Free Magic Time: Ghostlands by Robert Charles Wilson, Marc Scott Zicree Page A

a blanket, with who knew what lay ahead of them, or what pursued from behind—that he loved her; not romantically—not anymore, he had jettisoned the growing pearl of that, but intensely, deeply, gratefully.
    And that, absurdly, in this fragile, transitory moment, this present—in both senses of the word—he was happy.
    He leaned out of the saddle toward her, brought his lips close to her ear, nearly touching it, as if it were a kiss. “Don’t be afraid to enter uncharted terrain,” he said. “The past is not the future.”
    She let out a hard breath that might have been a laugh. “So that’s my answer to you, too, Cal Griffin. And here’s one other meaty little tidbit—maybe you don’t need to know how to beat it…maybe you just need to know how to have it not beat you.”
    He mulled on that, both of them as quiet as the snowflakes that drifted about them.
    Finally, Colleen said, “How ’bout we both find out how the story ends?…” She held a hand out to him.
    After due consideration, he took it.
     
    Cal and Colleen dropped the sundered tent where they hit asphalt, then guided Sooner and Big-T back through the night toward the derelict mall, the stars like glittering eyes of ghosts above them.
    Colleen was relieved Cal had opened up to her, still seemed able to talk to her, even though she’d chosen Doc rather than Cal. Her family had disintegrated when she wasfifteen. Her father had died physically; her mother had died emotionally, leaving Colleen an orphan and an exile.
    But now Doc and Goldie were her family…and Cal.
    She looked over at Cal, riding on his horse like a city lawyer would, sitting so badly in the saddle despite all her advice on how to ride. He caught her looking at him.
    “What?” Now it was his turn to question.
    “Nothing…only I was just wondering what sweet young thing might be waiting down the road to twist you round her little finger…. You smile, you think you’re immune? We could take out an ad—at least, if there were still newspapers—‘Wanted: single female, race not important, preferably human.’”
    It felt good to laugh.

FIVE
    THE FUGITIVE KIND
    “M an oh man, I’m tellin’ you, it was just like they were this big vacuum, came down the highway just suckin’ everyone up….”
    Mike Olifiers was hunkered around the campfire as it flickered low in the Food Court, its thin trail of smoke ascending to the skylight and out into the night. The rest of the fugitives, those who were not posting guard on the roof, sat or lay around it in a circle. The dim chiaroscuro of the firelight lent their faces a worn beauty, a wary grace.
    While Colleen went off to join Doc at his station topside and Goldie dozed beside one of his glowing orbs on the periphery—a rarity for him to sleep—Cal knelt across the fire from Olifiers, drew from the ragged ones their stories, their pasts. Mechanics, teachers, physicists, all caught in the net of the slavers.
    “It did not matter who you were or where you were from,” Moabi, an exchange student from Botswana, told him in a sweet accent redolent of molasses and honey, shaking his dreadlocks ruefully. He had been a filmmaker and performance artist, but none of that made the least difference. “You were a pair of hands to pick, a pair of legs to walk the corn rows, the soybean fields…. Beyond that, you were precisely nothing.”
    “Sunup to sundown,” added Tori Feldman, who had been a historian in a former life. “Can see to can’t see.”
    “Did you get any sense of what authority they represented, if any?” Cal asked.
    “Some were National Guard guys gone freelance, some regular army, presumably AWOL,” Flo Speakman responded. “Lots of other strays and bully boys. We picked this up chiefly by osmosis—”
    “The hard way,” Don Anderson, an amiable guy with severe scoliosis, chimed in, rubbing a vivid welt that ran across the left side of his face. This drew murmurs of agreement from the others.
    “They weren’t