Magic Time

by Marc Scott Zicree

  What would he do then? How would he know?

  When you’ve gone over the whole area, he told himself, and haven’t found what you’re looking for, then it’ll be time to go back and look again. You can’t do it any other way.

  Someone was singing.

  Humming, whispering; Shango knew almost before he opened his eyes, before he shifted his weight forward to peer through the honeysuckle, that it was a crazy. He’d learned the sound of crazies over the years.

  So in a way, the sight of the man kneeling beside the stream didn’t surprise him. Only that he had made it this far from civilization unharmed.

  Traveling with someone, Shango deduced at once, studying the wild black hair curling from beneath that straw cowboy hat, the jangly fruit-salad Hawaiian shirts. Father or brother or pal, he was someone they couldn’t leave behind.

  His back still to Shango, the man rose and sauntered along the bank with a loose-limbed casualness, a here/not-here quality that set him apart.

  Every now and then, the man found some bauble in the wet earth—a water-polished stone, a sprig of greenery—and stooped to claim it, the tangle of buttons pinned to his vest clattering as he bent. Shango saw now that the fellow had a pitifully old musket, all rusted and cracked, slung over his back. What possible good might that do, even as a bluff?

  Hell, thought Shango, starting to rise, it’s only an hour or so till dark, I couldn’t cover the whole of that burn scar anyway. Might as well see if I can find his family, get him back to them if he isn’t going to end up carrying nightsoil for Cadiz’s private garden patch.

  “Stay where you are,” snapped a voice from the top of the bank.

  The man raised his head. Crazy, thought Shango, and something more.

  It was Cadiz and his men, at the top of the bank.

  Shango recognized them from the descriptions: No National guardsmen would have added all those leather jackets and extra weapons belts to their cammies. The burly dude with the Air Cav patch displayed so prominently on his shoulder would be Cadiz; the sour-faced, freckled, curiously wizened man riding at his side was probably the odd and offensive Mr. Brattle. Two of the dozen or so foot soldiers who surrounded the two riders were already making their way down the stream-bank toward the brightly garbed man, who was by this time backing away.

  “Sorry,” he said, in a pleasant voice, “got to go. Wish I could stay.”

  “I said stay put!” snapped Brattle, in a thin harsh voice like a cough. “Where’d you come from? Nobody comes through here without us checking them out.”

  And Cadiz said, “Grab him.”

  That was a mistake. The man flung up his hand and shouted, fireballs flashing in the air. Shango’s breath caught in his throat. Another of them, like the firestarter he’d met near Spotsylvania, the others he’d heard of.

  At the top of the bank, Brattle said in his tight cold voice, “None of that!” and stretched out his hand toward the man.

  The man cried out, clutched his head, doubled over in pain. The fireballs frizzled and died, the smell of smoke thick in the air. The man fell to his knees in the stream, raised his hand as if he feared he would be struck. Brattle said, “Bring him. We’ll need one like that.”

  The foot soldiers seized the man by the arms.

  And at that point, one of the group around Cadiz and Brattle shifted, and Shango saw what was slung on the cruppers of their horses. Sacks of food, big plastic bottles of water such as the National Guard had handed out, a bundle of bright red-and-blue blankets lashed together. Tools—a small hatchet, a saw and some screwdrivers—bulging from faded blue-and-white-striped sheets.

  You bastards, thought Shango, recognizing the few pitiful objects that had stood between the Angels Rest oldsters and starvation. You fucking bastards.

  Anger rose up in him, at all those faces, from that of the woman by the parkway to that child’s he had uncovered only an hour ago—rage at what men had done out of power and hunger and greed.

  You have no right, he thought, to do what you are doing— and his hammer sprang as if of itself into his hand. Chill iron centered in him, terrible and hard, and no, this wasn’t his job, he thought, moving already, striding from the dusky vines and golden flowers, and no, he knew the way to take care of this problem was not to get himself killed by taking on twelve armed guys and a wizard who had the advantage of high ground and crossbows. But sometimes, thought Shango, perfectly cold, perfectly calm, sometimes your starry-eyed bleeding-heart Band-Aid-plastering liberals had a point.

