Marc Zicree - Magic Time

They swung west to avoid Philadelphia, traveling through the green sweet farming country that was being stripped of its horses and cows. Skirting Bala Cynwyd and Merton Station and Havertown, they would draw near travelers, scuffed and weather-worn, groups of two or three or four, mindful to keep their hands open and in sight, their weapons stowed- and Tina carefully hidden.

Sometimes Doc would dress wounds, administer simple remedies he had picked up from medicine chests of abandoned homes, first-aid kits from automobiles and RVs. Goldie might sing or dance to lull the children, do simple tricks of pretend magic-or real magic feigned as pretend-while Colleen hung back, keen-eyed, and Cal questioned the adults.

None of them had heard anything of a power to the west or the south. No, Wish Heart meant nothing to them, nor any combination of words sounding like that. Yes, they had disturbing dreams, naturally, but nothing like the revelations that had been visited upon Tina and Stern.

Curiously, as Cal and his companions journeyed on, they encountered none of the altered ones, by day or night, although some of the men and women they interrogated admitted to having heard of such creatures, and a few had even seen them, fleetingly.

Everyone they spoke to confirmed that the Change had come over the land at the same time, and that it stretched as far as anyone had seen, or that anyone they had talked with had seen. As to what it might be, or what had caused it, most had a theory, running a tabloid gamut from alien invasion or government conspiracy to warfare between the gods. Some were stated boldly, others offered with grave doubts-but none with the least hint of proof.

“It is like a Rorschach,” Doc commented as they rested in the shade of a willow grove just below Hazlettville. “Everyone sees this brave new world of ours through the lens of their perceptions, of fear, anger, desire. Casting the world in their own image. .”

“More a Thematic Aperception Test, if you want to be precise,” Goldie corrected him, tightrope-walking over a log balanced across the creek. “And, sorry to break it to you, they always did.” He was back in his expansive, talkative phase, no longer dressed down but instead tricked out in what he had taken to calling his Fall Collection-the electric-blue vest emblazoned with buttons, the Hawaiian shirts that never seemed to lose their brightness no matter how long they went unlaundered.

Colleen repeated more than once, and always with cause, that she really couldn’t tell which she preferred less, Goldie muted or Goldie loud.

In the quiet times down the long highways, Cal, intent on formulating some plan of attack, would question Tina and Goldie as to what they might sense or see of the force waiting for them at the end of their road. But on this subject Goldie had no premonitions, could summon no image nor inkling. And as for Tina, though its call grew more insistent every day, the darkness that pulled her relentlessly remained shrouded in its own secret.

Often, after they pitched camp, Cal practiced defensive moves with Doc and Colleen, Doc sharing what he had learned in Soviet basic training and Afghanistan, Colleen what she had gleaned from her father, and the streets, and the woods. They squared off bare-handed or with sheathed knives, or wielded sword or bow. Tina would hover near, watching absently, or drift off into the shadows, while Goldie sat cross-legged, humming to himself, voraciously poring over whatever stray volume he had picked up along the way, be it Marcel Proust, Stephen Hawking or Danielle Steel.

In the glow of a campfire against the chill of twilight, Colleen wrapped her arms around her knees and smiled, all the tension shaken out of her for once. She seemed to crackle and glow with energy, like the fire itself. Her smile changed her, gentled her, so that Cal wanted to reach over and touch her-to forget, for once, about the world that was changing, about the growing despair in Tina’s eyes. About the thing that they would have to face eventually if they had the grim fortune to find it.

“Fighting isn’t about hitting,” Colleen said, finishing a point she had made earlier, in the midst of their sparring. “It’s about distance, first and foremost. And it’s about always thinking, What do I do if this person goes for me ?”

Distance , thought Cal, and if this person goes for me. Looking into Colleen’s eyes, he understood suddenly that this was how she regarded everything, everyone: with wariness, fear, caution. Don’t give them a weapon against you. Don’t let them into striking range. It was how Cal himself had viewed the world in what he was increasingly thinking of as The Time Between, the period from his mother’s death through his thralldom to Stern, before the Change. And it was how Colleen viewed the world still.

And before he could look away, she saw the compassion and sadness under his thought.

The warmth vanished instantly from her eyes, leaving them bleak and bitter and angry: You don’t understand .

But he did, and that was what angered her. She got to her feet and walked off into the woods. He rose to follow, to draw her back, but she was moving quickly, and he lost her in the tangle of trees.

He pressed on, searching in the fading dusk, when the glow of a shifting light drew him toward a clearing.

Tina was there, unaware of him. She turned slowly in midair, arms and legs poised in an exquisite arabesque, regarding herself in the play of light against the fallen, dried leaves that carpeted the ground. Beautiful, but so forlorn.

Cal stood a long time, not disturbing her.

And, watching unsuspected from cover, silent as a hawk, Colleen contemplated the look on his face, the fear and tenderness there, and the love that she had thought beyond the capability of any man but her father.

They continued, past Wilmington and Aberdeen and Perry Hall, swinging wide of Baltimore, ever southward, moving fitfully and uncertainly, like a band of blind men drawn by a distant sound. Or, more accurately, a sound that only one of them could hear.

But then, it wasn’t like a sound, Cal reflected, lying in his sleeping bag while Doc stood guard by moonlight over the camp they had pitched at Cedar Beach, the cool waters of the Chesapeake softly lapping the shore. It was like a far-off molten core radiating mad heat. Cal studied his sister’s sleeping form, shielded in a North Face tent, her glow damped down to a phosphoresence that mirrored the night-washed waves. Tina’s sleep was nightly raked with dreams, from which she would wake trembling, unable or unwilling to describe what frightened her. The closer they approached the white-hot glare of whatever was summoning her, the more she seemed to be melting away, growing ever more distant and abstracted. As if she were leaving them already, in small steps, imperceptibly, until she would be gone entirely.

Seeing Cal studying his sister, Doc crouched near. “When one administers an X-ray, it always gives pause,” he said, seeming to catch Cal’s thought. “Will this help to relieve suffering or will it, in years to come, be the one fraction of difference that causes a cancer to form? It is the same with heart surgery, with almost any choice. The physician asks himself, Am I curing, or am I-” He stopped himself from saying killing . “Or am I creating harm?” He laid a hand on Cal’s arm. “Take heart, my friend. She is still with us, and we are together-what do you call them? — merry men, eh? And one woman who would choose to be called anything but. We will beard that lion in his den.”

If only it were just a lion , Cal thought. Even closing in on it, Tina still had no idea what it was. Crazy and angry and sad. . like the world it had created.