Magic Time

Chapter Twelve

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Rioting started in Petworth as soon as the sun went down. Maybe someone had gotten scared, thought Shango; thought to do a little hoarding when it became clear no lights were on and no cops near. Grocery shelves might be empty tomorrow, and no money to pay prices suddenly escalated to profit from the panic.

Maybe the Army, guessing what McKay may have guessed, had tried to lock the stuff down. Childhood in the projects had taught Shango everything he needed to know about the fear that stalked Washington’s squalid ring of slums and the violence that lay just below that fear.

From the window of the duty room of headquarters, across the street from the White House, Shango could see the glow of fire in the sky, hear the steady beat of boots as National guardsmen double-timed it down the streets. More National Guard showed up at about the same time to harden the cordon around the White House itself, and through the trees Shango and the other agents could see the ruddy light of torches illuminating the grounds.

“Fuckin’ mess,” said Gabriel Cox, the shift supervisor who’d been on duty since eight that morning, when the chief didn’t show.

Shango had to admit that was a pretty succinct summation of the situation.

Emergency shelters had been set up in the lobbies and hallways, the conference rooms of every office building along the Mall and in the classrooms and lecture halls of George Washington University for commuters stranded downtown. Some hardy souls had set out on foot around noon on the long trek to Georgetown, Manassas, Arlington, Woodbridge, but the majority of clerks and bureaucrats had stayed put, confident that transportation would be restored. From what he’d heard from the other agents since coming off duty at four, Shango gathered that frustrated and furious crowds had intermittently gathered around the offices of Eastern Bell, shouting for service to resume.

They’d remained there until it dawned on them slowly that not being able to phone their families was, in fact, the least of their worries.

Shango himself felt little actual concern for his own family. Home, to him, was a peeling blue double shotgun on Ascension Street near the Mississippi where his sister lived, his Georgetown apartment was just a place to shower and sleep. He knew perfectly well that seven or eight of his mother’s church-lady buddies would look in on her and that in case of a real emergency his sisters and brother would take care of her. They’d band together like they always had and get each other through.

He smiled a little in the dim glow of the candles that had been set around the duty room in the elaborate candelabra sent across to them by Jan McKay: centerpieces from any number of White House dinners. The golden light reminded him of nights in his childhood, when there’d been a little hiccup between NOPSI’s electricity cut-off date and Dad’s paycheck, or when Georges or Betsy or Andrew had roared through town and water had stood in the street up to the porch. Dad would bed everyone down in the living room on blankets and tell stories in front of a dead TV, taking all the voices and the special effects himself, a thousand times better than anything on Star Trek or MASH.

Funny, he thought, what the glow of a candle could do.

“So what do you think?” Cox looked up as Witjas, one of the younger men, came in with the hand-printed list of agents: who had checked in, who lived where, who might be expected to show up tomorrow.

“I think anybody who hasn’t shown up by this time isn’t gonna.” The young man tossed the papers on the gray metal table. “I was just out. Looks like more fires in Anacostia.”

“Oh, great,” muttered Cox, trying to sound pissed instead of scared. “What the hell is it about your people, Larry? Things fuck up, and they start wreckin’ their own neighborhoods.” He turned back to Witjas without waiting for a reply-which was fortunate, since Shango made it a point never to reply to Cox’s attitude on blacks. “How many have we got?”

The half dozen agents in the duty room put out their cigarettes and put down their half-eaten sandwiches and gathered around, divvying up shifts for the night: so many for the embassies, so many to work the White House perimeter, so many for inside. Many of those, like Witjas, who’d walked in from Falls Church and Bethesda had brought sleeping bags and changes of clothing under the assumption that they’d be staying for as long as they had to. When things hadn’t straightened out by about noon, Cox had passed out pens and paper and told them to start writing reports about everything they’d observed on their way in, and these had been forwarded to the emergency command post in the State Department building.

“You mind going back till midnight?” asked Cox, glancing up at Shango. “I’d feel safer if there was a fourth guy over there, and we’re gonna be spread thin.”

“Fine with me,” said Shango. “Beats listenin’ to Witjas snore in the conference room.” And you talk in here.

