Magic Time Read online

  Tina will stay at St. Augustine; she will wait for me. An image loomed before Cal of his sister fleeing into the streets for home, being swept up and lost in the mass of ten million souls vomiting from their buildings, flooding the thoroughfares and washing her hopelessly away.

  No. She’ll know to wait. She’s level-headed, smart. He summoned the memory, three years back, of when, newly arrived from Hurley, Tina had tripped and burned herself on the radiator. She had cried out just once, then been quiet through the mad rush to the emergency room, the long, chaotic night. Silent and watchful and calm, far calmer than Cal had been.

  But that had been an event prosaic and knowable, if unpleasant. This was something new.

  And yet . . .

  The nightmare clamor in the dark, the feel of the sword hilt, so right, the invitation to know himself at last.

  Your young men will dream dreams. It’s omens, Cal. Something’s coming. . . .

  Cal’s Midwestern common sense rebelled. Disasters always pricked some feeling of déjà vu. But that didn’t make those real premonitions, any more than some fake psychic on TV telling the viewers to—

  Mike Covey suddenly cried out, missing a step. Anita La Bonte grabbed him.

  Covey, who had taken credit for the brief that had been shipped in the night pouch to the Rome office, the brief Anita had sweated blood on till three A.M. four nights running all so he, and not Anita, might be the golden one to make the jump from fifth-year associate to contract partner.

  Forgotten now, or at least put aside.

  And not just the two of them. Tom Sammon’s simmering resentment at Gilley Gray’s “jokes,” Janice Fishman’s certainty that charm alone advanced Maria Bryant, all the petty slights and wounds, the long-held grudges melted in the white heat of catastrophe, fear . . .

  Not the cold dread they lived with every working day, that kept them strangers, the persistent hum they finally stopped hearing, though it permeated everything in their lives.

  Even hell, Cal realized, might have small patches of heaven.

  The door to the hall flew open as they hit the sixteenth-floor landing, a mass of bodies blindly surging in. Blundering, cries, shoving in the darkness. Paul Cajero’s arm was bumped, and his lighter clattered away, going out.

  “Watch it, there’s people here!” Cal cried out.

  Everyone within the stairwell stopped where they were, while those still in the hall jostled and shoved. A discord of words, grunts, the tang of fear—the second group parted and their leader stepped up, carrying a lit candle, appraising Cal coolly.

  “Who made you safari guide?” she asked. Even in the dimness, Cal recognized the denim shirt, the toolbelt slung low on her hip like some Home Improvement fast gun.

  “Guess the same guy who made you one,” Cal said. The corner of Colleen’s mouth twitched in the hint of a smile, and Cal could see she had a dimple in one cheek.

  She raised a heavy crossbar. “Been liberating folks stuck in the shafts,” she explained. “You in the hall, hang back till we’re clear.” Both groups shifted around, adjusting themselves. Her eyes swung back to Cal. “So . . . ,” she said, and it was both question and challenge.

  “How about, I take point,” Cal offered.

  “—and I ride drag and pick up the strays.” She nodded. “Yeah, okay.”

  His eyes followed her as she edged back into the throng, becoming indistinct, a silhouette. Paul Cajero was still scrabbling for his lighter. Cal spied its dark shape, scooped it up and flicked it to life. Paul murmured thanks, his face ruddy in the dancing light as they descended, their shadows in pursuit.

  What struck Cal first as he emerged onto the street was the absence.

  No diesel fumes, no din of engines or construction equipment. And no sirens, not even in the distance.

  The silent, inert vehicles stretched along Fifth to infinity, their owners spewed onto asphalt and pavement, sweat smell discernible in the air amid the dust of fallen debris. The neon hubbub that normally blazed on storefronts—HOT GIRLS! GET YOUR BAGELS! PHONES FOR LESS!—lay dark. Torn and tumbled men and women hunkered on curbs, pressing kerchiefs and wadded shirts to a host of injuries.

