The Border - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Robert McCammon (Начало книги) #1

by The McCammon Corporation.

by David Ho.

by Desert Isle Design, LLC.

Electronic Edition

ISBN

978-1-59606-704-2

Subterranean Press

PO Box 190106

Burton, MI 48519

subterraneanpress.com

Table of Contents

Part One

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Part Two

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Part Three

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty One

Twenty Two

Part Four

Twenty Three

Twenty Four

Twenty Five

Twenty Six

Twenty Seven

Twenty Eight

Part Five

Twenty Nine

Thirty

Thirty One

Thirty Two

Thirty Three

Thirty Four

Thirty Five

To Uncle Carlos

One.

Last Stand

At Panther Ridge

One.

The boy who was running ran into the rain.

He came suddenly into its stinging shower. Within seconds it became a small storm of torment, like the fierce prick of a hundred hot needles. He looked back as he ran and saw through the moving haze the tops of mountains explode in the distance. He saw chunks of rock as big as buildings fly into the diseased air, crash back upon the earth and crack into tumbling fragments. Above the mountains flickered the electric blue lightning that put terror into the heart of the bravest man and made the weaker man fall to his knees.

The boy kept running, into the rain.

The field was wide and long. The field was barren. Its mud

began to pull at the boy’s shoes. He was wearing dirty Pumas, once white. He couldn’t remember where they had come from, or when he’d put them on. He couldn’t remember where his dirty jeans had come from, or his grimy dark red shirt that was missing its right sleeve. He couldn’t remember much at all.

He knew, though, that he had to run. And he had to hope he would live through this day.

For though his memory flapped like a tattered flag, he knew what was behind him. He knew he was in Colorado. He knew why the mountains, as old as time, were being torn to jagged pieces. He knew what the blue lightning was, and why soon there would be pulses of red flame floating up from tortured earth to angry sky. They were fighting there. They had found another border to contest. And between them, they would destroy it all.

He ran on, breathing hard, and sweating in the sultry air, as the rain began to hammer down.

The mud took him. It trapped his shoes and made him stumble and down he went into its embrace. It was sticky and hot and got on his face and up his nose. Dark with mud, he struggled up to his knees. Through the curtains of rain, he saw the movements on both sides of him, to left and right in the wide barren field, and he knew one army was on the march.

The boy flattened himself in his muddy pool. He lay like the dead, though his heart was very much alive in its pounding and twisting on a root of terror. He wished he could cover himself with the mud, that he could sink into it and be protected by its darkness, but he lay still and curled up like an infant just out of the womb and stunned by life itself.

He had seen them before. Somewhere. His mind was wrecked. His mind had crashed into some event that had left him half-brainless and groping for memory. But to left and right he saw the blurred smears of their presence as they moved across the field like swirls of gray smoke, like formless but deadly ghosts.

He lay still, his hands gripped into the earth as if in fear of being flung into nothingness.

And suddenly he realized one of them had stopped its advance, and in stopping its body caught up with itself and took form, and suddenly one of them was standing only a few feet to his left and was staring at him.

The boy couldn’t help but stare back, his face freighted with mud. There was no protection to be found here. There was no protection to be found anywhere. The boy’s blue eyes stared into the black featureless slope of the creature’s face, or mask or helmet or whatever it might be. The creature was thin to the point of skeletal, its body about seven feet tall. It was similar to the human body in that it had two arms and two legs. Black-gloved hands with ten fingers. Black boots on human-shaped feet. Whether this was a construction or a real thing born from egg or womb, the boy did not know and could not guess. The black skin-tight suit showed no inch of flesh, and small veins laced the suit carrying rushes of dark reddish fluid. The creature did not seem to be breathing.

The creature held a weapon. It was black also, but it looked fleshy. It had two barrels, and was connected to the body by the fluid-carrying veins.

The weapon was held down at the creature’s side, but aimed at the boy. A finger was on a spiky pod that might be a trigger.

The boy knew his death was very close.

A vibration keened the air. It was felt rather than heard, and it made the hairs on the back of the boy’s neck ripple. It made his skin crawl and his scalp of unruly brown hair tighten, for he knew what was to come without knowing how he knew.

The creature looked behind it, and upward. Other creatures halted their blurred, ghostly motion and became solid. They too looked upward and their weapons raised in unison toward the enemy.

Then the boy heard it, through the noise of falling rain. He turned his head and angled his face up into the downpour, and through the low yellow clouds came the thing that made a noise like the quiet movement of gears in a fine wristwatch or the soft ticking of a time bomb.

It was huge, two hundred feet across in a triangle shape, and mottled with colors like the hide of a prehistoric predator: brown, yellow, and black. It was as thin as a razor and had no ports nor openings. It was all muscle. It glided forward with what the boy thought was an awesome and nearly silent power. Yellow tendrils of disturbed air flowed back from the flared wingtips, and four electric-blue orbs the size of manhole covers pulsed at its belly. As the craft continued to advance slowly and almost silently, one of the creatures on the ground fired its weapon. A double gout of flame that was not exactly flame, but had something white-hot at the center of its two scorching red trails, shot up toward the craft. Before it reached meat or metal—whatever the craft was made of—a blue spark erupted and snuffed out the flames and its two centers of destruction as easily as damp fingers on a matchhead.

Instantly, as the boy watched and shivered in spite of his frozen posture, the creatures turned their weapons on the craft and began to fire…faster and faster, the gouts of alien flame flaring up in dazzling incandescent ropes, hundreds of them, all to be extinguished by the leaping and sizzling blue spark.

The boy knew, without knowing how he knew. His mind echoed with things he could not exactly hear nor understand. He seemed to have come a long way from where he’d started, though where that had been he did not remember.

But he knew this, though he could not remember his own name or where he’d been running from or to or where his parents were: The creatures with the weapons…soldiers of the Cyphers.

The craft above…piloted by the Gorgons.

Names humans had given them. Their real names unknown. Their silence impenetrable.

The blue spark jumped and danced, putting out the white-hot flames with almost dismissive ease. The rain poured down and the yellow clouds swirled. The Cypher soldiers began to lower their ineffective weapons and vibrate again into blurs, and suddenly the boy was alone in the muddy field. The monstrous craft floated above him, its blue orbs pulsing. He felt as small as an insect on a windshield, about to be smashed into pulp. He tensed to jump up and run again, as far as he could get in this mud and downpour, and then the craft drifted on past him and he felt its force diminish as it gained speed. In his mouth there was the taste of mud and something like the tang of running the tongue across rusted metal. He heard a sharp sizzling noise—bacon in a frying pan—and turning his head in the direction of the parting craft he saw bolts of electric-blue energy striking out from the vehicle’s underside. Small explosions—bursts of black matter—showed hits on the Cypher soldiers even as they blurred themselves into near-invisibility.

The boy decided it was time to get up and run some more, in another direction.

He staggered to his feet and fled across the field, away from the battle. The rain struck his head and shoulders and the mud tried to pull him down. He fell to his knees once, but when he got up he vowed he would not fall again.

Onward through the rain and across the mud he ran, toward a yellow mist that hung across the horizon. He passed and leaped over smoking craters that held things at their bottoms that were burnt black and twisted like old tree roots. The breath was rasping hard in his lungs, which pained him as if they’d been punched by heavy fists; he coughed up a spool of red blood and kept going.

From the mist before him appeared a dozen or more Cypher soldiers, all thin and black-garbed in material that was not of this earth. They all held the weapons that seemed to be growing from their bodies, and they all wore the black featureless masks that might have been the faces of robots, for all the boy knew. Before he could change direction he was aware of something coming at him from behind with a metallic noise like piano wires being plucked in a high register. He veered to the left and dove into a fresh crater, while above him incandescent blue spheres of tight fire skimmed over his refuge at tremendous speed and tore into the Cyphers, spinning out whips that looked to be made of flaming barbed-wire. The boy crawled up to the crater’s edge to see the Cyphers being ripped to pieces by this new weapon, and though some of the Cyphers shot down a few of the fireballs with their own energy weapons or blurred away into the mist the battle was over in a matter of seconds. Twitching arms and legs lay upon the black-splattered battlefield and the fireballs like burning eyes powered on into the yellow mist beyond, seeking more victims.

A movement in the crater with him caught the boy’s attention. He felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck, and his heart pounded.

Across from him, a faceless mud-splattered Cypher soldier was reaching for its energy gun, which had been torn off its veins and lay shrivelled like dying flesh a few feet away. The black-gloved hands scrabbled to regain the diminished weapon, but could not quite reach it since some other encounter had nearly cut the creature in half. The legs were still twitching, the boots pushing futilely against the ravaged earth. In the body cavity glistened black intestines streaked with yellow and red like the bodies of the grasshoppers the boy remembered, yet did not know how he remembered. He smelled an acrid odor akin to the smell of the liquid the grasshoppers shot out upon rough fingers. Only this was maybe twice as strong. The Cypher lay in a pool of it. The creature still struggled to reach the weapon, but the severed body would not obey.

The boy spoke, in a voice he’d never heard before.

“I thought you were supposed to be so tough,” he said.

The faceless creature continued its struggle for the weapon. The boy got up in a crouch, mindful of other soldiers or flying things that might take his head off, and dared to touch the energy gun. It had a sticky feel, like rubber left out too long under a burning sun. The veins had ceased to pump fluid. The weapon was crumpling and collapsing inward on itself even as he watched. The Cypher soldier’s spidery hand reached for his ankle, and he feared the grip because he had the quick mental image of being paralyzed with pain. Avoiding the soldier’s hand, he stood up and ran again because he knew that sitting still in one place too long was death.

He also knew that he wanted to live. Knew that he needed to live, and so he’d better find himself a place of shelter before it was too late.

As he ran the rain thrashed into his face. From his pressured lungs he began to cough and spit up more threads of blood. He asked himself who he was and where he had come from, but to those questions only returned blankness. He had no memory beyond running across this field, as if his mind had been turned off and then on again by a jittery hand on a lightswitch. Father? Mother? Home? Brother or sister? Nothing, not even the shadow of a shadow.

He was hurting. His lungs, heart and stomach, yes, but his bones too. He felt rearranged. He felt as if in that weird old song about the thigh bone being connected to the kneebone and all that shit, his thigh bone was connected to his collarbone and his kneebone to his buttbone. Something about him was messed up, but he was good to run. For now, that was enough.

The monstrous triangular shape moved above him. He looked up and saw the massive Gorgon craft, mottled like a prehistorical reptile, gliding from the ugly yellow clouds. It was still firing its electric-blue bolts of energy to hit unseen figures on the ground. It was oblivious to him; he was nothing, worth not even a spark of destruction.

Suddenly the bright blue bolts began to flare out to the left and right, seeking other targets. The Gorgon craft might have given a shiver of dread, and in another few seconds the boy saw why.

From both sides came thin ebony missiles maybe twenty feet in length. There were ten of them, moving fast and silently. Four of them were hit by the bolts and exploded into flying black ribbons, but the remaining six grew claws and teeth as they pierced the meat of the Gorgon ship, and forming into shapes like voracious, glistening spiders, they began to rapidly eat and tear their way through the mottled hide.

Six more of the hungry missiles came at the ship, launched from somewhere beyond sight. Two were shot down, the other four became ebony spider-shapes that winnowed themselves into the alien flesh, if it could be called that. Chunks of the Gorgon ship began to fall away, revealing an interior of purplish-red meat veined with what looked like hexagonal corridors. The missile-spiders continued to claw and chew, faster and faster, as the blue bolts fired crazily in every direction. The boy dodged as an energy bolt sizzled the earth maybe forty feet to his right, but he couldn’t pull his gaze away from the hideous feast and the death of a giant.

Surely the Gorgon ship was dying. Its bulk shivered and writhed as the Cypher spiders penetrated deeper into the heart of the mystery. Dark red liquid was pouring out from a dozen wounds. Pieces of the craft fell to the earth and yet still writhed and convulsed. The machine screamed. There was a high-pitched sound that seemed to the boy a cross between fingernails on a blackboard and the sinister rattling of a timber viper. He had to put his hands to his ears, to block the noise out before it overcame him and made his knees buckle. A huge chunk of the craft fell away, spiralling fountains of the dark liquid. Within the cavity, the black spider-shapes were feasting, ripping through the alien meat and the inner corridors with claws and fangs that the boy thought could likely tear through concrete and metal. The Gorgon ship pitched to the right, spilling its insides in great falling sheets of liquid and fleshy pieces the Cypher-spiders had not fully consumed.

The machine-scream went on and on, as the ship crashed down upon the earth. The spiders swarmed over the twitching hide. The boy turned and fled.

Where there was any safety anymore, he didn’t know. The ear-piercing

noise ceased. Score one for the Cyphers, he thought. He ran through the yellow mist and onward, and suddenly found broken concrete under his feet.

He was in a parking lot. Around him in the thickened air were the rusted and weather-beaten hulks of eight abandoned vehicles. The rain had ceased. Puddles of water filled cracks and craters. A long building of red bricks stood before him, with not an unshattered window remaining. To the left was a sagging goalpost and the weeds of a football field. The bleachers had collapsed. A sign had stayed up in the parking lot, valiant in its declaration of a message from the past.

ethan gaines high school read the permanent black letters. And below those, the moveable red ones: Senior Pl y A ril 4-6 ‘The Ch ngeling’

The boy saw blurs approaching from his left, across the football field. A few of the Cypher soldiers stopped and regained their bodily forms for a few seconds before they sped up again. He thought there might be forty or fifty of them, coming like a dark wave. He started to run to the right, but even as the impulse hit him he knew he wouldn’t have time to escape; they would be on him too soon.

He slid to the concrete and under a smashed pickup truck that used to be black but was now more red with rust and still had a Denver Broncos decal on the remains of the broken rear window.

Dark blurs entered the parking lot. The Cypher soldiers were on the move, from somewhere to somewhere. The boy pressed himself against the cracked concrete. If any of them sensed him here…

Something was coming.

The boy felt it, in a shiver of his skin. He smelled some form of pulsing power in the tainted air. From his hiding place he saw the legs of several of the soldiers materialize, as they stood motionless; they too were feeling this yet-unknown approach.

There was silence but for the dripping of water from the car hulks. Then something passed overhead with a noise like a whisper of wind, and there was a bright flash of blue light that lit up the parking lot and made the boy squint and then whatever it was had gone.

The boy waited, blinking. Spots spun before his eyes. Some of the soldiers blurred out again, while others remained in cautious and stationary—and maybe stunned—visibility.

Above the boy, the pickup truck moved.

It gave a shudder that made its rusted seams groan, and the boy heard that same groaning of metal echo across the parking lot, and suddenly the underside of the pickup was changing from metal to red and brown scales, and its moldy tires were changing into stubby scaled legs from which grew red spikes tipped with gleaming black.

He realized the pickup truck was coming to life.

In a matter of seconds a breathing belly was over his head. He saw the shape over him broaden and thicken, with a noise that was a combination of bones slipping into sockets and metal crackling as it formed itself into flesh.

With a burst of panic he rolled out from under the thing, and found himself on his knees amid what was now not a parking lot of abandoned vehicles but a menagerie of creatures from the darkest depth of nightmares.

The boy realized that whatever had passed over and released its energy beam in its eye-stunning blue burst had the power to create life. And the life it had created here, from the rusted and abandoned hulks, were either born from real creatures of the Gorgons’ domain, or from the imagination of an alien warlord. Bulky, muscular shapes began to rise up from the concrete. The boy was in their midst, among their clawed feet and legs that seethed with red and black spikes. Horned heads with multiple eyes and gaping mouths scanned the battleground, as the Cypher soldiers opened fire. The red coils of otherworldly flame flailed out, striking and burning the newborn and monstrous flesh. The creatures that were hit roared and yowled, shaking the earth, and others rushed forward with tremendous speed upon the soldiers. As the boy watched in stunned horror while the Gorgon creations struck left and right with spiked arms and claws into the mass of soldiers, he noted that one of the thickly-muscled beasts had a Denver Broncos decal on the reddish scales at juncture of shoulders and neck. It appeared to be just underneath the armored flesh, like the faded remnant of an earthly tattoo.

The soldiers fired their weapons, scaled flesh burned and smoking, the creatures crushed and tore apart and trampled the long slim figures in their black uniforms, and intestines that smelled of grasshopper juice flew through the air and splattered where they hit. One monster’s triple-horned head with six deepset crimson eyes burst into flame from a Cypher weapon, and the creature rampaged around the parking lot blindly striking out as its craggy face melted like gray wax. The Cyphers were being overwhelmed and crushed beneath the monsters, and some blurred away but a few remained standing their ground and firing into the beasts until they too were ripped to dripping shreds. Some on all fours and some on two legs, the creatures began to give pursuit after the retreating soldiers. Three dying Gorgon beasts lay on the concrete being eaten up by the Cypher flames, and they shrieked and beat futilely at the alien fire and tried to rise up from their impending deaths. One got to its knees, its burning triangular head on a thick stalk of a neck turned, and its ebony eyes found the boy, who crawled backwards away from the thing even as the eyes burned out, the flames rippled across its scales and spikes and it fell back upon the concrete with a gasp of life released.

The boy got up, staggering, and ran again.

It was all he could do to stay upright, but as he entered the haze of yellow mist he knew he could not—must not—fall. He could hear the roaring of the monsters behind him, off in the distance, and his dirty Pumas nearly flew him off the ground. He was no longer on concrete, but again on a field of mud and weeds. Crumpled and smoking bodies of Cypher soldiers lay around him, where another battle had passed. Score one for the Gorgons, he thought.

He hadn’t gone another hundred yards when he knew something was coming up fast behind him.

He was terrified to look back. Terrified to slow down. Terrified, to know he was about to be destroyed in this muddy field.

Whatever it was, he sensed that it was almost upon him.

Then he did look back, to see what was after him, and he was about to juke to the right when a rider on a gray-dappled horse emerged from the mist, reached down and grabbed the boy’s arm in a lockgrip. He was pulled off his feet and upward, and a hard human voice growled, “Get up here!”

The boy got up behind the man and held on tightly to his waist, seeing the man was wearing at his left side a shoulder holster with what looked like an Uzi submachine gun in it. The horse and its two riders swept on across the field, while in the distance the Gorgon monsters roared like a chorus of funeral bells on the last day of the world.

Two.

But it was not the last day of the world.

It was a Thursday, the 10^th of May. Some may have wished it was the last day of the world, some may have prayed for it to be and wept bitter tears that it would be so, but others had prepared for yet another day to follow this one, and so the boy found himself on horseback, approaching a fortress.

On the road that led up to this Colorado hilltop on the southern edge of Fort Collins was an aged and weather-battered sign that showed the stylized emblem of a prowling panther and the tarnished brass lettering Panther Ridge Apartments. At the top of the hill, with a panoramic view of all around, were the apartments themselves. There were four buildings constructed of bricks the color of sand with gray-painted balconies and sliding glass doors. Built in 1990 and at one time a desired address for swinging singles, the Panther Ridge Apartments had fallen on hard times since the crash of 2007, and the investment company that owned it had sold it off to another company in the beginning of a downward spiral for maintenance and managers. The boy knew none of this. He saw only four dismal-looking buildings surrounded by a fifteen-foot high wall of mortared rocks topped with thick coils of barbed wire. Wooden watchtowers with tarpaper roofs stood behind the wall at east and west, north and south. He couldn’t fail to note heavy machine guns set up on pivoting stands at each tower. As the horse and its riders continued up the road to the north, a green signal flag was flown from the south-facing tower. The boy saw a large wooden door covered with metal plates begin to open inward. As it opened wider the horse galloped through and immediately the men and women who had pulled the heavy door open began to push it shut. It was locked by two lengths of squared-off timber manhandled across the door through iron brackets and into grooves in the walls. But by this time the boy was being lifted from the horse by a husky man on the ground who had run up alongside to do just this task. The husky man had a long gray beard and wore leather gloves and held the boy before him like a sack of garbage as he ran deeper into the apartment complex and down a set of stairs. A door was opened, the boy was nearly thrown inside, and the door closed again. The boy heard a key turning in the lock.

