Ghostlands

FOURTEEN

Mama Diamond was quiet for the next couple of days’ traveling, riding one horse and leading the other as Shango pedaled his ridiculous rail bike. The land was flat now, scrub prairie, the skies by daylight as blue as Dresden china. It was brutally cold, though, as they tended east. Mama Diamond had unpacked a fleece vest and wore it over her flannel shirt and under her leather overcoat with the elk buttons and rabbit lining. She wore a woolen cap to keep the breeze from biting at her ears.

The animal encounters had left her puzzled and disturbed, and she spent much of this time in profound thought.

Stern, it seemed, had taken something…and left something behind. Something more than the life-her life-he had promised to spare.

But exactly how had this happened, and why? Stern seemed like a man-a creature-an individual-that rarely if ever did anything by accident; beyond the huge joke-of-fate accident of his own transformation, an event which Mama Diamond felt certain he’d had absolutely no say or choice in.

As was the case by and large with everyone who had changed or gained some weird power or discovered some uncanny new talent.

Which now, surprisingly, unexpectedly, included Mama Diamond herself.

Someone or something-maybe God His Own Self-had rolled the dice with the whole damn world.

Not that she believed in God, at least not some old white dude with a beard. She wondered what her dead and buried Buddhist parents might have said about all this. Some creaky old Zen parable, undoubtedly. She could never make heads or tails of those. They weren’t like a gemstone or a fossil bone you could hold in your hands, solid, real, undeniable.

But now so was the fact that Mama Diamond was possessed of a truly distinctive new social skill.

Not possessed in the Salem inquisitor’s sense of the word. No, when she spoke to the animals, it was she, Mama Diamond, who had done the talking. She felt-knew-that she had spoken from the deepest and truest core of herself, the most authentic part of her, and that was the most unsettling thing.

Because, if that was the case, Stern hadn’t actually given her this power. It had merely been dormant and, deliberately or inadvertently, he had simply awakened it.

Sleeping Beauty waiting for her kiss.

And Stern was the handsome prince? No way, Jose. Mama Diamond shuddered at the thought. She had sworn off men since Danny, her fiance of fifteen minutes back in ’62, and at this late date (when, if she was going to be a pinup girl for anything, it would be arthritis) Mama Diamond sure as little green apples wasn’t going to be spliced to some hell-spawned T. rex imitator.

Still, Mama Diamond didn’t get the feeling she could reject this wild Dr. Doolittle, talk-to-the-animals (or more like screw-with-the animals’-ability-to-discern-reality) facility within her so readily.

She pondered once more what her parents might have made of this, and it occurred to her it would have astonished them at least as much as it astonished her. Not for what it did, but that Mama Diamond, known to them only as Judy Kuriyama out of San Berdoo, their rebel-without-a-cause tomboy of a little girl, had manifested it.

This was the kind of spooky crud only a Zen master might pull.

Did that make her a Zen master?

Hoo boy, don’t go there, Mama. You get cocky, you end up stepping on the wrong stone and sliding right down that cliff face into an arroyo. End of story. This newfound capacity guaranteed her nada, it was no get-out-of-jail-free card.

She learned that in a train yard at a junction town outside Sioux Falls, just across the border into Iowa.

The brittle, clear skies had given way to a raft of cloud, which yielded up, at dusk, a cold and dispiriting drizzle. Shango had told her the name of this town but Mama Diamond had already forgotten it-some largely abandoned town skirting a quartzite quarry, as bleak in the rain as a rusted automobile.

They camped in the train yard under a tin-roofed shed, the smoke from their campfire rising through a broken skylight to hang in the damp, still air. Marsh and Cope stood tethered in a far corner, restless in the shadows.

Mama Diamond was restless, too. She had noticed a sooty gas station-cum-general store on the ride in, and she offered to walk there now, maybe scavenge something interesting for dinner.

Shango agreed. “But be back before dark,” the federal agent admonished, gathering more scrap lumber to feed the fire.

Of course, the tiny shop had already been looted. All that remained of any interest was a single can of vegetarian chili half hidden under a stockroom shelf. Slim pickings. But Mama Diamond dutifully picked up the can and dusted it off and carried it back through the wet grit and gravel to the train shed.

She heard voices before she entered and was wise enough to stand a moment in the shadows, icy rain trickling down her collar. Voices. Strangers. Perhaps not friendly.

