Magic Time

by Marc Scott Zicree

  “Goldie,” Cal spoke tentatively, “for some folks, what happened was a good thing.”

  Goldie stopped whistling, though he kept his eyes on the musket. “For some. I suppose, if pressed, I myself could offer a testimonial.”

  “What do you think it means?”

  Goldie rubbed a spot on the barrel harder, making no change in its pitted surface, glaring at it as if his will could make it resolve into something shining and unsoiled and new.

  “What it means,” he answered after a long silence and would say no more.

  In the first twenty-four hours of what Shango had come to think of as the Darkness, the National Guard had established a depot in Lynchburg, partly to collect stock from the horse farms in Albermarle County and mostly to render whatever aid was possible to those in the mountain country beyond. In Albermarle County, there was a stockbreeder named Cadiz (or Gadiz or Cattes, the survivors at the Angels Rest Retirement Community pronounced it several different ways), an ex-Reservist and survivalist who was of the opinion that everyone should have been ready for catastrophe and who wasn’t about to let the National Guard confiscate his stockpiles of food and water to feed lazy and inefficient parasites who had not been as prudent as he.

  As the days and weeks of darkness and hunger progressed and fewer and fewer messages came down highway 95 from Washington, this had developed into what Mrs. Close at Angels Rest called “a situation”—exacerbated by the usual local politics and personalities—culminating in the cessation a week ago of any visits to Angels Rest by the National guardsmen.

  “They didn’t come real often,” the old lady told Shango, pausing in her laborious measuring out of thrice-used tea leaves to flavor the morning’s water rations. “But that nice Captain Brady used to make sure one of his men got up here every few days with something. And as long as he and his men came around, nobody bothered us much.” Beyond the shade of the gallery outside the kitchen, Shango could see the two remaining attendants at work laying out bedding— bright red-and-blue blankets, worn blue-striped sheets—on the unkempt lawn and rhododendron bushes, airing it in the absence of a regular supply of wash water. Beyond, a neat row of brown rectangles under the trees marked where those who’d been on oxygen or dialysis had been buried, the new grass like a mist of pale green velvet. Mrs. Close supported herself on the edge of the table when she got up to start the water boiling on the stove—one of the other residents had converted it from gas to wood—and Shango got quickly to his feet and fetched the heavy kettle.

  “Thank you, dear.” She smiled up at him. She was thin as a bundle of sticks, and her hands shook with a steady, constant tremor, as if a motor within were off balance. “Mr. Dean says he saw parties of Mr. Cadiz’s men riding in the woods the day before yesterday, carrying spears and arrows, he said, and wearing those camouflage jackets the National guardsmen wore.” Mr. Dean was the community’s scout, seventy-seven and the only Angels Rest inmate capable of walking more than a mile.

  She went on worriedly, “Mr. Dean also says they were riding horses the National guardsmen had the week before. Mr. Dean sometimes gets a little confused about people, but he’s very sharp on horses, so you might want to stay away from Lynchburg. Mr. Cadiz . . .” She glanced around nervously and lowered her voice in embarrassment.

  “Mr. Cadiz is very prejudiced against—well, he’s said some really awful things about Negroes.” She looked ashamed even to bring the matter up, and Shango was touched by her delicacy.

  “And if he’s taken over the National Guard post and has all their weapons, you might want to be careful. Mr. Dean told us some other things, too, about that horrible Douglas Brattle—Mr. Cadiz’s neighbor—who’s writing that book on torture, of all things, and has all those terrible books and pictures at his house. But I think Mr. Dean must be confused about that.”

  “About what?” Shango poured the hot water into the community teapot. He was still getting over his shock that the inmates of Angels Rest—a dozen trembling oldsters and the two nurses—had even let him through the gate, instead of locking it and the doors against him, not that either the honeysuckle-covered perimeter wall or the unbarred, ample windows of the old house would stand up to anything resembling a determined assault. The fact that they’d not only admitted him but had voted to share their tiny stores of food and water with him without demanding work in return, made him want to sit them all down and lecture them about the facts of life: don’t trust anybody, make sure you’ve got enough. . . .

