Ghostlands

SEVEN

In the years to come, those who were there would tell their children and grandchildren what they saw, and call her Lady Blade. But her real name was May.

The wind off Lake Michigan was a knife that hard near-winter day, cutting through the passersby as they hurried on, driven by the cold and the fear of the streets that were a hunting ground, now that Chicago was no longer the Ruby City and Primal was dethroned and destroyed, and his palace in shambles around him.

The city had reconstituted itself, in a fashion, devolved or at least returned to something of its former power structure, the old Party Machine, in this world where machines no longer ran but power and politics and greed held the whip hand, as they always had.

May felt nothing of the wind, tuned only to the still certainty within her that she had found the terminus of a search that had drawn her across many long miles and through many black places.

She stood at the corner of Randolph and Dearborn, cloud shadows painting her light and dark as they moved, studying the twisted metal framework that speared into the sky like the flayed fingers of giants. The rubble was piled high at its base, big scorched stones, a testament to rage and chaos and, perhaps, the inevitability of ruin.

Tons of stone and insulation, wiring and furniture, pipe and cement-fifty stories’ worth-thrown into a blender to spray out over the terrain. Left here to the snow and sun and rain, to wear away like a mountain of pride torn down. No one in Chicago had the equipment anymore to haul all that debris away, nor the inclination, she supposed. Better to leave it as a monument, or unmarked grave, or abandoned killing ground. She noted that the men and women hurrying by averted their eyes as they passed, shied to the other side of the street, pretended it wasn’t there.

But May could look it straight in the face; it was hardly the worst she had seen, or been forced to endure.

Once the structure had been the Chicago Media Building, home to Primal Records, punching up off the pavement five hundred feet in its assurance and arrogance. Then it had transformed, mutated as so much had mutated in this spinning world, into something far grander and more terrible, into cathedral and fortress and keep, where a demigod Beast held sway, a demon who had beaten back the Storm and granted safe haven to some, the privileged, for a time.

But May knew that it had been no haven for him, whatever largesse he had bestowed, for in the secret place of his soul he was lost.

Those here who had served and feared him and lived by his whim called him Primal, but they had not known him, not like she had.

For in the time before that time, May had called him husband, and known his true name.

It was not the same as the fitting names her people gave each other, that she herself had, but it bore something of the same intimacy, the same history.

“Listen,” a nervous voice beside her piped up, “it’s not safe to stay here. We gotta move on.”

“In a minute,” she said. She looked sidewise at the one who had brought her here, whom she had found at Buddy Guy’s club down on Wabash, who had been brave enough to answer her questions when no one else would meet her gaze or dare speak of the past and what had gone down.

But Gabe Cordell, with his shining black hair and broadly muscled arms, was a man with spine, even if he was in a wheelchair.

Rolling at a determined clip she’d had to walk briskly to keep pace with, Gabe had led her out into the night and brought her to a barricaded street of tenements and the home of a furtive man named Wharton, who for a time had been a follower of Primal’s.

Wharton had cherished the order and safety Primal had secured him; in truth, had loved him. In this day and age, when photographs were hard to come by, Wharton understood that memory could hold only so much, an image that faded with the corrosion of time.

From its hiding place under the floorboards, he withdrew the metal toolcase that had once held other keepsakes, unlocked it and gently lifted out the plaster cast. He held it up to May, angled it to catch the light of thick candles.

He had taken the death mask of the broken, ill-used man as he’d lain abandoned and discarded among the wreckage, so much garbage in the dirt.

The plaster face revealed little of the easy intelligence, the soft sweet eyes, the compassionate, off-center grin that had made her love him. But the round face was there, the delicate features, and May had no doubt. It was Clayton.

Who had left her, because he’d had to.

So now she stood at Randolph and Dearborn, alongside Gabe, who at last had brought her the answers she had journeyed so long in search of.

May reached inside her coat of many pockets, the black leather duster, and withdrew the folded paper she’d carried across three states and nine hundred miles. The wind caught at it and made it flutter like a bird frantic for release, but she held tight to it, strode across the broad street to the pile of stone that had been the final stopping place of the one that had shared her life, in the time before this time, when he had been a man and nothing more.

She didn’t read the words on the paper, didn’t need to; they were written as surely on her heart, with a knife that had gone deep, the scrawl of words scar tissue within her now.

May, Clay had written in that queer, spidery hand of his. Baby, I know you won’t understand this, but I’ve gotta get out of here. It’s not you or the kids.

(How strange it seemed to May that he’d said “kids,” when only their son had survived past infancy. Linda, their delicate storm child, their boy’s adored younger sister, had barely lived past her first year, and then succumbed to the faulty aortic valve that had been her birthday present upon her arrival into this world. She had died literally of a broken heart. May understood broken hearts now, but incredibly, inexplicably to her at the time, she herself had continued on. Once, she recalled, she had come upon something Mark Twain had written in his autobiography. “It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live.” Curious, how Twain could know precisely her life when he had died almost a century before.)

I love you. Always love you. But something’s happening to me. I don’t understand but it’s happening and I’ve got to go away. They know why it’s happening and I wish I could make them tell me what this is and what it means and if it’s good or bad. One minute I know it’s good and the next I know it’s bad just as hard. It’s power, May. But I don’t think I’m supposed to have it. If they find out I have it I don’t know what they’ll do, so I’ve got to go away. I don’t even know if I should be telling you this.

