Magic Time

by Marc Scott Zicree

  Bob turned his head on his pillow, looked pleadingly at Cal. “Please. Tell me. What’s happening here?”

  Again, thought crashed into Cal, guilty, frantic, desperate, justifying, words all tumbled and overlapping, a jumbled mea culpa and defense. PURE RESEARCH CHANGED OBJECTED CHANGED DEVIL’S BARGAIN CHANGED ME CHANGED NO CHANGE LOVE BOB LOVE NO—

  Cal looked at Bob, trying to steady himself, trying to focus through the screaming in his mind.

  Desperation-driven, panic-driven madness, Cal could empathize with. But in the face of this howling self-justification, everything in Cal rebelled.

  “You should know,” Cal’s low voice trembled, every word a fierce battle, “You have a choice. You have a—”

  NO NO NO.

  It thundered in Cal’s brain, the room itself shaking, tortured, accusatory.

  NO TELL NO BLOCKING DOORWAY BLOCKING HOLDING CLOSED CAN’T OPEN SWALLOW WHOLE SWALLOW ME I CEASE WHO WHAT I AM MONSTER.

  Cal battled to respond, to answer in words or thoughts, but the wall against him felt as solid as stone. For Fred Wishart, the continued existence of his fellow beings had fallen to nothing in the face of this higher imperative, his need to cling to Bob.

  All in Boone’s Gap were to die.

  Cal turned once more to the waiting Bob, clearly screened somehow from Fred’s words. Sensing it might end his own life, Cal struggled to speak.

  NO NO NO. It was like a hurricane. Cal staggered back, grasping the doorframe. UNDERSTAND UNDERSTAND BOB DIES IT TAKES ME.

  Fred Wishart ran distracted starry fingers through firelight hair, and his wild desolate eyes shifted—boring into Tina.

  AND IT TAKES HER.

  Cal couldn’t move. He felt as if he were falling away from himself. TAKE HER. Tina. Into the monster’s maw.

  Bob’s eyes were on him. Waiting. While, in an instant that would, in the future, seem to stretch on for an eternity, Cal’s voice was still.

  Suddenly, the far window exploded inward and a small gray body flung itself through the opening, landing with a springy lightness. It whipped its big head around and spotted Bob, hurled itself toward the bed with a chunk of concrete raised high in its hands.

  Cal screamed, “No!” as Fred Wishart’s head snapped up, eyes no longer human, no longer of the living earth at all, a blazing blue horror of darkness. Wishart opened his mouth, and fire poured out, light streamed from his eyes. The whole fabric of the house wrenched and twisted, crushing inward, and the grunter was hurled to the floor, swept into a corner like a bug by a broom.

  Glass shattered and more grunters were pouring in, through both windows now. Wishart swung his glare around to them, and they were caught and smashed back, cracking the walls, their necks snapping as they slid limply down.

  But now the first grunter was back up, launching himself toward Bob. A heavy respirator lurched from its base, flew killingly through the air at him.

  “Hank!” Cal saw that Wilma Hanson had burst in through the hall door. She dove between Hank and the respirator. It caught her hard, driving her back into Hank, ramming them against the wall, both of them splaying unmoving on the floor.

  And now Cal was aware of another, oppressive presence tearing into existence in the room, engulfing the air and his mind, a conquering, clamorous disputation of voices.

  Fred Wishart cried out, a wail of despair, hands thrashing in denial, refusal, but his concentration had been broken. Shining chaos, darkness that blazed like fire, seized him, collapsing him and capturing him and spinning him away into a whirlpool of nothingness and everything. And in the same unreal, horrific instant Cal saw Bob collapse like a marionette with its strings cut.

  “Cal!” Tina tried to cling to him.

  He reached frantically for her, but he was hurled back, stunned, into the wall. He saw her swept away, whirling like a glowing milkweed pod, twisting in the air, helpless in the clutch of remorseless power. He thought he screamed her name, later his voice was hoarse from shouting, but he had no recollection of any sound coming out. His whole soul screamed NO! NO! NO! and he reached for her in a nightmare.

