The Border

Dave nodded. He would’ve done the same. He gave a pat to Ethan’s back.

Under guard, Ethan walked across the parking lot with his companions. My protectors, he thought. Or was he the one protecting them? A light rain began to fall, oily to the skin. In the distance, there was a red flash: a streak of light, going somewhere. At the center of his friends, Captain Walsh and the guards, Ethan entered the lit-up section of the mall into a crowd of curious onlookers—survivors all, thin and weary from the constant war—and knew now he was on a journey into the unknown that he must at all cost complete.

H

“I see it,” said the major. He was studying a map in an atlas on the desk before him. He looked up at Ethan, Olivia, JayDee, Dave and Captain Walsh. The cut across the bridge of Dave’s nose had been cleaned, an antiseptic applied, and then a bandage. JayDee’s sprained ankle had been strengthened with a tight wrapping of gauze and the pain diminished with two Tylenol tablets. Major Fleming’s office lamp, powered like the other lights by the mall’s generators and some solar cells the troops had scavenged when they’d holed up in here after the Cyphers and Gorgons had destroyed most of Denver over a year ago, threw a pool of illumination upon Utah, but the major was far from illuminated.

He was a tall, square-shouldered man who’d been born for the United States Army. He had lost a lot of weight in the last year but the loss had just made him tougher, as it had all the men and women under his command. He was bald but meticulously shaven, had a pair of thick brown eyebrows and steel-gray eyes under his wire-rimmed glasses. He was forty-two years old, but the network of deep worry lines that cut across his face aged him by ten years.

“So you don’t know what’s there?” He directed this question to Ethan. “In fact, you don’t know if anything is there, do you?”

“No sir.” It was spoken quietly.

“What?” Ray Fleming had the habit of not liking to be spoken to quietly; he liked to hear and be heard.

“No sir, I don’t,” Ethan answered, “but I believe I have to go there. That’s all I can say.”

“You took a blood sample?” The major threw this at Dr. Hernandez, who stood in the corner.

“Yes sir. It’s normal, type A positive. His lungs are fine, his heart’s in good shape, his blood pressure is fine too. In all other ways he’s a normal fourteen- or fifteen-year-old boy.”

“Anybody fail their exam?”

“None.”

Ethan gave a soft grunt that no one else heard. At last the Gorgons had perfected their disguise. They had created artificial blood and organs that could pass for human. They had made their own lifelike Visible Man, but visible only to him. He wondered how many humans had been laid open by Gorgon surgical tools before the right chemistry was achieved.

“If I had a better lab, I could do a better job,” the doctor said, indicating maybe a persistent argument between the two. “I have to make do with—”

“What you have, yes,” Fleming finished for him. The hard and careful eyes returned to Ethan. “You say you killed a Gorgon without weapons. Exactly how?”

“I wanted it gone. It blew up into pieces.”

“Not enough. Let’s hear an explanation that makes sense.”

Dave suddenly reached over and pulled up the boy’s t-shirt to expose the four strange symbols that had emerged from the darkness of the bruise. Fleming had already seen them, but Dave wanted to drive home a point. “Does this make sense? Does any of it? Like I say, he made an earthquake happen. So…killing a Gorgon without weapons…I believe that, yeah.” He let Ethan’s shirt fall back down again, which Ethan was grateful for because he still couldn’t wrap his head around the freakishness of what was changing him. Though he was outwardly calm, a little place deep within himself was a crunched-up ball of terror.

“Do all of you believe that?” The major lifted his eyebrows and waited.

“I do,” Olivia answered. “Yes, I know I do.”

JayDee smiled thinly at the major. He leaned his weight on the rebar. “I think,” he said, “that Ethan is not a Gorgon or a Cypher, nor anything created by them. I think he used to be a boy, but he’s no longer just that. I think…what he is…what he’s becoming…is something different.”

“Explain.”

“I wish I could, sir. Ethan’s condition defied all medical sense when we found him. Now…with those symbols, which look to me like ancient runes…maybe Nordic, I don’t know…I can’t explain anything.”

“Reassuring,” said the major.

“I believe,” JayDee went on, his voice stronger, “that Ethan is being called to go to that mountain. And I believe, sir, that we ought to trust whatever is calling him.”

Again the major’s penetrating gaze speared Ethan. “Do you have any idea why you would be…” He paused, deliberating before he went on. “Compelled to go to this place?”

“I do have an idea,” Ethan replied. “I think it has something to do with stopping this war.”

“Oh…you can stop the war?” Fleming gave Captain Walsh a quick sharp glance. “A kid can stop the war between aliens fighting over—”

“The border,” said Ethan. “That’s what they’re fighting over. The border between what they believe they own. And I don’t know if I can stop the war or not…but…” The next thing was hard to say, but it had been working on him since leaving Panther Ridge, and knowing the disguised Gorgon and the human Kushman were after him. “But,” he went on, “maybe what I’m turning into can.”

Fleming said nothing for awhile. He studied the map again, took another long appraisal of the boy, and then his eyes went back to the map. “That’s a long way. Tough road up in those mountains, once you get off I-70. If there’s much left of I-70.” He balled up a fist and knocked gently at the mountain on the map, as if knocking at a secret door that only Ethan Gaines could open. “So you’re wanting to continue your trip in that school bus, is that correct?”

“Yes,” said Olivia.

“Who’s going?”

“All of us,” Dave said. “We’ve talked, and we’ve agreed.”

“You too, Doc?” Fleming’s eyes went to JayDee. “On a bad ankle?”

“Me too,” John Douglas replied. “Bad ankle or not.”

“Well,” was the major’s next comment. He took off his glasses and spent a moment polishing the lenses with a white cloth before he put them back on and spoke again. “I can’t spare you any soldiers. We have responsibilities here. Your bus has taken some damage, yes?”

“A little bit,” Dave said.

“We can fix that for you, maybe make some improvements. How are you doing for fuel? We’re down pretty low ourselves, I don’t know if I can give you any.”

“We’ll make do. Find diesel tanks at stations along the way and siphon it out.”

“Got the tools you need? The containers?”

“I could use a longer hose, say about twelve feet.”

The major nodded. “We can find one of those. Your bus is going to eat up a lot of fuel on those grades. You know that, right?”

“We know it,” Dave said. “Look…Major…I’m going to have to get some sleep. We’re all dog-tired. Can we bunk down somewhere?” They had already gone through the search procedure, and now the need for sleep was dragging Dave down. “Set us all up together?”

“We’ve got extra sleeping bags, but you ought to get some food before you crash.”

“Sleep first,” Dave said, and the others nodded agreement. Except for Ethan, who had business to tend to.

“Right. Captain Walsh, find these people a place to sack out. Mr. McKane, you don’t mind that I post a guard over this young man for the rest of the night.” It was a statement, and there was to be no argument.

“No problem.”

Ethan said nothing; it was to be expected. “All right, then. At least get yourself some water. There’s bread and soup in the food court if you change your minds.” He checked his wristwatch. “It’ll be open for about another hour. Captain, you’re in charge of them now. Find someone to stand guard duty. You’re all dismissed…except you, Carlos. Stick here a little longer.”

When Captain Walsh had escorted the group out, the major steepled his fingers and peered through the desklamp’s glow at Carlos Hernandez. “Honest answer. Am I crazy or are they?”

“Sir?”

“I want to believe,” Fleming said. “Dear God…I want to believe.” He gave a sigh that sounded to him like wind past a tomb, but maybe…maybe…there were seeds of hope in that wind, and they would be scattered and take root on fertile earth. The border, the kid had said. That’s what they’re fighting over. The thing was…that sounded right. Fleming did believe him. And only something from beyond this world would know that. “You’ve got patients to take care of,” he said. “Long night ahead.”

“Yes sir,” the doctor answered, and left the office.

Fleming sat for awhile, staring at that particular landmark on the map of Utah. After a few more minutes he switched off the desklamp with a hand that no one ever saw tremble. It would be lights out in two hours, except for the hospital that was set up in what used to be a Gap store, and then the mall would be patrolled by soldiers with flashlights. He sat in the dark, thinking of what his hometown of Seattle used to be, and the wreckage of what it was now. He imagined that the rest of the world was like that, and how could it ever return to what it had been? Without comm to the outside, there was no way to know. Had all the nuclear plants been shut down by the book, or had a few of them been abandoned and melted down with no humans to control the cooling elements? And what about the hundreds of thousands—millions?—of “freakies,” as Captain Walsh termed them, loose in the ruins of the cities? Even if the war was stopped, what about all that?

But did the fate of the earth depend on the boy who had been standing before him?

If so…if it was at all possible…Major Fleming would not be the one to stand in his way. There would be plenty of things eager and hungry to do that job.

Nineteen.

Ethan found he couldn’t go to the bathroom without the soldier following him. No water was running, so in the green-tiled bathroom between what had been an Abercrombie and an American Eagle aluminum cans stood in for urinals and black garbage bags for toilets. The smell was rank, but at least there was toilet paper. The soldier looked away while Ethan was doing his business, but when it was done the young trooper was all bird-dog again.