  And he struck like the hammer of Thor, like John Henry driving down the steel that killed him, and knocked the brains out of one man like mac’n’cheese from a broken dish and snapped the other thug’s spine on the backhand swing. He grabbed the Hawaiian-shirted man’s arm and pulled him clear as one of the men on top of the bank fired a crossbow.

  And then fear hit him. Crippling, staggering terror that iced his stomach and dropped him to his knees.

  Panic flooded him, screamed at him to drop everything and RUN—

  And looking up at the top of the bank, he saw the sour, freckled face of Douglas Brattle smile.

  That was his power, Shango understood.

  He could throw Fear.

  Shango raised his hammer in his hand.

  Bellowing like thunder, he charged straight up the bank, swinging the weapon around his head. A man leveled a crossbow at him, and he scrambled up anyway, not ceasing to shout, not ceasing the gush of rage that the shout summoned from his pounding heart.

  Anger poured out of him, hot as blood from a wound, the anger a weapon like the hammer, that nothing could disable or fuck up.

  And then something gleaming flashed across the bowman’s weapon, and he heard the fiberglass crossbow snap and the sprang! of the breaking string, the scream of the bowman as the arrow leaped wildly back into his face. The man ran shrieking into the woods, spraying blood.

  The gleaming thing had been a sword.

  And amid the chaos and the screams and the blood rage pounding within him, Shango realized others had entered the fray alongside him.

  Brattle’s horse reared, and Cadiz drove his mount forward, spear leveled. Shango smote the spear aside with his hammer, smote aside the sword the man drew.

  He grabbed Cadiz’s wrist and hauled him from the horse and into the tangle of fern underfoot, drove his boot into the side of his ribs, felt bone break, as this man must have broken the bones of Mrs. Close and Mr. Dean and the others who had taken Shango in.

  There was a cry behind him, and he spied another militiaman falling as a lean, muscular young woman smashed him down with a blow from her crossbow, arcing it wide like a club. Then, with a speed and agility he found impressive, the woman wheeled, loading the crossbow as a third rider drove down on her. She fired, falling back, her arrow lodging in the rider’s shoulder, flinging him backward off the horse to smash on the rocks.

  And now all was confusion, a blur of bodies and blades, of crushing movement. Something slashed along his cheek, he drove the attacker back with his boot. Others tried to take him around the waist, bring him down, but he threw them off, battered them away.

  Beyond this, as if lit by lightning, he glimpsed the young swordsman, forcing back two of the militiamen, who parried with big hunting knives, eager to gut him. The young man was no professional, that was clear. But he fought with a fire, a determination, that brought to Shango’s mind his own crazy-ass self as he’d gone screaming up the creek bank.

  And there was another man, too, an older man, wielding a length of pipe against the bastards, shouting a torrent of curses in something that sounded like Russian.

  Shango sought again for Cadiz, couldn’t find him. A man with three gold teeth lunged at him with a bayonet. Shango sidestepped it, drove the head of his hammer into the man’s solar plexus, sending him staggering back to collapse amid the rushes, choking.

  Shango straightened, saw the girl with the crossbow firing off a shot into the thigh of one of the Russia
n’s adversaries, unaware that a spearman was running at her own undefended back.

  “No!” The word rang out over the clearing and—though it was high and musical—it took Shango an instant to realize it wasn’t his own thought.

  Then in the green dusk, there was a brightness like a second sun.

  He saw to his astonishment a glowing, beautiful child skimming in the air like a stone skipped over water. The creature overtook the spearman and settled near the woman, the light extending out to canopy her.

  The spearman cried out in terror, but his momentum was carrying him, and his spear struck the glowing canopy, its wood fracturing as though the light were solid, sending the barbed metal tip of the spear shooting back and upward into the man’s own throat.

  He made a gurgling, surprised sound and fell, gasping out his life.

  The fear-caster wheeled his horse and pelted away into the trees.

  Shango swung around, to find the surviving men gone. He was panting, trembling, the rush of anger that had lighted his whole body ebbing, leaving ash and shock and dizziness in its wake.

