Magic Time: Angelfire

by Marc Zicree

  Water barrels are ranked outboard down both sides of the truck bed, which has an awning that extends from the tailgate all the way out over the remains of the cab. We roll it down in the event of inclement weather. The whole thing looks a lot like those old World War Two troop transports; only it’s a brilliant shade of macintosh yellow. For the first time in many days, the awning is rolled all the way up to the topmost strut of the support framework.

  I glance at the sky and realize that’s likely to change. It’s a chill, cloudy afternoon—unseasonably cold. The sky presses down on the land like a heavy, gray sponge full of rain. Somewhere, there are calendars that say it’s autumn, but it feels like half-past winter, and the trees are turning rapidly, as if hurrying to catch up.

  Along the road ahead I see a strip of maples with prematurely nude branches. It’s only when we get practically on top of them that I realize the leaves are merely transparent. They look like those blown glass things that once glittered in Manhattan shop windows. And as the moist breeze stirs them, I hear them, too—a fine shimmer of sound that’s almost music.

  Fascinating. The rocking of the wagon no longer seems so soporific. I swing out over the chopped-down door and hit the ground running.

  A sharp snarl snatches at me from behind. “Goldman! What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Replying to Colleen’s question while galloping into the forest would waste breath, so I don’t bother. I make the trees and gingerly reach up to touch the crystalline leaves. They’re beautiful, but hard and cold, with sharp, biting edges. A breeze moves through the branches and stirs them to song. I imagine an entire melody is cradled in those branches, but then I imagine a lot of things.

  I’m enchanted. I take off my cowboy hat and carefully dislodge several of the leaves into the crown. They fall with a sweet tinkle of sound.

  “What is it?” Cal Griffin peers down at me from his horse, hazel eyes darting from me into the deeper woods. His hand is on the hilt of his sword.

  I hold up one of the leaves. Steely sunlight sparks cold fire in the tracery of veins. “We may have to rename a couple of seasons,” I say. “How about spring, summer, shard, and bleak?”

  Cal leans down from the horse and takes the leaf from my fingers. “Ouch. You’re not kidding. I’d hate to be standing under a tree when these things fall. If they fall.” He lays the leaf carefully on the palm of my hand. “Better get back in the wagon. Colleen might slow down or even stop for you if you apologize for scaring her like that.”

  I carefully tuck the leaves into the pocket of my buckskin jacket and set the cowboy hat back in its rightful place. As always, my hair—too thick, too curly, and too long—puts up an admirable fight, but I cram the hat down until it submits peacefully.

  “Scare Colleen,” I repeat. “Isn’t that an oxymoron?”

  He smiles fleetingly and jerks a thumb toward the wagon, which has come to a stop down the road with Doc hovering near the tailgate. “Get.”

  “Maybe it’s just a paradox,” I say, moving away from the trees. “Or an anomaly, or a mere flight of fancy.”

  Cal clicks Sooner into a lope and leaves me to chug my way back to the wagon.

  Colleen stays stopped to let me climb in. Then she gives me a chill glance, laces the reins through her fingers like she’s done it every day of her life, and clucks the team into motion. In this nippy weather they are rarin’ to go, as they say in the Wild West. They toss their heads, paw the ground, and pull at their bits. Colleen manages them effortlessly.

  “You’re sure good at that horsey stuff,” I tell her, chipping at the brittle silence. “I guess it’s because you’re a native Corn-husker and all, huh?”

  She gives me a cool green glance. “You think?”

  I shrug. “Okay, I don’t know why you’re good at it. You just are. You’ve been around horses a lot, I’d guess.”

  She repeats the glance, then puts her eyes back on the crusty tarmac ahead. One callused hand smoothes back her hair, which is almost as spiky as her annoyance. Scissors still work, but Colleen is careless of such niceties. I think she does her hair with her pet machete.

  “Yeah. I got a horse when I was thirteen. Before Dad died. You never forget the feeling of the reins in your hands, the ripple of muscle between your knees, the smooth glide of a horse at a full gallop. To this day, whenever I get stressed out or pissed off …” A pointed glance. “.. . I walk myself through bridling and saddling a horse just to chill. Well… and to prove to myself I remember how to do it.”

