Ghostlands

FIVE

“Man oh man, I’m tellin’ you, it was just like they were this big vacuum, came down the highway just suckin’ everyone up….”

Mike Olifiers was hunkered around the campfire as it flickered low in the Food Court, its thin trail of smoke ascending to the skylight and out into the night. The rest of the fugitives, those who were not posting guard on the roof, sat or lay around it in a circle. The dim chiaroscuro of the firelight lent their faces a worn beauty, a wary grace.

While Colleen went off to join Doc at his station topside and Goldie dozed beside one of his glowing orbs on the periphery-a rarity for him to sleep-Cal knelt across the fire from Olifiers, drew from the ragged ones their stories, their pasts. Mechanics, teachers, physicists, all caught in the net of the slavers.

“It did not matter who you were or where you were from,” Moabi, an exchange student from Botswana, told him in a sweet accent redolent of molasses and honey, shaking his dreadlocks ruefully. He had been a filmmaker and performance artist, but none of that made the least difference. “You were a pair of hands to pick, a pair of legs to walk the corn rows, the soybean fields…. Beyond that, you were precisely nothing.”

“Sunup to sundown,” added Tori Feldman, who had been a historian in a former life. “Can see to can’t see.”

“Did you get any sense of what authority they represented, if any?” Cal asked.

“Some were National Guard guys gone freelance, some regular army, presumably AWOL,” Flo Speakman responded. “Lots of other strays and bully boys. We picked this up chiefly by osmosis-”

“The hard way,” Don Anderson, an amiable guy with severe scoliosis, chimed in, rubbing a vivid welt that ran across the left side of his face. This drew murmurs of agreement from the others.

“They weren’t exactly forthcoming with their resumes.” That was Rafe Dahlquist, the physicist, in his late fifties but still powerful and solid.

“It wasn’t like these guys were anything special,” Al Watt, a little bald guy with a timid, ready smile, piped up. He’d been a researcher on the Internet before the Change-an obsolete profession, if there ever was one. “I mean, we heard about all these dudes claiming to be the government, trying to get everything nailed down, these generals on the East Coast, up around the Great Lakes. Word was they had the Speaker of the House on a leash. But then there were all these other factions claiming they were the real guys in charge. I mean, you just hear this stuff, pick it up along the road. Everybody fighting everybody else.”

“Kinda like Yugoslavia after the USSR pulled up its tent,” said Krystee Cott, a lanky brunette with a sweetness about her that all the recent hard wear had not dispelled. Cal thought Doc might have a trenchant observation or two on her comment. Before leaving the navy, Krystee had been a demolitions expert-another area of expertise rendered null and void by the new modus operandi.

“Then there was the Storm…” Mike Kimmel said, and everyone else grew quiet. Kimmel was “Little Mike” to Olifiers’s “Big Mike,” a former wrestler turned part-time actor and balloon folder (“Big Mike’s the awesome behemoth,” Kimmel told Cal upon their introduction. “Me, I’m just the behemoth.”)

“I saw it do its handiwork on the outskirts of Philly,” Kimmel continued. “These fuckin’ clouds came in from the west and anyone with a glow on”-he meant the ones like Tina, the flares, fireflies, angelfire-“just got drawn up into it like it was this big magnet and they were iron filings. You shoulda heard it. I mean, I’m talkin’ thousands of ’em, screaming….”

“It’s like that everywhere anybody seen it,” Olifiers added. “It spreads like a cancer, does whatever the hell it wants-whatever the fuck it is. Nobody beats it, that’s the rule, nobody gets out alive…Except where you been.”

Cal saw now they were all looking at him with that same worshipful gaze they had given him on their first meeting. The firelight danced in their eyes, they squinted against its heat and smoke.

Lead us, that look said. Take us where you’re going. To salvation, to world’s end, to destruction.

A memory crashed in on Cal, of the dream he’d had the morning before the Change, where darkness surrounded him, and the hilt of the burning cold sword found his outstretched hand-the same sword he now wore in the scabbard at his belt-and the despairing, unseen multitude cried out for him to save them, to act….

And he did nothing.

“I don’t have the answer,” Cal said.

“Yeah, we know that, Chief,” Olifiers agreed. “But nobody else even seems to know the question.”

That night, for the first time since before the beginning, Cal had the dream again.

He dreamed chaos.

Darkness, blacker than anything he’d ever conceived of, center-of-the-earth black, no-universe-yet-made black, dead-a-thousand-years black. Voices shouting, so clear that he could distinguish not only male and female, but each separate human soul screaming. He could tell rage from pain from terror. In the darkness of the dream he could hear his own blood hammering in his ears.

