Magic Time: Angelfire (18 page)

Master for the portals that lead into this place. If they lose Enid, these people are trapped.”

“There must be a way,” I said, believing it. “We cannot have come here without reason.”

“Divine Providence, Doc?” Colleen crossed her arms over her heart.

“I doubt a theological debate is the best medicine for a possible concussion,” Cal interrupted. He touched my shoulder again. “Neither is anxiety. Rest. Let us worry about Enid.” He nodded to Goldie, and the two of them slipped from the room.

Colleen moved as if to follow, but did not. She let the door fall shut behind them, then swung back to look at me, her eyes subtly invading my thoughts.

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

We spoke the words together; our voices harmonized. Self-conscious laughter followed. I’m not certain why two human beings should be embarrassed at having spoken in unison, but it seems we were.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Sore, but whole. You, on the other hand, have a nasty gash on your forehead and a knee the size of a cantaloupe.”

I put a hand to my head, gingerly. A gauze bandage blocked inspection. “I, too, am fine.”

“Yeah? How many fingers am I holding up?” She showed me her fist.

“None,” I said, smiling. “Or all. It depends on how you look at it.”

She retreated again behind folded arms. “Doc, who’s Nurya?”

Breath left my body in a rush, leaving me winded. “What?”

“When you were coming around, you seemed to be having one hellacious nightmare. You shouted for Nurya. When you saw Magritte, you said the name again.” Color swept her face. “Shit, I’m sorry. I’m just too damn nosy. Forget I asked.”

So, she had not come into the room with the others. She had been there all along. It was she the flare had spoken to before leaving to find Cal.

“Nurya was my daughter. My little girl.” Even now, after so many years, the tears emerged easily.

Colleen sat on the edge of the bed—coiled, tense. “What happened?”

I could not look at her face, so I read answers from the pine knots in the ceiling. “You remember Chernobyl, yes?”

“Well, sure. It was all over the news. Even teenagers pay attention to the news sometimes. Christ, don’t tell me she got caught in
that
.”

“No.
I
got caught in that. Because of my expertise in triage. The disaster was… worse than even the American media made it. Doctors were brought in from everywhere. I was to set up a triage unit, then go home. But I couldn’t go home. There was too much to be done. What I failed to realize was that there was something to be done at home, too. My wife, Yelena, had contracted meningitis. She wouldn’t tell me this, but Nurya said her mother wasn’t feeling well. I simply didn’t hear her over the cries of the dying.”

I hesitated, testing the words as if they were an unknown trail. “Yelena was driving herself to hospital when she lost control of the car. It plunged into a stream. They drowned.”

Colleen had been watching my face. Now, she turned away. We sat in silence for a time, not looking at each other.

She was the first to speak. “My dad died when I was fifteen. He was two thousand miles away on some damned military training junket. He served in Vietnam for two tours of duty and then went to Texas to die of a heart attack giving a friggin’ seminar. He’d had a two-pack-a-day habit for years, and I’d just managed to nag him into giving up cigarettes. For a long time I thought maybe I just hadn’t nagged enough.” I could feel her eyes shift to my face; it was a gentle pressure. “It’s not your fault, you know.”

“Is it not?”

“You were needed—”

“At home. I was needed at home. There was nothing I could do for those poor souls that any other qualified physician could not have done. But only
I
could have made a difference to my family.”

Colleen made no reply. I had silenced her, and her silence 
was damning. Physician, heal thyself.

“So you came to America to start over,” she said after a

moment, “as a hot dog vendor.” The expression on her face

was so dubious it made me laugh.

“It was a life.”

“This is better.” She said the words with stark certainty

and meant them for both of us.

Our eyes met and locked. Détente.

“Yes, better,” I agreed.

“Doesn’t make us freaks, does it?”

“What if it does?”

She looked away. “Yeah, what if it does? Thanks, Doc.”

Her eyes met mine again at a slant. “You must have a real 
name.”

“Doc will suffice.”

She pursed her lips and gave me a look of grave disap
proval.

“Viktor,” I said. “My name is Viktor. With a
k
.”

“Well, Viktor with a
k
, thanks.”

“For what?”

She didn’t answer, but stood and looked down at me and 
smiled. “Huh. Turnabout. Last time it was me flat on my 
back.”

The door opened. Colleen tensed; an instinctive move
ment. It was Magritte with a nurse and food.

“Well, I guess I’ll just go check on our progress,” Colleen 
told me. “Later.”

“Yes, later,” I agreed, but she had gone.

“Are you cutthroat enough to take Enid away from us?” Mary McCrae didn’t pull punches.

“I don’t want to take him away. I just want to borrow him.” “For how long?”

“I don’t know. As long as it takes.”

“Days? Weeks? Months?”

“In months it could be too late.”

“For what?”

I had to search my head and heart for the right words. “I think the Source is gaining strength. I think that’s why things are continuing to change. At some point it may be too late for anyone to do anything.”