The lights were still on in this section of the mall where the generators were working. A mass of people occupied tents, cots and sleeping bags. Some were playing cards or dominoes, some were reading, talking or praying, others just lying and staring blankly at the walls or the ceiling. Children played with toys taken from the Learning Center or the Disney Store. As it had been at Panther Ridge, there were all ages and seemingly all races: a true melting pot, in this Land That Had Been Plenty. It appeared that the mall had been ransacked in the early days of the war, because some of the windows were broken out and all the clothing and shoe stores were empty holes, even the mannequins picked clean.

Ethan slowed his pace. The soldier was right behind him. “Just a minute,” he said, as he saw who he was looking for. He went past the dry fountain and stood before the Gorgon, Jeff Kushman, and the short bald man. Kushman had popsicle-stick splints and tape wrapped around the two broken fingers; he had already staked out his area and was sliding into his sleeping bag. The Gorgon stood with a rolled-up sleeping bag as if he intended to stand there all night, and the bald man was sitting on the floor with his shoes off, rubbing his feet and grimacing.

Of course the soldier followed Ethan’s footsteps, but he knew that would happen. Kushman, eyes heavy, looked up at him from the sleeping bag. The Gorgon’s head turned, and the flinty black eyes took him in. The bald man paid him no attention, so intent was he on his own two problems.

“You men all right?” Ethan asked. Before anyone could answer, he spoke to the Gorgon: “Don’t you know how to use a sleeping bag?”

“Sure he does,” Kushman said. “Just put it down anywhere, Jack. Right over here would be fine.”

The Gorgon obeyed, moving slowly and stiffly as if the lubrication of his joints was drying out.

“Jack?” Ethan repeated. “That’s funny, he doesn’t look like a ‘Jack’.”

“Shouldn’t you be getting some sleep, Ethan?” Jefferson Jericho offered a smile that didn’t have a lot of wattage behind it. “Is that your real name?”

“Real enough. Dave told me you three came from Denver. Right?”

“That’s right, son.”

“How’d you make it past all the Gray Men?”

“We were lucky.” Jefferson had already asked Joel Schuster what those horrors had been. There were none of those monsters in New Eden, and being so close to the things gave him extra incentive, if any more was needed. “We never saw any.”

“Captain Walsh said there are thousands here. You must’ve been lucky.”

“Yeah.” Jefferson watched Vope figuring out how to unroll and unzip the sleeping bag. He wondered if the Gorgon even needed sleep. One thing, they could mimic human habits pretty quickly.

“So everybody passed the blood test,” Ethan continued. He tried to probe Kushman’s mind with the silver hand, but again the bright blue sphere would not be pierced. “That’s a good thing. I wouldn’t want to think we were traveling with any aliens in human skin.”

“Me neither. That would be very disturbing, wouldn’t it? Listen…Ethan…I’m really tired, okay? Let’s talk tomorrow, I’ve got to get some sleep.” Jefferson saw that, to Vope’s credit, there had been no reaction and no reaction from Ratcoff either. But he thought: Ethan knows. The question being: if the boy knows, why hasn’t he done anything about it? He zipped up his sleeping bag as best he could, one-handed. “Goodnight,” he said as he settled in, and he gratefully closed his eyes against the overhead lights though there was still more than an hour before lights out. He would get another chance at the boy later, he thought, but at the moment the pain pills were putting him under.

“Night, Mr. Kushman,” Ethan said, and with the soldier at his back he walked toward the area where Olivia, Dave, and JayDee were sacked out. Dave had already been asleep when Ethan announced his bathroom trip to the trooper, and Olivia had been drifting that way. He was almost to them when someone touched his right arm.

He turned to face Nikki. The soldier stopped also, and being a sensible guy he backed up a few paces to give them a little more of that precious privacy.

“Hi,” Ethan said.

“Hi.” The overheads made the rhinestone star on her eyepatch glitter. “You found a place?”

“Yeah, I’m over there. You?”

“Over that way. Not far.”

He nodded. “Good to be in a safe place tonight.”

“Yeah. You get some food?”

“Somebody brought me a couple of pieces of bread and a can of Sprite. That’s all I need right now.” The somebody being a runner for Captain Walsh.

Nikki didn’t say anything for awhile. They both looked around at the people getting themselves and their children ready for a night’s rest. Then Nikki said, “It was bad…what happened to Mr. Roosa. I was standing right there almost beside him. He was a pretty good guy. It was bad, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Ethan. “Real bad.”

“Do you think they’ll come here tonight?”

He heard the fear in her voice. She looked pale and shaken, and maybe she was just hanging on. “I don’t think so,” Ethan answered. “No, probably not.”

“I don’t think so either.” She seemed to relax a little, at the confidence in Ethan’s voice. “Seems like if anybody would know, you would.”

He didn’t care to follow up that comment, which for sure dealt with his being—in her eye, at least—part alien. He had a sudden thought, though, and it involved a need to know. He said, “Would you come with me for just a minute? Let’s get away from some of these people?”

“Why?”

“I want to show you something and I want to ask you something. It’ll just take a minute. Okay?”

Nikki hesitated. She looked from him to the trooper and back again. “I don’t know, Ethan. Where would we go?”

“One of the bathrooms. I just need a minute.”

“No way,” the trooper said. “You had your bathroom time.”

Ethan had had enough. He gave the young soldier a look that might’ve melted iron. “Listen, I know you’re doing your job, but I need to ask this girl something in as private a place as there is around here. You can come in and stand there, if you want to, but I’m doing this. Shoot me if you need to.” His anger welled up. “I don’t give a fuck,” he said. And he took the girl’s elbow and began steering her back toward the bathroom. Amazingly for Ethan, Nikki let him guide her. The soldier started to say something else but closed his mouth and followed along right at their heels.

In the less-than-fragrant bathroom, with the soldier standing back a distance to give them the privacy Ethan had requested, Ethan said to Nikki, “Get ready. Okay?”

“Ready for what?”

“This.” Ethan lifted his t-shirt to show her the four upraised silver symbols. She gave a quiet gasp and stepped back a couple of paces, and for a few seconds she stared at the markings without speaking.

Then she said, with sort of a dazed but true admiration, “Cool.”

“They just happened,” he explained. “I was itching on the bus, maybe they came up then. But what I want to ask you…you said your friend was studying to be a tattoo artist, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So I guess you saw some of his tattoo books and stuff? Have you ever seen anything like this?”

“Well…maybe. I remember him showing me…like…way old lettering. Like ancient, I’m saying. But something like that exactly, I don’t remember. That one there…it looks like an ‘R’.”

The soldier was trying to edge closer to take a peek. Ethan let his t-shirt fall back into place. “They don’t hurt,” he said. “But they’re upraised, almost like they were burned on.” He felt a place within himself start to crack and break, and he feared that if it happened he would fall to pieces in front of Nikki and the guard. All he could do was stare at the floor until he could shake the feeling off and get control again. “I’m some kind of big time freak now, huh?” he said, not without bitterness.

“I guess Olivia and the others know about this? That’s why you’ve got the guard on you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I wish I could help you more.”

“It’s okay.” Ethan shrugged. “I mean…it is what it is, right? That’s what my mom used to tell me, whenever I was feeling down about anything.” He had a sudden start, because he remembered that…his mother’s voice, speaking to him. It is what it is. And did she speak his name when she said that? Yes, she did. It was so close…so close…yet still so far away. “Nikki,” he said, quietly choked, “I don’t know what I’m turning into but I swear to you—I swear—I used to be just a regular guy. I am human. Was human, I mean. Now…what am I?” Pain leaped from him, and he felt it enter her.

Nikki took a step forward.

She put a finger to his lips.

She said, “You’ll figure it out. Don’t let it knock you down, Ethan. One thing I do believe…whatever you are, you’re on our side.”

He nodded. When Nikki withdrew her finger, he could feel the burn of it across his mouth.

“Meeting done?” the trooper asked.

“Done,” Ethan answered, though he would’ve wished to talk to Nikki longer, to get to know her…really know her…but he thought black bruises and silver tattoos and general weirdness was not going to endear him to anyone.

“Out of here, then,” came the command.

They obeyed. Out in the mall, Ethan walked with Nikki back to where her sleeping bag was. He said goodnight and then returned to his own place. Dave and Olivia were both gone to the world. JayDee was staring up at the ceiling, lost in thought, but his eyelids were drooping. Ethan crawled into his sleeping bag with a final glance toward the area where the Gorgon, Kushman, and the short bald dude were sacked out. The guard took a position nearby, leaning against a wall and cradling his rifle. He had a flashlight on his belt, which he would use many times during the night to check on his charge.

Rain began to hammer on the roof, the noise thrumming through the mall. It sounded as if they were all trapped within a gigantic bass drum. Ethan’s eyes were starting to close, but before he gave himself up fully to sleep some mechanism within him was triggered and also went on guard-duty, so he would know instantly if while he was in a sleep-state any threat got too near.