  And in a nightmare she was gone.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Lantern light wavered over the broken ceiling, showing where plaster and lathe had been blown upward, darkness gaping overhead.

  Tina, thought Cal. Oh, Tina.

  He closed his eyes. “He’s breathing,” said Doc.

  Of course I’m breathing. It was only then he became aware that his head was being supported, something cold pressed to the back of his neck.

  “Can you hear us?” came Doc’s voice, and Cal realized the physician wasn’t speaking to him.

  He cracked open his eyes. A dim dawnlight showed through the shattered windows and ceiling, though most of the light came from the lantern.

  “He’s coming around.” It was Colleen’s voice. It was she cradling him.

  Cal turned his head slightly, saw Doc crouched by the far window, just turning toward him. Before him lay Hank’s crumpled form, Wilma bent on Hank’s far side, grasping his hand. To Goldie, who stood behind him, Doc said, “Bring the lantern.”

  Doc limped to Cal and lowered himself stiffly, scrutinizing Cal’s eyes. Then he nodded toward Hank. “He’s going to be all right, thanks to her.” He smiled wearily. “A broken shoulder in trade for a life.” Cal squinted against the glare of the lantern in Goldie’s hand, saw Hank stir. Then he became aware of another figure emerging from shadows.

  It was Bob Wishart.

  Goldie stepped aside as Bob neared. And in a voice surprisingly strong, with no hint of disorientation or weakness, Bob said, “I’m so very sorry.”

  Cal’s focus shifted again to the blown-out ceiling, to the memory of Tina being ripped screaming away.

  “She’s alive; I can feel it,” Bob said. “And my brother, too.” His voice turned angry. “But I can’t tell where.”

  Cal struggled to sit up, gasped as a fist of pain struck his ribs. Doc said, “No quick movements till those are taped.”

  Bob looked to the floor. “Maybe that thing changed him. Or maybe he was someone I never knew.” His eyes were glistening. “His hold on the town is broken. But he—it—he was willing to kill people. A piece of that poison is in me . . . keeping me alive.”

  Cal closed his eyes. Fred Wishart, willing to sacrifice anyone, anything to save the one he loved. And Cal had seen an identical capacity in himself.

  Colleen brushed the hair from Cal’s face, saw the anguish there. “We’ll find her.”

  Unwilling, unable, to share his thoughts, Cal looked away toward the shards of glass that glinted, irreparable, across the floor.

  “Mr. Shango.” General Christiansen rose from behind the enormous cypresswood desk in the Health Building office as Shango was shown into the room. He held out his hand; his khaki uniform was neat, but like everyone else in Washington he smelled, water being at a premium now. Cisterns stood in every courtyard, on every roof, to catch the rain; half the trees on the Mall had already been cut, to boil it and to cook. Shango wondered what the city would do when winter came—if there would be a city, then. The screened and iron-barred windows were thrown wide, and the sounds of horses, and the jangle and creak of the few National guardsmen passing back and forth in the courtyard, sounded loud against the deathly silence.

  “I apologize most sincerely that you had to wait so long,” the general said as Shango shook his hand. “Since the government moved up to Camp David, there’s only been a skeleton force here in town. I was in Arlington, getting records into storage. We have to work with the daylight, as I’m sure you know.”

  The mouth moved but the pale eyes studied him, reading his face. All the other functionaries who’d handed Shango along that day had just looked tired, incurious. Too beaten-down to care about anything except getting a loose end tied up and maybe too hungry, too.

  Christiansen was wary.

  Shango wondered why.

  “Everyone’s up at Camp David
now?” he asked.

  The general nodded. “Once cholera broke out, we didn’t really have any choice. We did what we could, but without med support—without sewage treatment or even any viable means of securing adequate drinking water—there wasn’t much we could do. Shortly after martial law was declared, all key government personnel were evacuated.”

