Magic Time

Chapter Twenty-Five

“This way, I think,” said Tina, when they crossed the third bridge, the one that took them off Staten Island and into New Jersey, and she pointed southwest, through a tangle of smoldering buildings, looted stores, gutted cars and smoke.

Cal cringed inwardly, and Colleen said, “Oh, great. We get to ride a nice straight line through Philly, Baltimore and D.C.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me to hear it’s in D.C.,” remarked Goldie, peering into a shaving mirror he’d mounted on his bike’s handlebars and mopping hydrogen peroxide on a cut above his eyebrow. A pack of young men had rushed them as they were coming off Goethals Bridge, trying to take their bikes, the food, the weapons. It had been no more than a skirmish, but it was an indication, Cal thought, of what might lie ahead.

They avoided the cities. When they could, they avoided the smaller towns as well. Cal took to studying the map more closely and kept to the countryside.

Now and then they’d see bicycle messengers or fleet-footed rollerbladers streaking along the silent highways, heading for New York or the next town up the road that had a militia company, slaloming among the motionless cars. Once, they found the body of one such messenger, broken and bloodied and discarded, his wheels flown. Cal had cautioned Tina to stay in the folds of her canopy, but she had insisted on viewing the dead man and had remained silent, brooding, long afterwards.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold up.” Goldie shouted and was off his bike and sprinting for the weedy field before any of them could stop him.

Cal brought the pedicab to a halt alongside Goldie’s fallen Red Ryder. Colleen and Doc coasted up behind him, puzzled and concerned. The balmy afternoon was melting into twilight, the hint of coming autumn borne on the calls of birds, the shiver of leaves, the breath of the wind.

They were just south of Elizabeth, riding down Highway 19, and hadn’t been within hailing distance of a soul for two days. The very quiet, the lack of incident, made them all jumpy.

And now Goldie was wading among exhaust-grimed obelisks, the veined-marble cherubim, the bronze plaques spiderwebbed with patina as with some skin disease. He glided, a shade, between the shadows of mausoleums, stepped daintily amid snaggle-toothed headstones.

Then he stooped and began digging in the dirt like a dog. Cal walked over to him, spoke softly. Goldie murmured a word of reply without glancing up.

“This is very not cool,” Colleen said, watching from the roadside with Doc. She cast wary glances at the row of silent houses beyond a grassy rise on the opposite side of the highway, the periphery of a small town. Her shoulder muscles were tensed coils. “Field glasses,” she said, and Doc handed her the binoculars. She scanned the windows of the silent, squat structures as Cal came up. “People at the windows, watching us.”

“They can watch all they like,” Cal said, “as long as they don’t do anything.”

“With the elimination of television,” added Doc, “their options for diversion are somewhat limited.”

“Yeah, well, let’s hope they don’t like their entertainment interactive.” She wheeled on Cal. “So what’s the story here? We adding grave robbing to our list of accomplishments?”

Cal contemplated Goldie, still rooting in the earth, a considerable pile of dirt forming behind him. “I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think so? What did he say?”

“He said, ‘Render unto Caesar.’ ”

“Oh great, perfect. Well, here’s what I say: we tackle him, hogtie him and haul his ass and ours out of here while we’ve still got something to haul. Or better yet, we leave him here.”

“No.”

“No?”

Cal looked at her evenly, shook his head.

Colleen opened her mouth to snap something-or maybe to bite him, Cal thought, seeing the sudden fury in her eyes. Then she abruptly turned and stomped off, away from them and from Goldie too, past the chiseled markers and pillared tombs.

Cal started after her, but a gentle hand touched his arm, and there was a voice like music.

Colleen drew up by a sweet gum tree and glowered at the sun-burnished, twilit clouds. Nearby, a Carrara marble angel stood atop an ornate Nouveau pedestal, its arms beseeching the heavens, wings spread wide. A plaque read, “Never to Forget Our Great War Dead,” followed by a list of names- boys from the town over the hill, no doubt-all nineteen, twenty, twenty-one.

Tina flowed toward her, effortless as mercury, the blades of grass quivering as if electrified where she passed.

“You shouldn’t be where you can be seen,” Colleen murmured.

“I can’t hide all my life.” The luminous clouds refracted through the lens of her aura, sparked brilliance.

“You got me there, kid.”

Tina looked away, and Colleen followed her gaze. Goldie was still engrossed in his digging.

“You really hate him,” Tina said.

Colleen was startled by her bluntness, felt a stab of guilt. “Nah, it’s not that, it’s-he’s slowing us down.”

“Maybe where we’re going. . it’s good not to hurry.”

Colleen rubbed a weary hand over her eyes. “Look, I feel sorry for him, I do. It’s not his fault. But he’s not in control. He could draw attention, maybe get us-” She stopped as she spied the blossoming look of pain and shame on Tina’s face.

He’s not the only one to draw attention. Colleen cursed herself; her mouth should have been chained up years ago. But then Tina particularly, with that astonishing grace, made her feel like an awkward, insensitive brute. And yet she had to admit to feeling a growing kinship with the girl, seeing in her tentativeness, her shyness, a reflection of her own concealed inner landscape.

Tina was looking off toward a bank of clouds. Colleen reached a tentative hand to touch her, then withdrew it.

“You know who Martha Graham is?” Tina asked, still studying the clouds.

“Unless she invented the cracker, no.”

“She said, ‘Dancing is a call. . Free choice doesn’t enter into it.’ ” She brought her ice-fire gaze to Colleen, gave a melancholy smile. “Do you think we have a choice in life or are we just fooling ourselves?”

“I think. . we can’t choose what happens to us. But we can choose how we act.” Colleen’s eyes returned to Goldie. He stood now, brushing the dirt from his clothes. He held a wrapped parcel under one arm.

“Maybe some people can’t.” Tina gazed beyond Goldie to where an evening mist was rising, and her voice was a whisper. “No matter how hard they try.”

Colleen and Tina found Cal, Doc and Goldie gingerly unwrapping the oilskin-bound package Goldie had dug up. Inside were more layers of paper and fabric in various stages of decomposition. Then finally, the object itself, dried-out wood and rusty metal.

It was a musket, Springfield 1857 just discernible on the pitted metal screwed to the wormy stock.

“This is what you needed to dig up? It wouldn’t even work if guns did work.” Colleen snapped. “How ’bout you tell me why, Gunga Din? And don’t give me that ‘Caesar’ crap.”

Goldie straightened, hefting the weapon in his long-fingered hands with their thick nails like gray stones. “I have absolutely no idea.”

They swung west to avoid Philadelphia, traveling through the green sweet farming country that was being stripped of its horses and cows. Skirting Bala Cynwyd and Merton Station and Havertown, they would draw near travelers, scuffed and weather-worn, groups of two or three or four, mindful to keep their hands open and in sight, their weapons stowed- and Tina carefully hidden.

