Ghostlands

FOUR

It took Cal and his companions nearly two hours to search out a shelter, one big enough to hold thirty road-weary travelers. In a different terrain (one with such novel variations as valleys and mountains and hillsides, not just an endless expanse of grassland), Cal would have been content securing some cave in a cliff face-ideally one with no bears, wolverines or other irritable residents, not to mention tunnels full of grunters or portals that could suddenly open onto different states.

But as Cal had learned in many a quick improvisation on this journey, you worked with what you had.

“I think this’ll do,” Cal said as they drew up rein and surveyed the square structure sitting smack-dab in the middle of all that grass that stretched from the horizon on the left to the horizon on the right (not to mention the horizons ahead and behind).

Goldie dismounted and strolled up to the entrance. The glass door that said IN was shattered and hanging off its hinges, while the door that said OUT was intact, if almost black with grime. Of course, no one paid the least attention to those rules anymore, not that anyone particularly ever had.

Seen from here, the interior appeared utterly dark and quiet. Goldie turned back to the others. “The king seems to be gone from his palace.”

“Palace?” Colleen asked.

“The Palace of Material Goods, the central image and shrine of all we once held dear. Or at least, you guys did-I myself took a path I prefer to think of as more stripped-down and Zen.”

Cal thought of the vast mountain of scavenged goods Goldie had assembled in his underground home in the tunnels beneath New York, the place Goldie had led him that first night after the Change, where Cal had found his sword. You seemed pretty damn materialistic back then, he reflected, but said nothing; he was just glad Goldie was talking again.

The sign towered over them at the head of the vast parking lot, proclaiming GATEWAY MALL, THE FUN PLACE! But it was clear that any and all fun had long since departed; had departed in fact-if the peeling paint, ruts in the asphalt, and cracked neon were any indication-months or even years before the Change. ’Twasn’t Beauty killed the Beast, Cal thought, it was the mercurial shift of economics and population growth and buying patterns.

Despite this, a scattering of RVs and dusty, pitted cars dotted the parking lot. Cal knew he’d have to dispatch Colleen and Doc with a contingent to investigate these, make certain there were no surprises lurking within.

The mall was a cavernous and intimidating space, but one well out of the wind, and readily defensible.

By now, Olifiers and his group had come up beside them. The big man peered through the glass doors uneasily. He swallowed hard, looking at all that dark possibility.

His trepidation brought a recollection to Cal of a movie he’d seen ages ago when he was eight and staying overnight at Howard Turner’s house. His own mother forbid having a set in their house (“it does to the brain what candy does to the teeth”) and certainly would have forbid him watching a film like this, which was on the whole just exactly why he was doing it, despite the fact that it scared the crap out of him and he couldn’t sleep without a night-light for months afterward.

It was the only film he’d ever seen set in a mall. A mall that was dead, literally, and overrun with the walking dead.

The Dawn of the Dead.

Funny, Cal realized, how since then he’d actually fought the living dead-reanimated grunters that had attacked the four of them outside the Wishart house in Boone’s Gap. But that event hadn’t scared him half as much; he’d just focused on the business of severing the rotted obscenities’ arms and legs and getting inside that damn nightmare of a house.

But this movie, geez…

The living-dead clown, the living-dead nun. Falling all over themselves on the escalators.

Then the cycle gang showed up, and the atrocities they committed made the ravenous dead pale by comparison.

Men were the real monsters, they always had been.

Wisdom could come from such unlikely sources….

“We’ll bed down here for the night; post sentries,” Cal told Olifiers.

“Whatever you say, Chief,” Olifiers answered, and led his people inside.

As the prairie moon rose into weighted clouds and the smell of coming snow filled the air, Cal instructed Goldie to summon up his patented and reliable (one of the few tricks he could do that was) spheres of light to illumine a path into the bowels of the mall, where a safe camp could be made.

Goldie guided his charges deeper into the enormous open space. It was like an airplane hangar; their hesitant footsteps echoed into the void. He noted their open astonishment as he formed the roiling balls of light-glowing bowling balls made of fog and St. Elmo’s Fire-and thought to himself, It’s a handy trick, but while their mouths say thank you their eyes definitely say creeped out.

The Food Court on the second level-near the extinct escalators, allowing quick access to higher or lower levels on a moment’s notice-proved a suitable location, if one mockingly devoid of food.