  Her eyes go back to the road then, and she closes up tight as a clam. Conservation of intimacies, I guess. I play with my glass leaves, trying to shake music out of them.

  After about five minutes of this Colleen speaks again. “You know what, Goldman? That’s damned annoying.”

  I wrap the leaves in a handkerchief that’s made its way into my breast pocket and put them away. “You know what, Ms. Brooks? No one’s called me Goldman since my sophomore baseball coach. Well… and my probation officer.”

  “Your what?”

  Loose lips, the curse of an unquiet mind. “Oh, look,” I say. “A road sign.”

  There is, indeed, a road sign. It proclaims that there is a town not far ahead. Grave Creek. Nice, ominous little name for a town.

  “Eight miles,” says Cal, drawing his horse up close to the wagon. “If we hustle we might make it before the sun goes down.”

  On a clear day we’d have some wiggle room, but the oppressive cloud cover puts us uncomfortably close to twilight. Since the Change, out after dark is not something you want to be. If the world is peculiar when the sun is up (and it is plenty peculiar), it is insanely scary when the sun goes down. Colleen nods and clucks her team into a brisk trot.

  Barely half an hour later we hear a shout from Cal, who’s taken the vanguard. He lopes back to us through the gloamin’, waving an arm. Doc draws up along our right flank to see what all the hoo-ha is about. Pulling up, Cal points southwest.

  The clouds have lifted at the horizon and a baleful red sun glares at us from beneath the edge. Against the bleed of crimson, a water tower stands in sharp silhouette. Firelight flickers atop the squashed sphere.

  “Civilization ho,” I say.

  “A lookout?” asks Doc, his eyes on the tower.

  “Or a beacon,” Cal says. “Maybe it’s a friendly hello to wayward travelers.”

  Wishful thinking. “You know, there were these pirates up Newfoundland way that used to set signal fires on the cliffs to beckon to merchant ships. After the ships piled up on the rocks, the pirates would go out in little boats and collect the booty. Survivors were offered a choice: join the jolly pirate band or die.”

  “Judas Priest, Goldman!” says Colleen. “Do you have to be such a friggin’ fountain of helpful information?”

  Doc Lysenko hides a smile in the twilight over his shoulder. “Ah, a child’s daydream. Didn’t you ever want to be a pirate, Colleen?”

  Colleen’s face goes through the most amazing set of expressions: Doc has surprised a smile, but she aborts it and stretches it into a grimace, then inverts it into a scowl, then smoothes it into a look of prim disapproval. “What I want,” she says finally, “is to be somewhere other than out in the middle of nowhere when night falls.”

  “Then we’d better get a move on.” Cal turns his horse and leads on toward the looming silhouette of the tower. Unaccountably, I shiver.

  Our road descends into a shallow, triangular valley where the woods stand back from the edge of the grassland like spectators at the scene of an accident. The bottom of the triangle is a mile or two distant, and a second road runs north to south along it, merging with the one we’re on. As we make the descent, my eyes are on the place where the town should be. I can just make out more flickers of light sprinkled about the base of the water tower. I do hope they’re not pirates.

  “We have company,” murmurs Doc from our starboard bow. He’s staring across the valley to the north-south road.
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br />   “Where?” asks Colleen, tensing.

  “There.” Doc’s gesture is almost lost in the twilight.

  A small group of people moves along the converging road toward Grave Creek, clearly visible against the dark woodland that hugs the road. They seem to be struggling with some sort of litter. Three of the people are very small. Children. Or munchkins, maybe. These days it could be either.

  “I think they may have injured,” Doc says. “They could likely use our help.”

  “Hold on, Doc,” Colleen warns him. “Let Cal scope it out first, okay?”

  Cal is already doing that, I realize, moving down into the valley at a leisurely, nonthreatening trot.

  “I’ll light the lanterns,” I say, and do, suspending them from hooks—one on each side of the driver’s box. Kerosene, no less. I just love modern conveniences.