He was, as he discovered within a few seconds, imprisoned.

The floor was bare white, scarred linoleum. The walls, painted a yellowish-gray, also bore scars. They looked to the boy, as he sat on the floor and examined his surroundings, like claw marks. And bullet holes here and there, too. The door was reinforced with metal plates, as the front gate had been. The sliding door to the balcony was covered with sheet metal and barbed wire. One small square of window allowed in a weak shaft of light. There was no furniture. The light fixtures had been removed but of course there was no electricity so the bare wires hanging down were just reminders of what had been. He saw on the walls and floor what might have been the faint brown remnants of bloodstains.

The boy said, “Okay,” just to hear his own voice again.

And it was more than that. Okay. If he had made it across that field and out of that parking lot with the Gorgons and Cyphers all around, then he was going to survive. He knew he had a survivor’s instinct, though he had no idea who he was or where he’d come from. So…okay. And okay because at least he was with humans, and maybe they were going to stick him in a pot, boil him, and eat him, but…well, maybe thinking that way wasn’t so okay, so he let that go. But at least he was with humans, right? And okay because for the moment—just for this moment—he felt safe here in this little apartment prison, and he didn’t have to do any more running right now, and he was tired and hurting and it was okay just to sit here and wait for what was coming next.

What was coming next was not very long in coming. Within a few minutes the boy heard the key in the lock again. His heartbeat quickened. He tensed and slid himself across the floor to press his back against the wall behind him, and he waited as the door opened and three men came into the dimly illuminated room. One of the men carried an old-timey black doctor’s bag and a burning oil lamp, which he held toward the boy as he entered. The other two men were armed with submachine guns, which they also aimed at the boy.

The door was closed and locked behind them.

“Stand up,” commanded one of the men with a machine gun. “Take off your clothes.”

“What?” the boy asked, still dazed from his run.

“Up,” came the rough voice. “And your clothes off.”

The boy got to his feet. The man who had spoken to him was the same who had heaved him up upon the horse. This man was maybe forty years old, was of medium build, but obviously strong for his size. He had a hard-lined face with a hawk’s beak of a nose and deep-set, wary, dark brown eyes. He looked like he’d never known what a smile felt like. Such a thing might break his face. The man wore faded jeans, brown workboots, a gray shirt with rolled-up sleeves, and on his head was a grimy dark blue baseball cap. He had a brown beard edged with gray. Around his left shoulder and hanging down close at his side was the holster for his very deadly weapon. On his left wrist was a battered-looking watch that had no crystal.

“Go ahead, son,” the man with the doctor’s bag urged. He was older, probably in his mid-sixties, was white-haired and clean-shaven, thin and dressed more neatly than either of the others in a blue shirt and faded khakis. He was holding onto whatever he could of his life as it had been. His face maybe had once been friendly and open, but now was strained and tense. The boy noted a holster around his waist with a revolver parked in it, and this man wore a wristwatch that looked to be in fairly good working order.

“Are you going to kill me?” the boy asked, speaking to the elder man.

“If we have to,” replied the hard-faced man. “Get your clothes off. Now.”

The third man, thin and sallow and black-bearded, stood aside near the door. The boy figured he was there in position to get a clear line of fire. The boy began to undress, slowly because his bones ached and he felt so weary he could sleep for a hundred years. When he was out of his clothes and they had dropped around him to the floor, he stood motionlessly while the three men stared at him in the light of the oil lamp.

“Where’d you get all those bruises?” asked the doctor-man, in a quiet voice.

The boy looked down at himself. He hadn’t realized. Across his chest was a massive, ugly black bruise. It covered from shoulder to shoulder. Black bruises were streaked across his sides, his stomach and his thighs. He had no memory of what had caused those injuries, but now he knew why he was aching and he was spitting up blood. Something had hit him, very hard.

“Please turn around,” said the doctor-man. “Let’s see your back.”

The boy did. The black-bearded man at the door gave a low grunt and the hard-faced man spoke in nearly a whisper to the third one.

“My question again,” said the doctor-man. “Where’d the bruises come from?”

“I don’t know,” came the still-stunned answer, as the boy turned to face them again.

“You have an equally large bruise across your back and down your spine. Your contusions look to be very severe. You’ve been through an extremely violent incident…not like falling down some stairs or skinning a knee. I mean…violent.” He stepped forward, shining the lamp into the boy’s eyes.

“Careful, doc!” warned the hard-faced man. His Uzi was trained on the boy’s midsection, and did not waver.

“Are you spitting up blood?”

“Yes sir.”

“I’m not surprised. What’s surprising me is that your lungs didn’t burst and that you still can breathe. Your hearing all right?”

“Got a little ringing in my ears. They kind of feel stopped up. That’s all.”

“Hm. Interesting. I think you’ve been through…well, I won’t say right now.” He offered a thin, crinkly smile, which was maybe the best he could do.

“Can I put my clothes back on?”

“Not yet. Hold your arms out to your sides, will you?”

The boy did as he was asked.

The doctor gave his medical bag to the hard-faced man and neared the boy again. He shone the lamp over the boy’s body, and seemed to be looking for something in particular. He frowned as he examined the huge black bruise across the boy’s chest. “You can lower your arms,” he said, and the boy did. Then the doctor reached back and opened the medical bag. From it he brought a hypodermic needle, which he uncapped ready for use. “Left arm, please,” he said.

The boy hesitated. “What’s this for?”

“A saline solution.”

“What’s it for?” the boy asked, with a little irritation.

“We’re checking to see,” said the doctor, “whether you’re fully human or not. The saline solution causes a reaction in the alien blood. It heats it up. Then things happen. Left arm, please.”

“I’m human,” the boy said.

“Do what you’re told,” the hard-faced man spoke up. “We don’t want to shoot you for no reason.”

“Okay.” The boy managed a tight smile. He offered his left arm. “Go ahead.”

The needle sank into a vein. The doctor stepped back. Both of the other men were ready with their weapons. The doctor checked the time on his wristwatch. About a minute slipped past. “Dave,” the doctor said to the hard-faced man, “I think he’s clean.”

“Sure about that?”

The doctor stared into the boy’s face. His eyes were blue, nested in wrinkles, but were very clear. “No nodules I can see. No abnormalities, no growths. No reaction to the saline. Let’s give a listen to the heart and take a bp reading.” The doctor retreived a stethoscope from his bag, checked the boy’s heartbeat and then used a blood pressure cuff. “Normal,” was the conclusion. “Under the circumstances.”

“What about the bruises?”

“Yes,” said the doctor. “What about those.” It was a statement, not a question. “Son, what’s your name?”

The boy hesitated. He was tired and hurting, and he could still taste blood in his mouth. A name? He had none to give. The men were waiting. He decided he’d better offer them something, and he thought of a name he’d recently seen. “Ethan Gaines,” he answered.

“Really?” Dave cocked his head to one side. “Funny about that. One of our lookouts spotted you through her binocs running into that high school parking lot. Funny, that it’s Ethan Gaines High School. Was, I mean. So that’s your name, huh?”

The boy shrugged.

“I think,” the doctor said, “he doesn’t know his name. He’s suffered a very violent concussive event. An explosion of some kind. Might have been caught in a shockwave. Where are your parents?”

“Don’t know,” the boy said. He frowned. “I just seemed to wake up, all of a sudden. I was running. That’s all I remember. I know I’m in Colorado…in Fort Collins, I think? But everything else…” He blinked and looked around the little prison. “What’s this place for? What did you mean…about the alien blood heating up?”

“That’s for later,” Dave said. “Right now, we’re the ones asking the questions…like where you came from?”

The boy had reached his limit with Dave. Whether the man was holding an Uzi on him on not, he didn’t care. He took a solid step forward, which made both guns train on him, and he thrust his chin out and his blue eyes glinted with anger and he said, “I told you. I don’t remember who I am, or where I came from. All I know is, I was running. From them. They were fighting over my head. All around me.” He had to pause to draw a breath into his sore lungs. “I don’t know who you people are. I’m real glad you got me out of where I was, but I don’t like guns aimed at me. Either yours or the Cyphers’.” He let that hang for a few seconds, and then he added, “Sir.”

The weapons were lowered. Dave glanced quickly at the doctor, who had stepped to one side and was wearing a small, amused smile.

“Well,” said the doctor. “Ethan, I think you can put on your clothes now. As for who we are, I am John Douglas. Was a pediatric surgeon in my previous life. Now, mostly an aspirin-pusher. This is Dave McKane,” he said, motioning toward the hard-faced man, “and Roger Pell.”

“Hi,” said Ethan, to all three of them. He started putting his clothes back on…dirty white socks, underwear that was the worse for wear, muddy jeans, the grimy dark red shirt with the torn-off right sleeve, and the dirt-caked Pumas. He thought to check the pockets of his jeans for anything that might be a clue, but searching them brought up nothing. “I don’t remember these clothes,” he told the men. And he felt something break inside him. It was sudden and quiet, and yet it was like an inner scream. He had been about to say I don’t remember who bought them for me, but it was lost and fell away. He trembled and his right hand came up to press against his forehead, to jar loose the memories that were not there, and his eyes burned and his throat closed up and everywhere he turned there seemed to be a wall.

“Hell,” Dave McKane said, “sometimes I forget my own name too.” His voice was quieter now, not so harsh. There was a quaver in it that he killed by clearing his throat. “It’s just the times. Right, Doc?”

“Right,” said John Douglas. He reached out and touched Ethan’s arm; it was the gentle touch of a pediatric surgeon. “The times,” he said, and Ethan blinked away his tears and nodded, because tears would win no battles and right no wrongs.

“She’ll want to see him,” Dave said, spreaking to the doc. “If you’re sure?”

“I’m sure. Ethan, you can call me JayDee. Okay?”

“Yes sir.”

“All right. Let’s get out of this hole.”

They took him out through the metal-reinforced door and into the yellow-misted light. A half-dozen people—thin, wearing clothes that had been patched many times and washed only a few—were standing around the door, waiting for the little drama within to play out, and they retreated up the stairs as Ethan emerged.

“This way.” JayDee directed Ethan to the left as they reached what had been the lowest building’s parking lot. The rain had stopped and the sun was hot through the jaundiced clouds. The air smelled of electricity before a thunderstorm. That and the air itself was heavy and humid. There was no hint of a breeze. As Ethan followed the three men across the parking lot, past a disused set of tennis courts and a swimming pool that had debris in it but only a small puddle of rainwater at its deepest end, he saw that people of many different generations were gathered here in the protection of this makeshift fortress. There were women of many ages holding babies and young children, there were older children and teenagers and on up to the elderly, people maybe in their seventies. Some of these people were working, the strong-backed chopping wood and stacking the lengths in neat piles, others laboring on the outer walls to strengthen places that looked damaged, and doing various other tasks in this fortress community. Most of the inhabitants paused in their work to watch Ethan and the men pass by. Everyone was thin and moved slowly, as if in a bad dream, their expressions blank and hollow-eyed, but they were survivors too. Ethan counted eight horses grazing in a corral on a brown-grassed, rocky hillside up near the highest point. A small wooden barn, surely not original to the apartment complex, stood nearby. With no gasoline available, true horsepower would be the only way to travel.

“Up here,” said JayDee, motioning Ethan up another flight of stairs at the central building. The walls had been painted with graffiti slogans in red, white and blue that proclaimed among other silent shouts We Will Not Die, This World Is Ours, and Tomorrow Is Another Day. Ethan wondered if the people who had painted those slogans were still alive.

He climbed the stairs behind JayDee, with Dave McKane and Roger Pell following him, and on the next level the doctor stopped at a door with the number 227 on it and knocked. Just before it opened something screamed past overhead, so fast it was nearly invisible, just the quickest impression of a yellow-and-brown-blotched triangular shape cutting through the air and then gone, and everyone but Ethan flinched because he was tired of running and if he was going to die today it would be without shrinking from his fate.

The door opened and a slim, pallid-faced man with a mass of curly reddish hair and a ginger-colored beard peered out. He was wearing glasses held together with electrical tape. The lenses magnified his gray eyes. He wore a pair of dirty overalls and a brown-checked shirt, and he was holding at his side a clipboard with a pad of yellow paper on which Ethan caught sight of lines of numbers. He had the stub of a much-chewed-upon pencil clenched in the left side of his mouth.

“Afternoon, Gary,” JayDee said. He motioned toward Ethan. “We have a new arrival.”

The man’s magnified eyes studied Ethan. His reddish brows went up. “Fell in some mud?” he asked, and Ethan nodded.

“Someone new?” came a woman’s voice from behind Gary, who wore a pistol in a holster at his waist just as did John Douglas. “Let’s have a look.”

Gary stepped aside. JayDee let Ethan enter the apartment first. There was a woman sitting behind a desk and behind her there was a wall with a large, expressionist painting of wild horses galloping across a field. The glass sliding door that led to the balcony and facing the distant mountains that had exploded behind Ethan not long ago was reinforced with a geometry of duct tape. On the floor was a crimson rug, there were two chairs, a coffee table and a brown sofa. Everything looked like junk shop stuff, but at least it made the place comfortable. Or maybe not. On another wall was a rack of three rifles, one with a scope. A few oil lamps were set about, their wicks burning low. A second woman was sitting in a chair in front of the desk, and before her was another clipboard and a pad of yellow paper with figures written on it. Evidently some kind of meeting had been in progress that involved number crunching, and as Ethan approached the desk he had the distinct feeling that the numbers were not good.

Both women stood up, as if he were worth the respect. He figured maybe he was, for getting here without being killed by either Gorgon monsters or Cypher soldiers. The woman who was behind the desk was the older of the two. She was dressed in a pale blue blouse and gray pants and around her neck she wore a necklace of turquoise stones with a silver crucifix in the middle. She said, “What do we have here?” Her dark brown eyes narrowed and quickly went to JayDee.

“He’s human,” the doctor said, answering her unspoken question. But in his voice there was something else. As far as I can tell, was what Ethan heard. “One problem, though. He doesn’t know his—”

“My name is Ethan Gaines,” said the boy, before JayDee could get that out.

“His history,” the doctor went on. The apartment door had been closed by Gary, after Dave and Roger had come in. The noise of work outside was muffled. “Ethan has no memory of where he came from or where his parents are. He is…shall we say…a mystery.”

“Hannah saw him through her binoculars,” Dave added. His voice was less gruff but still hard-edged. He removed his baseball cap, showing brown hair that stuck up with multiple cowlicks and had streaks of gray at the temples. “I made the decision to go out after him. Didn’t have time to bring it to you or anybody else.”

“Brave or crazy, which one is it?” said the woman behind the desk, speaking to Dave with a hint of irritation as if she valued his life greater than a horseback jaunt into the battlefield. Her gaze went to the boy again. “Ethan,” she said. “I am Olivia Quintero. I suppose I’m the leader here. At least that’s what they tell me. I guess I should say…welcome to Panther Ridge.”

Ethan nodded. He figured there were plenty of places worse to be. Like anywhere out there beyond the walls. He took a good long look at Olivia Quintero, who radiated a comforting confidence, or a strength of will and purpose. He thought that was why she was the leader here. She looked to be a tall woman, slimly built and likely made more slim by lack of food. But she was sinewy and tough in the way she held herself, her face placid and composed, her forehead high under a crown of short-cut white hair. Ethan thought she was maybe in her mid-fifties, her skin tone slightly darkened by her Hispanic heritage. Her forehead was lined and there were deeper lines at the corners of her eyes, but otherwise she wore the roads and travels of her life well. She looked like what he thought she must have been before all this happened: a high school principal, but one who had experienced some “stuff” in her own younger years and might let things slide if you explained yourself the right way. Maybe she’d been the principal at Ethan Gaines High, who knew? Or a businesswoman, maybe. Someone who had come up from a poor family and made a fortune selling real estate, the kind of houses that used to look like little castles before there was a need for fortresses. And how he knew this about the little castles he couldn’t remember, so he just let it go because no daylight was breaking through his night.

He felt her examining him, too. And she saw him as a muddied boy about fourteen or fifteen years old with a mop of unruly brown hair that hung over his forehead and nearly into his eyes, which were the light blue color of the early morning sky at the ranch she had owned with her deceased husband Vincent about twenty miles east of here, back when there was sanity in the world. She noted Ethan’s sharp nose and chin and the equally sharp—nearly piercing—expression in those eyes, and she thought he was an intelligent boy who must have been born under a very lucky star, to have survived what he must’ve gone through out there. Or…tal vez no tan afortunado, because maybe the lucky ones had all died early, along with their loved ones and their memories of what Earth had been.

Thinking about that too much was a dark path to Hell, and God only knew all of the survivors here had suffered aplenty, with more suffering yet to come. The suicide rate was getting higher. There was no way to stop someone who wanted to leave, and with so many guns around…

The loss of hope was the worst, Olivia knew. So she could let no one else know how close she was to taking a gun, putting it to her head in the middle of the night and joining her husband in what must surely be a better place than this.

But Panther Ridge needed a leader, someone who pressed on and organized things and said tomorrow is another day and would never show her terror and hopelessness. And she was it, though deep in her soul she wondered how much longer she could be, and why there was any point to any of it.

“Have you ever killed anyone?” Ethan suddenly asked her.

“What?” she replied, a little startled by the question.

“Killed anyone in that room I was put in,” Ethan went on. “I saw claw marks and bullet holes in the walls. What looked like bloodstains, too. I’m thinking people were taken in there and killed.”

Dave stepped closer, between Ethan and Olivia. “Yeah, we’ve killed some things in there. Maybe they were people once, but they sure weren’t when we killed them. It had to be done. Then we scrubbed up the blood the best we could. Don’t you know?”

“I know about the Gorgons and the Cyphers. I know they’re fighting. Tearing the world apart. That’s all I can remember.”

“And you don’t remember how you know?” Olivia asked. “Not anything?”

“Nothing,” said the boy.

Olivia glanced at John Douglas, who lifted his white eyebrows and shrugged, saying I have no idea. She directed her attention back to the new arrival. “I don’t know where you’ve been or how you survived out there, but I think there’s a lot you need to grasp. And much more than about the Cyphers and Gorgons. Are you hungry? I hope you don’t mind horse meat.”

“I don’t mind.”

“We do what we can here. Make do or do without. Mostly do without. But we keep going.” Why? she asked herself even as she said it. What is it that we think will change the way things are? She quickly pushed those questions away. She also saw no point in mentioning yet that on some nights true Hell was visited upon the wrack and ruin of this Earth. “Dave, take him to the mess hall. Get him fed. Find him a place to stay.”

“Sure,” said Dave, stone-faced. “Another happy addition to our little family.”

“How many people are here?” Ethan asked the woman.

“A hundred and twelve by last count. It changes sometimes, day to day.”

Ethan’s gaze went to the yellow pad on the desk. He saw that numbers had been written, scratched out and scrawled again by a nervous hand.

“That’s not people,” Olivia said, noting Ethan’s interest. “That’s circumstances. We’ve been here nearly two years. Our supplies are running out.”

“Food and water?” Ethan asked.

