Magic Time: Ghostlands (14 page)

SKY AND GRASS AND HIGHWAY

“T
hese friends of yours?” Cal asked Inigo.

The tweaked boy slowly shook his head, never taking his creamy huge eyes off the visitors. If anything, he seemed even more disquieted by their arrival than did Cal and the others.

Grunters.

Cal wondered where they’d come from on this flat plain with its cracked asphalt highway an enormous arrow pointing clear to the horizon. Certainly not out of the valley; all of them had been looking that way.

In the fading light of sunset, the clump of huddled figures with their bandy legs, their long bony arms, advanced with seeming timidity, like whipped strays drawn back to the company of men but sorely afraid of it. All were small compared to grown humans, of varying heights, none more than five feet. Cal could see that they had once been women and men, and a few of the shorter ones had a hyper quality that made him think they might have been—might still be—children.

In his travels, Cal learned that family members never all transformed into one kind of changeling, but that often the altered outcasts and abandoned ones found companions of like mind and form.

And although these eight twisted beings—with rapper caps pulled tight over bulbous gray heads (either wholly bald or with strands of wispy hair like chick fluff escaping out from under them), capacious Salvation Army jackets and jeans and long, thick-knuckled feet—had no doubt started life with no relationship to one another, now they were family.

Or at least, a crew, a posse. A pack.

Cal had seen other grunter packs in a proximity he’d sooner have avoided, been cornered by them in the bleak tunnels under New York and diverse spots along the map, fought tooth and claw to survive. In groups, they were invariably frightful, ravening homunculi with a wild, lithe ferocity.

But this gathering before him seemed of a wholly different cast, even if in the dimming light he could see they bore the same serrated teeth, the same yellow dirk nails.

There was none of the cunning, the calculation about them. Nor even the wary alertness of this boy who stood breathing fast beside him.

Colleen had whipped her crossbow off her back and leveled it. Doc held his machete. But Cal shook his head, motioned their weapons down. He moved toward the group slowly, with a show of calm he hoped was more convincing than he felt (because—despite all this talk about his great instincts as a leader—if he was
wrong
about these guys…)

The lead grunter stepped closer, eyeing Cal.

Cal addressed the newcomer. “My name is Cal Griffin. This is Colleen, Goldie, Doc. And that’s Inigo. What’s your name?”

The creature frowned spectacularly, and when he spoke, his voice was cracked and high-pitched—he sounded like Andy Devine in one of those ancient Westerns. “My name,” he said, “is Tom.”

“Just Tom?” Doc asked.

Tom shrugged, as if at an irrelevancy.

Doc leaned in close to Cal, whispered, “Even for a grunter, he appears rather—”

“Dim?” Cal finished in a whisper.

“Let’s just say I would not hold out for an Ivy League college if I were him.”

“What’s your take on this?” Cal asked Inigo, who continued to stare at his fellow trogs perplexedly. But the boy had nothing to offer; he’d never seen anything quite like them, either.

“Guys,” Colleen put in, “we don’t have time for this.”

But Cal had a feeling it was all connected somehow, that this was in some way a part of the larger mystery.

“It’s like a tumor,” Goldie suggested at last. “You know, some are malignant, some are benign.” Then he added, to Inigo, “No offense, my man. I’m talking groups larger than one, when that utterly delovely mob mentality kicks in.” And the way he said it brought home freshly to Cal that Goldie had seen in his desultory ramblings the worst the world had to offer…and not just from grunters.

Tom regarded them indifferently during this exchange, and then croaked, “You brought us food? You brought us blankets?”

“Well,” Cal said, surprised, “we have very little of those things ourselves.”

Tom looked suddenly, grievously disappointed. Cal wondered whether the creature might actually begin to weep.

“No blankets to spare,” Cal hurried on. “As for food—”

He walked to Sooner’s saddlebag, pulled out a can of creamed corn. “You can have this, if you like.”

Tom apparently did like, very much; he scuttled over to Cal and snatched the heavy can from him with the cupidity of a hungry goat in a petting zoo.