Sometimes Doc would dress wounds, administer simple remedies he had picked up from medicine chests of abandoned homes, first-aid kits from automobiles and RVs. Goldie might sing or dance to lull the children, do simple tricks of pretend magic-or real magic feigned as pretend-while Colleen hung back, keen-eyed, and Cal questioned the adults.

None of them had heard anything of a power to the west or the south. No, Wish Heart meant nothing to them, nor any combination of words sounding like that. Yes, they had disturbing dreams, naturally, but nothing like the revelations that had been visited upon Tina and Stern.

Curiously, as Cal and his companions journeyed on, they encountered none of the altered ones, by day or night, although some of the men and women they interrogated admitted to having heard of such creatures, and a few had even seen them, fleetingly.

Everyone they spoke to confirmed that the Change had come over the land at the same time, and that it stretched as far as anyone had seen, or that anyone they had talked with had seen. As to what it might be, or what had caused it, most had a theory, running a tabloid gamut from alien invasion or government conspiracy to warfare between the gods. Some were stated boldly, others offered with grave doubts-but none with the least hint of proof.

“It is like a Rorschach,” Doc commented as they rested in the shade of a willow grove just below Hazlettville. “Everyone sees this brave new world of ours through the lens of their perceptions, of fear, anger, desire. Casting the world in their own image. .”

“More a Thematic Aperception Test, if you want to be precise,” Goldie corrected him, tightrope-walking over a log balanced across the creek. “And, sorry to break it to you, they always did.” He was back in his expansive, talkative phase, no longer dressed down but instead tricked out in what he had taken to calling his Fall Collection-the electric-blue vest emblazoned with buttons, the Hawaiian shirts that never seemed to lose their brightness no matter how long they went unlaundered.

Colleen repeated more than once, and always with cause, that she really couldn’t tell which she preferred less, Goldie muted or Goldie loud.

In the quiet times down the long highways, Cal, intent on formulating some plan of attack, would question Tina and Goldie as to what they might sense or see of the force waiting for them at the end of their road. But on this subject Goldie had no premonitions, could summon no image nor inkling. And as for Tina, though its call grew more insistent every day, the darkness that pulled her relentlessly remained shrouded in its own secret.

Often, after they pitched camp, Cal practiced defensive moves with Doc and Colleen, Doc sharing what he had learned in Soviet basic training and Afghanistan, Colleen what she had gleaned from her father, and the streets, and the woods. They squared off bare-handed or with sheathed knives, or wielded sword or bow. Tina would hover near, watching absently, or drift off into the shadows, while Goldie sat cross-legged, humming to himself, voraciously poring over whatever stray volume he had picked up along the way, be it Marcel Proust, Stephen Hawking or Danielle Steel.

In the glow of a campfire against the chill of twilight, Colleen wrapped her arms around her knees and smiled, all the tension shaken out of her for once. She seemed to crackle and glow with energy, like the fire itself. Her smile changed her, gentled her, so that Cal wanted to reach over and touch her-to forget, for once, about the world that was changing, about the growing despair in Tina’s eyes. About the thing that they would have to face eventually if they had the grim fortune to find it.

“Fighting isn’t about hitting,” Colleen said, finishing a point she had made earlier, in the midst of their sparring. “It’s about distance, first and foremost. And it’s about always thinking, What do I do if this person goes for me?”

Distance, thought Cal, and if this person goes for me. Looking into Colleen’s eyes, he understood suddenly that this was how she regarded everything, everyone: with wariness, fear, caution. Don’t give them a weapon against you. Don’t let them into striking range. It was how Cal himself had viewed the world in what he was increasingly thinking of as The Time Between, the period from his mother’s death through his thralldom to Stern, before the Change. And it was how Colleen viewed the world still.

And before he could look away, she saw the compassion and sadness under his thought.

The warmth vanished instantly from her eyes, leaving them bleak and bitter and angry: You don’t understand.

But he did, and that was what angered her. She got to her feet and walked off into the woods. He rose to follow, to draw her back, but she was moving quickly, and he lost her in the tangle of trees.

He pressed on, searching in the fading dusk, when the glow of a shifting light drew him toward a clearing.

Tina was there, unaware of him. She turned slowly in midair, arms and legs poised in an exquisite arabesque, regarding herself in the play of light against the fallen, dried leaves that carpeted the ground. Beautiful, but so forlorn.

Cal stood a long time, not disturbing her.

And, watching unsuspected from cover, silent as a hawk, Colleen contemplated the look on his face, the fear and tenderness there, and the love that she had thought beyond the capability of any man but her father.

They continued, past Wilmington and Aberdeen and Perry Hall, swinging wide of Baltimore, ever southward, moving fitfully and uncertainly, like a band of blind men drawn by a distant sound. Or, more accurately, a sound that only one of them could hear.

But then, it wasn’t like a sound, Cal reflected, lying in his sleeping bag while Doc stood guard by moonlight over the camp they had pitched at Cedar Beach, the cool waters of the Chesapeake softly lapping the shore. It was like a far-off molten core radiating mad heat. Cal studied his sister’s sleeping form, shielded in a North Face tent, her glow damped down to a phosphoresence that mirrored the night-washed waves. Tina’s sleep was nightly raked with dreams, from which she would wake trembling, unable or unwilling to describe what frightened her. The closer they approached the white-hot glare of whatever was summoning her, the more she seemed to be melting away, growing ever more distant and abstracted. As if she were leaving them already, in small steps, imperceptibly, until she would be gone entirely.

Seeing Cal studying his sister, Doc crouched near. “When one administers an X-ray, it always gives pause,” he said, seeming to catch Cal’s thought. “Will this help to relieve suffering or will it, in years to come, be the one fraction of difference that causes a cancer to form? It is the same with heart surgery, with almost any choice. The physician asks himself, Am I curing, or am I-” He stopped himself from saying killing. “Or am I creating harm?” He laid a hand on Cal’s arm. “Take heart, my friend. She is still with us, and we are together-what do you call them? — merry men, eh? And one woman who would choose to be called anything but. We will beard that lion in his den.”

If only it were just a lion, Cal thought. Even closing in on it, Tina still had no idea what it was. Crazy and angry and sad. . like the world it had created.

What lens, Cal wondered, was it seeing through?

Later, while the others slept and Colleen stood watch, Tina dreamed of darkness again and gasped awake.

“Sh, it’s okay,” whispered Colleen, bending down to her in the mouth of the tent. She reached over and stroked Tina’s back, now as unsettlingly fine-boned as a baby bird’s. Beside such fragility, Colleen felt clumsy and rough.

She became aware of Tina’s gaze on her, turned to the scrutiny of those intense, blue-in-blue eyes.

“Your boyfriend,” said Tina softly, “Rory? He changed, too, didn’t he?”

“Rory was a punk,” Colleen replied, and there was a shakiness in her voice that surprised her.

Tina cocked her head, not taking her eyes off Colleen. “You wanted to love him, but you couldn’t. . so you settled for him needing you.”

