons leveled but not aimed. Though ranging in age from late twenties to early forties, their coloring from dark to fair, they looked as if they’d all been baked in the same oven by a smiling, doting grandma-all with identical brown, ill-fitting uniforms of small-town cops, all paunchy and rumpled, not one of them hard or watchful or keen.

In the luxurious, attenuated time sense as if he were watching a DVD on frame advance, Shango weighed his options. These guys wore no ornamentation of biker helmet or chains, no stomper boots, so they probably weren’t rogues, just standard-issue cops doing their job. But this was hardly a standard-issue town, with its ghastly deterrent of fake corpses, its enigmatic machines set along the perimeter.

This postcard paradise didn’t want visitors, that was clear. And here he was, and Mama Diamond, too, bound and determined to pay a call.

So what orders might these cops be under regarding trespassers? What orders would he be under, in like circumstances?

Not to kill, these guys didn’t have that vibe. But not to run off, either. To contain, to imprison, to hold.

But just as certainly as Larry Shango knew how to elegantly loop a Windsor knot and fieldstrip an M-16 blindfolded, he knew that wasn’t going to happen here, not nohow, not no way.

So. Show them his government-issue ID, his pass from the President, or at least the man who had once been President and whose bone and flesh and hair were now dusting away in an unmarked grave?

It might work…but the government as such was about as solid a concept, deserving the same respect in most parts, as paper money nowadays.

And if it failed to impress…well then, adios, element of surprise.

All this played out in Shango’s mind on the whole instantaneously, like a burst of data downloaded in toto, preverbal, hard-wired, known.

As did the action he took next.

Stepping in front of Mama Diamond to shield her, Shango dropped down, grabbed the ten-pound sledge from its resting place on his back, drew it from the straps that held it there, and threw the big hammer dead midsection at the cop in front. It hit the man square in the solar plexus, driving him back with a grunt of surprise and exhaled breath into the other two, who stumbled on the uneven ground and flailed to keep from falling.

As Shango expected, the blow caused cop number one to drop his service revolver. Shango dove onto the cool wet grass, seized the gun and came up with it held steady in both hands and trained on all three.

Okay, so it was a cowboy thing to do, but along with all those Shadow tapes his dad had brought home that long-ago flea market day back in New Orleans, he’d also brought some Lone Ranger.

And if Mama Diamond didn’t look a whole hell of a lot like Tonto, well, that wasn’t to say the notion didn’t still hold water.

The three cops were regaining their footing, breathing hard, just getting a sense of the new situation.

Now, let’s just hope none of them’s a hothead….

“Gentlemen…” Shango began, but didn’t have an opportunity to get much further into the fine art of compromise.

For just then, about the forty-eighth unanticipated, virtually impossible thing that day happened.

A blaring horn shattered the night and twin headlights raked over them. Shango immediately looked aside, but his eyes were dazzled and he was momentarily blinded.

The deep thrum of an engine roared up and Shango could hear big rubber tires turning off the nearby road and crunching onto the grass.

And although Shango was no connoisseur of poetry, a snatch of Coleridge rose up in his mind.

It was a miracle of rare device….

From the corner of his eye, he saw that Mama Diamond had grabbed hold of the horses to steady them. Shango re-angled his stance to keep the gun on the three men and also on the newcomers.

The door of the big Cadillac opened and its driver stepped out. Vaguely through the headlights, Shango could see others in the car, sitting watching them.

The driver ambled up, a silhouette backlit by the brilliant light.

“Mr. Shango,” the voice said, and he could hear the smile in it. “I was just thinking of you.”

Then Cal Griffin stepped up and shook his hand.