  Leaving the rest to die, thought Shango. If not of cholera, of those other sewer-borne plagues like typhoid, or of the yellow fever that almost certainly hummed on the mosquito-ridden air the moment the sun went down. Walking through the silent, stinking streets, past block after block of empty apartment buildings, of cars that had even yet not been hauled away, Shango had seen the rats coming and going on steps and through the half-open doors and windows with fat, saucy impunity. He knew why they looked so well-fed. One of the secretaries who’d showed him into or out of an office earlier in the day had mentioned that in many places the living had simply abandoned the dead where they lay. Cleanup crews were still being drafted but the work was slow. There were whole neighborhoods untouched after the cholera had swept through.

  They’re still dyin’ out there, more every day, she had told him, handing him a small cup of flat-tasting water. Hospitals and clinics are packed, and you can’t get in most of ’em. You be careful what you drink.

  “Is Mr. McKay all right?”

  Christiansen glanced down and to the side, then back up to meet Shango’s eyes. “He’s fine.”

  He’s dead, thought Shango, understanding that what Herman Goldman had told him in the woods of Virginia was true. When first he’d heard that psych 101 lecture about the way a liar’s eyes move when he or she fishes for a lie, he had thought it bullshit. But years of watching men from behind McKay’s shoulder or while on duty outside an ambassador’s suite had confirmed it. Practiced liars, no. Guys in other branches of the service, who ran cover for a living, no. The slightly crazy who half-believe their own tales, no. But the general run of the untruthful look aside and down, as if seeking a concealed crib-sheet.

  “He asked me to go up to Philadelphia, to bring a man named Goldman down here, a professor of some kind in particle physics,” Shango lied, concentrating on keeping his own eyes steadily on the general’s. “I couldn’t find him; nobody’d seen him after the rioting the first night.”

  Christiansen nodded, “He told us you’d gone to Philly, but not why. Goldman? A professor?”

  “He called him that,” Shango responded evenly, “but beyond that he didn’t say, not even if he lived there or was just coming in. Is Ms. Diaz still in town? Or Al Guthrie?” He named two of McKay’s inner circle and wasn’t surprised at all when Christiansen shook his head.

  “Guthrie was one of the first victims of the cholera,” he said. “I think Nina Diaz is at Camp David; I know she was in the group that went up there.”

  My black ass. Shango made his brow pucker a little with false consideration as he nodded. Through the windows the stink of the city was choking. He wondered how any were still able to live there, what they were living on, how they existed once the food ran low. FEMA, and the National Guard, and all the other emergency relief organizations, were set up to quickly transfer necessaries from one area to another, not to deal with everything coming to a halt at once. Shango wondered how the coup had been undertaken, and who had ultimately come out on top. He has enemies, Czernas had said: the military who had considered him unwise, the corporations who had regarded him as a threat to their network of favors and support. McKay had known that, to cover up the Source, he was being betrayed at the highest level.

  “See Captain Nye about putting you up in the barracks for the night.” Christiansen glanced at the hot gold light slanting through the window. “We’ll arrange transport for you up to Camp David in the morning. I wouldn’t advise you going very far outside the compound here,” he added, as Shango thanked him and turned to leave. “We’ve been able to keep order in the city after a fashion during the day, but between the gangs and the trogs coming up out of the Metro at night, outside is not someplace you want to be once it gets dark.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Shango.

  A service for the grunter men and Arleta Wishart was held late that afternoon. They’d all come, everyone in Boone’s Gap well enough to walk, a show of solidarity and mutual support.

  Cal stood at the back of the Union Hall and wondered distantly if indeed there would be peace for those interred.

  Now what? What now?

  He had lost his sister, been defeated by Fred Wishart, an offshoot, a lesser power of the whole. And all he’d learned from the experience was that he had feet of clay. Colleen, Doc and Goldie were ready to follow him, but how could he pretend he had the ability to lead?

  A touch on his arm. Colleen smiled. “Got the pedicab rigged for Doc. Damn optimist says we can leave come morning.”

  Cal felt himself curl inward. With a cool nod, he turned back to the proceedings.

  Beside him, Colleen closed her hands tightly, one over the other, and fought not to walk away, as she had done when Rory had shut her out. Fought not to react with anger, to the hurt of knowing there was nothing she could do.

  Instead, she simply stroked his back and moved off.

  Cal listened to the men and women at the podium, to their remembrances of the good times before their loved ones had lost themselves. Then, able to stand it no longer, he withdrew to the outer room.