Colleen felt her chest clench, the breath in her go dry. She felt naked, seen by this being that had been a child, had been human once, and was increasingly becoming something other, something more.

“I thought of leaving,” Colleen managed to say.

“We leave when we can… or when something takes us.” Tina scanned the dark waters, the woods enfolding them, the open gulf of air beyond the jagged coastline.

To the south.

“ ‘Rory was a punk,’ ” Tina repeated to herself, voice nearly inaudible. “And Mr. Stern was a dragon in his heart, long before the Change. Is this,” she spread her spider-fragile hands, through which the light of the campfire could almost be seen to shine, “because of what I am?”

She dropped her hands, and there was resignation and release in the gesture. “Maybe soon I’ll know.”

Her gaze was turned inward, and she floated silent, her soft radiance filling her like an opal, playing over the interior of the tent. Colleen peered at her, sensing her despair, knowing the feeling so well and so long in herself. The fear of abandonment, the fear of loss. Striving to be the best- whether that meant being the prettiest, the most graceful or the toughest on the block, it really boiled down to the same thing. Having value to someone. . and feeling so afraid of being worth nothing at all.

Colleen ached to comfort her, to say, Everything will be all right. But her heart brooked no false promises, to Tina or herself.

The campfire crackled as a log fell, sending up a firefly swarm of sparks, drawing Colleen’s attention. On the far side of the flame, Cal and Doc and Goldie drowsed in their sleeping bags beneath the dark velvet of the eastern sky. Colleen found her glance lingering on Cal. The amber light of the fire picked out the grave features, the long chin and straight nose, the soft light-brown curls. He looked troubled, even in sleep, saddled with the weight of the world.

“Do you love him?”

Colleen turned her head sharply at Tina’s question, asked in that same small voice. She was drawing breath to say something, though she didn’t know what, when Tina looked up suddenly and her eyes flared.

On the far side of the fire, a huddled form darted, snatched up a leather backpack and tore off into the brush.

“Cal! Doc!” Colleen was on the run, unslinging her crossbow, keeping the shadowy form in sight. It was a puny little cuss, about the size of a child, but it moved incredibly fleetly through the darkness over the uneven terrain.

A light rose up behind her, and Colleen heard the hubbub of Doc and Cal following, one of them having seized a burning stick from the fire. She plunged on, unmindful of the evergreen branches whipping at her face.

The little fucker was moving like greased lightning, despite the weight of the cumbersome pack, gaining ever more of a lead. By his rough silhouette, the pointed, tufted ears that stuck out on either side of his oversized head, the baggy clothes that hung off him, it was pretty damn clear just what he was.

A nightcrawler, like the bunch that had bustled past them on the way to the hospital. That had cornered Cal in the tunnels under Manhattan.

That had once been someone she’d shared her life with. Ahead of him through the cover of trees, Colleen could see a darkness in the rock face.

It was a cave mouth.

Oh no, you don’t, thought Colleen. She raised the crossbow and fired, deliberately missing him. The bolt struck a cedar trunk ahead of him with an authoritative thwak. He let out a cry and ducked away. She reloaded and loosed another arrow. This one lodged in a mound of earth on the far side of him.

The thief flailed in panic, then wheeled and ran directly at them, shrieking like a banshee.

Colleen held her ground, readying for the impact. But before the figure reached her, its foot caught on a root and it tumbled headlong, crashing down with a solid “Oof!” The pack went flying, spinning end over end, bouncing off a thick branch and deflecting into a ravine. It struck an out-cropping in the cliffside and burst open, raining tins of devilled ham and apricots and baby corn into the void.

Colleen leapt to the lip of the chasm, caught the glint of the cans as they fell and were lost. “Great, just great. . just about every meal for the next week.”

A rustle of leaves alerted her. The invader was trying to crawl away.

Colleen grabbed him, pinned him with her knee to his chest. “Where you think you’re going, you rat bastard?”

“Easy, easy there,” Cal said, drawing up to her. “He’s just a kid.”

And Colleen saw, in the darting milk-white eyes and the trembling chin, that it was true. She eased her knee off him, and the boy scooted back up against the rock face, terrified and cornered. Barefoot, he wore the tattered remnants of jeans and a Darth Maul T-shirt, and Colleen wondered if he shivered from fear or from the cold, if he could feel cold.

Cal crouched down to his level. “What’s your name, son? Where are you from? It’s okay, we’re not gonna hurt you.”

He said nothing, rocking, his arms tight around himself.

Doc pulled a hunk of bread from his pocket, held it out. “Here, boy.” And then, to Colleen’s accusatory glare, “The boy is hungry.”

The nightcrawler boy snatched it, gobbled it down. But he would say nothing to their questions.

And then a warm glow, melting green and red and blue, breached the clearing, and the boy looked up in wonder.

Tina drifted liquid to him, and it was clear from his face that he had never seen her like before. They appraised each other with their altered eyes, tilting their strange, large heads, and there was kinship on their faces, and loss.

“I’m Tina Griffin,” she said, settling before him like a soap bubble, throwing dancing colors onto his face. He squinted at her, the light hurting his eyes but unable to turn them away.

“Freddy Salvo,” he said finally, his words distorted by tumbled razor teeth. “From Brandywine, down the road…”

“Pretty weird, huh?” She nodded at her weightless arms and legs, toward his gray, leeched skin.

Tears pooled in his pale eyes. “This sucks, man. My mom freaked, threw me out on my sorry ass. . I try to catch stuff, you know, squirrels and shit, but it’s a joke.”

“Freddy,” Cal kneeled beside him, spoke gently. “Do you have a feeling of someone trying to pull you somewhere?”

“Nah.” His eyes ducked away, furtive. Then, still not looking at them, he mumbled. “I don’t listen to it. Nothin’ to do with me. It’s blurry, far off and shit.”

“Where’s it coming from?”

He considered, then motioned. To the west. The south.

Cal compressed his lips, thoughtful. So it wasn’t just Stern and Tina sensing it, not just New York. It was all the changed ones, at least the three kinds they knew about.

“You not goin’ there, are you?” Dread and awe mixed in Freddy’s voice. “Don’t do it, man.”

Cal asked, “Why?”

This seemed to catch the boy up short. After a moment, he merely gestured, uneasy, vague. Then, watchful of his captors, he rose shakily to his feet. “Can I. . go?” He eyed them, looking shamed. “Didn’t mean to steal your stuff. Been better, me in that ravine.”

Cal hesitated, weighing the thought before asking, “Would you like to come with us?”

The boy met this with a sharp, fearful intake of air. He shook his head.

Doc asked, “Is there anything we can do to help?”

A kind of desolation passed over Freddy’s face. Again, he shook his head, then turned to leave.

Something made him pause as he passed Tina. He glanced back, her aura dancing in his great white eyes.

“Do you know,” he asked her, “what’s going on? Do you know if we’re gonna be okay?”

His manner was intent, almost pleading. Tina searched in vain for words of comfort. She averted her eyes.

In silence, he disappeared into shadow.