Witjas gave him the finger as he left the duty room and descended the stairs.

No lights showed from the windows of the West Wing, but when Shango reached there-it must have been ten by then, though his watch had stopped at 9:17 that morning, like everyone else’s-he found the corridors and conference room still glowing with candlelight, stuffy after a day of no air-conditioning and the nightlong burning of dozens of small flames. When Shango came in, Agent Breckenridge was just showing Nina Diaz and Ron Guthrie out of McKay’s office-McKay’s press secretary and the White House chief of staff, part of the inner circle of advisers and friends. McKay had walked to the office door with them and looked like ten miles of bad road: shirt soaked with sweat, jacket and tie long gone, lines that most men didn’t develop until their sixties printed deep on his face. Past his shoulder Shango could see into the candlelit Oval Office, where chairs had been pulled up close to the desk and every surface was littered with papers and reports. Shango wondered whether any word had yet come in from the agents who were guarding McKay’s son up in Maine.

There were still a dozen people sitting in the hall waiting to be seen, a couple of the big-name lobbyists from the oil companies and arms manufacturers, but mostly military: grim-looking young corporals with folders on their knees. Messengers.

Not, by the look of them, bearers of any kind of good tidings.

McKay turned his head and met Shango’s eye. And smiled-relieved?

“Mr. Shango,” he said. He was always scrupulous about knowing the names of the men on the White House detail, and about calling people Mr., an odd little formality left over, Shango assumed, from his army days. The next instant a frown creased McKay’s forehead, “But you’re supposed to be off shift.”

“Mr. Cox thought an extra man here might be helpful.” And he saw understanding change the President’s blue eyes.

“As it happens,” said McKay, “I was thinking of sending a message asking you to come back for a few minutes. Steve,” he turned to where Steve Czernas, his deputy chief of staff, sat in the chair closest to the office door. “Mr. Breckenridge, if you’ll excuse us, please.”

Breckenridge-one of the older men on White House detail, thin and tough and very silent-glanced at Shango and stepped out into the corridor to let Shango and Czernas pass him and go on into the office. McKay shut the door.

“Mr. Shango,” he said, “I understand you scored at the top of your class in the training center.”

“Not in all areas, sir,” said Shango, hands folded before him. He was a little rumpled and tired, but with his tie tied and jacket on he still looked more businesslike than the Commander in Chief. “But I was in the top five percent, yes, sir.”

McKay smiled. “What you scored tops in was survival and escape and evasion.”

“I grew up black in the Deep South, sir.”

McKay grinned.

“I’m going to ask Mr. Richter-or Mr. Cox, if Mr. Richter hasn’t come in yet-if he would second you to special duty. Would you be willing to undertake that?”

“Of course, sir.” Shango felt a slight prickling of his scalp and thought, Here it is. What he’s known all along today that no one else has known.

He glanced at Czernas. Like Shango, he was still neat, Yale tie knotted, navy blazer unrumpled, chin smooth as Pamela Anderson’s tit, and yet, beneath his almost dandyish sleekness, he had the elastic, broad-shouldered fitness of a young man who works out diligently. He’d often been on those long road rides, zooming out ahead while McKay stayed obediently back with the Secret Service boys.

“This isn’t anything I’d ask of anyone if it weren’t an emergency,” McKay went on, and for an instant Shango could see him, thirty years younger, huddled in cammies by firelight in some Southeast Asian base camp, sizing up who to send out on patrol. “Jerri Bilmer was supposed to come into Dulles this morning, with some papers and possibly film, that could hold the key to what happened today.”

Bilmer. Shango remembered the way McKay had kept his cell phone beside him that morning, the way he’d sat tense on the exercycle seat, conscious of it, listening for it. Recalled, too, McKay talking to Bilmer at that garden party last month, just before Bilmer went on vacation.

“When was her flight due in?” asked Czernas, and McKay’s face seemed to settle a little in the wavering candlelight.

“9:20,” he said.

The glance that went around was almost audible. Oh, fuck.

