Magic Time

by Marc Scott Zicree

  There was a muffled whack. Misfits let out a cry, went down on one knee, revealing a figure behind him hefting a big wrench. Cal was astonished. It was the elevator mechanic—what was her name? Colleen—from his office building. She raised the wrench for another blow.

  “You fucking cunt!” Misfits swiveled to get a bead on her, but she brought the wrench down again, putting her weight into it, laying into his shoulder. He screamed and stumbled sideways, clutching the gun with both hands, staggering into a crazy, frantic run away from them. Cal could hear him spewing a litany of physical acts and body parts as his footfalls faded off down the street.

  Colleen had already turned, plunging toward the fray with wrench swinging. Cal rolled to his feet and joined her, grappling, kneeing, twisting arms and wrists.

  “Vamoose! Get outta here!” Colleen’s voice was as cool and unyielding as marble. The looters fled, slipping on broken booty, scrabbling up a few boxes and vanishing into the night.

  Cal straightened, gasping with the adrenaline rush. “Did you see that? With the gun?”

  “What?” Colleen, who wasn’t even breathing hard, knelt by the cop. He sat wheezing on the curb, slumped like a sack of potatoes.

  “You all in one piece there, friend, or are we gonna have to fetch the Superglue?”

  “Nah, I’m on top of it.” He coughed wetly, spat, struggled to rise, sat down again with a grunt.

  “Take it slow,” Cal advised. “No one’s on the meter here.” Still seeing the muzzle of the gun, he thought momentarily of Tina, looked up at his window. It was dark within, but even so he felt her eyes on him. He lifted his hand, tried to keep it from shaking. We’re okay.

  The cop felt along his bruised jaw, touched his bloody nose gingerly and winced. “Damn, they broke it.”

  A box of Kleenex lay where one of the looters had dropped it. Cal tore it open, handed the cop a wad of tissues. “Here.”

  “Thanks.” The cop was breathing easier now, and, in the moonlight, Cal could see he was older than he had looked in the heat of battle, fifty at least, face all furrows and hard wear. “You two were a couple of knights in armor.”

  Cal shrugged it off. “I live right here.”

  “Me, I’m just down there.” Colleen gestured toward the far end of the block. Then, noting Cal’s surprise, asked, “What?”

  “Nothing, it’s just you live somewhere, you have no idea—”

  “We don’t exactly belong to the same clubs,” she said coolly, and it brought back their meeting in the lobby, forever ago this morning.

  The cop tried to stand again. Cal gripped him under one arm, Colleen the other, until he was sure of his footing. He waved them off, grateful. “You better get back indoors.”

  “You have any idea what’s going on?” Cal asked.

  A hard cast came over the cop’s face. “No, but it’s a holy mess. Some of my boys saddled up, headed over the Queensboro Bridge. It’s the same there. Same as far as the eye can see. Could be the whole world, for all we know. It’s down; everything’s down.”

  Cal glanced at Colleen and was gratified to see she looked as chilled as he felt. “But, hey,” she was saying, “the government’s gotta be—”

  “What government?” The cop stared into the night. “Without phones, computers, they can’t even collect their damn graft.” He glanced at them and stopped, rancor evaporating to—pity? He forced a mirthless smile. “Nah, discount that. I’m just having a bad night. I hear they’re mobilizing the National Guard. It’ll take time, but it’ll be all right.”

  Cal nodded, unconvinced. The cop cast about, spied his fallen hat. He slapped it against his tree-trunk thigh, set it on his head. “Gotta go find my horse.”

  On the wind, Cal caught distant, unidentifiable sounds that might be screams, might be anything. He turned to the cop. “You wanna come upstairs?”

  “I’d love to, but long as the city’s paying my health plan....”He’d found his nightstick, nestled against the curb. He swung it around on its strap, thwap, into his palm. “You watch your backs, hear?”

  “Back at you,” Colleen said. The cop nodded, turned the corner onto Broadway and was gone, echoing steps soon lost on the wind.

  Cal brushed himself off, caught Colleen looking at him, shaking her head. Her appraising eyes said, Not bad, lawyer boy. Or at least, he wanted to think they did.