In the morning, Goldie caught a white perch off Gunpowder Falls, which provided them breakfast. But it was clear, with the loss of the pack, that they needed more food. Still, Colleen cautioned against going near cities and the more populous towns.

Under flocks of red-winged blackbirds migrating south, they wound their way across the coastal plain, passing fields of tobacco and corn, along the asphalt tributaries of the 702, the 150, the 97, to the 3, just north of Bowie, near the banks of the Patuxent.

Afternoon found them on a rolling green bluff, peering through stands of sugar maple and white oak at a tiny village of one main street with three blocks of shops and a defunct traffic light. A rusty sign on its periphery, pockmarked by BBs, proclaimed, “Stansbury, pop. 72.” It was so small, they would have passed it by if Goldie hadn’t stopped them.

“No,” he said, squinting fixedly at it. “Here.”

Cal unstrapped his sword, stashed it in the pedicab. And then, with Colleen, Doc and Tina hanging back in the dappled shadows, he and Goldie strolled into town.

The only resident on the main street was a heavy-set woman in a billowy flower-print dress, her long black hair streaked with white, settled in a pine rocker before an empty coffee shop. Its sun-parched, peeling sign read, “The Buttery-Real Home Cooking.”

“That open for business?” Cal asked.

“It is now,” she said, rising with a smile like sunshine emerging from clouds.

There was no meat, but the corn chowder was astounding, and the vegetable stew a marvel.

“Raise ’em myself, in my garden,” the woman-whose name was Lola Johnson-explained as she dished out apple pie. Cal noted that her wrists were twice as big around as his own, yet she seemed robust rather than flabby. “I’ve always had a knack with growing things.”

“And a talent for understatement,” Al Tingly chimed in. Over the course of their meal, other denizens of the town had appeared: Tingly, a lean, stoop-shouldered man who introduced himself as a “hardware merchant”; Laureen Du Costa, who ran the antiques shop three doors down; a scattering of others, none younger than fifty. Goldie eagerly sopped up remnants of stewed tomato with his corn bread. Doc had joined them, too, while Colleen remained secreted with Tina-no need to alarm the townsfolk with visitations, angelic or otherwise.

Stansbury, it emerged, had dwindled since its posted population, its younger citizens having long since fled to brighter horizons, the remnant content to look back on live-lier days and be thankful for present calm.

“Used to get more fresh faces before the interstate bypassed us for New Carrollton,” Laureen said. “But since all this hullabaloo, we’ve been grateful for a little anonymity.”

“You haven’t been eager for authorities to arrive, get everything running again?” asked Doc.

Tingly snorted. “Electricity always was a finicky cuss. We got used to lamps and candles. As for water, our system’s gravity fed, so there’s no squawk there. And if you’re asking us if we’d like a lot of government stooges stompin’ in here and-”

“Don’t get Al started,” Lola cut in, laughing, “or he’ll bend your ear about what a prime SOB Harry Truman was.”

After they had eaten their fill and more, Cal voiced their need to stock up on supplies, and Doc offered to trade medical services. But surprisingly, no one in town had any physical complaints to speak of, nor had anyone fallen afoul of any mysterious new ailments. In fact, since “the Big Nothing,” as Al Tingly called it, even his psoriasis had cleared up.

“Remarkable,” Doc murmured. “To what do you ascribe-”

“Go on, Lola.” Tingly smiled. “Take ’em over and show ’em your potato patch.”

“I could get used to this,” Doc said, as the three of them rocked on the pine glider on Lola Johnson’s porch and the breeze blew through rust and gold maple leaves. The bang of a screen door heralded Lola’s emergence from the house, bearing a tray with pitcher and glasses.

The lemonade, like the rest, was perfection.

Lola settled into a wicker chair opposite them, her expansive frame overflowing it. “Well?” she beamed, throwing her big arms wide to take in the surging tangle of asparagus fern and morning glory that spread across the porch, along the roof line, down the steps. Beyond, in her front yard, flowers the size of hats rivaled in their lushness the corn that stood tall and ready for harvest, the potatoes, yams and carrots bursting from the soil, the trees sagging under the weight of apples, plums and pears. “Not bad for a little Maryland girl with just a spade and hoe.”

“It’s incredible,” Cal said.

“I mean, I was always good, but this-most of it’s been in just the last two weeks. Can you believe that?”

“Oh, yes,” chimed Goldie. “Were any of your neighbors equally fortunate?” asked Doc.

“Well, not at first. But then I’d pop round, putter a little here and there, and. . ”

“The same results.”

“Let’s just say, I don’t think we’ll be hearing our stomachs growling any time soon.” Her summer-radiant grin appeared and Cal was again struck by the joyfulness of this woman, and her power. Enthroned amid bounty, she seemed like the ghost of Christmas present atop the cornucopia in the Dickens tale, like some primeval spirit of nature.

Which would be cause for celebration in the general run of things, if not for the bodies they had encountered on the road, the predators that roamed free. . and what awaited them to the south.

Cal rose from the glider, set his empty glass on the tray. “From what I’ve seen, ma’am, I wouldn’t be counting on assistance coming any time soon. Things are getting pretty hairy out there. You might consider being concerned about folks coming ’round who might covet what you’ve got.”

She waved it away with an airy laugh. “Oh, we’re such a little flyspeck, I suspect most folks’ll just sail on by, won’t even know we’re here. . ’cept nice ones, like you.” Her eyes came to rest on his, full of easy certainty, and somehow, despite all his fears and knowledge, Cal felt reassured.

As the afternoon sun waned, Cal attempted to settle up with Lola Johnson for the foodstuffs, but she insisted they stay the night. Ed Spadaro had been off in Omaha when “the conniption” had happened, prior to which he had entrusted her with keeping an eye on his bed and breakfast.

“It’s moving into the off-season,” Lola noted. “Not that we get much of an on-season, really. We’re quiet folks, and our charms, what little they might be, are subtle.” She added that her perquisites included fixing the rates, which, if she chose, could just damn well be gratis.

In the end, they agreed and gratefully settled into their rooms at the Priory. Under cover of darkness, they spirited Tina into one of the suites. That night, they bathed for the first time in weeks, ate hot food and slept in clean, crisp sheets.

With the exception of Tina, their dreams held no ordeals.

Cal awakened to sunlight glinting through the window and the songs of bobolinks. He stretched, well rested, feeling none of the knots and aches that had plagued him in recent days.

In the clarity of half-wakefulness, his mind drifted over the bounty of Lola Johnson’s garden and how she had felt so certain that the grasping, avaricious ones would pass right on by Stansbury, not give it a second glance-as if she intended not to witness it but somehow to cause it. As she had caused the peaches and pomegranates and sweet potatoes in gardens all over town to swell and grow delectable. As she, if only unconsciously, had brought an equal vitality to her neighbors themselves.

There is a power to the west and the south that caused all this, Stern had said on that fiery rooftop in Manhattan. And everywhere that power had touched, it had sown nightmare and malaise.