He was slipping away. Again he asked himself…why not tell Dave or Olivia or JayDee or Captain Walsh or Major Fleming what he knew to be true about the Gorgon, and about the blue sphere that protected Kushman’s mind? It wasn’t that they wouldn’t believe him. So…why not?

He knew.

If they had come to find him, then they had some idea of what he was, or what he might be. If he revealed them to anyone, his chance to know might be lost. And, also, people might be injured by the powerful serpentine presence he felt coiled within Jack the Gorgon. He thought that he shouldn’t tell what he knew just yet, for the sake of the safety of others. But he could handle the Gorgon; he was sure he could. He didn’t fear the thing, and he understood that Jack the Gorgon knew it.

So…wait. Just wait, and see what happens tomorrow.

The rain beat down. Ethan’s eyes closed. After awhile someone on a loudspeaker announced lights out, and the mall’s overheads went dark. The flashlights of patrolling soldiers played back and forth over the sleeping survivors of many days and nights of alien war, and like the survivors of any war some cried out and moaned and wept in their restless slumber while the earth turned toward another morning.

H

It was barely the dawn of a stormy day when Ethan felt his alarms going off. His body tingled and his brain said wake up and defend. He came fully awake almost instantly, and it seemed he recalled for just a few seconds a boy who liked to curl up in his bed and sleep late on a Saturday morning until his mother coaxed him out with breakfast of a waffle and bacon.

That boy was nearly gone.

The rain was still pouring down on the roof. Thunder boomed—real thunder, not alien weapons. Yet Ethan knew the alien presence was very close, and this sensation of alarm was not coming from the black-bearded Gorgon, Jeff Kushman, or the short bald guy. Other people were waking up, but not with Ethan’s sense of urgency. His guard was sitting cross-legged on the floor against the wall with his rifle beside him. The man was awake, either had just awakened—improbable—or had been watching Ethan and occasionally checking the boy with his flashlight all night, which was likely the case.

Ethan heard the crackle of walkie-talkies and several other soldiers rushed past, heading for the mall’s main entrance. This flurry of activity caused a stir of unease among others who had awakened, and they in turn awakened their family members or friends around them. One soldier came running along the pathway that was kept clear of sleeping bags and tents on the far side of the corridor; he was talking on his walkie-talkie in a voice that though unintelligible was charged with tension. Ethan’s guard stood up; he seemed torn between his duty here and his desire to go find out what was happening. He clicked on his own walkie-talkie, which had been hooked to his belt. “Chris, you there? What’s going on?”

Dave was waking up. He unzipped his sleeping bag and stretched so hard his joints cracked. Then he was aware of the commotion and he looked dazedly around, his need for sleep still not fully supplied. Olivia, too, had begun to stir. “What’s up?” Dave asked Ethan, who shook his head.

The soldier listened to his friend, and then he said to Ethan, “I’m off guard duty now. Something’s going on outside.”

“What is it?” Dave asked, reaching for his cap. His hair was a mass of cowlicks.

“Don’t know yet. You folks just stay here.” With that, the soldier was striding away.

“Hell if I’ll stay here.” Dave put his cap and his workboots on and stood up. Other people were moving toward the entrance, drawn by the unknown. Olivia was getting out of her sleeping bag and JayDee said in a voice still husky with sleep, “What’s wrong? What’s happening?”

“I’m going to find out.”

Ethan saw Kushman, Jack the Gorgon, and the short bald dude joining the throng of people who moved past. Kushman gave him a quick glance, as if to note his position, and then walked on. Ethan sat watching the procession of humanity. He saw mothers holding children, teenagers so burdened they had aged prematurely far beyond their years, men who had likely lost their entire families, women bedraggled and thin with hunger and sorrow, elderly people struggling onward. An old woman on a walker was being helped by a man about her age, and a young boy about sixteen or so was helping both of them. Here was a middle-aged man on crutches, missing his left leg from the knee down. There a man with long gray hair and beard and the look of a suffering saint. A wizened woman who was likely only in her early thirties held the hand of a little girl and clutched a baby to her chest. A black man with a bandage covering half his face staggered past, his hand gripped in the hand of a skinny white man who urged him along in a quiet, patient voice.

The survivors, Ethan thought. And what made them want to live a day or an hour or a minute longer? Why had they not left this earth already by their own hands, as so many had at Panther Ridge? What did they believe in that made them struggle on, as painfully as that might be? Many had given up, faced with what they believed to be hopeless odds, but many had stayed too, holding onto some measure of hope, however fantastic it might be.

He respected these people. These humans, struggling on in the darkest of hours. They wanted to live, and they were fighting for whatever scrap of life they could claw from this battle of ancient foes. They deserved the chance to live without the shadows of Cyphers and Gorgons oppressing them, he thought. They had been through much and suffered much, just as humanity all across this world had suffered, and now they deserved freedom.

He stood up.

“Going with you,” said JayDee as he steadied himself with his rebar cane, and both Ethan and Dave helped him to his feet. Olivia still looked dazed from an uneasy sleep, dark circles under her eyes, and Ethan went to her side to make sure she didn’t fall because she looked so frail and unsteady, but she said, “I’m all right. Just hold my hand, okay?”

“I will,” he promised.

They made their way through the growing crowd to the mall’s entrance, where soldiers were trying to maintain some kind of order and failing miserably. Ethan saw people looking and pointing through the glass at something that seemed to be up in the dark, rainswept sky. He let go of Olivia’s hand and pushed his way toward the front, avoiding Kushman and the other two who stood nearby also peering through the glass. Captain Walsh was there, communicating with another soldier on her walkie-talkie, and Ethan was about to ask what was going on when he saw it himself.

A sphere of glowing red flames about five feet in diameter was hanging over the parking lot. As Ethan watched, what appeared to be red lightning bolts crackled out from it in all directions a distance of ten or twelve feet. Though the rain was still pouring down, the sphere was unaffected.

“You have any idea what that is?” the captain asked Ethan, pausing in her use of the walkie-talkie.

“I know it’s from the Cyphers.”

“How?”

“Red and blue. The Cyphers’ weapons put out red flames, the Gorgons’ blue. It’s different forms of energy.”

“Thing’s been sitting right there for the last fifteen minutes.” She levelled her gaze at him. “Any more ideas? The major’s out there with a recon team. He’d be real interested.”

He did have an idea, but how it came to him was another mystery. He just knew. “Recon,” he said, as he watched the sphere, “is right. That’s what it’s here for. It’s found something and it’s reporting back to wherever their command center is.”

“Found what? Us?” She didn’t hesitate, but shouted at another couple of soldiers, “Move these people back! Get them away from this glass!”

“You heard the captain! Come on, everybody move back! Let’s go!”

“Not us,” said Ethan, who was aware that Dave was coming up beside him.

“What?”

“They doesn’t care about us. They’ve found a—” Gorgon, he almost said. But he knew it was the truth. The Cyphers had sent out their own form of reconnaisance, searching the ruins of Denver for the enemy, and in this mall they had found one in human disguise who called himself Jack.

“Found what?” the captain asked. Suddenly dark shapes appeared out of the rain and Major Fleming came through the doors with four other soldiers, all of them wearing hooded ponchos and all dripping wet.

“Get these civilians back from here!” Fleming, his face strained and pallid, had nearly shouted it at Captain Walsh. “Away from this glass, now!”

“Back! Move back everybody!” another of the soldiers was yelling. He was using his rifle, held sideways, as a tool to push several people away from the doors but the crush was too thick.

Dave took hold of Ethan’s elbow. “Come on,” he said, “let’s move—”

Ethan saw something coming through the rain. His guts knotted up, because though it was moving very fast he thought he recognized what it was.

“It’s here,” he heard himself say, and Major Fleming spun around to look toward the parking lot, his eyes narrowed against the sphere’s glare.

A thin black missile about twenty feet long plowed into the parking lot just to the left of the sphere. Chunks of concrete flew up into the air. A second missile came in and hit about ten feet to the left of that one, digging itself a small ragged-edged crater. A third and fourth missile sped in, hitting the parking lot so close to the doors that pieces of concrete cracked the glass and caused the crowd to fall back trailing shouts and screams.

“Shit!” the major cried out. “What the—”

He never got to finish that sentence, because in the next instant four thin-legged, glistening black spider-shapes, each as big as a pickup truck, scrabbled out of the rain pursued by machine-gun bullets from the watchtowers. They crashed through the doors and sent them flying, even as the crowd retreated and then turned to run. Dave pulled Ethan with him, almost picking the boy up under his arm. The major and the captain had their pistols out and the soldiers were backpedalling but firing their rifles as fast as they could. The Cypher spiders were unharmed by bullets. The claws at the ends of their legs left grooves in the tiles, and the multiple rows of sharp teeth in the crimson slashes of their mouths were searching for meat, if not Gorgon then human, for all now were at the mercy of the Cyphers.