“Canned food and bottled water, both stockpiles pretty low. That’s why we’ve had to start eating the horses, and we don’t trust the rainwater. So, that’s how things are,” she finished.

Bad, Ethan thought. He could see the end of things, deep in her eyes. As if she felt that, she looked away at Dave once more. “Take him and get him fed. Ethan, I’ll see you later. Okay?”

He nodded, and Dave and Roger led him out of the room and shut the door.

John Douglas stayed behind, as Kathy Mattson took her chair again and Gary Roosa regarded his clipboard and yellow pad with all the figures of doom upon them. Olivia sat down, but she knew there was a reason the doctor had stayed and so she said, “What is it?”

“Interesting young man,” said JayDee.

“Tough to think what he must’ve gone through. But others have made it too. We had a few survivors in a couple of a days ago, didn’t we?”

“We did. Hard to survive out there, but not impossible.” The doctor frowned. “It’s just that…I wish I had a decent lab set up. Wish I had some way to really give Ethan a thorough exam.”

“Why?” A trace of fear tightened her mouth. “Because you think he may not be—”

“I think,” JayDee interrupted, “he’s human and clean. But I also think—and this stays in this room, please—that he sustained some injuries that…well, I don’t know how he’s walking around, with all the bruises he has under his clothes. And ought to have, at least in my opinion, some major internal injuries. I think he was caught in a shockwave. It’s just…very strange, that he’s so…”

“Alive?” Olivia prompted.

“Maybe that,” JayDee admitted. “From the outside, it looks like he had a massive chest injury. That alone would be enough to…” He shrugged. “But I can’t really say, because I can’t do a proper exam.”

“Then do what you can do,” Olivia said, her gaze steady. “Watch him. If it turns out he’s a different kind of lifeform…good enough to get past the saline…then we’d better know that fast. So watch him, do you hear me?”

“I hear.” JayDee started for the door.

“Keep your gun loaded,” she reminded him, as she turned her attention to the numbers of the dwindling stockpiles and the ideas of further rationing that Kathy and Gary—both ex-accountants from the previous world—had advanced.

“Yes,” JayDee replied heavily, and he went out of the room into the sick sunlight.

Three.

Dave and JayDee watched the boy eat a small bowl of horsemeat stew at a table in the room that served as the mess hall. Meals were usually staggered so as not to overwhelm the three cooks, who were doing the best they could with what they had. Everything had to be cooked outside over woodfires, then brought in. Beyond the double-locked storage room doors, the canned foods were getting low and the bottled water was almost gone. Afternoon light filtered through two windows that were reinforced with duct tape. A few oil lamps and candle lanterns were set about on the other tables. It was a dreary-looking room, but across one wall someone had painted in bright red We Will Survive. The paint had been applied with fierce—or frantic—resolve, and had dripped down in red rivulets to the linoleum-tiled floor.

The boy ate as if there were no tomorrow. He’d been given a paper cup with three swallows of water and told it was all he could have, so he was taking it easy on that. The horsemeat stew, though, was quickly history.

“Take a deep breath,” said John Douglas.

Ethan paused in his licking of the bowl to do as the doctor said.

“No pain in your lungs?”

“A little tight. Sore right in here,” Ethan answered, touching the center of his chest. He went back to getting every shred of meat his fingers and tongue could find.

“Sore neck too, I’d think.”

“Little bit.”

“I’m surprised you aren’t in more pain.” The doctor rubbed his chin; unlike most of the other men, he tried to shave as often as possible and he used deodorant. He had been fastidious about his appearance and his habits as a younger man, and as an older man in the world that used to be. It was tougher now, and the point was unclear about why one would wish to maintain as many old habits as possible, but he was a creature of order and neatness and it kept him connected to the man he used to be. It also probably kept him sane and wanting to live. “I’d think,” he offered, ‘‘that you could hardly walk after such traumas, much less run. Then again, you are a young boy. Fifteen years old, would be my guess. But still…” He paused, unable to come to any conclusion about this without a proper examination lab, and that fact made him very uneasy. Though he was certain this boy was human. Almost certain. At least the saline test hadn’t set the boy’s blood burning, and made him burst into a spiked monstrosity or a howling spider-like nightmare as had happened in previous tests when so-called ‘humans’ were brought in.

“But still,” Dave growled, though it wasn’t meant as a growl, “your story is…can I say…fucked up.” A brickmason in his previous life, also a bouncer at a Fort Collins country music bar and an all-around rough-ass dude who didn’t mind throwing himself into any kind of action that called for a bad attitude, Dave McKane minced no words. He had dirty fingernails and dirty hair and dirt in the creases of his face and he carried his responsibilities in this fortress—this last stand—very, very seriously. “If you have no memory, how come you know about the Gorgons and Cyphers? How come that wasn’t blanked out?”

Ethan sipped at his cup of water. He met Dave’s stare. “I guess I haven’t got any memory of most things, but that…I know they’re fighting.”

“Then you know how it started? You remember it? The day?”

Ethan concentrated. Nothing was there. He sipped at his water again, and found with his tongue a shred of horsemeat between two teeth. “No, I don’t remember that.”

“The third day of April, two years ago?” said Dave. He folded his hands together atop the table, and recalled praying at a kitchen table similar to this one with his wife and two sons in the little house not many miles from here yet worlds away. He had gone out alone one morning a couple of months after getting here, riding the dappled gray horse Pilgrim, daring fate and maybe wishing to commit suicide by alien weapon. They didn’t fight over one place very long but you could never tell when they would come back. The battleground shifted, and nothing was ever resolved. As far as he knew, it was the same all over the world.

Dave had ridden Pilgrim to the piece of land he and Cheryl had owned, and stood at the crater where the charred debris of the house lay. He had seen the shards of that kitchen table down at the bottom, and then he had turned away and thrown up and gotten back on his horse because Panther Ridge was his home now and Cheryl and the boys were dead. And…a Gorgon ship was coming, sliding through the yellow air, which meant the Cyphers would not be far away either.

“April the third,” JayDee said, picking up the recollections and emotions. He felt a hammer blow to his heart, and he thought he had progressed past that pain, but he had not. There was so much pain, for everyone. His wife of thirty-two years had died in their apartment here, in March. He had watched her slowly lose her mind, cry for her mother and father and tremble like a little child when the aliens were fighting in this area and their explosions shook the earth. Deborah had stopped eating and dwindled away, a victim of lost hope. He had tried to feed her, tried his best, but she lay in bed day after day and stared at the stained ceiling and the part of her that had known joy and freedom was already gone. And as he sat at her bedside and held her hand in the deepening twilight with the oil lamps lit, she had looked at him with her weary and watery eyes and asked one question in the voice of a child imploring her father: Are we safe?

He had not known what he was about to say, but he had to say something. Though before he could speak he heard the wave of them coming, the shriek of their approach, the thunder of their headlong rush against the walls of Panther Ridge, and he heard the first rifle shots and the chatter of machine guns, and when he looked at Deborah again she had left this earth because she could no longer bear what it had become.

At that moment John Douglas had faced a choice. It involved either the rifle or the pistol he owned. It involved what he intended to do in the next few minutes, as he stared at the dead woman who had been the love of his life and had raised for them two daughters and a son. It involved whether he had the strength to go out there and join the fight, or whether he needed in his heart and soul to follow Deborah to whatever Promised Land lay beyond life, because this one had become a blighted and corrupted nightmare.

The minutes had passed slowly, and not without its thorny seconds. But in the end he had left Deborah sleeping alone, and he had taken his rifle and pistol out to defend his fortress.

“That day,” JayDee said quietly. “April the third. It was about ten in the morning. Oh, I remember the time exactly. It was eighteen minutes after ten. I was in my office, doing some paperwork. One of my nurses ran in, said for me to come look at the TV out in the waiting room. CNN, Fox, MSNBC, all the local channels were covering it. Huge explosions in the skies across the world. What looked like fiery meteors blowing up, and out of them were coming…those Gorgon ships. Nobody was calling them ‘Gorgon’ yet, I mean. That was later. But they were coming out of the blasts…just gliding out, and then the fighter planes went up and they were shot to pieces, and that went on for…I don’t remember how long.”

“Two days,” Dave offered. He flicked his Bic and lit a cigarette without asking permission, because nobody gave a damn anymore whether you smoked or not. “It was over in two days. I know you don’t remember Nine-Eleven,” he said, speaking to Ethan, “but this was…like…a thousand Nine-Elevens, one after another. The Gorgons finished off our Air Force and the Army and Navy, too.” He blew smoke through his nostrils, like a furious dragon, though his eyes were blank and nearly dead. “It was the same all over the world. Nothing could hurt those ships. At least nothing we had. Nothing created on earth. The Gorgons hit some of the cities, but not all. New York was blasted, so was Atlanta and Dallas and Los Angeles…Moscow…Tokyo…Berlin…Beijing. A show of power, is what the big dogs at the Pentagon said. But the big dogs were suddenly not so big. Suddenly…nobody was very big.” He focused once more on the boy through the drift of smoke. “You don’t remember any of this?”

“No,” said Ethan. If it had ever been there, it was all gone. And maybe, he thought, it was better that way.

“A cloaking device,” said JayDee, “is what the scientists said got the Gorgons close enough to our atmosphere to enter without being detected. And by then they were calling them ‘Gorgons’, so that name stuck.”

“Why that name?”

“Somebody at Fox News came up with it,” Dave answered. “Supposed to be so terrible to look at you’d turn to stone. The idea was there…that the Gorgons must be so different from us…it would drive a person insane to see one. Anyway, once that name was out there, it was used in all the newscasts.”

JayDee remembered images of the worldwide panic. People were running, but where would they run to? The President of the United States urged calm, and then he disappeared into a “secure location”, as did every other elected official in Washington. Elsewhere around the world, the so-called leaders fled their positions and roles. All civil order broke down and all police forces were overwhelmed. The television networks and radio stations hung on as long as they could. Within forty-eight hours of the first Gorgon ship being documented as it slid from its fiery womb, amateur videos were taken of what appeared to be swirling black portals opening in the air, and from them emerged the huge, sleek bat-like shapes of what came to be known as the Cypher ships.

“An enigma,” JayDee said, almost to himself. “The unknowable.” He blinked, bringing himself back to the moment. “The Cyphers,” he said to Ethan, “came from what looked like black holes opening in the sky. Then…those two forces went to war. Humans were puny. We’re the bugs to be stepped on…or played with,” he added. “But their battle is with each other. Soon after the Cyphers came, power grids around the world started failing. The cell towers went out. I suppose the communications satellites were destroyed. The Cyphers must’ve done that, to silence the chatter I guess. Or another display of power.”

Ethan finished his meager cup of water and was still thirsty but satisfied at least that he’d gotten this much. He was trying to take everything in, and it was a lot to take. Dave smoked his cigarette in silence for a moment, and then he said, “I talked to somebody who heard one of the last radio broadcasts.” He regarded the cigarette’s glowing tip, and blew on it to make it flare. “Some scientists and military men were talking. Giving their ideas on what was happening. That these two civilizations—whatever they are—have been at war…like…forever. And maybe it’s the Earth they’re fighting over, and maybe not, because—”

“It’s the border,” said Ethan, who heard himself speak those words as if from a distance.

Dave and JayDee said nothing, but they both stared at Ethan with renewed interest.

“The border,” Ethan repeated. “Between them. Their worlds, or their universe or dimension or wherever they come from. Earth is on the border, and that’s what they’re fighting over.” He realized, almost startled, that he he had no doubt what he was saying was true. “They’re going to keep fighting until one destroys the other. That may never happen, because…” He felt a sudden panic rise up inside him; he felt he was floating away from himself, into an area unknown. It took him a moment to draw a deep breath that hurt his lungs, and to calm himself. “They’re in an—” He cast about for the right term. “An arms race,” he said.

The silence went on, as the two men stared at the boy who had named himself after a high school.

It was JayDee who spoke first, in a tight and cautious voice. “Now…tell us…how would you believe all that, if you can’t remember anything else? Did you hear that from someone? One of your parents?”

“No.” Ethan felt hot and sweaty, uncomfortable in his own skin. His bones were aching like sore teeth. “I don’t know who told me. I just…” He met the doctor’s puzzled stare. His own blue eyes glinted with a nearly feverish intensity. “I just know that’s the truth. We’re on the border between them, and it’s not the Earth they want. It’s a line in space.”

Dave and JayDee looked at each other, and Ethan read their unspoken question: Are you believing what you’re hearing?

“I’m really tired,” Ethan said. “Can I get some sleep somewhere?”

It took a few seconds for the spell of Ethan’s comments to break. Dave cleared his throat and said, “Sure. There are plenty of empty apartments.” He did not say that most of them had been occupied by people who had over time come to the end of their hope and killed themselves. A cemetery behind the third building held dozens of white-painted wooden crosses. Whole families had decided to let go of their lives, and who could blame them? There were two ministers—a male Presbyterian and a female Methodist—among the survivors at Panther Ridge, and they still led religious services and did what they could, but sometimes the voice of Christ could not be heard over the distant explosions and the shrieking of the nightime army.

Which Dave decided Ethan didn’t need to hear about right now. They didn’t come every night, but if they came tonight…the boy would find out soon enough.

“Come on, then.” Dave kept the stub of his cigarette between his teeth as he stood up. “Let’s get you settled in. Get you a bucket of sand to scrub some of that mud off, too.” Water being too precious a commodity to waste on washing. He would not yet tell Ethan any more about the things they had killed—exterminated would be the better word—in the Security Room, and what they had burned that at first had appeared to be human but was in reality nearly demonic.

His Uzi and its holster was never far away from him. He picked it up off the table and put it on, and he, JayDee, and the boy left the mess hall to find an apartment without human bloodstains somewhere on the walls, the floor or the furniture.

Four.

Ethan.

He woke up. It seemed that someone had called him, in the name he had chosen for himself to give him some kind of identity. Not loudly, but quietly. Enough to make him lie on the bed in the apartment he’d been given, his eyes open, and listen to the dark.

It was not entirely dark in Apartment 246. Two candle lanterns burned low. The walls were a cheap brown plasterboard, the carpet the color of wheat. On one wall was a decoration of metal squares painted blue and silver. Someone’s artistic touch, he thought. He sat up on the bed, his back against the pillows. He was hungry, thirsty, and edgy. He was wearing the dark green p.j. bottoms of somebody who was probably dead. His bones still ached, and his bruises felt heavy with gathered blood. He wanted to return to sleep, back to its peace and stillness, but he could not…because something was on his mind…something important…and he couldn’t figure out what it was.

He felt like an empty hole, waiting to be filled. With what? Knowledge? Memory? There was nothing beyond his waking up, into running across that field in the rain. Water, he thought. Thirsty. But he understood that the last of the water was being rationed, and that the people here did not want to drink the rainwater because it brought with it chemicals or poisons. They were eating the horses; the horses ate grass, and the grass was watered by the rain. So they were getting chemicals in the rain anyway. He guessed that even boiling the rainwater over a fire wasn’t enough for them to fully trust it. So the bottled water was going down and down, and when it was gone they would have to drink the rain no matter what.

Ethan understood why they feared being caught in one of the battles between the Gorgons and Cyphers, but what else was it they feared that made them cower here behind the stone walls?

He had no idea how long he’d slept. JayDee had brought him the p.j.s and some other clothes, two pairs of jeans with patched knees and a couple of t-shirts, one gray and the other purple with the clenched fist logo of the band Black Destroyer, which Ethan had never heard…or never remembered hearing. He’d scrubbed the mud off himself in the yellow-tiled bathroom with a bucket of sand. He had looked at his injuries in the mirror, by the candle’s light. His chest was black, from shoulder to shoulder. And turning around, he could angle his head and see in the mirror the mass of black bruises on his back. They looked soul-deep. He thought that maybe it was best he had no memory of what had caused them, because it seemed to him he’d been through a world of pain.

Thirsty, he thought. But there was no water in the empty taps of either kitchen or bathroom and the toilet was a dry hole. Dave had told him he was supposed to do his business in the same bucket of sand he’d been given. To get any water, he’d have to go to the mess hall where the rations were given out, and that place—Dave had told him—was locked up tight and guarded by men with guns after the nighttime meal, such as it was.

Ethan found himself staring at the blue and silver squares on the wall opposite his bed.

He could imagine them melting, and becoming streams of clear, fresh and pure water that ran down the wall and puddled on the floor.

As he stared at them, the blue and silver squares seemed to shimmer and merge into a glistening pool.

The swimming pool, he thought. Something…about the swimming pool.

But he didn’t know what. The swimming pool was mostly empty, except for some debris that looked like broken lawn furniture and a few inches of murky rainwater in the deep end.

Still…he had a strong sensation that he should get up from this bed and go to the swimming pool, and there he might understand what was drawing him. He got up, pulled on the Black Destroyer t-shirt and his Pumas, and he went out of the apartment onto an exterior corridor that led to a concrete stairway. Halfway down the stairs he saw on the horizon blue flickers of what might have been lightning but might also have been the never-ending battle. He continued down to the parking lot and walked along the curving roadway in the direction of the pool.

Quiet had fallen upon Panther Ridge. It was a warm and humid night, with the threat of more rain coming. Through the windows of some of the apartments he saw the comforting sight of little flames of oil and candle lamps, and he knew he was not the only one awake. He saw lights up on the watchtowers too; the towers were likely manned around the clock, the watchers at their machine guns. He came upon a group of six people sitting in the parking lot, with a few oil lamps at the center of their circle. They were holding hands and praying, their heads bowed. He went on. He passed a man with shoulder-length hair and no shirt or shoes, just wearing a pair of jeans, sitting on the pavement with his knees pulled up to his chin. “They might be comin’ tonight,” he said to Ethan. “But they ain’t gonna eat me. No, they ain’t.” And so saying, he lifted the automatic pistol that lay at his side, and he put its barrel to his temple.

Ethan saw the man grin. There was madness in it, and Ethan went on.

He came in another moment to the swimming pool, which was surrounded by what had once been a decorative iron fence and gate. Most of it had been knocked down, all of it rusted by the corrosive rain. The gate was open, hanging by a hinge. Ethan thought that many of the people here were also hanging by a hinge. He went to the side of the pool and looked down into it, and saw only what he’d briefly seen when he’d passed by here before: what looked like broken pieces of wooden chairs and maybe some other junk in a few inches of water in the deep end—5 feet, no diving, the pockmarked sign read—otherwise nothing else.

Nothing here, he thought.

But still…

…something.

He had the image of the blue and silver squares in his mind, as they merged and glistened and became clear water.

Ethan walked down the steps into the pool’s shallow end. The blue paint covering the bottom had gone dark and scabby and was coming up in wrinkled sheets. Exposed beneath it was gray concrete. He walked in a straight line at the center of the pool, down the slight decline into the deep end. His shoes found about four inches of dirty rainwater around the drain.

What was here? he asked himself.

Nothing, was the answer.

His motion in the water caused the debris to float away from him. He sloshed in a circle around the drain, because it seemed to him the thing to do. Was there something here after all? he wondered. A deep, secret movement…like the flowing together of the blue and silver squares upon the wall? He stood for awhile in the deep end, his senses questing for something he wasn’t sure of, and then he walked back up to the shallow end along the middle of the pool. He had the distinct feeling that something hidden was very near, and yet…

“What in the name of Jack Shit are you doing out here?” a hard voice suddenly asked.

Ethan looked to his right, where the figure of Dave McKane stood with his Uzi at his side, pointed somewhere just east of the boy. “I heard your door open and close,” Dave said. “My place is next to yours. What are you doing? Getting water?”