“She’s wearing black leggings, black sneakers and a red sequinned sweatshirt. She’ll have a black purse with her and some kind of travel bag.” McKay took a deep breath. “Find her. Get her here. If you can’t find her alive. .” And there was a hesitation, an understanding among them of what they might have to do if her plane hadn’t touched down by 9:17. “Bring her purse and her luggage. This is vital. This is. . this is to vital what the Nagasaki blast was to a damp sparkler. Understand?”

Shango thought, Oh, shit. His uncle had been one of the cops to clean up the wreckage after a Delta flight had come down on a New Orleans housing project in the seventies.

“About a month ago,” the President went on, “I heard a rumor that what I’d been told was a minor project of energy research called Source was receiving clandestine sums from both the Department of Defense and the CIA-”

Czernas opened his mouth, glanced sidelong at Shango, then back to McKay, with Aren’t there too many people in this room? written all over his handsome young face. McKay’s eyes met his, long and steadily, then he continued deliberately, “far more than any minor research installation should have been getting. I couldn’t get a straight story out of either DoD or CIA, and in fact I got substantially different stories from each person I talked to. I still don’t know if they thought what they told me was the truth. The reports I’ve received over the past eighteen months-and the reports Source has been turning in since the Reagan administration-were all carefully tailored to make the project look like something other than it was.”

Czernas looked over at Shango again, tightened his lips, and then asked, “And what was it, sir?” Shango said nothing and didn’t react. He understood already why McKay was telling them both this.

“That was what Ms. Bilmer was trying to find out. We agreed that whatever day she came in, from whatever direction, she’d be on the 9:20 Houston flight, United Airlines 1046. She planned to change planes a couple of times, in case anyone was a little curious about which direction she came from. I don’t know her starting point, other than that it was somewhere in the West.”

“It shouldn’t take more than a few hours to get to Dulles by bicycle,” said Czernas after a moment. “I biked here this morning. My backpack should hold enough water for the trip.”

“I’ll lend you my backpack,” said McKay to Shango. “You can carry water.”

“Excuse me, sir,” Shango said quietly. “I’m not sure taking bikes is wise, at this point. There’s rioting down in Anacostia and in other places as well. There’s still no transportation as far as I’ve heard. Bikes may make us a target.”

“Can we really afford the time it’ll take to walk?” replied Czernas. “Would the risk be that much greater, to justify the delay? We’ll both be armed.”

McKay hesitated. “Speed is of the essence,” he said at last. “And even more than speed-getting back here with those papers. With that information. That’s why I’m sending both of you. I must get whatever it is she has. And I must get it soon.”

“Yes, sir,” said Shango. Already the buildings had the faint smell of sewage, of plumbing that wouldn’t work, of water that wouldn’t come through pipes. First it’ll be water, thought Shango, and then it’ll be food, if something isn’t done. He knew the Army and the National Guard were already stockpiling supplies. That would cause further trouble.

“I’ve written you an authorization, as Commander-in-Chief.”

“That won’t cut any ice with Jerri Bilmer,” said the aide. “I mean, she’ll know us by sight, but she wouldn’t trust Jesus Christ if he showed her the holes in his hands. If some of the other services are involved in the cover-up, she may recognize us and vanish in the crowd. Is there anything we can give her, to let her know she can go with us?”

Shango thought Czernas was referring to another document, but after a moment’s thought, McKay reached into the open collar of his sweat-stained shirt and drew out a little ball-link chain that still bore a slip of punch-printed tin.

Shango had one like it, in a footlocker at his sister’s place. The sign of someone he used to be.

McKay coiled it down into Czernas’ hand.

“Mr. Shango,” he said, turning to the agent, “Czernas is in charge of this mission, but you’re both responsible for its accomplishment. If one or the other of you should not be able to complete this task, I charge the other one to complete it. My authorization will let you take whatever you need, do whatever you must.” And Shango saw in his eyes exactly his own thoughts about what had happened to every plane in the sky that morning. “But find her and the information. Bring them back.”

“We’ll get them,” said Czernas. Then he grinned his boyish grin and added, “Heck, by tomorrow they might have got the cars running again, and this whole thing’ll be a snap.”

