The Golden Minute

by John Birmingham

  And she was fast coming to understand that they were pretty fucking dangerous.

  She heard them hissing ‘witch’ and muttering curses, which was a bit hypocritical. The bad vibes cannon was mostly firing at her, but she also heard Mary’s name spoken as if from some book of dark spells.

  “Who are the other two?” she asked under her breath.

  “Justices Corwin and Stoughton,” Mary said. “They who have delivered baleful judgment upon so many innocents during our tribulation.”

  Cady performed a cartoon double take.

  “Wait. What? Justice Corwin? The one talking to Sheriff Corwin?”

  “Aye. His nephew.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” she muttered to herself. Mary did not seem bothered by the dropping of the F-bomb. Perhaps they hadn’t been invented here yet.

  “So… what? When they string us up later they’re all gonna have a big party, marry their cousins and play banjo with their fucking toes.”

  This time the old woman stared at her in open confusion.

  “I do not understand that of which you speak, Goody Smith.”

  “It’s fine. I’m good,” Cady waved her off, but her blood was up and her heartbeat pounded in her ears. “I just… it’s just… there’s a lot of Corwins here today is all.”

  “Justice Corwin has an abiding interest in the trials because his own child was afflicted, so said the dark woman Tituba.”

  Cady returned Mary’s look of blank incomprehension.

  “I’m not sure who this Tuba bitch is, but it sounded like you just said Corwin’s kid was messed up by witchcraft.”

  “Afflicted. Yes. To hear it from Tituba.”

  “Well, where I come from that sounds less like an abiding interest than a big ol’ conflict of interest. Where’s our lawyer? He should be getting us some new judges. Without, you know, a kid who’s gone all Exorcist or Alma from F.E.A.R.”

  “Our lawyer?” Mary said, dialing in on the only part of what Cady had said that made any sense to her.

  “Yeah. You’ve got lawyers, right? The… law… talking guy… who, you know, talks for us? In court?”

  Mary shook her head.

  “We have no lawyer, Cadence. We can speak only when we are spoken to.”

  Cady stared at her. “Seriously?”

  “All they would hear from us are confessions and repentance.”

  A gavel banged down and Cady jumped.

  She got another surprise to find Sheriff Corwin standing, ready to give evidence before his uncle Justice Corwin. There was no dock for the witnesses. The setup only vaguely recalled the few episodes of Law and Order she’d ever seen. But there he was, standing in front of the judges, holding a Bible and taking some sort of oath.

  Then he sat his ass down in a plain wooden chair, not unlike hers.

  “Sheriff Corwin,” said Judge Corwin. “Did one of these women threaten you with witchcraft this very day.”

  The sheriff pointed at Cady and nodded.

  “Her.”

  She could feel her heart slowing down in her chest. The thumping in her ears became a sort of muffled, slo-mo booming, and her head started to spin.

  “How did she make this threat on behalf of the one she serves?”

  “She avowed that she would turn me into a newt,” Corwin testified, glaring at Cady as he spoke.

  The collective gasp that went up quickly collapsed into mutters and more curses and cries of ‘Repent! Witch!’

  “Oh for fuck’s sake,” Cady muttered. But quietly. Only Mary heard her.

  “Did she make this threat in front of witnesses?”

  “Before the eyes of my deputies and the others of her coven,” he said.

  Justice Corwin, a lumpy, weak-chinned man in his fifties, rocking a really bitching bald mullet with the remains of his stringy, grey shoulder-length hair, powered up his glower, just for Mary.

  “Is this so? Goody Bradbury?”

  Cady’s heart, which had felt as though it was slowing to a crawl, suddenly accelerated again. She had totally been joking that she’d give the sheriff a fearsome newting. It had been the first on-point reference that had come to mind. If popular culture had taught her nothing else, she at least knew that’s what you did in these situations. When all else failed, you quipped like a mofo.

  “I heard nothing,” Mary said.

  “You lying hag!” the sheriff boomed out.

