Ghostlands

FORTY-THREE

“Them’s some powerful riffs you got there, Old Man.”

The first words Enid Blindman uttered once the group of them had cleared the shadow of the ruined, disfigured monument were addressed to Papa Sky. The next were to no one in particular.

“This is one scary-ass place.”

True enough on both counts, Mama Diamond reflected. But the statement of more burning urgency was clearly the latter.

Because everything was bound and determined to kill them.

As they struggled their way along the melted and reformed face of the mountain and down the rubble field (the stones of which still bore the jackhammer gouges made when Rushmore was first carved, sixty years ago and more), great ragged boulders tore clear and pounded after them. Blasted, burned vestiges of ponderosa pine came alive and snatched at them with blackened branches like spearpoints.

Her companions fought back the onslaught, shattering rock and shearing wood with light, and sound, and blades of keenest metal.

But the party was just getting started.

It’s not nice to mess with Mother Nature….

Only this wasn’t Mother Nature. No, she and Mama Diamond had enjoyed quite a cordial relationship over the last seven decades, as Mama sought out a good deal of the fine lady’s bounty, prying it lovingly from earth and stone and riverbed.

No, if Mama Diamond was to understand the information Cal Griffin and Agent Shango had shared with her, this was Dr. Marcus Sanrio at work-Sanrio and whatever else held sway there inside that mountain.

Mama Diamond had thought until now that dragons and their little gray workforce were about the worst this world had to offer.

Old Woman, you had no idea….

They’d reached a roughly level area now, a broad expanse of cracked concrete with a big oozy bowl shape at the center. Mama Diamond saw that it had once been an amphitheater, before-as with the mountain itself-it had melted like an ice-cream cone and then resolidified.

Beyond the flat expanse lay a collapsed structure that Mama supposed had been an information center, a museum and a gift shop, but that now was so much fused wreckage of stonework, girders and glass. And out past that, rows of scorched granite stumps that (she knew from photos Katy and Samantha had sent from their vacation back in ’98) had once been tall, ordered pillars like something out of that movie she’d seen on public TV, what was it called?

Triumph of the Will…

There’d been a triumph of the will here, all right, but it wasn’t the U.S. government or Nazis, or anything particularly human anymore.

The shards of glass and tortured sharp metal and smaller hunks of rubble quivered and launched themselves careening at them. Christina screwed up her face in concentration, extending her forcefield to encircle Mama Diamond and the rest. Enid and Papa Sky played duets for all they were worth, while everyone huddled inside the blazing halo.

“We are still within the Source Project’s sphere of influence,” commented Doc.

“I’d say you’re not gonna lose any bonus points on that one, Viktor,” said Colleen.

“What the hell is the Source Project doing inside Mount Rushmore?” Howie piped up.

“Originally Rushmore was conceived as a far grander project,” said Cal. “The Presidents were supposed to be full figures, not just faces, and there was going to be a huge museum and repository carved out of the inside of the mountain.”

“How in the name of fried green tomatoes do you know all that?” asked Colleen.

Cal shrugged. “Tina did a social studies paper once. Anyway, supposedly all they ever actually blasted out was the Hall of Records.”

“That tunnel with the porcelain plaques,” said Doc.

“Yes,” Cal answered. “But in actuality they must’ve carved out the rest of the mountain secretly…and put in the Source Project.”

“Let’s hear it for American ingenuity,” said Colleen.

“How far to the periphery?” Cal asked Shango.

“I’d reckon fifty miles, as the crow flies.”

“I hate to break this to you, Larry, but we’re not crows.” Colleen had to shout now over the din of the rocks and glass and metal crashing against the barrier. “More like paper targets, or soon to be chalk outlines.”

“Really, Colleen,” Doc chided, “I wish you would try to be more positive.” His eyes smiled, and Mama Diamond saw some of the tension ease out of Colleen’s shoulders as she accepted the taunt.

“Makes no nevermind if we reach the borderland,” Papa Sky added in his smoky cigarette rasp, lifting his lips from the bamboo reed set in the mouthpiece of his gleaming alto sax. “You try to pass through it into the world outside, why, it’ll just burn you clean away.”

Mama Diamond saw that the boy Inigo was nodding somberly in agreement.

“And how exactly did you get here?” Cal asked Papa Sky, but Papa only smiled inscrutably and would speak no further regarding his travels here, nor any possible companions, human or otherwise.

Cal sighed, and let it go. “We can’t stay here, that’s for sure.” He let out a slow, considered breath. “Mary McCrae’s Preserve was in the Olentangy Indian Caverns of Ohio. A sacred site, that helped lend it its power. Now, the Source Project might hold sway here, but it’s smack dab in middle of the Black Hills-”

Mama Diamond nodded; she knew the lore well. “The granddaddy of all sacred sites.”

