Ghostlands

ONE

East Of Storm Lake, Iowa

“All right, I admit it. Radio Goldman is stone-cold dead.”

Herman Goldman stood like an iron spike driven into the rutted blacktop that had once been Route 169 heading north to Blue Earth-technically still was, Cal Griffin reflected, although no car had driven it in the nearly half year since the Change. No car could have, since cars ran nowhere on the face of the earth as far as anyone knew, as any of them had heard.

Horses, though, were a hot commodity again; and Cal and his friends had been hard-pressed to retain Sooner, Koshka and their other steeds from the depredations of roving smash-and-grab gangs that had lain in wait at numerous rest stops and Kodak moments along the way. “Horse thief” was no longer a quaint term out of a Western-it was a job description.

And we’ve got the scars to prove it.

You can’t go through life without making enemies, his father had told him when Cal was barely four. That was just before Dad’s first abandonment of the family, cutting out for the territories, the apogees and perigees of a roving life that had made enemies of his own family.

Now I’m the rootless one, Cal thought, and his collection of scars, both physical and emotional, formed the road map of his travels.

“Maybe you need new batteries,” Colleen said, jolting Cal from his reverie.

Goldie glowered at her, stuck out his tongue. There were no radios, of course, and batteries didn’t do shit. They were both speaking metaphorically, baiting each other as they tended to do when most frustrated. When it grew too barbed, veering into real venom, Cal would step in as he always did, smoothing their rough edges, reminding them of what held them together, of what bound them on this road. He was their moderator, their governing influence, and he knew well why they thought of him as their leader, despite how reluctant he had once been to accept that role.

Goldie tilted his head quizzically, as if listening for a distant, staticky station, and Cal realized that “radio” wasn’t just a metaphorical term, after all. Goldie had been their crystal set even before the Change, catching the twisted music and voices on the winds of the Source, coaxing and wheedling and beguiling them on the daunting path that had begun that sweltering day in Manhattan when Cal had saved Goldie from being pulverized by a truck on Fifth Avenue-and Goldie had tried (unsuccessfully, of course) to warn him of the coming Storm.

Since Chicago, Goldie had led them by fits and starts through the blasted terrain of western Illinois and Wisconsin, past Rockford and Beloit, skirting the horror of Madison, where cholera and a newborn smallpox raged. In general, the most populous areas were hardest hit, and best avoided.

On the outskirts of Sauk City, by the banks of the Wisconsin, Goldie had found a cliff face with a faded petroglyph that he’d been able to coax into opening a portal that emptied onto the Effigy Mounds in Iowa. It had been murder getting the horses through-they grew frenzied at the prickling feeling of being transported-but it had saved several hundred miles of rough traveling.

They had continued west, drawn by the elusive call of the Source. Until now.

Goldie shook his head. “Nada. K-Source is not on the air…which certainly does not mean it’s not still out there, doing it’s nasty best.”

“Great,” Colleen enthused. “So we’re stuck in this beauty spot.” The afternoon light had turned long, the shadow of a bleached FOOD GAS LODGING sign stretching out toward the horizon, browned prairie grasses tossing in the frigid wind. Route 169 opened ahead like a mottled black ribbon, and despite the signage, there was no food, no gas, no lodging anywhere in sight.

“Patience, Colleen,” Doc advised from atop Koshka, looking every bit the brooding Russian horseman in his fleece-lined greatcoat. “I won’t try to tell you it’s a virtue, but it will save wear and tear on the stomach lining.”

Goldie remounted his steed, took the reins from Cal, who was straddling Sooner. Goldie’s horse had originally been called Jayhawk, but he’d taken to calling it Later. He’d wanted Colleen to rechristen her horse Further, but she had so far resisted the idea, merely commenting on an increase in Goldie’s annoyance factor.