Which, Ethan realized as Dave pulled him away, was no mercy at all.

“Let me go!” he said, and just that quickly he wrenched loose from Dave, found his footing, and stood before the spiders as they scuttled forward.

“Come on! Don’t be a fool!” Dave shouted, still pulling at him, but Ethan would not be moved. The soldiers were still firing, using up clip after clip, and Ethan noted that before the slugs could hit little sparks of red jumped out of the creatures and seemed to either incinerate or evaporate the bullets. The Cypher spiders carried their own force fields with them.

Two of the things were almost upon him, as the crowd and the soldiers drew back. Dave tried to pick Ethan up, but the boy fought free, and now Dave had to retreat too because it was certain death to stay where he was. Ethan remembered these things eating the Gorgon ship, and he recalled thinking that the claws and fangs could likely tear through concrete and metal. He heard Olivia screaming his name, and suddenly Major Fleming was beside him firing a .45, and Captain Walsh was on his other side firing a pistol, but the red sparks flared and jumped and there was no stopping these monsters.

Ethan braced himself and thrust his right hand out, his palm aimed at the closest spider. He was his own weapon, his own force of destruction, and now in needing to destroy these things he felt the awesome power move and build within him from its secret place, only a matter of seconds, until he thought he himself would explode into flaming, bloody pieces.

The air between them rippled, as with tremendous heat. A swarm of a thousand burning hornets shot out between his hand, and the spider he had targeted, and maybe no one else could see it, but to Ethan the thrust of deadly energy was clear.

Every hornet was incinerated by the thing’s force field before any one of them could penetrate, and suddenly Ethan realized he was not yet strong enough to kill these things.

They were upon him. The major had the back of his t-shirt and was pulling him away as Fleming emptied his clip, and Captain Walsh continued to fire as she scrambled back.

In the crowd behind them, Burt Ratcoff felt a tremendous pain that began in his midsection and coursed through his arms and legs. He cried out in agony, a pain that made the tears burst from his eyes. He had a sudden vision of himself striding down Fifth Avenue in his life that used to be, happy to be alive, with his wife beside him and their son healthy and well and studying to be an insurance adjuster, and just that quickly the human being who had been Burt Ratcoff was gone and in its place stood a Gorgon-engineered weapon.

The body burst into blue flame. The body elongated, the blue-burning clothes flying away as the people around him screamed and tried to put distance between them and a thin figure that was growing to be seven…eight…nine…ten feet tall.

The burning, featureless giant strode forward as Ethan, Major Fleming and Captain Walsh retreated, and standing to one side of them it began to fling from its flaming hands blue spheres that exploded against the Cypher spiders’ force fields, sending blue and red sparks of energy spinning into the air. One of the spiders was overwhelmed and caught blue flame, and as it sizzled it began to turn in a tight circle of what might have been agony and panic, around and around, as the three others scrabbled past it.

Ethan stood his ground, shaking off the major’s hand clasped to his shoulder. He tried again, summoning up power from a well he knew was full but that terrified him with its fearful depths. It was there when he needed it, and he needed it now. Sweat broke out on his face in an instant. He felt the surge of storms within him. From his fingers or from the palm of his hand—possibly from his entire body, he wasn’t sure—came thousands of the small, flaming bullet-shaped projectiles and what looked like jagged silver bolts of lightning. The force field around the spider he had targeted sparked a thousand times in two seconds and then was breached. As the creature advanced across the tiles between the remnants of a Brookstone and a Foot Locker, it blew apart into black fragments that smashed into the walls oozing ebony fluids.

The burning blue giant had grown to twelve feet tall, as thin as a shadow, and was throwing fiery spheres past Ethan at the remaining two spider-shapes. Ethan felt no heat from them, but as they zipped past him with their soundless power, he felt the flesh crawl on his bones. One missed its spider target and punctured a hole with melting, dripping edges in the concrete wall next to the Build-A-Bear Workshop, a seccond, third, and fourth sizzled out in the creature’s force field, but the fifth got through and lit the thing up in blue fire. The first spider that had been hit was collapsing in a black puddle, making a tock…tock…tock noise like a machine running down.

The fourth spider scrabbled toward Ethan; at the same time Cypher soldiers began to materialize through the walls.

“Back! Get back!” Major Fleming was shouting to his own men. He didn’t need to issue the order twice. Captain Walsh was down on one knee emptying another pistol clip at the Cypher spider, but again the bullets were quickly incinerated. Ethan willed loose another burst of concentrated energy, which once more might have issued from the center of his body but was being directed to its target by his hand; he was aware of his runaway heartbeat, what seemed like a stream of heat flowing out of him to warp the air between himself and the spider-shape, and thousands more burning bullets and silver spears of lightning flew into the creature’s force-field. At the same time, one of the blue giant’s spheres penetrated and a dozen or more of Ethan’s flaming projectiles got through, and as the red maw opened to consume Ethan’s head, the monster burst into blue fire and then exploded into pieces.

Eight faceless Cypher soldiers had emerged from the walls. As one they fired their fleshy black weapons at the blue giant that had once been a human being. Fourteen orbs of white-hot flame hit the thin twelve-foot-tall figure at the same time, two missing the target and whirling over the heads of the Army soldiers, the civilians and Jack the Gorgon to blast holes through the mall’s ceiling.

Ethan had little time to think, just to act. A swarm of the little fiery bullets and the silver bolts of energy crackled out to blow one, two, three and four Cypher soldiers to smoking shreds that smelled of grasshopper juice. Two of the white-hot orbs hissed over Ethan as he threw himself to the floor, and just that quickly he took aim with the weapon of mass destruction that his hand had become and destroyed the fifth, sixth, and seventh Cypher in spinning, burning fragments. The eighth turned, disappeared into a wall, and was gone.

The blue giant staggered. Its flame was going out. Ethan saw the last of the blue fire flicker and go dark. Exposed there was a tall thin figure made of gray ash. With a sound like a quiet sigh, the ash collapsed into a pile, and that was the end of whoever and whatever the short bald dude had been.

Back in the stunned crowd, among those who had crouched down on the floor to find whatever cover they could, Jefferson Jericho looked up at Vope, who had remained standing during this confrontation. Only Jefferson had seen the prickling of small black spikes and a yellow discoloration on Vope’s hands, as if the Gorgon wanted to join the fight but was constrained by his mission. Then the spikes were gone and the false flesh color returned, and Vope looked down at Jefferson Jericho with a faint sneer of derision at the earthman’s puny lack of courage.

Ethan felt a wave of exhaustion pass over him. He sank to his knees. He heard behind him the confusion and terror of the crowd. A hand grasped his shoulder and helped him up, but his knees were weak, and he nearly toppled again.

Olivia had come to help him. Behind her were Dave and a little further back Nikki. JayDee was limping forward on his rebar cane, and following close behind him was Hannah Grimes. The second burning Cypher spider was still, its body crisping away. The mall smelled of acrid burnt plastic and grasshopper juice. Major Fleming was approaching Ethan. Captain Walsh and three other soldiers were standing over the pile of ashes that had once been a human being.

Olivia looked into Ethan’s face and suddenly drew back, her own face tightening, but to the credit of her courage she kept her hand fixed to his shoulder.

“What is it?” he asked her, because he sensed that something about himself had further changed.

She said, as matter-of-factly as she could, “Your left eye has turned silver.”

Twenty.

In the holocaust that the world had become, in the battle between star-faring races that had begun before memory and might last into eternity, the city of Chicago had been reduced to ruins nearly two years ago but the battle lines were always shifting, and it was not ruins that the warring races fought over but territory. They had burned Chicago and most of its suburbs to ash and melted wreckage, the great buildings fallen, the streets pocked with blackened craters and covered with the stones and shattered glass of man’s creations, now lost to the constant warfare. It was the same all over this world, one of many that lay on the line of dispute. It would so forever be, the ravaging of planet after planet, some populated by higher forms of life and others just awakening to life in whatever bizarre form it might take to crawl from the slime of beginnings.

The wreckage of Chicago lay under pouring rain from a low sky of ugly yellow, and on this grim morning the Gorgon and the Cypher ships battled in the turbulent air and their soldiers fought amid the fallen buildings, crushed cars, human skeletons, and the few remaining mutants hiding in their holes. Whatever there was to burn had already burned, in this city that had long ago known the tragedy of fire, and yet now the flames were red and blue and created by alien minds devoted to the study of destruction. Hundreds of Cypher soldiers moved through the gloom firing their fleshy blasters at furtive, sliding shapes, and then hundreds of small blue spheres emitting piercing shrieks came flying from an unknown source and with flaming whips tore the Cyphers into pieces that gushed brown fluid and oozed black intestines streaked with yellow and red. Above the battlefield, explosions flashed in the clouds. Burning Cypher ships came crashing down, some to explode themselves in the rubble and others to sink, hissing with heat, into the fetid, lifeless water of Lake Michigan.

