Magic Time

Chapter Twenty

OUTSIDE D.C.

As Shango and Czernas drew closer to Dulles Airport, the wrecks became more frequent, splattering the green countryside. Sweating, exhausted, Shango had a vision of the United States spread westward like some mammoth counterpane, strewn with burned wreckage, with scarred earth and ruined buildings, with smoking fields of metal and seats and burst luggage and charred rubber and soggy, crusted, fly-swarming fragments of people’s parents, spouses, children, friends. He dreaded Dulles as a child dreads the coming of nightmare when the first premonitory stirrings of fright invade a dream. This is going to be bad.

He was right beyond his grimmest imaginings.

On the some ten thousand acres of Dulles Airport’s run-ways, half a dozen pilots, those whose planes had already extended their landing gear, had managed to bring their planes in at a glide. Others, when their consoles went dark and their engines stopped, tried anyway, without the hydraulics or electrical signals to lower the gear, without instruments. One of these, an American Airlines DC10, had come down on top of an El-Al flight that was trying the same thing and the two planes had rolled, skidded, slid onto the next runway and into a third plane, a Lufthansa. Again-curiously-there was very little evidence of fire, only patches of blackened grass.

The moaning reached them first, like the outcry of hopeless ghosts, and as they came nearer, the growing stink of human waste, like a warning of still more terrible things to come.

The National Guard was there, trying to care for some of the injured and to keep a kind of order. But when, after nearly an hour of searching through the jostling crowds, through the reek of blood and piss, through the endless echoing wails of the injured, of men yelling in frustration and women holding children who wept or rocked and stared and scratched themselves in strange fevers, Shango and Czernas at last found the major in charge, it was clear that tallying the missing, rather than the wounded, dead and dying, was low on his list.

“Are you crazy?” he said, focusing bloodshot eyes on the two men. Soot blackened his face and his clothing; he was shaking with fatigue. “We haven’t even gotten all the survivors out of the wrecks! Twenty-four hours we’ve been working and there are still people trapped out there, and you’re asking me. . Okay, put ’em in the shuttle garages.” He turned to a worn and filthy captain, grim-faced and sickened. “See what else you can find for blankets and bandages. Start asking people for clothes from their luggage, anything. . Any word on the water yet?” This to another man, a civilian, dirty and beaten as all the rest.

The man shook his head; the major turned back to Czernas. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to commandeer those bicycles,” he said. “We haven’t had word from headquarters since midnight and. . ”

Silently, Czernas produced again the authorization McKay had written for them.

The major said, “God damn motherfuckers. How the fuck many of you spooks are coming in? We’ve already had the CIA and the FBI-What?” A heavy-set woman, in what was left of an Anne Klein suit and a pair of Nikes, had come up behind him with another request. “Well, what the fuck are they? Who are they? Gremlins hiding in the goddam baggage tunnels?”

He turned back to Czernas. “I gotta go have a look at this,” he said. “I put a guy on getting together a list of planes that aren’t accounted for. . Melker. Corporal Melker.” His brow squeezed as if only with the greatest effort could he recall the name. “Stuff was in the computer. Christ knows where the fuck he- What do you mean, hold back a reserve?” He swung around on a green-uniformed major of the regular Army. “What the fuck reserve are you talking about?”

“I have orders that water and food are to be rationed.”

“Well, I have fucking orders that water and food are to be given out to people who’re fuckin’ dying. .!”

Shango turned promptly away, and Czernas followed. Four feet from the crowd around the major, a big Lebanese businessman grabbed the handlebars of Shango’s bike, tried to thrust a handful of money at him; Shango shoved him and, when he wouldn’t let go, caught and back-twisted the businessman’s little finger. The man screamed and staggered into the crowd. “Let’s get up to the tower,” he said. “See what we can see from there.”

Squads of exhausted National guardsmen and civilian volunteers were carrying survivors in on stretchers. Soldiers shoved a baggage cart half-full of half-empty water bottles, and were stopped by another officer with conflicting orders or maybe just his own opinion about what was best to be done. Someone had designated one of the shuttle garages as a privy-huge hand-lettered signs pointed toward it and requested that it be used-but it was clear from the smell, as Shango and Czernas crossed from the terminal to the tower, that these were not being heeded. Small groups of men clustered around the officers and soldiers, men in white shirts and dress pants, shouting in frustration at the conflicting orders, the miscarried information-the fear.

