With careful control, Marvin waved his hand in a small arc in front of himself and Sandra, and to the side of Nose Ring, and murmured, “Fuckety fuck.” Everything made of elastic and synthetic and leather crumbled away. All the employees’ shoes and underpants and bras and some of the clothing that had a low cotton content became dirt and fell to the floor.
There were screams and people grabbed at their clothing.
Marvin raced in, ready to grab Dani off the stretcher. He intended to carry her to the stairwell, but the guy with the nose ring reached for his shoulder. There was power in his hand, raw, blazing power. “Fuckety,” Marvin said out loud. But his attention had been on Dani, not fully on the guy and instead of turning the security guy to dirt, the wall behind him crumbled away. The spell had brushed by Nose Ring and hit the wall.
The guy stepped back, his eyes wide. He shook his whole body like a wet bulldog to rid himself of the traces of Marvin’s spell. But he didn’t turn to dirt.
Instead, Nose Ring threw out his hand and hit Marvin square in the chest with a magic taser. Electricity lit up Marvin’s body. The world tilted. He was falling.
Throwing his last ounce of power, he whispered, “Fuckety fuck fuck,” and hit the security guy in his nose ring. Marvin landed on Dani. The world went dark.
Sandra
Sandra watched Marvin’s magic lash out, silent, transforming shoes, clothing, and medical equipment into soil. And then thefeeling of incredible power building fast. There was another magic user here. And it was far from the familiar sensation of Marvin’s magics; this magic was hot and razor sharp. It came from the security guard at the end of the stretcher.
Marvin cursed. The wall behind the magic user crumbled into dirt.
The security guard threw out his hand.
Marvin collapsed on top of Dani. The security man screamed. Fell silent. And stared at his left arm. It was crumbling into rich good garden soil. Dani tried to sit up. Tried to pull her magic to her. But someone must have given her a booster directly into her IV. Her eyes were drugged and dazed. There were too many medicines in her system for Dani to a help.
Sandra had to act.
But her magic was a claylike lump of hard uselessness inside her. What her first teachers had labeled as fear.Fear. Yes. She was terrified.
But Sandra moved through the chaos to the other end of Dani’s bed, away from the one-armed magic user, and pulled the heavily laden gurney—or what was left of it—back into Dani’s room. She shut the door on the chaos of the hallway. The door had a latch. She figured it was easily unlockable from the hallway, but she turned it anyway.
Dani was still trying to move, still trying to gather her magic, but it wasn’t coming. Moving on some kind of automatic reflex, Sandra pulled Marvin off of Dani and lowered him to the floor. Well, tried to. Her back, which hadn’t twinged in months, spasmed tight, so it was more like providing a cushion for his head with her hands when he landed. Then she folded the IV line into a kink to shut off the last of the drugs. Aloud, she said, “Mable. If you can hear me, we’re in Dani’s room. Marvin’s been hit with a spell and he’s drooling on the floor but he’s alive. Dani’s coming back awake but her magic is doped up again.There’s a finger latch between us and a magic user whose left arm is now made of dirt. Get me help!”
Sandra spotted some tape on a shelf and removed Dani’s plastic IV needle, happy to see that Marvin’s spell had missed the plastic attached to and inside of her friend. There was no gauze so she folded a tissue and held it in place over the bleeding hole and wrapped the tape around Dani’s arm. She gave Dani a few sips of water and dumped the rest of the cup over Marvin’s face. He cursed as he struggled to wake up fully. Then cursed some more when he finally sat upright on the floor. “What the hell did you do that for?”
“It worked, didn’t it? Get up. You need to get it together. You just turned some thug’s arm to dirt. We’re out of the closet and I have a feeling it’s about to get busy in here.”
“The guy,” he groaned, placing a hand on his chest. “Nose Ring. He had magic.”
“A lot of magic,” Sandra said, putting her ear against the door. “He zapped you.” She glanced at his pants. “You don’t wear pull up protection, do you?”
“No?”
“Shouda, wouda, coulda.”
Marvin looked down. “I peed my pants. Son of a bitch.”
“You could be, I guess,” Sandra said. “I never met your mama. It’s too quiet out there.”
Marvin spluttered as if he had never heard her make a joke. Maybe he never had. Maybe she didn’t make jokes anymore.
“It’s too quiet for Mable to be on the way. We’d hear things,” Dani said, sitting up on her ruined stretcher. She fingered the dirt beneath her. “Who knew mattresses were mostly plastic?”
“Everything is mostly plastic,” Marvin said. “Crap never breaks down unless you have a magic spell and a lot of powerto make it work. Everything currently made of plastic could be made out of hemp and revive the farming economy and improve the oxygen content of the atmosphere—”
“We heard it before, Marvin,” Sandra interrupted.
He rolled over to his hands and knees and grabbed one of the wall shelves to pull himself up. “Oh hell. My knees. I’m too old for this shit.”
Dani slid off the dirt gurney and held herself upright with both hands. “I’ma vomit,” she slurred.
Adjusting the position of her ear on the door, Sandra whispered. “Shhh. I hear something.”