  “You want some lukewarm lemonade?” he asked.

  WEST VIRGINIA

  Up here, where no coal had been mined in twenty years, there was no dust. The SCSRs had run out long ago, so they would be out of luck if they ran into gas now, but according to Llewellyn there had been little in this area of the mine.

  “Shut up a minute,” Hank said softly, and the men shut up. Their respect for him, he noticed, had grown as they’d moved along; as he’d gotten them through the tangle of caved-in tunnels and worked-out rooms and submains that went nowhere— if not easily, at least steadily, more and more confident in the dark. In the silence that followed Hank could hear a dim swift shuffling and could smell something elusive, half-familiar.

  “What is it?” Ryan edged up closer behind Hank.

  His voice sounded higher above him than it should. Hank tried to straighten a little out of his comfortable slouch and found that he couldn’t. Only this morning he’d been able to look at Wilma’s nephew almost eye to eye.

  “D’you hear it?”

  Ryan shook his head. Hank could see him do it, though no flare was lit.

  “Tell the guys to keep it down, okay?” whispered Hank. “And maybe we might want to have a light now a little more often.”

  “Is that safe?” Llewellyn asked.

  “Maybe safer than not,” returned Hank, though he could not have said what it was that he feared. “Everybody keep a hand on each other. If nobody keels over, we know it’s pretty safe for a quick look.”

  “I like your definition of ‘pretty safe,’ Culver.”

  “You got a better one?”

  A pinlight of yellow. Hank could see—squinting and backing off from the glare himself—that nobody liked it much, though it was a comfort in the dark.

  Ryan swallowed hard. “You mean all that crap Gordy was talking about . . .” He let the words trail off and averted his eyes. He bit his lower lip, a childhood filled with every monster movie from The Thing to Alien playing fast across his face. “Jesus.”

  “Look,” Hank said quietly, trying to keep as far from the light as he could. “You know and I know there’s nothing down here but us. My daddy and my granddaddy and your grand-daddy too and goddam near everybody else’s—they worked here all their lives and all they ever saw was each other. But a couple of things happened today that nobody or their grand-daddies ever ran across in their lives. And lately I’ve heard things, sounds that shouldn’t be here. And I think maybe it’d be a good idea if everybody could see what’s around them.”

  Ryan nodded, scared but accepting. Accepting what? thought Hank. Accepting the fact that Hank had been moving through the old mains with perfect ease, able to identify scratches and minor malformations of track and rock and abandoned bits of machinery in the dark?

  Accepting the fact that Hank could hear things the others couldn’t?

  Although God knew, as the flame was blown out again, the men were noisy enough, chattering loudly about baseball and TV and the movies, trying to cover their fear. Trying to pretend that each and every one of them wasn’t thinking: If all this is going on down here, what the fuck are we going to find when we get to the top?

  That had been in Hank’s mind as well. Maybe that was the source of this feeling inside him, this dread of leaving the dark of underground. This feeling that this was where he wanted to be, where he wanted to stay.

  To hell with the world of traffic noise and stink and management directives and health care plans. To hell with glaring sunlight and cold. To hell with people who asked questions that were none of their business. To hell with Wilma and her kitty cats.

&nbs
p; Darkness. Peace.

  Provided, he thought wryly, I could find something to eat down here.

  He was just glancing back to tell Ryan they might want to light up again for another quick look when a black, deformed Something flung itself out of the crossing tunnel and smashed at the boy’s head with a club.

  Ryan must have heard or sensed something, for he was dodging, flinching, even as the cluster of dark slumped forms bore him down. Hank heard the hard whack of the club on the boy’s shoulder and heard Ryan yell and knew the blow hadn’t brained him, as had been intended. Ryan yelled again, a scream of pain, as the things seized him. In the darkness Hank could see them, five or six crouching troll-like things, huge eyes catching the far-off reflection of the torchlight.

  Hank was running, bounding down the tunnel, as the things dragged Ryan into the crosscut from which they’d come—a vent shaft back into what was left of an old room-and-pillar main. The others behind Llewellyn clung and blundered together in shock in the darkness, groping and scrambling for lighters and paper.