  Cal’s nearing the floor of the vale when yet another group of folks comes out of the woods to our north. This new bunch heads down across the meadow on a course that roughly parallels the north-south road. There is a flicker of fire as someone in the road troupe lights a torch. There is no answering flicker of light from the folks in the meadow. They just keep pressing through the tall, dry grasses.

  The newcomers, I realize, are moving very smartly. Maybe this is because they aren’t hauling someone on a litter, or maybe because they’re in a bigger hurry. The new folks overtake the first party and swing wide as if to pass them by. Then they veer sharply onto an intercept course, and suddenly it’s as if I’m looking at them in a funhouse mirror. They become indistinct, fluid around the edges, a school of shadows flowing across the landscape as if pulled by currents.

  By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes. Hair rises up on the back of my neck and I wish I could borrow Colleen’s machete—or Doc’s faith.

  There is a shout up ahead as Cal digs his heels into Sooner’s flanks and tears off across the meadow.

  “Oh, shit!” Colleen voices my sentiments exactly before she brings the reins down hard on gleaming horsehide.

  The horses plunge into sudden and frantic motion—hot-blooded engines snorting steam into the twilight. The wagon jerks and my cowboy hat goes flying. Liberated hair tumbles into my eyes, blinding me. I hear nothing but the agonized squeaking of the truck’s springs and the labored effort of the team. The truck is heavy, awkward, and probably a bitch to pull, but Colleen steers them off the road entirely and sends us bumping straight across the meadow. We’re on a path that will take us directly into collision with the others … if our wheels don’t fall off first.

  Ahead of us, where the two roads meet, the first band of travelers has gathered to make a stand. There are seven of them. Three are children; two are women—one extremely pregnant. One of the two men is stretched out on the litter, brandishing a torch. The others have torches, too, and baseball bats, and a wildly barking dog. Slim defense against what they face. Advancing on them are strange, dark beings that are less men than shadows of men—vaporous, nebulous, writhing.

  Cal rides Sooner into the breach between the two groups. His sword is still in its sheath, but he’s swinging a loaded sling. Slowing Sooner only a little, he looses a scatter of golf-ball-size rocks into the shadow troupe.

  Surprise! The rocks connect. The sound that results is not one I ever want to hear again. It is as if the air itself has cried out—a siren of rage that drowns out the baying of the dog and the thunder of our charging horses.

  The shadows seem to melt back into the tall grass. But only for a moment. Then they’re back. I try to count them and fail. The shadows uncoil and ooze forward, pressing Cal and his horse back toward the crossroads and the frightened refugees.

  Colleen shoves the reins into my hands. “Take the team!” she yells, then rolls off the back of the seat into the truck bed, leaving me with a handful of fat leather noodles.

  TWO

  COLLEEN

  My crossbow and a quiver of bolts were lying in the well behind the seat. I grabbed them as I went over. I’d barely touched down when the wagon veered sharply, slamming me hard against the left wheel well. If it hurt, I didn’t feel it.

  Just ahead a child screamed high and shrill. I barely heard it over the rumble of the wagon and I barely heard that over the bass drum in my chest.

  I came upright and poked my head out through the support struts of the awning. We were still aimed more or less at the crossroads, but unless Goldman suddenly learned to steer a four-in-hand, we were going to trundle by to the north, behind the… whatever-the-hell they were.

  Looking at them made me want to rub my eyes. They were shadows. Spooks. No kind of tweak I’d ever seen before. I couldn’t tell how big they were, how fast, how nimble. From this distance I couldn’t tell a damn thing about them, except that they were attacking.

  Cal had gotten out of their way and was circling, maybe hoping to distract them, maybe looking for time to reload his sling. The tweaks followed his movement, reaching out like shadowy fingers. A chill streaked up my spine.

  I was nocking an arrow when Doc flew past. Before I could do more than yelp, he pulled the lantern off my side of the wagon and galloped his mare full tilt at the tweaks, shouting and waving the lantern at them. I ground my teeth together and shot the bolt into the cradle.

  The lantern did jack. If anything, light made these things harder to see.

  Fine. I’ll just have to guess what I’m shooting at.

  I aimed into the pack of flickering shapes and fired.