  “Why do you lie to us?” his uncle asked, jabbing the handle of the gavel at the old woman. “What God do you serve?”

  “I serve the Almighty of our holy Testament,” she bristled.

  “Goodwomen Hubbard and Bibber and Walcott and Warren have all sworn before God that you serve His Antagonist. And we see here this morning that they swear true.”

  “They swear to their own advantages,” Mary spat back. “The Mistress Walcott is but a strumpet…”

  Another collective gasp, this one tinged with outrage.

  “… who conjures ghosts because I would not let my granddaughter marry Ann Putnam’s uncle Carr.”

  “You accuse your own victims of dark conjurings?” Justice Corwin thundered. “This shall not stand.”

  Jesus Christ, Cady thought to herself. It’s like I missed an episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

  She couldn’t follow any of it. But Granville, she thought, did look like an early beta-release televangelist counting all of his PayPal pledges during the commercial break. That asshole knew exactly what was going down.

  Cady took a deep breath and steadied her nerves.

  This whole goat circus had proven out one truth so far.

  She knew she could rely on Mary Bradbury, because that old girl had her back.

  They were in this together now.

  There was formality, but little structure or sense to the next hour; or not that Cady could discern. TV really was her only experience of court procedure, and this fusterclucking shit show made Judge Judy’s televised ass casserole look like the Supreme Court on its finest day. The magistrates, who seemed to be running everything on their own, except for the clerk, who wasn’t a clerk but rather the local priest, didn’t even ask her to explain the inexplicable sample bag of twenty-first century prepper tech. They didn’t question her about the shootout, or Smith’s vanishing act.

  Instead they called a procession of assholes she’d never met who all testified to her central role in an endless series of spectral orgies, always held out in the woods at night. One guy insisted Cady had abducted him every night for two years, each time striking him a blow on the spine of such power that he was paralyzed and only able to watch naked witches capering and dancing while a goat-headed devil played the flute. She figured he was the colonial version of a mouth-breather named Darryl who ended up in amateur cable documentaries on The Learning Channel, insisting he’d been abducted by ET and anally probed while Men in Black watched on.

  “Can you describe the raiment in which she appeared, Goodman Ring?” Justice Granville asked.

  “She was swaddled in a coat of sheep hide and lamb’s wool. She wore the boots of a soldier and the trousers of a field hand.”

  The constant murmur of the crowd ramped up volubly.

  “She wears it now?”

  “The trews of a man, no less!”

  Granville leaned forward over the bench to directly address the big-haired priest who was writing everything down in his ledger.

  “Let the records attest that Goodman Ring correctly describes the garb of this woman.”

  “Dude!” Cady protested, “He’s looking right at me!”

  “Quiet, you,” Granville ordered.

  He was forced to raise his voice, as all of the onlookers who’d been stunned by the witness’s uncanny ability to describe what Cady was wearing were now scandalized by her inability to shut the fuck up. She fell back in her chair, rubbing her eyes.

  “How long does this go on?” she asked.

  But before Mary could reply a woman’s voice cri
ed out.

  “Oh she is in the rafters. On the beam. I see her on the beam!”

  More cries of dismay and even horror followed as other voices, all of them belonging to women, added to the insane chorus.

  “I see Goody Bradbury up there with her.”

  “Oh they burn my eyes!”

  “They are calling to their kin.”

  “She bit me!”

  “And the man-girl bites me also! Oh it hurts. It hurts so much!”

  Cady craned around in her seat to get a better look at the commotion behind them. Instantly a dozen or more twisted themselves in their own seats. Some of them contorting so violently that they fell to the floor and lay there, spasming. Mary gripped her upper arm and hissed, “Do not move.”

  But that set off even more cries of alarm and even one scream.

  “The hag breaks my arm. Look, oh I am bruised and broken.”

  Justice Granville roared from the bench. “Do you dare vex us with your craft now?”

  “This is no doing of ours,” Mary shot back at him.

  Cady shook off the old woman’s arm, and immediately a convulsive wave ran through the crowd, as, one after another, at least half of the onlookers performed an exaggerated caricature of the same movement.