After one of the shrieking spheres had passed, five Cypher soldiers climbed from a crater near where the Willis Tower had stood before it was blasted to pieces by a Gorgon energy beam on the first day of their arrival. They drifted through the rain-swept ruins, ghosting in and out, their black and featureless heads swiveling back and forth in search of the quick reptilian movements of the enemy. The human kind could not understand the communication signals sent to these soldiers, or from where, or what these creatures truly were; it was beyond human knowledge, and thus as much magic as it was technology far advanced.

The five soldiers were identified by a small red glyph on the lower right slope of their faceplates:

It was a symbol of great honor and equally great prowess in battle, and though no human could fully understand its meaning the closest human language could decipher it would be First Born Of The Blessed Machine. The soldier who led them had one more addition to its glyph, a second crescent beneath the first, and the nearest meaning in the human language would be: Bringer Of Ignoble Death.

Neither male nor female, neither truly born nor wholly constructed in the weapon pods, the First Born moved through the wet rubble with the careful stealth of ancient warriors. Behind their faceplates worked calculations, soundlessly and rapidly, in no mathematics that could be fathomed on Earth. Distant sensors sparked pinpoints of light on floating grids, marking the proximity of kindred forces and the despised enemy of all that was correct and true. Above them a huge battleship of that enemy emerged from the clouds and began to fire its destructive beams at another target on the ground. Explosions, dust, and debris plumed into the dirty air some leagues distant. The First Born moved on, seeking enemy contact and fully aware that their foes were masters of camouflage, had learned the art of becoming one with any surface that afforded a hiding place, and that this foe had also learned to trick the spatial sensors by projecting a multitude of false images.

Through the rubble they went, silently calculating in their alien mathematics built on the geometrics of the tenth dimension. The First Born entered the dark hulk of a fallen building, where sheets of gold-colored glass had shattered on the stones. Human bones, skulls and ribcages lay scattered about, some bearing teeth marks. The First Born recognized them as the interior foundations of the denizens of this world. They did not know they were walking in what used to be an international bank, and underfoot were hundreds of pieces of paper currency from many nations of the world, now moldering in puddles of diseased rain.

Deathbringer suddenly stood still. The creature was receiving a message from the high command. The other First Born stopped as well, standing motionless on a floor of broken tiles.

The language was also mathematics. Behind the faceplate it pieced together an image of a burning blue giant throwing spheres of enemy fire at crawler weapons as seen through the viewpoint of a podmate…and then a denizen of this world attacking other podmates and destroying them with what seemed impossible ease.

The orders came. The nearest proximation of human understanding would have been: Capture this specimen. High altitude tracker on station. Begin immediate deployment.

This was surely a task to heighten the honor of the First Born of the Blessed Machine.

Deathbringer’s faceplate grid showed a concentration of enemies at a measure of what would have been two hundred yards in human distance. The count of enemy soldiers might have had different root structures, but there appeared to be twenty of them.

Therefore when the monsters erupted from the cracked gray walls all around the First Born, exposing themselves as having been disguised by the stonework, Deathbringer was not caught unaware because this creature had seen the pulsing, wet red oval of the camouflage organ in many field dissections. It was a mystery yet to be conquered.

They knew no fear, neither First Born nor the reptilian attackers with their scaly flesh of yellow banded with black or brown, or black banded with yellow and red, or brown banded with black and yellow, no two exactly alike. To an inhabitant of the earth this would have been a hypnotic beauty, as God might have created the serpent before cursing it to crawl on its belly after the Fall of Man. Yet their quick and slithering movements and the visage that was too close to that of a king cobra was terror beyond terror, and to be caught by the slitted red pupils in narrow eyes that never blinked was more than enough to paralyze a human being.

The weapons of these soldiers were simple. They had been bred for this war. Beyond the claws, fangs, and speed to tear their enemy apart at close range, at long range some could spit spears of acid that would eat through any earthly material short of tungsten steel. Six of the twenty had been bred as creations that could extend their upper appendages a length of seven feet in human distance, and their claws would transmutate into any number of deadly implements according to the creature’s braincore.

Instantly the First Born pressed back-to-back. They began to fire their double-barreled weapons as they spun in a rapid wheeling motion. They turned so fast they were ghostly imprints, nothing solid about them but the white-hot gouts of energy streaking out across what used to be a refined lobby of commerce, now a battleground where reptilian forms exploded into burning pieces.

Still the enemy darted forward, diminished now by half their force. The spears of acid came sizzling through the air at the First Born. They blurred out almost as one, and yet acid hit a faceplate before all had displaced themselves. The one struck lost its distortion and vibrated back into focus, its faceplate being melted away and beneath it a sparking of red schematics. An elongated yellow-and-black arm with a spinning yellow spearhead for a hand pierced the chest and a black-and-brown-banded arm that ended in a dozen crimson spikes drove into the lower body and tore loose a slide of glistening black intestines. As the dying creature crumpled to its knees, its acid-burned head was ripped from the neck by the brute strength of a reptilian commander with a growth of three thorny spikes on each shoulder. The remaining four First Born blurred back in across the chamber behind their enemy. Their weapons cut apart another six of the hated foe. Four enemy soldiers were left, among them their commander. There was no retreat; all knew this was a battle to the death.

A stream of acid spittle came at one of the First Born, who vibrated out and left the viscous slime burning into the concrete wall. The four reptilians streaked forward with incredible speed upon the other three First Born. The energy blasters fired, missed, and blew the far wall to pieces as their targets went into slither mode across the floor. An elongated arm with a barb-covered mallet at the end of it swung within inches of Deathbringer’s faceplate. Deathbringer’s weapon destroyed the offending enemy. The fourth First Born ghosted back in a few feet away and blasted a second enemy into burning pieces. The reptilian commander sent a spear of acid flying at Deathbringer, who went to one knee the liquid passed over its left shoulder. Deathbringer fired but missed as the commander snaked aside. Then, as another First Born’s energy bolts blew the third reptilian apart, the commander camouflaged itself amid the rubble and vanished, leaving not a blip on the faceplate search grids.

The orders must be obeyed. Capture this specimen. High altitude tracker on station. Begin immediate deployment.

A shift of Deathbringer’s search grid showed their destination. It was a distance from where the four First Born of the Blessed Machine stood, but what was such a distance to an interstellar traveller who could enter and leave the fourth dimension at will? A mathematical picture of the specimen could be brought up, but that information was already burned into Deathbringer’s numeric code and the codes of the other soldiers. If the specimen moved during the time it would take to reach this destination, the tracker would maintain contact if it was not destroyed by enemy action, for the skycraft battleships fought even at the edge of this world’s atmosphere.

Deathbringer transmitted the coordinates and the path to the other soldiers. They took no notice of the headless body lying nearby, for that one had become a negative. They began to ghost out, one after the other. As Deathbringer began to vibrate into distortion a claw attached to a scaly and sinewy arm with a shoulder adorned by three spikes reached from the gray stones on the floor. It seized the ankle of Deathbringer’s left boot. Then the rest of the reptilian commander began to restore itself from the state of camouflage and rise up from the rubble, its facial hood flaring wide to show the same violent scarlet as the slitted pupils, its mouth opening to spew acid into the black faceplate.

Deathbringer knew two things that might be termed emotions: loyalty to the Blessed Machine and hatred of the enemy. In its complex mathematics, there was no room for anything else. Except, perhaps, an integer’s sliver of cruelty. Deathbringer fired its weapon at point-blank range, a single energy orb, and severed the left arm at the shoulder, thrusting the commander backward to the floor as a spool of acid flew into the air. The right arm was burned away by the next single burst. The legs were burned off one after the other, and the flesh of the reptilian commander’s scorched and squirming torso changed back and forth from the gray of the rubble stones to its yellow-and-black banding, the camouflage organ overcome with the chemicals of agony.

The black faceplate with its small red glyph of glory angled down at the tortured commander and drew in a numerical picture of the scene. Then, satisfied with its work, Deathbringer did not bring death but instead ghosted out.

A specimen had to be captured for the honor of the First Born, and for the triumph of the Blessed Machine.

Twenty-One.

“Let’s hear it,” said Major Fleming, his jaw set like a chunk of granite. “The truth.”

The mall’s maintenance room bristled with guns: automatic rifles, machine guns and pistols. The ashen-faced soldiers who held these weapons aimed them at two figures seated on metal folding chairs: Jefferson Jericho and Jack Vope. Ropes had been lashed around the prisoners, tying them together back-to-back under a harsh incandescent light. Standing out of the line of fire were Dave, Olivia, and Ethan, who had one blue eye and one silver with no discernible pupil. JayDee had come down on the elevator and stood leaning on his cane behind Olivia.

