Black Magic

by Russell James

  This was his mother, the one he remembered, who fought the powers that be, who led the crusade to save the Everglades, who managed their world after his father’s death. Andy had missed her.

  “Guess you’d better buckle up,” he said.

  He turned the key and the truck rumbled to life. The diesel sent vibrations up though his seat and he flashed back to assembling a convoy in Afghanistan. He shook it off and flipped on the lights and wipers. He remembered that the truck had no reverse gear. He thrust the gearshift into first.

  “What kills me is I’m just going to have to fix this later,” he said.

  He let out the clutch and the truck crept forward. It flattened the chain link fence in front of it and rolled out onto Washington Street. Walking Bear and Autumn were already there in the pickup truck. They headed toward the Apex plant. Andy upshifted to second and followed.

  A dead stoplight bounced on its cable in the stiff, shifting wind, three empty eyes watching the two trucks pass beneath it. Darkness reigned outside the headlights’ narrow path. Each swipe of the wipers threw a sheet of water over the side of the truck. Andy took a deep breath to calm the dread that roiled in his stomach. He hoped he was ready to cope with whatever Lyle had in store for them at the plant. He prayed that whatever it was, he could keep his mother safe from it.

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Carlina drove way too fast. Rain fell like buckets of water against her windshield and all the wipers did was add a steady backbeat to the rain’s rampage. She guessed and braked and prayed that no one else was foolish enough to be out in this weather. Her own safety never entered her mind. Her worries were about Ricky and Angela, home alone in the heart of this storm.

  From the main road, she saw that the house was dark, just like the rest of town. The two great oaks on either side of the house swayed so low in the wind gusts she could not believe they were still standing. She barely had the car in park before she was out and through the house’s front door.

  As soon as she entered, Angela leapt from the living room’s dim shadows and wrapped her quivering arms around her mother’s waist.

  “Mommy! Mommy!” she cried rapid fire. “You are home. You’re okay. It’s Ricky. Something’s wrong. I wanted to run. Daddy said not to leave so I stayed. You have to fix Ricky!”

  She pulled her mother down the hall and halted her in front of Ricky’s open door. Carlina looked in and screamed her son’s name.

  Two candles burning at the ends of his desk lit the scene in an eerie flickering glow. Ricky sat at his desk, eyes glazed to a milky blue. He held both hands up before him and moved them like he was conducting some silent symphony. Above the desk floated a set of playing cards. With each flick of Ricky’s wrist, the cards took on a new shape, flew a new formation. At his mother’s cry, Ricky did not react, undisturbed in whatever world he now inhabited.

  The wind gusted to a freight-train crescendo. Loose siding rattled against the walls. Two sharp warning cracks sounded outside. Carlina’s maternal sense went to high alert, her subconscious cued to some unseen but half-processed danger. She reached for Angela.

  The old oak outside exploded like a clap of thunder. Carlina jumped at the sound. Her hands missed Angela by inches.

  The ceiling along the front of the house collapsed. Barrel-sized branches burst through the sheetrock like an invading organism. A blast of rain and leaves swept in like its humid breath. One branch brushed Carlina aside. Her head hit the wall and she saw stars.

  The trunk plummeted straight into the hallway. Angela disappeared beneath it.

  It was a strange delightful place Ricky floated within. The world was white. A swishing sound like small waves on a beach soothed him. All he could see were the cards as they floated before him and assumed new shapes at his command. Magic flowed through his fingertips with every flick and twist. It cruised through his body and left him without a care in the world. Had he been here minutes? Hours? Days? No matter.

  Something large and scary stirred outside his blissful bubble. But it barely registered, like a wild bear scratching outside a foot-thick wall. Only the world in the bubble mattered.

  Then Angela’s screams pierced his dream place like a bolt of lightning. A high-pitched, terrified wail that sent a spike of fear up his spine. He’d heard her scared. He’d heard her hurt. He’d never heard her like that.

  He had to save her.