Scared and angry and crazy, Tina had added, and that had fit the picture of the merciless force that had shredded the world as conscious and evil-undeniably evil.

But then, how did Lola Johnson fit into that picture? How did this town?

They didn’t.

Floating dreamily, his thoughts flowing free, Cal contemplated the events of recent days, remembered the storm that had come upon New York so suddenly, when his sister had first felt the call that was drawing her, drawing them all, southward.

What if this force were like a storm, and nothing more? A storm might wreck a house if you opened a window and let it in. Or it might nourish a crop to feed a community.

But the storm itself was a force of nature, pure and simple; it held no awareness, no moral sense. It all lay in how it was directed, what channel it was guided through.

By others.

And, if that was the case, then the power that caused all this and the sentience that was scared, angry, crazy. .

Might be two entirely different things.

Which allowed the possibility of Lola Johnson’s channeling that storm to grow and nurture and heal, a benevolent power that worked her will. That might continue to heal even a wayward traveler, a lost one-

Rising with urgency and hope, Cal pulled on his clothes and hurried down the hall to his sister’s room.

But she was unchanged.

Colleen was in the room with her. Cal had noticed that Colleen was growing closer to Tina, a deeper bond forming, one that might well hold anguish for them both in the days to come. Looking at the two of them now, he put on a gentle smile.

“We’re moving on,” he said.

He found Goldie sitting on the veranda, polishing his Springfield musket-a hopeless effort considering that its metal parts were rusted through and the stock was as dessicated as driftwood.

“Where’s Doc?” Cal asked.

“Loading the last of the jackpot from Mama Nature, I mean, Mrs. Johnson. I hope you like plums. Me, I was holding out for eggplant, but I lost the toss.”

Cal settled beside him on the step. “Thanks for bringing us here.”

Goldie stopped polishing and looked evenly at Cal. “I saw it for what it was. You couldn’t. Mama wouldn’t let you.”

“Yeah, I kind of figured that out.”

Goldie gave him a lopsided grin. “There’s hope for you yet.” He returned to his polishing, whistling a snappy rendition of “Whatever Lola Wants.”

“Goldie,” Cal spoke tentatively, “for some folks, what happened was a good thing.”

Goldie stopped whistling, though he kept his eyes on the musket. “For some. I suppose, if pressed, I myself could offer a testimonial.”

“What do you think it means?”

Goldie rubbed a spot on the barrel harder, making no change in its pitted surface, glaring at it as if his will could make it resolve into something shining and unsoiled and new.

“What it means,” he answered after a long silence and would say no more.

In the first twenty-four hours of what Shango had come to think of as the Darkness, the National Guard had established a depot in Lynchburg, partly to collect stock from the horse farms in Albermarle County and mostly to render whatever aid was possible to those in the mountain country beyond. In Albermarle County, there was a stockbreeder named Cadiz (or Gadiz or Cattes, the survivors at the Angels Rest Retirement Community pronounced it several different ways), an ex-Reservist and survivalist who was of the opinion that everyone should have been ready for catastrophe and who wasn’t about to let the National Guard confiscate his stockpiles of food and water to feed lazy and inefficient parasites who had not been as prudent as he.

As the days and weeks of darkness and hunger progressed and fewer and fewer messages came down highway 95 from Washington, this had developed into what Mrs. Close at Angels Rest called “a situation”-exacerbated by the usual local politics and personalities-culminating in the cessation a week ago of any visits to Angels Rest by the National guardsmen.

“They didn’t come real often,” the old lady told Shango, pausing in her laborious measuring out of thrice-used tea leaves to flavor the morning’s water rations. “But that nice Captain Brady used to make sure one of his men got up here every few days with something. And as long as he and his men came around, nobody bothered us much.” Beyond the shade of the gallery outside the kitchen, Shango could see the two remaining attendants at work laying out bedding- bright red-and-blue blankets, worn blue-striped sheets-on the unkempt lawn and rhododendron bushes, airing it in the absence of a regular supply of wash water. Beyond, a neat row of brown rectangles under the trees marked where those who’d been on oxygen or dialysis had been buried, the new grass like a mist of pale green velvet. Mrs. Close supported herself on the edge of the table when she got up to start the water boiling on the stove-one of the other residents had converted it from gas to wood-and Shango got quickly to his feet and fetched the heavy kettle.

“Thank you, dear.” She smiled up at him. She was thin as a bundle of sticks, and her hands shook with a steady, constant tremor, as if a motor within were off balance. “Mr. Dean says he saw parties of Mr. Cadiz’s men riding in the woods the day before yesterday, carrying spears and arrows, he said, and wearing those camouflage jackets the National guardsmen wore.” Mr. Dean was the community’s scout, seventy-seven and the only Angels Rest inmate capable of walking more than a mile.

She went on worriedly, “Mr. Dean also says they were riding horses the National guardsmen had the week before. Mr. Dean sometimes gets a little confused about people, but he’s very sharp on horses, so you might want to stay away from Lynchburg. Mr. Cadiz. .” She glanced around nervously and lowered her voice in embarrassment.

“Mr. Cadiz is very prejudiced against-well, he’s said some really awful things about Negroes.” She looked ashamed even to bring the matter up, and Shango was touched by her delicacy.

“And if he’s taken over the National Guard post and has all their weapons, you might want to be careful. Mr. Dean told us some other things, too, about that horrible Douglas Brattle-Mr. Cadiz’s neighbor-who’s writing that book on torture, of all things, and has all those terrible books and pictures at his house. But I think Mr. Dean must be confused about that.”

“About what?” Shango poured the hot water into the community teapot. He was still getting over his shock that the inmates of Angels Rest-a dozen trembling oldsters and the two nurses-had even let him through the gate, instead of locking it and the doors against him, not that either the honeysuckle-covered perimeter wall or the unbarred, ample windows of the old house would stand up to anything resembling a determined assault. The fact that they’d not only admitted him but had voted to share their tiny stores of food and water with him without demanding work in return, made him want to sit them all down and lecture them about the facts of life: don’t trust anybody, make sure you’ve got enough. .

He’d spent yesterday afternoon felling trees in the surrounding woods and hauling them up to the kitchen and repairing the plastic rainwater catches. His arms were now sore and stiff.

“About Mr. Brattle-well-being able to do things. Mr. Dean says Mr. Brattle could make a horse spook just by looking at it, and when one of the men argued with Mr. Cadiz, Mr. Brattle sort of-sort of waved at him, and the man doubled over and almost fell down.”

And that explained, thought Shango grimly, what probably happened to that nice Captain Brady and the National Guard.

The thought of it shivered across his skin like rat’s feet.

In his widening search for United Flight 1046, he’d heard of people with unexplained powers. Whispers at first, and he’d put them aside as fear-fed rumors. Then near Spotsylvania he’d encountered a woman who could start or extinguish fires just by looking at wood. Something was turning people into gremlins or trogs or boogies or whatever else they were called-and apparently turning people into other things as well.