  Hank was quicker. He slipped through the crosscut bore, seeing the things ahead of him clearly, easily, in the pitchy black of underground. Ryan was struggling, flailing with his right arm, his left clearly useless. Broken collarbone. Hank grabbed a handful of mud-colored clothing, elbowed the flat, gray face that came around to gnash undershot teeth at him; kicked hard at a bent and crouching groin. The narrowness of the seam gave him some advantage, since all six of them couldn’t come at him at once. They had weapons, wrenches and hammers from toolkits; edged metal tore his arm.

  Kicking, snarling, he managed to shove down one of the attackers and get to Ryan, dragged him away, thrust him in the direction of the torchlight that appeared in the end of the seam. “Go!”

  Stumbling, Ryan fled in the direction of the sudden tiny flare of new-made light.

  Hank kicked, cursing, at the things that clutched at him and felt another slash on his arm, and the hot wetness of blood. Bartolo’s voice yelled, “Hank!” behind him and the light came closer.

  The attacking things squinted against the flame, snarling, rage and hunger warring with pain and fear. They fled stumbling, loping, swallowed into the blackness of the shaft.

  “Hank, you okay?”

  “Gimme a minute!” yelled Hank leaning against the wall, trembling so hard he thought he’d fall. “I’m okay! Just gimme a minute!”

  The light stopped, though its ruddy glare continued to flicker over the coal wall. Hank kept his back to it. The cold of the rock under his shoulder steadied him. His blood felt hot, running out over his arm and soaking into his shirt and coverall. His headache had returned, and with it wave after wave of dizziness that he knew had nothing to do with the wound, nothing to do with his earlier fever and aches.

  Or nothing obvious, anyway.

  “What the fuck were they?” he heard Gordy demand, and Ryan gasping over and over again, “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  “Jesus,” said somebody, and somebody else, “Oh, man. What the hell’d they want?”

  “What you think they wanted, meathead?” demanded Roop McDonough’s voice. “They’re these things wanderin’ around down here a mile below the surface, way too far from the nearest take-out, what the hell you think they wanted? Took one look at us and thought, Hey, it’s Pizza Man! He delivers!”

  “Fuck,” said somebody.

  Hank thought, Fuck.

  They were right. They hadn’t even seen what he’d seen, and—hungry, angry, strange animal instincts whispering in his own bones—they were right.

  What the hell had happened? The words came back to him, echoing in circles, riding over the chopped meaningless yammering of the men.

  What had happened to him?

  And what had happened to Sonny Grimes, whose mutated features he had recognized on the slumped, huge-eyed troll he had just fought?

  NEW YORK

  He couldn’t stop his hands shaking. But then, he had always been prone to physical manifestations of anxiety.

  Dr. Louis Chernsky stood by his desk, drapes open, picture window revealing the blackness that had settled on the city like a shroud. An aromatherapy candle sat atop his desk, flickering pitifully, exhaling a pine scent that utterly failed to soothe him.

  He shook out two more Xanax, filled a paper cup from the cooler and gulped them down. He nearly choked as a chuckle sounded from the shadows near the door. A denser silhouette stood framed against the dimness spilling from the hall.

  “Still here. I always figured you had no life of your own.” The voice was thick and husky, halfway between three packs and throat cancer. Chernsky shouldn’t have been able to recognize it, but the scorn was familiar.

  “Mr. Stern.”

  Stern walked slowly into the room, seeming to draw the waiting room’s shadows with him. There was an odd stiffness to his movements, as though his bones had broken and been reset strangely. “I need a session, Louis. I seem to be going through some changes.”

  The candlelight touched him, and Chernsky gasped. Stern’s appearance was shocking. It wasn’t just that his black suit, ever so immaculate, was scuffed and torn, sleeves mere tatters. He seemed larger somehow, more muscular. And his face, lined and pitted now like distressed leather. The wavering candlelight cast hard shadows on distorted bones: the eye sockets more sunken than before, the nose and brow and cheekbones more pronounced.