  Cady stood up.

  Granville shouted at her to resume her seat, but half of the court leaped up as well.

  One woman, a girl in her late teens, started to run at Cady, one hand raised in a fist. Cady felt confident in her ability to fend the kid off, but she didn’t have to. The girl slowed in her rush, still swinging her arm, but at such an increasingly glacial speed that her fist stopped inches from Cady’s face.

  It was the worst pantomime performance she’d seen since high school drama, and she laughed. Just one short snort of derision, but it set off a tsunami of hysterical laughter around the room.

  “You think this is funny?” Granville roared.

  “I think it’s pathetic,” she lobbed back at him. “You’ve been hanging people because of this shit?”

  A horrified gasp.

  Okay. They knew that word at least.

  “Crushing them to death? Because some drama queen did a bad mime of a man punching a high wind? You people suck.”

  The girl was still standing in front of Cady, her face a rictus of stress and effort, her fist shaking as violently as if she had late stage Parkinson’s. Her face distorted, her eyes bulging with horror. Her cheeks pulled in and her throat visibly worked as if to suck on some invisible Devil’s teat. Cady’s eyes flitted around the room where more and more of the women, and now a few of the men, mimed sucking on the world’s biggest invisible hooter.

  “Oh jeez,” she muttered, and instantly they all commenced speaking in tongues.

  Mary was shaking her head, causing some of her superfans to violently wrench their own heads from left to right.

  Cady’s eyes narrowed.

  The girl in front of her squeezed her eyes shut.

  Cady jumped.

  The courtroom thundered as a hundred or more pairs of boots crashed up and down on the wooden floor. Granville hammered away with his gavel. One of the other magistrates yelled at her to be still. But she saw her chance and she went for it.

  Cady McCall leaped forward and performed her version of a spinning back kick. Georgia could do one that looked like it’d been cut and pasted from a Jackie Chan movie. Cady’s was closer to a GIF of that old Disney cartoon with the dancing hippo in the tutu. But it worked. The dignity and order of the courtroom, already faltering with so many of the spectators acting like ass clowns, completely fell apart as her possessed little meat puppets attempted to copy the move. Chaos erupted. Chairs flew through the air, some kicked, some thrown in self-defense. Men shouted. Women cried and screamed. The would-be improv-bitch who’d ‘tried’ to punch Cady up-ended the table full of evidence with her whirling scythe of a spin kick.

  Cady doubled down on the play: twerking out some bootylicious dance floor moves, a little shadow boxing and some air guitar. Judges roared. The sheriff and his deputies struggled to regain control of the mayhem, and Cady grabbed Mary by the arm, dragging her through the heaving crush of twitching, flailing bodies to where the contents of her backpack were now scattered on the floor. She hadn’t intended it as another diversion, but it worked well enough as bewitched Handmaids suddenly wrenched and tugged at those around them, amplifying the turmoil.

  She ignored the weaponry, going instead for chocolate bars, protein balls and one or two small items that they might yet spirit away. Mary crashed into her, crying out in genuine distress. Cady went down in the pandemonium, caught up in the folds of the old woman’s frock. It recalled the moments immediately after the Indian, or Noble Savage or whatever the hell he was, had crash-tackled her. But this time she didn’t pass out.

  This time Sheriff Corwin hauled her up by her hair, her scalp screaming with hot white pain. He knocked the food from her hands and bitch-slapped her for good measure. She almost did pass out then, but the stars in her head soon cleared. The black roses which bloomed all around her did not spread. She was dragged in front of the judges’ bench, where Granville was pounding away with his gavel like a jackhammer.

  “Take them back to the cells,” he shouted. Corwin had his meaty forearm locked around Cady’s throat. A small, stoop-shouldered fellow in a flat, round hat pushed through the crowd to help Mary to her feet, and she thanked him with a pat on the arm. They obviously knew each other, and exchanged a few quick words, but Corwin kicked the man away and snarled at Mary to follow him.

  13

  “Look. It is our American friend.”

