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

peace.
    “Okay,” she said, turning back to Gabriel. Time to go home now, back to her son. Then try to catch the trail of the one who had done this, to find his reasons, to bring him to justice, if she could.
    And having come to know a good deal of her nature by now, May felt reasonably certain that she could.
    A rough clatter down the street seized her attention.
    “Uh-oh,” Gabe said. “Outta time.”
    May could see them now, sliding out of windows, oozing out of doorways, coming up from holes in the pavement like angry ghosts.
    “Wreckin’ crew,” said Gabe. “I warned ya about this.”
    The scuzzy men and women were walking junkyards, armed to the teeth with chains, clubs, saws, knives, you name it, and armored with essentially anything that could be bent to that purpose. They were closing in from all sides, and to the silent observers who watched from behind their curtains and window shades it looked like the lady in the long leatherpiece and the guy in the chair—unless they could suddenly levitate—were pretty much toast.
    “Not that I hold a grudge,” Gabe said, “but if you’d like your last words to be an apology, I wouldn’t say no.”
    “In a minute,” May said for the second time, just as the mob let out a hair-raising cry and charged.
    Now, Gabe was a pretty cool customer when it came down to it, and in the moment before they rushed him, he’d locked his chair and gripped taut in his gloved hands the length of razor wire he’d brought along for just such eventualities. But he had to admit he was pretty well flummoxed that Little Mrs. Primal didn’t even bat an eye.
    She just stood her ground as they came on, noisy as a parade of drunken Shriners, and then she went to work. Spinning, rolling, slashing, throwing—a knife came from every one of those million pockets in her long coat, and she put every one of those gleaming beauties to best use.
    It seemed like forever and no time at all, blood everywhere but amazingly not one of those bastards was killed nor even particularly amputated. They took off screaming, with a good number of new beauty marks to show off to the folks, and before you knew it there were just the two of them, May and Gabe—without a mark on them, except maybe a little sweat from exertion—out there on the street.
    But not for long. The whole neighborhood came pouring out of their makeshift homes and storefronts and businesses cheering, everyone wanting to make them kielbasa.
    May was gracious, but as soon as she could she extricated herself and set off west, leaving behind only a multitude of witnesses to spin the story, and one of her best throwing knives as a thank-you present for Gabe.
    She wasn’t the showy type.
    Just as she was on the outskirts of town, however, Gabriel caught up with her, rolling fast. “You don’t get off that easy, not without you telling me how you pulled that stunt.”
    It was a fair question, he had earned it.
    So May showed him the finely worked necklace of porcupine quills, of eagle talon and bear claw, passed down to her from her mother’s mother, who in turn got it from her own father, who had ridden with and been kin to the one known sometimes as Curly, or Our Strange Man, or Crazy Horse. May had always been pretty fast and alert, but since the coming of the Storm, the attributes had soaked down through her skin, and now she could move and sting and tear like nobody’s business.
    Gabriel listened in quiet solemnity, then she told him her fitting name.
    In the years to come, those who were there told their children and grandchildren what they saw, and called her Lady Blade. But her real name was May, and for a time she wore the name her husband had borne, which was Devine.
    But she had another name, handed down by her people. In the generations since her great-grandfather had been forced to go to the white boarding school and truncate his name, it had been Catches.
    But in this free and terrible time, May saw that it could at last