  Above the buildings, Cal could discern pillars of rising smoke drifting across the sky. The planes. Despite the asphalt’s baking heat, he shivered.

  He was already on the move as he plotted a route to Tina. The major streets were choked, a strangling knot of humanity. For a moment, he considered the subways. Power would likely be out there, too. And in the blackness, shadowy forms waiting, eyes watching.

  I prefer the subterranean, that homeless man, Goldie, had said.

  Cal jettisoned the notion, quickly formed a grid in his mind of back streets and serviceways that led more or less directly to St. Augustine. He was heading purposefully toward a nearby alley when a voice called out behind him, throaty and loud.

  “Hey, hold up there!” Cal turned to see the lean, muscular figure making a dash for him from the revolving door. Eighty flights on that concrete StairMaster hadn’t taken a bite out of her vitality, apparently.

  Colleen Brooks caught up with him, breath hardly labored. “Listen, what I said earlier—”

  “It’s okay,” he said, still moving.

  “I was outta line.” She fell into step, shrugging, abashed. “Trouble with my love life.”

  Cal slowed, disarmed by her directness.

  “What can I say? He puts up with me.” Her eyes swept over the street scene with cool curiosity, then returned to Cal. “So, you got plans for the Apocalypse?”

  “My sister. I take care of her.” They had reached the alley mouth. He needed to get going but found himself surprisingly reluctant to end the conversation.

  “She far?”

  “St. Augustine. On MacDougal.”

  “Get some water before you go, ’cause that’ll be a freakin’ long walk.”

  Cal knew this and had planned to, but he nodded his thanks. He turned to go, then the doubt came to him that perhaps this fierce, competent girl might be hanging with him to avoid facing something fearful ahead of her. “You need . . . help of some kind?”

  Colleen gave a wide smile, the first he had seen, and it so changed her, lightened her, that Cal had a glimpse of what she might have been had her path been less corrosive, less needful of guard. She shook her head. “Not from around here, are you?”

  “No,” Cal said and smiled, too. Colleen nodded knowingly. They began to drift apart, Colleen moving off in the other direction. “You keep your head low,” she said.

  Cal stopped, startled.

  Keep your head low. Amid his wild prophecies and seeming knowledge of Cal’s dream, just before zero hour, Goldie had said exactly those words.

  And metal wings will fail, leather ones prevail. . . .

  The planes had fallen out of the sky, but what the hell did “leather ones” refer to?

  Coincidence, it was all coincidence. And yet, for a fleeting instant, Cal had an image of the three of them somehow tethered, their destinies twined.

  “Yeah,” Cal murmured to Colleen as she headed off. “Yeah, you, too.” Then the alley enfolded him, and he was running.

  Chapter Nine

  WASHINGTON D.C.

  The Joint Chiefs of Staff—or those of them as happened to be in Washington in late summer—arrived at 11:45, according to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century clocks that continued to tick smugly in the Green Room and the Blue Room and the Red Room after everyone’s quartz-movement Rolexes froze up. Larry Shango, who’d grown up with a Basin Street boy’s mistrust of the uptown whites who spent more on a pair of shoes than his daddy could make in a week at the restaurant, had to smile.

  An inner smile, since it was really none of his business to have an opinion about anything.

  By 11:45 there was little else to smile at.

  His eyes had been on McKay when the building started shaking—when the Japanese delegates, with the promptitude of long practice, had gone under the furn
iture or into the doorways and the aides and the folks from the Department of Commerce had tumbled like pins in a bowling alley. He’d seen the look on McKay’s face. Later on, as the FBI and Secret Service cordons snapped into place around the White House and the National Guard started to arrive, sweating from the double-time march through the car-clogged streets, he’d kept nearly as close an eye on the President as on the men and women around him.

  And by 11:45 he was pretty sure he was right.

  McKay wasn’t surprised.

  He was, however, scared damn near shitless. And it was a couple of hours before anyone else got that scared.