  The hand on his shoulder was not friendly. It did not land like a hearty, welcoming pat on the back, but rather as a heavy claw meant to haul him around and into the fist that was already speeding toward his nose. Smith had the briefest and immediate inkling that he was in danger when he saw the brownshirts emerge from the dark in the mirror behind the bar. At least six of them, maybe seven. And grinning like a moron whose shoelaces had just magically tied themselves, was the leader of the very gang he’d encountered earlier in the day. That was an ugly dial he would not soon forget.

  “The lonesome cowboy,” the moron said. “All on his own.”

  Smith had sensed trouble when the space around him perceptibly emptied of fellow feeling and jollity, a sudden vacuum quickly filled by creeping murmur and dark intent.

  He turned with the tug of the hand on his shoulder, into the blow that was meant to lay him out. This was not the first time Marshal John Titanic Smith had been rousted by some ne’er-do-well in a bar. As he pivoted, he swept his right hand up and through the gap between him and the attacker, knocking aside the blow so that it sailed harmlessly over his shoulder. His warding arm then wrapped around both of his would-be assailant’s limbs, tying them up as completely as a hog trussed for slaughter. He tightened the embrace with a fearsome wrenching motion that snapped the captured limbs, each at the elbow. The feller screamed, but not for long. Smith’s thick and unusually voluminous forehead smashed down onto the bridge of his nose and that was that.

  The Hun dropped like a bag of wet chaff.

  Or he would have if Titanic Smith had cared to let go his burden.

  Titanic Smith did not.

  There was just the slightest pause, as though the brownshirts were suddenly stunned into immobility, and then Smith set about using the unconscious thug as a heavily weighted and oversized cosh. He roared his own war cry and lay about him like an Apache in a killing frenzy. Brown-shirted Hun went flying to the far four corners of the world, and for a short but happy interlude it seemed as though the marshal might prevail against superior numbers. But the defining character of superior numbers is that they tend to be… well, superior, and before long the sheer weight of wrathful brownshirts began to tell. Blows landed. Boots and fists and one low and malicious swing with a barstool swept Smith’s legs out from beneath him.

  He went down and the kickin
g started.

  It were as though he had traveled back to that gladiator school where he’d earned himself a fearful kicking from that Roman feller’s henchmen.

  Smith managed to grab one set of boots and he rolled into them, putting such pressure on the knees of the feller they belonged to that he tumbled backward and toppled like a ringbarked redwood. Unfortunately, that merely opened more kicking space for his chums and Smith was sure they would have kicked him to actual pieces had not a giant arrowhead slammed into the mob to completely undo its coherence. Dazed and near stupefied, Smith could only roll onto his back and blink away the blood and tears as he watched his personal battle turn into a general melee.

  He had a vague impression of black-clad knights or avenging angels and a great deal of violence.

  And then, just before he passed out, he glimpsed the careworn face of an older gentlemen in the sort of suit Smith thought that bankers might wear to a funeral on a rainy morning.

  A suit with a red carnation in the buttonhole of one lapel.

  He came to, coughing and spluttering firewater through his nose. He heard a raucous, strangely jolly chorus of laughter and prepared himself for some more of that German boot music, but instead gentle hands raised his head to a glass of cool, iced water and he sipped and spat, clearing the blood from his mouth.

  “Give him some more Schnapps, Hermann. He is awake now.”

  “No, more water.”

  “No, he needs beer.”

  His rescuers—he presumed them to be allies on account of all the kickin’ and punchin’ he wasn’t having to contend with—argued among themselves over the best course for his recovery. Mostly their medical opinions differed on what sort of liquor they should be pouring down his throat, and how much. Smith wrapped a hand around the glass of cold water and greedily gulped it down. His head cleared some, and the water stayed down. It were always a danger after taking a few wallops to the noggin that you’d spend the next few hours pukin’ and trippin’ over your own feet. But it seemed he had covered his noggin well enough in the scrum and most of the blows had landed on his upper body and his arms as he covered himself up.