Magic Time: Ghostlands Read Online Free Page A

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.

TWO
    OUTSIDE MEDICINE BOW, WYOMING
    M ama Diamond was alone in her house of rock and bone when she heard the whistle far down the tracks and over the horizon, and mistook it for a memory.
    Mama Diamond was old. She was thin as chicken bones, and a cataract had clouded much of the vision in her left eye. She wore rings on her fingers, the rings fixed in place by swollen knuckles, a part of her now. The rings were cheap silver melted down from old forks and spoons, set with garnet and turquoise. She had made them herself, back when her lapidary and fossil business just off the juncture of highways 30 and 487 was a going concern, here at the foot of Como Bluff. One of the richest fossil beds in the world, it was a perfect spot for tourists to wile away an hour or two on the drive from Laramie to Casper, just a long shout out of Medicine Bow in the flyspeck little town of Burnt Stick. She was Japanese-American, but the tourists took her for Blackfoot. She made no effort to disabuse them of the notion; it was good for business.
    But now there were no more tourists, only wanderers and marauders and crazy, lost pilgrims on the way from somewhere to nowhere or back again.
    Mama herself was a long way from the place she’d once called home in the San Bernardino Mountains of California.There she’d had a different name, been called Nisei among other things, and had parents who told her bedtime stories of their growing times in Osaka and San Francisco, at least in the days before she and her family had been gathered up like raw cotton in a sack and carted off to the internment camps at Manzanar and Heart Mountain.
    So she had set off on her own journey long years ago, been a wanderer and a pilgrim herself, traversing the Utah, Colorado and Montana ranges and even the far-flung Gobi, until she had come at last to Wyoming, to this place of long skies and fierce winters. She liked living in a place with hard weather and harder people, in the shadow of the mountains that told the truth of the land. Folks said America was a young country, but those granite spires put the lie to that. It was a realm like everywhere