Magic Time

Chapter One

NEAR GROUND ZERO-BEFORE DAWN

Randy Waller had heard all the stories about Medicine Water Creek.

It was a load of bullshit, as far as he was concerned, dreamed up by some drunk sad-sack Sioux to make up for the fact that they’d got their asses kicked by the U.S. cavalry and hadn’t done a damn thing since.

He drew rein at the top of the draw and lit up, scanning the fence line in the glimmer of first light. Fuckin’ miles to cover today, and they were saying it’d rain tonight. That meant Black Hat Coulee would flood by tomorrow and he’d have to dick around with wire and fence posts and nails while standing knee-deep in muddy water, oh joy. Better to get up early and get the whole thing done today and talk the foreman into letting him take the truck into town tonight.

Under him his horse snorted, rubbed a cheek on the fence post. Randy nudged the animal forward along the fence, down into the long dip of bottomlands where the clay-colored stream appeared and disappeared among twisted hummocks of rock. The city kids who came up here in vans, with their long hair and their two-hundred-dollar hiking boots, to “find communion with the Earth”- which, by all Randy could see, meant smoking pot and humping in the bushes-talked about old Indian legends and ate up stories about how horses would spook here in broad daylight and even the coyotes would avoid the place at night.

Of course, they didn’t come here at night. Randy blew a double line of smoke from his nostrils and scouted the matte-blue shadows among the rocks, the waving thickness of grass that grew everywhere on the level ground. They were all over at the ranch house, raiding the garbage.

And as for “Medicine Water”-which Randy’s dad had called Piss Creek. .

It was low this time of year, midsummer. A glistening thread among the dark convolutions of eroded rock, course echoed by the pale bands that marked the water-chewed banks. Mounds and turrets of gray-black lava lifted like sleeping buffalo from the deep grass. This time of the morning, before the prairie winds started up, the place was deathly silent, filled with the hard cold of the night.

That’d wear off goddam soon. Randy stubbed the butt on his boot heel, flicked it away into the creek. “Let’s go, Bean,” he said and twitched the reins. Whole place’d get hot as the inside of a cow by. .

Movement caught his eye. The horse flung up its head, reared and veered sidelong, and Randy hauled savagely on the bit. Just a goddam cow for Chrissake.

Only it wasn’t a cow, he saw, when he’d dragged his mount around to a trembling standstill. It was a buffalo.

Shit, where’d that come from? Government herd taking up good grassland over in the national fuckin’monument…

The smell of blood hit him, metallic and savage. He saw it glisten darkly on the buffalo’s muzzle, long strings dripping down to the grass. The buffalo shook its horns warningly and lowed; Randy saw the nasty glitter of a small black eye. More blood smell; ol’ Bean jittered and tried to run again, and Randy saw there was another buffalo close to the first. Holy shit, must be them ritual mutilators like in the newspaper! Because this one, a huge curly-haired bull, had been hacked savagely, the whole hump cut off its back, raw meat gleaming where the skin had been pulled back.

Like the old buffalo hunters used to do, he thought suddenly, the ones the city kids talk about-the ones that killed a hundred animals for their tongues or humps or hides and left the rest to rot.

The world all around him seemed suddenly to breathe.

Where the hell the buffalo came from Randy couldn’t imagine. Hell, he’d looked down this way not ten minutes ago from the top of the draw, and there hadn’t been so much as a chipmunk, let alone six-ten-twelve-full-grown buffalo. And why hadn’t he smelled the blood?

It stank to Christ now. In the thin gloom of the place he shouldn’t have been able to see, but he could. Some of them had had their humps torn away, others, it seemed, only their tongues. Something came around the corner of a rock pinnacle, and Randy screamed, for this buffalo had been skinned, meat gleaming naked and pearly and rubied with dots and runnels of oozing blood-it worked its jaws, ruminatively chewing, and it looked at Randy with deep-set black eyes.

Bean reared, fighting the brutal drag of the bit, humped his back and fishtailed, throwing Randy to the ground. Randy cursed, scrambled to his feet, made a futile snatch at the reins as the horse pelted wildly away, and the buffalo- how the fuck many of them WERE there? — let it pass.

Bloodied mouths. Bloodied fur. The hot smell of them, like thunder in the ground. A glimmer of blue lightning crept half-seen among the rocks before sinking into the dust. The earth quivered, and voices seemed to cry out-chants, maybe-endlessly far away.

Randy screamed again and ran for the nearest hummock of rock. But something tore at his leg, what felt like huge broken tusks ripping through the leather of his boot, and looking down he saw the white bones of an old skeleton rising up through the grass and the earth. Ribs snapped shut on his leg like the bony fingers of a giant hand. He wrenched his leg free and stumbled two more feet, and then another skeleton speared through the topsoil, ribs closing around his ankle again. The ground shook a second time and there was a sound, and he looked up to see them-hundreds of them now, robbed of humps and tongues and skins-all lower their heads and charge.

THE SOURCE-BEFORE DAWN

“Dr. Wishart?”

A fast staccato at the office door, though he’d turned out the light. Opening his eyes, Fred Wishart saw the red gleam of the clock-4:58. For a moment he couldn’t remember whether it was morning or evening. He was tired, tired to his bones.

“Dr. Wishart?” Whoever was in the hall-it sounded like Yeoh, one of the assistants in the particle-trace lab-tried the doorknob.

Wishart was glad he’d locked it. A day, a night, however long it had been, calculating and recalibrating the accelerators, trying to pin down, once and for all, the mathematical model for resonance alignment so it wouldn’t set up a feedback loop. . He took off his thick black-framed glasses, closed his eyes again, shutting out the dim shapes of the monitors all around him. Hating them. Hating this place. Hating even the screen savers that played across their square flat faces now: peaceful scenes. The paradise beauty of the Allegheny Mountains in high summer. Two Sisters Rock with a day moon standing above it in an opal sky. The old shaft-head buildings on Green Mountain, robed in shaggy honeysuckle and ivy, deep grass covering the ruin man’s greediness had left. Bob had taken that picture and had been tickled when Fred had scanned it and made a screen saver of it, to remember home by.

Home.

Home and the family he loved.

The home he had fled.

He was so tired. They were all tired, he knew, exhausted. Everybody on the project had been working sixteen- and twenty-hour days for weeks. He’d locked the door and turned out his light when he’d made the fourth error in his input-not good. He wondered if the others would be sensible enough to steal a little downtime as well. His hand twitched toward the nearest of the regiment of white foam coffee cups that littered the hollow square of his workspace, among the keyboards and printouts. But he gave it up. The stuff would be dead cold, and there wasn’t a soul in the place, from Dr. Sanrio down to the humblest clerk or security officer, who could get decent coffee out of those godless little machines.

Yet they had to have something to show the Senate committee if there was a hearing. And Sanrio seemed to think that new woman with the cleaning crew had been asking an awful lot of questions, though her clearances seemed okay. But spies or no spies, if they continued to push this way, they’d only make more errors.

And errors were something they could not afford. Knocking.

Go away.

A rattle of the doorknob.

I’m asleep. I’m dead. I’ve decided to work at home today.

“Dr. Wishart? Are you in there?”

No.

“Dr. Wishart, there’s been a leak.”