Ghostlands

FORTY-FIVE

Well now, that’s a relief, Mama Diamond thought, even as she felt a chill run straight from the crown of her head to her little toe. She knew, too, that no one else in her party was thinking anything even remotely like it.

But then, the rest of them hadn’t been feeling particularly like a fifth (or in this case, tenth) wheel, and wondering if their insistence on accompanying this little expeditionary force into the mouth of hell hadn’t been merely the first cranky expression of a nascent second childhood raising its senile voice.

Which was merely a roundabout way of saying that Mama Diamond had been doubting her finely honed instincts right along about now.

But hotfooting it in the snowfall paralleling Highway 40 out of Rushmore, skirting the deserted, fallen structures of Keystone and its blasted, twisted billboards touting the Flying T Chuckwagon Supper and Show, Old MacDonald’s Petting Farm, the Reptile Gardens and the National Presidential Wax Museum (not to mention the Holy Terror Mine-and if that description didn’t fit the whole damn area nowadays, Mama Diamond didn’t know what did), Mr. Cal Griffin and his stalwart band of adventurers had come upon a whole herd of rusticating herbivores that might have been candidates for a petting zoo themselves if not for a little thing or two.

Namely, that they were dead, skinned and in a real bad mood…

The bitter cold wind was lifting low off the ground now, and it carried to Mama Diamond the sticky iron blood smell of the beasts, a stink that seemed to weight the air, make it hard to breathe in. There was another smell, too, the musty odor of their thick winter coats; the parts of their carcasses that still had coats on them, that was, that hadn’t been cut away by the long-departed buffalo men who were bones and dust as ancient as these animals themselves.

As if they all abruptly heard some call on the air beyond the range of human hearing (and who was to say they didn’t), the brutes raised their heads as one and appraised the interlopers with clear challenge, and imminent threat. The lead bull was grunting his displeasure with throaty deep exclamations, blowing puffs of pungent air from his nostrils. He tensed his huge shoulders and raised his tuft of tail, readying to charge.

Out of the corner of her eye-never taking her gaze off the lead buffalo-Mama Diamond could see Griffin gesturing the rest of his band closer together, keeping himself at the forefront, all of them hefting their varied assortment of absurd weaponry.

Weaponry that would no more dispatch this enormous collection of tainted meat on the hoof than a rolled newspaper. Which was, Mama Diamond felt, just what Dr. Marcus Sanrio and his ghastly inhuman buddies back in their mountain fastness had counted on.

But these hideous rejects from a meat market studding the landscape ahead as far as the eye could see weren’t the only things that had been called here-Mama Diamond herself had, too, though by a different, unknown agency and for a far different purpose. She had been touched by a dragon, and it had left its mark, awakened the dragon part within her. She understood now that her journey from Burnt Stick to Atherton to this lonely, cold highway outside Keystone, South Dakota-and for that matter, the entirety of her roving, long life, from San Bernardino to Manzanar and the fossil beds beyond-had been aimed to arrive her at this precise moment; the trajectory of her life like a toy arrow fired at a guard shack.

She realized, too, that her parlays with the horses and wolves and panther had been no more, really, than practice sessions.

At last, at long last, Mama Diamond knew just what she was here for.

“Out of my way, boys and girls,” she said to Griffin and the others as she strode to the head of the group, confidence filling her like wind in a clipper ship’s sails.

They were the last words she said in the tongue of man.

The lead buffalo tilted its head to look at her with its dead black eyes, sniffed at her with its broad, flat nose, incarnadined with shiny, black blood. Behind it, the others of the herd regarded her, waiting, lethal.

“Ho there, Grass Eater!” Mama Diamond called to the leader, in the dragon tongue she knew it would comprehend, her voice booming out so all would hear. “You Dead Thing, you Killer of Flies!”

(From her peripheral vision, Mama Diamond spied Colleen starting to pipe up, saw Cal grab her arm, commanding her to silence. Sharp boy, that one, quick on the uptake. He’d know how to play this out, without Mama having to draw him pictures-a damn good thing, seeing as how Mama Diamond felt sure she wasn’t going to have spare time to haul out pencil and paper….)

“You’re insolent for such a small thing,” Old King Buffalo replied to Mama Diamond, then added, “It will be a pleasure to rip you apart.”

“Listen to Old Cow brag! Did you boast that way when man and horse ran you down, when they laid you low? They should have cut out your tongue, too, Braggart Cow!”

