Magic Time

by Marc Scott Zicree

  Then what? Did they know, any more than Cal himself?

  As they came off the long exit ramps and pushed out of the crowd into the streets of Queens, Cal drew to a halt and glanced back. Manhattan gleamed in the sunlight, the Empire State and the Chrysler Building so regal and fine at this distance.

  He remembered the day he and Tina had arrived here from Hurley, with such hopes, such dreams. The golden city.

  “A zloty for your thoughts.” Doc rolled up alongside. “I’d say a ruble, but everyone knows they’re worthless.”

  “I guess,” Cal struggled to find words. “It’s hard to let go.”

  “Of the past.”

  “More . . . the things you hoped for.” He thought of Tina’s promise of greatness, the fire of her certainty in it. Perhaps all gone now, melted like snow.

  Colleen was looking back now, too, and the image of Rory came to her. She felt a stab of regret, an unreasoning guilt at having failed and abandoned him, and wondered what subterranean passage he might be gliding through. Hell of a way to end a relationship . . .

  Goldie, still oddly muted, peered back at the city.

  “Anything you’d like to add?” Cal asked.

  Goldie addressed the island, its silent spires. “We’ll write when we get work.”

  Cal thought of Stern, of those he had led and destroyed. Of Rory and his monstrous brethren in the tunnels. Of the lost and broken ones in the hospital corridors and on the streets. Of the rivers of blood that had burst upon them all and whose currents were now carrying them to who knew what dark source.

  The Change that had smashed everything, that was devouring them all. A force of nature or something conscious and malevolent? Scared and angry, Tina had said. Sad and crazy.

  That made it conscious, then.

  “Whatever caused this,” Cal murmured, “it’s one sadistic bastard.”

  And we’re gonna kill you, if we can.

  They crossed the Verrazano Bridge the next day, with the smoke of a thousand individual fires curtaining the sky to the north.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “This way, I think,” said Tina, when they crossed the third bridge, the one that took them off Staten Island and into New Jersey, and she pointed southwest, through a tangle of smoldering buildings, looted stores, gutted cars and smoke.

  Cal cringed inwardly, and Colleen said, “Oh, great. We get to ride a nice straight line through Philly, Baltimore and D.C.”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me to hear it’s in D.C.,” remarked Goldie, peering into a shaving mirror he’d mounted on his bike’s handlebars and mopping hydrogen peroxide on a cut above his eyebrow. A pack of young men had rushed them as they were coming off Goethals Bridge, trying to take their bikes, the food, the weapons. It had been no more than a skirmish, but it was an indication, Cal thought, of what might lie ahead.

  They avoided the cities. When they could, they avoided the smaller towns as well. Cal took to studying the map more closely and kept to the countryside.

  Now and then they’d see bicycle messengers or fleet-footed rollerbladers streaking along the silent highways, heading for New York or the next town up the road that had a militia company, slaloming among the motionless cars. Once, they found the body of one such messenger, broken and bloodied and discarded, his wheels flown. Cal had cautioned Tina to stay in the folds of her canopy, but she had insisted on viewing the dead man and had remained silent, brooding, long afterwards.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold up.” Goldie shouted and was off his bike and sprinting for the weedy field before any of them could stop him.

  Cal brought the pedicab to a halt alongside Goldie’s fallen Red Ryder. Colleen and Doc coasted up behind him, puzzled and concerned. The balmy afternoon was melting into twilight, the hint of coming autumn borne on the calls of birds, the shiver of leaves, the breath of the wind.

  They were just south of Elizabeth, riding down Highway 19, and hadn’t been within hailing distance of a soul for two days. The very quiet, the lack of incident, made them all jumpy.

  And now Goldie was wading among exhaust-grimed obelisks, the veined-marble cherubim, the bronze plaques spiderwebbed with patina as with some skin disease. He glided, a shade, between the shadows of mausoleums, stepped daintily amid snaggle-toothed headstones.