  He held his palm up and the cards retreated there into a neat stack. He gripped it and his room reappeared. The deafening sounds of Hurricane Rita blasted his ears. Wind whipped his hair around and rain splattered the …hallway? Half the house was gone. Angela screamed again.

  He saw her through his doorway. The old oak had snapped in half and crushed most of their house. Angela lay under the gnarled trunk, almost invisible amid a tangle of sheared branches and swirling leaves.

  “Ricky!” she screamed. She reached out for him with a bloody hand.

  Ricky responded instantly.

  “Bakshokah serat!”

  The coin in his pocket blazed. The cards flew from his hand, one after the other. They formed two flights, the cards overlapping with one corner pointing straight down. They dove at the branches that pinned Angela to the ground. Like two chain saws, they chewed through the tree on either side of Ricky’s sister. White chunks of wood sprayed into the driving rain. The cards finished their pass and left the tree trunk in three pieces. They boomeranged back to Ricky’s hand.

  He ran out into the ruined half of the house and kicked away the chunk of trunk that still pinned his sister. He pulled her off the ground and she buried her sobbing face into his neck. He wrapped his arms around her tiny, trembling body.

  If anything had happened to her…

  He shielded his eyes from the rain and searched for his mother. She leaned against the wall, head in both hands. Ricky picked up Angela, though she was years too old to be carried. She wrapped her arms around his neck, her legs around his waist. He picked his way to his mother’s side through the wreckage of the once great tree.

  “Ricky! Angela!” She embraced them in a wet group hug. “Get to the car!”

  They leaned into the wind and navigated through the wreckage that had been their home. At the car, Ricky slid Angela into the back seat. He had to pry her arms from around his neck. She grabbed a teddy bear from the floor and curled up into a fetal position across the seat. He got into the front with his mother.

  “The shelter is open downtown,” Carlina said. “We’ll go there. Your father will find us there.”

  She started the car but did not put it in gear.

  “Ricky, those cards…?”

  Ricky shifted in his seat.

  “They are from the Magic Shop,” he said. “They were just supposed to be a game.”

  “The Reverend was right,” Carlina said. “They are the Devil’s work. Give them to me.”

  “They are out there in the storm,” he lied. “Miles away by now.”

  “Thank God,” she said. She backed the car down the driveway.

  Ricky felt the lump of the deck of cards in his back pocket.

  I should have left them in the storm. The cards took control of me and did who knows what while I was zoned out.

  The coin in his front pocket was still warm.

  But when I took control of them, I saved my sister.

  He had a feeling he would need that power again before the day was over.

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  The shelter was worse than Carlina expected.

  When she opened the shelter’s interior door, she was certain she would see the apparatus of local government hard at work with people tracking the storm and providing hot coffee and doughnuts to the poor homeless unfortunates like herself. The town backup generator would have the lights and air conditioning going and a big screen TV would be tuned to WAMM’s Storm Tracker Update.

  Instead she felt like she was entering a cave. The emergency lights barely kept the darkness at bay. Tired, wet, s
cared people sat on the floor or on old, threadbare canvas cots. The air smelled of mildew and the sweat of fear. When Carlina opened the door, expectant faces turned to inspect her and then looked back at the floor in disappointment. The shelter wasn’t a ray of hope in the storm. It was a subterranean void of despair.

  Mayor Diaz approached. Carlina sighed. Flora was a sweet person and an energetic town booster, but she would be way out of her depth in this emergency. Wasn’t there someone from the state or county here to actually get things done?

  Flora looked genuinely concerned. She was, for the first time in Carlina’s recollection, washed free of any makeup. She gave Carlina a hug.

  “Carlina! Come in. Are you alright?”

  “I’m okay,” she said. “But a tree crushed the house.” She’d keep her son’s magic act to herself, thank you.

  “Oh God,” Flora said. She knelt down before Angela, who had her face buried in her soggy teddy bear. Flora examined the girl’s battered arms. “Are you hurt, Angela?”

  Angela peeked up from between the teddy bear’s ears and shook her head. “Just bumped.”

  “I’ve heard cookies help with bumps,” Flora said. “Mrs. Wilson has some there in the corner if you’d like.”