Cal stepped back, appalled by the smell of the creature, which cut through the horrendous stench of the valley like a knife blade. While Inigo had a smell like damp soil, earthy but not unpleasing, Tom reeked like a wet dog that had rolled in something, or an unwashed stable, or rotting hay—or some combination of all three. Tom grinned, bearing his big prognathous teeth. His breath was bad, too.

“It’s as if he expects it,” Doc said. “As if he’s done this before.”

“So?” Colleen added. “Any beggar in Times Square has done the same thing. And they have better patter.”

Tom blinked at this exchange—maybe confused, Cal thought, but essentially indifferent.

Cal said, “Is it true, Tom? Have you done this before? Have other people given you food?”

“People from the lights,” Tom said. His speech was obviously painful and truncated, but there was nothing unusual about his accent, Cal thought. When he squeaked
People from the lights,
he squeaked it with a hint of a broad Midwestern twang. What had this man been before the Change overtook him? A counter clerk, a plumber, a computer programmer? Someone you’d pass in the street without looking twice.

Now he was bent and malformed and had difficulty mustering the intricacies of a simple declarative sentence.

“People from the lights?” Cal asked.

Tom seemed to reconsider his position, began to look vaguely frightened. He clasped the can of creamed corn to his chest and backed away a step.

“Hang on,” Cal said.

“No…” Goldie said faintly. Cal glanced over to him. His expression had gone vague, eyes wide and distant, and Cal understood with a sudden quickening of the pulse that Goldie wasn’t referring to the grunters.

Inigo caught the vibe, too, on the air, the night wind. “Something’s coming,” he murmured.

Reflexively, Cal shot a hand to the hilt of his sword.

Now the rest of his brood noticed it, too. They stood upright, turned their heads to the south.

A distant drone, achingly familiar, resolving as it drew rapidly closer into—

The rattle and sigh of leather stretched by wind.

“Shit!” Colleen cried out, dropping down, swiveling her crossbow up high.

The dragon came low out of the setting sun, out of the flame-streaked clouds.

Hunting.

With a cry, Tom and his brood took off at a wild, loping run, back the way they’d come, in a desperate attempt perhaps to reach whatever hidey-hole they’d emerged from.

But the dragon swooped down on them, big jaws snapping, missing one by inches. The grunters screamed and scattered, a number of them falling aside roughly and rolling, crab-crawling into the tall grass in an attempt to hide.

But the smallest of the bunch, one Cal thought to be a child, bolted away from the others in blind terror, shrieking, toward a bare patch of earth with no hint of cover.

Cal saw the dragon wasn’t Stern but rather another grotesque, bands of green and red rippling along its rough, scarred body. It hovered at the apogee of its ascent, huge wings angling against the wind, ridged head swiveling as it scanned the ground with eager, fierce eyes. In the fiery dark sky, its outstretched wings were almost translucent, the color of port wine.

Its eyes fixed on the grunter child.

With its wings drawn up behind it like lateen sails, it arrowed down some invisible arc of the wind.

Cal raised his sword and darted forward, Doc close behind, running hard. But it was futile—the grunter child was a dozen yards away.

Cal glanced back and saw Colleen fighting the bolt that had become jammed in the cradle of her crossbow. Goldie—

Goldie stood upright and raised his hands. Balls of fierce turquoise light arced from his palms and flew toward the plunging dragon.

The light was brighter than the glare of the setting sun, and the grunter child looked back to see the source of these sudden shadows. When he saw the dragon dropping toward him, he stumbled and fell—which might have saved his life, Cal thought. The dragon overshot its prey. Goldie’s fireballs overshot their target, too, but the dragon was forced to curve low to avoid them. It folded its wings and struck the tarmac of the highway, rolled a few times before it stood upright.

“Motherfucker!” the dragon howled, its voice like stone grinding stone in some fetid cavern. “I’m gonna fuck you up, you fucking fucks!”

“Aw, geez,” Colleen muttered to herself. “White-trash dragons, yet.”

The dragon on the ground was no less threatening, no less lethal, than it had been in the air. At its full height it towered over the grunter child. For that matter, it towered over Cal, who arrived between the child and the dragon and held his sword at point.

“Run!” he told the child. “Get out of here, find a place to hide.” But the grunter only stared at him, paralyzed.

The dragon grinned.