  The bolt hit something—I heard it—and one of the flickers stopped, suddenly solid. It flailed the air for a moment, then leapt. Straight at Doc. It was like a wave of quicksilver that covered eight or nine feet in a single bound.

  By all rights Doc should’ve been dead. Would have been dead, if not for the blessed stupidity of animals. First, his horse shied, dodging the tweak but putting itself and Doc right between me and my target. Then this mutt torpedoed out of nowhere and started doggy-dancing all around, barking its fool head off. The horse bolted and Doc tumbled off over its rump. He and the lantern hit the ground with the sound of shattering glass. The dog disappeared, but I could still hear it barking.

  My chance was gone; the wagon rumbled past the tweaks and onto the north-south road. The horses got tarmac under their feet and charged due north. I lost sight of Doc.

  I jerked my head around toward the front seat and yelled at Goldman to bring us around. “Crank it!” I shouted, and mimed the motion at him.

  He cranked, pulling us into a right-hand crash turn that I prayed wouldn’t tip us over. Against the force of the turn I clawed my way to the right side of the truck bed and tried to see Doc.

  He was about twenty yards behind us now, pushing himself up off the ground. The lantern had fallen four, maybe five yards beyond him, and flames were spreading swiftly through the dry grass between him and the tweaks, fanned by a chill westerly breeze.

  The shadow-pack would be on him in a flash.

  I hefted the crossbow and tried to steady it on the lip of the truck bed. I didn’t have a clear shot, not arcing away like this. But if I had to wait until the wagon came around, it would be too late. I squinted through the fire and smoke and dying sunset for Cal, but he was riding away up the road with three children clinging to him for dear life. The other refugees were frantically dragging the litter along behind.

  I was it.

  Doc was on his knees, watching the tweaks from behind the spreading curtain of flame. Their bodies whipped as if caught in a fierce wind and they were making this freakish keening sound. Made my skin crawl.

  They were afraid of fire.

  I popped back into the truck bed, threw open a supply locker and scrabbled madly through the stuff inside. Ammunition. I needed ammunition. I found cotton wadding, cloth bandages, alcohol. I used a bandage to bind the wadding to the tip of the bolt in my bow, doused it in alcohol, and dug a cigarette lighter out of my back pocket. The small blue flame was a comfort. Scrambling, I m
ade a handful of sloppy, drunken bolts, then slipped three of them into the magazine on the underside of the crossbow. The rest I slipped into my quiver.

  We’d made a full 180 and were bearing down on the tweaks hard. Past the gleaming flanks of the team, I could see one of them circling to the left around Doc’s protecting veil of fire. I swear to God I could see through the damn thing. I had to take a shot anyway.

  I scrambled back into the driver’s box, just about knocking Goldman off the seat, and used the frontmost support strut to drag myself upright. I lit the bolt, blinking at the sudden flare of light, aimed one-handed over the nose of the truck, and fired.

  The bolt sailed into the shadow-thing and stopped dead. The tweak went solid. Its head twisted toward me, and eyes the color of magma speared me where I stood. In the split second I got a clear look at it, it went up like a bonfire. Bile rose in my throat.

  We were almost on top of them now, and I didn’t trust Goldman to steer. I nocked another bolt, then reached down to haul on the reins.

  “Jesu-Christé!” yelped Goldman. Sounded like a legitimate prayer to me.

  The team swerved sharply left, sweeping by the blaze and the beasts. Just as we completed our end-around, I clipped the bow to my belt, leapt Goldman and went overboard.

  Mom always said I acted without thinking—used my gut instead of my brains. It was meant to be an insult. But since it usually followed the words, “You’re just like your father,” it was hard to take it that way. She was dead right, of course. I realized that as I hit the ground—hard.

  I tucked and rolled to my feet. Doc was about fifteen feet away, crouched with a large shard of the shattered lantern clutched in both hands. I dashed the remaining distance, keeping my crossbow aimed at the fire.

  “Hurt?” I asked.

  He shook his head, eyes wild behind a veil of dark hair. But his voice came out, as always, rock steady. “Terrified.”