  Tables laden with food stood waiting. Bob Wishart peered out the front window, a figure of solitude and sadness. He motioned Cal over to him.

  “I’ve been trying to think what I’ve done wrong, where I failed, to have drawn down all these bad things.” Bob smiled grimly. “What is it about self-blame that’s such a comfort?”

  Cal looked through the window, toward the hills, no longer mist-quilted, where dusk held sway.

  “You know, I said he left a part of himself in me, to keep me going?” Bob continued. “Well, I’ve got power. I mean, just a little, for starters. But maybe I’ll be able to protect this town a tad, make up for. . . .”

  He winced and lapsed into silence, contemplating the fading day. Cal thought of Lola Johnson, who could shield her town, safeguard its bounty, and he prayed that Bob Wishart might be a safe harbor for his neighbors, where his brother had brought only the storm.

  “There’s something I have to tell you,” Bob added. “The reason I know Fred’s alive is, when he left a part of himself, he took a part of me. I can feel myself there with him.”

  Bob Wishart gripped the sill, and his voice hardened. “They made a mistake, taking him back. He didn’t want to go... and he ain’t alone.” He turned to Cal. “They just may have swallowed a virus.”

  Cal studied him and it came like a warming sun that the war had not ended. It had just begun.

  He left Bob Wishart and returned to the service. A bit off to the side, in the shadows, Hank sat beside Wilma. They weren’t speaking or even looking at each other but were sitting close, in the way of old friends reunited. Behind them stood Colleen, Doc and Goldie.

  Cal moved up to them, placed his hand on Colleen’s shoulder. It was a warm touch, and she warmed to it.

  Around him, he saw the faces in the glow of candles and torches: men who’d worked the mines all their lives, women who until a few weeks ago had sewed for minimum wage in little factories to support their families. Parents whose children had awakened from their cold silent sleep, weak and hungry but well. Women whose miner husbands were being buried as grunters that day.

  People Ely Stern would have dismissed with a single cutting phrase. A way of life that Cal had fled, wanting something more for himself, for Tina.

  And there they still were, when New York was bleeding and rotting away. In a town whose smallness and simplicity gave it an advantage when nothing worked anymore but friendship and the bonds between person and person.

  Maybe better, maybe worse, in the days to come. But as Goldie had said, Thems on bottom will be on top now.<
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  Chapter Thirty

  Between the dog and the wolf, Shango’s Cajun friends had called this twilight time. Circling through the dove-colored twilight of the lower end of the Mall, Shango looked back toward the Capitol Building, the stout wall of sandbags and cinderblocks and barbed wire that surrounded the National Guard complex, and saw a blue-white glow of light moving along that new-made rampart.

  So the dogs of war, like the wolves down in Albermarle County, were enlisting those with “talents.”

  Plywood and sheet metal had been wired over the palisade around the White House, but most of the plywood was gone. There were no guards. No one moved around the knee-deep grass of the untended lawns. Someone had tried to be careful about bolting security doors and grilles over the doors and windows of the Executive Mansion itself, but the place had been broken into and looted.

  Did anyone really think the Army would leave food and water there? wondered Shango, as he passed it in the blue dusk. Was this just a quest for combustibles? Or the rage and revenge at a system that had promised to protect the weak and the poor, at least a little bit?

  And had then, as such systems do, simply decided to protect itself instead. To protect itself, and pretend that certain of its own members weren’t responsible for the horror of what the world had become. He’d seen enough of that in the service. At the time he’d just accepted that, as in the Army, it was how things worked.

  He didn’t go in. Light was fading; it was dark enough that sentries on the higher ground near the Capitol wouldn’t be able to see him if they looked down the Mall, but not too dark for him to see what he was doing, and he didn’t want to kindle a light. He’d picked up a shovel on his way at a looted and deserted hardware store in Georgetown and concealed it in the Old Executive Building. It now hung in the straps of his backpack, while he carried the hammer in his hand.

  Go to a fountain, Goldie had said. Near the roses.

  If someone had actually killed the President, would they really have been so dumb as to bury him in the Rose Garden?