After the chaos was over, Ethan had gone into the bathroom to check out his silver eye in the mirror. He’d thought he would’ve been afraid to see it, but he was no longer afraid. Instead, he was simply fascinated. The feeling of power that had flowed through him during that encounter had been incredible…impossible for the part of him that was still a human boy to understand, but for the other part of him…whatever that was, and was going to be…an immense satisfaction at having been able to save human lives. There in the bathroom, with an armed guard still at his back, he had lifted up his t-shirt and seen that a new figure had appeared in the silver tattoo just above his heart. Now it read GUARD, with another symbol just beginning to come up from the dark slate.

He’d had no choice but to go to the major and tell him.

The Cyphers sent a recon probe and those weapons, because there’s a Gorgon here disguised as a man. I haven’t said anything because I can handle him. Do you believe that?

And the hard-assed major who thought he’d seen everything in this nightmarish war had said, Yes I do.

I’m sorry for not telling you, but I wanted to watch him. The man with him…Kushman…is a human, but he’s being protected by the Gorgons. I don’t know why, but I need to know. When you take these two men, I’ll need to be with you. The Gorgon is afraid of me, and so is the man.

Hell, the major had said, I’m afraid of you too.

You don’t have to be. My task is somewhere else, but as long as that Gorgon is here this place is in danger from the Cyphers. I should’ve expected that, but I’m thankful no one was hurt.

Except that…man who got burned up, said the major. What was that?

A Gorgon-engineered weapon. We should be glad for that, because those spiders were nearly too much for me.

Okay. Right. Well…how old did you say you were?

And here was the question, because Ethan knew whatever was in him was old. Whatever was in him, growing stronger and taking control of everything, was so ancient these runes on his chest might have been its most recent communication with the inhabitants of this world. What- ever it was, it knew the cosmic dust and dark matter that blew between the stars to seed the lifeless spheres of raw planets into new life; it knew how cold and remote could be the outer reaches of space whose distances and dimensions defied the minds of men to imagine, and it knew how ruthless these two enemies were, and how military men and women of Earth might wish to stop this war but it was the only entity who could, and it was not from around here.

I’m fifteen, going on way more than you can count, Ethan said, and the major asked no more questions.

“Waiting to hear something that makes sense,” Fleming said to the two figures tied together on chairs in the maintenance room. “Kushman? You want to say anything?”

“Sir?” said one of the soldiers. He was young and lean and had a Southern accent. “Pardon, sir…but I think I’ve seen this man before. I mean…not here, but somewhere else.”

“How would that be, Private?”

“I don’t know, sir. He just looks real familiar. Like…somebody I remember from television. My mom used to watch him, back in Birmingham…or who he looks like.”

“I doubt this bastard was ever a television star,” Fleming answered, and then he returned to his business by pulling back the bolt of his .45 automatic and levelling the barrel at the man’s head. “I’ll kill you, friend. And if your Gorgon buddy moves, I’m leaving that up to Ethan. So let’s hear it.”

“Major,” said Jefferson Jericho, his eyes wide and set with an expression of puzzlement and pleading, “this is a big mistake. I hardly knew either of these men. I just met them on the road. Hey, I’m from the South too,” he told the young Southern soldier. “I used to live in—”

“Shut it,” Fleming interrupted. “Ethan knows the Gorgons are protecting you. Why do you need protection?”

“Protecting me?” Jefferson brought up a crooked smile. “If that’s so, they haven’t done a very good job, have they?”

Dave was watching Vope, who blinked…blinked…blinked.

“Major,” Dave said, “I think you ought to go ahead and put that sonofabitch there out of our misery. I’ll do it, if you like. Glad to.”

“No,” Ethan said. “Besides, you wouldn’t know how.”

“Would you?”

“Yes,” Ethan answered, sure in that knowledge, and looking into the silver eye made Dave go silent.

“I have let you restrain me,” Jack the Gorgon suddenly said. “I have allowed this indignity, but I could easily break loose from these bonds. The boy could destroy me, but not before you, called Major, are dead.”

“This guy’s crazy,” Jefferson spoke up. “Mental. But how does that mean he’s a Gorgon?”

“You want to tell him what you’ve told me?” Fleming asked the boy with the silver eye.

Ethan stared for a moment at Jeff Kushman. Looking into the man’s face, at the softness that seemed only lately to have been touched by this brutal war, he had the feeling that there was something wrong with the name…that it was an alias to an alias, that this man was a walking lie but he was good at lying, he was very skilled at it, and he may have been able to convince and persuade someone who could not see the hard blue sphere that shielded the images in his mind. Ethan said, “I can read the Gorgon’s mind. I can see things in there.” He decided to try his luck at persuasion. “I can read yours too, Mr. Kushman…but that’s not the name you really use, is it?”

Jefferson’s face flushed; he looked around for help and found only hard faces and accusing eyes. “Listen to me,” he said, speaking to everyone, “I’m human! I’m one of you! Look at this boy and tell me what he is! You’re not going to trust a…an alien over a human, are you?”

“I know who and what you are,” Ethan said. “Denying it just makes you smaller.”

“This isn’t a boy!” Jefferson had almost shouted it. His eyes were shiny with fear. “I don’t know what he is, but he’s not one of us! Listen, listen…okay?” He directed this to Major Fleming, and specifically to the hand that held the pistol. “I didn’t want to get involved in this, I was somewhere else! It’s not me that wants him!” He felt the ropes tighten as the Gorgon shifted in his chair. He looked to Dave and Olivia. “I swear to God, I don’t want to hurt him! I don’t care, I just want to get back to where I was! Back to my people! You know?” It was all pouring out of him, he felt that his dam had broken and he couldn’t hold back the floodwaters but he thought that he could be killed three ways now: by this weird boy, by the Gorgon he was roped to, or by the major’s pistol. “I was pushed into this!” he said. “I was forced to do it, I didn’t want to be here!”

“Forced to do what?” the major asked, and he looked as if he were so ready to use that gun.

“I was forced to—”

“I will speak,” said the Gorgon.

Everyone was silent. Jefferson Jericho looked at the floor, his heart pounding and his mind racing.

Vope couldn’t turn his head enough to look at anyone directly, so he stared impassively at the far wall. “The boy is a curiosity to us. How he kills without weapons. He is something that should not be, yet he is. We wish to know his internals and systems. You would do the same, Major, if you were fighting an enemy such as we are.”

“We are fighting your enemy,” Fleming answered. “And we’re fighting you, too.”

“You have lost both those wars long ago. The only chance your kind has for survival is to nest with us. Release us from these bonds, Major. We will take the boy and consider him an offering.”

“Like hell!” Dave growled. “Nobody’s taking Ethan!”

Vope was silent. Then his head cocked slightly to one side and he said, “Your refusal has been noted. You ask for an attack that will burn you all to the ground. In the end, we shall have what we want.”

“Then maybe I should blow your damn head off right now,” said Fleming, who stepped closer to press the pistol’s barrel against Vope’s temple.

“Good luck with that,” Jefferson said bitterly. He tensed himself for what he feared was to come, the sweat running down his sides under his shirt.

“Yes,” said the Gorgon, as if in agreement with that last statement. Jefferson Jericho couldn’t see what happened next, but the others could. The Gorgon’s body shimmered and began to lose its substance. There was a sound like a soft whistling, as if air was being displaced. Maybe it was a whirring sound, like a little machine in motion. As Vope faded out and the ropes that had bound him fell slack, the black-bearded and dark-eyed face angled to look up at Major Fleming, and it seemed to the major that something behind that face was struggling to get out, to cast off its disguise, because the face was as distorted as if made of melting wax, or like an empty rubber mask seen in a funhouse mirror. There came the harsh, otherworldly echo of the Gorgon’s final word to him: “Idiot.”

Then the body was gone, but perhaps there remained for a second or two the faintest impression of a dark aura where the body had been…and that too passed away, and the barrel of Fleming’s automatic was aimed at empty air.

“Jesus!” Jefferson Jericho shouted, as he realized the ropes had fallen from him and Vope had been teleported from the room. “Don’t leave me here!” Jefferson stood up from his chair, causing all the guns in the room to train on him. “Don’t leave me!” he called into the air, with a voice like that of a broken child. There was no reply to his plea, not even the merest pinch of pain from the device buried in the back of his neck.

“I can’t live out here! I can’t survive it!” he babbled to the major, as tears of terror burned his eyes. “This is all wrong! I’ve got to get back to where I was!” He turned his agonized appeal upon Ethan, Dave, Olivia and JayDee. “Please…you’ve got to help me get back!”

“I’ll help you into a fucking grave, if that suits you,” Dave said.

Ethan sent out the silver hand again—it was easy now, so easy, as if he’d been doing it all his life—to probe into the head of the man who called himself Jeff Kushman, but the incandescent blue sphere still protected the man’s memories. Whatever the Gorgons had done to him, they were still shielding him. It was a strong force. Ethan’s force couldn’t remain in there very long without feeling that it was sapping his strength; he had to pull out, and he brought the silver hand back to rest within himself. From beginning to end it had taken less than three seconds.

“What are you talking about?” Olivia asked the frantic Kushman. “Help you get back to where?”