  Then he stooped and began digging in the dirt like a dog. Cal walked over to him, spoke softly. Goldie murmured a word of reply without glancing up.

  “This is very not cool,” Colleen said, watching from the roadside with Doc. She cast wary glances at the row of silent houses beyond a grassy rise on the opposite side of the highway, the periphery of a small town. Her shoulder muscles were tensed coils. “Field glasses,” she said, and Doc handed her the binoculars. She scanned the windows of the silent, squat structures as Cal came up. “People at the windows, watching us.”

  “They can watch all they like,” Cal said, “as long as they don’t do anything.”

  “With the elimination of television,” added Doc, “their options for diversion are somewhat limited.”

  “Yeah, well, let’s hope they don’t like their entertainment interactive.” She wheeled on Cal. “So what’s the story here? We adding grave robbing to our list of accomplishments?”

  Cal contemplated Goldie, still rooting in the earth, a considerable pile of dirt forming behind him. “I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t think so? What did he say?”

  “He said, ‘Render unto Caesar.’ ”

  “Oh great, perfect. Well, here’s what I say: we tackle him, hogtie him and haul his ass and ours out of here while we’ve still got something to haul. Or better yet, we leave him here.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  Cal looked at her evenly, shook his head.

  Colleen opened her mouth to snap something—or maybe to bite him, Cal thought, seeing the sudden fury in her eyes. Then she abruptly turned and stomped off, away from them and from Goldie too, past the chiseled markers and pillared tombs.

  Cal started after her, but a gentle hand touched his arm, and there was a voice like music.

  Colleen drew up by a sweet gum tree and glowered at the sun-burnished, twilit clouds. Nearby, a Carrara marble angel stood atop an ornate Nouveau pedestal, its arms beseeching the heavens, wings spread wide. A plaque read, “Never to Forget Our Great War Dead,” followed by a list of names— boys from the town over the hill, no doubt—all nineteen, twenty, twenty-one.

  Tina flowed toward her, effortless as mercury, the blades of grass quivering as if electrified where she passed.

  “You shouldn’t be where you can be seen,” Colleen murmured.

  “I can’t hide all my life.” The luminous clouds refracted through the lens of her aura, sparked brilliance.

  “You got me there, kid.”

  Tina looked away, and Colleen followed her gaze. Goldie was still engrossed in his digging.

  “You really hate him,” Tina said.

  Colleen was startled by her bluntness, felt a stab of guilt. “Nah, it’s not that, it’s—he’s slowing us down.”

  “Maybe where we’re going . . . it’s good not to hurry.”

  Colleen rubbed a weary hand over her eyes. “Look, I feel sorry for him, I do. It’s not his fault. But he’s not in control. He could draw attention, maybe get us—” She stopped as she spied the blossoming look of pain and shame on Tina’s face.

  He’s not the only one to draw attention. Colleen cursed herself; her mouth should have been chained up years ago. But then Tina particularly, with that astonishing grace, made her feel like an awkward, insensitive brute. And yet she had to admit to feeling a growing kinship with the girl, seeing in her tentativeness, her shyness, a reflection of her own concealed inner landscape.

  Tina was looking off toward a bank of clouds. Colleen reached a tentative hand to touch her, then withdrew it.

  “You know who Martha Graham is?” Tina asked, still studying the clouds.

  “Unless she invented the c
racker, no.”

  “She said, ‘Dancing is a call. . . . Free choice doesn’t enter into it.’ ” She brought her ice-fire gaze to Colleen, gave a melancholy smile. “Do you think we have a choice in life or are we just fooling ourselves?”

  “I think . . . we can’t choose what happens to us. But we can choose how we act.” Colleen’s eyes returned to Goldie. He stood now, brushing the dirt from his clothes. He held a wrapped parcel under one arm.

  “Maybe some people can’t.” Tina gazed beyond Goldie to where an evening mist was rising, and her voice was a whisper. “No matter how hard they try.”