It recalled to Goldman a favorite joke he’d had as a boy-he’d pulled it a thousand times, or at least wanted to; standing midway on a stopped escalator frantically calling to the bemused shoppers below, “Help, I’m stuck on this escalator!”

Of course, he never really asked for help, not when he’d been a kid with those ludicrously brilliant parents, their souls like chalk and “empathy” merely a word in their universitized (hell yes, it was a word if he said it was) vocabularies, nor did he ask for help in college or when he joined the workforce or even later, when the world became more tricky and so-called reality particularly elusive.

Nowadays, reality matched what he’d sensed its hidden nature had been all along, ages before anyone else saw it-those in his immediate circle, at least (well, and anyone not in the pay of the Source Project). It gave him some small satisfaction, knowing he’d been right, and evidence that at least on certain isolated occasions he could actually trust his instincts.

But be careful of that, Herman Goldman, he cautioned himself, because you know how you get. The ever-present danger of the bipolar personality, particularly in its manic phase, that blazing conviction that one had everything well in hand…just before taking a magnificent half-gainer off a ledge right into the abyss.

His eyes ran along the walls, cast in the cool radiance of the globes he’d placed along the periphery. The big dusty signs were like plastic tombstones: TACO HAVEN, A TASTE OF ITALY, BURGER STATION…junk food for a junk culture. So much had been disposable in the world gone by, discarded without a care. Now the most disposable thing was life itself, snuffed out in an instant.

Unbidden, the face came to him, delicate and glowing, with eyes like black opal….

Magritte.

Desolation surged up in him, fierce and remorseless, and Goldie knew if he didn’t force the image away he would start screaming and not stop until the massive building came shuddering down around them, burying all thought and memory.

Enough. Peace.

The image of the flare faded and was gone. For now, only for now. Only until he did what he needed to do.

Sanity was a transient thing, as he himself had been transient, was transient still. But it could be held for the moment, summoned like a pale sphere of light.

Goldie helped Olifiers get a fire going, while a solid little bantam named Flo Speakman assembled a spit to cook the dressed fawn three of their band had felled with improvised bolos earlier that morning.

“We sucked at first,” Steve Altman, a diminutive and hyperkinetic Long Island native, confided pridefully. “But we’re making steady improvement. Hey, we actually hit something other than ourselves.”

“Consistency is a talent to foster,” Goldie murmured. And overconfidence can get you killed, he added silently to himself.

You, or someone infinitely more dear…

While Doc oversaw stationing lookouts from Olifiers’s contingent atop the roof of the mall, Cal and Colleen backtracked two miles in the beginnings of snowfall to cover their traces. Snow would blanket the land shortly, but that might not be enough to safeguard them.

“The more people we travel with, the more visible we become,” Colleen cautioned as she watched their back trail over one shoulder.

They rode abreast, both dragging heavy hunks of canvas that had once been part of a four-man tent they’d found in the remains of a camping goods store. Already the chill breeze was licking at the snowy ground in their wake, sending up little puffs of dusty snow, scattering it over their trail.

Colleen swung back around to look at him. “That’s just the way it is, Cal. And no amount of Good Samaritan, hail-fellow-well-met will change that fact. It makes us targets.”

“We’re already targets, Colleen.”

“Yeah, of course, like I don’t know that. It’s practically been our theme song since we crossed the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. What we’re talking here is how big we want the bull’s-eye.”

Cal nodded as he shook the nylon rope that tethered him to his chunk of ex-tent, smoothing out a large wrinkle in the stiff fabric. “I’m planning on cutting them loose, as soon as we find a good place to set them down…safely.”

“Now that’s a tune I can dance to.”

Cal hesitated, reluctant to say more of what he was thinking.

“What?” Colleen prompted. “C’mon, Griffin, I know how you are when you get that look. Give out, don’t be a tease.”

Hell, it had to be said sometime, didn’t it? “I’m thinking of cutting you guys loose, too.” Before she could counter, he added quickly, “At least, you and Doc. Goldie…well, he and the Source, they have a hook in each other. As for me…” He didn’t need to finish it.

“We’ve been round this track before, Cal. You really think you’re gonna shake us off? You get to the Source, you’re gonna need-”

“Colleen, I don’t know how to beat it.” Cal mastered himself, continued with quiet fervor. “I’ve been hoping I’d find some inspiration, some guidance from on high. But I don’t have a clue how to take on the Source-and I’m getting a real strong feeling I’m not about to.” He ran a hand through his hair, blew out a frosty breath. “We saw what it could do in Boone’s Gap, and that was just a finger of it, stretched taut as a rubber band, and it still wiped the floor with us.”