Not that it was inappropriate, actually. According to Goldie, this was the name Ken Kesey had painted on the psychedelic bus the Merry Pranksters had driven across America back in 1965. Cal dimly recalled reading the Tom Wolfe book on the subject, years ago. The irony was explicit. Kesey and friends had seen themselves as divine madmen embedded in a staid, magicless reality. And we’re the opposite, Cal thought. Reality has gone mad; we cling to sanity. Such sanity as we make for ourselves.

Colleen pressed her heels to her gelding’s flanks and the four of them moved ahead at a brisk trot. She turned to Cal. “How ’bout you, Cal? Anything off your map trick?”

Cal reached back and pulled a Triple-A map booklet from his saddlebag to open it across the pommel of his saddle. He had unearthed it in the looted ruins of a convenience store outside Osage. On their passage from Boone’s Gap to Enid’s Preserve and beyond, he had gained a fitful ability to read a map in a new and frequently useful way, to sense the changed terrain ahead, discern some of its tweaked geography.

But that skill had utterly deserted him since their showdown with Primal. And now, looking at the creased paper with its tangle of red and blue lines like arteries and veins of a body, he knew he had no special clue as to what lay before them. Only that Tina, if miraculously still alive, was somewhere due west of them, and that they had to keep moving.

Perhaps as they drew nearer the Source, it was leeching away such powers, drawing to itself the life forces of this new world, as it had seized Tina and the others like her. Or maybe Cal was generally tone deaf to such abilities, and his tin ear had simply returned.

Cal closed the map book, returned it to his saddlebag. “All I can say is Sioux Falls is about a hundred and fifty miles down the highway. If it’s still there.”

“And not somewhere in Luxembourg,” Goldie added.

No telling.

They paused to let the horses drink from a roadside pond, dismounting to give them respite. It had rained yesterday and they’d collected the water in buckets, pans, whatever containers came to hand, transferring it later to bottles and canteens. The water was fresh-with any luck, not too contaminated with stale automotive oils or last year’s pesticides. Had this land once been cultivated? Hard to tell. The prairie grasses had come back this summer, conjured out of the ground like ghost buffalo.

Colleen grimaced, angling her neck left then right to get the kinks out.

“Here, let me,” Doc said, and moved to massage her neck with long, skillful fingers. There was a clatter from within her shirt, and Doc withdrew a long chain around her neck. It jangled with the dog tags Cal knew came from her late father, the Russian Orthodox cross Doc had given her in Chicago-and a triangular piece that resembled black leather, but which gleamed, even in the pale light of winter coming, with iridescent fire.

“Get your hands off my trinkets.” Colleen playfully swatted Doc’s hand away.

“Yes, but one of them is such an interesting trinket….”

It was the amulet the old black blind man in Chicago had given her, the ancient sax player the refugee musicians in Buddy Guy’s club had called Papa Sky. The talisman had burned the flesh of the demented half-flare Clayton Devine when he’d seized Colleen, had driven him back in the desperate, charged moment when they’d learned the servant was actually the master, that Devine was secretly Primal.

The powerful, vital charm had been given them from parts unknown, for reasons unknown.

You have friends in high places, Papa Sky had told Cal, and the memory brought no comfort, only the disquieting sense that such a friend might well see them as pawns in his grand design, not players in their own.

Doc was studying the leather triangle closely now. “Organic, almost certainly-”

“Speak English,” Colleen said. “Or Russian, and then translate.”

“I would say it came off an animal…but as to which in this brave new world, I would need another specimen for comparison.”

Another mystery, Cal thought, and one I’d bet hard currency we won’t solve today.

Colleen placed the chain carefully back inside her shirt. They remounted and moved on.

The wind kicked up out of the west, ran its cold hand across Cal’s cheek. “This wind picks up, we may have to hunker down out here. Better keep an eye out for places to go to ground.” But not for long, never for long, no matter what the flatlands threw at them.