“No, sir.” Ethan saw that Dave might not have done much sleeping tonight, because he was still dressed in what he’d been wearing today and he had his baseball cap on. “I just came out walking.”

“That’s a bag of bull’s balls.”

Ethan decided the truth was best. The truth, at least, as he understood it. “I felt like I needed to come here.”

“Yeah? Midnight swimming?”

“No, sir. I just needed to come here, that’s all.”

“What? To get a drink?”

Ethan shook his head. “I’m thirsty, but Olivia said not to trust the rainwater. That’s why you only drink the bottled water.” He thought of the prison room, and the inspection he’d endured. What John Douglas had said: We’re checking to see whether you’re fully human or not. Ethan knew, but he wanted to hear it. “You think the rainwater’s poison, don’t you? Because of all the alien stuff up there?” He tilted his chin toward the lightning-shot sky. “What does it do to people? Turn them into things you have to kill?”

“We don’t know that yet,” Dave said. “We don’t know why some things come in here looking like humans. Maybe they were humans once, and they’re being engineered by them.” He made a motion toward the horizon’s flickering lightning. “Playing with the human toys, maybe. There’s just a hell of a lot we don’t know.”

“But that’s not all, is it?”

“No,” Dave said. “Not all.”

“Tell me.”

“First get out of there.” Dave aimed his Uzi at the ground and retreated a few paces as Ethan came up the pool’s steps.

“What else?” Ethan prompted.

Dave said, “The Gray Men come at night.”

“The Gray Men,” Ethan repeated. He didn’t like the sound of that, not from Dave’s mouth or from his own. And then he had to ask: “What are they?”

“Mutated humans.” Dave pulled no punches and he wasn’t about to start now. “Some of them are…way mutated…into things that don’t look human anymore. We don’t know what causes it. Maybe it’s something in the atmosphere, in the rain, maybe it’s a disease they brought. The Gray Men come at night. Not every night, but when they do try to get in here…it’s bad. We think—JayDee thinks—their skin can’t take sunlight anymore. Or something that keeps them hidden during the day. Like I say, we don’t know for sure and we haven’t met anybody who does.”

Ethan had a jumble of questions in his mind, all trying to be first. He started with, “Why are they called Gray Men?”

“Because they are gray. Or near enough. They’ve lost all their flesh color. I don’t know who first called them that, but it suits ’em. They started coming about three months ago. Only a few at first…then more and more. I think they have some kind of radar or sense or whatever that draws them together…maybe they can smell each other.” Dave offered a thin, pained smile. “We don’t have much ammo left. Glad you joined our happy group?”

“Better than being out there.”

“Uh-huh. Well, the Gray Men try to get at us because they’re meat eaters. They drag their dead away, so we figure they eat the corpses. That keeps them satisfied for awhile.”

Ethan nodded. “But I’m not gray and I’m not mutated. So why did you take me to that room where you’ve killed things?”

“We took you to the Secure Room because we’ve had…let’s call them intruders. They’re creatures who look like humans, and maybe they used to be or they still think they are…but now they’re another kind of lifeform. JayDee’s opinion—and Olivia’s too—is that they’re humans who’ve been picked up by the aliens and experimented on. Then they’re let loose. Like alien time-bombs, I guess. Let’s just say we’ve had some real interesting reactions to the saline. We had another doctor here. He killed himself and his wife and son last December, but it was his idea to get something in the bloodstream to test all new arrivals. Thank God he came up with that, or we would’ve let some real horrors in here without knowing it until too late.”

“The rain,” Ethan said. “You think that’s what makes the Gray Men? If that’s so, hasn’t anybody here ever started changing?”

“Yes, they have. It starts out as gray, ashy-looking blotches. The blotches get bigger, fast…and then the bones start changing. We kept the first victim under watch while it happened. We had to chain her up, which was cruel as hell but we had to.” Dave stared darkly at the boy before he went on. “After a couple of days, when she was twisted and deformed, she started growing a second head that was all mouth and little needle teeth. That’s when her father stepped in and shot her. She was twelve years old.”

“Oh,” said Ethan, or thought he did.

“We had four others. They had to be taken care of before it got too bad. There has to be poison in the atmosphere,” Dave said. “Sometimes the rain falls dirty brown or piss yellow, but we’re not sure that causes the mutations. Nobody’s sure of anything. But yeah…that’s why we’re depending on the bottled water. We shelter the horses but we know they’re getting exposed to the rain, and we’re eating the horses, and the rain’s eating through the roofs and walls and leaking in…so there’s no way to avoid it. The doc thinks it takes time for the effects to show up, and maybe it depends on a person’s chemistry too. Like any virus, or cancer. Some get it, some don’t.” Dave shrugged. “What are you gonna do?” He answered his own question: “Die, eventually. It’s just…how long you want to wait.”

“Why have you waited?” Ethan glanced pointedly at the submachine gun.

Dave held the Uzi up before his face and examined it as if it were a piece of deadly art. Then he let it fall back to his side. “Good question,” he allowed. “I’ve known a lot of people in here who decided not to wait. Decided that between the Gorgons, the Cyphers, the Gray Men and plain old hopelessness, it was best to pass on through the gates.” He paused for a moment, pondering an answer. “I guess,” he said at last, “I’m not ready yet. But tomorrow, I might be. Just depends on the—”

Weather, he was about to say, but he was interrupted by a red flare suddenly shooting skyward from the watchtower at the western corner of the wall.

It was followed within seconds by the wail of a crank-driven siren from somewhere else in the complex. Dave said, “Lucky you. They’re coming tonight,” in a voice both hollow and haunted.

As Dave started running toward the wall and others with pistols and rifles began to emerge from their dwellings wearing whatever had come quickly to hand, Ethan heard the sounds of the Gray Men.

It was distant at first, a strange murmur of discordant music, steadily growing louder. Ethan had already seen that wooden walkways had been built along the top of the wall a few feet below the coils of barbed wire, and now the defenders of Panther Ridge were using ladders to climb up. A second red flare shot from the southernmost watchtower, which Ethan figured meant the Gray Men were attacking from two directions. He had to see for himself, so he started running away from the pool, down the road and to the wall’s nearest ladder. Just as he reached it, a tall and slender older woman with a crown of short-cut gray hair got in his way to climb up first. She paused to look him in the face. Olivia Quintero had a rifle under her arm and a holstered revolver around the waist of her jeans. She had pulled on a yellow western-style blouse with blue cornflowers stitched across the shoulders.

“Get away from here.” Her dark brown eyes were nearly ebony. “Move!” She climbed up without waiting to see if he obeyed or not. Ethan let a man with another rifle go up next. Then he climbed up to the walkway himself, because he had to see.

The shrieking hit him like an oncoming wave. The rock wall was as high as his upper chest. As he stared out through the barbed-wire coils, he saw that the earth itself seemed to be in motion. Were there a hundred of them? More than that? They were scrabbling up the hillside toward the wall. A white star shell flare was fired from the southernmost watchtower. As it sizzled and drifted down Ethan saw that some of the attackers wore the rags of clothing but many were naked, and their nakedness revealed ashy gray flesh that drooped in gobbets off the bones like the dissolving of a nasty jelly, or ashy gray flesh that looked to be covered with scales, or ashy gray flesh that rippled with what looked to be spines or bony plate armor. The full impact of horror hit Ethan like a blow to the belly. Here were sinewy creatures with flattened skulls and hunched backs, like human battering rams. There were things that ran on legs as thick as tree trunks, things that hobbled on jellying limbs and things that crawled as decaying crablike torsos under the legs of the others.

From the front of the unhuman wave came leaping creatures with armored backs and clawed hooks for hands. They grappled the wall and began to scramble up toward the barbed wire. Frozen with shock, Ethan saw one of the climbers look up and grin in a gray, slit-eyed face with a nose that had collapsed inward and thin lips parted from teeth like little sawblades. Then the face exploded with one of the first machine-gun bursts and the body hung twitching a few feet below the barbed wire with its hooks driven into the mortar between the rocks.

The other rifles, pistols, and machine guns opened up. Though the bodies of the Gray Men were torn by the hail of bullets, the creatures continued onward in their crashing wave against the walls of the fortress of Panther Ridge. Something hit the metal-covered door with a force that made the walkway under Ethan’s feet tremble. Dust flew from between the stones. Shots were directed at whatever was down there, and that monstrous strength hit the door again but with less power and then more shots seemed to finish it off.

Before Ethan in the white flarelight was a sea of malformed, grotesque creatures that used to be human beings. He saw men, women, and children turned to hissing and shrieking monsters by either an alien disease or poison in the rainwater. He saw hump-backed shapes with greedy eyes and skeletal figures with gray, paper-thin flesh that looked like…

The Visible Man.

He remembered.

Building his model of the Visible Man, with its clear plastic skin that displayed all the internal organs, veins, and arteries of a human being. Got it from…where? Wal-Mart? No, Amazon. Sitting at his desk in his room…a house somewhere…under a green desklamp…the plastic organs lined up in the order he wanted to paint them…carefully because he wanted everything about the anatomy kit to be right…a school project…and a woman coming into the room…dark-haired…and saying—

“Get back!” shouted the woman at Ethan’s side. He realized a scale-skinned, thin monstrosity with black, sunken eyes in one head and a grapefruit-sized growth of a second head with white sightless eyes on the stalk of its neck had climbed up to the wire and was reaching through the coils for his throat, and then Olivia Quintero pushed him aside and shot the thing in the temple of its larger head so that its brains flew out and the second head chattered and gnashed its sharp little baby teeth as the body slithered down and away.

She gave Ethan a look that would’ve cracked a mirror, and then she chambered another bullet and fired again into the mass of Gray Men bodies that were climbing relentlessly up the wall with their spiked fingers and toes. Some were getting to the wire and reaching through to grasp at whatever their claws could find before they were shot down. A gray-fleshed froglike figure with bulging eyes and the long ebony hair of a woman suddenly came leaping up and landed in the barbed wire to Ethan’s left, crushing it down, and following it was a male creature with four arms—two normal-sized and two spindly things growing from its rib cage—that moved in a frenzy, tearing the wire from its frame. Ethan saw Dave McKane fire his Uzi right in the thing’s face, but as soon as that bloodied creature fell away it was replaced by two others, one rail-thin and its ashy flesh covered with small, sharp spines, and the other a thick behemoth with a distorted skull like a hammerhead and a face that looked to be all gaping sharp-toothed mouth with eyes the size of black beads.

The hammerhead monster gave from its hideous mouth a roar that no longer had a sound anywhere near human. It pushed itself over the barbed wire onto the walkway. Only a few feet to Ethan’s left, it grasped with spiked fingers the shoulders of a young man whose revolver went off into the monster’s chest, but the gaping mouth was already tearing hunks of flesh from the young man’s face. As the creature was shot by every weapon that could bear on it, its mouth expanded to engulf the man’s entire head, and with a violent and sickening twist, it ripped the head from the body. Then the lead storm finally sent the beast falling back over the barbed wire and the headless body toppled the other way to the ground.

Other things were clambering up, faster and faster. They were tearing the wire loose from its framing, taking bullets and falling, and then more climbed up to take their places.

Guns were starting to click empty. Desperate hands searched for bullets in holsters, pockets and ammo boxes. Some of the defenders had brought axes, and now they were reduced to flailing and chopping. Ethan could feel the cold spread of panic. Creatures that resembled human beings only in the depth of tortured nightmares were tearing the wire down and coming over the top. Dave McKane’s Uzi fired and fired and suddenly went silent as he frantically dug into his pockets for more clips. Olivia Quintero’s rifle spoke, knocking a dark spidery shape off the wall. She paused to slap another ammo clip into her weapon and was almost seized by a slim creature with long white hair, jellied flesh, and the jagged-toothed grin of a shark. She hit the thing in the chest with the rifle’s butt and followed that blow with a bullet to the forehead that sent it reeling off and downward, shrieking like the sound of fingernails across a chalkboard. The sweat of effort and fear glistened on Olivia’s face. She drew her pistol, took aim, and began firing slowly and methodically into the shapes that were relentlessly climbing up.

Ethan saw.

There were too many. Tonight the Gray Men were going to defeat this last stand at Panther Ridge. The watchtower machine guns were still firing and so too were the rifles and the pistols along the walls, but Ethan knew that soon the bullets would be gone and all guns reduced to clubs. He saw dozens of the things climbing up the walls, and dozens more out there swarming forward—a malignant army of them—so that again the earth itself seemed in turbulent motion.

They needed to be thrown off the walls, he thought. They needed to be shaken off the hillside, devoured by the earth itself, and what power could do that?

It came to him, amid the shooting and the shrieking and the screams as one of the female defenders near him was attacked, that he should press his hands against the rocks of the wall before him, as if touching the earth itself beyond the wall. Of shaping the earth, or molding it. Of commanding the earth and demanding from it, and seeing in his mind the vision of what he wanted to happen.

It was a sharp, clear inner voice that told him to do this, that it was the right thing, just as walking down into the swimming pool had been the right thing. Just touch the rocks, this voice—his own voice, but a stronger and surer voice—said; just touch the rocks, and see in your mind the power…

…of an earthquake.

I’m just a boy! he thought. I can’t! I can’t do that!

But even as he thought this, Ethan knew the Gray Men were coming over the wall and more were climbing up and the bullets were running out and time was short because in just a little while they would all be dead.

Earthquake, he thought.

You can, said the voice. His own, but different. An older voice, maybe. One that knew things he did not, and maybe he was afraid to know. Because the fact was, he was scared almost to immobility. Paralyzed, waiting for the end.

You can, said the voice. Obey. And try. Do it now, before the time is gone.

He had no idea how to do this, but he realized something was expected of him. And yes, it seemed crazy to him, but he had to try. He placed his palms against the stones. He looked out upon the seething mass. He drew a long deep breath into his still-sore lungs, and when he exhaled, he saw vividly in his mind the hillside moving like the skin of a snake, and he fixed firmly upon that, and a second went by and another and another and nothing happened but the clicking of the guns going empty and the shrieks of the Gray Men climbing up and the sound of axes hitting deformed flesh…nothing…nothing at all. And when he was about to take his hands away from the stones and prepare for his own death maybe he felt a startling heat suddenly rise up from his deepest part and seem to scorch his flesh from the inside, or maybe it was like a surge of electricity that burned his ears and crackled in his hair, or maybe it was like none of these things but a sense of firm belief that he could do this, if he wanted to save himself and the others, and just that fast in the midst of this tumult and violence Ethan felt some part of him—some mystery part he did not understand—gather ferocious strength. He felt it leave his body like a whirlwind and and cast its will upon the earth.

The earth groaned like the awakening of an old man from a long and troubled slumber. And then the old man stretched and tossed, and in that instant the entire hilltop shifted.

It was not a gentle shifting. Cracks shot across the roadway and glass shattered in apartment windows behind Ethan. The Panther Ridge Apartment buildings made noises of wood splintering and balconies popping loose from their supports. But the walls shook off a few of the climbers and blew rock dust and fragments into the deformed faces of those below. Many of the defenders fell to their knees and some fell off the walkway, and Ethan also went to his knees but staggered up, still with his hands pressed against the stones. He had the sense of being part of the earth himself, of directing its throes through the earth element of rock, but otherwise his heart was pounding like crazy and he had already bitten blood from his lower lip. One of the watchtowers crashed over, its machine-gunner leaping out to safety. The hilltop shook again, more violently still, and more of the Gray Men lost their grips on the wall. The Gray Men fell down, monstrosity tangled up with monstrosity. The third tremor was the most violent. Dozens of rocks in the walls broke apart with the noise of small explosions. More glass blew from the apartment windows. The whole of Panther Ridge shifted, with the noise of ancient mountain stones shattering to pieces. Fissures cracked open and snaked down the hillside. Some of the Gray Men staggered and stepped into them as the fissures widened two or three feet. Many were still caught within when the fissures closed again, rock grinding against malformed flesh and crushing the alien-infected bones. Clawed hands reached up from their new graves and grasped at the air until they were still.

This assault by the earth, which continued with more minor quakes, was enough to show that the Gray Men for the most part retained their survival instincts. They turned and fled down the hillside, many dragging dead bodies with them for later feasting. They had come shrieking but they departed silently, as if in shame. Some looked back over their spiny shoulders, and their message was nearly the same as the graffiti declaration written on the wall of the Panther Ridge Apartments: Tomorrow Is Another Night.

Then they were just a mass of misshapen figures running and hobbling and shambling across the nightscape down at the bottom of the hill, and in another moment they were gone from sight.

The quakes had ended.

Ethan had taken his hands away from the stones. His task—however incredible it had been—was done. His palms and fingers felt burning hot. He had broken out in a cold sweat and was breathing hard, he was scared to death, he was dazed and disoriented but he had felt the awesome power that had emerged slide back into its hiding place deep within himself and become still and silent. And whatever he had been for the last few moments, he was once again only the boy who had wanted to build a very cool Visible Man.

Five.

“Seven dead, twelve wounded,” said John Douglas in the yellow lamplight. “Got six people with broken bones. Jane Petersen is not going to survive her wounds. And I think we should move Mitch Vandervere’s body as soon as possible, don’t you?”

“Yes,” said Olivia, her eyes weary and dark-circled. She was sitting at the desk in her apartment, with the damning yellow legal pads before her and a few ballpoint pens in a black leather holder. She had taken from a bottom drawer of her desk something that Vincent had given her as a joke on her fiftieth birthday four years ago: the Magic Eight Ball with its black ink inside and its floating icosahedron. She had set it before her on the desk, just as an element of the past. An element that had survived many terrors and tumults up until now. An element of Vincent, and their life together that now seemed like a magical fantasy, a time of joy that was very hard to remember. Yet the Magic Eight Ball brought some of it back. A little bit. La parte más pequeña. She made no decisions using it, but sometimes…sometimes…she thought she might, because it could be Vincent trying to speak to her, to guide and comfort her, through the black ink of the unknown.

“I liked Jane very much,” she heard herself say, hollowly. “A very kind woman. Yes, we should move Mitch’s body. Will you take care of that?” She was asking Dave McKane, who had sprawled himself out on the tattered brown sofa and was staring up at the cracked ceiling. The series of bizarre quakes had knocked the hell out of the old buildings. Some of the stairs had given way, part of the eastern wall had crumbled, just about every window was broken and was held together only by the duct tape, and some of the roofs had fallen in. Dave had already seen the dozens of cracks in the walls of his own apartment. He figured it was only a matter of time before the damned place collapsed. The floor of his bedroom had gone so crooked it was like walking across the deck of a ship at sea pitched at a dangerous angle by a rogue wave.

“I’ll get to it,” he said listlessly.

JayDee had splotches and streaks of other people’s blood on his shirt and his khaki trousers. The hospital—two apartments with the wall removed between them—was in the lower building and was being staffed by two nurses, one who had worked for a veterinarian in Fort Collins and one who had been a dental assistant when she was a young woman in Boise, Idaho, about thirty years ago. The make-do medical resources consisted of Band-Aids in various sizes, bottles of aspirin and sedatives, antiseptic, some plaster bandages to make casts, some wooden splints, a few surgical instruments such as probes and forceps and some dental tools, and a few bottles of pain-killers like Demerol and Vicodin.

“We need to do another bullet count,” Olivia said. She was trying very hard to keep her voice strong and steady. There were three other people in the room beside Dave and JayDee, all of whom shared some measure of responsibility for keeping track of supplies and the ammo. “Find out what everybody’s got left.”