  The ghostly, glimmering girl hovered over the dead man, staring down at her handiwork, and she looked sickened. She appeared to be twelve or thirteen years old, Shango’s niece Kitta’s age, and smaller than she should have been, were she human.

  “How’d you do that?” the muscular young woman asked her quietly, and it was clear to Shango that she both knew this girl and knew nothing of her power.

  “I—I don’t know,” the girl stammered, settling like a dragonfly, ready to rise and flee. Her white hair floated weightless around a thin, haunted face. “I was just mad and scared, and I wanted him to stop.”

  Shango had heard of such creatures in his travels, had even perhaps glimpsed one far in the distance over Arlington, a light moving quickly through the midnight sky, in this world where he had thought lights no longer moved in the heavens. Fireflies, he’d heard them called, or feys, or little bright fuckers.

  The man in the Hawaiian shirts was clambering up the bank, panting, helped by the curly-haired young swordsman. “You okay, Goldie?”

  “I’m fine,” said Goldie, looking around him with those hectic brown eyes, “though there are mental health professionals in several metropolitan areas who might beg to differ.”

  The glowing girl-angel regarded Shango with her blue-in-blue eyes and whispered, “Are you all right?”

  “Yes. Thank you, miss.” He inclined his head and, looking around him, saw that he’d killed one of Cadiz’s men on top of the stream bank, though he had no conscious memory of it.

  Kneeling, he cleaned the head of his hammer in the stream, the blood trailing away, his hands shaking as they’d never shaken on night bombings raids in the Gulf.

  “Thank you for helping him,” the young man said, sheathing his sword and approaching Shango and, in the way he held himself, his easy air of authority, left no doubt as to who was leader of the group. “I’m Cal Griffin,” he added, and introduced the others.

  Shango regarded them as they stood together, and, though it was obvious they were travelers, they seemed neither refugees nor brigands. Perhaps, he reflected, they were pilgrims. Like himself.

  “My name’s Larry Shango,” he said, sliding the weapon back into the straps of his backpack, standing up again. “And I’d suggest we make tracks out of here, before more company comes.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  With the young man called Cal Griffin, with Colleen Brooks and Dr. Lysenko and Goldie and Tina, Shango returned to Angels Rest. As he expected he found the house looted, the old men and women who had sheltered there dead. They had been clubbed like cattle, presumably a fate Cadiz considered more merciful than being left to starve.

  In the potting shed behind the shady, silent house, under the dispassionate moon, they found a broken-handled shovel Cadiz had left and began digging a mass grave. Through all of this, Shango said little of himself and nothing of the business that had brought him here.

  “The guy’s military or security services, I know the vibe from my dad,” Colleen told Cal, as the others spelled them on the digging. “Maybe AWOL.”

  “No,” said Cal. “He doesn’t strike me as a man to walk away.” He glanced over at the big man working the shovel, shirtless now, the lantern light showing the dark sheen of him in the night air. His eyes were mirror mazes that reflected back the viewer, that gave up nothing. But in his actions by the creek, in his watchfulness and in the quiet, deep tenor of his voice, Cal read compassion.

  As they laid the bodies in the pit, Goldie murmured some words from the Bhagavad Gita, and Doc said a blessing. Then they filled in the hole, and Shango found them a campsite that was shielded and secure.

  Huddled beside the fire, Cal told Shango of the events in New York, of the man who’d changed into a dragon, and of what he’d seen in the tunnels. He spoke of the miracles they had encountered, cruel and otherwise, along the road, and of the Plant Lady in the little town off the Patuxent. And he told him of the place they sought called Wish Heart.

  To all of this, Shango listened attentively, and nodded, and observed, “Staying off the beaten path, sounds like you’ve had an easier ride of it.” But he didn’t tell them of the Source Project, or of D.C. And looking across the fire at Cal, seeing the lines of weariness on the face that was so youthful, and the way those hazel eyes followed the flare-girl Tina with such worry and such grief, Shango thought of the ties of obligation and affection and relation, thought of his family in New Orleans, and of Czernas and McKay.