“They won’t,” said McKay, and there was in his voice a note of sureness and sorrow that turned Shango’s heart icy with dread. “They won’t.”

NEW YORK

One hundred three point two. Shit.

Cal shook down the thermometer, gazed at his sister. Her hair was plastered to her brow in thin strands, clung to the side of her face. She turned her head on the pillow with a bleary, fevered intensity. By the bedroom’s candlelight, she looked like some refugee child, fragile and very pale.

“How’s the head?” he asked.

“Light,” Tina whispered dreamily. “Like if I let go, I’d just float up and up.”

When he and Colleen had entered the apartment, they had found Tina leaning against the window frame, staring out at the night as though the fight was still raging. He’d called her name several times before snaring her attention, and then she’d turned to them with an eerie slowness, seeming to summon herself back from a long distance.

He had touched her face, felt an alarming heat. Then he’d gathered her in his arms, as he had so many times when she was little, and carried her to her room. In the gloom, his foot had found a heavy volume-the Nijinsky diary, fallen from the nightstand in the tremor. He had nudged it aside and set Tina softly on the bed, a feather.

Colleen hadn’t said, “Maybe I should go.” She’d just gone to the kitchen, soaked a dish towel in water from an Evian bottle and brought it to him, along with the aspirin. Then she had withdrawn to the living room, silent, waiting.

Cal shook the thermometer again, guided it toward Tina’s mouth. She groaned a protest. “Just one more time,” he said, “just to-”

He stopped, startled, as he spied her hand resting atop the covers. In the moonlight it appeared bloodless, translucent, faint tracings of veins beneath the skin.

Tina followed his gaze. “Looks like I’m turning into one of those fish you can see through,” she murmured, but he could hear the fear beneath.

Tightness gripped his chest, and he had the wild thought that vampires had gotten to her, drained her. He pushed it away, held the thermometer before her mouth. “Just to be sure.”

She nodded this time and took it.

“Any better?” asked Colleen, when Cal emerged from his sister’s bedroom. He raised his eyes, and his face in the candlelight seemed older than it was downtown this morning, when he was just another fresh-faced life-support system for an Armani. Not that his suit was an Armani, she thought, looking around at the threadbare apartment, the shelves of law books, the fencing trophies treasured on a shelf. CALVIN GRIFFIN, they said. CLASS OF 1992. HURLEY HIGH SCHOOL.

Where the fuck was Hurley?

“Worse,” he said, and his eyes looked old and weary.

She remembered the tone in his voice when he’d said, My sister, on the street that morning. I take care of her.

Yet he’d stopped to ask if she, Colleen, needed help. If she was okay.

She could see the tremor of his hand as he set the thermometer down on the edge of the pass-through into the kitchen. She wanted to put an arm around his shoulders and tell him, She’ll be all right, but that might be bullshit. For all she knew, the poor kid might have the plague.

And hanging around here wasn’t exactly the greatest health move for her, either. She held no special immunity from whatever the hell it was.

But surprisingly, this didn’t worry her. She felt calm here, comforted even, although she couldn’t have said why.

Cal Griffin stood still, looking bleakly at her-no, beyond her, to nothing at all. She said, “Try the phone.”

“It’s dead.” So was his voice, his eyes.

“Try it.”

He opened his mouth to snap but saw her point-things could come back on at any time-and picked up the receiver. Even as she watched him try not to smash it against the wall-of course it was dead as stone-Colleen realized she’d been prepared to go over and pick up the phone herself, assuming he’d simply say, Oh, fuck off, it’s dead, why bother. Like Rory did. She’d almost forgotten that there were people willing to listen to her. Willing to change their minds or their attitudes.

I’ve been around Rory too long.

She looked at the framed photos on the wall: a slim, solemn, fair-haired boy with worried eyes, an ethereal slip of a dark-haired girl, on a shabby front porch with a tired-looking woman. That was the only photo that contained Mom. The rest were just Sister and Young Mr. Suit: college graduation, him getting another fencing trophy, Sis in ballet tights, a series of recitals, a brittle clipping from some local paper, with her looking so innocent and fragile it made your throat hurt-all the prettiness Colleen had envied as a girl, without the spite that the pretty girls so often showed.