“I’ve got five clips,” Dave answered. “Thirty-two bullets each. After that, I’m done.” He sat up on the sofa and took his baseball cap off. His face was deeply lined and his eyes dazed. “We can’t take another one like that. There are too many now. If those quakes hadn’t happened…they would’ve gotten in. No way we could’ve turned ’em back.”

“The quakes,” said Carmen Niega, a thin Hispanic woman who’d been a tax attorney in Denver. She had lived here a little less than four months, arriving with a half-dozen other wanderers. “Has anything like that ever happened before?”

“Never,” Olivia said. She looked toward the door, which hung open because it was now impossible to close in the crooked frame. Ethan Gaines was standing on the threshold, peering in. Behind him, the first dank yellow light of dawn had begun to filter through the thick soup of clouds. “You all right?” she asked him.

He nodded, his face wan and rock dust whitening his hair and clothes.

“Told you to get away from there,” she said. She glanced at the doctor. “John, I think he’s in shock. Would you—”

“No, I’m not,” Ethan replied before JayDee could speak. He came into the room, stumbling a little bit because he realized he probably was in shock. “I wanted to tell you. Tell all of you.” He paused, trying to figure out exactly what it was he wanted to say.

“Tell us what?” Dave prompted, the harshness back in his voice because he was dead tired, and he had to go put together a detail to bury people including the headless body of a pretty good guy who used to remember a few jokes and play poker with him and some of the others.

Ethan said, “I think…I caused the earthquakes.” He frowned. “I know I caused them.”

There was a moment’s silence. Then JayDee said quietly, “Ethan, let’s go to the hospital where you can lie down and rest, and I can give you some water and a seda—”

“I said…I caused the quakes,” Ethan repeated.

“Sure you did.” Dave put his cap back on and ran a hand across his bearded chin. “Oh yeah, you did a great job. Ran the Gray Men off, yeah. Also almost destroyed our complex here, but…hey…I don’t mind sleeping in a room that’s about to fall in. If my ceiling doesn’t collapse first. What’s wrong with you, kid? You lost your marbles along with your memory?”

“Stop it, Dave,” Olivia cautioned. She stood up. “Ethan, I want you to go with the doctor. Will you—”

“No, I won’t go.” Ethan came forward into the room with such a deliberate stride and such a determined expression that Carmen Niega, Russ Whitcomb and Joel Shuster backed away to give him room. He passed JayDee and walked up to the edge of Olivia’s desk. In the lamplight his eyes were bright blue and nearly frightening to Olivia in their fierce intensity. “I’m telling you. I knew to touch the rocks in the wall and…I don’t know, exactly…but…I saw what would happen, in my head. It was like I was making a command, and the earth did what I wanted. What I saw. Only…it was stronger than I thought it would be. Does that make any sense?”

“No, Ethan…it doesn’t. It just happened, that’s all. Why it happened at that moment, I don’t know. We were very lucky. But you didn’t cause the quakes. Now, I really do want you to go to the hospital. I want you to be quiet and rest down there, if you can.”

JayDee gave a grunt. It was going to be hard to rest, with all those injured people in there needing attention. Still, he could give the boy a swallow of the precious bottled water and two sleeping pills and that would take care of him for about twelve hours.

“Hey…listen!” Kitt Falkenberg had come to the door. She was about thirty years of age, had dirty blonde hair and a tall, lean physique and had been a star volleyball outside hitter at the University of Colorado. In her voice was the high, breathless strain of both excitement and tension. “I heard it from Tommy Cordell and then I saw it myself! The swimming pool! The quakes cracked it right down the middle. Only…it’s filling up!”

“What?” Dave roused himself to his feet.

“The pool,” Kitt repeated, her green eyes nearly luminous in her dirt-smudged face. “Water’s flooding in…coming up through the crack! Come on, you’ve gotta see it!”

It took them a few minutes to get out of the crooked apartment and down the hill. Olivia was first. JayDee walked at the back of the group alongside Ethan. About forty people had already gathered around the pool. In the yellow light of oncoming dawn Olivia pushed through the throng, with Dave behind her. They saw what Kitt had already seen: the pool had a jagged crack right along its center, from the drain to the shallow end, and water was streaming up from below. A man—Dave and Olivia recognized him as Paul Edson, who in his previous life had been a musician in a jazz band and played a very mean saxophone—was standing in the shallow end, and was leaning over to touch the water as it gurgled up.

“It’s cold,” Paul said. He cupped a handful and tasted it. “My God!” he said. “I think it’s spring water!”

Others entered the pool to also touch and taste the water. Olivia descended the steps and cupped a handful, then put it to her mouth. Her eyes found Dave. She said, nearly as breathlessly as Kitt had spoken, “We’ve been living here with a spring under the swimming pool. All this time. Clean water.” She brought herself back to her leadership role, and she pulled herself up straight and took on the mask again. “Everyone, get bottles or buckets or whatever you can find and fill them! Come on, hurry! Tell everyone else you see to get over here!” She didn’t have to tell anyone twice, and from the strength of the water rising from its underground channel there was really no need to hurry, except to beat the next contaminated rainfall. She thought they needed some kind of covering for the pool, something to keep the rain out, and she looked to Dave again to tell him that but Dave had retreated from the pool’s edge.

He was standing a few feet to Ethan’s right, staring at the boy. It had occurred to Dave that Ethan had said I felt like I needed to come here after Dave had seen him walking the length of the pool. Dave had realized that the crack had followed Ethan’s trail; the pool had broken open directly where the boy had been walking.

Ethan watched, his eyes heavy-lidded, as the water continued to stream in. He felt very tired, drifting toward sleep. Is this what shock feels like? he wondered. He watched the other people moving quickly to go get their bottles and buckets, and then he was aware of Dave McKane standing at his side, staring fixedly at him as if he had never really seen the boy before.

“What is it?” Ethan asked.

“I’m just looking,” Dave answered.

“At what?”

“I don’t know yet,” said Dave, and it was the truth. He turned away to get to his misshapen apartment and find whatever bottles he could. There was still the task of burying Mitch to take care of, as well as burying the other dead.

John Douglas decided it was time to guide the obviously dazed boy to the hospital and get him sedated and resting, and then with the help of his nurses tend to the broken bones and other wounds. It was going to be a rough morning…but then again, they all were.

Olivia came out of the pool and asked a couple of the men to devise some kind of canopy that might deflect the rain, but even as she proposed this idea she thought of the dwindling supply of food and ammunition, the damaged walls and the growing hoardes of Gray Men. Panther Ridge could not hold out much longer, even with an unlimited supply of clean water. She looked up at the dull yellow clouds of dawn. Somewhere out there, and all around what remained of the world, the Cyphers and Gorgons were still fighting. Maybe it would be an endless war, she thought; at least it would be a war that she and likely none of the defenders of Panther Ridge would ever see ended.

“All right,” she said to herself. There was so much to do, so much to take care of. She could not break, on this misty yellow morning. The pool was yielding a bounty of fresh water. That was kind of a miracle, wasn’t it? Just a little pond of hope, growing deeper by the moment.

“All right,” Olivia repeated, because it sounded good and strong. And then she turned away from the pool and went off to find her own bottles with which to collect a little of a liquid miracle.

The dead were buried by a detail of men, among them Dave McKane, who thought they were used to such a task but they never were. Dave worked hard and steadily and spoke to none of the others, and when the new graves were filled he lit a cigarette and walked over to the pool to smoke in silence and watch the water gush forth. He liked the noise it made, like the sound of a stream moving through a quiet forest. He had six cigarettes left and he was down to his last Bic lighter. Nasty habit anyway, he thought; ought to give it up someday. A low peal of thunder echoed off in the clouds above. Either that, or one side had just scored a hit on the other.

At the hospital, Ethan slept in a darkened room with the aid of two zaleplon capsules. In another room, John Douglas and the two nurses worked on the injured. The morning moved on. The fallen watchtower was being rebuilt, and the eastern wall repaired, and workers began to fill in damaged places in the other walls with more rocks and mortar. The sun remained a faint smear. Around noon a light rain began to fall, but by then a green canvas canopy had been put up on a wooden frame over the pool, which continued to be filled by the underground spring.

In his apartment, Dave McKane had looked up at the pipes and dead wires that hung from the cracked ceiling over his bed and he had crossed the crooked floor to the closet and gotten out his sleeping bag. He had taken off his shoes and baseball cap, unrolled the sleeping bag onto his gray sofa and pushed himself into it. One hour after trying to get some sleep, he was still awake and thinking.

He had been born into a hardscrabble farmer’s life by no-nonsense parents who believed in God, the Devil, and the pride of a job well done. He’d worked for years in the family’s corn and soybean fields. When the Gorgons had appeared just after ten o’clock on the morning of April third, he’d called his mom and pop at the farm outside Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to tell them he, Cheryl, and the boys would be there in a couple of days, that everything was going to be all right and it was not the end of the world and it was crazy, sure, and scary as hell but the military was going to take care of business.

Then CNN had shown the jets bursting into flames and falling like dead leaves, and the missiles exploding as they hit some kind of force field that protected the crafts, and the President in the Oval Office telling everyone to remain calm before he and all the rest of the government officials vanished. Around the world, panicked mobs searched for leadership and found that no one was there. Police and military forces disbanded to protect and shelter their own families and find a way to survive. Then the Cypher ships had arrived, and all cell phones, landlines, the Internet, televisions, radios, and electric power had gone dead.

Dave, Cheryl, and his two sons had never made it to Cedar Rapids. Nor to her parents’ home south of Colorado Springs, and they had never found out what happened to them or to Cheryl’s sister in San Francisco. It had been so fast it was still unreal. It was night, they were packing to leave the house in the glow of candles and the battery-powered lanterns, and Dave was carrying a couple of suitcases through the front room out to the camper parked on the other side of their pickup truck. In the next instant faceless, black-suited soldiers with weapons growing out of them were not only in the house, but were moving through the walls like shimmering ghosts. Cheryl was in the back room with Mike and Steven, and Dave had shouted for everyone to get to the camper now, and he dropped the suitcases and was reaching for his shotgun next to the open door when a blue flash licked at the windows. He remembered an ear-cracking blast and a sensation of first being kicked in the back by a heavy boot and then falling as if into a black pit…a great distance, falling, falling…falling, it seemed, from one world into another…and when he came to he was lying on the ground next to the scorched camper with his clothes smoking, the burning house and the pickup truck had collapsed into a crater and every tree in the woods all around had become a torch that burned with an eerie blue flame.

He had tried to get up, but his body was trembling, his nerves out of control, he couldn’t make anything work. His nose was bleeding and blood was crawling from his eyesockets. He had grabbed fistfuls of dirt and dragged himself across the ground as best he could, screaming the names of his wife and sons. In the sky above his torment, things left glowing blue and red trails that some might have called beautiful as they zigzagged across the dark.

How long it was Dave stayed at the house, after the fire had died and he had crawled down into the crater and found the blackened bodies, he didn’t know. It was a murky light, he was sitting amid the bodies in the smoking ruins trying to remember where the camper’s keys were and how he could change the four melted tires when the Cypher soldiers moved through again, silent and ghostly, on some unknown mission to an unknown destination. A couple of them looked at him as they passed by the crater’s edge, or rather their faceless, helmeted heads turned toward him and downward for the briefest of seconds. But he was nothing for them to contend with, in his burned rags with his blood-crusted nose and his bloody half-insane eyes and his mouth hanging open drooling threads of saliva.

He was nothing, on the scale of this war.

He remembered thinking that it was time to move. Time to go, if he was going. And he had looked at the very nice Bulova wristwatch Cheryl had given him on their tenth anniversary and seen that the crystal was gone and the hands were frozen at 9:27, and that had nearly killed the last part of his mind. But something must have kicked in to get him moving, because after that he remembered staggering along the highway in what must have been the dark of another night, with the smoke of burning trees, houses, and fields shrouding the earth. Headlights stabbed through the smoke as cars and vans with panicked people inside missed him by inches. He kept walking to his own unknown destination, and maybe he was shouting and raving about the end of the world because he thought in his ravaged mind, yes it really is.

His path had eventually brought him here to the fortress that the Panther Ridge Apartments had become, and though every day he prodded himself to take some supplies, saddle up a horse and go out on a journey to Cedar Rapids to see if his mother and father were still alive, the truth was he thought they were dead and any journey out there would be a torturous trip through an unbelievable Hell. He figured he wouldn’t make it two nights out, with the Gray Men on their search for fresh meat. Either that, or he might be caught in some battle between the aliens, and he would die burned to black ashes as Cheryl, Mike, and Steven had died.

Did that mean he was at heart a coward? he had asked himself. That for all his bar fights and bad-assedness and bravado, he was inside a frightened little shadow of what he portrayed himself to be?

Because, really…he was afraid. He was terrified. His friends were here. He was useful in this place. It was where he knew he would die, eventually. And from the numbers of Gray Men that had stormed the fortress last night, death was only a matter of using up five Uzi clips. Then it would all be over for him. Would it be tonight? Tomorrow night? One night next week? Impossible to know, but soon. And when it was over for him, it would likely be over for everyone else here, because not for very long would even freak earthquakes banish hunger for human meat from the bellies of those monsters.

Dave lay in his sleeping bag on his sofa and wished he had the last bottle of Jim Beam he’d finished off about a month ago. He could not make himself sleep. He could not let go of two things.

Ethan, saying with fierce conviction The earth did what I wanted.

And the fact that where the boy had walked at the bottom of the swimming pool, a crack had opened up to give them clean water.

They didn’t have to worry about rationing the bottled water anymore. Sure, there was plenty to worry about, but…not about water anymore.

The earth did what I wanted, he’d said.

And only Dave knew about Ethan walking the length of the pool, and when challenged the reply was I felt like I needed to come here.

A simple statement. But…there was something more to it. Much more. Dave had his own feelings, and abruptly he got out of his sleeping bag and put on his shoes and cap. He had seen black-helmeted soldiers glide through the walls of his house and seen monstrous things that used to be God-fearing, hard-working American citizens tearing at barbed wire for the taste of human meat and seen the glowing trails of alien battleships in the night sky, and he realized that things he had never dreamt could possibly be true were true, and forevermore nothing in this nightmare world could be considered impossible. Dave left his apartment and started down the hill toward the hospital, because he had some questions to ask a mysterious boy.

Six.

Even in the stronghold of sleep, Ethan was not safe.

He was standing atop the wall again, watching the multitude of distorted, disfigured and decaying figures swarming forward up the hillside. Guns were firing all around him and cut many of them down, but just as many of the Gray Men caught hold of the rocks, hooking spiked toes and fingers into the cracks and climbing up with the speed and determination of rabid hunger. They began to climb over the barbed wire, some pressing the coils down with their bodies so more could get over, others tearing with maddened fury through the wire to get at the defenders beyond.

The walls were about to be conquered. Guns were running out of ammo and falling silent. Some of the defenders were caught between ripping claws and torn by saw-blade teeth, others jumped in panic from the platform to the ground and fled to find shelter. Ethan backed away from spiny figures crawling over the wire before him. He was balanced on the edge of the platform, and suddenly an ashen-colored hand darted through the coils and caught him by the throat. Ethan saw a slender thing that might have been half-human and half-serpent pushing itself over the wire, and he was pulled toward it with terrible strength. A yellow-eyed face blotched with warty gray scales and topped with a shock of black hair stared into Ethan’s own face, and the thin-lipped mouth opened to show teeth already sharpened and broken by gnawing on human bones.

The mouth opened. The teeth glinted.

The creature spoke, in a rattling whisper.

“Go,” it said, “to the white mansion.” Then a bullet hit the side of its head and the black blood ran. The yellow eyes blinked, as if in indignant surprise. The hook-nailed hand released Ethan’s throat and the creature fell back across the barbed wire leaving pieces of gray flesh hanging from the barbs.

“Ethan? Ethan?”

Someone was shaking his shoulder. He felt himself flinch, and realized in his darkness that he was coming out of a solid sleep. He opened his eyes to the glow of an oil lamp on the table next to him. Curtains had been drawn over the windows to filter the afternoon’s hazy light. Rain was falling outside, thrashing at the broken glass which had been covered over with sheets of styrofoam. Water dripped from the ceiling at a half-dozen places. Ethan had no idea how long he’d been sleeping in this narrow bed in the small room that was part of the hospital. Someone had pulled a chair up next to his bed. Ethan saw a hard-lined face with a hawk’s beak of a nose. Dave McKane had removed his baseball cap, his multiple cowlicks sticking up. The man smelled like a wet dog.

“JayDee let me in,” Dave explained quietly. The door between this room and the other part of the hospital was closed, mostly. “Said you’d had enough rest, you oughta be okay.”

Ethan sat up on the bed. His body still ached and his mind was a little foggy. Three words were echoing around in his brain: the white mansion. He nodded. “I’m okay. Better, I guess.”

Dave grunted. He wore the pained expression of someone in desperate need of either a cigarette or a drink of whiskey, and the doctor had forbidden him to smoke in here and that last bottle of Beam was a golden memory. “I have to ask you some questions.” His voice was not harsh, but rather imploring. He paused and studied the knuckles of his hands for a moment. Rainwater glistened on the baseball cap, which was hung on the back of his chair. The rain itself had felt oily and hot on Dave’s skin as he’d walked from his apartment to the hospital, and he wondered how many alien poisons were in it.

“Go ahead,” Ethan said, sensing the man’s indecision of where to begin.

“Yeah,” Dave answered. “Okay. You said you caused the quakes. How is that possible? I mean…you’re a boy, right? A human? Aren’t you?”

“You must think so. You didn’t bring your machine gun.”

“I’m going to believe you’re human. Not something that looks human. Some experiment the Cyphers or the Gorgons made. But…if you caused the quakes, how did you do that?”

“I don’t really know,” Ethan said, and in his mind he thought the white mansion. He was trying to push that away, but it would not be pushed away, and stronger and stronger it was becoming. “I wanted it to happen. I put my hands on the wall. I wanted the earth to shake the Gray Men off. That’s all I could think to do.”

“You put your hands on the wall? And you just thought of what you wanted to happen, and it did?”

“Yes.”

“Uh-huh. Okay, then. Move my hat off the back of the chair and put it on my head.”

Ethan almost laughed, but the stony expression on Dave’s face said it would be a bad idea. “That would be a trick, wouldn’t it? I don’t think I can do that.”

“Why not? You caused a freakin’ earthquake! Using your mind, is that what you’re saying? And now you can’t use your mind to move a little hat?”

“I had to want to do it…like…because it was the only way. I don’t know how I did it. I just knew…right then…that minute…I had to try, because I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want anybody else to die. I had to do what I could…whatever I could. So…it just came out of me. I felt it. Then when it was over I felt it go back into me, and it went to sleep.”

“What did you feel? What came out of you and then went back in?” There was a note of sarcasm in the man’s voice.

“I guess…power. That’s all I can say.”

“Power.” Now the sarcasm dripped. “Yeah, right. A fifteen-year-old boy with the power to make an earthquake happen, but he can’t move a hat a couple of feet. Can you levitate yourself off the bed? See the future? Can you tell me how all this hell comes to a happy ending?”

“No,” Ethan said, his face shadowed in the lamplight. “No. And no, I can’t.”

Dave ran a hand across his forehead. He listened to the rain hammering down outside. He stared intensely into the boy’s eyes. “Did you know about the spring under the pool?”

“No.”

“Then what were you doing? Why were you walking around in there?”

“I thought it was where I ought to be.”

“Something told you that? Something spoke to you? Is that it?”