Jefferson Jericho decided the time had come. Even with all these guns trained on him, even if it meant his death in the next thirty seconds. He had to get back to Her protection, back to the Ant Farm, and there was only one way to do that…broken fingers or not.

Flesh to flesh, She had said. He figured that must trigger the process of transportation or whatever the hell it was that would get him out of here.

He stepped out of the ropes and with the courage of desperation lunged past Major Fleming before the man could stop him.

He grabbed hold of Ethan’s forearms, flesh to flesh except for the splints around his broken fingers. Now! he thought as he peered into the depths of the boy’s silver eye, though he was calling mentally to Her, Queen of the Gorgons. Get me out of here NOW!

Ethan clearly heard that call, as if the man was speaking it to him. The room began to fade. He was aware of Dave reaching for him, but it was too late. It was as if the light was simply going out, the walls dissolving, and Ethan knew it was his own body—and Kushman’s too—that was leaving the room, bound for an unknown destination.

Ethan had the impression of a figure standing behind Jeff Kushman—a large, leathery shape with a dark and dimly seen face, and set there were the fearsome, hypnotic eyes of the Gorgon, commanding him to obey but that was the last thing he wanted to do, and as he felt the Other Realm beginning to close in upon him he thought no, I will not be taken…I will not be taken, I’m going back to where I was. He didn’t know how he did it. He just knew he needed to fight, and he was not going to be removed from his friends and the task he had to do. He felt a tremendous pressure, pulling at him as if drawing him into a whirlpool, or over a waterfall to dash him to pieces on the rocks below. But he thought no, no…you’re not taking me…and his strength of will—the strength of will worlds beyond that of the human boy he used to be—was enough to break the power of what was transporting them; it was enough to scramble the signal or block the portal or do whatever was needed to be done, for the figure of the Gorgon behind Jeff Kushman faded away and the presence of the Other Realm was gone, and quite suddenly they were standing in the maintenance room of the mall again, with the light shining down upon all those guns in the hands of the soldiers.

It had happened so quickly that Dave was still moving. It had appeared to Dave and everyone else in the room that the bodies of Ethan and Jeff Kushman had faded almost to shadows and then had come back into focus in the space of time it took for two anxious heartbeats. Dave wrenched Ethan out of the man’s grip, and pushing Ethan aside he laid a right hook into Jefferson Jericho’s jaw with every bit of wiry muscle a tough-assed ex-bouncer, brickmason, and general owner of a bad attitude could throw.

The Tennessee stallion went down so hard most of the people in the room, including John Douglas, thought he was dead.

But the dead man returned to life after a few seconds with a spitting of blood and a moan that seemed to emanate from the center of a tortured soul, and Dave McKane stood over him with fists clenched and shouted, “Stay down, you sonofabitch! Just stay down!” all the while wishing the bastard would at least try to get to his knees.

“We’ll take it from here,” the major said. “You all right?” he asked the boy, who nodded. It was all Fleming could do not to ask Ethan where he had gone—or almost gone—but he didn’t want to know.

Olivia pulled Ethan to her and hugged him. Then it came out of her. Everything…the loss of Vincent, the loss of her world, the tragedy and senselessness of this war, the hardship and struggle, the deaths of so many people she had known and cared for, and though she knew she hugged in her arms a boy who harbored a presence in him that was not of this earth, she didn’t care because she needed someone to love and protect, and just that fast she broke. She began to sob, to weep for the dead and for the living, for those who had long ago given up hope and for those who still hung on to what tomorrow might bring, for those who had lost everything and for those who had kept their families intact only by good luck or the determination of the damned. She wept for those who, like her, kept their loved ones alive by a treasured picture or a memory held like a candle on the darkest night or some kind of Magic Eight Ball to ease their loss. It seemed in that moment that she wept for the young students of Ethan Gaines High School, who had painted a mural upon a wall proclaiming the dream of the Family of Man that had been torn to pieces by the terrible, arrogant power of red and blue fire.

And she wept also for the boy who knew no name but Ethan Gaines, who had once been alive and in the care of a mother who loved him, but was now embraced and guided by an alien force, raised from the dead to carry out a task only that force could understand. He could never go back to what he’d been, before. Never. And neither could anyone else, because even if the war was ended tomorrow…the world was not a computer, and it could not be rebooted.

JayDee put an arm around her shoulders. He leaned his head against hers. He wished he could find something to say, but there were no words. He wished he could weep himself, could get rid of the pain of having to put those three poor souls out of their misery back at Panther Ridge. He looked at Dave, who was rubbing the knuckles of the fist that had almost knocked Jefferson Jericho out of this world.

“We need to get Ethan to the White Mansion,” JayDee said. “The sooner the better, I think.”

“Yeah,” Dave agreed. “How about it, Major? When can we leave?”

“I told you we’d make some improvements to your bus. You’ll need ’em. If you’ll give me the rest of today and tonight, you can head off in the morning.”

Ethan gently pulled away from Olivia. “That would be good,” he said. “Thank you.” He felt weary and a little lightheaded. The joints of his body ached. He knew he was paying a price for the force that was using him. He wondered when it would happen that the part of him that was still human would be completely gone, and the alien within him took total control. He figured he was halfway there already. Would he even know when it happened? Would it be like going to sleep, or dying, or would it be like being a bystander in his own supercharged body?

He didn’t want to think about these things too much, because they scared him. “I think I need to get something to eat and then lie down and rest for awhile,” he said, running a hand across his forehead. “Someplace quiet.”

“What about me?” asked the man on the floor. Still groggy, he crawled away to put more distance between himself and Dave McKane’s fist. His tongue found two loose teeth and tasted blood. “What’s going to happen to me?”

“We’ll find a place to lock you up nice and tight,” Fleming said. “If I’m understanding all this, you’ve been aiding and abetting the enemy. The Gorgons wanted the boy and they got you to help? Save your speech, I don’t care to hear it,” he said, before Kushman could speak again. “In my Army, that’s reason enough for an execution.”

“Kill me? Just like that?”

“Execute you,” said the major. “Just like that.”

“Ethan, listen to me!” Jefferson Jericho started to struggle to his feet, but he saw that McKane wanted to hit him again so he stayed where he was. “I was forced to do this! I didn’t want to! Who would want to help the Gorgons or the Cyphers unless they had to?” He probed his teeth again; one was so loose it was just about to come out. “I can’t…I can’t explain it all to you, but they were protecting me and my people. They were keeping us out of the war. So…it was either find you and take you back—and I don’t know how they do that, that’s way beyond me—or lose our protection. Do you understand?”

“Why’d they choose you?” Dave asked.

“They chose me because they thought a real human could get to him easier. Just like Vope said, they want to study him. But they’re afraid of him, too.” Jefferson tensed, ready for pain to be delivered to him at any second for his failure and his betrayal, but no pain came. He realized he had truly been abandoned, She had turned Her back on him, and probably everybody in New Eden had been destroyed like ants beneath a crushing boot, the Ant Farm whirled away into space or some other dimension and burned into nothingness. “I thought…he must be a Cypher weapon or something, but…what he did out there…killing those soldiers…he can’t be one of them.”

“Ethan is something different,” said Olivia, who had regained her composure. “Becoming something different,” she corrected herself.

“A third kind of alien,” JayDee said, and surprised himself by voicing the thought. “He believes he can stop this war. I say, give him the chance.”

“Right.” Jefferson nodded strenuously. “A chance. Yes. Absolutely. But…listen…nobody can stay here. Vope says they’ll be coming to burn this place to the ground. They can do it. They will do it.”

“I’ll know when they’re coming,” said Ethan.

“How will you know? ESP or something?”

“You can call it that. I’ll just know when they get close enough.” Ethan turned his attention to the major. “If I’m gone, there’s no need for them to attack this place. They may do it just because they can, but like JayDee said…the sooner we get on the road, the better.”

“Okay, but give us time to work tonight. If I were you I wouldn’t want to head off after dark, anyway. It’s too risky.”

“It’s a risk to stay here,” Ethan said, but he knew that night travel was pushing even his powers of survival and certainly they didn’t want to run into any more armies of Gray Men.

“I’m not staying here!” Jefferson Jericho stood up and staggered but held himself upright. “Hell, no! I didn’t ask for any of this! You want to lock me up with the Gorgons coming to kill everybody? And execute me, for trying to save the lives of my people? How was I supposed to know that the boy wasn’t a Cypher weapon? I didn’t know he was a human!” He glanced at Ethan and the boy’s silver eye, which sent a shiver up his spine. “If you can call that human!”

“Before we go,” Dave said to Major Fleming, “I’d like the job of putting a bullet through this scumbag’s head.”

“What do you mean, your people?” Olivia asked, disregarding Dave’s remark. “What people? And where?”

