Marc Zicree - Angelfire

Cal came to sit at the edge of the bed and gripped my shoulder. “You gave us quite a scare,” he said. He looked weary and perhaps a little anxious.

I had nothing to say, so I tested my voice by asking the first question that came into my head. “How long…?”

“Almost six hours.” The tiny woman moved to the foot of the bed. “We have no doctor here, only one nurse and a medicine man. Do you think you might be concussed?”

“Possible.”

“Head hurt?” asked Cal.

“Among other things.”

“Well, at least we can offer something for that,” said the woman. “But I’d advise you to eat something.”

My stomach growled on cue and I managed a weak smile. “Advice I shall take, thank you.”

“I’ll see to it.” The flare bobbed and was gone in an aura the color of sky.

I did not miss the way Cal’s eyes followed her; she was like Tina-yet unlike her.

“Is there anything else we should do for you, Dr. Lysenko?” my hostess inquired.

Doctor Lysenko. How odd it sounded, still. For years no one had called me that, and now it was my name again, my reality. “Observe me,” I said, “in case I should do something peculiar.”

She smiled, her pale eyes kindling. “Now, I like that in a person-humor under duress.” She looked to Cal. “I expect you’ll want to compare notes and catch him up on things. I’ll get Cherise to have a look at him… in case he should do something peculiar.”

She left, and Goldie moved to take her place at the foot of the bed. “That was Mary, of course.”

“I had suspected as much.” I looked at Colleen, who leaned against the doorjamb, aloof. She seemed more than usually subdued. “You are all okay?”

Cal nodded. “Thanks to Goldie’s new friends. Colleen took a knock to the head, too, but fortunately it was just a glancing blow. She never lost consciousness.”

“Ah. You are a better man than I am, boi baba ,” I told her.

She smiled, and the others threw me a puzzled look. Is muttering Russian a sign of concussion? Well, if not that, perhaps rhyming is.

“We are in the Preserve?” I asked.

Cal’s face became instantly animated. Whatever gray ghost had haunted it passed without rattling its bonds. “This is incredible, Doc. We are hundreds of miles from Grave Creek.”

“I don’t understand. The Preserve is not in the Adena mounds?”

“The mounds are only a portal to the Preserve, they link to it across miles of Ohio landscape.”

“But how? By what mechanism?” I found what he was saying strange but not impossible, and it struck me how much like a dream reality had become.

“Unknown,” said Goldie. “The only thing the two sides of the portal seem to have in common is that they were both Native American cultural and religious centers. It makes a strange sort of sense.”

What a perfect turn of phrase. What other sort of sense could it make? “They came through the portal and brought us here?”

Cal nodded, “Just in time, too.”

“And we have found Enid?”

The smile reached his eyes. “It’s just like Goldie said- Enid’s music has the power to render a flare invisible to the Source. Magritte isn’t the only flare here, and he’s protecting them all.”

I tried to sit up but thought better of it. “Then this place would be safe for Tina as well?”

Cal’s expression was suddenly guarded. “If we need a safe house for Tina, this could be it.”

“Except for one small fly in the ointment.” Colleen spoke at last. “Enid can’t leave. Seems he’s the one and only Key

Master for the portals that lead into this place. If they lose Enid, these people are trapped.”

“There must be a way,” I said, believing it. “We cannot have come here without reason.”

“Divine Providence, Doc?” Colleen crossed her arms over her heart.

“I doubt a theological debate is the best medicine for a possible concussion,” Cal interrupted. He touched my shoulder again. “Neither is anxiety. Rest. Let us worry about Enid.” He nodded to Goldie, and the two of them slipped from the room.

Colleen moved as if to follow, but did not. She let the door fall shut behind them, then swung back to look at me, her eyes subtly invading my thoughts.

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

We spoke the words together; our voices harmonized. Self-conscious laughter followed. I’m not certain why two human beings should be embarrassed at having spoken in unison, but it seems we were.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Sore, but whole. You, on the other hand, have a nasty gash on your forehead and a knee the size of a cantaloupe.”

I put a hand to my head, gingerly. A gauze bandage blocked inspection. “I, too, am fine.”

“Yeah? How many fingers am I holding up?” She showed me her fist.

“None,” I said, smiling. “Or all. It depends on how you look at it.”

She retreated again behind folded arms. “Doc, who’s Nurya?”

Breath left my body in a rush, leaving me winded. “What?”

“When you were coming around, you seemed to be having one hellacious nightmare. You shouted for Nurya. When you saw Magritte, you said the name again.” Color swept her face. “Shit, I’m sorry. I’m just too damn nosy. Forget I asked.”

So, she had not come into the room with the others. She had been there all along. It was she the flare had spoken to before leaving to find Cal.

“Nurya was my daughter. My little girl.” Even now, after so many years, the tears emerged easily.

Colleen sat on the edge of the bed-coiled, tense. “What happened?”

I could not look at her face, so I read answers from the pine knots in the ceiling. “You remember Chernobyl, yes?”

“Well, sure. It was all over the news. Even teenagers pay attention to the news sometimes. Christ, don’t tell me she got caught in that .”

“No. I got caught in that. Because of my expertise in triage. The disaster was… worse than even the American media made it. Doctors were brought in from everywhere. I was to set up a triage unit, then go home. But I couldn’t go home. There was too much to be done. What I failed to realize was that there was something to be done at home, too. My wife, Yelena, had contracted meningitis. She wouldn’t tell me this, but Nurya said her mother wasn’t feeling well. I simply didn’t hear her over the cries of the dying.”

I hesitated, testing the words as if they were an unknown trail. “Yelena was driving herself to hospital when she lost control of the car. It plunged into a stream. They drowned.”

Colleen had been watching my face. Now, she turned away. We sat in silence for a time, not looking at each other.

She was the first to speak. “My dad died when I was fifteen. He was two thousand miles away on some damned military training junket. He served in Vietnam for two tours of duty and then went to Texas to die of a heart attack giving a friggin’ seminar. He’d had a two-pack-a-day habit for years, and I’d just managed to nag him into giving up cigarettes. For a long time I thought maybe I just hadn’t nagged enough.” I could feel her eyes shift to my face; it was a gentle pressure. “It’s not your fault, you know.”

“Is it not?”

“You were needed-”

“At home. I was needed at home. There was nothing I could do for those poor souls that any other qualified physician could not have done. But only I could have made a difference to my family.”

Colleen made no reply. I had silenced her, and her silence was damning. Physician, heal thyself.

“So you came to America to start over,” she said after a

moment, “as a hot dog vendor.” The expression on her face

was so dubious it made me laugh.