She didn’t feel much like a Zen master just now. She felt old and wet and a little bit frightened.

One harsh voice ordered Shango to stand aside and keep his hands away from his body.

Mama Diamond quietly maneuvered herself to a place where she could see into the enclosure. Three men had gathered around Shango. A fourth stood by the horses and was rummaging through the saddlebags-looking for food and dry goods, probably. He discovered Mama Diamond’s tube of Polident and threw it aside with a snort of disgust.

The men were seedy-looking, drifter types. Such scavengers had had a relatively easy time of it after the Change, living off the stored fat of civilization. But times were leaner now. Most scavengers had learned to trade for food. Some had resorted to raiding and stealing.

The three men around Shango, two of them armed with baseball bats, were demanding to know where Shango’s partner had gone.

“I don’t have a partner,” the federal agent said coolly.

“So? That’s your fuckin’ Polident, I suppose?”

“I trade in small goods,” Shango said. “Amazing what people will barter for denture cream, toothpaste, aspirin, hemorrhoid ointment-”

This was not a cooperative answer. The questioner jabbed Shango’s belly with the handle of his bat. Mama Diamond saw real pain on the government man’s face.

Enough is enough, Mama Diamond thought. She tried to recall the energy that had risen in her veins back at the wolf encounter. That sense of command. Of seniority, power, wisdom-whatever you wanted to call it.

How do you summon such a thing?

She tried. It even seemed to her that she succeeded. But was she truly feeling the energy or just remembering it? Elusive, this skill.

Nevertheless she stepped forward, until the light of the fire made her plainly visible. “Stop that,” she said.

It didn’t sound like the voice of command. It sounded like her own customary croak. Worse, it sounded almost timid.

The thugs looked at her for a long, startled moment. Then the vocal one laughed out loud. “Calm down there, Grandma,” he said. “You’ll pop your dentures.”

This was not a token of success, but Mama Diamond resolved to keep trying. “Don’t get smart with me,” she said. “If you know what’s good for you-”

She wasn’t allowed to finish. The scavenger who had been looting her saddlebags took a couple of steps closer and swung at Mama Diamond with a wooden billy club that had been strapped to his belt.

Mama Diamond took the blow in the ribs. The pain was agonizing. All her breath went out of her at once, and she fell to the grimy floor like a bag of rocks.

“There’s no need for that,” Shango said immediately.

“He speaks,” the chief thug remarked.

At which his two buddies held Shango’s arms behind him and the chief began to beat him with his fists. Mama Diamond, writhing on the floor, wondered whether all this might be a dream…or whether she had dreamed her conversation with the wolf and the panther.

Or maybe her skills only worked on animals.

The scavenger who had clubbed her went back to the saddlebags. He pulled out a pair of Mama Diamond’s long johns and held them up. “Winter drawers,” he remarked. “Shit, I thought these went out with black-and-white TV.”

Nearer the fire, the beating of Shango continued methodically.

“Marsh,” Mama Diamond groaned. “Cope.”

The horses regarded her with rolling, fearful eyes.

“Help,” she said.

Cope let out a trumpeting cry-in seeming acknowledgment, or was that wishful thinking? — then lashed out with his rear legs. Both hooves hammered the small of the unsuspecting vandal’s back, propelling him several feet through the air. He landed on his face in an ungraceful sprawl and lay motionless, but still drawing breath.

He was lucky, Mama Diamond thought. Lucky to be merely unconscious. Lucky to have been standing so near the big horse that the beast’s powerful hind legs hadn’t gotten fully extended.

It was all the opening the government man needed. Shango did something Mama Diamond could not quite follow-bent and twisted himself free of the men who held him-and delivered two or three kicks of his own, barely less powerful than Cope’s.

The horses yanked and fought their tethers. “Calm down,” Mama Diamond whispered, struggling to her feet. Her upper body burned like fire, but she didn’t believe any ribs had been broken. That was a mercy.

One of the thugs fled past her, out into the drizzling rain and the dark of the rail yard. The thugs who remained were unconscious on the ground. Shango took a length of rope and bound them methodically to a standpipe. Then he helped Mama Diamond closer to the fire.

“I doubt we’ll have any more trouble tonight,” Shango said. “These types tend not to have a whole lot of friends. But we should move out pretty hastily come dawn. And keep watch till then.”

“I could have used the sleep.”