  Angela gave her mother an expectant glance for approval.

  “Just two,” Carlina said.

  Angela ran to Mrs. Wilson. Flora turned to Ricky. “They’re good for all ages.”

  Ricky shook his head. He backed up to the shelter wall and sat down.

  “He’s not himself,” Carlina said.

  “None of us are,” Flora said. “The storm took us by surprise. But all of you are safe. Anything lost can be replaced. Any building damaged can be rebuilt. Where’s Felix?”

  Carlina realized that the mayor knew everyone in town by name and, more impressively, remembered them all in the midst of this chaos.

  “He isn’t here? Oh God, that means he’s out there. He was looking for Reverend Wright. He wasn’t at the church this morning.”

  Flora gave Carlina a hug across her shoulders. “Don’t worry. The town is full of safe places to be. If he knew you were taking care of Ricky and Angela, he probably found a dry spot to ride this out. He’s got a good head on his shoulders. He’ll be fine.”

  Carlina felt better for the first time in hours. Of course Felix would be okay. No one was tougher than her Felix.

  “Now we are better off here than we look,” Flora said. “In addition to Mrs. Wilson’s cookies we have canned food. There’s a bathroom on the right and we have water from the well on a battery pump. This place was designed to survive a Soviet nuclear attack. A hurricane is nothing.”

  Carlina decided she had been wrong. This place was a ray of hope, and Flora was the surprising bulb lighting it. The people around her weren’t sitting in abject desolation. They were reading, or playing board games with one another.

  “This storm will pass,” Flora said. “And we are going to walk out into the daylight and make Citrus Glade better than it has ever been.”

  The mayor was right. The worst had passed now that she and the kids were safe in the shelter.

  Except that the shelter was one Arroyo short.

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Ricky hadn’t said two words on the harrowing ride to the shelter. His mother hadn’t mentioned the cards or magic again, as if avoiding it made it go away.

  He could not sort through all the negative emotions that bubbled up inside him. Embarrassment at having the magic take him over, shame that he longed for it to do so again, fear at what kind of living zombie he might have become if Angela hadn’t snapped him back to reality.

  But the main thing he felt was guilt. He knew, he could feel, when he was in the magic stream, that he was part of all this; the storm, the missing Reverend, even the renewed oranges on his family’s trees. The world had been normal until he had started messing with Lyle and his so-called stage illusions. There was no way this magic wasn’t one hundred percent black.

  If he was part of the cause, he wasn’t alone. The other three Outsiders were making their own contributions to this hell on earth. The others would be home doing magic, sprawled out in some catatonic state. Someone had to wake them up and break that connection.

  Angela had stopped him. It was up to him to stop the others.

  He watched the mayor lead his mother across the shelter. He swiped a penlight from atop a case of bottled water. He rose and cracked open the inner shelter door. He slipped through the opening and shut the door behind him. At the top of the steps to the exterior door, he paused and planned. Barry’s house was closest. He’d go there first. He mapped the route in his head.

  Rain pummeled the heavy metal door. The wind howled by and stray branches scraped across the outside of the door. Ricky took a deep breath, braced his back against the door and pushed.

  Rain lashed his face as he stepped outside. He steadied the door against the gusts and laid it back down. The latch clicked shut. He bowed his head against the deluge and ran for Barry’s house.

  He decided to approach from the back, to check Barry’s bedroom from the window. If he had the magic hat going, it wasn’t likely that he’d be pulling animals from it in the living room.

  He splashed through one backyard and hopped the fence into Barry’s. He shielded his eyes from the rain and didn’t like what he saw. Barry’s back window was broken. He ran to the back of the dark house.

  The eave offered partial shelter from the rain. The room was pitch black. He pointed his penlight in and snapped it on. His fingers locked around the tube. Barry lay on the floor. The flashlight’s beam made his eyeglasses’ shattered left lens look like frosted glass. His head lay on one side, a jagged chunk ripped from his throat. His nose was a bloody stump. The hat lay sideways on his desk. Ricky aimed the flashlight beam inside it. Empty.

