Magic Time

Chapter Thirty

Between the dog and the wolf, Shango’s Cajun friends had called this twilight time. Circling through the dove-colored twilight of the lower end of the Mall, Shango looked back toward the Capitol Building, the stout wall of sandbags and cinderblocks and barbed wire that surrounded the National Guard complex, and saw a blue-white glow of light moving along that new-made rampart.

So the dogs of war, like the wolves down in Albermarle County, were enlisting those with “talents.”

Plywood and sheet metal had been wired over the palisade around the White House, but most of the plywood was gone. There were no guards. No one moved around the knee-deep grass of the untended lawns. Someone had tried to be careful about bolting security doors and grilles over the doors and windows of the Executive Mansion itself, but the place had been broken into and looted.

Did anyone really think the Army would leave food and water there? wondered Shango, as he passed it in the blue dusk. Was this just a quest for combustibles? Or the rage and revenge at a system that had promised to protect the weak and the poor, at least a little bit?

And had then, as such systems do, simply decided to protect itself instead. To protect itself, and pretend that certain of its own members weren’t responsible for the horror of what the world had become. He’d seen enough of that in the service. At the time he’d just accepted that, as in the Army, it was how things worked.

He didn’t go in. Light was fading; it was dark enough that sentries on the higher ground near the Capitol wouldn’t be able to see him if they looked down the Mall, but not too dark for him to see what he was doing, and he didn’t want to kindle a light. He’d picked up a shovel on his way at a looted and deserted hardware store in Georgetown and concealed it in the Old Executive Building. It now hung in the straps of his backpack, while he carried the hammer in his hand.

Go to a fountain, Goldie had said. Near the roses.

If someone had actually killed the President, would they really have been so dumb as to bury him in the Rose Garden?

Shango had no doubt that McKay was dead. Had he attempted to push through some program of food distribution that impinged on the Army’s stockpiles? One of those sad-faced, exhausted secretaries had told him, “All sorts of people workin’ for the Army these days”; people who still held power, people who’d possessed stockpiles of food or domestic animals, people who knew people in the government, who owed or were owed favors. People with something to trade. People the military wanted, for one reason or another, to keep on its side.

If you were good buddies with senators or generals, it probably wasn’t difficult to be enrolled as a “special deputy” or “consultant” in order to cadge a spot at Camp David-or in the government bunkers under the mountains in western Maryland where the center of things now undoubtedly was-and a ration book.

But the members of the bureaucracy who were still struggling to govern, still trying to sort out the mess-certainly the bulk of the enlisted men, the Reservists, the National Guard-would have remained loyal to McKay. And McKay, for all the compromises he’d made on his way to the Presidency, had lines that he wouldn’t cross.

And one of those lines had been the one that divided the good-old-boy Us from the scared and hungry and militarily worthless Them.

Between the epidemic and the evacuation, it wouldn’t have been difficult to put the man himself away but keep his name. Aides and press secretaries and members of the Secret Service could be dealt with, particularly if people were dying on all sides anyway. No need to make a fuss about it: X or Y just hadn’t made it onto the convoy of wagons heading for Maryland, they’ll be along later.

Only later never came.

It was fairly easy to find the grave. It was in a rose bed about thirty feet from the fountain, just behind a bench. Maybe the same bench where McKay and Bilmer had sat, when McKay had asked her to go look for the Source. Shango almost laughed as he started to dig in the still-soft earth-they hadn’t even replaced the uprooted rose bushes, just dumped them in a crude pile on top. Some of the blossoms, brown and withered, still had a little color in their hearts. After all that, all that had survived was a list of names of people who were at the Source, people you couldn’t get to anyway.

Mosquitoes whined in a cloud around the nearly empty basin, sang in Shango’s ears as his shovel bit the soil. The whole lower two-thirds of the Mall, from the Air and Space Museum to the river, was marshy with standing water and humming with insects, as Washington returned to the stagnant wetland it had been before the introduction of drainage pumps and reflecting pools. Sometimes a soldier’s voice carried from the redoubts of the central command post or footfalls passed along Pennsylvania Avenue-armed bands in quest of forage or fuel-but the stillness and hush were like a leaden shroud. The shovel blade made a harsh hissing crunch in the dirt.