Ethan shrugged. “I don’t—”

“Why don’t you know?” Dave had almost shouted it, but he was holding himself back with a massive effort. “Or better yet…what the hell do you know? Not your real name, where you came from, or where your folks are. You just ‘woke up’ and you were running, isn’t that what you said? And suddenly you can make an earthquake, and a swimming pool cracks open right where you’ve been walking and clean water flows out? Because you thought it was where you ought to be?” Dave grinned crazily, with fury and frustration behind it. “Christ!” he said. “Okay, you found us some water! How about more food? More bullets, too. That’s what we need, because we’re not going to be able to hold off another attack. So conjure us up some more ammo, Ethan! Can you do that for us? If you can’t…we’re done for. Got it?”

Ethan frowned. He knew the seriousness of what Dave was saying, but something else was working at him and it was relentless. “The white mansion,” he said. “Have you ever heard of it?”

“What? Do you mean the White House? In Washington? What’s that got to do with—”

“The white mansion,” Ethan repeated. “Not the White House. I think it might be a real place, and I think I need to go there.”

“Really? Well, I think I need to go to the freakin’ moon. Are you crazy, kid? Is that it? You’re out of your mind?”

Ethan stared into the glow of the oil lamp. Who was he, really? Where had he come from? He didn’t know the answers to those questions, but he knew some truths and he decided to speak them. “I think I have to go there. I think something wants me to go. It’s important, but I don’t know why. This place…the apartments…it’s no good. No one can stay here. The next time they attack…it’s going to be all over for those who stay. But I believe the white mansion is a real place…and I think…I believe…something is telling me to go there.” He looked steadily into Dave’s eyes. “That name came to me in a dream. I keep thinking about it. Can you find out for me if it’s a real place, and where it is?”

“Oh, you’re having revelations in dreams now? What’s next? Water into wine? Make it whiskey, and I’m sold.”

“I’d settle for lemonade,” Ethan answered, his face solemn. “I’m telling you what you already know about Panther Ridge. Sir,” he said, so as not to sound disrespectful. “Can you please help me find out about the white mansion? Ask if anybody else has ever heard of it, and where it might be?”

“Oh, sure! We’ll check the Net, how about that?” Dave stood up. He put on his baseball cap, still damp with oily rain. He had no idea why he’d come here to ask the boy these questions, but there were no answers that suited him. Maybe he’d wanted there to be…something…some answer he could grasp and hold onto. Instead…the boy had to be crazy, and that was that.

Ethan got out of bed and followed Dave from the room. In the hospital, a few people were sitting in chairs either waiting for treatment or being treated. As in Dave’s apartment, pipes and wires dangled from the crooked ceiling. JayDee was busy applying a cast to the left arm of a weary-looking middle-aged man in a dirty white t-shirt and jeans, and the two nurses were tending to other patients.

“You okay to go?” JayDee asked Ethan as he worked on the man’s cast, and Ethan nodded. Dave was almost to the door, which like the one in Olivia’s apartment would not close in its damaged frame. “Be careful,” JayDee told Ethan. “Raining pretty hard out—”

“Hey! Just a minute! You…son!”

The man with the injured arm had spoken. He was staring at Ethan. “Wait. I know you from somewhere. Don’t I?”

Dave stopped just short of the door and looked back. Outside, the rain was slamming down.

Ethan didn’t recognize the man, who had curly gray hair, brown eyes and the patch of a bandage across his bruised forehead. “I don’t…think so.” A little spark jumped in his heart. “Do you know me?”

“From somewhere. I came in a few days ago, with my wife. It seems like I’ve seen you before. Damn, that’s hurting!” he protested to JayDee, and then he returned his attention to the boy. “I think I’ve seen you, but I can’t remember from where. Wait a minute…wait a minute…you had on…different clothes. A shirt…a dark red shirt, with one sleeve torn off.”

“That’s right.” Dave came back to stand nearer. “That’s what he was wearing when he was brought in yesterday. So where’d you see him?”

The man started to speak and then seemed to stop himself. He wore an expression of dismay.

“Go ahead, tell us,” JayDee urged, pausing in his wrapping of the plaster bandages.

“I remember,” the man said. “We were with another group. In a strip mall. Maybe six or seven miles from here. The place was wrecked. We were trying to find a new place to hide, because our other place was torn up. They were fighting up over us…and we were trying to find somewhere to crawl into. Then…” He looked from Ethan to Dave and back again, and once more he seemed not to know what to say. “The aliens must’ve just gone through. We came to a place where there were bodies. People dead maybe a few hours…lying in the bricks where the walls had been blown apart. And…you. You were lying there, too. That’s where I saw you. Only…you were dead. Like the others. Six people, all dead. Lying in those bricks, and that’s where you were.”

“Bullshit!” Dave snapped, with rising anger. “If it was him lying there, you can see he’s not dead!”

“Yeah, but…he was dead. It looked like an explosion had thrown them around the room and blasted the walls out, but…his face…he looked like he was just sleeping, and Kay said for me to check him and make sure…because he was only a boy and we shouldn’t leave him. So…I checked his heartbeat and his pulse, and there was nothing.” His gaze found the floor. “I did check. I did. There was—”

“You were wrong,” Dave interrupted. His face had reddened. “Damned wrong! Maybe his heart and pulse were slow, but…look at him! Does he look dead to you?” And then Dave caught JayDee staring at him, and Dave remembered he and the doc standing in the Secure Room looking at the ugly black bruises on Ethan’s chest and back, and JayDee saying I think he’s suffered a very violent concussive event. An explosion of some kind. Might have been caught in a shockwave. “Wrong,” Dave repeated to the man with the broken arm, and then he turned away and walked out because questions led to questions and there were no answers and even in a madhouse world like this had become a dead boy did not rise from the dead. He kept walking, faster and faster, out into the driving rain that felt like small lead weights striking his skull, back and shoulders.

The white mansion, he thought as he strode up the hill. It was crazy. Made no sense. Nothing did anymore. The white mansion, my ass, he thought.

But he also thought how resolute the boy’s voice had been, when Ethan had said I think I have to go there.

And more unsettling…I believe something is telling me to go there.

Dave looked back and saw Ethan following, a slim figure almost obscured by the rain. He started to pause and wait for the boy, but he kept going. He didn’t know if he thought Ethan was crazy, or…

…something else?

Nobody could make an earthquake, Dave thought as he walked through the downpour. And that weirdness about the swimming pool, and the white mansion, and now the boy lying dead in the bricks of a destroyed strip mall, wearing the one-sleeved dark red shirt he’d had on yesterday.

But still…the boy, saying I believe something is telling me to go there.

Go where? And why? And how would anybody even figure out what the damned place was, and where it was?

Would be nice, Dave thought, for this so-called voice that Ethan is hearing to tell him the whole story and not just bits and pieces.

For all his toughness, for all his hardness and bitterness about what this world and his life—all their lives—had turned into, Dave McKane was suddenly overcome.

He felt himself stagger. He felt his knees buckle. He felt the hard rain beating on his back, driving him down. He had the crazed feeling that he was coming apart at the seams, himself becoming a Gray Man in this poisoned land, and once a certain threshold was crossed in that change he could never return to what he’d been.

Suddenly he was on his knees on the roadway, and he pressed his hands to his mouth to contain a cry for mercy, not just for himself but for all of them, all who had suffered and lost loved ones and become prisoners here waiting to die. He felt tears burning his eyes, but they were quickly washed away. He thought that if he let himself cry he would go over the edge, and all his pretend strength would fly away and be gone, baby, gone.

So he just knelt there in the pouring rain, and he hung on to whatever he had left.

“You need some help?”

Dave looked up. Ethan was standing over him. The boy offered a hand.

Dave wanted to believe in something. Anything, to get him to tomorrow. He asked himself if it was wrong to believe—at least in this moment—that Ethan Gaines could make the earth quake, that he had felt the movement of a spring beneath the pool’s concrete and earth’s rock, that he had been dead and brought back to life by some force unknown, and that he was being directed to go to a place called the white mansion?

Was it wrong, in this moment?

He didn’t know, but at least in this moment with aliens battling across the world and nightmare creatures being spawned from their energies and poisons, he did believe. Just a little, just enough to get him to tomorrow.

But even so, he rejected the hand and stood up on his own.

He began walking again up the hillside to his crumbling apartment, more slowly now, with the labor of intense deliberation, and after a moment meant to give Dave McKane his space, the boy followed nearly in his footsteps.

Seven.

Near midnight, Dave spoke the words he’d been trying to get out for awhile but they hadn’t come. They were ready now.

“What if there’s a real place called the white mansion?”

“Surely there is,” John Douglas answered. “A town somewhere. Or used to be a town. Could be in another country.” He placed his tiles upon the Scrabble board to spell the word oasis, and then he took five more tiles followed by a long drink from his full cup of fresh water. “But just because Ethan heard it supposedly spoken to him in a dream…that doesn’t mean very much. Does it?” He peered across the board at Dave. Two oil lamps and a candle lantern burned in the doctor’s apartment, number 108, which had sustained shattered windows and a half-dozen fissures down the walls. The door had been reshaped with a handsaw to fit the warped frame. In any other cirmcumstance, the entire apartment complex would have been evacuated and yellow-taped off as a condemned property, but the beggars here could not be choosers.

Olivia Quintero studied the board on the scarred table between them. A rifle leaned against the chair at her side. The Gray Men had not come tonight, in the pouring rain. They might yet attack before dawn, but for now they were quiet. She needed to go to sleep, but Dave had asked her to join him and the doctor here, and it was at least a way to relax a little. The best she could do was add an E and a L to the word bow. She chose two more tiles, a T and a blank. “What do you think about the story?” Her question was directed to JayDee. “About Ethan lying dead?”

“I think the man was in a mental state and he missed the heartbeat and pulse.”

“Maybe so. But after what you told me in my office…about the bruises. You were thinking the boy was caught in a shockwave and he ought to be dead. Isn’t that right?”

“I didn’t put it exactly like that.”

“You didn’t have to.” She watched as Dave put an R in front of oar. “That was your meaning. As I recall, you were amazed he didn’t at least have major internal injuries, and he could still walk.” She leaned back in her chair, the better to judge the expressions of both men. “Dave, what are you thinking?”

Dave took his time. He watched JayDee add with before the word draw. Then he said, without looking at Olivia, “I’m not sure Ethan is what he seems to be. I don’t know what the hell he is, but I’d say…if he really did cause those quakes…somehow…by using some force we don’t—”

“Impossible!” scoffed the doctor.

“Is it?” Dave took a drink from his own cup of water. “Look, what do we know about anything anymore? What can we be sure of? All this the last two years…it defies everything humans ever believed in. And the Gray Men…mutating so fast. Who would have ever thought it was possible? And it wouldn’t have been possible, without the aliens. Without whatever it is they’ve infected the world with. Okay…” He turned his chair to more directly face the doctor. “What if…Ethan is something different. Maybe an experiment the Cyphers or Gorgons made—”

“His blood didn’t fry,” JayDee reminded him.

“That’s right, but still…something different. Something more advanced.”

“Not human?” Olivia asked. “He looks like a boy, but he’s not?”

“I don’t know. I’m just trying to—”

“Talk yourself into believing Ethan Gaines has come to Panther Ridge to save us?” JayDee’s white eyebrows went up. “To deliver the mighty earthquakes to keep the Gray Men from eating us alive? If that’s so, even Ethan has to understand that one more tremor like that, and Panther Ridge is a pile of rubble.”

“It’s a pile of rubble already,” Dave shot back. He took down another swallow of water and imagined it tasting like Beam, but it was plenty good enough as it was. “More than that. It’s a graveyard.”

Neither JayDee nor Olivia spoke. The doctor shifted uncomfortably in his chair, and Olivia regarded her little rack of letter tiles as if she actually was concentrating on the game and not just trying to avoid thinking too much about the onrushing future.

“We’re all going to die here,” Dave went on. “We can’t hold out. That’s what’s impossible.” He fired a quick dark glance at JayDee. “I’ve been asking around, if anybody has ever heard of ‘the white mansion.’ So far, nothing. I’ve asked if anybody’s got a road atlas, but again…no. Maybe somebody’ll come up with something, maybe not. In the meantime, I know there’s a library at the high school.” From the high school is where much of JayDee’s medical supplies had come, and some of the canned food, but Dave’s last trip there had been months ago. “I’m taking a horse over there in the morning, and I’m going to see if I can find anything…some maps, maybe…anything that could help.”

Olivia said, “You can’t go out alone. You shouldn’t have gone out alone after Ethan. It was foolish. And you know you shouldn’t go out at all, unless you’re looking for food and ammo.”

“Yeah, but I’m going anyway. I won’t ask anybody to go with me, I can handle it.”

Olivia paused, examining her tiles again. She decided to save her blank and placed dart on the board, then she chose three more tiles, one a dreaded Z. “You believe in this?” she asked quietly, as the oil lamps made soft guttering sounds. “That Ethan is wanting to go to a real place? That he’s feeling…what would the word be…summoned? And that this white mansion place isn’t halfway around the world?”

“Summoned?” JayDee managed a crooked smile but it quickly slipped away. “Summoned by what? A voice in a dream? That’s what you have to go on?” The question was aimed at Dave.

“I have to go on what the boy tells me,” Dave replied firmly. “Sure, that’s all I’ve got…but I do know I saw the earthquakes. Felt ’em, too. I believe he knew the spring was there before it came up. I think he sensed it. Don’t ask me, I can’t explain.” He leaned forward slightly, looking from John Douglas to Olivia and back again. “He’s asked me to help him find this place. He thinks it’s real enough, and he says it’s pulling at him. Can it be found?” Dave shrugged. “Is it fifty miles away? A hundred? A thousand? Don’t know. I have to get to that library tomorrow and try to find some maps. That’s the best I can do. And John…you know what those bruises looked like on his chest and back. You said it yourself…you were surprised his lungs hadn’t burst and he was still breathing.”

“True, I did,” JayDee answered, but there was a note of pity in his voice. “I am amazed he’s alive. But Dave…that doesn’t mean he died and has risen from the dead.”

Dave was silent for awhile. The rain thrashed harder against the crooked roofs and broken walls of the Panther Ridge Apartments, whose glory was a distant memory.

Dave looked directly into JayDee’s eyes. He said in a low, restrained voice, “But what if it does?”

JayDee slapped the edge of the table with both hands, upsetting all the little tiles of all the little words. He stood up, a frown etched across his face. “I’m not listening to this. Thank you for the company. I’m getting some sleep now, goodnight to you both.” He motioned toward the door. “Push hard, it sticks.”

Dave and Olivia said goodnight to JayDee. Dave picked his Uzi in its holster up from the floor beside his chair and Olivia hefted her rifle. Dave did have to push hard against the door. In the outside corridor, they walked together toward the stairs.

“It seems to me,” Olivia said, breaking their silence, “that you want to believe in something very badly.”

“Yeah, that’s probably right. Sad, huh?”

“Not sad. I have to say…I wonder about Ethan myself. John does too, only he doesn’t want to say so directly. It’s hard to believe in very much anymore. That there’s a purpose to anything.” She stopped walking, and so did Dave. “So you believe that Ethan has a purpose? And it’s beneficial to us, somehow? What might that be?”

“No idea. But the things he’s done so far have helped us. I don’t know what he is or why he’s here, but I say…if he can help us…then I need to help him do what he’s asking. If that means following a direction he heard in a dream, to the best of my ability…yeah, I’m for it. You should be too. We all should be. Otherwise, we’re just waiting to fill up the graveyard, and I don’t want to wait for that anymore.”

“Hm,” said Olivia, and she pondered that before she spoke again. Rain was pouring off the roof to their right. Lightning flickered across the troubled darkness. “I suppose…maybe I’m afraid to believe. That would mean opening yourself up again, wouldn’t it? I guess it’s safer to sit in a room with a picture of your dead husband and think…not too much longer now, and we’ll be together.”

“Don’t give up,” Dave said.

“Trust in a boy who has no memory? Trust in three words from a dream? That’s hanging on with your fingernails, I think.”

“Sure it is. But it is hanging on.”

Olivia nodded and smiled faintly. There was so much pain behind the smile that Dave had to lower his head and look away. “I’ll go with you tomorrow,” she told him.

“You don’t have to. No need for two of us to ride out.”

“Maybe I also want to hang on a little longer. Besides, they’re my horses.” The herd had come from the ranch she’d owned with Vincent. Watching them being slaughtered and eaten, one after the other, had been at first devastating, and now a matter of survival.

“Okay.” Dave put a hand on her shoulder. “Meet at the corral at eight?”

“I’ll be there.”

Dave had no doubt she would be. Shielding themselves as best they could from the downpour, they parted ways at the bottom of the steps. Dave returned to his apartment and his sleeping bag on the gray sofa. Olivia went to her apartment, touched a match to the wick of a lamp and sat at her desk, and there she picked up the Magic Eight Ball Vincent had given her. She turned it between her hands, remembering the day this had come to her wrapped in red paper with a silver ribbon. It had been, it seemed, a lifetime ago.

And now, against all logic and reason, she had to ask a question. It was whispered, as if into Vincent’s listening ear.

“Should I believe?”

She shook the ball and then turned it over.

The little white plastic die emerged from its inky soup.

Maybe it was Vincent answering her, maybe it was Fate, maybe it was only happenstance, which she certainly thought was the most likely.

But the answer was: You may rely on it.

She took the lamp with her, and she went into the next room and undressed. She slid into her bed where good dreams and belief in miracles did not come easily, but that always had a pistol tucked under the pillow.

Eight.

A brooding yellow sky stretched overhead. There was no

wind, but the air smelled burnt. The horses were skittish, nervous to the touch. Dave rode alongside Olivia as they went through the metal-plated door that had been opened for them. As soon as they were descending the road, the door was closed and locked again, according to Olivia’s orders. At each corner of the wall that had been rebuilt and fortified around the Panther Ridge Apartments the machine gunners sat behind their weapons, scanning both the silent sky and the ominous earth.

The two riders headed toward the high school down in the valley below. Occasionally on the hillside they passed a hand, arm, or head of a nightmarish creature, caught like strange flowers in fissures in the ground. The vultures were busy; Dave thought that they didn’t care what meat they ate, and so even those things were likely to be corrupted and turned into…what?

He had his Uzi in his shoulder holster and in a holster at his belt, a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolver that had belonged to Mitch Vandervere. Mitch’s apartment had yielded four boxes of bullets, twenty each, and the gun held five rounds. That was the way of things. When someone fell, you drew straws or cards with whoever else was on the burial detail and took the departed’s weapons and ammo, no fighting or squabbling allowed, and Dave had won high card over Mitch’s headless corpse. So in Dave’s possession were 80 Magnum rounds and five clips of thirty-two slugs each for the Uzi, and that was it for now. Olivia had her rifle slung across her shoulder, along with a small black leather bag holding thirty more bullets.

They didn’t speak as they rode. They had not talked about their mission before they’d left. A few men had offered to ride with them, as extra protection, but the offerings had been half-hearted, and Olivia had said no, they’d manage this by themselves.

They crossed open ground scarred by craters with edges seared crusted and black by the alien weapons. The road’s asphalt was cracked and also cratered, and Olivia thought the Earth was being transformed into a planet the Cyphers and Gorgons perhaps better understood: a ruined charnel house of war that in another year or two would no longer be suitable for human life. Everything would be contaminated, if it wasn’t already. And now she had to stop these thoughts before they overwhelmed her, and she had tears in her eyes and a deep, sick sadness in her heart and that old ticking time bomb in her mind that said it would be so easy and so right to join Vincent. Her spirit was so near to being extinguished. Her life force, tattered and destroyed. She could feel it leaving her, day by day. When she and Dave got back behind the walls, she knew two or three more people would probably have shot themselves. They were losing more and more, and it was getting faster now.