  “Oh no, oh no,” Ricky moaned. Damn it, Barry. What the hell did you conjure up out of that hat?

  A watery trail sliced from Barry’s window and across his backyard.

  And where the hell did it go?

  If Barry couldn’t handle the power of the top hat, there was no way Paco could control the demolition derby his magic wand could conjure. Paco might already be dead. Or he might be near impossible to stop. But Ricky had to try.

  He paused before he set out. There was something of Barry’s he could use. He climbed in through his dead friend’s window.

  Glass crunched under his feet with each tentative step he took. He played his flashlight beam around the edges of Barry’s body, unwilling to again see the damage done to his friend. Tufts of coarse gray fur clung to Barry’s clothes. Ricky stepped in a puddle of congealing blood and it squished under his shoe. He knelt and took a guess. Fifty-fifty odds. He opened Barry’s right pocket with his fingertips and slipped his other hand inside. He felt a handful of change at the bottom and pulled it out.

  He flicked his flashlight on to the coins in his hand. One gold coin, the one given to Barry by Lyle, stood out in the collection of silver and copper. Ricky plucked it out. His own coin sat in his left pocket. He put Barry’s in his right. He’d felt the heat one coin created during the magic. No point in doubling that in one location.

  He returned the rest of the coins to Barry’s pocket.

  All Barry had wanted was somewhere, anywhere, to fit in.

  “I’ll fix this, dude,” he said.

  Ricky climbed out the window and paused under the shelter of the eave. The wind now blew the rain nearly horizontal. He ducked his head and made his way toward Paco’s.

  Chapter Sixty

  Something slithered around Juliana’s knees. She jerked awake and slammed her head on the roof of the truck cab.

  “Goddamn it!” she cursed at the pain. She realized she was waist-deep in black, rushing water. Rain spanked the truck’s windows. She put her last sentient moments back together. Driving the truck north in the storm, crossing the bridge, falling.

  A catfish brushed against he
r foot again and she pulled her feet up as high as she could. The truck was buried nose first in the canal and she lay across the steering wheel. She did a quick check and flexed her hands and feet. Everything worked. Damn, after a crash like that you’d think…

  But there was something, something inside her wasn’t right. She ran a hand along her side and felt her rib cocked off at an odd angle. Something wheezed within her when she breathed. A punctured lung. Damn it.

  Wait, she thought. This ought to hurt like hell.

  But it didn’t. In fact, not only did she not hurt, she felt great. Powerful. She could not know that with the stupefying cocaine flushed from her system, the door had opened up for something more potent to hit her. She caught sight of her face in the mirror over the twisted passenger sun visor. Her eyes had a hint of blue behind them.

  Emotions boiled up within her. Jealousy. Rage. Vengeance. She could have been killed driving this damn truck in a hurricane. Goddamn Vicente, that unappreciative ass.

  She wanted the two of them out of this crappy town and living on the beach somewhere. But no, all he ever said was how perfect this town was. Well she knew what it really was. He had another woman. He had to. Some skank who thought she could slip by and make a fool out of Juliana.

  Juliana didn’t have time to find the bitch, but she knew where she’d be tonight. Huddled in the shelter to ride out the storm. Juliana was ready to settle this. The hard way.

  She pushed open the driver’s door. Its weight and the wind sent it crashing against the nose of the cab. Rain blew in and spattered her face so hard it felt like pebbles. She pulled herself through the door, climbed up into the bed, and leapt to the edge of the canal. Her bare feet dug into the soft ground and she landed standing. There was something sharp under her foot, but the pain seemed miles away, well obscured by the fury she felt against Citrus Glade.

  The wind gusted hard and she leaned into it for balance. The trailer of cars was sideways in the canal, a total loss for the Colombians. Yeah, well. She sucked in a slow, raspy breath and turned back to the road. Low clouds raced across the sky. Through the rain she caught glimpses of the town a few miles away. She walked out to the yellow line in the middle of the road and headed back to town.