Ghostlands

FIFTY-FIVE

I’ve fought them dead before, Cal Griffin thought, cursing.

But at least last time, they stayed dead awhile.

He was swinging his blade wide, sweat coursing down him despite the chill of the cave.

In Boone’s Gap, outside the barricaded Wishart home, the gluey, fragmented corpses of the decomposing grunters had risen to battle them, only staying down when their feet and hands were severed clean through.

Not so now. Cal could see in stolen, quick glances, where Shango was flailing his hammer, Colleen wielding her crossbow and Doc his machete, that the moment the loathsome curs were run through or bludgeoned, or otherwise had their clocks thoroughly cleaned, the light would go out in their eyes but this would stop them only momentarily.

Then, as if an unseen puppet master had taken over (which, Cal recognized, was exactly what was occurring), each grunter would shudder like a dog waking from a bad dream and resume the attack with even greater frenzy.

Fleetingly, he caught sight of May Catches the Enemy amid a group of the fiends. She was a wonder of motion, seemingly effortless, throwing, spinning, leaping, stabbing. Drawing knives from a multiplicity of sheathes and hiding places in the folds of her clothing, she slowed her attackers, pushing them back, living, dead and dying alike. Cal saw that Inigo kept close to her now, that she was shielding him even as he attempted to tear at the monsters himself.

At the same time, Enid and Howard Russo were flanking Papa Sky, keeping the attackers at bay as best they could. Christina, too, was driving a group of them back with the force of her light, and Stern was smashing, crushing and squashing as many as he could reach as he stalked forward.

Crazy Horse and his phantom warriors, still mounted on their war ponies, were faring even better, the power of their spectral weapons causing the dead things to stiffen as if electrified and then dust away to nothing.

“Aw shit, Rory…”

Cal looked over to see that Colleen was gaping at a little gray brute she’d just shot with a crossbow bolt to the head. He stood staring blank dead eyes at her, the shaft protruding from a point just above his eyes, black blood leaking down. He was in tatters, mere remnants of clothes, but even in the weak light Cal could make out the brown bomber jacket, filthy, faded jeans and “I ¦ NY” T-shirt that hung on his shrunken frame.

It was Colleen’s old boyfriend, who had lurked in the dark confines of the Manhattan apartment he and Colleen had shared, then disappeared down a manhole into the sewers below…only to emerge here.

Rory gave a liquid gurgle and lurched toward her, arms splayed, mouth in a hideous, vacant grin, spittle and blood and bile bubbling out.

Without thinking, Cal leapt for him, tackled him, took him down to the unyielding stone floor. The dead grunter let out a deafening high screech of pure agony, flared like a moth immolating itself on a hot bulb, and vanished.

Cal stood shakily, he and Colleen staring at each other in puzzlement. Then Cal understood-

“The shirts! The Ghost Shirts!” he shouted to Doc and Colleen, Mama Diamond and Shango and the others, grabbing up another dead, flailing grunter and hugging it close to his chest. Like Rory, it screamed and evaporated.

The others got the hint, wading through the howling, writhing mass, grabbing them, drawing them close. One by one, the creatures sparked like strings of firecrackers, wailing, and were gone.

But there were still a hell of a lot of them….

Just then, Cal spied a shadowy figure on the periphery, emerging out of the depths of a branching passageway coming off the main, stepping toward them. The sea of grunters parted to let him pass.

“Stop your fighting, friends,” the figure called out to Cal and the rest, and even though there was something under the words, an indefinable quality that was not quite, well, human, Cal recognized the voice even before Christina’s glow revealed his face.

It was Goldie.

Cal shot a questioning look Christina’s way. Slowly, she shook her head. Cal looked to Stern, who caught his meaning.

The figure was ambling toward them with a crooked half smile on his lips, a twinkle in his eye. Stern drew a deep breath, like a huge bellows being extended fully open, then spit out a projectile maelstrom of flame. It caught the figure dead on, knocked him back and transformed him to a pillar of incandescence. Pure nova, he flared up in Catherine wheels of blue-white energy, spiraling out and extinguishing, leaving no evidence he had been there at all.

“You sonofabitch!” Colleen cried and dove for Stern. But Cal stepped between them, facing her.

