Marc Zicree - Magic Time

The Change that had smashed everything, that was devouring them all. A force of nature or something conscious and malevolent? Scared and angry , Tina had said. Sad and crazy.

That made it conscious, then.

“Whatever caused this,” Cal murmured, “it’s one sadistic bastard.”

And we’re gonna kill you, if we can.

They crossed the Verrazano Bridge the next day, with the smoke of a thousand individual fires curtaining the sky to the north.

“This way, I think,” said Tina, when they crossed the third bridge, the one that took them off Staten Island and into New Jersey, and she pointed southwest, through a tangle of smoldering buildings, looted stores, gutted cars and smoke.

Cal cringed inwardly, and Colleen said, “Oh, great. We get to ride a nice straight line through Philly, Baltimore and D.C.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me to hear it’s in D.C.,” remarked Goldie, peering into a shaving mirror he’d mounted on his bike’s handlebars and mopping hydrogen peroxide on a cut above his eyebrow. A pack of young men had rushed them as they were coming off Goethals Bridge, trying to take their bikes, the food, the weapons. It had been no more than a skirmish, but it was an indication, Cal thought, of what might lie ahead.

They avoided the cities. When they could, they avoided the smaller towns as well. Cal took to studying the map more closely and kept to the countryside.

Now and then they’d see bicycle messengers or fleet-footed rollerbladers streaking along the silent highways, heading for New York or the next town up the road that had a militia company, slaloming among the motionless cars. Once, they found the body of one such messenger, broken and bloodied and discarded, his wheels flown. Cal had cautioned Tina to stay in the folds of her canopy, but she had insisted on viewing the dead man and had remained silent, brooding, long afterwards.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold up.” Goldie shouted and was off his bike and sprinting for the weedy field before any of them could stop him.

Cal brought the pedicab to a halt alongside Goldie’s fallen Red Ryder. Colleen and Doc coasted up behind him, puzzled and concerned. The balmy afternoon was melting into twilight, the hint of coming autumn borne on the calls of birds, the shiver of leaves, the breath of the wind.

They were just south of Elizabeth, riding down Highway 19, and hadn’t been within hailing distance of a soul for two days. The very quiet, the lack of incident, made them all jumpy.

And now Goldie was wading among exhaust-grimed obelisks, the veined-marble cherubim, the bronze plaques spiderwebbed with patina as with some skin disease. He glided, a shade, between the shadows of mausoleums, stepped daintily amid snaggle-toothed headstones.

Then he stooped and began digging in the dirt like a dog. Cal walked over to him, spoke softly. Goldie murmured a word of reply without glancing up.

“This is very not cool,” Colleen said, watching from the roadside with Doc. She cast wary glances at the row of silent houses beyond a grassy rise on the opposite side of the highway, the periphery of a small town. Her shoulder muscles were tensed coils. “Field glasses,” she said, and Doc handed her the binoculars. She scanned the windows of the silent, squat structures as Cal came up. “People at the windows, watching us.”

“They can watch all they like,” Cal said, “as long as they don’t do anything.”

“With the elimination of television,” added Doc, “their options for diversion are somewhat limited.”

“Yeah, well, let’s hope they don’t like their entertainment interactive.” She wheeled on Cal. “So what’s the story here? We adding grave robbing to our list of accomplishments?”

Cal contemplated Goldie, still rooting in the earth, a considerable pile of dirt forming behind him. “I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think so? What did he say?”

“He said, ‘Render unto Caesar.’ ”

“Oh great, perfect. Well, here’s what I say: we tackle him, hogtie him and haul his ass and ours out of here while we’ve still got something to haul. Or better yet, we leave him here.”

“No.”

“No?”

Cal looked at her evenly, shook his head.

Colleen opened her mouth to snap something-or maybe to bite him, Cal thought, seeing the sudden fury in her eyes. Then she abruptly turned and stomped off, away from them and from Goldie too, past the chiseled markers and pillared tombs.

Cal started after her, but a gentle hand touched his arm, and there was a voice like music.

Colleen drew up by a sweet gum tree and glowered at the sun-burnished, twilit clouds. Nearby, a Carrara marble angel stood atop an ornate Nouveau pedestal, its arms beseeching the heavens, wings spread wide. A plaque read, “Never to Forget Our Great War Dead,” followed by a list of names- boys from the town over the hill, no doubt-all nineteen, twenty, twenty-one.

Tina flowed toward her, effortless as mercury, the blades of grass quivering as if electrified where she passed.

“You shouldn’t be where you can be seen,” Colleen murmured.

“I can’t hide all my life.” The luminous clouds refracted through the lens of her aura, sparked brilliance.

“You got me there, kid.”

Tina looked away, and Colleen followed her gaze. Goldie was still engrossed in his digging.

“You really hate him,” Tina said.

Colleen was startled by her bluntness, felt a stab of guilt. “Nah, it’s not that, it’s-he’s slowing us down.”

“Maybe where we’re going. . it’s good not to hurry.”

Colleen rubbed a weary hand over her eyes. “Look, I feel sorry for him, I do. It’s not his fault. But he’s not in control. He could draw attention, maybe get us-” She stopped as she spied the blossoming look of pain and shame on Tina’s face.

He’s not the only one to draw attention. Colleen cursed herself; her mouth should have been chained up years ago. But then Tina particularly, with that astonishing grace, made her feel like an awkward, insensitive brute. And yet she had to admit to feeling a growing kinship with the girl, seeing in her tentativeness, her shyness, a reflection of her own concealed inner landscape.

Tina was looking off toward a bank of clouds. Colleen reached a tentative hand to touch her, then withdrew it.

“You know who Martha Graham is?” Tina asked, still studying the clouds.

“Unless she invented the cracker, no.”

“She said, ‘Dancing is a call. . Free choice doesn’t enter into it.’ ” She brought her ice-fire gaze to Colleen, gave a melancholy smile. “Do you think we have a choice in life or are we just fooling ourselves?”

“I think. . we can’t choose what happens to us. But we can choose how we act.” Colleen’s eyes returned to Goldie. He stood now, brushing the dirt from his clothes. He held a wrapped parcel under one arm.

“Maybe some people can’t.” Tina gazed beyond Goldie to where an evening mist was rising, and her voice was a whisper. “No matter how hard they try.”

Colleen and Tina found Cal, Doc and Goldie gingerly unwrapping the oilskin-bound package Goldie had dug up. Inside were more layers of paper and fabric in various stages of decomposition. Then finally, the object itself, dried-out wood and rusty metal.

It was a musket, Springfield 1857 just discernible on the pitted metal screwed to the wormy stock.

“ This is what you needed to dig up? It wouldn’t even work if guns did work.” Colleen snapped. “How ’bout you tell me why, Gunga Din? And don’t give me that ‘Caesar’ crap.”

Goldie straightened, hefting the weapon in his long-fingered hands with their thick nails like gray stones. “I have absolutely no idea.”