No wonder McKay had looked scared that first morning, when everyone else was just concerned because the lights were out.

Hang on, Chief, he thought. The fear that had grown inside him for weeks now tore at him like broken glass. He reached into the pocket of his shorts, touched the dog tag he’d taken from Czernas’ backpack. Just hang on and keep the lid on things. I’ll get you whatever Bilmer knew, whatever Bilmer had.

And then what?

He looked out the windows again, to the neat row of grass-dusted graves.

“Now, you watch out for yourself in those woods.” Mrs. Close pressed into Shango’s hand a block of much-recycled tinfoil enclosing bread that Shango knew the community could not spare. “I don’t suppose. .” She bit her lower lip. Tiny and fragile, she couldn’t have weighed eighty-five pounds; the medication that had kept her thyroid from over-burning-devouring her body at a rate faster than food could replenish it-had long since run out. “I don’t suppose when you’ve looked at that plane wreck Mr. Dean gave you the map to, you could come back? Mr. Dean says Mr. Cadiz and his men seem to be collecting all the food and water and things and taking them back to Lynchburg for their own families and people who’ll work for them. We don’t have very much here to begin with, and I’m sure none of us are in any shape to work for Mr. Cadiz even if we wanted to. If he takes what we have, or if he hurts Mrs. Soniat or Mrs. Metcalf, I don’t know what we’ll do.”

His father had brought him up not to lie. “Is it yes or is it no?” he’d say. “Don’t say yes and then do no. That’s being a coward, and a liar.”

But he couldn’t speak, knowing that when he left this place she would die. They all would die. He’d done what he could to bar the windows with two-by-fours, had helped them set up a lookout post on the roof, had given them Czernas’ binoculars, and he knew these defenses would do no good at all.

In his mind he saw Czernas in the hot sunlight of the parkway, standing before that beautiful old woman in the green sweatpants: that woman who might be dead now, as Czernas was dead. Like Czernas, he could not speak.

Mrs. Close patted his arm gently and smiled her understanding. “It’s all right,” she said. Shango wondered how many times this woman had heard Sorry, we can’t, since her family had put her in Angels Rest. “You just do what you can, dear, and we’ll hang on here. We’re a lot tougher than we look. It was sweet of you to stay and cut the wood and put those bars on the windows.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, meaning it, hurting inside for her courage.

“We’ll be all right,” she said again. “You be careful out there.”

In Charlottesville they’d told him about four planes that had come down south of town, in the green woodlands that lay along the knees of the mountains. One of these had proved to be an American flight, he’d seen the fuselage of the plane and hadn’t gone any nearer than that. The other had burst its belly open when it first hit the ground and had spewed passengers, seats, luggage over about a thousand yards of highway 29. Shango had searched the rotted, unburied corpses until he’d found half of a boarding pass that identified it as an Air France plane.

Old Mr. Dean, who didn’t look like he could stand up to a stiff wind, had gone over Shango’s map last night and marked the precise location of the third plane, as well as innumerable minor landmarks of the woods. The witnesses at Angels Rest had all seen it come down, catching a wing on the ground and pinwheeling as it sheared apart; using the map and his compass-at least that still worked-Shango set up a grid, doing alone and without equipment a task that usually fell to professional investigation teams with helicopters, dogs, radio communication and metal detectors at their disposal. He worked doggedly, patiently, pacing himself; rationing his energy and his concentration as he’d learned to ration water and food.

There was little chance McKay or anyone else would have recognized him as the quiet, blue-blazered agent of the White House detail he’d been a few weeks ago. He was ragged and indescribably filthy-making it more of a wonder that the folks at Angels Rest had let him through the gate-and the clothes he’d gleaned from the luggage of downed planes were stained, mismatched and torn. He kept his beard clipped short but it started high, just under his cheekbones, and above it his eyes were red-rimmed, hollow with fatigue. It was as if all the disguise he’d worn for years in the service, all the neatness and presentability that made him invisible, had worn away, leaving. .

What?

Exhaustion had ground him down to the point of feeling very little, either of revulsion or pity-only weariness, and the growing dread he felt every time he thought of McKay, of the man he should have been protecting but wasn’t.

He’ll think I’m dead, Shango thought. Or worse, that I’ve given up, leaving him, and by now there’s no one else he can send.

And his mind turned backward on itself, conjuring images of despair and ruin until he forced it to stop, forced himself to concentrate on the task at hand. If she was on a plane, if her stuff was on a plane, it’ll be out here somewhere.

One chance, out of how many?

Shut up and search, he told himself. Shut up and do your job. If it’s here, I’ll find it. There was nothing else but that.

The first body he found, at the edge of a burn scar in the thin woods a few miles from Angels Rest, had a boarding pass in what had been her jeans pocket. It was hard to read- blood and fluids from three weeks of decay had badly discolored the card, and animals had mauled the body-but he made out the flight information.

United 1046 from Houston.

Shango closed his eyes and thought, Shit. He sat down on the ground, shocked that he’d actually found the flight. That it had, in fact, come down here, instead of clear the hell on the other side of the Appalachians. For a moment he felt disoriented, like a dog who’d chased a Cadillac and then actually caught it.

Then, hearing his mother’s admonishing voice in his mind, he added, Thank you, God.

And opening his eyes again, he viewed the scene of the wreck.

Coming down without instruments, the big 747 had caught wind shear off the Allegheny Plateau, had veered over on its side, caught its wing and bounced. At least that’s what Shango guessed from what little he knew about flight dynamics, coupled with Mrs. Close’s description. The thing must have been burning after the first bounce. Bodies, seats, luggage, debris would be scattered all over the back half of Albermarle County. Shango could see twisted hunks of metal on the ground among the charred trees, a couple of corkscrewed seats, a smashed and gutted suitcase, a shattered stroller. Close by, the stink of decay and a humming column of flies marked another body.

He gritted his teeth and walked to the second body, scanning the ground as he went.

For two days, he searched.

He found about a hundred and fifty suitcases, most of which had been torn open or burst on impact: suits, dresses, belts, scarves, cosmetics exploding among the light ferns and creepers. A Bally loafer had survived by falling into a puddle. A woman’s mauve-and-pale-green scarf incorporated into a squirrel’s nest. An old man’s cane embedded in an elm tree as if it had been fired from a gun.

Some of the bodies had fared the same, torn to pieces on impact. This wasn’t the first wreck Shango had checked out, nor the first time he’d moved aside a bush expecting to see a body at the end of a protruding leg that turned out not to have one. He didn’t know whether the matter-of-factness he felt was because of exhaustion or because, after three weeks of heat and flies and animals, what he found didn’t look particularly human anymore. It was just meat.

What he didn’t feel by day, he felt in his nightmares at night-but in his nightmares, the bodies all had faces: his mother, his brother, his father. Mrs. Close. The guy in the tower with the sling on his arm. Czernas. McKay. And he’d wake sweating in the dark, in whatever burrow he’d found for himself, hearing the foxes fighting over a severed hand.