The dragon’s grin was terrible, resplendent with tooth and fang. Cal raised his sword. The dragon’s eyes followed the bright steel.

Colleen chose that moment to fire her crossbow. The bolt sped past Cal and embedded itself in the dragon’s shoulder—not deeply, because the dragon’s pebbled skin was as dense as leather. But deep enough that the dragon screamed.

The scream—an eardrum-rattling roar, animal pain aligned with human rage—seemed to set the grunter child free. He turned and ran for the tall grass while Colleen nocked another bolt. Cal steadied himself in case the dragon leapt at him. And the dragon did leap, but directly upward, rowing the air in an effort to heave himself aloft. Cal was thrown to the ground by the wind rush and almost deafened by the kettledrum beat of the vast black-red wings. The dragon flashed over his head, diving once more toward the grunter child. The child had begun to scream, long hooting screams that erupted from his larynx like hiccups. And there was another sound—

Another sound, familiar and yet exotic.

The rumble of an automobile engine, the grinding of tires on gritty tarmac.

Which was, of course, impossible.

Colleen was distracted by the arrival of the vehicle. Her second shot went wide, the bolt passing the dragon’s left wing like an errant torpedo.

The child continued to scream. But even the dragon seemed to hesitate in the air at the sight of this new arrival.

Here was a miracle.

It didn’t look much like a miracle. It looked like an old Cadillac El Dorado, dusty black, with a cracked windshield and a rust-spattered scratch running down the passenger door like a lightning bolt. But it was moving under its own power.

Everything Cal had learned since the Change made this a miracle. Automobiles were useless; engines were useless. Since that watershed day in July, no one on earth—to Cal’s knowledge—had been able to run a motor or plug in an appliance. That was the essence of the Change. There was no clause exempting late-model Caddies. It was as if a living mastodon had wandered down the road—more surprising in fact; the Change might well have revived a few mastodons, but the automobile should have been irrevocably extinct.

The dragon lost interest in the grunter child and spiraled upward, sculling for altitude.

Tom came running out of the high grass, grabbed the child up in his arms and dashed back to hiding.

The automobile crunched to a stop. The driver’s door flew open and a young man stepped out.

The driver appeared to be in his twenties, a short, amiable-looking guy with glasses, thinning black hair and a bristle-length goatee framing his mouth. He wore a black T-shirt under a Day-Glo orange vest. At the sight of the dragon, his expression betrayed shock and surprise. Whatever he’d come here for, it wasn’t this.

He reached into the car, grabbed up something from the backseat.

He pulled it out, wheeled around with it, braced himself against the roof of the El Dorado.

The dragon screeched and whirled, red eyes flashing.

The newcomer fired his rifle—

And that was impossible, too. Cal had seen people attempting to use firearms in the immediate aftermath of the Change. The result was a slow fizzle at best, as if the gunpowder were burning at an inhibited speed. No bang, no bullet.

But the stranger’s rifle—which was decorated, oddly, with what looked like garnets or rubies—barked and kicked.

The bullet went wide.

“You son-of-a-fuckin’ bitch!” Enraged, the dragon dove at the stranger, batted the gun aside. It seized him by the shoulders, thorny yellow claws digging deep into his nylon vest, clenching the muscles beneath so tightly that the young man’s arms involuntarily stuck out from his sides. His eyes rolled with pain, and he screamed as the dragon flew up with him into the dazzling sky.

It hovered there, clutching him tightly—and drew the knife-blade talons of its free paw forward to eviscerate him.

But by now Cal had reached the car and grabbed up the rifle. He pumped another shell into the chamber.
God, let this miracle work again.
He aimed and fired.

The dragon screamed, dropping its captive, who fell the dozen or so feet to the ground, landing with a cushioned
whoomph
in the high grass.

Its enormous wings reduced to limp fabric on a sagging frame, the dragon plummeted to earth, hitting the highway with a satisfying thud.

Its body twitched once and fell silent, conspicuously dead, the iron stench of its blood thick on the air.

The grunters, terrified, had vanished.

Cal lowered the still-smoking gun. The acrid tang of gunpowder was in the air; Cal loved that smell, had loved it since he’d been a kid with cap guns.

Colleen sidled up alongside him, impressed. “Pretty slick shooting, ace.”