Fear was in the air. Shango felt himself bristle and prickle, like a cat at twilight, sensing the rising rage as he sensed it sometimes in the bad neighborhoods of hopeless poverty around D.C.: danger. Rage that’s ready to strike out.

He’d been away from the White House, from the President, from his job for twelve hours now, with God only knew how much longer to go. God only knew what was going on in D.C. The same kind of rage, he thought. The same frustration edging toward flashpoint with every miscarriage of supplies, every fuckup.

McKay was sitting in the middle of it. Waiting for the piece of information that might save them all, if he could get it in time.

The door at the bottom of the control tower stood open and unguarded. Shango slid his hammer from its place in the backpack straps and carried it ready in one hand, hiked his bike onto his shoulder with the other hand, led the way up the darkness of the concrete stair. Czernas followed, bike on shoulder-good high-quality racing models, neither vehicle weighed above twenty pounds. Late-afternoon light filled the huge square room at the top from four walls of windows, and beyond those the runways spread like a defiled map.

Shango counted, even as he set his bike down, clamping his mind shut against the horror and the implications of the count. Thirty wrecks scattered across the two-mile runways of Dulles.

Eight were United flights.

More dotted the green countryside beyond, as far as the eye could see.

“There a guy named Melker here?” he asked the lookout reservist, a tough-looking little grasshopper of a woman scanning in all directions with binoculars. She shook her head.

“You guys got any kind of map going?”

The other occupant of the tower, a white male civilian with his left shoulder strapped tight and a bandage on his head, beckoned with his pencil and said, “Help yourself.”

It was an inch-to-the-mile scale map of Arlington, Fairfax, Loudon and Prince William counties, and someone had meticulously calculated and plotted the probable locations of all wrecks visible from the tower. Shango could have embraced the gentleman with the broken shoulder, Secret Service or no Secret Service, and never mind what people would say if they saw him kiss a white guy. The wrecks that had been gotten to on the runways already had been circled, but no notation had been made about what flights they’d been or if there were survivors.

“Please don’t tell me you’re from the Bureau of Statistics,” said the lookout corporal, peering at Shango over the tops of her glasses, when he asked.

There was plenty of extra paper and pencils, to copy the map. Someone in the tower, thank God, had had the wits to install an old-fashioned manual pencil sharpener at his or her desk. Shango and Czernas started at opposite ends, marking every detail, not knowing what would be important to know later: Shango noted how neat Czernas’ copying was, as if he’d had drafting classes sometime in the past. The growing slant of the afternoon sun turned the young man’s drooping forelock to gold, glittered on the stubble of his cheeks.

Now and then Shango would get up, prowl to the windows, stand for a moment beside the silent reservist, edgy with the sense of growing danger. He noticed that not a wreck had exploded, and though many had caught fire and burned on the ground once the tanks ruptured, not one was burning now. Nor was there evidence of widespread fires, only sullen patches of ash. Was this something McKay would need to know, or had he heard already? Gremlins in the baggage system, the major had said. Toward the end of last night, rumors had filtered to the command post in the Treasury building about scrunched little mutants in the Metro, in basements, looting in the alleys in the rioters’ wake. Shango could imagine what the military boys were making of that.

Down on a runway, a gang of men-a couple of women, too-accosted a group of reservists pulling a cart of what might have been food: a dumb show of shoving, anger, cross-purposes and frustration. Up in the tower, only the soft scratching of Czernas’ pencil and that of the guy with the sling as he collated flight information and passenger lists.

The light was failing. Shango knew they’d have to spend the night at Dulles, guarding the bikes, guarding their water. Thank God he’d brought candles. He reviewed the buildings, what he could see from the vantage point of the tower, trying to find a place that wasn’t crawling with humanity but wasn’t so isolated they’d be trapped in a corner by scared or angry men, or by gremlins, whatever the hell the gremlins really were. Footfalls blundered in the dark stairway, and Shango had his hammer in his hand before a weary-looking guardsman appeared in the doorway:

“Verne? Palmerson? Major Walker’s putting together a squad to get those last four planes before it gets dark. You, Blondie, Hammerhead, you better come too. He needs every warm body.”

Czernas looked up, doubtful and torn, and Shango went to the door without a word and held out McKay’s pass. The guardsman gave it one cold glance and said, “Well, excu-u-use me,” saluted elaborately, and went downstairs with Verne and Palmerson, leaving Czernas and Shango alone. A few minutes later Shango saw a small squad, including the lookout corporal and the guy with the strapped-up shoulder, leave the base of the tower, heading out toward the farthest smoking wreck.