The second day he found the tail section, eighteen people still more or less seat-belted into the twisted wreckage. There was a beverage service cart and most of a flight attendant nearby.

Earphones half-crushed, gray worms in the fast-growing new creepers underfoot. Somebody’s portable CD player with a Gregorian chant disc still in it. A slightly waterlogged copy of The Velveteen Rabbit: after a long time, if you love enough and are loved, you lose all your soft plush and your stitching gets a little loose and you get a little faded and a little saggy and you become Real.

And Real is the best that you can be.

Voices rang behind him in the woods.

Shango shoved the book into his backpack and slithered into the nearest cover, a thicket of sugarberry brambles near the broken impact crater of a seat section, keeping his head down and balling his body small. He heard the soft whuffle of horses and the creak of leather, not too near but near enough they’d have seen him; a man’s voice said, “-live off the country till we get that first crop in. Then we’ll be able to increase their rations. Till then they’re lucky they’re getting anything. Bastards couldn’t be bothered to lay up provisions, who the hell’d they think was going to feed them?”

Shango waited till the noises faded utterly, then crept from the thicket. It was late afternoon, and he had two hours or so of daylight left. But instead of returning at once to his search, he made his way back to a stream cut he’d marked earlier in the day as a place to hole up for the night. Spring runs had undercut the bank and wild honeysuckle grew down over it, leaving a hidey hole behind. Shango dipped up water in one hand, the other hand ready on his knife, listening, always listening, to the birdsong and the soft rustlings of beasts in the woods.

The last body he’d found had been a boy of six or seven, burned, dismembered by foxes. Why that child’s body affected him he didn’t know. Maybe because a section of seat had covered the face, so that when he’d tipped it clear to look for flight bags or purses, the flesh had still been in place, recognizable to those who’d loved this boy.

But they were probably dead, too.

And he thought, Those who kept the Source in existence-those who organized it, funded it, lied about it to McKay- are the people who’re going to end up with the food and the water and the protection that everyone else is dying without.

Whoever they are, they, too, knew what it meant when the lights went out.

Anger flamed within him. Anger beyond anything he’d thought himself capable of feeling, a volcano, a cataclysm: hatred for the men who had killed that child.

Hatred followed by an exhaustion so intense that it made him dizzy and sick.

He crawled behind the honeysuckle, sat with the damp cool clay of the bank against his back.

McKay was a part of it, he thought. YOU were a part of it. All this time, being a cog in their wheel, being good at your job and proud to be good at your job. And your job was to protect the men who secretly, quietly, were working on this.

He remembered how good it had felt, to hear Cox or McKay say, He’s good at his job. He’s the best. How good it had felt to have a scorepad that said, “Ninety-nine out of a hundred rounds in the target zone”; to spot some questionable yo-yo in a crowd and remove him, or to establish a perimeter or make a transfer from door to car without slip-ups. That sense of accomplishment. Something apart from, beyond, the chaos in which he’d grown up, the chaos of watching his father and mother giving their time and money and attention to a thousand things besides their children: buying one too many rounds of beers for friends, being gone with the church ladies one too many nights. No time, gotta go. . Not this week, honey, next week. .

And it had all been betrayal, in the end. It had all been to protect the people who thought that the risk of this-this horror, this catastrophe-coming to pass was less important than getting power.

He thought, I will find Bilmer. I will get her notes, her evidence, back to McKay. And then I will protect McKay from these people, because whoever they are, they will destroy him before they’ll admit that they were wrong.

Shango closed his eyes. He’d be able to go over about another square mile of woods before it got too dark to see. He’d been marking them off on Mr. Dean’s map: oak tree to pond, covered. Pond to birches, covered. Birches to the second burn scar, covered.

But what if he’d missed something? What if a fox had dragged Bilmer’s body, or purse, or luggage away to its hole? The next section to search, beyond the second burn scar, might contain something, but what if the papers themselves had become exposed?

What would he do then? How would he know?

When you’ve gone over the whole area, he told himself, and haven’t found what you’re looking for, then it’ll be time to go back and look again. You can’t do it any other way.

Someone was singing.

Humming, whispering; Shango knew almost before he opened his eyes, before he shifted his weight forward to peer through the honeysuckle, that it was a crazy. He’d learned the sound of crazies over the years.

So in a way, the sight of the man kneeling beside the stream didn’t surprise him. Only that he had made it this far from civilization unharmed.

Traveling with someone, Shango deduced at once, studying the wild black hair curling from beneath that straw cowboy hat, the jangly fruit-salad Hawaiian shirts. Father or brother or pal, he was someone they couldn’t leave behind.

His back still to Shango, the man rose and sauntered along the bank with a loose-limbed casualness, a here/not-here quality that set him apart.

Every now and then, the man found some bauble in the wet earth-a water-polished stone, a sprig of greenery-and stooped to claim it, the tangle of buttons pinned to his vest clattering as he bent. Shango saw now that the fellow had a pitifully old musket, all rusted and cracked, slung over his back. What possible good might that do, even as a bluff?

Hell, thought Shango, starting to rise, it’s only an hour or so till dark, I couldn’t cover the whole of that burn scar anyway. Might as well see if I can find his family, get him back to them if he isn’t going to end up carrying nightsoil for Cadiz’s private garden patch.

“Stay where you are,” snapped a voice from the top of the bank.

The man raised his head. Crazy, thought Shango, and something more.

It was Cadiz and his men, at the top of the bank.

Shango recognized them from the descriptions: No National guardsmen would have added all those leather jackets and extra weapons belts to their cammies. The burly dude with the Air Cav patch displayed so prominently on his shoulder would be Cadiz; the sour-faced, freckled, curiously wizened man riding at his side was probably the odd and offensive Mr. Brattle. Two of the dozen or so foot soldiers who surrounded the two riders were already making their way down the stream-bank toward the brightly garbed man, who was by this time backing away.

“Sorry,” he said, in a pleasant voice, “got to go. Wish I could stay.”

“I said stay put!” snapped Brattle, in a thin harsh voice like a cough. “Where’d you come from? Nobody comes through here without us checking them out.”

And Cadiz said, “Grab him.”

That was a mistake. The man flung up his hand and shouted, fireballs flashing in the air. Shango’s breath caught in his throat. Another of them, like the firestarter he’d met near Spotsylvania, the others he’d heard of.

At the top of the bank, Brattle said in his tight cold voice, “None of that!” and stretched out his hand toward the man.

The man cried out, clutched his head, doubled over in pain. The fireballs frizzled and died, the smell of smoke thick in the air. The man fell to his knees in the stream, raised his hand as if he feared he would be struck. Brattle said, “Bring him. We’ll need one like that.”

The foot soldiers seized the man by the arms.

