Marc Zicree - Magic Time

She had been flung out of the dissolving plane and decapitated by flying debris. Shango soon found her purse under a shattered wing section that had protected it. Delicately, he peeled back the lining and revealed the folded sheets of paper that had cost Bilmer her life and might yet cost him his. Carefully, he unfolded them, drew them apart. Water had soaked most of the sheets, but the inner one was readable. A list of personnel, of home addresses. A last-minute marginal note concerning buffalo and wolves and blue lightning that crawled from the ground.

And that was all.

Shango turned them over in his hands, fighting the urge to laugh. All this, he thought, remembering the chaos of Dulles and the horror of plane after wrecked plane that he’d patiently searched, pawing through the corpses of people he didn’t know, rifling the burned, soaked luggage that was all that remained of thousands of ended lives, and in the end getting only this.

“That what you were looking for?”

Shango looked to Cal. The young man was watching him, concern in his dark eyes, as if he saw how close Shango was to ripping the papers into white flakes of nothingness, releasing them to the winds that would carry off his soul and his life as well.

“Yes,” he said.

“Is it what you need?”

“I don’t know.”

Shango drew a deep breath, reminding himself that his job was not yet done. It wasn’t his to judge, just to find. McKay might be able to make something of this, might match up a name, or a town. If it were what he needed, if it might save the day. If the Source Project was even the cause of all this.

Shango had already done the near impossible. It was time to go.

To McKay, who had trusted him, whom he had left to the care of less-watchful souls.

On sudden impulse, Shango fished the steel dog tag from his pocket, laid it in Goldman’s hand. “Can you see the man who gave me this? See if he’s all right?”

The wild-haired man cocked his head questioningly. Then he took the slip of steel, pressed it between his palms, then to his lips. In the cool morning light, his eyes seemed both focused and distant, seeing beyond the hunks of metal that littered the ground, the stinks of decay. Though the morning was silent, he seemed to hear something, for his face changed, fell a little, the pale brown eyes sad. He made as if to speak, then hesitated.

“What is it, Goldie?” Cal asked.

“I’m sorry,” Goldman said to Shango, handing back the dog tag. “The man you work for, the one you like. . is dead.”

Shango said nothing. Just folded the steel back into his huge palm.

“Goldie’s visions aren’t always accurate,” Cal offered.

“Oh, geez, no,” Goldie agreed quickly, as if the thought that people would take his visions as gospel appalled him. “Sometimes what I see is just ’cause I’m. .” Suddenly, the jangly quality, the wildness ebbed out of him, and he was calm and sure. “If, when you go back, he’s not there to greet you, go to a fountain near the roses.” He peered worriedly from beneath his straw hat brim at Shango’s motionless, expressionless face. “Just wanted to save you the trip,” he said.

“I appreciate it.” The words came out like the dry stir of ash. “I still have to go back.”

Shango slid the metal tag back into his pocket and glanced at the retrieved sheets of wilted paper he still held in his other hand.

Time to go now.

And as he folded the sheets, his eyes tumbled down the list of names.

Wish Heart , Griffin had told him. Shango’s heart was a stone in him, as he kept his silence. And he thought of his duty and of the void that lay there if it were set aside. A void to be looked into and then drawn back from.

And everyone who had drifted through his wandering life floated ghostlike before him now, the ones who had trusted him and stood for him, and whom he had failed. Czernas, and Mrs. Close and Mr. Dean, and all the other guiltless souls at Angels Rest. And perhaps McKay, too, almost certainly so.

He contemplated the men standing beside him, who had brought him here and risked themselves. They were, he knew, going into even greater danger, all innocent, like calves to a slaughterhouse.

What would they be thinking in their last moments?

Of their loved ones, who would be with them.

And he knew that his duty, his oath of office, that everything he stood for, decreed that he tell them nothing of the knowledge he held.

But if McKay were dead, where might that duty lie?

“Wishart isn’t a place,” said Shango. “He’s a person. Dr. Fred Wishart. And he does live in the South. South of here, anyway. A place called Boone’s Gap, West Virginia- though it’s unlikely he was there when all this came down.” Then he told them all he knew-what precious little there was of it-about the Source Project.

Surprise showed in Cal Griffin’s eyes, and he was quiet, weighing this intelligence, shuffling it into all that had unfolded in the days that had brought them here.

Goldie chuckled, but there was no humor in the sound. “You know, funniest coincidence: during the Manhattan Project, there was a serious concern that if they set off an atomic reaction, it might just keep going, blow up the whole world. What the hell, they pushed the button anyway.”

“This force,” Cal asked Shango in a hushed tone, “is it something the scientists made or something they just plugged into?”

“I don’t know,” said Shango. “I don’t even know where it was located.”

“Lay you odds it’s to the west,” Goldie muttered.

“I can’t say how to stop it or control it,” Shango continued and felt his own futility. “All I know is someone was doing something they didn’t want shared, that it was about power.” But then, it was always about power.

Shango tucked the sheets into his pack, looked northward. The sun was rising high into the gray, cloudless sky, but it gave no warmth. Time to go.

Home ?

Or just back ?

Cal put a hand on his arm, smiled into Shango’s dark eyes. “If you’d care to come with us, we could sure as hell use you.”

And though he had his duty, though his modus operandi had been always to be alone, to rely on no one and watch his own back, Shango felt the longing rise in him to go with them, to be with them.

Reluctantly, he shook his head. “I have to make sure.”

Cal nodded. “I understand.” He clasped Shango’s hand. Looking into Cal’s eyes, Shango was reminded, strangely, of McKay.

“Keep your head low,” said Goldie, as if speaking to a man who proposed to cross a busy street, as if he had said it many, many times.

“You, too,” Shango said.

The dead of night was the worst time.

By day, the white house among the honeysuckle was as invisible to Wilma as it was to the rest of the people in the town-she didn’t see it, didn’t even think about it, except when she walked to the trailer court to help Shannon and Greg care for Tessa or down to the Senior Center, where two or three of the old people were beginning to nod and doze with that same cold constant silence. But at night it seemed to come into focus again.

That was when things came out of the darkness.

Two nights ago, skeletal wolves melted into being from the gray mists that lifted from the earth to surround the house, solidifying around burning red fire specks of eyes. Wilma had watched them from her back porch steps as they’d tried to clamber through the broken, yawning windows, through the open door. Blue lightning had sizzled and snapped from the walls, and purplish flame crept from the windows in a phosphorescent stream. The wolves howled and howled, writhing in pain as they burned, and then had melted away. But when dawn came, Wilma, looking hard, saw on the dilapidated paintwork the marks of their claws and teeth.