Marc Zicree - Magic Time

If you were good buddies with senators or generals, it probably wasn’t difficult to be enrolled as a “special deputy” or “consultant” in order to cadge a spot at Camp David-or in the government bunkers under the mountains in western Maryland where the center of things now undoubtedly was-and a ration book.

But the members of the bureaucracy who were still struggling to govern, still trying to sort out the mess-certainly the bulk of the enlisted men, the Reservists, the National Guard-would have remained loyal to McKay. And McKay, for all the compromises he’d made on his way to the Presidency, had lines that he wouldn’t cross.

And one of those lines had been the one that divided the good-old-boy Us from the scared and hungry and militarily worthless Them.

Between the epidemic and the evacuation, it wouldn’t have been difficult to put the man himself away but keep his name. Aides and press secretaries and members of the Secret Service could be dealt with, particularly if people were dying on all sides anyway. No need to make a fuss about it: X or Y just hadn’t made it onto the convoy of wagons heading for Maryland, they’ll be along later.

Only later never came.

It was fairly easy to find the grave. It was in a rose bed about thirty feet from the fountain, just behind a bench. Maybe the same bench where McKay and Bilmer had sat, when McKay had asked her to go look for the Source. Shango almost laughed as he started to dig in the still-soft earth-they hadn’t even replaced the uprooted rose bushes, just dumped them in a crude pile on top. Some of the blossoms, brown and withered, still had a little color in their hearts. After all that, all that had survived was a list of names of people who were at the Source, people you couldn’t get to anyway.

Mosquitoes whined in a cloud around the nearly empty basin, sang in Shango’s ears as his shovel bit the soil. The whole lower two-thirds of the Mall, from the Air and Space Museum to the river, was marshy with standing water and humming with insects, as Washington returned to the stagnant wetland it had been before the introduction of drainage pumps and reflecting pools. Sometimes a soldier’s voice carried from the redoubts of the central command post or footfalls passed along Pennsylvania Avenue-armed bands in quest of forage or fuel-but the stillness and hush were like a leaden shroud. The shovel blade made a harsh hissing crunch in the dirt.

It wasn’t quite dark when Shango found the body. He scraped and scooped at the dirt, knelt in the shallow depression-it wasn’t more than a yard deep-and cracked his little fireplace striker patiently over a tuft of dry lint until a spark took. The yellow glow expanded to show his dirt-clotted fawn-and-black fur, a black leather collar.

It was Jimmy, the big German shepherd whom the newspapers had delighted to call the First Dog.

He had been clubbed to death.

With him in the grave, like isolate fragments of bone, were a pair of broken, owlish glasses-a little blood and hair still adhering to a bent-in temple piece-and a woman’s pink-and-white Nike, stained black with blood. Nothing more. They were the kind of thing you’d find on the scene of a killing during clean-up, after the bodies had been taken away, particularly if the killings had taken place at night.

Shango blew out his little scrap of kindling and carefully refilled the grave.

No mistaking the dog’s crushed skull, the broken ribs and back. Jimmy had been thin with scant rations, but quite clearly nobody had thought it a good idea to blow the cover story by cooking him.

He had died trying to defend McKay and Jan.

As Shango himself had promised he would do.

He sat for a long time on the grave of his canine brother, while the last traces of the time of the dog faded into the time of the wolf.

And what now? he thought, his mind relaxed and clear- aware of his anger, like an acid-bath of rage, but not really feeling it, any more than a fish feels wet. Stars made their appearance overhead, hundreds of them, thousands, beautiful with a beauty that had not been seen in this place since men had first learned to burn coal gas to chase away the night. The blue flicker of witchlight reappeared along the Capitol rampart, a cold phosphor glow, and Shango wondered how many people had what his granny had simply called Power .

How many people-like the fear-caster in Albermarle County, and the firestarter in Spotsylvania and crazy Herman Goldman-who would be willing to use that power, for good or for what they conceived to be good, or at least to be good for them? Of course Christiansen, and the men behind him, would be gathering them into their service as Cadiz had gathered Brattle.

They’d be up in Maryland, too.

Shango found that the idea of going along with Christiansen, riding with the convoy to the government’s new headquarters, strongly appealed to him. Finding the men who’d tossed Jan McKay’s glasses and shoe so casually into the nearest hole in the ground.

Finding the men who’d ordered McKay’s death.

Find them and what?

Shango’s mission was over. He had done what McKay had asked of him, found what he needed to find, and it was empty, useless. A weapon that broke in his hand.

And it dawned on him that he was thinking about vengeance-even at the cost of his own life-not because of his anger, but because it was another job. And if he didn’t get another job, another task to absorb him, as he’d let McKay’s life and safety absorb him, as he’d let being the best in the service absorb him. .

He’d have to get a life.

A life with people in it. People like Czernas and Griffin and the lady in the green sweatsuit. People who ran around and did what they wanted and went crazy and talked to God and couldn’t get their acts together and dissipated their energies when they should have been helping their children get out of the projects.

Messy, chaotic people. People whose problems and demands frightened him because there was nothing he could do about them. Because if he made a choice, and that choice turned out to be wrong, there’d be more chaos and anger and hurt.

He felt as if he’d put his hand to his side and brought it away bloody from some ancient, seeping wound. A wound whose pain he’d forgotten because he’d lived with it daily, hourly, pretending there wasn’t pain as he’d pretended there wasn’t anger.

He was afraid to choose, he understood then. And he was afraid to live with choice.

It was easier to be the best, to be a weapon in someone else’s hand.

He remembered the fear-caster, staring at him with cold eyes like ball bearings, filling him with terror that only his anger could quell. He had run toward the fear, howling his rage. . and the fear had been defeated.

Shango drew in his breath and let it out. He felt dizzy and disoriented, as he had after anger had burst through both fear and the self-imposed bonds of the job; shaky, as he’d heard men were, after they’ve been imprisoned for years, at the sight of wall-less places and sky.

He thought, I could get another job . There were plenty of them around. A job such as Griffin had chosen, to find the weak point of the Source. A job like the ones McKay had done, struggling to keep help and life flowing to those that needed them, until death overtook him.

Shango shook his head. Most times, he’d learned that the windmill was bigger and tougher than the knight.

And the windmill didn’t care.

The stars moved, leaving the question: What now? South to New Orleans? The town would be underwater by now, of course, with the pumping stations dead. The local military authorities would be in charge. Mother, brother, sisters would be somewhere nearby, surviving, he was sure, probably in the middle of a giant gaggle of cousins and neighbors and church ladies, hanging together as they always hung together.