He remembered the hard Minnesota winters of his childhood, where the snow flew parallel to the ground-a spray of fluffy white shrapnel you’d swear could peel off layers of skin. That’s when you knew God was no Caribbean tour director but a stern taskmaster, and not one particularly inclined to like you. You found out who you really were in those endless gray months, not in the sunshine days. Good practice for what ultimately came down, Cal thought, and for what might lie ahead.

Doc clucked in mock disapproval. “America is for sissies. You haven’t tried a Moscow winter.”

“No,” Colleen said as the horses continued on, “and I haven’t driven a tank in Afghanistan, either. But I wouldn’t lay bets on beating me at arm wrestling, if I were you.”

“Which is why I take pains not to cross you, Boi Baba,” Doc said.

Cal caught the slight smile Colleen shot him, the affection beneath. He would have to remember to ask Doc what that phrase meant when they were alone. Probably “pain in the ass” or “woman of sarcasm.”

A distant cry sounded in the air, and he saw Colleen glance up sharply. He followed her gaze-nothing but a lone red-tailed hawk, its brown and white wings spread wide to catch the currents and float circling, scanning the ground for a lunch that thankfully was not them.

On several nights spaced over the last two weeks, Colleen had mentioned to Cal she thought she had heard a muffled beating like vast wings through the thick, obscuring cloud layer above them as they’d made camp. But it had been fleeting, and neither Cal nor Doc nor Goldie could corroborate the sound over the hammering prairie night wind that snatched away their body heat and drove them huddling into their tents till morning.

But whatever unseen god of hawks and demons shadowed them-if it was indeed more than imagination pricked by the brooding suggestiveness of this wide ocean grassland-it did not deign to make its appearance known.

“So what now?” Colleen asked Cal. “Homestead and wait for the crops to come up?”

“We continue west, see if we can find some people.” Nowadays, short of tuning into K-Source, that was the only way to get current information. And also rumor, distortions and outright lies.

“Um, I don’t think that’s gonna be a problem….” Goldie had pulled up, was scanning the fading light to the east.

Cal followed his gaze and spied the ragtag group of men and women emerging from the tall grass, about thirty in all, a hundred yards off, striding quickly toward them. Even at this distance and in this light, he could see they all held broken branches, stones, twisted lengths of pipe. A beefy man in front-a huge guy, like a refrigerator with a head-raised a pair of field glasses and scrutinized Cal and his companions.

He lowered them excitedly, shouted, “One in the middle, that’s him!”

With a cry, the group broke into a run, came rushing toward them, waving their weapons.

“Your call,” Colleen said evenly to Cal. “Hell-bent for leather, or…?”

“Goldie?”

Colleen snorted. “Right, trust the one with the personality dis-”

“Colleen.”

Goldie considered the mob, lapsing into a strange calm, as if there weren’t a herd of buffalo stampeding toward him. After a long moment, he muttered, “Look like a nice group of folks.”

A fortune cookie with a sting in its tail, like so much of what Goldie said. Was he being ironic, or…?

Cal brought his horse around to face the attackers, unsheathed his sword. Colleen took the hint and unslung her crossbow; Doc freed his machete.

Goldie sat on Later and watched them come, began to hum under his breath. Cal caught a snatch of tune, realized it was “It’s a Wonderful Day in the Neighborhood.”

Refrigerator slowed as he drew near, raised his hands. “Easy, easy there, boss. We got no harm.” He turned back to his followers. “Lay ’em down, folks.” They set their weapons on the ground. Cal lowered his sword, nodded at Colleen and Doc to stand down.

Refrigerator strode up close to Cal, nearly his height standing on the ground. “You’re Griffin, ain’t you? Cal Griffin.”

Cal hesitated a moment, then nodded.

Refrigerator squinted one big blue aggie eye, wrinkles fanning out. “You don’t look like such a long drink of water.” Then he bellowed a laugh like a volcanic eruption and seized Cal in a bear hug, nearly yanking him off his mount.

Colleen whipped up the crossbow reflexively, but Doc put a steadying hand on her wrist.

