Ghostlands

SIX

They stood waiting in the fresh snow outside the glass doors-one shattered, one whole-as the horses thundered to a halt in front of the mall.

Colleen had her crossbow trained on the lead horseman as he steadied his mount, holding his torch overhead in a big gloved hand. The other men were fanned out behind him on their horses, palms on their weapons. On two of the steeds were big coiled lengths of chain-shackles awaiting use.

The horses blew out steam from their nostrils, their mouths frothing from the hard ride. The trio of gray, stooped grunters were gasping, too, the vapor in the cold air wreathing them in what looked like veils. Their huge, pallid eyes stared unblinking at Colleen and Doc, Goldie and Cal.

Cal stepped forward, but said nothing. He held his sword casually, in readiness.

“I am Hector Perez,” the head man said, speaking each word as if it were a command. “Lieutenant in charge of this duly deputized posse. We are currently pursuing a group of escapees from Stateville Correctional Facility in Joliet, Illinois.”

“Joliet, huh? Not Unionville?” Colleen asked, with an edge.

Perez didn’t move his head, but his narrowed eyes slid over to appraise her. “Sorry, ma’am, I didn’t catch your name.”

“I didn’t give it.”

Cal stepped between Perez and Colleen. “You were telling us your business,” he prompted.

“We have reason to believe our fugitives are inside that building.” Perez paused, then added meaningfully, “Our quarrel is not with you, unless you choose to make it one.”

Cal said, “Give us a minute.”

Perez nodded assent. Cal drew Colleen and the others close, none of them lowering their weapons or taking their eyes off their adversaries. They spoke in low tones.

“What do you think?” Cal asked

“I think they’re full of it,” said Goldie. “Olifiers and the others don’t have a prison vibe-or enough homemade tattoos by half. Plus I can smell eau de police a mile away, and these guys ain’t it. I’m telling you, they may have been regular force once upon a time, but they’re independent contractors now.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Yeah, but what if they’re not?” Colleen whispered hoarsely. “Do we really want to come down on the wrong side of this?”

Cal mulled it over, took a step back toward the grim rider. “Mr. Perez, much as we’d like to be agreeable, we aren’t convinced of your jurisdiction here.”

Perez grimaced, looking as if he’d just gotten a piece of nut jammed in a tooth. He shifted on his saddle and spoke solely to Cal. “Let me tell you my working philosophy. I treat everyone with respect. You can’t rob a man of his respect and expect him to act rationally. But there’s a hierarchy of command, and I am committed to that prevailing.”

“Is that why you have been whipping these people?” Doc asked acidly.

“We have levels of escalation when we meet with failure to obey, and pain compliance is one of our tools, yes.”

Recognizing he was gaining no traction, Perez sighed and again addressed them all. “I have seen enough suffering to last me a lifetime. I have seen mothers cook up their own babies in convection ovens. I have seen grown men violate boys not out of nursery school. I’m pleased to tell you those individuals did not survive to face a jury of their peers. Do we comprehend each other?”

“I think so, yes.”

“Then stand aside.”

Which was when the screams started.

In later times, Goldie associated the moment he first really came into his true dark power with that night, and the smell. That terrible, irrevocable instant when the clean, crisp scent of snow was invaded by the iron tang of blood, the air hot and fresh and thick with it, and the knowledge that someone was dying or dead.

But in that moment when the screaming began, all that was immediately clear was that Perez and his men were not alone.

Miles back, Perez had divided his force-which turned out to be not fifteen men, but forty-into three contingents. The middle group, the ones with torches, the decoys, rode straight on. The others came in fast and low on foot, silently and shrouded in darkness, flanking the building.

Fortunately, as Goldie might well have observed, Cal Griffin was a lawyer, and thus well used to misdirection, treachery and betrayal.

So when these intruders came on hard and fast and furious, they discovered Cal had secreted fully half of Olifiers’s thirty-three men and women in the cars and trucks and Winnebagos that had up and died in and around the parking lot that fateful day when the Storm moved in.

These ravaged men and women surged out of hiding, screaming their lungs out, armed to the teeth with the pipes and branches and stones they’d brought to the party, not to mention the knives and swords and crossbows Cal and company had picked up along the way and augmented them with.

Like a director setting up a crowd scene, Cal questioned each and every one of them beforehand, discerning their skills and temperament, giving each his or her task.

He’d requested they not harm the paddyrollers any more than they needed to.

But hell-not to put too fine a point on it-it was payback time.

The screams didn’t surprise Perez. However, the sudden loud release of a very large spring from the roof of the mall building did.

Perez looked up at the sound from above, but wasn’t fast enough to get out of the way.

The weighted net-Goldie’s “security device,” hauled all the way from New York City-was catapulted off the roof of the mall building and landed squarely atop him and his horse, snaring them both. Perez let out a curse, the horse flailed wildly and shrieked, but the strong fibers held them fast.

Perez was an old hand, however, and managed to hold on to his torch in spite of everything. The cords began to sizzle and smoke where he worked to burn through them.

The three grunters tethered to Perez’s horse were clear of the net, but still bound to the steed. They pulled frantically, blindly, as if to get away but curiously did nothing to bite or tear away the ropes.

Cal cut their bonds, and they scampered away.

The other horsemen charged, and Cal, Colleen, Doc and Goldie had their hands full. But this was not the ragtag quartet that had driven a rioting mob back when Ely Stern had led it rampaging down Eighty-first. The four of them had been practicing their fighting skills every day since, and now they moved with a flow and effortless teamwork that rivaled the best basketball squad. Parry, thrust, slash, fire, fall back, regroup, attack again. And all the while Goldie dazzling the enemy with his harmless fireworks-not that they knew that-driving the attackers back.