The white mansion, she thought as they neared the high school. Ethan’s name right up there on the weather-beaten sign. The building itself a wreckage. And in the parking lot…what was that? Three huge…things…lying there covered with vultures like dark rippling skins…the thick, hideous bodies burned to crisps and seeping black fluids like scorched engine oil. And here and there the outlines of where smaller bodies had been lying, only now they were reduced to a residue of shiny ebony material like shreds of rubber. She knew what those were, she’d seen them before. The remnants of Cypher soldiers, bubbling and melting away to nothingness. But those creatures…those monsters…Olivia’s mind had to fix on something else, and quickly. “Dave?” she said in a weak voice, “what happened to the cars? The ones that used to be here?”

“Don’t ask,” he said, because Hannah Grimes had told him what she’d seen through the binoculars and he’d informed Hannah—a tough old bird if there ever was one—to keep that pinned under her wig, for the sake of Christ. So far Hannah wasn’t talking, but it was probably just a matter of time. Creating alien flesh out of earthly metal was a new one; when that got around Panther Ridge, Katie bar the fucking door.

The horses nickered and shivered and would not go into the parking lot. “Go on, go on,” said Dave to his mount but the animal’s eyes had gotten wild and it rumbled like an avalanche deep in its lungs, the message being You may be a damned fool but I am not. No further, bucko.

“What are those?” Olivia had finally made herself fix on the monsters, even as her horse began to back away as if fearful of stepping into a tarpit. “Dave?”

“Whatever they were, they’re dead.” He got down from the saddle and looked for a place to tie his horse. Last time he’d been here, a few months back, he’d used the front fender of a pickup truck. That same truck had recently walked away and might be lying over there plucked by vultures. He noted the impressions in the asphalt that might have been caused by the weight of those things. Flesh from metal. Life from an inanimate object. A good trick, if you could do it. He recalled something he’d read maybe in a book at his own high school, but it had stuck with him because he’d thought it had sounded cool. How did it go? Something like… “Any super-advanced technology seems like magic.” Was that it? No, but close enough. Well, here was the super-advanced technology on full magical display.

Damn ’em, he thought. Their weapons were getting stranger and more deadly. An arms race, Ethan had said. “Yeah, and we’re stuck right in the fuckin’ middle,” Dave said to that thought, which made Olivia ask, “What?” and he just shrugged and walked the horse to a STOP sign that stood near the entrance to the lot. It had been bent almost in half by possibly the same concussion that had blown out the school’s windows. “You want to stay here, that’s fine with me,” he said. “I can find the library.”

Olivia was already dismounting. She walked her jittery horse over and tied it up to the sign as well. Her eyes were fixed on Dave, but they wanted to slide over to look at the dead creatures again, and she knew she couldn’t stay out here alone.

She unslung the rifle from her shoulder, a smooth move she was getting good at. Never in her life would she have believed she might become a warrior. But here she was, ready to fight if she had to.

“Let’s go,” she said. They followed a cracked concrete path up to stone stairs that entered the building. One door had been blown inward off its hinges, the other hung crookedly like a Saturday night drunk. Or, Dave mused, how Saturday night drunks used to hang. The light within was murky, stained yellow like the ugly sky. Glass crunched under their boots, a noise that seemed to Olivia to be terribly loud in this silent place.

But not quite silent. Water dripped from the ceiling in a hundred places. Wet papers had grown to the floor and turned the color of strong tea. The floor tiles gave a little as Dave and Olivia walked; the floor itself felt spongy, as if upheld by rotten beams just on the verge of collapse. They passed what had once been a trophy case, the pride of the high school’s sports teams, now shattered and the trophies darkened by waterstains. A huge mural on one wall that had likely been painted by students depicted the world and figures surrounding it linked arm in arm. The mural was blotched by large brown scabs where the wall’s plaster had fallen away, but the faded message “The Family Of Man” was still legible.

“That was the office,” Dave said as they passed an open doorway. “Lunchroom is up this way. I found the medical supplies in a room a little further along. The library must be past that.”

Olivia nodded. The falling water tap…tap…tapped. Puddles washed around discarded notebooks and debris that had spilled from open lockers in the students’ panic to get home on that day in April. She could imagine the teachers and the principal trying to keep order, the intercom system crackling, the parents swarming these halls in search of their children while the newscasts showed the Gorgon ships destroying cities all over the world. Only ghosts remained here now, she thought. The ghosts of a way of life; the ghosts of not only the American Dream, but the dream of the Family of Man.

“You okay?” Dave asked.

She said, “Yes,” but he knew she was not so he replied, “We won’t be in here too long,” and she said nothing else.

They kept moving forward into the yellowed gloom. A tarnished trumpet lay on the warped floor. Gideon has left the building, Olivia thought. That almost made her laugh, but there was too much sadness in this ruin, too much expectation and promise gone and lost. She dared not let herself think about what might have happened to many of the students, parents and teachers. Some of them might have been among the Gray Men…if not here, then somewhere else.

“This,” Dave said, “must be the place.”

He had stopped in the hallway just ahead of her. On either side of rows of lockers was a door marked library with a cracked glass inset. “Let’s take a look,” Dave told her, but before he opened the door he slid the .357 Magnum revolver out of his belt holster and clicked off the safety.

Olivia followed him in, and left the door open behind them.

It was a pretty mess. A complete disaster. The windows were broken out and the rain and wind had swept in and all the standing shelves had gone over. Everything was scattered and drenched. Yellow and green mold grew in patches on the walls and the floor, and both the visitors knew not to touch that. There was a sickly-sweet odor in the air, a vile miasma of corruption. Part of the ceiling had collapsed and wires and pipes were hanging down. On the floor the books were everywhere, locked together by dampness and mold.

They stood looking at the room in silence.

“Jeez,” Dave finally said. He frowned and wished he had a cigarette. “I guess none of the bastards like to read, huh?”

Now that did strike Olivia. She laughed, a pure and hearty laugh, and Dave liked the sound of it. He gave a tight, passing smile and shrugged. The light was bad in here. He didn’t like the idea of getting on his knees in that muck and weird mold and hunting for road maps. The place looked like somebody had turned it upside down and shaken it a few times. He thought they needed a shovel to go through all this, or at least rubber gloves. He cursed himself for not thinking of that. But they were here now, so where to begin?

Good question.

He began to try to move books aside with his foot, and this worked okay at first but at the lower level things had turned gluey and were stuck to the floor. Some of the books looked to have nearly melted away, and there was no telling what they once had been. He saw nothing of maps or road atlases, and he asked himself how would he know any if he saw them in this wet mess?

“Would this do?” Olivia had placed her foot on a battered world globe that lay on the floor.

“I don’t think so. I don’t know.” Dave heard a note of resignation in his voice. “Even if we found maps, I don’t know what we’d be looking for. Christ…this didn’t exactly turn out like I thought it would.” He kicked some melted books aside. “Stupid, I guess.”

“Not stupid,” said Olivia. “Hopeful.”

“Yeah. Well…maybe that’s as stupid as you can get these days.”

Olivia began moving the fragments and wet skeletons of books aside with her booted foot as well. So much for the ideas and intellect of men, she thought. She uncovered some blue-bound Hardy Boys mysteries, and at that she almost teared up again. Stay strong, she told herself. Easy to say, tough to do. “I’ve known you long enough,” she said, “to know you’re the kind of man who doesn’t believe in…let’s say…miracles. But this boy has changed your mind? Dave, if this is even a real place, it could be anywhere. And why? What’s telling him to go there?”

“He’s a weird kid,” was all Dave could offer, as he continued to search through the sodden mess.

“Yes, I get that. But sometimes…you know…dreams are just dreams. I’ve had plenty of bad ones. Sure you have too.”

“Yeah,” Dave said. He looked at Olivia in the dim yellow light. “I know it’s crazy. I know being here, doing this, is crazy. But still…you know Ethan is right. JayDee does too. We can’t hang on much longer. We’re going to have to move…find some other place, if we want to stay alive.”

“You think the White Mansion is that place?”

“Hell if I know, but Panther Ridge is about done.” He took his dirty baseball cap off, wiped the small beads of sweat from his forehead and then put the cap back on. “Ethan is different, Olivia. Whether that’s good or bad, I don’t know. But he’s helped us so far…I believe that. Call me stupid or crazy or whatever you like, but I’m here…that’s all I know.”

She had no answer for any of that. She saw the librarian’s office and the check-out counter across the room. A rack of DVD movies had fallen over and plastic cracked under her feet as she approached the counter. In all this chaos a small metal statue of a football player stood upright on the countertop, holding a little paper American flag in one fist and a football cradled in the other arm like a beloved child.

With Olivia’s next forward step, the floor beneath her suddenly sagged. There was a thick wet sound of something rotted giving way. She cried out as her right leg went through the floor. She thought she was going all the way through into the basement and she nearly let go of her rifle to grab at the tiles around her but then she stopped, just the one leg dangling down into darkness.

Dave was there at her side in an instant, helping her up. “Easy, easy,” he said. “You okay? Hurt your leg?”

“Bumped my knee pretty good. That’s about it. Watch the floor, it bites.”

“Yeah, I see.” Dave peered into the hole but could really see nothing but dark. Water dripped down there and from the basement rose an acrid, musty odor as if from a diseased garden of poison mushrooms. “Careful.”

“You too. Hey,” she said, having seen something of interest. “There’s a file cabinet behind the counter. Worth opening up.”

“Right. Come on, stay with me.”

They went around behind the check-out counter to the file cabinet, which appeared to have survived undamaged through whatever storm had raged in here. Dave opened the top drawer to find what appeared to be a couple of years’ worth of school newspapers, the Gazette. The second drawer held boxes of supplies like pencils, pens, rubber bands, gem clips and the like. The third drawer was mostly empty except for a few pads of printer paper, and the fourth and last drawer held two mousetraps.

“More drawers behind the check-out counter,” Olivia noted, and she found herself limping over there because she really had taken a hard shot to the knee. Thing’s going to swell up on me, she thought. Magnifico! Just what she needed, to have to hobble around for a few days like an old grandmother.

She opened the top drawer behind the counter and found another supply of pens, notepads, paper clips and someone’s stash of several flavors of Orbit gum. The next drawer held a thick red-and-gold yearbook The Mountaineer from the past year, a couple of old cell phones that must have been confiscated on The Day, and…nearly hidden under the yearbook was something else. She lifted The Mountaineer out and saw the cover of a highway twisting through a pine forest. It was a Rand-McNally United States Road Atlas, three years old. A dead roach had been smashed flat between The Mountaineer and McNally. “Here!” Olivia said, as she took the road atlas out. A librarian’s stern command was written across the cover in red Sharpie: Not To Leave This Room.

“Got what you need,” she told Dave, with not just a little measure of triumph.

Dave came over to see. “Yes!” He was aware he hadn’t sounded excited in a very long time, and this note in his voice surprised him. “Okay, then. Good! It’s a start, at least.” He rolled the atlas up and stuck it into the waistband of his jeans. “I don’t know what we’ll be looking for, but—”

The floor cracked. Just a quiet noise, but an ominous one.

“I think we should—” get out of here, Olivia was going to say, but she didn’t have the chance.

Something was crawling up from the hole in the library floor.

It came up, swaying like a cobra. It was thin and gray-fleshed and had been a woman at one time, for the sagging exposed breasts and the scraggly patches of long, white hair. The sunken eyes in the skull-like face darted here and there, seeking either the sources of the human voices or where the smell of the fresh meat was coming from. The claw-like hands scrabbled to pull the body completely free but something seemed to be obstructing it, and the thing’s mouth twisted with frustration and a little rattling noise came from the dry throat. Olivia started to cry out but checked herself. No time for that. Grim-lipped, she swung her rifle up to fire instead.

The library’s floor rippled and heaved like a dirty ocean wave. The wet tiles burst open as clawed hands pushed their way free. Dave thought at first that he and Olivia had stumbled across a sleeping nest of Gray Men, and this was partly true…but in the next few seconds, as the floor continued to split apart and the glistening gray flesh slid out he realized with another start of horror that something very different had been incubating in the basement of the Ethan Gaines High School.

Dave had worked as a teenager on a crew demolishing old houses and hauling the timbers and bricks away. Hey, hey! the foreman had called one hot August afternoon. Looky over here!

And so Dave had seen, caught within a wall that had just been broken open, the sight of a dozen or more rats squealing and scrambling in their attempt to escape, but they had been joined and nearly knotted tail-to-tail in a circle and could not go in any one direction, and a few had died and begun to rot while the living ones continued to thrash wildly, their teeth bared, eyes glittering and breath rasping in their desperation.

It’s a Rat King, the foreman had said. Seen only one of ’em before, my whole life. They got stuck in a little space, peed on each other, and their tails growed together. Nasty!

The foreman had lifted his shovel and gone to work smashing the Rat King, which died in a bloody and chittering mess. To Dave had gone the honor of throwing the remains into a garbage can.

Now, many years later in this nightmare world, Dave McKane was watching a Rat King made up of Gray Men crawling from the broken floor.

Their legs had grown together into something resembling long, thin tentacles not unlike rat tails. Some of the bodies had been engulfed by other bodies so that they had nearly disappeared one into the other, cannibalized or absorbed, and maybe there were twenty or more of them in this Rat King circle, what had been men, women, and children, and heads and arms were not always where they were supposed to be. What remained of their clothes were sodden, dark-stained rags. Scabrous gray flesh pulled itself up from the basement. The ruined faces and misshapen heads strained on their necks. In some of the gaping mouths glinted teeth like little razor blades, and in others showed rows of sharklike rippers.

Dave realized at once that there were two problems.

This Rat King circle shared a common purpose and a direction, and the writhing monster lay between him, Olivia, and the way out.

Her face a rictus of terror, Olivia had backed up and was pressed against him. The thing struggled to get free from the basement, with wet books and moldy pages plastered upon its flesh. The Rat King of Gray Men made no noise but a hissing and a slithering, and now it appeared to be gathering its tentacles beneath itself in an effort to stand. Dave thought that if they were going to get out of here they had to go now.

He opened fire with his Magnum, which was incredibly loud and bright with its bloom of flame. Two shots, and two of the nightmarish faces were blasted away. Then Olivia’s rifle spoke, drilling a hole through the white-haired head of the female creature that had first begun to climb out. Black fluid spurted from the wound. Dave grasped Olivia’s shoulder, shouted, “Let’s move!” in the strongest voice he could summon and pulled her with him around the counter. The mass of melded-together Gray Men moved faster; it reached for them with serpentine arms. A gray mallet of a hand with seven fingers grasped Olivia’s right ankle and she would’ve fallen into the midst of them had Dave not held onto her with all his strength. Olivia sent a bullet into what might have once been a human shoulder, and she pulled free with the resolve that if she didn’t, she was dead. Dave fired again into one of the faces. Gray flesh and dark matter spattered the library walls. A low moaning like a chorus of the damned rose from the creature. The thing was hauling itself forward on elbows and gray bellies, the broken heads lolling. The tentacled appendages pushed at the floor. The bared teeth of the remaining heads snapped at Olivia and Dave, and a gray forest of arms reached out for bloody sustenance. The two humans in the room opened fire once more at a range of no further than four or five feet. Dave’s revolver went empty and he drew the Uzi from its holster, spraying the thing’s body with 9mm bullets.

With a high, eerie cry that came from each mouth at the same time, the mutated horror suddenly began to retreat, pulling itself back to its cavern beneath the floor. There was room enough to get past. Dave shoved Olivia toward the door, mindful of her knee but mindful also of keeping them both alive. He fired his last bullet of the clip into the gray body and saw what looked to be a child’s distorted face in its depths, either grown into or consumed by the others. The eyes were open and the mouth, which had no lower jaw, gaped wide as if in perpetual hunger or torment. Then Dave was out the door. They ran for daylight, Olivia damning her hurt knee and moving as fast as she could. Dave stayed beside her, giving her a shoulder to lean on. He thought that if either one of them dared to look back, it would prove their sanity had been permanently checked out in the Ethan Gaines library.

Neither one looked back, but Olivia was sobbing when she untied her horse and swung herself up. Dave was too tough to cry, but his stomach betrayed him. His breakfast of a pair of biscuits and a few spoonfuls of Spam came up. His horse smelled the mutated flesh on him and tried to run before he could get himself firmly in the saddle.

No one had to say Ride or Go or Let’s get the hell out of here.

They rode. Behind them, as the horses galloped toward the uncertain safety of Panther Ridge, the vultures were disturbed by the commotion. Some flew up off the burned carcasses they were consuming, but after a few moments they settled down again over the dead monsters in the parking lot like a black shroud and fought for their places at the feast.

Nine.

Kidneys, stomach. Large intestine, small intestine, pancreas. Liver, spleen, lungs. Brain, heart. Ethan was sitting in a chair in his apartment. The chair was made of scuffed brown leather and used to be a recliner but the mechanism was jammed. A candle lantern burned on a small table beside him. The table was crooked because the floor was crooked. The first sickly light of morning had begun to creep through the duct-taped windows. Ethan wore his dark green p.j. bottoms and a gray t-shirt. He had slept a little during the night, maybe a couple of hours straight. Even asleep, he’d been listening for the siren that meant the Gray Men were coming back, but it had been four nights since he’d found out he could make earthquakes. He felt like a raw nerve and a twisted muscle. When he’d gotten out of bed the first time he’d gone into the bathroom with the candle lantern, lifted his t-shirt and inspected his chest in the mirror. Then as much of his back as he could see.

The doc was right.

He didn’t think he ought to be alive.

John Douglas had wanted him to come down to the hospital yesterday afternoon for another checkup. He didn’t want to because he knew what he looked like, but he did anyway. They did the shot of saline solution while a man with a shotgun stood nearby. Just a precaution, JayDee had said. Not that I don’t trust you.

Ethan’s blood pressure was checked. No problem. Then when JayDee asked Ethan to take off his shirt to check the heartbeat was when the doc made a noise between a choke and a gasp and it seemed for a minute that he was going to press his hand against his mouth to stop any more sounds from coming out, but then JayDee got his bearings back and he said in a tight voice, “You’ve seen yourself, I’m guessing.”

“Yes sir.”

“Turn around, if you please.”

“Same on my back,” Ethan said.

“Let’s take a look.”

Ethan obeyed. The bruises were worse. They were still as black as a midnight funeral and now they had converged. There was no area of unbruised flesh on his chest, stomach or back down to the bottom of his spine. His sides were mottled with purple and green, the tendrils of one huge bruise reaching around to connect with the other.

“Damn,” said the man with the shotgun, whose name Ethan thought was Lester.

JayDee approached Ethan with caution. “I’m going to listen to your heart,” he said, as if asking permission, and Ethan nodded. “Okay,” JayDee said when he’d finished that, but he still had the stethoscope plugged into his ears. “Now…I want to listen to your lungs. Just take a deep breath when I ask you, and let it out slowly. Right?”

“You’re the doctor,” Ethan said.

JayDee began his work. “Breathe. That hurt you any?”

“A little.”

He moved around to Ethan’s back. “Breathe. Coughing up anymore blood?”

“No sir.”

“Another deep breath, please.” When JayDee was finished he came back around to look into Ethan’s face. “Les,” he said quietly as he took off the stethoscope and put it aside, “you can leave us now.”

“Sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure. Go ahead.” He waited for Les to shut the warped door behind him, as much as it would shut. Cracks from the earthquake riddled the walls. JayDee said, “You can put your shirt back on,” and Ethan did. “Have a seat.” JayDee motioned toward a chair, but Ethan said, “I’m okay standing.”