It wasn’t quite dark when Shango found the body. He scraped and scooped at the dirt, knelt in the shallow depression-it wasn’t more than a yard deep-and cracked his little fireplace striker patiently over a tuft of dry lint until a spark took. The yellow glow expanded to show his dirt-clotted fawn-and-black fur, a black leather collar.

It was Jimmy, the big German shepherd whom the newspapers had delighted to call the First Dog.

He had been clubbed to death.

With him in the grave, like isolate fragments of bone, were a pair of broken, owlish glasses-a little blood and hair still adhering to a bent-in temple piece-and a woman’s pink-and-white Nike, stained black with blood. Nothing more. They were the kind of thing you’d find on the scene of a killing during clean-up, after the bodies had been taken away, particularly if the killings had taken place at night.

Shango blew out his little scrap of kindling and carefully refilled the grave.

No mistaking the dog’s crushed skull, the broken ribs and back. Jimmy had been thin with scant rations, but quite clearly nobody had thought it a good idea to blow the cover story by cooking him.

He had died trying to defend McKay and Jan.

As Shango himself had promised he would do.

He sat for a long time on the grave of his canine brother, while the last traces of the time of the dog faded into the time of the wolf.

And what now? he thought, his mind relaxed and clear- aware of his anger, like an acid-bath of rage, but not really feeling it, any more than a fish feels wet. Stars made their appearance overhead, hundreds of them, thousands, beautiful with a beauty that had not been seen in this place since men had first learned to burn coal gas to chase away the night. The blue flicker of witchlight reappeared along the Capitol rampart, a cold phosphor glow, and Shango wondered how many people had what his granny had simply called Power.

How many people-like the fear-caster in Albermarle County, and the firestarter in Spotsylvania and crazy Herman Goldman-who would be willing to use that power, for good or for what they conceived to be good, or at least to be good for them? Of course Christiansen, and the men behind him, would be gathering them into their service as Cadiz had gathered Brattle.

They’d be up in Maryland, too.

Shango found that the idea of going along with Christiansen, riding with the convoy to the government’s new headquarters, strongly appealed to him. Finding the men who’d tossed Jan McKay’s glasses and shoe so casually into the nearest hole in the ground.

Finding the men who’d ordered McKay’s death.

Find them and what?

Shango’s mission was over. He had done what McKay had asked of him, found what he needed to find, and it was empty, useless. A weapon that broke in his hand.

And it dawned on him that he was thinking about vengeance-even at the cost of his own life-not because of his anger, but because it was another job. And if he didn’t get another job, another task to absorb him, as he’d let McKay’s life and safety absorb him, as he’d let being the best in the service absorb him. .

He’d have to get a life.

A life with people in it. People like Czernas and Griffin and the lady in the green sweatsuit. People who ran around and did what they wanted and went crazy and talked to God and couldn’t get their acts together and dissipated their energies when they should have been helping their children get out of the projects.

Messy, chaotic people. People whose problems and demands frightened him because there was nothing he could do about them. Because if he made a choice, and that choice turned out to be wrong, there’d be more chaos and anger and hurt.

He felt as if he’d put his hand to his side and brought it away bloody from some ancient, seeping wound. A wound whose pain he’d forgotten because he’d lived with it daily, hourly, pretending there wasn’t pain as he’d pretended there wasn’t anger.

He was afraid to choose, he understood then. And he was afraid to live with choice.

It was easier to be the best, to be a weapon in someone else’s hand.

He remembered the fear-caster, staring at him with cold eyes like ball bearings, filling him with terror that only his anger could quell. He had run toward the fear, howling his rage. . and the fear had been defeated.

Shango drew in his breath and let it out. He felt dizzy and disoriented, as he had after anger had burst through both fear and the self-imposed bonds of the job; shaky, as he’d heard men were, after they’ve been imprisoned for years, at the sight of wall-less places and sky.

He thought, I could get another job. There were plenty of them around. A job such as Griffin had chosen, to find the weak point of the Source. A job like the ones McKay had done, struggling to keep help and life flowing to those that needed them, until death overtook him.

