Ghostlands

FORTY-SEVEN

Stumbling down the mountainside, bitter with the cost of their survival, the winter wind stinging their eyes to slits and icing their lashes, they might all have appeared blind ones to a passing observer, although only one of them truly was.

Do you think there’s forgiveness in this world, Mr. Griffin, or just atonement? Mama Diamond had asked Cal on the moonlit roof of the dormitory back in Atherton.

From the safe distance Mama Diamond’s act of courage had bought them in their confrontation with the butchered, reanimated buffalo, Cal had seen the merciless black shape wrapped in storm cloud swoop out of the darkling sky to seize her up and carry her off into the gale.

Whatever that dark messenger had been, there was no telling where Mama Diamond might be now. Still alive? Cal could only hope. Lost, certainly, to the Storm. Would she forgive him, wherever she was? Could he ever atone for bringing her here?

Or any of those that had followed him: Magritte, Mike Olifiers…

Goldie.

Enid Blindman had been a Pied Piper to lead others to sanctuary, Cal reflected. But what had he led them to? He looked over at his sister, the glowing halo of her floating, changed self casting illumination on the night-dark path ahead.

He knew there was no point in flagellating himself. He had done what he’d had to, as had the rest of them. The world turned every moment, it hurtled through space; stillness was no more than an illusion, a cunning self-deception. Every action, even inaction-especially inaction-was a choice. And the assumption that one held responsibility for all the wild vagaries of the universe was simply arrogance.

I am the captain of my ship, not of the sea….

Cal had listened to the voice within him, and taken the wise counsel of others. It was right to be here, a testament to their tenacity and courage and will-which didn’t lessen the ache of loss in his chest.

Still, he had Christina with him; he had kept that promise, at least. And in doing so, he’d forced changes on himself perhaps even greater than those imposed on his sister, albeit more subtle, less telling to the eye.

He came to an awareness that his sister was scrutinizing him with her strange, opalescent eyes. He smiled at her, and she gave him the ghost of a smile back.

They had traveled through bleak, uncharted territories, the two of them, both together and alone, and had neither safety nor security now. But then, safety and security were illusions, too; everyone died, that was the way of things.

Gravel and the dust of ages crunching beneath his boots, Cal reflected that if the journey of his life were marked by two ports of call, one of them fear, the other love, he knew at which destination he had arrived.

His sister was beside him, and that was enough.

As they struggled along the looping, switchbacked path of Route 40, thick grasses twined and stretched to grasp at their legs; prairie rattlers and bull snakes uncoiled out of their winter sleeping places to leap snapping at them; slumbering hordes of grasshoppers and mosquitoes and katydids swarmed up to envelop them. The night and land were alive, suffused with a muted, blue St. Elmo’s fire that pulsed and writhed over all that rose to meet them at the bidding of the Thing unseen.

Christina drove them back with her luminosity, Enid and Papa Sky with the heat of their music. And what they couldn’t deflect, Cal and Colleen, Doc and Inigo and Howie and Shango stomped and hacked to bits with boot and sword, machete and knife.

Inch by inch, yard by yard, mile by mile…

How much farther now? Hard to tell in this blackness. Thirty miles? Twenty-five? An infinity.

They were coming down out of the Black Hills onto the Badlands now. The snow, with its odd taste of defilement when it brushed their lips, was abating, giving way to a cruel, unrelenting wind that had teeth in it, that chilled them clean through despite the many layers of clothing they wore. Their teeth chattered, and their limbs shook as they pressed on in grim silence. Tina alone seemed untouched by the cold, serene and enigmatic in her weightlessness.

The attacks appeared to be lessening, becoming more sporadic, less intent. Perhaps whatever lived at the Source drew in upon itself as night came on; perhaps even It needed to sleep sometimes.

Cal hoped so.

Alongside the roadway, rows of white metal signs banged a percussive rhythm against their wooden poles in the fierce wind. Cal could see the triangular signs all bore the same scolding admonition-THINK.

Following his glance, Inigo came up beside him. “That’s to show where someone died here. You know, in an accident.”

We may die here, too, Cal reflected. But it won’t be any accident.

To the boy, he said, “Are you from around these parts? Before the Change?”

Inigo nodded. “Came here when I was ten. My dad worked at Ellsworth for a time, the Air Force base outside Rapid. Then he got a job in the mountain….” The boy’s face darkened in the gloom, remembering. “We didn’t see him much after that, my mom and me.”

“What happened to them, your folks?” Cal asked. He realized he was speaking low, so none of the others could hear, although he couldn’t have said why.

Inigo shrugged. “Dad ran off before things came down…. Ma went to find him.”

“They just left you?”

“Mom had this lady friend she put me with…. When the Storm came, I didn’t see that lady anymore.” He shivered, and added cryptically, “I didn’t want to.”

“Is that when you changed?”

“Around then, yeah. I kinda kept my head down, found stuff to eat…. You can do okay, if you don’t make waves.”

Yeah, but somewhere along the way you radically altered your operating philosophy, kid. It occurred to Cal this was the longest conversation he’d had with the grunter boy, and the most Inigo had chosen to reveal.

“So how’d you get inside the mountain?” Cal asked.

Before Inigo could respond, his pale big eyes went wider still, as he saw something ahead in the darkness that made him stop dead.

Cal halted and peered into the blackness. Behind him, the others stopped, too.

Ahead of them, the night sky was lit with flashes that burst staccato across the heavens, like strings of immense firecrackers going off, or gigantic Christmas lights exploding.

The lightning was coming for them.

And beneath it, swarming across the vista of ragged terrain, the strobing stormlight giving their matted, wet fur fleeting illumination, packs of gray buffalo wolves, spat dead, reincarnated, up out of the earth. They were still many miles away, but the thunder carried their maddened howls echoing up the mountain face to them.