And another, just the two of them, hand in hand.

“I have to get her to a hospital,” said Cal. “She’s burning up.”

Colleen glanced back at him. Voices carried up to the fourth-floor window. Looters had returned to Patel’s, picking over the goods scattered on the sidewalk and on the street.

“Roosevelt’s the closest.” Not knowing how to speak of comfort, Colleen took refuge in the practical, which was always the best course anyway, she thought. “Fifty-ninth and Tenth. You got something to carry her in?”

She saw the young man flip through half a dozen possibilities in a second, picking them up and discarding them like her dad checking out bolts of different sizes, looking for one that fit.

“There’s grocery carts at Patel’s,” he said.

Colleen nodded. Close, and the looters wouldn’t be fighting over them-not yet, anyway.

Cal drew a deep breath, made a smile and held out his hand to her. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you more than I can say.” And there was that brisk lawyer tone in his voice that added, We’re done here.

I won’t ask you for anything else.

“I’ll get the cart,” said Colleen, ignoring him. “Can you get her down the stairs?”

Cal closed his eyes briefly. Colleen could see the relief on his face, that he wouldn’t have to do this alone. He said, “Thank you,” again, the voice of a friend.

WEST VIRGINIA

“There is nothing unsafe about those tunnels!” Norman Mullein pitched his voice to carry over the voices of the men and women crowding the wet gravel yard between the office and the pithead. “There hasn’t been a flood, there wasn’t a cave-in. . ”

“How would you know?” yelled Anne Flue, in tones at least an octave lower than the mine supervisor’s.

“And destroying the elevators in attempting to clear the downcasts would only halt production and put everybody out of work for weeks.”

“Like them dying down there wouldn’t put ’em out of work for longer?”

Wilma stood back from the crowd, arms folded, watching the faces of her friends and neighbors and feeling oddly detached. The sky still held its light-drenched blue brilliance, but, with the setting of the sun behind the green spine of Pigeon Ridge the valley that held Boone’s Gap was beginning to fill with shadow, and twilight was, she found, having a curious effect on her.

With the coming of dusk the world seemed to take on different colors. The company compound, with its clutter of green-painted buildings, its tall angular pithead, its cyclone fences strung as though to keep the crowding woods at bay, looked strange to her now. Over the scents of coal and mud and machine-oil other scents tickled and whispered and murmured in her brain. Scents of the woods. Scents of the night.

“. . wait another few hours and everything will be all right. We’re overdue to hear from the power company. . ”

“Overdue?” hooted Ulee Grant. “My nephew just got back from biking down to Beckley, and he tells me every-thing’s out there as well. And he says you can see smoke in the sky, off from Charlestown and way off in the north towards Wheeling, and you know what else? He says the whole day, he didn’t see one airplane, one helicopter; he didn’t see one working car on the road.”

“To hell with this!” Hazel Noyes, Wilma’s next-younger sister, planted a booted foot on the edge of the porch and hoisted herself up to stand at the same level as Mullein. “So we can’t get the elevators out of the shaft? I guess that means we’ve got to go in some other way.”

“Now, wait a minute!” protested the supervisor, looking as if he might shove her off the porch in sheer irritation.

“Everybody, get food, get water, get blankets, and get all the candles and lamps you can,” Hazel went on. “Meet me over at the old Green Mountain pithead.”

“That’s company property!”

Hazel raised her eyebrows and mimed a moment of stunned surprise. “Gosh, and here I thought all these years you’d turned it into a state park when you were done with it!” Hazel had had her nose broken by Applby’s goons on a picket line when she was fifteen: Norman Mullein did not impress her. She turned back to her friends. “It’s a slant mine, not a shaft. Candy, can you meet us there with maps?”

“Those maps are company property!” protested Mullein. “Miss Leary, I forbid you. . ”

“Oh, button it,” snapped Candace, springing up the steps and pushing past him. “I quit, okay?” She went into the office.

“Get water,” Hazel was repeating. “Get lamps. . Blankets. .”