Still no sign of approaching vehicles. That meant no water, no food, no relief for the burned and broken and pain-racked. Far out on one runway someone had set up a depot of something-Shango couldn’t tell if it was food or water or weapons or what-surrounded by men; there seemed to be an argument going on in front of it.

Night was coming on.

He and Czernas copied until it was almost too dark to see, Shango listening more and more intently to the silent stairwell as the minutes passed. Once he thought he heard noises and walked to the top of the stairs to see. But there was only dark and silence and the stench of piss from the dead restroom on the landing below.

Quietly, he said, “We better get going.”

A big section of Loudon County remained yet to be copied, but Czernas packed up his pencil and sheets without a word. Shango got a candle from his backpack and handed it to Czernas, wishing there were some way he could carry one too, in addition to the bike and the hammer. One light wouldn’t be a hell of a lot, in that stairwell.

Gremlins in the baggage tunnels. .

The flame danced and jigged with the updraft of the stairwell. Door at the bottom left open, thought Shango, straining his eyes to look past the darkness, to look past the next turn in the pitch-black stair. Straining his ears as well, though all he could hear was the click and clatter of the wheels, as they slowly spun with the movement of being carried; the creak of backpack straps and the scrape of the coarse nylon on the walls. Czernas’ breathing. .

Czernas yelled, and as he and the bike crashed down into Shango’s back, Shango thought, They were behind us. Restroom… Weight smashed him, rolled him agonizingly down the stairs, metal, flesh, concrete jabbing and punching him. The light went out. Hands clutched, gouged in the dark. Someone kicked him, stepped on him. He heard Czernas yell his name and tried to lunge back up the stairs to help him, but the bike caught on something or someone and he was falling again, a man’s weight falling on top of him.

“Shango!” Czernas yelled again and then cried out, a mortal cry, and there was a stink of blood.

He came to hearing men outside the stairwell door: “The fuck you’re gonna get that bike!” “You said we’d flip for ’em!” “Yeah, well, you guys flip for the other one. . ”

A moment later, dim and confused with echoes in the darkness, another cry.

Something hot lay against Shango’s leg, limp and wet. He groped along the floor: it was Czernas, he identified the light nylon shirt. There was a lot of blood, but he could tell it wasn’t pumping out anymore. He felt for his face, to see if there was breathing, and encountered the gashed throat.

All they wanted was the damn bikes, he thought, sitting in the silent dark. You should have played possum. Why did you call out my name?

Were you trying to get to me? To make sure I was alive?

Was that why they killed you?

His backpack was still buckled to his body, though the water bottles and the outside knife were gone. His whole body throbbed and he guessed the only reason he wasn’t throwing up was there was nothing to throw. He sat in the dark beside the body for a long time, listening to the far-off groaning of the injured in the main terminal.

IT’S ON ITS WAY AND IT’S GOING TO BE BAD. As if a door had opened before him into one of the lower rooms in Hell, he glimpsed how bad it was actually going to get.

Was that what McKay had seen yesterday at 9:17, when the earth had shaken and the blue lightning had crawled along the walls, and the lights went out?

If Bilmer was in the terminal still, alive or dead, he’d have to find her. To hunt patiently through the dying and the dead, to keep clear of the quarrels and fights over food, over water, over fear as the confusion and conflicting orders grew worse.

And if she wasn’t there, he’d have to go look for her. Look for United Flight 1046, somewhere out in the green countryside that lay beyond the airport. Because McKay had asked him to.

Because if he had to leave McKay in danger, he had to bring back something to show for his desertion.

There was no point in staying longer at Czernas’ side. His body would be picked up by a clean-up squad or rot where it lay; that was another one of many things that was no longer Shango’s job. He rolled Czernas over, unbuckled his backpack and added it to his own, went carefully over the dark landing to make sure he wasn’t leaving a water bottle that the thieves had missed.

Then he drew a deep breath, picked up his hammer and went down the dark stairs to the dark night outside.

He didn’t look back.

WEST VIRGINIA

The mist started at about Blackbird Street, a hundred feet or so beyond the trailer court, where land had been cleared in the eighties for a housing development that never came through. It grew thicker among the trees beyond. It was a curious mist, white and thin, but it made little swirls along the ground and Wilma felt the skin on her neck prickle again at the sight of it-the smell of it. She slowed her steps on the cracked and disused sidewalk of Second Street and gestured Shannon, Ryan and Hazel to stay back.

Shannon said, “Be careful! The things I saw-the things that chased me. .”