  He’d spent yesterday afternoon felling trees in the surrounding woods and hauling them up to the kitchen and repairing the plastic rainwater catches. His arms were now sore and stiff.

  “About Mr. Brattle—well—being able to do things. Mr. Dean says Mr. Brattle could make a horse spook just by looking at it, and when one of the men argued with Mr. Cadiz, Mr. Brattle sort of—sort of waved at him, and the man doubled over and almost fell down.”

  And that explained, thought Shango grimly, what probably happened to that nice Captain Brady and the National Guard.

  The thought of it shivered across his skin like rat’s feet.

  In his widening search for United Flight 1046, he’d heard of people with unexplained powers. Whispers at first, and he’d put them aside as fear-fed rumors. Then near Spotsylvania he’d encountered a woman who could start or extinguish fires just by looking at wood. Something was turning people into gremlins or trogs or boogies or whatever else they were called—and apparently turning people into other things as well.

  No wonder McKay had looked scared that first morning, when everyone else was just concerned because the lights were out.

  Hang on, Chief, he thought. The fear that had grown inside him for weeks now tore at him like broken glass. He reached into the pocket of his shorts, touched the dog tag he’d taken from Czernas’ backpack. Just hang on and keep the lid on things. I’ll get you whatever Bilmer knew, whatever Bilmer had.

  And then what?

  He looked out the windows again, to the neat row of grass-dusted graves.

  “Now, you watch out for yourself in those woods.” Mrs. Close pressed into Shango’s hand a block of much-recycled tinfoil enclosing bread that Shango knew the community could not spare. “I don’t suppose . . .” She bit her lower lip. Tiny and fragile, she couldn’t have weighed eighty-five pounds; the medication that had kept her thyroid from over-burning—devouring her body at a rate faster than food could replenish it—had long since run out. “I don’t suppose when you’ve looked at that plane wreck Mr. Dean gave you the map to, you could come back? Mr. Dean says Mr. Cadiz and his men seem to be collecting all the food and water and things and taking them back to Lynchburg for their own families and people who’ll work for them. We don’t have very much here to begin with, and I’m sure none of us are in any shape to work for Mr. Cadiz even if we wanted to. If he takes what we have, or if he hurts Mrs. Soniat or Mrs. Metcalf, I don’t know what we’ll do.”

  His father had brought him up not to lie. “Is it yes or is it no?” he’d say. “Don’t say yes and then do no. That’s being a coward, and a liar.”

  But he couldn’t speak, knowing that when he left this place she would die. They all would die. He’d done what he could to bar the windows with two-by-fours, had helped them set up a lookout post on the roof, had given them Czernas’ binoculars, and he knew these defenses would do no good at all.

  In his mind he saw Czernas in the hot sunlight of the parkway, standing before that beautiful old woman in the green sweatpants: that woman who might be dead now, as Czernas was dead. Like Czernas, he could not speak.

  Mrs. Close patted his arm gently and smiled her understanding. “It’s all right,” she said. Shango wondered how many times this woman had heard Sorry, we can’t, since her family had put her in Angels Rest. “You just do what you can, dear, and we’ll hang on here. We’re a lot tougher than we look. It was sweet of you to stay and cut the wood and put those bars on the windows.”

  “I’m sorry,�
�� he said, meaning it, hurting inside for her courage.

  “We’ll be all right,” she said again. “You be careful out there.”

  In Charlottesville they’d told him about four planes that had come down south of town, in the green woodlands that lay along the knees of the mountains. One of these had proved to be an American flight, he’d seen the fuselage of the plane and hadn’t gone any nearer than that. The other had burst its belly open when it first hit the ground and had spewed passengers, seats, luggage over about a thousand yards of highway 29. Shango had searched the rotted, unburied corpses until he’d found half of a boarding pass that identified it as an Air France plane.