  A log broke and fell in the sheltered fire. A flake of light fell across Colleen Brooks, nearly invisible in the trees, listening, standing guard; Shango saw her eyes, and they were on Cal, with a look in them that told him things that Cal had probably never seen. And Cal was watching Goldie, worried about the man but believing, caring for him. And Doc’s gaze moved among them, concerned and at rest.

  People holding each other’s hands in the night.

  “What about you?” Cal asked Shango. “Where are you bound?”

  “Here,” said Shango, the word speaking double to him. Where are you going, and to what place are you tied?

  Here.

  “I came to find a woman who was on the plane that crashed here. I don’t think she survived,” he added, seeing the way Cal’s eyes shifted, “but she had something, was carrying something, that I was sent to find. And I see now it’s going to be a long search, especially if I’ve got a pissed-off gang of skinheads runnin’ around the woods lookin’ for me.” He thought of those cold mad coal-black eyes in the fear-caster Brattle’s pale face, and of what Cadiz and his band would do to him if they caught him again.

  “What you’re looking for . . . is it bigger than a breadbox,” asked Goldie softly, “and smaller than the Empire State Building?”

  Shango glanced up and met the man’s wild brown eyes. A crazy, he thought, but he had seen the fireballs leap and blaze from his hands.

  To his own surprise he heard his voice saying, “No. It’s just a couple of sheets of paper, folded up small. She probably glued it in her purse lining. That’s what she usually did.”

  “Did you know her?”

  “I met her once or twice.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Jerri Bilmer. Geraldine.”

  Goldie chewed meditatively on his corn chowder. “You have anything she owned, or touched, or wore?”

  “No.”

  Goldie sighed and set his bowl aside, rising. “You’re gonna make me break a sweat, aren’t you?”

  They insisted on going with him to the plane, despite his protests. In the end, his pragmatism won out. With Cadiz and Brattle in the woods somewhere, Shango needed whatever help he could get—even if his common sense told him magic tricks were ridiculous, that this was insanity.

  These were insane times.

  Still, as morning had broken and they’d set off, he had demanded that the glowing girl and the Russian and the Brooks
woman stay behind in camp, sheltered, protected. No need to draw them all into the crosshairs.

  So now Shango stood beside the blackened, sheared metal of United 1046 out of Houston, Griffin beside him, alert, his sword unsheathed, while Goldman bent beside a crumpled piece of fuselage and scooped a handful of fine gray ash that might once have been part of a seat cushion, or a backpack, or a dress. Standing, he sifted it slowly in his hand. There was no mirth to him now, no hint of the Woodstock Nation clown.

  “What would she have been thinking about at the end?” Goldie asked Shango. “Her family, loved ones?”

  “No . . . about the mission, and failing.” And Shango realized he was speaking too of himself.

  As Goldman concentrated, his color drained, and he looked wounded. He took a couple of hesitant steps to his left and then turned back and strode between two willows.

  He led them to the sad, crumpled object that had been Jerri Bilmer.

  She had been flung out of the dissolving plane and decapitated by flying debris. Shango soon found her purse under a shattered wing section that had protected it. Delicately, he peeled back the lining and revealed the folded sheets of paper that had cost Bilmer her life and might yet cost him his. Carefully, he unfolded them, drew them apart. Water had soaked most of the sheets, but the inner one was readable. A list of personnel, of home addresses. A last-minute marginal note concerning buffalo and wolves and blue lightning that crawled from the ground.

  And that was all.

  Shango turned them over in his hands, fighting the urge to laugh. All this, he thought, remembering the chaos of Dulles and the horror of plane after wrecked plane that he’d patiently searched, pawing through the corpses of people he didn’t know, rifling the burned, soaked luggage that was all that remained of thousands of ended lives, and in the end getting only this.

  “That what you were looking for?”

  Shango looked to Cal. The young man was watching him, concern in his dark eyes, as if he saw how close Shango was to ripping the papers into white flakes of nothingness, releasing them to the winds that would carry off his soul and his life as well.