  “Reports are still coming in via semaphore and other nonelectric sources, but these conditions seem to prevail up and down the East Coast and as far west as Denver.” General Christiansen set his papers on the table and glanced around at the other advisers, civilian and military, with pale, small watchful eyes. He had a hunter’s tan and the air of a man who’d make you remake your bunk three times just to let you know he could. “No word yet from the West, but according to our sources, portions of Mexico and Canada seem similarly affected. We have no launch capability, no defensive capability at all.”

  “But what is it?” asked Dr. Perry, the stout, normally jovial physicist who headed up McKay’s recently revived Science Advisory Board. His voice cut across the gasp and stammer of panic that Christiansen’s announcement had triggered. “The things I’ve been hearing are absurd. There’s no way—”

  “Once you’ve eliminated the impossible,” Christiansen cut in, “then whatever’s left is probable... only maybe we’d better not eliminate the impossible just yet.” A riff on Conan Doyle and not bad for a crisis, Shango thought. He hadn’t known Christiansen had it in him. He noted, however, that while the general’s mouth formed the ghost of a smile, his eyes stayed cold.

  “All right, gentlemen,” McKay jumped in. “Here’s what we have to ascertain, right now or sooner—”

  A babble of conflicting opinions, defensive statements erupted, which McKay’s voice rose over, forcing silence. “Is this a natural disaster or man-made? If man-made, is it deliberate attack or accident? From within the U.S. or elsewhere? Is it worldwide, with the same effects? And are those effects strengthening or easing?” He addressed Christiansen. “Ed, with the reports you’re getting in, try to nail down specific times the alteration occurred in the various locales; maybe it’ll help us track its locus, which direction it spread and how fast.”

  Christiansen nodded, whispered something to an aide, who jotted a note. McKay opened his mouth to add something, then thought better of it, Shango saw.

  And just what aren’t you saying? Shango wondered, dogged by the certainty of the words under the words, the poker hand held but not yet played. His eyes moved from face to face as they responded with the familiar round of finger pointing, before McKay again corralled them back to order.

  It was Shango’s job not to have an opinion, but a childhood of watching his mother and her church-lady pals in the tenants association and various neighborhood committees had left him with an insatiable curiosity about unspoken truths, hidden alliances—about who they’d run to and whisper once the meeting let out. His mind touched this and from long practice dodged away again, concentrating on the task at hand.

  Watching the men in the room. Never mind that these were the highest brass in the DoD, watch ’em anyway. Watch the windows, the backs of the National guardsmen visible through them. Something massive had happened, and there was no guarantee what was next, and this man, this paunchy balding white guy with the pleasant Oklahoma drawl, was his responsibility.

  He knows something.

  Shango perceived that McKay was searching the faces of the men and women who flowed in succession into the Oval Office—group after group—for some sign as to who else knew.

  The lights weren’t on by noon. The White House command post sent over every available agent as soon as they showed up—most had started walking toward Foggy Bottom the minute the ground quit shaking—and there were anti-sniper posts in every building that overlooked the White House, but it still put Shango’s teeth on edge when McKay insisted on opening the windows. The men loosened their ties and took off their jackets and the women looked like they wished they could shed their pantyhose. Having grown up in New Orleans without benefit of air-conditioning—or indoor plumbing, until he was five—Shango wasn’t much bothered by the heat. But while mentally calculating sight-lines from the windows every time McKay moved and watching each flicker of motion outside, he was deeply conscious of time’s passage. The emergency generators should have come on-line long before this. First in the White House, then in the government buildings all around it.

  He didn’t hear helicopters, sirens, nothing, though the humid air was laden with the far-off tang of smoke. Only the voices of the National Guardsmen and a growing clamor of distant voices in the Mall and in the streets.

  Things were down too long. Way, way too long.