“So, if Enid were to go with you, you might be able to ‘pull the plug on the Source,’ as Goldie put it … or you might not.”

I nodded.

“And if not?”

“Then we do what we can and come back here to re - group.”
If we’re still alive
.

“Either way it could be weeks before Enid returns.
If
he returns. And while he’s gone—”

“I know. You’re stranded.”

“Worse. We have no consistent way to protect the flares, as you call them.”

“You protect them now while he’s away. How?”

She studied me, as if trying to decide how much to tell me. “A battery of sorts. Look, Mr. Griffin, let’s assume for a moment our… flares could be shielded inside the Preserve long enough for you to get where you’re going and back. Enid’s talent is essential to us in other ways. We wouldn’t survive long without it. Refugees aren’t the only thing that comes in from outside.
Everything
does: food, clothing, equipment. Even if I could ensure everyone’s safety, I must be able to open the door.”

I read her eyes. “Goldie,” I said.

“Goldie. You think that’s an unreasonable request?”

“No, but I can’t ask him to stay. I can’t
afford
to have him stay. He’s our bloodhound. He’s how we track the Source.”

She gazed at me for a moment. “So he said. No one else can do that?”

“The Change is selective, Mary. You know that better than anyone. It chose Goldie and Enid, but not me or Doc or Colleen.”

She was nodding. “Or me, for that matter. In my past life…” She paused, smiled. “Listen to me, sounding as if I’d died and been reincarnated. In my past life I was conversant, Mr. Griffin. I spoke the language. I knew the drill. I could perform because I knew the rules of engagement. There is a new language; I don’t speak it. There are new rules; I don’t know them. I don’t know the drill anymore—I’m winging it. It’s as if I’ve gone suddenly blind and Enid is my seeing-eye dog.”

“And Goldie is mine.”

“Your what?” Goldie was standing in the doorway of Mary’s office, looking from one of us to the other.

“Lucky rabbit’s foot,” said Mary wryly.

I decided to cut to the chase. “Goldie, Mary would need you to stay here and take Enid’s place if he comes with us.”

He was unsurprised. “Sure. Makes perfect sense, except that you’d be in dry dock without me.”

“You’re that sure?” Mary asked.

Goldie nodded. He wandered farther into the room, coming to squat by the coffee table.

“You couldn’t show them on a map?” she pressed him.

He chuckled, his eyes picking over the odds and ends on the tabletop. “Mary, I don’t know if you’ve tried using maps lately, but they can be awfully unreliable. Things aren’t where they belong. The Ohio is a whitewater theme park ride, and there are invisible corridors between Ohio and West Virginia. And it’s still changing. Isn’t it, Cal?” He glanced up at me, his eyes ice-pick sharp, reminding me that the Change hadn’t left me completely untouched.

If I were to twist suddenly
, I wondered,
what form would I take?
I turned the thought aside.

“So you can’t just divine where it is on a current map and let them extrapolate?” Mary asked.

He picked up the rattle and fiddled with it, turning it over in his hands. It responded with a soft scrape of dried beans. He seemed fascinated by it. “I could point to … oh, South Dakota and say it’s there. I could even point to the Badlands and say it’s there. But the Badlands covers a hell of a lot of territory. The reality is: I feel a pull; I take a step. If it’s the right step, I feel the pull get stronger. If I take the wrong step…” He shrugged. “Right now, all I know is that the pull is coming from somewhere west of here.”

Mary sat back in her chair and looked at me. “So, that’s it, then. I can’t let Enid go. And you can’t let Goldie go. An impasse.”

I looked down at my hands. They were clenched, knuckles white. I relaxed them with effort. “Mary, I know you care about the people here. I understand that you want to protect them. But they’re a handful of people out of the millions— maybe billions—who are homeless, helpless, confused. When we left New York, it was coming apart at the seams. People were dying—worse, they were
killing
. Even people who didn’t change behaved like animals.”

“And your point?”

I looked up at her. “If Enid stays here, he can save a handful. If he goes with us, he could save billions.”

Mary flushed to the roots of her hair. “You overstate your case, Mr. Griffin. We have no way of knowing how widespread—”

“Did you hear what I said? We came here from
Manhattan
. We can vouch for the fact that the Change has affected New York, West Virginia, Ohio. Planes have fallen out of the sky, there’s no electricity, and the landscape in some places is as twisted as the people. You came here from farther west. Is it any different on this side of the Ohio?”

“Don’t push me, Mr. Griffin. And don’t try to manipulate me. Perhaps you think because I’m a woman you can do that. You’d be wrong. I can tell when I’m being jerked around.”

“Cal doesn’t jerk people around, Mary,” Goldie said quietly. “Right now he’s just trying to get you to look at the big picture. If we get to the Source and unplug it, which Cal be
lieves we can, then it doesn’t just help your folks, it helps everybody.”