Wilma slipped away into the shadows, dusk swallowing her up as the crowd scattered.

Dusk did strange things to her thoughts. She was conscious of movement everywhere, of wildness in her heart and in her veins. As she passed the cars and pickups, stopped wherever they’d been at 9:15 this morning, she felt an odd indifference, as though such things meant nothing to her anymore. It was the time of night when she’d ordinarily have started thinking about getting a flashlight, but she knew there weren’t any and it didn’t bother her. She had no trouble making out shapes-in some ways they were clearer.

In all the shabby little houses along Front Street, people were lighting candles, waiting for moms and dads, husbands and wives, to get back from the pithead with news. Half of those houses had only had electricity for fifteen or twenty years anyway, and many of them still had wood stoves: the company had built those houses back in the forties, then sold them in the seventies to the miners who’d rented them for decades.

She turned the corner, climbed the long hill of Applby Street.

And slowed her steps at the sight of the big white house on the corner amid the honeysuckle.

Or at the non-sight of it. For a moment it seemed to her that all that was there was a kind of shadowy vacancy. Then she saw it again, but she saw, too, Boone’s Gap’s single patrolman, Glen Abate, making his methodical way down the street. Checking on houses, knocking on doors.

He walked past the Wishart house as if he didn’t see it. Didn’t remember it was there.

Didn’t remember that there were people in it who hadn’t been accounted for, that a man he’d gone to school with lay in a coma in the downstairs bedroom, dependent on machines that had to have failed when everything else did.

And for some reason, Wilma wasn’t surprised.

She climbed her own front steps, the cats curling and rubbing against her ankles as she came into the porch; walked down the hall to the kitchen and opened cans. Some-body-probably Eleanor of Aquitaine, who was a savage little huntress-had brought a dead mole in as a present, and for some reason the smell of the blood touched a chord in Wilma, not of disgust but of intent and savage eagerness.

I’m not feeling like myself, she thought.

But that was a lie.

She felt more like herself than she’d felt since childhood. She felt light and springy, dazzlingly aware of small noises that she could identify with a weird clarity as tree mice, lizards, cicadas. And with each identification, she felt a strange delight and a dizzying impulse to go and catch them in her hands.

Perhaps what had happened wasn’t entirely bad, if it freed the spirit like this?

Across the yard, the white house appeared and disappeared in the dusk.

Wilma sat on the back porch steps for a time and watched it. She could hear the birds whistling and calling their territories in every bush and tree of the vast thick-growing yards, and knew they were absent from the Wishart yard. The fireflies, which prickled the cobalt velvet of the summer dusk more thickly than they had in years, came nowhere near that house.

There was light-or something that wasn’t quite light- in the window of Bob’s ground-floor bedroom.

We’re all right here, Arleta Wishart had called through the door in a voice unlike her own. We’re all fine.

And, Bob’s calling me.

Bob, locked for weeks in the silence of his coma?

He has to be dead, she thought. She knew that no battery in the town was working.

So why that prickling down her spine, that animal sense of wrongness when she looked toward the house that Glen Abate apparently didn’t see?

Wilma got to her feet, picked her way through the deep grass toward the house.

The light in the window wasn’t fire. Nothing of the golden warmth of kerosene or beeswax or any flame. It was violet, cold and pulsing rather than flickering, and as she stepped forward into the rank beds of honeysuckle she felt a pressure, a tightness in her chest, as if the air around the house were suddenly hostile and alive.

Anger. Anger and terror.

Go away! Go away! Go away!

She called out cautiously, “Bob?” Edged another step closer, her tall body crouching, limbs drawing together in a sort of lithe feral readiness, to spring or to flee. The air clawed and crinkled on her skin, and she prickled, nostrils twitching. Before her the honeysuckle stirred in the darkness, and from the leaves, from the thin glabrous flowers and the tough vines, came a kind of hissing, as if the plants themselves stirred and lashed against the ground.

She saw it move, ripple and rise, and she thought, Stranglers. The very scent of the flowers changed to a warning stink, the pungence of blood and death.