So Clay fled east, leaving her and their boy safe behind, or so he thought.

She had thought it safe, too, and so had left their son in the keeping of her friend Agnes Wu, whom she had met through Clay’s work. She and Agnes had gone to innumerable movies when Clay had pulled graveyard shift; they’d shared their unspoken stories, the wounds of their souls, long into countless nights. Like herself, Agnes felt torn from her nurturing lands, her kin, driven by duty and allegiance to this barren and secretive place. Even worse, the tight security blackout kept Agnes isolated away from the grown children in Ithaca she so loved; perhaps that’s why she’d become so fond of May’s boy-he’d reminded her of her own son.

A good person to leave her boy with, May reasoned, this brilliant, homesick woman, to stow her son at Agnes’s spacious residence within the outer confines of the Project grounds.

May had tracked Clay from South Dakota, determined to find him, to help him, following clues, trying to guess just how he was thinking.

Then the Storm had come, and all bets were off…and she herself came to know a fair portion of what Clayton had felt.

Clay had been born here in Chicago, had grown up here until he was nine, when that drunken butcher had performed surgery on his mother and she had died drowning in her own blood, and his father, a dead man living, had drowned himself in booze. Clayton had been a castaway then, handed off to relatives in far-flung places, thrown up on barren shores, homeless until he had found a home with her.

So perhaps he had come to this city because it had once meant security to him, and sanity. He had tried to re-create that sanity, had failed, had died.

May drew alongside the towering pile of stone, lifted one of the smaller pieces, slid the note into the recess within. She touched a finger to her lips, then to the cold rock. Rest in peace.

“Okay,” she said, turning back to Gabriel. Time to go home now, back to her son. Then try to catch the trail of the one who had done this, to find his reasons, to bring him to justice, if she could.

And having come to know a good deal of her nature by now, May felt reasonably certain that she could.

A rough clatter down the street seized her attention.

“Uh-oh,” Gabe said. “Outta time.”

May could see them now, sliding out of windows, oozing out of doorways, coming up from holes in the pavement like angry ghosts.

“Wreckin’ crew,” said Gabe. “I warned ya about this.”

The scuzzy men and women were walking junkyards, armed to the teeth with chains, clubs, saws, knives, you name it, and armored with essentially anything that could be bent to that purpose. They were closing in from all sides, and to the silent observers who watched from behind their curtains and window shades it looked like the lady in the long leatherpiece and the guy in the chair-unless they could suddenly levitate-were pretty much toast.

“Not that I hold a grudge,” Gabe said, “but if you’d like your last words to be an apology, I wouldn’t say no.”

“In a minute,” May said for the second time, just as the mob let out a hair-raising cry and charged.

Now, Gabe was a pretty cool customer when it came down to it, and in the moment before they rushed him, he’d locked his chair and gripped taut in his gloved hands the length of razor wire he’d brought along for just such eventualities. But he had to admit he was pretty well flummoxed that Little Mrs. Primal didn’t even bat an eye.

She just stood her ground as they came on, noisy as a parade of drunken Shriners, and then she went to work. Spinning, rolling, slashing, throwing-a knife came from every one of those million pockets in her long coat, and she put every one of those gleaming beauties to best use.

It seemed like forever and no time at all, blood everywhere but amazingly not one of those bastards was killed nor even particularly amputated. They took off screaming, with a good number of new beauty marks to show off to the folks, and before you knew it there were just the two of them, May and Gabe-without a mark on them, except maybe a little sweat from exertion-out there on the street.

But not for long. The whole neighborhood came pouring out of their makeshift homes and storefronts and businesses cheering, everyone wanting to make them kielbasa.

May was gracious, but as soon as she could she extricated herself and set off west, leaving behind only a multitude of witnesses to spin the story, and one of her best throwing knives as a thank-you present for Gabe.

She wasn’t the showy type.

Just as she was on the outskirts of town, however, Gabriel caught up with her, rolling fast. “You don’t get off that easy, not without you telling me how you pulled that stunt.”

It was a fair question, he had earned it.

So May showed him the finely worked necklace of porcupine quills, of eagle talon and bear claw, passed down to her from her mother’s mother, who in turn got it from her own father, who had ridden with and been kin to the one known sometimes as Curly, or Our Strange Man, or Crazy Horse. May had always been pretty fast and alert, but since the coming of the Storm, the attributes had soaked down through her skin, and now she could move and sting and tear like nobody’s business.

Gabriel listened in quiet solemnity, then she told him her fitting name.

In the years to come, those who were there told their children and grandchildren what they saw, and called her Lady Blade. But her real name was May, and for a time she wore the name her husband had borne, which was Devine.

But she had another name, handed down by her people. In the generations since her great-grandfather had been forced to go to the white boarding school and truncate his name, it had been Catches.

But in this free and terrible time, May saw that it could at last return it to its full and fitting truth, and so she wore it along with her necklace of porcupine and eagle and bear.

They called her Lady Blade. But her real name was May Catches the Enemy.