“Well, I’m sitting down then.” JayDee eased himself into the chair. Something creaked; either the chair or his weary bones. The doc stretched his legs out before him and, staring at Ethan, rubbed his clean-shaven chin.

“You know what I’m going to say,” JayDee ventured.

Ethan shrugged, but he knew.

“At a time like this, a man needs a good stout drink of rye whiskey,” JayDee said. “That was my drink of choice. In the quiet of the evening, before a nice fire in the hearth…a little Frank Sinatra on the stereo…way before your time, I know…and all was right with the world. Deborah…my wife, bless her soul…would sit with me and listen to the music or read. Oh, maybe that sounds boring to you. Does it?” This time his white eyebrows did not go up; it was a question that did not expect an answer. “Well, it was a life,” he went on. “A damned good life.” He gave a sad, crooked smile. “What I wouldn’t give for that again, and as boring as you please. For two years now…Hell has visited earth. In many forms, too terrible to recount.” His smile that was not really a smile faded and the expression in his eyes sharpened. “Tell me about the white mansion,” he said. “I mean…Dave’s already told me. But you tell me. All right? Wait…before you say anything…I’ll tell you that a couple of days ago Dave and Olivia went down to the high school’s library to find maps to help figure out where this white mansion might be. Dave’s thinking it might be the name of a town. Somewhere.” He added a little sarcasm to that word. “They did find a road atlas. They won’t talk about what happened over there, but Olivia hurt her knee a little bit. While she was in here she started shaking and crying, and she was about to go to pieces. I gave her a sedative, the best I could do. Dave won’t talk about it either. So I want you to know, Ethan…that something terrible happened to them down there…while they were…let’s say…acting on your behalf. It had to be bad…because I saw how bad it was in Dave’s face. And when you can read that in his face…brother, it was a whole big bag of bad.”

Ethan nodded. He didn’t know what to say. The best he could manage was, “I didn’t ask them to do that.”

“No, you didn’t. But…you see…it’s this white mansion thing. And the earthquake you said you caused. And that Dave believes that somehow you knew the spring was there under the swimming pool. Those things. Kinda hard for a rational person to swallow, isn’t it?”

“I guess.”

“But,” JayDee went on, his brow furrowed, “Dave has a point. What’s rational anymore? What makes sense? I’ve seen what looks like a man explode into something covered with black spikes, right in that secure room you were locked up in when you first got here. Seen a teenaged girl’s face implode, and suddenly it was a mouth filled with greedy little teeth that tried to bite my head off, until Dave shot the thing to pieces. Does that make sense? Well…maybe it does if you’re a Gorgon or a Cypher. See, I think they’re making weapons out of what used to be human beings. Experimenting on them. On us. They’ve got a real slam-bang weapons program going on, they’re wanting to see what works and what doesn’t. Maybe they’re just doing it because they can, and that’s their way. What do you think, Ethan? You brought that up about the Gorgons and Cyphers fighting over the border. That’s what you said, right?”

“Yes,” said Ethan quietly.

“Why did you say that? What information do you have that I, Dave, Olivia and everyone else here doesn’t have?”

Ethan didn’t answer for a moment. Then he said, just as quietly, “I know it’s true. It’s what they’re fighting over. The border between their—”

“What are you?” JayDee suddenly asked, and he drew his legs back as if they might be in danger of black spikes or a mouthful of little daggers. “You and I both know…those injuries you have…they should’ve killed you. And the bruises are worse, aren’t they? Yet your blood pressure is fine, your lungs are in good shape, and your heart’s just ticking along. And let me tell you…your lungs ought to be so clogged full of blood you couldn’t draw a breath, and I still don’t know how you’re walking. God, if I only had an X-ray machine and some power to run it! So…young man who doesn’t know his name or remember anything about his life before he suddenly woke up running across a field…what exactly are you, because I don’t think you’re human.”

The statement tainted the air. Ethan felt a spark of anger grow into a flame. “You think I’m something they made? Like…a secret weapon? That I’m supposed to explode or grow two heads or something? Is that it?”

“I’d say somebody who can create an earthquake just by wanting to make it happen already has got a little secret weapon in him. My question is, what else is in there you don’t know about?”

Ethan stared at JayDee. Did a little heat ripple in the air between them? Ethan said, “Kidneys, stomach. Large intestine, small intestine, pancreas. Liver, spleen, lungs. Brain, heart. Those are things I know I have. I am human, sir. And I’m remembering something, too. It’s getting clearer and the details are filling in. I’m in a room, sitting at a desk under a green desk lamp, and I’m putting together a model of the Visible Man. You know what that is?”

“I had one. Every kid who ever grew up to be a doctor probably put that thing together.”

“Okay. I’m looking at my desk, and that’s what I see lying there. The parts. Kidneys, stomach, large intestine, small intestine, pancreas, liver, spleen, lungs, brain, and heart. I’ve got them arranged in that order, to be painted. My jars of paint are sitting there. The brand is Testors. A woman with dark hair comes into the room…and she starts to speak, but I can’t hear what she says.” Sadness pierced him like a blade; not only sadness, but a deep sense of desperation. Tears burned his eyes. “I want to hear, but I can’t. And…what I want most of all…most of all…is for her to speak my name, because I think she’s my mother, but…if she does say it, I can’t hear it. Or maybe I just can’t recognize it anymore.” He wiped his eyes and stared at the floor. A shiver passed through him, quick and then gone. “I’m human. I know I am.” And then he looked up into the careful eyes of John Douglas, and Ethan said what he was really thinking: “I’ve got to be.”

It was another moment before JayDee spoke. “You have no idea what the white mansion is? You just believe it’s a place you have to get to?”

Ethan nodded.

“Well,” said JayDee, as thickly as if he had a mouthful of sand, “Dave believes it too. Maybe Olivia does. She’s not saying much lately. But I know Dave’s been going through that road atlas. There’s no town in these United…in this country,” he corrected himself, “bearing that name. Dave took my magnifying glass—the last one I have, incidentally—and he’s been going through that atlas page by page. He must be nearly blind by now. I hear he’s not sleeping very much either. I just wanted you to know.”

“Okay,” said Ethan, who thought he should respond in some way.

“You can go now, if you want to. Me, I’m just going to sit here for awhile and think…or maybe try not to think.”

Kidneys, stomach. Large intestine, small intestine, pancreas. Liver, spleen, lungs. Brain, heart.

Sitting in the broken recliner in the apartment of a dead man, with the thin sickly light of morning coming through the duct-taped windows, Ethan can see those plastic organs lying before him on the desktop. The dark-haired woman comes in. She is smiling, and Ethan thinks she is pretty, but her face is really just a blur. And what he wants to say is Speak my name, but he does not and she does not, and he returns his gaze to the shell of the Visible Man that he so desires to make complete.

He heard a tapping at the door, which like so many others had been sawed so that it closed firmly in the misshapen frame.

“Who is it?” he called.

The voice was a tired mumble. “Dave. Got something.”

At once, Ethan was up and opening the door. Dave came in looking like he’d been on a three-day binge. He was wearing dirty jeans and a faded brown t-shirt that had so many holes in it a pitbull could have been using it as a chewrag. His hair was a touseled mess, and his eyes were weary, swollen maybe from deciphering too much small print. In his right hand was a page torn from the road atlas and in his left was the magnifying glass. “Might have something,” he amended, holding up the page. “Want you to take a look.” He came in as Ethan stepped aside. Dave went to the candle lantern. “Map of southeastern Utah,” he said. “You probably won’t need the magnifier, but I sure as hell did.”

Ethan took the page as Dave offered it.

Dave touched the map with a forefinger. “There. About midway between the two towns of Monticello and Blanding. It’s at the eastern edge of the Manti-La-Sal National Forest. See that?”

Ethan did. White Mansion Mtn., it read. 10,961 ft.

“It’s over three hundred miles from here as the eagle flies. But we’re not eagles.” Dave rubbed his eyes. “That’s what I found. Ring any bells?”

“No, nothing. But maybe that’s it?”

Dave gave a short bark of a laugh. “Maybe? Maybe? You know what’s it’s like searching those maps with a magnifying glass, hour after hour?” Dave hadn’t realized until he and Olivia had gotten back to Panther Ridge that the last few maps and the index had been ripped out. It had been close work, and hoping the White Mansion wasn’t up in Canada because those were the missing maps. He had scoured everything remaining…all towns, military bases, lakes, bays, mountains, canyons, and at last had come to the name of the mountain in Utah.

“I don’t know anything about that area,” he said, “but I know to get there would be…like…a miracle. Going south to Denver, crossing the Rockies on I-70, with the Gray Men and the aliens everywhere. So, when you say maybe that’s it…that doesn’t make me feel too very confident.”

“How am I supposed to know for sure?” was Ethan’s next question, delivered flatly and as a matter-of-fact.

Dave looked down at the floor as if he were trying to control an outburst. It took him a moment to get himself stabilized; he was tired, hungry, and thirsty, and he figured he’d aged his eyes by about five years in the past two days. But when he lifted his gaze to Ethan again and spoke, his face was calm, and his voice as quiet as he could force it to be under the circumstances. “That’s the only White Mansion I could find. Either that’s it or not. Either, like you say, something you don’t understand is trying to guide you there, or it was just a bad dream and it meant absolutely fucking nothing. But I’ve decided to believe in you, Ethan. I’ve decided to listen to you. Got that?”

Ethan stared into Dave’s eyes, his own face betraying no emotion. “Have you decided to follow me?” he asked. “If I go there, are you going with me? Is Olivia? Dr. Douglas? Anyone else?”

“You’ll never make that by yourself. God only knows how anybody could make that trip.”

“That’s no answer. Sir,” he added.

Dave took the map back from Ethan. He felt near collapse, near just lying down in a corner somewhere and peering into the Magnum’s barrel until he gathered enough courage to pull the trigger. But still…damn it…the White Mansion. And this boy…this damned strange boy who JayDee had said ought to be lying six feet under by now. This boy…maybe an experiment by either Cyphers or Gorgons? So why was he here, and what was to be done with him?

“You ask too many questions,” Dave said. “Right now I’m going back to my place and get some sleep. We’ll talk about this later…when I can think straight.” So saying, he turned away from Ethan and left the apartment, half-walking and half-staggering, with the map from the road atlas in one hand and the magnifying glass in the other.

The White Mansion, Ethan thought after Dave had gone.

Go there. It’s important. Somehow…really important.

And he asked himself, that if he knew it was somehow really important, then how come he didn’t know why? If his mind or whatever it was guiding him was only giving him bits and pieces, clues that right now made no sense…why wasn’t it giving him the whole picture, so he could understand?

Over three hundred miles from here as the eagle flies, Dave had said. But we’re not eagles.

It was a long way, to depend on a voice in a dream and a voice inside himself urging him to go. A long way, with all that out there, the Gray Men hungering for meat, and the Gorgons and Cyphers forever at war. And how were they supposed to get there? By walking? By the horses, which meant taking the last food from these people? And what would they do for food on the journey? How could it be done?

Ethan sat down and stared at the glow of the candle lantern. The morning’s light was getting stronger, a yellowish hue. Ethan figured it was going to be what people used to call a “nice day”, considering how screwed up the atmosphere was.

I should be dead, he thought. But I’m human. I know I am. I remember a mother and a house and a room with a desk lamp and on the table, bottles of Testors paint and the plastic organs lined up. But I should be dead…and instead of that I am here staring at a candle and wondering…

….who will go with me, when I go?

Ten.

With the passage of three more days, life as such went on at Panther Ridge. Water was collected from the spring that had filled up the swimming pool. Another horse was slaughtered, and on that day Olivia Quintero did not emerge from her apartment. John Douglas talked a weeping young man out of killing himself, his wife, and little boy, but while he was doing that, a middle-aged woman who used to be a watercolor artist in Loveland blew her head off with a shotgun in the dark confines of Apartment 278. Work went on to strengthen the wall, as always. Up in the machine-gun towers the nightwatchmen saw the distant flickering of either lightning or two worlds at war over the border.

On that same night, Ethan Gaines walked the perimeter, lost in thought. The pull from the White Mansion was stronger now, and it was hard to sleep. The complex was quiet; it was about two in the morning, he figured. A few other people were up, walking alone or talking in small groups. He saw a woman sobbing with her head against a man’s shoulder, and the man had a drawn, weary face and eyes that saw nothing. He saw a teen-aged girl lying on the ground staring up at the sky as if trying to pierce the mysteries there. She was hampered by that because she wore a black eyepatch over her left eye, but it was decorated with small stick-on rhinestones. She was about his age, he thought, and she had blonde hair and a pretty oval face with a small cleft in the chin. Maybe she was sixteen or seventeen, he decided. She didn’t look at him as he passed by; her study was the stars that could be seen faintly through the drifting clouds. He saw a circle of a dozen people on their knees in the grass, heads bowed and eyes squeezed tightly shut as if that would speed their prayers; maybe they stayed there all night praying, he didn’t know.

And that led to a question for him: where was God in all this?

Was the same God those people fervently prayed to the God who had created the Gorgons and Cyphers? Did God favor one civilization over the other, or were all left to the rolling of the celestial dice?

The White Mansion, he thought. It intruded upon him night and day, breaking in like an unwanted commercial in this ragged movie of his life. I’ve got to get there, somehow.

We’re not eagles, Dave had said. And Dave was not speaking to him lately, had not spoken to him since that early morning revelation. There was no plan, there was just the waiting. And Ethan saw very clearly, as he walked with the weight of the unknown burdening his shoulders, that these people were waiting to die. Their hope was running out like the sand in the hourglass. Everyone had their limit; when that limit was reached…blammo, off to meet the Maker.

This is shit, Ethan thought as he looked at the broken-down, crooked and messed-up apartment buildings. No one can stay here. If they want to live, they have to move because movement is life. Going somewhere is life. But here behind these stone walls that are worked on day and night…they are just waiting to find the limit of their hope, and it comes to everybody.

Even if you died on the road to somewhere, he thought…at least you tried.

“Hola,” someone said. “Can’t sleep?”

Ethan stopped. He’d almost walked right into Olivia, who was on her own circuit of the perimeter. She was carrying a lantern and was wearing faded jeans and a blue-patterned blouse. She had on a pair of sneakers the color of a bright yellow tennis ball, but dirtier. The candlelight showed a dazed look in her eyes. Ethan thought she was just barely holding herself together, but she was not too far gone to forget to wear her pistol in its holster around her waist.

“Oh,” Ethan said. “Hi. Yeah. I mean…no, I can’t sleep.”

“Me neither. Not lately. I’m out of sleeping pills. Been thinking of hitting myself in the head with a hammer, but I’m not ready for anything that drastic.”

Ethan gave her a guarded smile that did not hold very long, because there were important things to say. “Dave showed me the map. Did he tell you?”

“He did. White Mansion Mountain in southeastern Utah, a long way from here.”

“A pretty long way,” Ethan agreed.

“Maybe you and your parents visited that place once. Maybe that’s why you want to go there, because you’re remembering.”

“I don’t think so. There’s no father,” he said.

“What?”

“In the house I’m starting to remember, where I’m sitting at the desk putting together my Visible Man. Did JayDee tell you about that?”

“Yes.”

“I thought he would. Well…there’s a dark-haired woman who I think is my mother, but I don’t think I have a father. There’s just…not a presence there. I mean, I did have a father, but I think he left when I was a little boy.”

Olivia lifted the lantern to view his face as if she’d never really studied it before. Ethan’s sharp blue eyes glinted; his jaw was set. He looked ready for something, but she didn’t know what. He looked expectant. He shifted his weight from foot to foot, and seemed as uneasy as a horse sensing the killing blade. “Walk with me,” she said, and started off. She was still limping a little and her knee was taped up under the jeans, but otherwise she was okay if one didn’t consider the nightmares that had interrupted her sleep since that morning in the library. More than once she’d awakened in a cold sweat as a wave of mutated flesh and biting teeth had rolled up at her from a broken floor, and in those nightmares there was no Dave McKane to help her.

Ethan walked with her, noting the limp. “JayDee said you hurt your knee.”

“It’s nothing. Need to walk to keep the blood moving.”

They had gone only a few paces more when something glowing bright blue streaked across the sky above Panther Ridge. It was maybe four or five hundred feet up, and it moved in a blur but soundlessly. Ethan and Olivia watched it disappear into the clouds beyond. In about three seconds there was a faint hum that became louder and louder still until it became a high-pitched shriek that would have left no one in the complex asleep, and suddenly a red and pulsing sphere with a fiery halo around it came out of the clouds and darted after the blue object. It, too, was quickly lost from sight.

“They’re active tonight,” Olivia said tonelessly. She saw candles and oil lamps going on in what remained of windows across the complex. There would be no more sleeping this night. Many times they had seen the battling lights in the night sky, seen and heard distant explosions and the otherworldly sounds of alien weapons at work, but how could anyone get used to it? “Come on, let’s keep walking,” she told Ethan, since both of them had stopped to watch the quick and deadly spectacle. “Okay,” she said after a moment more. “About the White Mansion.”

“I have to get there.” In his voice there was no hesitation. “Soon.”

“All right.” Olivia wondered if the glint of his eyes meant he was feverish. “How do you figure on getting there? Walking?”

“It would take too long.” What he said next just came to him, like a memory, or like another voice speaking through him. “I have to get there soon or the chance might be lost.”

“Chance?” She frowned, a little unnerved by this word. “What chance do you mean?”

He opened his mouth, about to speak but not knowing exactly what he was going to say. He had no choice but to trust in whatever was guiding him, whatever was trying to pull—or push—him on this dangerous and maybe crazy journey. He opened his mouth, but before any words could come out a sizzling white-hot thing shot across the sky above Panther Ridge and then another and another and suddenly dozens of them, sounding like bacon fat in a skillet, until the sky was crisscrossed with them and they left trails that burned the eyeballs. Up in the clouds there was thunder and lightning and then lightning and thunder but the lightning was red and blue and the thunder was the deep boom of ocean waves crashing against a jagged shore…harder and harder, louder and louder.

“Jesus,” Olivia whispered, her eyes on the heavens. Beside her, Ethan’s muscles had tensed and his heart was pounding. His lungs did hurt, he thought. Have to tell the doc about that…but in the next instant he thought too late…too late…

“Too late,” he heard himself say, as if from a vast and unfathomable distance.

“What?” she asked him, a frantic note in her voice. And again, when he didn’t answer: “What?”

From the clouds descended a monster.

Ethan figured it was nearly twice as big as the Gorgon ship he’d seen destroyed over the muddy field. It was the same triangular shape with the same prehistoric monster markings of brown, yellow, and black, but yet not wholly the same because each craft was different. It was razor-thin, had no openings nor ports and six of the eight electric-blue orbs that pulsed at its belly had gone dead black. Dozens of spheres of white-hot energy were attacking it from all sides, and the orbs tried to explode as many as they could but the ones getting through were burning red-edged holes in the reptilian hide. There was an electric smell in the air and the smell of charred meat that had been placed on a grill when it was already three days rotten. It was a swampy smell, the odor of firebombed rattlesnakes that had been left to decay under a hot August sun. There came the high-pitched, fingernail-on-blackboard and viper hiss of agony. The Gorgon ship was coming down upon the Panther Ridge Apartments. Olivia realized it a few seconds after Ethan, because her brain was stunned. It had seized up, run out of the lubrication of reality. Others realized what was about to happen too, for a sudden screaming and wailing arose from the apartment complex like voices of the doomed from the very center of Hell.