The big man let go and stepped back, still laughing, wiping tears from his eyes. His companions were all staring ardently at Cal, smiling shyly.

Up close, Cal could see now they were a weary and malnourished bunch, though leanly muscled as if used to hard labor. Their jackets and overcoats were buttoned against the chill, a sad attempt given the rips and tears that gaped like toothless mouths; their tattered clothes hung off them as if they were scarecrows outfitted by an indifferent assembler. Most were in their twenties and thirties, with a scattering of teens.

“I’m Mike Olifiers,” Refrigerator said. “These others, hell, they can all introduce themselves. We been long traveling, out of Unionville, hugging the Missouri River mostly, but it’s been worth it, yes sir.” He pulled a big kerchief from his pocket, blew his nose explosively, then fixed Cal again with an admiring gaze.

“We heard about you. You beat the Storm back in West Virginia, blew it clean outta Chicago.”

“Well, sort of, not really…”

“You’re famous in these parts, boy, don’t you know that?”

“Hard to believe word’s gotten around so fast,” Colleen cut in. “I mean, it’s not like we’ve got CNN or even E! True Hollywood Story, God help us.”

“Word travels fast, even so,” Olifiers replied. “Good word, ’cause there’s so damn little of it.”

Cal felt chilled rather than warmed. Oddly, he had a memory of when he was eighteen, when his mother died, and he had decided in that garish police waiting room to raise Tina on his own. He thought, then as now, I’m not big enough.

“I’m sure whatever you heard is mostly exaggeration,” Cal said. “And besides, I didn’t do it alone.” Or succeed, Cal thought bitterly, remembering the slashing nightmare of the Source blasting into existence in the devastated Wishart house in Boone’s Gap, spiriting Fred Wishart and Tina away.

“You’re modest; I heard that, too,” said Olifiers. He reached out to put a meaty hand on Cal’s shoulder. His wrist came clear of his sleeve and Cal caught sight of a livid mark along the skin. Seeing this, Olifiers pulled his hand back as if burned, shame blossoming in his eyes. He pulled his sleeve down to cover it, looked at the others.

They shifted where they stood, tried to make subtle adjustments to their clothes at the neck and wrist.

Colleen picked up the vibe, looked in confusion from the group to Cal. But Doc had seen the mark, too. Cal nodded to him.

Doc dismounted, approached Olifiers and his band. “You will excuse me….” With the expert hands of a physician, he examined Olifiers’s wrist, turning it this way and that in the muted twilight. Then he drew near the others. Olifiers signaled compliance. No longer effusive, they stood as Doc lifted collars, pulled up pant legs to reveal thin ankles, inspected necks and shoulders.

He turned back to Cal, the expression on his angular face all the affirmation Cal needed. “Rope burns, lesions from manacles and shackles, welts-possibly from lashing…”

It was as Cal suspected. At the Preserve, Mary McCrae had told him of such things, but he had never seen it firsthand. Another wonder of this new world.

Cal’s lips felt numb, reticent to pronounce the words. He forced them out. “You’re escaped slaves, aren’t you?”

The sun dipping low and every sign of a hard snow on the way, Cal elected not to question their new companions until he found them safe harbor for the night. As he, Colleen and Doc rode point through the grasslands, Goldie drew up alongside on Later, speaking low so the fugitives straggling behind couldn’t hear.

“I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings-”

“Since when?” Colleen interjected.

Cal cut her off with a wave, but Goldie was unperturbed. “As long as we have Winnie the Pooh and the other residents of the Hundred-Acre Wood accompanying us on our jaunty way, it’s virtually a sure thing we’re gonna get a visit from the paddyrollers. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of our lives.”

“The paddy-what?” Colleen asked. “They anything like the Tommyknockers?”

“No, Colleen, those are creatures from folklore and a Stephen King novel,” Goldie said, with a patronizing air she would’ve liked to chop into little pieces and stuff down his throat. “I’m talking reality, or at least history here.”