The sound of blows, metal on metal-metal tearing flesh. The stink of blood and of earth soaked with blood, of smoke and of charring.

He stood at the black heart of the tumult as they cried their anguish, their despair, demanded, pleaded-

That he act.

A shard of light split the blackness like a razor stroke. It glanced across an immense, irregular mound that might have been the bodies of men or merely the things they had used.

An object gleamed atop it, brilliant in the light, and Cal saw that it was a sword. Not opulent and bejeweled but plain, the leather of the hilt palm-worn. This weapon had seen use.

He reached out, seized it in his hand. The grooves and creases worn into the hilt by sweaty usage fit his palm. It was his palm that had made them.

As he drew it out, the light danced liquid on the blade, flashed a Rorschach of half-glimpsed living things in its silver-gold. Around him, the cries rose and blended to a single keening of raw need and pain. Holding the sword high, he knew what he must do.

But still he hesitated.

And here the dream added a new detail, one that tore freezing dead fingers into his heart.

In the light from the sword, Cal could make out one of the figures beside him in the darkness, a frail, delicate form with hair fine as spiderweb and eyes a scorching blue….

It was his sister, it was Tina.

And others dim beyond her, among the multitude of souls, barely discernible, crying out to him, begging…

Colleen. Doc. Goldie.

Words surged from within him, a reply ripped from his throat, his soul, screaming above their screams.

“IT WILL KILL HER!”

He did nothing, knowing they would die.

All of them were torn shrieking away by the Blackness, the Dark, the Storm….

Their cries were drowned in thunder that rent the universe apart.

Cal awoke to the sound of his own sobbing.

Far miles away, in the sea of mists, leaning his great pebbled arms against the railing of what some might have been deceived into calling a bridge, the distant, familiar one thought of the dream he’d had again.

Dead-a-thousand-years black…

He never saw himself in the dream, never could discern what role he might play. But he saw others there, ones he knew, enemies, those who wished him harm, never friends.

But then, he had no friends.

No, strike that. He had one.

A fragile thing to pin your hopes on, a dream of chaos and an old man blind as a stone.

Even so, he admitted, it beat getting a real job….

His dragon’s laughter, resonant and grating as a body being dragged over gravel, boomed out across the fraudulent sea and counterfeit sky…and was even heard by the Thing that ruled dragon, and sea, and sky.

“Penny for your thoughts.”

Finishing his shift on sentry duty, Doc Lysenko found Cal Griffin sitting at the far edge of roof, peering out at the clouds, and the night, and the drifting snow.

“You’ve said that before,” Cal said, not looking at him.

“I’m a man of simple habits, Calvin. I find what works and I repeat it.”

“Not a bad trait for a doctor.”

“No…” Doc concurred. He crouched against the raised lip at the edge and faced Cal. “‘I could be bounded up in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I had bad dreams….’”

“Hamlet, act two, scene two,” Cal said.

“I’m impressed.”

“Blame my mother…and public TV. What’s your point?”

“You’re a worrier.”

“Shouldn’t I be?”

“Oh, indeed, I would never presume to separate you from your angst. I’m merely offering a sympathetic ear.”

Cal said nothing.

“You have a golden opportunity for complaining here,” Doc added. “Don’t waste it.”

Cal smiled at that, a weary smile, the weight of the world in it. “Oh, Doc, I am so not the man I need to be.”

“How many called to leadership feel they are? At least, the deserving ones? The megalomaniacs rarely have such doubts.”

Doc looked into the darkness to the uncertain future, then from memory quoted, “‘If only the men truly up to this challenge, the moral giants, were here to assume this mantle. But failing their appearance on the scene, we ourselves must take it up, though we are woefully inadequate to the task.’ You know who said words to that effect?”

“I have a feeling you’re going to tell me.”

“It was John Adams, just before your country’s Revolution. So I’m afraid, Calvin, that your qualms are anything but unique.”

“Doc-”

“Don’t ‘Doc’ me. You inspire others to transcend themselves. That is a rare power, Calvin, greater than parlor tricks such as passing through walls or making balls of light. The block-and-tackle doesn’t question its purpose, nor the spatula nor the paper clip. But because we are conscious, we do, endlessly.

“Calvin, if Colleen is our rock and Goldie our erratic sage, then you are our beacon. Shine, Calvin. Just shine.”

“They’re looking to me to be something I’m not,” Cal said. “To be this…legend. I mean, Jesus, they broke out of slavery, came on the run in search of this larger-than-life tin god.”

“And that is such a bad thing?”

“If the Change brought about anything good, it’s that it made me be who I am instead of pretending to be something I’m not.”

