Marc Zicree - Magic Time

Forgotten now, or at least put aside.

And not just the two of them. Tom Sammon’s simmering resentment at Gilley Gray’s “jokes,” Janice Fishman’s certainty that charm alone advanced Maria Bryant, all the petty slights and wounds, the long-held grudges melted in the white heat of catastrophe, fear. .

Not the cold dread they lived with every working day, that kept them strangers, the persistent hum they finally stopped hearing, though it permeated everything in their lives.

Even hell, Cal realized, might have small patches of heaven.

The door to the hall flew open as they hit the sixteenth-floor landing, a mass of bodies blindly surging in. Blundering, cries, shoving in the darkness. Paul Cajero’s arm was bumped, and his lighter clattered away, going out.

“Watch it, there’s people here!” Cal cried out.

Everyone within the stairwell stopped where they were, while those still in the hall jostled and shoved. A discord of words, grunts, the tang of fear-the second group parted and their leader stepped up, carrying a lit candle, appraising Cal coolly.

“Who made you safari guide?” she asked. Even in the dimness, Cal recognized the denim shirt, the toolbelt slung low on her hip like some Home Improvement fast gun.

“Guess the same guy who made you one,” Cal said. The corner of Colleen’s mouth twitched in the hint of a smile, and Cal could see she had a dimple in one cheek.

She raised a heavy crossbar. “Been liberating folks stuck in the shafts,” she explained. “You in the hall, hang back till we’re clear.” Both groups shifted around, adjusting themselves. Her eyes swung back to Cal. “So. .,” she said, and it was both question and challenge.

“How about, I take point,” Cal offered.

“-and I ride drag and pick up the strays.” She nodded. “Yeah, okay.”

His eyes followed her as she edged back into the throng, becoming indistinct, a silhouette. Paul Cajero was still scrabbling for his lighter. Cal spied its dark shape, scooped it up and flicked it to life. Paul murmured thanks, his face ruddy in the dancing light as they descended, their shadows in pursuit.

What struck Cal first as he emerged onto the street was the absence.

No diesel fumes, no din of engines or construction equipment. And no sirens, not even in the distance.

The silent, inert vehicles stretched along Fifth to infinity, their owners spewed onto asphalt and pavement, sweat smell discernible in the air amid the dust of fallen debris. The neon hubbub that normally blazed on storefronts-HOT GIRLS! GET YOUR BAGELS! PHONES FOR LESS! — lay dark. Torn and tumbled men and women hunkered on curbs, pressing kerchiefs and wadded shirts to a host of injuries.

Above the buildings, Cal could discern pillars of rising smoke drifting across the sky. The planes. Despite the asphalt’s baking heat, he shivered.

He was already on the move as he plotted a route to Tina. The major streets were choked, a strangling knot of humanity. For a moment, he considered the subways. Power would likely be out there, too. And in the blackness, shadowy forms waiting, eyes watching.

I prefer the subterranean, that homeless man, Goldie, had said.

Cal jettisoned the notion, quickly formed a grid in his mind of back streets and serviceways that led more or less directly to St. Augustine. He was heading purposefully toward a nearby alley when a voice called out behind him, throaty and loud.

“Hey, hold up there!” Cal turned to see the lean, muscular figure making a dash for him from the revolving door. Eighty flights on that concrete StairMaster hadn’t taken a bite out of her vitality, apparently.

Colleen Brooks caught up with him, breath hardly labored. “Listen, what I said earlier-”

“It’s okay,” he said, still moving.

“I was outta line.” She fell into step, shrugging, abashed. “Trouble with my love life.”

Cal slowed, disarmed by her directness.

“What can I say? He puts up with me.” Her eyes swept over the street scene with cool curiosity, then returned to Cal. “So, you got plans for the Apocalypse?”

“My sister. I take care of her.” They had reached the alley mouth. He needed to get going but found himself surprisingly reluctant to end the conversation.

“She far?”

“St. Augustine. On MacDougal.”

“Get some water before you go, ’cause that’ll be a freakin’ long walk.”

Cal knew this and had planned to, but he nodded his thanks. He turned to go, then the doubt came to him that perhaps this fierce, competent girl might be hanging with him to avoid facing something fearful ahead of her. “You need. . help of some kind?”

Colleen gave a wide smile, the first he had seen, and it so changed her, lightened her, that Cal had a glimpse of what she might have been had her path been less corrosive, less needful of guard. She shook her head. “Not from around here, are you?”

“No,” Cal said and smiled, too. Colleen nodded knowingly. They began to drift apart, Colleen moving off in the other direction. “You keep your head low,” she said.

Cal stopped, startled.

Keep your head low. Amid his wild prophecies and seeming knowledge of Cal’s dream, just before zero hour, Goldie had said exactly those words.

And metal wings will fail, leather ones prevail. .

The planes had fallen out of the sky, but what the hell did “leather ones” refer to?

Coincidence, it was all coincidence. And yet, for a fleeting instant, Cal had an image of the three of them somehow tethered, their destinies twined.

“Yeah,” Cal murmured to Colleen as she headed off. “Yeah, you, too.” Then the alley enfolded him, and he was running.

WASHINGTON D.C.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff-or those of them as happened to be in Washington in late summer-arrived at 11:45, according to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century clocks that continued to tick smugly in the Green Room and the Blue Room and the Red Room after everyone’s quartz-movement Rolexes froze up. Larry Shango, who’d grown up with a Basin Street boy’s mistrust of the uptown whites who spent more on a pair of shoes than his daddy could make in a week at the restaurant, had to smile.

An inner smile, since it was really none of his business to have an opinion about anything.

By 11:45 there was little else to smile at.

His eyes had been on McKay when the building started shaking-when the Japanese delegates, with the promptitude of long practice, had gone under the furniture or into the doorways and the aides and the folks from the Department of Commerce had tumbled like pins in a bowling alley. He’d seen the look on McKay’s face. Later on, as the FBI and Secret Service cordons snapped into place around the White House and the National Guard started to arrive, sweating from the double-time march through the car-clogged streets, he’d kept nearly as close an eye on the President as on the men and women around him.

And by 11:45 he was pretty sure he was right.

McKay wasn’t surprised.

He was, however, scared damn near shitless. And it was a couple of hours before anyone else got that scared.

“Reports are still coming in via semaphore and other nonelectric sources, but these conditions seem to prevail up and down the East Coast and as far west as Denver.” General Christiansen set his papers on the table and glanced around at the other advisers, civilian and military, with pale, small watchful eyes. He had a hunter’s tan and the air of a man who’d make you remake your bunk three times just to let you know he could. “No word yet from the West, but according to our sources, portions of Mexico and Canada seem similarly affected. We have no launch capability, no defensive capability at all.”