Then it all went south.

Perez was nearly free of the smoldering net. He screamed at a twisted little man atop a black mare, a man who had hung back out of the action and said nothing.

“Eddie!”

Eddie just nodded and raised his head-which Goldie could see, even from this distance in the torchlight and moonbeams bouncing off the fresh-fallen snow, was cadaver-thin with shiny black hair pasted down like a coat of shellac. He fixed his gaze on them.

It was just as though a big invisible hand grabbed up Colleen and lifted her high into the air, flinging her toward the little man. She cried out, dropping her crossbow.

Eddie angled his head, as if drawing her toward him with an unseen tether, reeling her in. Colleen hovered ten feet away from him and ten feet up. Her arms pressed down into her sides and she grunted, as if the invisible hand was squeezing her.

“Stand down!” Perez, free of the mesh now, shouted at Cal and the others. “Stand down or she dies!”

“You do that and I will be so pissed!” Colleen yelled at them. But then Eddie frowned, and they could all see she was being pressed even harder, and she cried out.

And Goldie thought of Douglas Brattle, the fear caster who had attacked him and Larry Shango along that shallow creekbed in Albermarle County, and of Primal in the dark core of Chicago, who had seized Magritte-beautiful, soul-sick Magritte-and drained her of her life like a man would suck the juice out of an orange.

And the anguish and grief and rage were upon him again-and with them the screaming, cacophonous blood-choir song of the Source that was always there and not there-and this time he didn’t stuff it back down and away but instead opened himself up to the tearing out of his own lungs and guts and heart.

You open yourself to it and fall away….

In his peripheral vision, Goldie could see Cal hesitating, starting to lower his sword, and Doc his blade.

But Goldie-the pure, yes, primal fire that was Goldie, or what was left of his mind and self-had no such thought, no hesitance; instead, he reached out with both hands, fingers spreading like a flower blossoming to a bee.

The sheer force rippled through the night like a shock wave, you could see it distorting the air, pulverizing the falling snowflakes, blasting them apart and aside as it plowed ahead. It reached Eddie’s steed, knocked the horse brutally back, drove it to its knees with a strangled, terrified groan.

Eddie took the brunt of the force wave. It slammed into him and hurled him back off the horse, sent him cartwheeling helplessly through the air.

The invisible cord severed, Colleen dropped onto the soft snow, the breath knocked from her but otherwise unharmed.

Not so with Eddie, who struck a big cedar with a hideous impact that shook the tree as if a rampaging bull had run full tilt into it. Then-incredibly-he was gone, vanished clean away. The extremities of the tree, it’s bare branches, burst into flame with a sudden whoosh of ignition, lighter fluid on a barbecue. It blazed like a tiki torch.

Seeing this, everyone on both sides of the fray was stilled to shocked silence.

Cal recovered first, said to Goldie, “How did you do that?”

“I don’t know,” Goldie said, equally stunned.

“Where did he go? Did you send him away?”

A whisper now, “I don’t know….”

(But in a savage rush of emotion, Goldie realized he hungered to do more of this…and needed to learn more to be able to do so.)

“Take them!” Perez was yelling at his men. “Dammit, take them!” But they were reluctant now, all the fight drained out of them by the appalling miracle they had just witnessed.

The topmost parts of the cedar, blackened and burning furiously, cracked off the tree and fell crashing to earth, throwing angry sparks up into the night.

Goldie shot out his hands again-whether a bluff or not, no one could tell, least of all himself. The attackers wheeled their horses around and took off for the hills at a mad gallop.

Seeing he was alone against them, Perez threw aside his torch and, with an expletive, reined his horse about to race after his men.

But at the last moment, he drew the speargun from its holster on the saddle and fired one killing bolt back at Cal.

Cal had no time to even register it, for a vast figure surged up behind him from out of the doorway and threw him down into the drift. He heard the whip-crack of the spear flying above him, then the hard wet-meat noise of it connecting with the body of the one who had saved him.

There was the smell of blood, and Mike Olifiers fell beside Cal, the spear through his neck.

Cal staggered to him as Olifiers pumped out his life, red onto the snow. Doc was there, too, now, as were Colleen and Goldie, but there was nothing he could do.

Olifiers was drowning, choking on his blood, struggling to gasp something out to Cal.

“Why?” Cal asked, tortured, wanting to turn back time, to take the spear that had been meant for him, not Olifiers. “Why did you do that?”

“They,” Olifiers gurgled, “need…” He reached up a big meaty hand, wet with blood, and grabbed Cal’s shoulder hard as Cal bent over him. His eyes were fierce as they sought out the younger man.

He didn’t need to say the rest.

They need you.

Olifiers fell back, and was gone.

Perez had followed his men-the ones who were still alive, who could still ride-away into the night, across the flatlands.

They didn’t come back.

The three grunters still crouched nearby, not moving, eyes huge and wary, staring at the big dead man, and the four beside him.

“Go on,” Cal told them. “Go where you like. You’re free.”

Two of them fled into the darkness that so suited them. But the other remained, drew timidly up to Cal.

“Want…” it said tentatively, “to follow you.” Its eyes moved from Cal down to the body beside him, awash in its own blood, then back to Cal.

Cal weighed the offer, and then said, “What’s your name?”

The grunter-whose name was Brian Forbes, and who had been a man once in Detroit-followed silently on padded feet as they carried Olifiers back into the mall.