“Calvin, six words. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”

“For someone from Kiev, you’ve seen a lot of American movies.”

“Five years of selling hot dogs and not going to singles bars.”

“Okay, okay, I get your point. Print the Legend. If the Legend is what these people need-and what I suppose we need, too-then maybe I shouldn’t avoid it but rather embrace it.”

“I must say, Calvin, you’re getting so adept at articulating what I am about to say, you really don’t need me anymore. Pray continue.”

“These people are looking for a cure, and I don’t have one. But you’d say it’s like medicine. Sometimes hope is all you can offer, and though it may seem a false hope, it can help people marshal their forces, actually get better.”

“Yes,” Doc replied. “Miracles do happen, if one comes to it with a good heart and the possibility of good actually happening.”

Cal mulled it over, then said, “It’s medicine, even if it’s an empty black bag on one hand…the Storm on the other. Which is the better choice to offer?”

“And what is your answer?”

“My answer is, I’ll think on it. I’m not saying yes.”

“Any other reply, and I would conclude you were a spatula. But before this is over, Calvin, I suspect you will have to be our Gandhi and our Eleanor Roosevelt and our General Patton all in one. So I would advise you to get used to it.”

All Cal said to that was, “Mm.”

“And one thing more I might add for you to consider.”

“Another thing?”

“We are embarked on a journey into the unknown-which, I might observe, is indeed true of life in its entirety-but even more so now. You cannot know what you will need at your ultimate moment of truth…nor whom. So given that, it is a good idea to bring as wide a variety of dramatis personae as possible.”

Cal grinned. “Back to the theater metaphor.”

“We are but players….” Doc rose with a groan. “Now, I’m afraid this old man is weary. If you will excuse me…”

“She deserves you,” Cal murmured. “Colleen.”

Doc nodded, accepting Cal’s acceptance. He continued on, limping slightly as he went.

“Doc?” Cal asked. Doc turned back. “What role do you play in our little band?”

“Me?” He considered it. “I am the mirror for the rest of you.” He smiled. “Good night, Calvin.”

Colleen and Doc bedded down in what had once been a Waldenbooks, amid the cracked vacant shelves, the discarded magazines displaying brides and movie stars and politicians. Sleep wouldn’t come to Colleen, which was nothing new, merely the ongoing challenge of relaxing and letting go of vigilance. Nevertheless, she forced stillness on herself and cradled Viktor in her arms as he drifted into sleep.

She maintained the contact even when, in troubled dreams, he called out to Yelena and Nurya, his lost wife and daughter, as he often did.

Colleen envied them their eternal claim on him. He had jettisoned so much of his past, had brought along no images of them (“No photograph could adequately capture what I hold in my mind,” he told her on one of the rare occasions she could coax him to speak of them). She wished she could see them just once, see what he had cherished and lost. That wound so defined him, had so charted his actions from Ukraine to Manhattan to this harsh pioneer land.

It was half-past two in the morning when Cal appeared in the shop’s doorway-its metal gate forever frozen halfway up-to alert them to the fact that they had visitors.

Emerging onto the roof with Cal and Doc, Colleen found the snowstorm had intensified, the flat surface growing icy, the breaths of the lookouts misting out into the moonlit sky like the trails of lost souls. She was surprised to see that Olifiers was there, too, and that he had brought the rest of his people with him.

Cal motioned her and Doc to the forward edge, where Goldie already stood gazing out. Even with the naked eye, Colleen could make out the horsemen several miles off, bearing torches, moving deliberately in their direction.

The paddyrollers.

How the hell did they get a line on us? Colleen wondered. She knew she had obliterated any evidence even an astute tracker would have caught, especially at night.

“Do we pull up stakes?” she asked Cal.

“No. They could run us to ground, and out in the open we’d have a harder time making a stand.”

“So what’s the play?”

“We’ve got a few minutes. We use the time we have.” He moved off to confer with Olifiers and the others.

Goldie was humming a tune Colleen at first couldn’t place, then recognized as “Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here.”

“Will you quit with that?” she snapped. “Or at least hum something good.”

Obligingly, he switched to “Every Breath You Take,” by the Police.

Colleen didn’t get the joke, until she looked through the field glasses Doc handed off to her.

In the garish light of their torches, she could see fifteen hard men riding quickly on big, powerful horses. The riders were weighted down with evil-looking knives, short swords and what looked like spearguns.

They wore body armor and police helmets.

But more striking than that-and what chilled Colleen beyond anything the white crystals flurrying around her could-were the three stunted figures scrabbling ahead of the horses, tethered to them by thick lengths of rope.

She understood now how the trackers had found them.

The posse had grunters on leashes, and were using them as bloodhounds.