“So could I,” Shango admitted. He was bleeding from a cut beside his right eye, dark blood on dark skin. He winced when he smiled ruefully.

Mama Diamond took a fresh handkerchief from her saddlebag, cleaned out the cut with a little water and taped it shut with a Band-Aid. She cast a satisfied glance at the unconscious men-the one Cope had dispatched at her bidding, the other two the result of Shango’s efficient handiwork.

“Well, Mr. Shango,” Mama Diamond said, “it appears I have a way with animals…and you have one with men.”

Come morning, the air was cold but the rain of the night had gone. Sunlight came through the cluttered junk of the train yard at slants and angles like the strings of a cast-off harp.

Mama Diamond had hardly slept, even during her off-shift. Her eyes were raw and her chest ached dully. Stubbornly, she refused Shango’s offer of aspirin. This pain had come hard-won; hell, she might as well feel it.

The three captive vandals continued to moan against their gags-Shango had gagged them around midnight, when they took to emitting loud verbal obscenities-and squirmed against their restraints. Mama Diamond said, “We just leave them?”

“Their buddy might come back. Even if not-you know how hard it is to tie a man up so effectively he can’t work himself free? If we’re not here to kick ’em when they wiggle, they’ll soon enough be undone.”

“I don’t want their lives on my conscience,” Mama Diamond said.

“Neither do I,” said Shango, “though it wouldn’t be such a heavy burden, would it?”

“I suppose not,” Mama Diamond said. But she was relieved it was a subject she didn’t have to fret over.

Shango rigged a device whereby the horses could be harnessed to the rail bike, one rider per horse, and supplies strapped to the bike itself. It worked well enough that Shango was able to learn the basics of riding, and it seemed like an economical division of labor, at least where the land was level, the berms not too high, the rails unobstructed.

As the day’s ride dragged on, Mama Diamond smiled to herself as the thought occurred what some passing stranger might remark upon seeing their passing parade, this weird assemblage like a land catamaran with horses instead of pontoons.

“Well, that’s certainly different.”

I know what it’s like to be different, Mama Diamond thought, glancing over at Shango as he rode atop Marsh, his solemn level gaze on points east, the destination ahead. Even as a child, Mama Diamond had been alone more often than not, secretive and self-absorbed, an outsider. The camps did that to you, even if you were a kid; you’d listen to Fibber McGee and Molly on the radio, One Man’s Family. All those normal folks who were able to go where they wanted, do whatever they chose, just get in a car and drive…

But there you and your folks were, and all those thousands of people who looked just like you, locked up in an internment camp in the middle of nowhere, a hot flat desert ringed by glowering, unsympathetic mountains. An alien.

Her mother told her the authorities said it was for their own protection. But if that was so, then why were the machine guns in the guard towers pointed in rather than out?

Mama Diamond remembered the baking summer night-she couldn’t have been more than seven, if that-when she’d fired an improvised arrow out of her homemade toy bow up and up into tower number three. Boy howdy, she’d set those alarms yowling!

So Mama Diamond well knew that inside every quiet, self-sufficient loner was one hell-raiser just waiting for an excuse to bust out.

Shango shifted in the saddle, gave a low grunt. The tenderfoot way he was riding, Mama Diamond could tell he’d be plenty sore tonight. Not that he’d complain…

She knew he’d been different, too; it hadn’t taken a Change to make him the Cat Who Walked Alone. She wondered what message the Cold Old World had sent him as a kid to cut him away from the herd.

Now here they were, the two of them, two loners spliced together on the road, on a treasure hunt-and who could say whether the treasure they’d find would be Mama Diamond’s gemstones or the dark new heart of the planet?

Certainly not Mama Diamond. Nor could she say, if two loners were together, that they could truthfully be called loners anymore.

Mama Diamond felt the music of the power within her, felt her strange new talent-and this other thing, this new good feeling she could not name.

It made her uneasy, this feeling, this new situation, all of it. As a rule, she distrusted the good even more than the bad; after all, as she’d told her old friend Arnie Sproule on many a starless night, happiness was dangerous…while misery, well, they never could take that away from you.

Still, for all its danger and its newness, Mama Diamond thought she’d work on standing this good patch a while longer, trying it on for size.

Because even if she knew what it was like to be different, Mama thought as a few bright clouds rolled high and far through the frozen blue of the sky…

She didn’t know what it was like to be this.