Cal nodded, remembering the lessons his mother had given him to augment the inadequate-and inaccurate-courses he had endured back at Hurley High. “The paddyrollers were men who made a living pursuing escaped slaves and returning them to their masters.”

Doc added, “During and in the period immediately prior to your American Civil War.”

Colleen groaned, reining Big-T back as the big gelding tried to surge forward. “Am I the only one here without the least excuse for an education?”

Doc smiled gently. “No, Colleen, you are educated in the skills that are most useful of all. The rest of us have simply accumulated a magpie collection of mostly useless facts.”

Colleen grimaced. “God, Viktor, I hate it when you’re charming.” But her eyes were smiling. “Paddyrollers, huh?” She contemplated Olifiers and the group of footsore men and women gamely bringing up the rear.

“Or something with an alternate name but the same enchanting job description,” Goldie noted.

“It may be a new world,” Cal said, sorrow welling in his voice, “but it’s a whole lot like the one that came before it.”

Colleen let out a slow breath, considering. “If they’ve got a good tracker, or anyone with a map ability like yours-” She nodded toward Cal.

“Like I used to have, you mean.”

“Whatever. We’re in for a hell of a ride.”

“An E-ticket ride, if I might elaborate,” muttered Goldie.

“Yeah,” Colleen said. “And no one would know what the hell you’re elaborating about, as usual.”

“Oops, sorry, I always forget you’re of a generation without cultural grounding.” Goldie plucked one of the five aces from his hat, toyed with it between his fingers. “Second vocabulary term of the day. It’s an old thing from Disneyland-back when there was a Disneyland, I suppose. My esteemed mother and father took me there, a little side trip from a couple of symposia they were attending.” A flick of his fingers and the ace was gone…appearing back in the brim with the other cards. “They didn’t just use to have one pass where you’d enter and ride all the attractions. There were tickets with letter grades-A, B, C, D and E. The A tickets were really lame-trolley rides on Main Street, that sort of thing. But the E-ticket rides, now that was real magic, the monorail, jungle cruise, haunted mansion…. It was the highest you could go, the best.”

“Thanks as usual for telling me more than I’d ever need to know,” Colleen huffed. “Anyhow, if you’re right about that paddyroller stuff, what’s coming down the pike won’t be the best of anything. It’ll be a royal ass-kicking, and I’d just as soon it not be us on the receiving end.”

“Ducking out on a fight?” Cal grinned devilishly. “That doesn’t sound like the Colleen Brooks I know.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not Russell Crowe in Gladiator.” Answering their looks, she added. “Okay, okay, maybe I am Russell Crowe in Gladiator, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it…at least, not all the time.” Another glance back at Olifiers and his group. “All I’m saying is, just because these folks are charter members of the Cal Griffin fan club doesn’t mean we should run interference for them till spring thaw.”

“So what would you have them do, Colleen?” Doc asked. “Return to the life they so recently fled?”

“They claim they fled. Honestly, Viktor, we don’t have to believe everything Joe Apocalypse and his brother tells us. I mean, look at the mess it got us into back in Chicago.”

Anguish blossomed in Goldie’s eyes, was quickly suppressed.

Colleen was instantly repentant. “Oh God, Goldman, I’m sorry…. I use my mouth like most people use a sledgehammer.”

For the briefest moment, Cal flashed again on Agent Larry Shango, whom he’d seen use a hammer like that most effectively, and fortuitously, when Shango had entered the fray at a deserted creekbed in Albermarle County and saved Herman Goldman from paramilitary raiders; before Shango had shared the secret list naming the scientists of the Source Project with them. He wondered on what path that fierce, self-contained traveler might now be embarked.

Cal forced his mind back to the here and now, to doing what he did best…smoothing the rough edges, binding the four of them back together, keeping them on track.

“We’re all worn to the nub,” Cal said. “Let’s get these folks bedded down for the night. Then we can recharge, get some perspective.”

Goldie nodded, urged his horse forward. But for the rest of their ride, he was silent.