Christina brought her lambent protection around Cal and the others once more.

It’s going to get worse before it gets better, Cal thought grimly, drawing his sword.

If it ever gets better…

They plunged forward to meet the storm.

Morning found the group of them weary, singed and bloodied, but still alive.

“It comes in fits and starts,” Cal observed. “Like the Source is pacing itself.”

“Ours not to reason why,” Doc added, applying a salve and bandage to a scorched patch on Colleen’s arm. “Merely to take respite where we can.”

They broke out the food from their packs, the few delicacies they’d brought from the Insomnia Cafe back in Atherton, and rested on tumbled boulders amid melting snow and mud, short grasses and anemic cacti. Cal saw that Inigo had pulled the hood of his jacket over his head, donned sunglasses against the light. Howie, too, had pulled his fedora low and affixed his Ray-Bans.

“I reckon we got maybe another fifteen miles or so,” Papa Sky commented between bites of Swiss on rye, his creased face turned southeast into the wind. Cal wondered anew how the old blind man could sense so much more than they.

“Funny thing, you knowin’ all about these parts, and me knowin’ diddly,” Enid said, rubbing his chin, the bells in his dreads jingling softly. “I was born here, y’know? Pine Ridge. My mama was Lakota.”

“I thought it was your father who was Lakota, not your mother,” Colleen noted. “I mean, that’s what Goldman said.”

“Yeah, well, ol’ Goldie didn’t always listen too good,” Enid replied. “Depending on the occasion.”

True enough, Cal thought.

“I left here when I was a baby,” Enid continued, standing to stretch. “My mama married a real estate guy, and we moved to Decatur. Cancer got ’em both, way before the Storm.”

“Just as well you didn’t grow up in these parts, son,” Papa Sky said. “Folks round here sometimes got a bone in their craw ’bout black folks. Comes from the buffalo soldiers and all, in the Indian Wars.”

“Well geez, that’s hardly a week ago Wednesday,” Colleen observed. “Maybe it’s time to get over it.”

“First thing you learn about this land,” Papa Sky said evenly, “is history ain’t history. It’s pretty much the same thing as right now. Everything’s all mixed up together.”

“What about your real father?” Doc asked Enid.

Enid’s face grew stony. “Mama never talked about him. She figured what’s gone is gone.”

Like Inigo’s father, Cal thought, and his own, and Tina’s. Orphans, the lot of them; foundlings and scatterlings, abandoned to wind and storm.

Papa Sky said nothing, looking off at the horizon with empty dead eyes.

They moved on.

As morning eased toward afternoon, the fractious cloud cover broke, and a high, brilliant sun cast a clean, hard light over the land. Traveling along the path of what had once been Highway 40 skirting Custer, they passed Red Shirt along the 41 and transferred onto the narrow, rutted path of Route 2 stretching toward the Pine Ridge Reservation.

The Black Hills gobbling down the last of the daylight, Cal and his companions crested a plateau from which they could spy seventy miles in all directions under a fiery sunset, the soaring formations of the Mauvaises Terres striated with bands of red and brown and yellow, an ancient land of erosion and fossil bones in the crumbled, weathered earth. From far off came the cries of western meadowlarks and cowbirds, rugged survivors of this scourged, enduring land.

And like a brilliant, long nail pounded into the cross of the earth, the beacon of power bursting into the heavens, pinwheeling endlessly from the Source.

He had gotten Christina back, Cal thought ruefully, but beyond that they hadn’t changed anything.

With night descending and the last remnants of their strength waning, they staggered across the flat expanse of tableland-which Papa Sky informed them was about halfway between Buffalo Gap and Porcupine, and was called Cuny Table by the locals. Finally, Papa Sky brought them to a halt before a rickety, paint-peeled wooden stand, with the whitewashed words ICE-COLD POP AND MORE.

There was nothing and no one else in sight, as far as the eye could see in the wash of moonlight.

“This is the Stronghold,” Papa Sky informed them.

“This is the Stronghold?” Colleen asked incredulously. “Gee, and I coulda had a V8.” Cal was glad Colleen at least had the diplomacy not to add, This is what happens when you let a blind guy lead you.

“Sir, are you sure-?” Cal began.

Then the land ahead of them rippled and shook and turned over.

The ground opened up, revealing a cavernous space beneath. Cal could discern torches burning within, and a multiplicity of passages branching off, and countless people gathered together.

“Hua kola!” Papa Sky called out.

A lone figure backlit by torches stepped up the slope toward them, boots crunching on gravel and snow, emerging into the light cast by Christina’s glow.

Cal drew in a sharp breath. The figure was a woman clad in leather and furs against the cold, wearing more sheathed knives than he had ever seen on any human being. Her eyes were green and wary, her hair long and black and platted down the back.

Beside him, Inigo gasped as he saw the woman, and took off at run toward her.

“No!” Cal cried, but the boy paid him no heed.

Seeing him come on, the woman dropped into a defensive stance and pulled a long, deadly blade from its scabbard.

Drawing near, the grunter boy cried out, “It’s me! It’s Inigo!”

The woman’s mouth opened in soundless surprise, her eyes astonished. She threw the knife aside into the snow as he leapt for her, and she enclosed him rocking in her arms. They sobbed, the two of them, for all the time lost, for this meeting.

Inigo’s words were muffled in her embrace, but Cal caught them as they drifted on the night wind to him.

“Mom…Mom…”

In time, she rose, and with her boy’s hand in hers, walked up to Cal. She extended her free hand, and Cal took it.

“I’m Cal Griffin,” he said.

Her eyes reacted with surprise; something raw and primal flared there, and was quickly suppressed.

“May Catches the Enemy,” the Lakota woman replied by way of introduction, and led them into the waiting earth.