  Old Mr. Dean, who didn’t look like he could stand up to a stiff wind, had gone over Shango’s map last night and marked the precise location of the third plane, as well as innumerable minor landmarks of the woods. The witnesses at Angels Rest had all seen it come down, catching a wing on the ground and pinwheeling as it sheared apart; using the map and his compass—at least that still worked—Shango set up a grid, doing alone and without equipment a task that usually fell to professional investigation teams with helicopters, dogs, radio communication and metal detectors at their disposal. He worked doggedly, patiently, pacing himself; rationing his energy and his concentration as he’d learned to ration water and food.

  There was little chance McKay or anyone else would have recognized him as the quiet, blue-blazered agent of the White House detail he’d been a few weeks ago. He was ragged and indescribably filthy—making it more of a wonder that the folks at Angels Rest had let him through the gate—and the clothes he’d gleaned from the luggage of downed planes were stained, mismatched and torn. He kept his beard clipped short but it started high, just under his cheekbones, and above it his eyes were red-rimmed, hollow with fatigue. It was as if all the disguise he’d worn for years in the service, all the neatness and presentability that made him invisible, had worn away, leaving . . .

  What?

  Exhaustion had ground him down to the point of feeling very little, either of revulsion or pity—only weariness, and the growing dread he felt every time he thought of McKay, of the man he should have been protecting but wasn’t.

  He’ll think I’m dead, Shango thought. Or worse, that I’ve given up, leaving him, and by now there’s no one else he can send.

  And his mind turned backward on itself, conjuring images of despair and ruin until he forced it to stop, forced himself to concentrate on the task at hand. If she was on a plane, if her stuff was on a plane, it’ll be out here somewhere.

  One chance, out of how many?

  Shut up and search, he told himself. Shut up and do your job. If it’s here, I’ll find it. There was nothing else but that.

  The first body he found, at the edge of a burn scar in the thin woods a few miles from Angels Rest, had a boarding pass in what had been her jeans pocket. It was hard to read— blood and fluids from three weeks of decay had badly discolored the card, and animals had mauled the body—but he made out the flight information.

  United 1046 from Houston.

  Shango closed his eyes and thought, Shit. He sat down on the ground, shocked that he’d actually found the flight. That it had, in fact, come down here, instead of clear the hell on the other side of the Appalachians. For a moment he felt disoriented, like a dog who’d chased a Cadillac and then actually caught it.

  Then, hearing his mother’s admonishing voice in his mind, he added, Thank you, God.

  And opening his eyes again, he viewed the scene of the wreck.

  Coming down without instruments, the big 747 had caught wind shear off the Allegheny Plateau, had veered over on its side, caught its wing and bounced. At least that’s what Shango guessed from what little he knew about flight dynamics, coupled with Mrs. Close’s description. The thing must have been burning after the first bounce. Bodies, seats, luggage, debris would be scattered all over the back half of Albermarle County. Shango could see twisted hunks of metal on the ground among the charred trees, a couple of corkscrewed seats, a smashed and gutted suitcase, a shattered stroller. Close by, the stink of decay and a humming column of flies marked another body.

  He gritted his teeth and walked to the second body, scanning the ground as he went.

  For two days, he searched.

  He found about a hundred and fifty suitcases, most of which had been torn open or burst on impact: suits, dresses, belts, scarves, cosmetics exploding among the light ferns and creepers. A Bally loafer had survived by falling into a puddle. A woman’s mauve-and-pale-green scarf incorporated into a squirrel’s nest. An old man’s cane embedded in an elm tree as if it had been fired from a gun.

  Some of the bodies had fared the same, torn to pieces on impact. This wasn’t the first wreck Shango had checked out, nor the first time he’d moved aside a bush expecting to see a body at the end of a protruding leg that turned out not to have one. He didn’t know whether the matter-of-factness he felt was because of exhaustion or because, after three weeks of heat and flies and animals, what he found didn’t look particularly human anymore. It was just meat.

  What he didn’t feel by day, he felt in his nightmares at night—but in his nightmares, the bodies all had faces: his mother, his brother, his father. Mrs. Close. The guy in the tower with the sling on his arm. Czernas. McKay. And he’d wake sweating in the dark, in whatever burrow he’d found for himself, hearing the foxes fighting over a severed hand.

