Marc Zicree - Magic Time

My black ass. Shango made his brow pucker a little with false consideration as he nodded. Through the windows the stink of the city was choking. He wondered how any were still able to live there, what they were living on, how they existed once the food ran low. FEMA, and the National Guard, and all the other emergency relief organizations, were set up to quickly transfer necessaries from one area to another, not to deal with everything coming to a halt at once. Shango wondered how the coup had been undertaken, and who had ultimately come out on top. He has enemies , Czernas had said: the military who had considered him unwise, the corporations who had regarded him as a threat to their network of favors and support. McKay had known that, to cover up the Source, he was being betrayed at the highest level.

“See Captain Nye about putting you up in the barracks for the night.” Christiansen glanced at the hot gold light slanting through the window. “We’ll arrange transport for you up to Camp David in the morning. I wouldn’t advise you going very far outside the compound here,” he added, as Shango thanked him and turned to leave. “We’ve been able to keep order in the city after a fashion during the day, but between the gangs and the trogs coming up out of the Metro at night, outside is not someplace you want to be once it gets dark.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Shango.

A service for the grunter men and Arleta Wishart was held late that afternoon. They’d all come, everyone in Boone’s Gap well enough to walk, a show of solidarity and mutual support.

Cal stood at the back of the Union Hall and wondered distantly if indeed there would be peace for those interred.

Now what? What now?

He had lost his sister, been defeated by Fred Wishart, an offshoot, a lesser power of the whole. And all he’d learned from the experience was that he had feet of clay. Colleen, Doc and Goldie were ready to follow him, but how could he pretend he had the ability to lead?

A touch on his arm. Colleen smiled. “Got the pedicab rigged for Doc. Damn optimist says we can leave come morning.”

Cal felt himself curl inward. With a cool nod, he turned back to the proceedings.

Beside him, Colleen closed her hands tightly, one over the other, and fought not to walk away, as she had done when Rory had shut her out. Fought not to react with anger, to the hurt of knowing there was nothing she could do.

Instead, she simply stroked his back and moved off.

Cal listened to the men and women at the podium, to their remembrances of the good times before their loved ones had lost themselves. Then, able to stand it no longer, he withdrew to the outer room.

Tables laden with food stood waiting. Bob Wishart peered out the front window, a figure of solitude and sadness. He motioned Cal over to him.

“I’ve been trying to think what I’ve done wrong, where I failed, to have drawn down all these bad things.” Bob smiled grimly. “What is it about self-blame that’s such a comfort?”

Cal looked through the window, toward the hills, no longer mist-quilted, where dusk held sway.

“You know, I said he left a part of himself in me, to keep me going?” Bob continued. “Well, I’ve got power. I mean, just a little, for starters. But maybe I’ll be able to protect this town a tad, make up for. . ”

He winced and lapsed into silence, contemplating the fading day. Cal thought of Lola Johnson, who could shield her town, safeguard its bounty, and he prayed that Bob Wishart might be a safe harbor for his neighbors, where his brother had brought only the storm.

“There’s something I have to tell you,” Bob added. “The reason I know Fred’s alive is, when he left a part of himself, he took a part of me. I can feel myself there with him.”

Bob Wishart gripped the sill, and his voice hardened. “They made a mistake, taking him back. He didn’t want to go… and he ain’t alone.” He turned to Cal. “They just may have swallowed a virus.”

Cal studied him and it came like a warming sun that the war had not ended. It had just begun.

He left Bob Wishart and returned to the service. A bit off to the side, in the shadows, Hank sat beside Wilma. They weren’t speaking or even looking at each other but were sitting close, in the way of old friends reunited. Behind them stood Colleen, Doc and Goldie.

Cal moved up to them, placed his hand on Colleen’s shoulder. It was a warm touch, and she warmed to it.

Around him, he saw the faces in the glow of candles and torches: men who’d worked the mines all their lives, women who until a few weeks ago had sewed for minimum wage in little factories to support their families. Parents whose children had awakened from their cold silent sleep, weak and hungry but well. Women whose miner husbands were being buried as grunters that day.

People Ely Stern would have dismissed with a single cutting phrase. A way of life that Cal had fled, wanting something more for himself, for Tina.

And there they still were, when New York was bleeding and rotting away. In a town whose smallness and simplicity gave it an advantage when nothing worked anymore but friendship and the bonds between person and person.

Maybe better, maybe worse, in the days to come. But as Goldie had said, Thems on bottom will be on top now.

Between the dog and the wolf , Shango’s Cajun friends had called this twilight time. Circling through the dove-colored twilight of the lower end of the Mall, Shango looked back toward the Capitol Building, the stout wall of sandbags and cinderblocks and barbed wire that surrounded the National Guard complex, and saw a blue-white glow of light moving along that new-made rampart.

So the dogs of war, like the wolves down in Albermarle County, were enlisting those with “talents.”

Plywood and sheet metal had been wired over the palisade around the White House, but most of the plywood was gone. There were no guards. No one moved around the knee-deep grass of the untended lawns. Someone had tried to be careful about bolting security doors and grilles over the doors and windows of the Executive Mansion itself, but the place had been broken into and looted.

Did anyone really think the Army would leave food and water there? wondered Shango, as he passed it in the blue dusk. Was this just a quest for combustibles? Or the rage and revenge at a system that had promised to protect the weak and the poor, at least a little bit?

And had then, as such systems do, simply decided to protect itself instead. To protect itself, and pretend that certain of its own members weren’t responsible for the horror of what the world had become. He’d seen enough of that in the service. At the time he’d just accepted that, as in the Army, it was how things worked.

He didn’t go in. Light was fading; it was dark enough that sentries on the higher ground near the Capitol wouldn’t be able to see him if they looked down the Mall, but not too dark for him to see what he was doing, and he didn’t want to kindle a light. He’d picked up a shovel on his way at a looted and deserted hardware store in Georgetown and concealed it in the Old Executive Building. It now hung in the straps of his backpack, while he carried the hammer in his hand.

Go to a fountain , Goldie had said. Near the roses .

If someone had actually killed the President, would they really have been so dumb as to bury him in the Rose Garden ?

Shango had no doubt that McKay was dead. Had he attempted to push through some program of food distribution that impinged on the Army’s stockpiles? One of those sad-faced, exhausted secretaries had told him, “All sorts of people workin’ for the Army these days”; people who still held power, people who’d possessed stockpiles of food or domestic animals, people who knew people in the government, who owed or were owed favors. People with something to trade. People the military wanted, for one reason or another, to keep on its side.