“That’s right,” Cal said. “So odds are it should have a power all its own, too.”

“In theory,” Doc said. But theory was all they had now.

They fell silent then, the only sound the fusillade of debris continuing to batter their defenses.

Finally, Papa Sky spoke, his ancient, musky voice barely audible. “There’s a place I know…. Least, I heard tell of it. Rumor is some folks tried to get there once, long time back, old men, women, children…It’s called the Stronghold.”

“Tell me it’s fifty feet from here,” Colleen said.

“More like fifty miles,” he replied. Colleen groaned.

“Where?” Cal asked Papa Sky.

“A tableland just past the Black Hills…in the Badlands.”

“Well?” Cal asked the others.

Mama Diamond felt she really shouldn’t have a vote. After all, despite the conviction she had felt that the others would need her along, thus far she’d been little more than baggage. She saw the others nodding their assent (reluctantly, of course; it would be fifty miles of long, hard road, a royal sonofabitch, and no two ways about it) and added her own.

Cal took this in and rose, Mama Diamond and the others following suit. Slowly, fighting the whole wide world every inch of the way, they journeyed past the melted pillars and out through the parking lot, to the twisting roadway leading down to the Badlands.

Enid Blindman and Papa Sky continued playing all the while. As they made their tortuous way, Mama Diamond touched Papa on the arm. “Those folks who tried to get there, a long time back, what happened to them?”

Papa Sky stopped playing, and his face was gray under its cherrywood sheen.

“They were on the run,” he said, looking out at her with troubled, unseeing eyes. “A whole lot of them got rubbed out. At a place called Wounded Knee…”

Farther down the slope of the mountains, they found the terrain less ravaged than at its apogee, or rather ravaged by the natural sweep of earth and time; the flow and retreat of ocean, the exhalation of molten rock, the layers of stone that had rippled and overturned like blankets on a restless sleeper.

All under a storm-wracked sky that held little sympathy, and a great deal of threat.

The ponderosa pines were thicker here, and green-needled once more, the aspens speckled white and brown, not charred as by a dragon’s breath. The air presented a fitful, elusive intensity of humid heat radiating off the mountainside behind them; a whisper of the Source. But for the most part, the wind wore its winter coat, and chilled them despite their heavy clothes. Icy rain pelted at them, alternating with flurries of snow. Their legs felt leaden; Colleen longed for Big-T, her redoubtable steed whom they’d left stabled back in Atherton, and for Cal’s Sooner and Doc’s Koshka. She thought then of Goldie’s horse Jayhawk-whom he had renamed Later, in a predictable fit of Goldie-ness-and it brought her a fresh pang of grief and regret.

As the afternoon waned, the assaults on them from all directions (rail fences flying at them, barbed wire coiling and springing like pythons) grew less determined and more sporadic, until they ceased altogether. Cal directed Christina to conserve her energies; in answer, her aura withdrew from about them until it encompassed only the pale, hovering girl herself. Papa Sky and Enid continued to play, but more softly, Doc leading the sightless old man with a gentle touch on his arm.

Walking alongside Cal, Colleen could sense his wariness. The cessation of attacks hadn’t lessened his anxiety; rather, it had served only to increase it. Colleen shared his concern. She had learned on her father’s knee that you pull back your ground forces to make room for the artillery bombardment.

As their boots crunched on the newly fallen snow, she wondered what new hell they would soon face.

She didn’t have long to wait for the answer.

Descending, rounding a bend in the cracked highway amidst towering granite needles that (as Mama Diamond coolly informed them, as if they were nothing more than a nomadic tour group and she their seasoned guide) had been thrust out of the earth two and half billion years ago, they hit a level patch, a shelf on the slanting hillside.

Cal drew to an abrupt halt, motioning the others to stillness.

They were not alone.

Cal drew his sword from its scabbard, and Colleen unslung her crossbow and nocked a bolt into it soundlessly. She saw the others readying themselves, too, although she felt certain they knew as well as she did that they had about as much chance as a canary at a cat convention.

There were hundreds of them, arrayed along the hillside in the tall grass, amid the thick pines, snorting blasts of steamy breath from big nostrils, the snow like powdered sugar on their massive shoulders and heads. Some still grazed on the wheatgrass and bluestem, tearing up great hunks of sod, with blunt sounds like great machines gouging out the earth.

Blood dripped from their diminutive mouths, and ran from their fathomless black eyes like crimson tears beneath vast horns like polished granite, black speckled in gray. Great gashes in their hides showed glistening meat with marbled fat and bone beneath; violence had been done to them, wantonly and on a grand scale.

They were dead, of course, but had been called forth from the womb of the earth to face them now with blank malevolence.

The buffalo covered the land, and hungered for their blood.