  Chernsky had a sudden vision of the gargoyle he had seen by moonlight atop Notre Dame years ago. If it could move and walk . . . Chernsky had to stifle a giggle, felt hysteria rising. Stern tilted his head quizzically, and his eyes—in the yellow light, it was hard to tell—but were they yellow?

  “You, uh, should see a physician,” Chernsky said. “This time of night? Emergency room would be hell.” Stern belched, a sound far louder and deeper than it should have been, it came up from the depths of him and assaulted the room. “Pardon me. I have got the worst heartburn.”

  “What do you want?” Chernsky became aware he was wheezing thinly. He longed for the inhaler in his desk but didn’t dare to look away from his terrible visitor.

  “Answers would be nice.” His lips edged into a smile, but his eyes stayed cold.

  “I—don’t have any.” Chernsky tried to swallow, found he couldn’t. Stern was right up to him now.

  He ran a pointed nail delicately across Chernsky’s cheek, not hurting him. “No, that’s right, you’re process oriented. Has to come from within, new experiences to discover.”

  With a cry, Chernsky tried to bolt from the room. Almost at the door, Stern rose up behind him, yanked him back by the collar of his coat. Chernsky screamed, feeling himself pulled off his feet by a strength far beyond anything he would have thought possible.

  In the part of him that was the detached observer, he watched as he flailed and shrieked, the thing that had been his patient shaking him as a dog worried a doll. Then, flying through the air toward the big glass pane, he thought of Susan, of the Winnebago, of Zion and Yellowstone and the decals that went on the back bumper. There was a shattering that filled the world and a coldness of air like a blow and a falling that was all waiting.

  Stern stood back from the jagged, glinting hole, counting the seconds. He didn’t need to see it; it was sweeter this way. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three... From twelve stories below came a sound like a bag of glass breaking. He sidled to the broken pane and looked down, saw the sprawled figure in the splash of moonlight, even more silent than it had been during their sessions.

  “We have to stop now,” Stern said. “I gotta tell ya, it felt different . . . but good.”

  Chapter Twelve

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Rioting started in Petworth as soon as the sun went down. Maybe someone had gotten scared, thought Shango; thought to do a little hoarding when it became clear no lights were on and no cops near. Grocery shelves might be empty tomorrow, and no money to pay prices suddenly escalated to profit from the panic.

&n
bsp; Maybe the Army, guessing what McKay may have guessed, had tried to lock the stuff down. Childhood in the projects had taught Shango everything he needed to know about the fear that stalked Washington’s squalid ring of slums and the violence that lay just below that fear.

  From the window of the duty room of headquarters, across the street from the White House, Shango could see the glow of fire in the sky, hear the steady beat of boots as National guardsmen double-timed it down the streets. More National Guard showed up at about the same time to harden the cordon around the White House itself, and through the trees Shango and the other agents could see the ruddy light of torches illuminating the grounds.

  “Fuckin’ mess,” said Gabriel Cox, the shift supervisor who’d been on duty since eight that morning, when the chief didn’t show.

  Shango had to admit that was a pretty succinct summation of the situation.

  Emergency shelters had been set up in the lobbies and hallways, the conference rooms of every office building along the Mall and in the classrooms and lecture halls of George Washington University for commuters stranded downtown. Some hardy souls had set out on foot around noon on the long trek to Georgetown, Manassas, Arlington, Woodbridge, but the majority of clerks and bureaucrats had stayed put, confident that transportation would be restored. From what he’d heard from the other agents since coming off duty at four, Shango gathered that frustrated and furious crowds had intermittently gathered around the offices of Eastern Bell, shouting for service to resume.

  They’d remained there until it dawned on them slowly that not being able to phone their families was, in fact, the least of their worries.

  Shango himself felt little actual concern for his own family. Home, to him, was a peeling blue double shotgun on Ascension Street near the Mississippi where his sister lived, his Georgetown apartment was just a place to shower and sleep. He knew perfectly well that seven or eight of his mother’s church-lady buddies would look in on her and that in case of a real emergency his sisters and brother would take care of her. They’d band together like they always had and get each other through.