Marc Zicree - Magic Time

“Yeah,” he said, amazed a little at himself. “Yeah, I think I can.”

Hank had a drink of water, the thermoses were low again and would have to be refilled before they started their hike. Most of the men took a final pee into the elevator shaft (“Hey, you shoulda thought of that before you left the house!” joked Gordy), and Hank turned his attention to the tedium of cranking the manual controls on the doors once more. The air in the vestibule was sour and stale, and there seemed little point in conserving air that wasn’t moving anyway, but the locks that prevented air loss were still in place: crank open, through, crank shut, crank open, through, crank shut. .

It had been at least an hour since he’d put Grimes and his like-minded pals out into the tunnel. They’d gripe, almost certainly, about the long trudge ahead of them, and Hank found himself looking forward to knocking Sonny’s head against the nearest wall.

The third door opened, and Hank thought, Just say anything, Sonny. Anything at all.

But there was only silence as the doors opened. Hank stood, trembling, wondering if they were dead of methane gas and then wondering, as he lit the spill again, whether he’d go up in a bellowing blast of flame.

But there was no gas. And there were no bodies. In the light of the single flickering flare, the tunnel outside was empty. Sonny Grimes and his five companions were gone.

NEW YORK

Jesus, it’s like a cave in here. As Colleen Brooks entered her apartment, what she half-laughingly thought of as her spider sense snapped onto full alert. When she’d left that morning, the drapes had been open. Now they were shut tight, the place dark as night. And what was that smell? Dank, musky, something she could almost but not quite place. “Hey,” she called out, “any survivors?”

“Hi, babe.” It took Colleen a moment to locate the sound, make out the shape on the lounger. Rory sat like a pile of stone.

“Why’s it so dark in here?” She strode toward the drapes, grabbed the pull.

“Don’t. My eyes are killing me.”

Colleen’s foot bumped something that rolled into the near wall, made a glassy clink . She felt around with her toe, nudged more of the same. Empties.

“Three in the afternoon. Man !” She glared at Rory, knowing full well he couldn’t see her in this gloom.

He chose not to respond or was too fogged out to get it. “Pullin’ a half-day?” he asked dully.

Shit, yes. Case you haven’t noticed, the whole friggin’ city’s closed. Don’t get into it, girl. She sighed, unstrapping the heavy tool belt, feeling her way to the sofa to lay it down. “Yeah, but there’s gonna be an elephant’s dump to clean up when they get the power back on.”

He said nothing to that, so maybe it had occurred on his radar screen that something was going on in the larger world. She added, mostly thinking aloud, “But it’s the cars, too. Like a damn graveyard. You looked outside?”

“Huh?” he responded vaguely.

This was getting old even faster than she was. Stepping cautiously-she didn’t need to tear her foot open on some damn Budweiser shard and add stitches to this royally cocked-up day-she headed for the bathroom. “I’m gonna take a shower.”

“Good luck. Water’s off.”

Great. “And I don’t suppose you thought to go out and buy some?” She caught the acid edge in her voice, just like her mother, and hated it.

“It’s. . bright out.” He managed to sound surly and whiny at the same time.

“Bright.” And now she heard her mother in her head: You sure know how to pick ’em. Yup, when the woman’s right, she’s right, even though she’d been dead from cancer, burned to ashes and dumped at sea, lo these eleven years.

So what now? Colleen plopped down on the sofa, felt the spring pressing her butt through the tear in the leather. She stared at the Rory shape on the lounger opposite, heard the slow rasp as he scratched his arm, over and over. Bitterness filled her. She hoped it was the beginning of some loathsome skin disease, that his worthless hide would bubble and peel away from him like steamed chicken.

Then she repented, thought again of the man he had been. Or was her memory, as it had so many times, playing her for a fool, imprinting an image of someone she had wanted, needed so hungrily that she had tried to assemble him from defective parts?

It had been a long day. And, Christ, it was shaping up to be a long night.

WEST VIRGINIA

They searched for Sonny and the others for nearly an hour.

Then they went on.

It was four in the afternoon by that time, and most of the respirators the men had taken from the walls at the time of the power-out were exhausted. While hunting for Sonny, they gathered every other SCSR they could find, but still they were short two or three apiece for a trek of what could easily extend on into the night, if they could find their goal at all. If it hadn’t been for the batteries going out, for the utter, unexplained failure of every source of power, Hank suspected most of the men would have remained by the downcast rather than undertake the crazy quest through the blackness of the worked-out mains.

He certainly would have.

But he knew the way. It was long and complicated, yet it was clear in his mind, over the grinding of the headache, the feverish dry heat in his bones. Like the road from Boone’s Gap down the mountains and on into Pittsburgh that he used to drive a couple times a month to visit his sister Thea and her kids. Turn here, turn there, this gas station, that burger joint on the right.

He knew it. He felt he had always known.

“Maybe they just got tired of waiting for us?” Ryan blew out the single flame as the men joined hands again, linking together in the dark. “I mean, Sonny’ll walk away from some guy waiting on him at a Burger King if he thinks they’re taking too long to serve him.”

“Yeah, but where’s he gonna go?” asked Brackett.

“And the others wouldn’t have been dumb enough to go with him,” Bartolo pointed out reasonably. “Could-you don’t think something could have-have happened to them, do you?”

“ Happened ?” repeated Llewellyn. “What do you mean, happened ?”

“I dunno. Just-well. .”

“You mean,” said the engineer, interpreting the note in his voice, “do you think something could have got them?”

“Well,” said Bartolo, meaning, Yes, that’s what he thought.

“You mean like those worm things in Rodan ?” asked Gordy, as Hank followed the wall of the old main unerringly into the blackness. And with the blitheness of one who knows perfectly well there was nothing down in the mines except themselves, he related the plot of that cinematic epic for the benefit of everyone who hadn’t seen giant rubber maggots devouring unconvincingly shrieking Toho Studio extras on the late night movie.

It was the headache , thought Hank, as he made his way on ahead. He didn’t know why he thought this, but he knew it was true. All he wanted, now, was to walk away also, to disappear into the cool darkness. To be alone. He knew that was what they’d done.

That didn’t give him a reason why they hadn’t come back.

Feeling the wall, Hank took comfort in the rambling monotone. It was as good, he thought, as having someone counting-a way of gauging by sound whether the air was bad without reminding everyone that’s what they were doing. Remembering the way the main ran on for hundreds of feet before the floor began to rise, before the first of the submains branched out into the worked-out areas where they’d collapsed the roofs back in ’89.