Slowly she withdrew. On the lawn behind her, Sebastian, Imp and Eleanor crouched in a line like three sphinxes, tails twitching slightly, huge eyes seeming to glow in the dark. Crazy with the craziness of cats in the night. Aware, as she was aware, of the lizards in the ferns, of the birds in the trees.

The honeysuckle stirred again, and Sebastian opened his red mouth and hissed.

Careful, soft-footed, alive to every whisper in the dark, Wilma circled the house to the path by the back door. Something in the house was aware of her. Something in the house followed her around the walls with its consciousness. Some- thing in the house crouched down into itself, gathering darkness.

Arleta was in there, thought Wilma. Arleta and Bob-and Arleta was still alive even if Bob wasn’t. She had a momentary vision of them, the pale chubby, helpless little woman in her pink sweats, her soft fair-haired son helpless in the bed.

Her friends, whom she could not desert.

She edged down the path, tense and ready to flee. Under her feet the concrete shifted suddenly, the ground jerking, breaking. The two slabs of broken path yawned open, and she sprang back as they snapped shut like jaws biting at her ankle; the path jerked again, like a snake’s back rippling. Wilma leaped back, not even fully aware that she shouldn’t have been able to clear eight feet from a standing start. Her feet hit the ground, and she darted forward again in a long-legged springy run.

She grabbed the back door handle, moving fast, dragging on it with all her strength. Though the door had never had a lock on it, not even a hook, it refused to budge. Some terrible strength pulled against her own, though she could look through the screen and see nothing in the dark dusty clutter of old couches and boxes of romances heaped there. Behind her she heard a rustle, a whoosing green-plant heaviness of moving air, and reaching up she slashed and clawed at the screen where it was loose on its crazy old nails, bringing it down in a great tearing curl.

With weightless strength she swung up, through and into the porch, hearing in her mind the screaming desperate voice, GET OUT! GET OUT! GO AWAY! The darkness seemed to slam around her, a crushing fist, smothering. Dust and panic and something else, something terrible. Wilma dodged an instant before a cardboard box slammed heavily against the wall by her shoulder, the violence of the blow splitting the ancient glue. Paperbacks snowed to the plank floor, then rose up again like mad birds, flying at her face, shoving, suffocating. Wilma backed, dodged, nimble and very fast, instinct beyond words telling her to keep moving and changing direction, but whatever was in the porch with her was strong and fast as well.

Fear pounded on her, fear like a whirlwind-her own fear and a fear that seemed to come with that terrified scream. She grabbed the doorknob that would let her into the kitchen, and it was scalding hot under her hand. She jerked back, and one of the old couches swung at her legs like a battering ram. She sprang on top of it, up and over, ran as it tipped, plunged out through the window screen again. Fell, rolled, was on her feet and fleeing.

It was only when she sat once more on her own porch steps, panting and shivering and staring through the darkness at the white house that she could still see perfectly well-see with the preternatural clearness with which she still saw every leaf of the honeysuckle, every blade of the grass, through the night’s gathering gloom-that she thought, How the hell did I survive that?

Softly, silently, the cats padded up to her through the gloom. Clinton levitated in a weightless spring to her shoulder; Mortimer butted the side of her knee gently with his flat furry skull; Isabella coaxingly dropped a mostly dead bug on her foot and touched her with a gentle paw. Wilma scratched scruffs, stroked backs, rubbed chins, drawing from them the comfort of company, the uncomplicated love that never disappointed her, never made demands that she wasn’t prepared to fulfill.

It seemed to her years since the morning whistle had sounded in the mine, since she’d taken her shower and opened cans. She guessed now what the others didn’t, that the lights might not be coming back on.

Good thing I have a manual can opener.

Except, of course, she thought, when we run out of cans. She looked across at the darkness of the Wishart house, at the eerie purplish phosphorescence flickering in its window, and whatever was there looked back at her.

Voices in the street. Shannon Grant and Marcia duPone-friends and neighbors, reminding her that whatever else had changed, there were things that hadn’t.

Wilma closed the back door and returned to the dark of her house, to gather up water, food, blankets for those who would need them. And she felt whatever was in the Wishart house aware of her as she stepped out the front door to join her friends.