“It wasn’t him,” he said levelly. “Just a projection, an illusion, like the rest.” Colleen quieted, nodding. Cal turned again to face the grunters.

But by now, those that were still living had taken to their heels, scrambled up the slippery rock walls, and disappeared back into their hidey-holes and the other dark places that succored them.

The rest, the cadavers, the undying dead, dropped as if their batteries had been pulled, lay still and wet and broken on the cold hard ground.

It’s not done with us, Cal realized, this Thing that was Sanrio and the others, this Thing that took Goldie. But then, they had barely started what they were going to do to It.

“Take me to where you saw It in the flesh,” Cal said to Stern. “Take me to where we can hurt It.”

“That way,” Stern said, pointing a bloody, taloned hand toward the passageway from which the facsimile of Goldie had appeared.

The phantom warriors had ridden up alongside them now. Cal saw Colleen and Doc and the others who’d dismounted for the close fighting remount their steeds. He was gratified that all of them were still there; although bruised and bloodstained, none had fallen in battle.

He moved toward the ethereal pony that had borne him here.

But before he could reach it, a tremor shuddered up out the mouth of the passage, and an angry roar issued from within.

Cal was closest to it. His nose caught a sharp tang of creosote and wooden ties, the echoes of foundries long since abandoned, Pennsylvania coal and Pittsburgh steel.

Like a great black serpent, like a Worm God of night-crawlers and machinery, the helltrain shot out of the tunnel. Driven not by steam or diesel but by an altogether darker power. The engine was driving toward him now, glittering ebony-black, its antique iron cowcatcher arrayed in a demonic grin. Its unholy scream drowned out the shouts of his companions.

He could feel the envelope of air it was pushing ahead of itself, could smell its sour greasy-iron stench, its momentum and enormous mass.

“Stand your ground!” Cal wasn’t sure whether Stern had cried it, or he’d heard it in his mind, or both.

At any rate, it was all happening so fast there wasn’t time to do much else. Cal grasped the hilt of his sword with both hands, braced his toes against the filthy rubble mound on which he stood.

Steel against steel. In the world as it once had been, this would have been futile; more than that, suicide and madness. The sword blade would have cracked or broken, and the train would have sustained little more than a nick, if that, and driven Cal under its wheels, crushed and chewed him up, just as the Thing at the Source was chewing up the world.

But times had changed, and this sword had never met anything it couldn’t cut.

The blade bit into the train as if into living, screaming flesh. Cal felt the jolt up the length of both arms; whole rivers of energy flared up him. His heartbeat stuttered in its rhythm. With a sound like glaciers calving, the train opened in a wound.

And exploded around him.

He felt steel part under the impact of his blade, felt it continue its lethal momentum.

Then something sharp struck his face, and something else struck his body, and he dropped away from the impact and rolled aside as the train, severed from the Source, detonated into a hundred thousand parts….

Not parts of metal, as Cal had expected, but fluttering and buzzing parts, a cloud of them too thick to see through: black beetles, houseflies, bluebottle flies, crows screaming at the unseen moon, ravens….

The train had been a prison composed of its own captives.

It lost all resemblance to a train, the way water scattered from a broken cup loses all order and definition. The various crawling and flying things of which it was made beat the rushing air with their wings, soaring up and out and away from the thing they had been constrained to be.

Some, inevitably, were crushed against the rails or flew headlong into the rock walls and ceiling. Cal smelled broken chitin and the blood of birds. But most of the captives simply scattered.

Distantly, Cal heard Mama Diamond call out to them, a command in a language he could not comprehend. With a great whoosh the flying mass of them whirled off into the dark unknown like chaff before a storm, and were gone.

Cal stood up slowly, beating a swarm of carpet beetles off his hair and skin and clothes. He was bruised where the body of a crow had struck him and scratched where another bird’s talons had raked across his face, but he was basically all right. He had managed to keep his grip on his sword, one hand curled around the hilt.

He turned back to the others, breathing hard, fighting to keep his legs from giving out under him. They were staring at him in awe, all but Stern and the wraith warriors, whose expressions were unfathomable.

“Let’s finish this,” Cal said.

Stern led them deeper into the mountain.