Magic Time

Chapter Eight

WEST VIRGINIA

“Arleta? Are you there?” Wilma sprang up the front steps of the big white house, tried the knob with fingers barked and bloody from having been thrown off her feet by the earthquake. Behind her, old Mr. Swann from the trailer court and young Shannon Grant-to whom she’d been talking when the quake hit-waited anxiously, ready to give whatever help might be needed. Only a few years ago Shannon had been one of Wilma’s students, and Wilma fully expected to one day see Shannon’s daughter Tessa, currently two years old and perched on her mother’s hip, in her classes as well.

The knob wouldn’t turn. Oddly, it didn’t rattle, as it would have if the door were locked. It felt frozen, jammed hard. Wilma pushed inward. Nothing. “Arleta?”

“We’re all right here, Wilma.” Arleta’s voice, behind the shut door.

Wilma tried to look through the window, but the curtain was drawn. “Arleta?”

“We’re all fine.”

She must be terrified, thought Wilma. Like the cats, skittering spookily around the shadows, fearful of everything, and why not? The house wasn’t supposed to move. “Can you open the door? Are you hurt? Is Bob okay?” There were, of course, backup batteries on Bob’s machines, but every battery in Wilma’s house seemed to have been affected, and in Shannon’s, too.

“We’re all fine, really.” If it hadn’t been for the unmistakably human timber of the voice Wilma would have sworn it was a recording. Poor Arleta!

“What about Bob’s machines?” she persisted. “How long do the backup batteries keep running? Do we need to get an emergency team here or something?”

Still that stilted, wooden tone, still that sense of… what? Something odd, Wilma didn’t know quite what. As if it wasn’t really Arleta. “Bob’s machines will run for forty-eight hours without any problems. Don’t worry. We’re fine.”

As Ryan would say, thought Wilma, my ass.

“I have to go now. Bob’s calling for me.”

“What? Arleta?” Wilma gripped the doorknob again, shook it. Bob? Bob’s in a coma. “Arleta, let me just. .”

Behind her, Mr. Swann gasped, put a hand to his chest and leaned suddenly against the railing. Shannon caught his elbow as he staggered. “It’s nothing, I just felt sorta bad.” The neighbors were all coming out into the street now, the Stickneys and June Culver and old Mrs. Weise. She saw Jim Stickney walk over and get into his Jeep Wrangler, then get out again a few moments later.

Shock because of the quake, thought Wilma. Californians got used to them, she’d heard-didn’t even bother to get out of bed, most of them. But the Appalachians weren’t supposed to shake.

She got Mr. Swann into her living room and sat him down on the couch. Shannon and Rae Ann Stickney and Gerda Weise followed them through the door uninvited, making soft-voiced inquiries: Was everything all right and did much get broken and were the batteries out in your radio too? Their faces showed something Wilma hadn’t seen there a few moments ago: bafflement. The expressions of people faced with something they’ve never encountered, something far wider than an earthquake.

“It’s not just batteries.” Shannon was still holding Tessa’s hand. “That old hand-crank generator of Jim’s won’t go, either. We were going to drive over to the pithead and see if everything’s all right there, and. . ”

Wilma realized how deep the silence was. The refrigerator was still. The battery-operated clock wasn’t ticking. Nor were there the sounds she had been half-listening for in the distance, the wail of emergency sirens.

Nothing. Stillness.

She began to understand that what had happened was very different from what she had thought.

NEW YORK

The sky was clear now, save for a few twisting vapor trails, already dissipating, melting into the clouds.

Cal had not seen any of the planes hit ground; the buildings had blocked his view. But they had crashed; how could they not have? Most on the periphery of the city, away from its heart, so perhaps. . He caught himself trying to force the disaster into the smallest possible proportions.

As for the buildings, none had collapsed as far as Cal could see, though many were fractured and a few tilted at treacherous angles.

It’s omens, Cal, Goldie had said. Something’s coming.

Cal shuddered, and the desperate urgency to be on the move, to reach his sister, drowned all else.

The legal staff, drawn together in the dim light of the common room, had learned soon enough that, of all their technological marvels, only lighters still worked. Most of them had children, parents, spouses and others of variable significance. Despite their misgivings at leaving the relative safety of the building (now that it had stopped shaking), they, like Cal, were eager to brave the stairwells and be gone.

Only one question delayed them.

“What about Mr. Stern?”