  Colleen and Tina found Cal, Doc and Goldie gingerly unwrapping the oilskin-bound package Goldie had dug up. Inside were more layers of paper and fabric in various stages of decomposition. Then finally, the object itself, dried-out wood and rusty metal.

  It was a musket, Springfield 1857 just discernible on the pitted metal screwed to the wormy stock.

  “This is what you needed to dig up? It wouldn’t even work if guns did work.” Colleen snapped. “How ’bout you tell me why, Gunga Din? And don’t give me that ‘Caesar’ crap.”

  Goldie straightened, hefting the weapon in his long-fingered hands with their thick nails like gray stones. “I have absolutely no idea.”

  They swung west to avoid Philadelphia, traveling through the green sweet farming country that was being stripped of its horses and cows. Skirting Bala Cynwyd and Merton Station and Havertown, they would draw near travelers, scuffed and weather-worn, groups of two or three or four, mindful to keep their hands open and in sight, their weapons stowed— and Tina carefully hidden.

  Sometimes Doc would dress wounds, administer simple remedies he had picked up from medicine chests of abandoned homes, first-aid kits from automobiles and RVs. Goldie might sing or dance to lull the children, do simple tricks of pretend magic—or real magic feigned as pretend—while Colleen hung back, keen-eyed, and Cal questioned the adults.

  None of them had heard anything of a power to the west or the south. No, Wish Heart meant nothing to them, nor any combination of words sounding like that. Yes, they had disturbing dreams, naturally, but nothing like the revelations that had been visited upon Tina and Stern.

  Curiously, as Cal and his companions journeyed on, they encountered none of the altered ones, by day or night, although some of the men and women they interrogated admitted to having heard of such creatures, and a few had even seen them, fleetingly.

  Everyone they spoke to confirmed that the Change had come over the land at the same time, and that it stretched as far as anyone had seen, or that anyone they had talked with had seen. As to what it might be, or what had caused it, most had a theory, running a tabloid gamut from alien invasion or government conspiracy to warfare between the gods. Some were stated boldly, others offered with grave doubts—but none with the least hint of proof.

  “It is like a Rorschach,” Doc commented as they rested in the shade of a willow grove just below Hazlettville. “Everyone sees this brave new world of ours through the lens of their perceptions, of fear, anger, desire. Casting the world in their own image . . .”

  “More a Thematic Aperception Test, if you want to be precise,” Goldie corrected him, tightrope-walking over a log balanced across the creek. “And, sorry to break it to you, they always did.” He was back in his expansive, talkative phase, no longer dressed down but instead tricked out in what he had taken to calling his Fall Collection—the electric-blue vest emblazoned with buttons, the Hawaiian shirts that never seemed to lose their brightness no matter how long they went unlaundered.

  Colleen repeated more than once, and always with cause, that she really couldn’t tell which she preferred less, Goldie muted or Goldie loud.

  In the quiet times down the long highways, Cal, intent on formulating some plan of attack, would question Tina and Goldie as to what they might sense or see of the force waiting for them at the end of their road. But on this subject Goldie had no premonitions, could summon no image nor inkling. And as for Tina, though its call grew more insistent every day, the darkness that pulled her relentlessly remained shrouded in its own secret.

  Often, after they pitched camp, Cal practiced defensive moves with Doc and Colleen, Doc sharing what he had learned in Soviet basic training and Afghanistan, Colleen what she had gleaned from her father, and the streets, and the woods. They squared off bare-handed or with sheathed knives, or wielded sword or bow. Tina would hover near, watching absently, or drift off into the shadows, while Goldie sat cross-legged, humming to himself, voraciously poring over whatever stray volume he had picked up along the way, be it Marcel Proust, Stephen Hawking or Danielle Steel.

  In the glow of a campfire against the chill of twilight, Colleen wrapped her arms around her knees and smiled, all the tension shaken out of her for once. She seemed to crackle and glow with energy, like the fire itself. Her smile changed her, gentled her, so that Cal wanted to reach over and touch her—to forget, for once, about the world that was changing, about the growing despair in Tina’s eyes. About the thing that they would have to face eventually if they had the grim fortune to find it.

