Marc Zicree - Magic Time

He gritted his teeth and walked to the second body, scanning the ground as he went.

For two days, he searched.

He found about a hundred and fifty suitcases, most of which had been torn open or burst on impact: suits, dresses, belts, scarves, cosmetics exploding among the light ferns and creepers. A Bally loafer had survived by falling into a puddle. A woman’s mauve-and-pale-green scarf incorporated into a squirrel’s nest. An old man’s cane embedded in an elm tree as if it had been fired from a gun.

Some of the bodies had fared the same, torn to pieces on impact. This wasn’t the first wreck Shango had checked out, nor the first time he’d moved aside a bush expecting to see a body at the end of a protruding leg that turned out not to have one. He didn’t know whether the matter-of-factness he felt was because of exhaustion or because, after three weeks of heat and flies and animals, what he found didn’t look particularly human anymore. It was just meat.

What he didn’t feel by day, he felt in his nightmares at night-but in his nightmares, the bodies all had faces: his mother, his brother, his father. Mrs. Close. The guy in the tower with the sling on his arm. Czernas. McKay. And he’d wake sweating in the dark, in whatever burrow he’d found for himself, hearing the foxes fighting over a severed hand.

The second day he found the tail section, eighteen people still more or less seat-belted into the twisted wreckage. There was a beverage service cart and most of a flight attendant nearby.

Earphones half-crushed, gray worms in the fast-growing new creepers underfoot. Somebody’s portable CD player with a Gregorian chant disc still in it. A slightly waterlogged copy of The Velveteen Rabbit: after a long time, if you love enough and are loved, you lose all your soft plush and your stitching gets a little loose and you get a little faded and a little saggy and you become Real.

And Real is the best that you can be .

Voices rang behind him in the woods.

Shango shoved the book into his backpack and slithered into the nearest cover, a thicket of sugarberry brambles near the broken impact crater of a seat section, keeping his head down and balling his body small. He heard the soft whuffle of horses and the creak of leather, not too near but near enough they’d have seen him; a man’s voice said, “-live off the country till we get that first crop in. Then we’ll be able to increase their rations. Till then they’re lucky they’re getting anything. Bastards couldn’t be bothered to lay up provisions, who the hell’d they think was going to feed them?”

Shango waited till the noises faded utterly, then crept from the thicket. It was late afternoon, and he had two hours or so of daylight left. But instead of returning at once to his search, he made his way back to a stream cut he’d marked earlier in the day as a place to hole up for the night. Spring runs had undercut the bank and wild honeysuckle grew down over it, leaving a hidey hole behind. Shango dipped up water in one hand, the other hand ready on his knife, listening, always listening, to the birdsong and the soft rustlings of beasts in the woods.

The last body he’d found had been a boy of six or seven, burned, dismembered by foxes. Why that child’s body affected him he didn’t know. Maybe because a section of seat had covered the face, so that when he’d tipped it clear to look for flight bags or purses, the flesh had still been in place, recognizable to those who’d loved this boy.

But they were probably dead, too.

And he thought, Those who kept the Source in existence-those who organized it, funded it, lied about it to McKay- are the people who’re going to end up with the food and the water and the protection that everyone else is dying without .

Whoever they are, they, too, knew what it meant when the lights went out.

Anger flamed within him. Anger beyond anything he’d thought himself capable of feeling, a volcano, a cataclysm: hatred for the men who had killed that child.

Hatred followed by an exhaustion so intense that it made him dizzy and sick.

He crawled behind the honeysuckle, sat with the damp cool clay of the bank against his back.

McKay was a part of it , he thought. YOU were a part of it. All this time, being a cog in their wheel, being good at your job and proud to be good at your job. And your job was to protect the men who secretly, quietly, were working on this.

He remembered how good it had felt, to hear Cox or McKay say, He’s good at his job. He’s the best . How good it had felt to have a scorepad that said, “Ninety-nine out of a hundred rounds in the target zone”; to spot some questionable yo-yo in a crowd and remove him, or to establish a perimeter or make a transfer from door to car without slip-ups. That sense of accomplishment. Something apart from, beyond, the chaos in which he’d grown up, the chaos of watching his father and mother giving their time and money and attention to a thousand things besides their children: buying one too many rounds of beers for friends, being gone with the church ladies one too many nights. No time, gotta go. . Not this week, honey, next week. .

And it had all been betrayal, in the end. It had all been to protect the people who thought that the risk of this-this horror, this catastrophe-coming to pass was less important than getting power.

He thought, I will find Bilmer. I will get her notes, her evidence, back to McKay. And then I will protect McKay from these people, because whoever they are, they will destroy him before they’ll admit that they were wrong.

Shango closed his eyes. He’d be able to go over about another square mile of woods before it got too dark to see. He’d been marking them off on Mr. Dean’s map: oak tree to pond, covered. Pond to birches, covered. Birches to the second burn scar, covered.

But what if he’d missed something? What if a fox had dragged Bilmer’s body, or purse, or luggage away to its hole? The next section to search, beyond the second burn scar, might contain something, but what if the papers themselves had become exposed?

What would he do then? How would he know?

When you’ve gone over the whole area, he told himself, and haven’t found what you’re looking for, then it’ll be time to go back and look again. You can’t do it any other way.

Someone was singing.

Humming, whispering; Shango knew almost before he opened his eyes, before he shifted his weight forward to peer through the honeysuckle, that it was a crazy. He’d learned the sound of crazies over the years.

So in a way, the sight of the man kneeling beside the stream didn’t surprise him. Only that he had made it this far from civilization unharmed.

Traveling with someone, Shango deduced at once, studying the wild black hair curling from beneath that straw cowboy hat, the jangly fruit-salad Hawaiian shirts. Father or brother or pal, he was someone they couldn’t leave behind.

His back still to Shango, the man rose and sauntered along the bank with a loose-limbed casualness, a here/not-here quality that set him apart.

Every now and then, the man found some bauble in the wet earth-a water-polished stone, a sprig of greenery-and stooped to claim it, the tangle of buttons pinned to his vest clattering as he bent. Shango saw now that the fellow had a pitifully old musket, all rusted and cracked, slung over his back. What possible good might that do, even as a bluff?

Hell , thought Shango, starting to rise, it’s only an hour or so till dark, I couldn’t cover the whole of that burn scar anyway. Might as well see if I can find his family, get him back to them if he isn’t going to end up carrying nightsoil for Cadiz’s private garden patch.