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

exactly forthcoming with their resumés.” That was Rafe Dahlquist, the physicist, in his late fifties but still powerful and solid.
    “It wasn’t like these guys were anything special,” Al Watt, a little bald guy with a timid, ready smile, piped up. He’d been a researcher on the Internet before the Change—an obsolete profession, if there ever was one. “I mean, we heard about all these dudes claiming to be the government, trying to get everything nailed down, these generals on the East Coast, up around the Great Lakes. Word was they had the Speaker of the House on a leash. But then there were all these other factions claiming they were the real guys in charge. I mean, you just hear this stuff, pick it up along the road. Everybody fighting everybody else.”
    “Kinda like Yugoslavia after the USSR pulled up its tent,” said Krystee Cott, a lanky brunette with a sweetness about her that all the recent hard wear had not dispelled. Cal thought Doc might have a trenchant observation or two on her comment. Before leaving the navy, Krystee had been a demolitions expert—another area of expertise rendered null and void by the new modus operandi.
    “Then there was the Storm…” Mike Kimmel said, and everyone else grew quiet. Kimmel was “Little Mike” to Olifiers’s “Big Mike,” a former wrestler turned part-time actor and balloon folder (“Big Mike’s the awesome behemoth,” Kimmel told Cal upon their introduction. “Me, I’m just the behemoth.”)
    “I saw it do its handiwork on the outskirts of Philly,” Kimmel continued. “These fuckin’ clouds came in from the west and anyone with a glow on”—he meant the ones like Tina, the flares, fireflies, angelfire—“just got drawn up into it like it was this big magnet and they were iron filings. You shoulda heard it. I mean, I’m talkin’ thousands of ’em, screaming….”
    “It’s like that everywhere anybody seen it,” Olifiers added. “It spreads like a cancer, does whatever the hell it wants—whatever the fuck it is. Nobody beats it, that’s the rule, nobody gets out alive…Except where you been.”
    Cal saw now they were all looking at him with that same worshipful gaze they had given him on their first meeting. The firelight danced in their eyes, they squinted against its heat and smoke.
    Lead us, that look said. Take us where you’re going. To salvation, to world’s end, to destruction.
    A memory crashed in on Cal, of the dream he’d had the morning before the Change, where darkness surrounded him, and the hilt of the burning cold sword found his outstretched hand—the same sword he now wore in the scabbard at his belt—and the despairing, unseen multitude cried out for him to save them, to act ….
    And he did nothing.
    “I don’t have the answer,” Cal said.
    “Yeah, we know that, Chief,” Olifiers agreed. “But nobody else even seems to know the question.”
     
    That night, for the first time since before the beginning, Cal had the dream again.
    He dreamed chaos.
    Darkness, blacker than anything he’d ever conceived of, center-of-the-earth black, no-universe-yet-made black, dead-a-thousand-years black. Voices shouting, so clear that he could distinguish not only male and female, but each separate human soul screaming. He could tell rage from pain from terror. In the darkness of the dream he could hear his own blood hammering in his ears.
    The sound of blows, metal on metal—metal tearing flesh. The stink of blood and of earth soaked with blood, of smoke and of charring.
    He stood at the black heart of the tumult as they cried their anguish, their despair, demanded, pleaded—
    That he act.
    A shard of light split the blackness like a razor stroke. It glanced across an immense, irregular mound that might have been the bodies of men or merely the things they had used.
    An object gleamed atop it, brilliant in the light, and Cal saw that it was a sword. Not opulent and bejeweled but plain, the leather of the hilt