And at that point, one of the group around Cadiz and Brattle shifted, and Shango saw what was slung on the cruppers of their horses. Sacks of food, big plastic bottles of water such as the National Guard had handed out, a bundle of bright red-and-blue blankets lashed together. Tools-a small hatchet, a saw and some screwdrivers-bulging from faded blue-and-white-striped sheets.

You bastards, thought Shango, recognizing the few pitiful objects that had stood between the Angels Rest oldsters and starvation. You fucking bastards.

Anger rose up in him, at all those faces, from that of the woman by the parkway to that child’s he had uncovered only an hour ago-rage at what men had done out of power and hunger and greed.

You have no right, he thought, to do what you are doing- and his hammer sprang as if of itself into his hand. Chill iron centered in him, terrible and hard, and no, this wasn’t his job, he thought, moving already, striding from the dusky vines and golden flowers, and no, he knew the way to take care of this problem was not to get himself killed by taking on twelve armed guys and a wizard who had the advantage of high ground and crossbows. But sometimes, thought Shango, perfectly cold, perfectly calm, sometimes your starry-eyed bleeding-heart Band-Aid-plastering liberals had a point.

And he struck like the hammer of Thor, like John Henry driving down the steel that killed him, and knocked the brains out of one man like mac’n’cheese from a broken dish and snapped the other thug’s spine on the backhand swing. He grabbed the Hawaiian-shirted man’s arm and pulled him clear as one of the men on top of the bank fired a crossbow.

And then fear hit him. Crippling, staggering terror that iced his stomach and dropped him to his knees.

Panic flooded him, screamed at him to drop everything and RUN-

And looking up at the top of the bank, he saw the sour, freckled face of Douglas Brattle smile.

That was his power, Shango understood.

He could throw Fear.

Shango raised his hammer in his hand.

Bellowing like thunder, he charged straight up the bank, swinging the weapon around his head. A man leveled a crossbow at him, and he scrambled up anyway, not ceasing to shout, not ceasing the gush of rage that the shout summoned from his pounding heart.

Anger poured out of him, hot as blood from a wound, the anger a weapon like the hammer, that nothing could disable or fuck up.

And then something gleaming flashed across the bowman’s weapon, and he heard the fiberglass crossbow snap and the sprang! of the breaking string, the scream of the bowman as the arrow leaped wildly back into his face. The man ran shrieking into the woods, spraying blood.

The gleaming thing had been a sword.

And amid the chaos and the screams and the blood rage pounding within him, Shango realized others had entered the fray alongside him.

Brattle’s horse reared, and Cadiz drove his mount forward, spear leveled. Shango smote the spear aside with his hammer, smote aside the sword the man drew.

He grabbed Cadiz’s wrist and hauled him from the horse and into the tangle of fern underfoot, drove his boot into the side of his ribs, felt bone break, as this man must have broken the bones of Mrs. Close and Mr. Dean and the others who had taken Shango in.

There was a cry behind him, and he spied another militiaman falling as a lean, muscular young woman smashed him down with a blow from her crossbow, arcing it wide like a club. Then, with a speed and agility he found impressive, the woman wheeled, loading the crossbow as a third rider drove down on her. She fired, falling back, her arrow lodging in the rider’s shoulder, flinging him backward off the horse to smash on the rocks.

And now all was confusion, a blur of bodies and blades, of crushing movement. Something slashed along his cheek, he drove the attacker back with his boot. Others tried to take him around the waist, bring him down, but he threw them off, battered them away.

Beyond this, as if lit by lightning, he glimpsed the young swordsman, forcing back two of the militiamen, who parried with big hunting knives, eager to gut him. The young man was no professional, that was clear. But he fought with a fire, a determination, that brought to Shango’s mind his own crazy-ass self as he’d gone screaming up the creek bank.

And there was another man, too, an older man, wielding a length of pipe against the bastards, shouting a torrent of curses in something that sounded like Russian.

Shango sought again for Cadiz, couldn’t find him. A man with three gold teeth lunged at him with a bayonet. Shango sidestepped it, drove the head of his hammer into the man’s solar plexus, sending him staggering back to collapse amid the rushes, choking.

Shango straightened, saw the girl with the crossbow firing off a shot into the thigh of one of the Russian’s adversaries, unaware that a spearman was running at her own undefended back.

“No!” The word rang out over the clearing and-though it was high and musical-it took Shango an instant to realize it wasn’t his own thought.

Then in the green dusk, there was a brightness like a second sun.

He saw to his astonishment a glowing, beautiful child skimming in the air like a stone skipped over water. The creature overtook the spearman and settled near the woman, the light extending out to canopy her.

The spearman cried out in terror, but his momentum was carrying him, and his spear struck the glowing canopy, its wood fracturing as though the light were solid, sending the barbed metal tip of the spear shooting back and upward into the man’s own throat.

He made a gurgling, surprised sound and fell, gasping out his life.

The fear-caster wheeled his horse and pelted away into the trees.

Shango swung around, to find the surviving men gone. He was panting, trembling, the rush of anger that had lighted his whole body ebbing, leaving ash and shock and dizziness in its wake.

The ghostly, glimmering girl hovered over the dead man, staring down at her handiwork, and she looked sickened. She appeared to be twelve or thirteen years old, Shango’s niece Kitta’s age, and smaller than she should have been, were she human.

“How’d you do that?” the muscular young woman asked her quietly, and it was clear to Shango that she both knew this girl and knew nothing of her power.

“I–I don’t know,” the girl stammered, settling like a dragonfly, ready to rise and flee. Her white hair floated weightless around a thin, haunted face. “I was just mad and scared, and I wanted him to stop.”

Shango had heard of such creatures in his travels, had even perhaps glimpsed one far in the distance over Arlington, a light moving quickly through the midnight sky, in this world where he had thought lights no longer moved in the heavens. Fireflies, he’d heard them called, or feys, or little bright fuckers.

The man in the Hawaiian shirts was clambering up the bank, panting, helped by the curly-haired young swordsman. “You okay, Goldie?”

“I’m fine,” said Goldie, looking around him with those hectic brown eyes, “though there are mental health professionals in several metropolitan areas who might beg to differ.”

The glowing girl-angel regarded Shango with her blue-in-blue eyes and whispered, “Are you all right?”

“Yes. Thank you, miss.” He inclined his head and, looking around him, saw that he’d killed one of Cadiz’s men on top of the stream bank, though he had no conscious memory of it.

Kneeling, he cleaned the head of his hammer in the stream, the blood trailing away, his hands shaking as they’d never shaken on night bombings raids in the Gulf.

“Thank you for helping him,” the young man said, sheathing his sword and approaching Shango and, in the way he held himself, his easy air of authority, left no doubt as to who was leader of the group. “I’m Cal Griffin,” he added, and introduced the others.

Shango regarded them as they stood together, and, though it was obvious they were travelers, they seemed neither refugees nor brigands. Perhaps, he reflected, they were pilgrims. Like himself.

“My name’s Larry Shango,” he said, sliding the weapon back into the straps of his backpack, standing up again. “And I’d suggest we make tracks out of here, before more company comes.”