“Do you want my spear?” asked Ryan. He’d brought the makeshift weapon with him when he’d come to tell his aunt about what was happening to his eight-year-old brother, Louie.

Wilma only shook her head. “I’m not sure a spear will do any good.” They’d already learned, to the chagrin of about eighty percent of the town’s masculine population, that the guns weren’t working. She moved forward cautiously, the white vapors swirling around her knees. The mist seemed to flatten the shapes of the pavement, the vacant lots, the trees behind them, into a pale matte one-dimensionality that was unsettlingly reminiscent of the expression in Tessa’s eyes.

Dampness and cold. It was close to twilight, and maybe time was different; who could say? It was harder and harder to see the trees on either side of the road, but this was not because of mist. Rather, visibility itself seemed to be breaking up. The smell was stronger, cold, like the air after lightning, and there was a sound. Someone crying, she thought, crying at the end of an endless tunnel.

Wilma stepped back with an exclamation as a black flying cloud swirled out of the mist-crickets, cicadas, june bugs, driven as if in a wind. The insects enveloped her, crawling and clinging. Wilma beat at them with her hands, twisted, flailed, clawed the horrid things from her hair, but at the same time felt in each struggling little bug a helpless desperation.

She ran free of the whirling cloud, panting. The crying in the trees was louder. Women running, she thought. She had an impression of long black hair, deerskin skirts, wrapped babies clutched to naked dusky breasts, wailing in pain and terror. Through flesh gone transparent she saw their bones outlined in fire, and then they were gone.

A howling like wolves, like the winds of winter-like ghosts lost along the corridor from one world to the next. The mists around her grew dark with a darkness her night-sighted eyes could not penetrate, and the clammy air grew colder. Walking forward, Wilma saw a bicycle lying beside the road, a young man’s body tangled in its frame. Stepping close, she recognized Bruce Swann, whom she’d taught English only a few years ago. Trying to leave town? Trying to come back along the Charleston road?

She shivered, alone in the mist and the darkening silence.

A blue flickering in the darkness, a sudden roar. Hornets, she thought, terrified. Swarms of them-she saw the flash of phosphorus reflecting off their wings as they swirled toward her. She ran, desperately keeping to the road. The insects veered and swerved in a pursuing cloud, trying to run her off the pavement, she realized. Trying to make her enter the crowding shadows among the trees. Fingerlets of blue flame licked up through the asphalt, singeing her hiking boots as she fled. More lines of blue flame crept down the trunks of the trees, crawled toward her, and she ran harder, breath coming in sobbing gasps.

A hornet caught in her long gray hair, stung the side of her scalp, the pain a red-hot needle. Under her feet she thought the pavement was moving, rippling, shifting and cracking, but she didn’t dare look down. Ahead of her the road had changed, and she couldn’t tell where she was: it looked like the squalid unpaved roads that led up to the hollows, like something out of the last century, muddy and narrow. Yet she felt pavement still under her feet. Another sting on her wrist, and she ran still harder knowing a swarm could easily sting her to death. The insects’ maddened roar filled her ears, and above it, behind it, she sensed still greater desperation.

Something was in the woods, she thought. Something terrified, frantic, insane. Something that wanted her to leave the pavement and run into its darkness, down its throat.

Lights burned gold before her. The flame behind her roared up, and the hornets howled against it like black hail. Shapes waved and closed in through mist and darkness. Then the vapors thinned, and the shapes became definitely human, holding out their hands to stop, seize, calling her name.

“Wilma!” yelled a male voice, raised a weapon-a spear.

“Wilma!”

She stumbled, panting, and looked around in the charcoal mists of evening. She could hear the hornets buzzing sullenly somewhere in the darkness behind her; her head and her wrist throbbed from the two stings. Her hair had come out of its habitual pins and hung down in a scraggly colorless mane over her shoulders, and she trembled where she stood, almost sick with shock.

“Are you okay?” asked Hazel.

She was back at the corner of Blackbird Street.

She had not turned around. She knew that. Had only run forward, continuing in the direction she’d been going. .

And had emerged from the mist at her starting point, where Shannon and Hazel and Ryan awaited her.

She turned, looking back into the fog that was now dyed with darkness. A voice cried something-words in a language she did not understand-and far away, it seemed to her that blue flames crawled along the ground and then sank out of sight.

She supposed that there were worse things than coming back out exactly where she’d gone in.

She straightened up, still clinging to Hazel’s shoulder for support. “Well, whatever it is,” she said, “it doesn’t want us to leave.”