  The second day he found the tail section, eighteen people still more or less seat-belted into the twisted wreckage. There was a beverage service cart and most of a flight attendant nearby.

  Earphones half-crushed, gray worms in the fast-growing new creepers underfoot. Somebody’s portable CD player with a Gregorian chant disc still in it. A slightly waterlogged copy of The Velveteen Rabbit: after a long time, if you love enough and are loved, you lose all your soft plush and your stitching gets a little loose and you get a little faded and a little saggy and you become Real.

  And Real is the best that you can be.

  Voices rang behind him in the woods.

  Shango shoved the book into his backpack and slithered into the nearest cover, a thicket of sugarberry brambles near the broken impact crater of a seat section, keeping his head down and balling his body small. He heard the soft whuffle of horses and the creak of leather, not too near but near enough they’d have seen him; a man’s voice said, “—live off the country till we get that first crop in. Then we’ll be able to increase their rations. Till then they’re lucky they’re getting anything. Bastards couldn’t be bothered to lay up provisions, who the hell’d they think was going to feed them?”

  Shango waited till the noises faded utterly, then crept from the thicket. It was late afternoon, and he had two hours or so of daylight left. But instead of returning at once to his search, he made his way back to a stream cut he’d marked earlier in the day as a place to hole up for the night. Spring runs had undercut the bank and wild honeysuckle grew down over it, leaving a hidey hole behind. Shango dipped up water in one hand, the other hand ready on his knife, listening, always listening, to the birdsong and the soft rustlings of beasts in the woods.

  The last body he’d found had been a boy of six or seven, burned, dismembered by foxes. Why that child’s body affected him he didn’t know. Maybe because a section of seat had covered the face, so that when he’d tipped it clear to look for flight bags or purses, the flesh had still been in place, recognizable to those who’d loved this boy.

  But they were probably dead, too.

  And he thought, Those who kept the Source in existence-—those who organized it, funded it, lied about it to McKay— are the people who’re going to end up with the food and the water and the protection that everyone else is dying without.

  Whoever they are, they, too, knew what it meant when the lights went out.

  Anger flamed within him. Anger beyond anything he’d thought himself capable of feeling, a volcano, a cataclysm: hatred for the men w
ho had killed that child.

  Hatred followed by an exhaustion so intense that it made him dizzy and sick.

  He crawled behind the honeysuckle, sat with the damp cool clay of the bank against his back.

  McKay was a part of it, he thought. YOU were a part of it. All this time, being a cog in their wheel, being good at your job and proud to be good at your job. And your job was to protect the men who secretly, quietly, were working on this.

  He remembered how good it had felt, to hear Cox or McKay say, He’s good at his job. He’s the best. How good it had felt to have a scorepad that said, “Ninety-nine out of a hundred rounds in the target zone”; to spot some questionable yo-yo in a crowd and remove him, or to establish a perimeter or make a transfer from door to car without slip-ups. That sense of accomplishment. Something apart from, beyond, the chaos in which he’d grown up, the chaos of watching his father and mother giving their time and money and attention to a thousand things besides their children: buying one too many rounds of beers for friends, being gone with the church ladies one too many nights. No time, gotta go . . . Not this week, honey, next week . . .

  And it had all been betrayal, in the end. It had all been to protect the people who thought that the risk of this—this horror, this catastrophe—coming to pass was less important than getting power.

  He thought, I will find Bilmer. I will get her notes, her evidence, back to McKay. And then I will protect McKay from these people, because whoever they are, they will destroy him before they’ll admit that they were wrong.

  Shango closed his eyes. He’d be able to go over about another square mile of woods before it got too dark to see. He’d been marking them off on Mr. Dean’s map: oak tree to pond, covered. Pond to birches, covered. Birches to the second burn scar, covered.

  But what if he’d missed something? What if a fox had dragged Bilmer’s body, or purse, or luggage away to its hole? The next section to search, beyond the second burn scar, might contain something, but what if the papers themselves had become exposed?