  “Fighting isn’t about hitting,” Colleen said, finishing a point she had made earlier, in the midst of their sparring. “It’s about distance, first and foremost. And it’s about always thinking, What do I do if this person goes for me?”

  Distance, thought Cal, and if this person goes for me. Looking into Colleen’s eyes, he understood suddenly that this was how she regarded everything, everyone: with wariness, fear, caution. Don’t give them a weapon against you. Don’t let them into striking range. It was how Cal himself had viewed the world in what he was increasingly thinking of as The Time Between, the period from his mother’s death through his thralldom to Stern, before the Change. And it was how Colleen viewed the world still.

  And before he could look away, she saw the compassion and sadness under his thought.

  The warmth vanished instantly from her eyes, leaving them bleak and bitter and angry: You don’t understand.

  But he did, and that was what angered her. She got to her feet and walked off into the woods. He rose to follow, to draw her back, but she was moving quickly, and he lost her in the tangle of trees.

  He pressed on, searching in the fading dusk, when the glow of a shifting light drew him toward a clearing.

  Tina was there, unaware of him. She turned slowly in midair, arms and legs poised in an exquisite arabesque, regarding herself in the play of light against the fallen, dried leaves that carpeted the ground. Beautiful, but so forlorn.

  Cal stood a long time, not disturbing her.

  And, watching unsuspected from cover, silent as a hawk, Colleen contemplated the look on his face, the fear and tenderness there, and the love that she had thought beyond the capability of any man but her father.

  They continued, past Wilmington and Aberdeen and Perry Hall, swinging wide of Baltimore, ever southward, moving fitfully and uncertainly, like a band of blind men drawn by a distant sound. Or, more accurately, a sound that only one of them could hear.

  But then, it wasn’t like a sound, Cal reflected, lying in his sleeping bag while Doc stood guard by moonlight over the camp they had pitched at Cedar Beach, the cool waters of the Chesapeake softly lapping the shore. It was like a far-off molten core radiating mad heat. Cal studied his sister’s sleeping form, shielded in a North Face tent, her glow damped down to a phosphoresence that mirrored the night-washed waves. Tina’s sleep was nightly raked with dreams, from which she would wake trembling, unable or unwilling to describe what frightened her. The closer they approached the white-hot glare of whatever was summoning her, the more she seemed to be melting away, growing ever more distant and abstracted. As if she were leaving them already, in small steps, imperceptibly, until she would be gone entirely.

  Seeing Cal studying his sister, Doc crouched near. “When one administers an X-ray, it always gives pause,” he said, seeming to catch Cal’s thought. “Will this help to
relieve suffering or will it, in years to come, be the one fraction of difference that causes a cancer to form? It is the same with heart surgery, with almost any choice. The physician asks himself, Am I curing, or am I—” He stopped himself from saying killing. “Or am I creating harm?” He laid a hand on Cal’s arm. “Take heart, my friend. She is still with us, and we are together—what do you call them?—merry men, eh? And one woman who would choose to be called anything but. We will beard that lion in his den.”

  If only it were just a lion, Cal thought. Even closing in on it, Tina still had no idea what it was. Crazy and angry and sad . . . like the world it had created.

  What lens, Cal wondered, was it seeing through?

  Later, while the others slept and Colleen stood watch, Tina dreamed of darkness again and gasped awake.

  “Sh, it’s okay,” whispered Colleen, bending down to her in the mouth of the tent. She reached over and stroked Tina’s back, now as unsettlingly fine-boned as a baby bird’s. Beside such fragility, Colleen felt clumsy and rough.

  She became aware of Tina’s gaze on her, turned to the scrutiny of those intense, blue-in-blue eyes.

  “Your boyfriend,” said Tina softly, “Rory? He changed, too, didn’t he?”

  “Rory was a punk,” Colleen replied, and there was a shakiness in her voice that surprised her.