Shango shook his head. Most times, he’d learned that the windmill was bigger and tougher than the knight.

And the windmill didn’t care.

The stars moved, leaving the question: What now? South to New Orleans? The town would be underwater by now, of course, with the pumping stations dead. The local military authorities would be in charge. Mother, brother, sisters would be somewhere nearby, surviving, he was sure, probably in the middle of a giant gaggle of cousins and neighbors and church ladies, hanging together as they always hung together.

His family. His people. You have family in town? Czernas had asked, and he wondered, for the first time, what message Czernas had left for his own family, and whether they had ever gotten it. Shango parked his own family like baggage, years ago. Maybe it was time to go back.

West to the Source? It had been a week since he’d spoken to Griffin and his friends, since he’d sent them on toward Boone’s Gap. Whatever that young man and those around him were going to try to do when they found the Source- or the fragment of it in the South-it had not altered the horrible change wrought in the world. Had they been obliterated? he wondered. Or had they only failed?

McKay had known the truth, even in that first moment. The lights were not going to come back on. And he, Larry Shango, might be the only person now who had the clue that might lead to its location.

For what that clue was worth. Evidently it hadn’t gotten Griffin anything.

But there was another thing that only he knew: that McKay was dead. And almost certainly, with McKay’s death, any concern for retrieving that little boy from the wilds of Maine had vanished.

Did his road lie north, then? To make sure, at least, that the child lived, in this shaky and increasingly perilous world? To do what he could to help him, if necessary, as he had been unable to help McKay and Jan?

The sense of calm he felt in his heart told him that his choice-the first real choice he’d made in a long time- was the right one for him, for now; it also told him, a little to his surprise, what a right choice felt like. Maybe it’s not so hard.

He sat for a long while in thought, between dog and wolf, turning his fragment of paper, his memories and his choices, over in his mind: Who he was, and what he was, and what he might or could be. At last, he got to his feet and walked silently along the empty street, north past Lafayette Square and on up New York Avenue by starlight.

By dawn, he was far away.

Darkness clung to the mountains.

Again, Cal watched Tina being wrenched away from him, vanishing into that blinding whirlwind that was neither light nor darkness, woke up crying her name. Suddenly, he wasn’t certain if it was his mother’s face he’d seen, or Tina’s, or his own.

I’ll find her, he thought, and knew it was true.

But he shivered a little at the thought of what it might be that he found.

Giving up on sleep, he rose and dressed. He found Hank sitting on Wilma’s porch, where Cal had heard them talking quietly far into the night.

He drew up at the sight of cans of tuna, loaves of bread, bags of rice and assorted sundries that had been piled high.

Hank smiled. “Happy trails.”

“We can’t take this,” Cal said, knowing Boone’s Gap would need every bit.

“It’s not charity; it’s an investment. Where you’re goin’. . well, everyone here kinda wants to be in on the fight.”

Without apparent effort, Hank lifted the entire pedicab onto the porch, and together they began to load.

“Some people say we’re given what we deserve,” Hank said, tying down a ration of sweet corn. “Maybe it’s just what we need.”

And what did Cal need, for the road ahead, for the Big Kahuna? Strength? Strength to endure whatever might come in the hard days, to endure loss and pain and not falter.

Lights moved in the house behind them, and Cal heard voices. Wilma’s and Doc’s. Goldie. Colleen making some disparaging comment about greedy overfed butter-stealing cats.

The question of his strength faded into nothing. Cal knew he wasn’t strong enough, he didn’t have to be.

He had the strength of others.

Wilma, Hank and Bob walked them to the edge of town. Cal realized that Boone’s Gap was in fact exactly that: a pass through the mountains. Dawn was paling the sky, and Hank blinked and flinched.

“Here,” Goldie said and handed the grunter a pair of raffish blue sunglasses.

Sunlight broke over the crests of the mountains, golden on the tips of the trees, dew transforming the grass to a silver ocean. Riding the thermals, a single hawk cried its song of challenge. Cal and his party started down the road, into the blue shadows that still lay to the west.