He remained secluded in the conference room. Since Cal’s exchange with him, none had ventured to disturb him. Yet to leave without informing him, gaining his sovereign consent…

They milled uncertainly in the gloom, Janice Fishman and Paul Cajero and Tom Sammon and the others. The lowly ones who made the office go, the exalted few who jockeyed for position and coveted partnerships. Darkness veiled their expressions, but Cal could read their fear.

“I’ll do it,” he said.

As he cracked open the conference room doors, Cal could see in the weak light from the outer office that Stern had not moved. He sat slumped against the wall, eyes half-closed, a black stillness.

Cal entered, hunkered down. “Mr. Stern?”

Not looking at him, Stern said, “Hm?”

“How are you doing?”

“Got a bitch of a sinus headache. Tell Naomi to get me some Sudafed.” He scratched one arm languorously but relentlessly through the black fabric of his coat sleeve. Somehow, more than the planes careening out of the sky, the buildings drunkenly askew, this strange diffidence spoke most powerfully to Cal of calamity. Earlier, he had thought himself a rock perilously seamed and cracked, but it was Stern, not he, who had shattered.

“Looks like power’s out all over the city,” said Cal. No need to elaborate on the cars and planes, keep it simple. “Everyone wants to head out, find out what’s happened.”

“Not five yet,” Stern mumbled absently, still not looking at him.

No, it’s not five yet.

Cal visualized the vaulting, unreinforced brick walls of St. Augustine, tried not to picture his sister crushed beneath them. .

I’m not Mother Teresa. This is not Woodstock. But it was sure a hell of a lot like Mount St. Helens and Hurricane Andrew and Armageddon all rolled into one, so why aren’t you getting it?

Cal forced down his anger. Stern was clearly, however elusively, injured. The crackling blue lightning Cal had glimpsed about Stern as he himself had dived beneath the table could readily have been some electrical discharge spat from the wall sockets as the juice cut out.

“Come on now,” Cal said firmly, grasping Stern’s arm, hauling him up.

With a mad shout, Stern tore his arm free, so violently that Cal staggered, was nearly flung off his feet. Stern plopped down sullenly, staring at nothing.

“Your skin itch?” he asked idly.

Cal backed slowly to the doors. “No,” he said quietly. “Does yours?”

Still looking away, Stern muttered, “No.”

Cal’s back brushed the doors, and he stopped. He might get Paul Cajero and Ed Ledding and Chris Black in here to help deal with Stern, try to wrestle him down the stairs. But Stern would fight them every step of the way, he felt certain of it, and precious time would be lost.

“Look,” Cal sighed. “I’ll get someone to send back help for you, okay? I’ve got to go now.”

Stern didn’t turn, but something at last seemed to register. “Leave, and you’re terminated.”

Cal gave a mirthless laugh-the dreaded words at last.

The coffin-lid doors murmured softly against the carpet as they closed behind him.

Stern was glad Griffin was gone. His chatter had been irritating, almost as maddening as that damn itching. But it felt muted now, hushed in the darkness and the quiet. Calm descended over him as he floated on a gentle sea, its waters embracing him. All he wanted was to remain awhile, to let the feeling wash over him.

But then a dim memory came to him. The Bernero-Vivante deposition was later today. What time was it getting to be? Dreamily, he lifted the Piaget on his wrist to eye level, glanced at its face. In the gloom, he caught a reflection of his eyes in the glass.

I should be frightened by this, he thought. But he wasn’t, merely intrigued, and far removed. He continued to stare at his own eyes looking back at him, their irises no longer the familiar black. Vaguely, it occurred to him that his choice of clothing no longer matched the color of his eyes.

For that, he would need yellow.

“Easy there. Nobody’s got to hurry now.” Cal’s voice betrayed none of the sick urgency he felt. Cautiously, they descended the stairwell, Anita La Bonte and Barbara Claman and about ten of the others holding their lighters aloft, offering a timorous, close illumination. The fire doors at each floor blocked any light; other than the scant blue flames all was blackness. It lent their party a hushed intimacy. As they had ventured down, their group of thirty-odd had been joined by others with the same imperative, had swelled to more than seventy. On floors above and below them, they could hear similar parties, moving with the same blind tentativeness. Their feet shuffled on the steps, a dull thudding like an army of golems on the march. When they spoke, even in whispers, their voices echoed back, a loud, jarring assault. So they were quiet, by and large, their reeling thoughts held checked within.

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 deja 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.