Marc Zicree - Magic Time

“Take it slow,” Cal advised. “No one’s on the meter here.” Still seeing the muzzle of the gun, he thought momentarily of Tina, looked up at his window. It was dark within, but even so he felt her eyes on him. He lifted his hand, tried to keep it from shaking. We’re okay.

The cop felt along his bruised jaw, touched his bloody nose gingerly and winced. “Damn, they broke it.”

A box of Kleenex lay where one of the looters had dropped it. Cal tore it open, handed the cop a wad of tissues. “Here.”

“Thanks.” The cop was breathing easier now, and, in the moonlight, Cal could see he was older than he had looked in the heat of battle, fifty at least, face all furrows and hard wear. “You two were a couple of knights in armor.”

Cal shrugged it off. “I live right here.”

“Me, I’m just down there.” Colleen gestured toward the far end of the block. Then, noting Cal’s surprise, asked, “ What ?”

“Nothing, it’s just you live somewhere, you have no idea-”

“We don’t exactly belong to the same clubs,” she said coolly, and it brought back their meeting in the lobby, forever ago this morning.

The cop tried to stand again. Cal gripped him under one arm, Colleen the other, until he was sure of his footing. He waved them off, grateful. “You better get back indoors.”

“You have any idea what’s going on?” Cal asked.

A hard cast came over the cop’s face. “No, but it’s a holy mess. Some of my boys saddled up, headed over the Queensboro Bridge. It’s the same there. Same as far as the eye can see. Could be the whole world, for all we know. It’s down; everything’s down.”

Cal glanced at Colleen and was gratified to see she looked as chilled as he felt. “But, hey,” she was saying, “the government’s gotta be-”

“What government?” The cop stared into the night. “Without phones, computers, they can’t even collect their damn graft.” He glanced at them and stopped, rancor evaporating to-pity? He forced a mirthless smile. “Nah, discount that. I’m just having a bad night. I hear they’re mobilizing the National Guard. It’ll take time, but it’ll be all right.”

Cal nodded, unconvinced. The cop cast about, spied his fallen hat. He slapped it against his tree-trunk thigh, set it on his head. “Gotta go find my horse.”

On the wind, Cal caught distant, unidentifiable sounds that might be screams, might be anything. He turned to the cop. “You wanna come upstairs?”

“I’d love to, but long as the city’s paying my health plan….”He’d found his nightstick, nestled against the curb. He swung it around on its strap, thwap , into his palm. “You watch your backs, hear?”

“Back at you,” Colleen said. The cop nodded, turned the corner onto Broadway and was gone, echoing steps soon lost on the wind.

Cal brushed himself off, caught Colleen looking at him, shaking her head. Her appraising eyes said, Not bad, lawyer boy. Or at least, he wanted to think they did.

“You want some lukewarm lemonade?” he asked.

WEST VIRGINIA

Up here, where no coal had been mined in twenty years, there was no dust. The SCSRs had run out long ago, so they would be out of luck if they ran into gas now, but according to Llewellyn there had been little in this area of the mine.

“Shut up a minute,” Hank said softly, and the men shut up. Their respect for him, he noticed, had grown as they’d moved along; as he’d gotten them through the tangle of caved-in tunnels and worked-out rooms and submains that went nowhere- if not easily, at least steadily, more and more confident in the dark. In the silence that followed Hank could hear a dim swift shuffling and could smell something elusive, half-familiar.

“What is it?” Ryan edged up closer behind Hank.

His voice sounded higher above him than it should. Hank tried to straighten a little out of his comfortable slouch and found that he couldn’t. Only this morning he’d been able to look at Wilma’s nephew almost eye to eye.

“D’you hear it?”

Ryan shook his head. Hank could see him do it, though no flare was lit.

“Tell the guys to keep it down, okay?” whispered Hank. “And maybe we might want to have a light now a little more often.”

“Is that safe?” Llewellyn asked.

“Maybe safer than not,” returned Hank, though he could not have said what it was that he feared. “Everybody keep a hand on each other. If nobody keels over, we know it’s pretty safe for a quick look.”

“I like your definition of ‘pretty safe,’ Culver.”

“You got a better one?”

A pinlight of yellow. Hank could see-squinting and backing off from the glare himself-that nobody liked it much, though it was a comfort in the dark.

Ryan swallowed hard. “You mean all that crap Gordy was talking about. .” He let the words trail off and averted his eyes. He bit his lower lip, a childhood filled with every monster movie from The Thing to Alien playing fast across his face. “Jesus.”

“Look,” Hank said quietly, trying to keep as far from the light as he could. “You know and I know there’s nothing down here but us. My daddy and my granddaddy and your grand-daddy too and goddam near everybody else’s-they worked here all their lives and all they ever saw was each other. But a couple of things happened today that nobody or their grand-daddies ever ran across in their lives. And lately I’ve heard things, sounds that shouldn’t be here. And I think maybe it’d be a good idea if everybody could see what’s around them.”

Ryan nodded, scared but accepting. Accepting what ? thought Hank. Accepting the fact that Hank had been moving through the old mains with perfect ease, able to identify scratches and minor malformations of track and rock and abandoned bits of machinery in the dark?

Accepting the fact that Hank could hear things the others couldn’t?

Although God knew, as the flame was blown out again, the men were noisy enough, chattering loudly about baseball and TV and the movies, trying to cover their fear. Trying to pretend that each and every one of them wasn’t thinking: If all this is going on down here, what the fuck are we going to find when we get to the top ?

That had been in Hank’s mind as well. Maybe that was the source of this feeling inside him, this dread of leaving the dark of underground. This feeling that this was where he wanted to be, where he wanted to stay.

To hell with the world of traffic noise and stink and management directives and health care plans. To hell with glaring sunlight and cold. To hell with people who asked questions that were none of their business. To hell with Wilma and her kitty cats.

Darkness. Peace.

Provided , he thought wryly, I could find something to eat down here .

He was just glancing back to tell Ryan they might want to light up again for another quick look when a black, deformed Something flung itself out of the crossing tunnel and smashed at the boy’s head with a club.

Ryan must have heard or sensed something, for he was dodging, flinching, even as the cluster of dark slumped forms bore him down. Hank heard the hard whack of the club on the boy’s shoulder and heard Ryan yell and knew the blow hadn’t brained him, as had been intended. Ryan yelled again, a scream of pain, as the things seized him. In the darkness Hank could see them, five or six crouching troll-like things, huge eyes catching the far-off reflection of the torchlight.

Hank was running, bounding down the tunnel, as the things dragged Ryan into the crosscut from which they’d come-a vent shaft back into what was left of an old room-and-pillar main. The others behind Llewellyn clung and blundered together in shock in the darkness, groping and scrambling for lighters and paper.