Marc Zicree - Magic Time

And then the smell of blood was everywhere, and the taut, heaving grunter on top of her collapsed, hot liquid spilling over her face, and she was released, the other two squealing, running away. A hand reached down to her, and she seized it, climbed to her feet.

The sword he held was still clotted with earth from where it had been plunged into the dirt in front of the Wishart house.

“Sorry to disobey your orders,” Doc said.

Wilma grinned, but there was no time for words, as beyond the press of bodies, she spied a familiar, darting form.

Hank, unmistakably. On the move with a chunk of concrete in his hand, giving low, growling orders, rallying his followers as he vaulted past the others. Rolling and regaining his footing, running as he had as a boy; no, even faster.

Toward the Wishart house.

And Wilma, bounding with her uncanny feline grace, was after him.

Bob Wishart lay immobile on the bed, his eyes closed, still connected to a maze of wires and tubes and useless, dark machinery. Beside him stood his brother, lightly resting a protective hand on Bob in much the same way, Cal realized, that he had his own hand on his sister’s thin shoulders.

Dr. Fred Wishart looked as he had in the flash Cal had glimpsed earlier: pale, translucent, with little indication of the power he wielded. But Cal could see that the tiny flashes of light that made up Wishart’s skin were continually flickering out and reflaring, as if he were in a constant state of disintegration and rebirth, photon by photon. The mighty effort he was expending was consuming him; it took the fuel of the entire town to keep him from being extinguished.

It was he, not the Source, feeding on Boone’s Gap.

Dr. Wishart’s gaze followed them as they entered the room, and there was that same desperate fierceness Cal had seen before, with a new, indefinable note tempering it. Power murmured and flickered in the corners of the room, blue lines of what looked like fire creeping across the floor, slow-moving greenish mists oozing from the walls.

Wishart turned to his twin, spoke in a voice surprisingly melodic and gentle. “Bob?” Cal saw that the two were breathing in unison.

Bob’s eyes fluttered open. Fred nodded toward the doorway, toward him and Tina. Bob turned his head dreamily to them. Barely conscious, hardly moving, he seemed held by a whisper.

“There, you see?” Dr. Wishart said. “No harm.”

Bob looked relieved, and Cal was again struck by the difference between the brothers, the difference that had been branded on them before the Change, before they were grown. The frantic, anguished moment in the hall came to Cal, his despair to save his sister, who knew him best, whom he loved above all. And he understood that it was his need that had spoken to the minds of the unseen twins, had moved Fred to relent, to spare them. . for Bob’s sake, for his gentler nature.

And how much did Bob know of the rest?

Cautiously, Cal inched farther into the room with Tina. “You haven’t told him?” he asked Dr. Wishart. “He doesn’t know about the others?”

Fred Wishart’s gaze darkened. Bob looked at him, perplexed.

“It’s nothing,” Fred told him, too quickly. But his brother’s eyes remained on him, inquiring. “I’m not strong enough. I’m just borrowing from some of the people here. . to keep you alive, to keep us together.”

And killing your neighbors, the people you grew up with, who never did you harm. Cal wanted to hate him, this monster who had mutilated those wretches on the lawn and in the fog, who was even now draining the life from the old and the young and the weak.

But drawing his sister closer to him, holding her there, Cal found he could not.

Cal heard Tina’s soft voice. “You’re killing the town, everyone in it, to keep this going.”

“Fred?” Bob’s voice was tender and mournful, a parched croak, long unused. “Fred, we can’t. .”

“No, Bobby. If I let go, you’ll die-”

“But Fred. .”

Fred’s crystalline-bright eyes flashed on Cal and Tina, and Cal felt himself assailed by a blast of thought. YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND YOU DON’T KNOW.

Bob’s troubled gaze, briefly on Cal, returned to his brother. Fred reacted as though to a caress. Damping his anger, he said, “The world-something. . happened. More important than-”

Fred Wishart froze for a moment, buffeted by some internal war he alone was privy to. He continued, ever so gently, “I let go, I’m destroyed, too. Something bad needs me-to be whole. . ”

Bob turned his head on his pillow, looked pleadingly at Cal. “Please. Tell me. What’s happening here?”

Again, thought crashed into Cal, guilty, frantic, desperate, justifying, words all tumbled and overlapping, a jumbled mea culpa and defense. PURE RESEARCH CHANGED OBJECTED CHANGED DEVIL’S BARGAIN CHANGED ME CHANGED NO CHANGE LOVE BOB LOVE NO-

Cal looked at Bob, trying to steady himself, trying to focus through the screaming in his mind.

Desperation-driven, panic-driven madness, Cal could empathize with. But in the face of this howling self-justification, everything in Cal rebelled.

“You should know,” Cal’s low voice trembled, every word a fierce battle, “You have a choice. You have a-”

NO NO NO.

It thundered in Cal’s brain, the room itself shaking, tortured, accusatory.

NO TELL NO BLOCKING DOORWAY BLOCKING HOLDING CLOSED CAN’T OPEN SWALLOW WHOLE SWALLOW ME I CEASE WHO WHAT I AM MONSTER.

Cal battled to respond, to answer in words or thoughts, but the wall against him felt as solid as stone. For Fred Wishart, the continued existence of his fellow beings had fallen to nothing in the face of this higher imperative, his need to cling to Bob.

All in Boone’s Gap were to die.

Cal turned once more to the waiting Bob, clearly screened somehow from Fred’s words. Sensing it might end his own life, Cal struggled to speak.

NO NO NO. It was like a hurricane. Cal staggered back, grasping the doorframe. UNDERSTAND UNDERSTAND BOB DIES IT TAKES ME.

Fred Wishart ran distracted starry fingers through firelight hair, and his wild desolate eyes shifted-boring into Tina.

AND IT TAKES HER.

Cal couldn’t move. He felt as if he were falling away from himself. TAKE HER. Tina. Into the monster’s maw.

Bob’s eyes were on him. Waiting. While, in an instant that would, in the future, seem to stretch on for an eternity, Cal’s voice was still.

Suddenly, the far window exploded inward and a small gray body flung itself through the opening, landing with a springy lightness. It whipped its big head around and spotted Bob, hurled itself toward the bed with a chunk of concrete raised high in its hands.

Cal screamed, “No!” as Fred Wishart’s head snapped up, eyes no longer human, no longer of the living earth at all, a blazing blue horror of darkness. Wishart opened his mouth, and fire poured out, light streamed from his eyes. The whole fabric of the house wrenched and twisted, crushing inward, and the grunter was hurled to the floor, swept into a corner like a bug by a broom.

Glass shattered and more grunters were pouring in, through both windows now. Wishart swung his glare around to them, and they were caught and smashed back, cracking the walls, their necks snapping as they slid limply down.

But now the first grunter was back up, launching himself toward Bob. A heavy respirator lurched from its base, flew killingly through the air at him.

“ Hank !” Cal saw that Wilma Hanson had burst in through the hall door. She dove between Hank and the respirator. It caught her hard, driving her back into Hank, ramming them against the wall, both of them splaying unmoving on the floor.

And now Cal was aware of another, oppressive presence tearing into existence in the room, engulfing the air and his mind, a conquering, clamorous disputation of voices.