“We beat Primal,” Colleen reminded him, her voice flat, not looking at him, staring into the night.

“Yes, we beat Primal, but he had only a fraction of the power whatever is at the Source will have…and I don’t have to remind you of the cost.”

The snow was falling more heavily now, glistening in their hair and shoulders, enfolding them in its silence, its intimacy.

“I need Goldie, he’s the only way I’m going to find it, I know that-which doesn’t mean I excuse myself. But you and Doc…” Here his voice softened. “I’ve seen the two of you…you’re right together. You deserve a life.”

“Aw geez, Cal, what is this, the Lifetime Channel? No, I forgot, we don’t have that anymore. Which is one of the few good things that’s come out of all this.”

“Don’t joke.”

“Why not? It’s one of the rare things I’m good at.” She looked down as Big-T’s hoof connected with a hillock of snow and sent the powder flying in a wide arc into the darkness. She grew serious, was quiet a long moment that was filled only with the creak of leather and the sound of their canvas drags slithering over the rough ground.

Then finally, in a voice so low he almost didn’t catch it, she said, “I’m scared, Cal.”

“You?” It shocked him. Not that Colleen felt fear-after all, she was human-but that she would admit it to him.

“I don’t want complications in my life,” she said. “I don’t want to be blindsided anymore, I don’t want the unknown. I’m sick to death of not knowing what I’m gonna face around each and every corner.”

“So you agree with me.”

“Hell no, you idiot. I’m not talking about the Source, I’m talking about Viktor!”

Cal couldn’t help but smile. “Avoiding a relationship is not a good excuse to kill yourself.”

She peered again into the blackness. “This is all your fault, you know. Dragging me to hell and gone, getting me to feel all over again…What a friggin’ mess.”

For all her feigned gravity, he knew she was speaking playfully, chiding him to move him off his position, get him to yield. Another weapon in her arsenal, one she wielded as capably as all the rest. What a remarkable woman, he thought, and she had been there all along, living right on Eighty-first just down the street from him. And would he have ever noticed her if not for the Change?

No.

He’d have stayed entombed in his trivial, small life, pursuing the phantom of stability, security. Living in illusion, bracketed between interpreted past and assumed future, hardly in the present at all. Asleep to all the wondrous possibilities around him, to the miracles as well as the horrors.

How hard it was, even now, to be fully awake…

Yet she worked at him-they all worked at each other, the four of them, orphans and outcasts, to stay alert, to not fall into complacency, to be truly alive.

Incredibly, he realized in this moment, with the snow feathering down, the night surrounding them like a blanket, with who knew what lay ahead of them, or what pursued from behind-that he loved her; not romantically-not anymore, he had jettisoned the growing pearl of that, but intensely, deeply, gratefully.

And that, absurdly, in this fragile, transitory moment, this present-in both senses of the word-he was happy.

He leaned out of the saddle toward her, brought his lips close to her ear, nearly touching it, as if it were a kiss. “Don’t be afraid to enter uncharted terrain,” he said. “The past is not the future.”

She let out a hard breath that might have been a laugh. “So that’s my answer to you, too, Cal Griffin. And here’s one other meaty little tidbit-maybe you don’t need to know how to beat it…maybe you just need to know how to have it not beat you.”

He mulled on that, both of them as quiet as the snowflakes that drifted about them.

Finally, Colleen said, “How ’bout we both find out how the story ends?…” She held a hand out to him.

After due consideration, he took it.

Cal and Colleen dropped the sundered tent where they hit asphalt, then guided Sooner and Big-T back through the night toward the derelict mall, the stars like glittering eyes of ghosts above them.

Colleen was relieved Cal had opened up to her, still seemed able to talk to her, even though she’d chosen Doc rather than Cal. Her family had disintegrated when she was fifteen. Her father had died physically; her mother had died emotionally, leaving Colleen an orphan and an exile.

But now Doc and Goldie were her family…and Cal.

She looked over at Cal, riding on his horse like a city lawyer would, sitting so badly in the saddle despite all her advice on how to ride. He caught her looking at him.

“What?” Now it was his turn to question.

“Nothing…only I was just wondering what sweet young thing might be waiting down the road to twist you round her little finger…. You smile, you think you’re immune? We could take out an ad-at least, if there were still newspapers-‘Wanted: single female, race not important, preferably human.’”

It felt good to laugh.