  The gang from FEMA came and went, then came back with horrifying preliminary reports typed on old manual typewriters or printed by the clerk with the neatest handwriting. A squad of reporters, who asked every kind of damn-fool question and had the frightened look of people who didn’t want to believe what they’ve been hearing. Lobbyists from two major oil companies and a multinational arms firm demanding explanations right now. The House Majority Leader and two or three senators who, Shango knew, were high up in the councils of McKay’s party, responsible for his election—the men who truly set party policy, who pulled the strings. Anyone who could possibly work himself into the schedule did: Al Guthrie and Nina Diaz were worn to a frazzle, trying to triage priorities when everything was vital. McKay listened to them patiently: baffled, angry men, men deeply concerned with the long-term goals they’d worked all their lives to achieve. The heat became unbearable. Someone came in with jugs of water that tasted like metal and the unwelcome information that there wasn’t a toilet in five miles that would flush.

  And everything the President said, every plan and motion he requested, was aimed at stockpiling, digging in, guaranteeing stores and supplies. In the eighteen months McKay had been in the White House, Shango had observed that he wasn’t a survivalist and wasn’t inclined to panic.

  Yet he had the air of a man who knew for certain that the lights weren’t going to come back on.

  NEW YORK

  She had been there, on the broken curb in front of St. Augustine, solemn and watchful. As Cal had prayed.

  Tina lifted her head at his approach, and he read in her eyes not relief but confirmation. She knew he would come. Wordlessly, she rose swanlike and fell into step with him for the long walk home.

  From block to block, neighborhood to neighborhood, the city rearranged and reasserted itself. Those newly returned home assayed the damage, cleared out shattered crockery and picture frames, righted rockers and bureaus. TVs that had pitched off tables and stands or had remained stock still, undamaged, were unresponsive and mute. As was every automobile, refrigerator, light bulb, electrical device of any kind.

  Against their silence, a deluge of voices roiled up and overflowed onto the streets, full of shaky speculation, edged with fear and bafflement, leavened by uneasy, occasionally boisterous humor.

  As they reached Eighty-first and Amsterdam, Cal felt the tension in his shoulders ease, the tightness of breath release. It was a scene they had encountered on dozens of blocks, but the faces here were familiar, the buildings known.

  At the crown of the street, Elaine Jamgotchian was sweeping litter and dead leaves out to the gutter, while Sylvia Feldman leaned on her walker in the shade of an anemic maple, complaining (as she had on so many thousand other days) that her useless son Larry hadn’t yet shown up where could he be no doubt with that useless half-blind mulatto wife of his what did he see in her.

  Cal smiled at the prosaic simplicity of it, and the toughness underlying it. He murmured greetings, received assurances they were a
ll in one piece. Tina stood by, all huge eyes and attentive distance. Like heat-seeking grandmother missiles, the women turned their attention on her. Under prodding that brooked no evasion, she finally offered the intelligence that, while she herself was unmarked by the day’s experience, Mallory Stein had suffered three broken ribs and several other students had gone MIA.

  And you couldn’t tell me this? Cal thought fretfully but said nothing.

  He had gotten her home.

  Mr. J., Elaine’s husband, sidled up in the standard-issue workpants and pajama tops he’d worn ever since they’d downsized him from the dockyard. His deep-grooved face was brown and sweaty, which accentuated the white of his beard and thinning hair. “We’re doing all right, God bless you,” he told Cal in his soft Armenian accent. “It will all be fine soon as they get everything going again.”

  Soon as they get everything going.

  Cal didn’t say what nagging intuition, or dream logic, kept hammering at him. Instead, he glanced at his sister, saw her paleness in the lowering sun, felt weariness radiating off her. It surprised him to see her stripped of her usual vibrancy. Normally, the walk they had just endured wouldn’t have taken a notch off her stamina. But then, it had been a day of surprises, and the emotional toll had undoubtedly worn on her.

  Cal excused them, and together they headed toward the sturdy, weathered welcome of their fourth-floor walkup. An Amoco tanker truck lay diagonally across the street where it had quit, its cab door open, the driver apparently long gone. Not like anyone’s gonna steal it. The two of them had to step up onto the opposite curb to ease around it.