King Buffalo was shifting his weight from side to side, still readying himself but with the slightest hint of hesitation, made unsure by Mama Diamond’s belligerence, her lack of caution.

“Old Cow doubting himself? Lie down, Old Cow, you and your sheep herd with you! Back to earth and worms with you! And bother no more your betters!”

That last jibe hit home; Old King Buffalo lowered his head; his breath was coming in short, enraged grunts.

Let it be now, Mama Diamond thought, reaching down into herself, summoning every bit of resolve and conviction from the deep dragon part of her. And the human part, too, the part that had scratched treasures out of the earth and dispensed their gleaming delights to Native boys and passing travelers alike.

That had left her family behind without a glance.

That had been loved by a boy named Danny once, and lost him to the wider world that had so scared her.

Well, she was in that wide world, now.

With a roar that echoed to the sky, Old King Buffalo charged, and the rest of his herd with him, thundering the earth, the cracked road and ground trembling, their hooves throwing up great clots of snow and grass and dirt.

“BURN!” Mama Diamond screamed and felt herself ignite like the world bursting alight. She extended her arms and willed herself outward in an expression of blaze and consumption.

And this time, her utter surety in the unwavering fact of it made her see it:

Gouts of blue and red and white-hot flame spewed from her and struck King Buffalo, knocking him backward into the others as he screamed and burned. The others were on fire now, too, and the trees and grasses, too. The buffalo plunged aside, bellowing in their terror, dead as they were, some plunging off the cliffside, flipping down and away, screaming, while others stampeded blindly away, shearing off tree trunks and stones in their blind panic.

Mama Diamond risked a glance at her companions, and from their puzzlement it was clear they saw none of the flames, had no understanding why the beasts had rioted and parted. But none of that mattered. Mama Diamond could feel her power ebbing, starting to falter….

“Run!” she cried to the others, and could not say whether she said it in the dragon tongue or not.

But Cal Griffin didn’t need more. He took off at a run, the others following, bolting down the roadway in the opening she’d made for them as the corpse buffalo shrieked and rolled in the dirt and fled.

Mama Diamond stumbled after them, but her legs were watery under her, she had no oomph left, as she continued to fire the stream of flame at the brutes, this way and that, keeping the path open as long as she could.

And maybe the flames were just an illusion, Mama Diamond knew, no more real than a lonely girl’s wish on a summer’s night, but how real were these dead things? (Real enough to kill, she knew that.) The scorched ones were staying scorched, the shredded remnants of their fur and skin and the muscle beneath smoking and filling the winter air with the smell of charred meat.

With a phht! Mama Diamond’s flames abruptly cut out, and her body was intact and cold and frightfully mortal once more as she shivered there.

Coming aware that there was no further threat, the buffalo slowed in their headlong, chaotic rush, turned back toward her again, those that hadn’t plummeted clean off the mountain.

Slowly, cautiously, they drew near, circling her, their crisped hooves crunching the grasses and snow and asphalt. Over their heads, Mama Diamond could discern Griffin and the others clear of them, safe now, just slowing and glancing back, seeing to their dismay that she was not right behind them, that she was cut off and trapped.

Nothing in the world they could do, nothing at all, Mama Diamond reflected, and that was all right. Or at least, it would have to be.

Utterly spent, she sank to her knees in the fresh snow, no longer able to stand, to do anything. A ludicrous phrase came to mind, something from her childhood, from a lesson on writing, of all things. Vomit, then mop. Well, she’d vomited out all that flame, but she didn’t have a lick of energy to mop now, not no way, not nohow.

She saw Old King Buffalo had righted himself and gained his feet, every bit of him black now, burnt clear down to the skeleton. He approached her, was scant feet away.

“You got a bone to pick, Old Cow?” Mama Diamond croaked, and she laughed, although it wasn’t really funny.

Old King Buffalo shrieked like all the damned souls echoing up from the mouth of hell and charged, the rest of them coming on, too.

Mama Diamond closed her eyes, the hammering of their footfalls all the sound in the world, knowing it would not be long now.

Then she felt a hurricane beating of wind surge from above her, and heard angry, rasping words that cut through the din.

“Leave her-she’s mine.”

Mama Diamond opened her eyes and looked up, but all she could see was a vortex of whirling black cloud whipping down out of the storm roof, something winged and dark within, hauling the tempest down with itself as it dropped.

Enormous, taloned fingers wrapped about her midsection and yanked her high into the storm.

In the moment before consciousness left her and she knew no more than the stones in the earth, Mama Diamond put a name to the voice.

It was Ely Stern.