“In Tennessee. I…had a housing development, near Nashville.” Jefferson decided not to reveal too much about himself, in case the Southern soldier’s mother had lost her bankroll betting on the book and DVD of God’s High Rollers’ System For Riches And Happiness, forty-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents but for a few dollars more could be delivered overnight by Federal Express. “The whole development…everything…was scooped up by the Gorgons. Put somewhere so they could study us. I was taken by one of them…she looked like a woman, she could change her face and her shape…and she told me if I didn’t bring the boy back, our protection would be gone. That’s why I did it. For my people, like I said. And I swear to God I thought he was a Cypher weapon. I thought that’s why they wanted him.” He turned his agonized eyes upon Ethan and figured if he ever needed an iota of salesmanship he needed a ton of it now. First, the build-up: “I know you’ve got a fantastic power…I’ve never seen anything like that…what you did out there. You saved everybody.” He brought upon his face the expression of a desperate supplicant, which was closer to reality than he cared to admit. “Can you stop this war?”

Ethan probed the man’s mind and found that, not surprisingly, the blue sphere was gone. His Gorgon keeper had left him to his own resources in penalty for failure. The silver hand of Ethan’s curiosity roamed through a landscape of scenes from the man’s past that in some places were hard to view; he found bits and scraps that told him the real name was Leon Kushman but the man went by another—Jefferson Jericho—and there were scenes of adoring crowds and stacks of money being counted and women, many women, who—

Ethan had the complete picture of Jefferson Jericho in the time it took between the words Can and war. He saw the Gorgon creature in its many guises and knew all. He saw a rainbow through a window and knew the sudden elation of a car salesman with a grand idea to make himself rich. He saw Jericho’s wife—her name Ramona? No…Regina—with a pistol, and knew how close this man had come to paying for his many sins with a bullet to the head…but saved by the Gorgon ship blasting into view over the Tennessee pastures.

“You were lucky that day she was going to shoot you,” Ethan said, and saw the blood drain from the man’s face. “Or maybe not, because here you are with us.”

Jefferson touched his right temple, as if he could feel Ethan moving around in there but the silver hand had already gone. “You know what I’m telling you is true, don’t you?” He heard a little begging in his voice, but that was all right; the boy might respond to it.

“That part is true. Some of the rest of it, not so much. And to answer your other question: I’ll know more about that when we get where we’re going, White Mansion Mountain in Utah.”

“Are you done bulling the shit?” Dave asked, speaking to Jefferson. “Time you got locked up or put down with a bullet.” He looked again to the major. “I’ll do it, if nobody else will.”

“This man has done some bad things,” Ethan agreed, “but he doesn’t deserve to be killed for this one. His real name is Jefferson Jericho, and he was a—”

“God dog it!” said the Southern soldier. “I knew he was familiar! My momma watched him, nine o’clock every Sunday night, bought his book too! I should’ve known from his voice!”

“A preacher, of a kind,” Ethan went on. “He sold dreams. Some turned out good and some went wrong. There’s no point in locking him up, either. His Gorgon protection is gone. He has nowhere left to go.”

“That,” said Jefferson, “is unfortunately correct.” He maintained eye contact with the boy, as difficult as that was for him. “By this time, my people and my town are gone, too.” His tongue finally worked the loose tooth out and he spat it to the floor along with a spatter of blood. “You know what we called my town?”

“New Eden,” Ethan said.

“Why did I even have to ask?” Jefferson worked up a tight smile. “Well, the snake got in it.”

“You mean another snake got in it?”

“Yeah. That’s what I mean.” The preacherman should’ve felt trapped, backed into a corner, but instead he felt strangely free and strangely strong. With this boy able to read his mind, there was no longer any reason to pretend, to put on a show, to hide behind any façade. It was almost, in a way, a relief. “I didn’t ask to be here. So do whatever you want with me. Like you say, I have nowhere else to go. A rifle bullet now or blown to pieces by the Gorgons later…what’s the difference?”

“None,” said Dave. “So I say the rifle bullet.”

“You give up very easily,” Ethan said, “to be such a good talker.”

“What?” This had come almost simultaneously from Dave and Jefferson.

“Your skill is talking people into doing things. Sometimes things they don’t really want to do, but you make them believe. That’s what your life has been, hasn’t it?”

“Some might say.”

“I say, because I know.” Ethan was getting a feeling he couldn’t shake. It was true that the man was a user of other people, that he had crushed others down for his own needs and left many impoverished, but many enriched as well. He did have a gift of persuasion, though it was no match for the silver hand that uncovered all truths. He had talked his way onto the bus over Dave’s objections, and he had hidden a Gorgon and a Gorgon-engineered human under their noses, and he might have spirited Ethan away to the Gorgon realm if the alien presence hadn’t been so powerful. Ethan had no idea what was waiting at their destination, but this feeling he could not shake made him look at Dave and say in a voice that was direct and forceful and far older than the years he portrayed, “We might need this man.”

“What?” Dave repeated. “Why in hell would we need him?”

“I’m not sure yet,” Ethan answered, “but I might not be enough.”

“Enough for what?” Olivia asked, as puzzled as both Dave, JayDee, and even Jefferson Jericho.

“For the task. What that is, I don’t know yet, but this man…” Ethan paused, trying to read this feeling but unable yet to decipher it. “He’s too valuable to leave behind. He’s seen a creature who might be the Gorgon queen…if she really is a female. He’s been favored by her,” he said. No need to go into the other details he had uncovered, he decided. “I believe he should go with us, no matter what else he’s done.”

There was a moment of silence. Jefferson couldn’t decide if going to this mountain Ethan was talking about was any safer than staying here, but he did know one thing: as long as he was with this boy, he would be more protected than by the soldiers with all their useless guns. On the other hand, Ethan was a target for the Gorgons, and they weren’t giving up; they would find him, wherever he was. And out there were the Gray Men, too. Thousands of those things…

Still…what was the tradeoff?

“I’ll tell you everything I know,” Jefferson said, speaking to Dave because the rock needed to be turned. It wouldn’t take much; the boy was in command here. He turned his focus on the woman. “Things about Vope and Ratcoff you’d probably want to know too. I can make myself useful, I promise you that.”

Dave’s eyes were dark and dangerous. “You make a move toward Ethan again and I’ll kill you,” he said, “and that’s my promise to you, scumbag.”

“Fair enough,” said the preacherman, with a slight bow of his head. Maybe it did register in him that he might still have a chance to seize Ethan and be transported to the Gorgon queen, might still have a chance to save his people and his town and himself, but he felt the boy’s eyes on him, imagined he felt the boy’s alien power taking his brain apart and examining those thoughts one by one to test their weight, and so he let them fly away.

“I’ll know,” Ethan said. That was enough for Jefferson Jericho to hear.

I’ll be a good boy, Jefferson thought, and Ethan answered, “I’ll count on that.”

Major Fleming and the other soldiers had work to do. Dave vowed to keep himself between Ethan and Jefferson Jericho at all times. Olivia took JayDee’s hand and helped him to the service elevator. There were supplies to be gathered for the trip, and Hannah Grimes had to be approached about driving the bus because Dave didn’t think he could handle a rig that size, not on the roads they would face when they left I-70 in Utah. The interstate itself might be a cratered challenge; who knew what was out there, in those mountains that must be crossed?

But something was out there that Ethan had to find. No one doubted it. They would be leaving as soon as the work was done on the bus, out into the world again, out into the war.

Jefferson Jericho realized everything he had ever built was likely destroyed. Regina, also destroyed. Or maybe New Eden was returned to its original plot on the Earth and left for the ravages of the war or the Gray Men to tear it to pieces. Which did he think was the better fate? He didn’t want to think, but he figured he would never see the place again. He was throwing in his lot with this boy and the others, and maybe Dave McKane would kill him before they got to this mountain that seemed for some reason to be so special, or the Gorgon queen would transport him out of here and kill him in retribution, or something was waiting on the road that could overcome even the boy’s power and kill them all. But at least he was alive today. He was not going to be locked up or executed.

The boy might have a use for him. That made him a little nervous, but for now Jefferson counted that as a victory. And for now, it was the best payoff a High Roller could hope for.

Twenty-Two.

Ethan was prepared for what awaited him in the mall. A boy with a silver eye who could blow apart Cypher spiders and soldiers by the power of a mind-weapon was going to find people cringing from him as if he carried a plague. They would be terrified of him, and who could blame them? He would be terrified of himself, if he wasn’t in this suit of skin. Dave went to find Hannah Grimes and took Jefferson Jericho with him. Ethan, Olivia, and JayDee went to the food court to get something to eat. The people who were already there left in a hurry, and that included a few nervous soldiers. The three survivors of Panther Ridge, alone in the food court, served themselves bowls of thin vegetable soup from a big metal pot and cups of water from plastic jugs and then sat down at one of the bright orange tables.

They hadn’t been there very long when Olivia motioned to her right and said, “We have company.”

Ethan saw Nikki approaching. She, at least, seemed to have no fear of him anymore. She came up to the table. For a moment she looked with true wonder into the silver eye that had no pupil and then she asked, “Does it hurt?”

“No. It’s not any different from the other one.”

“That is…so freaky,” she said, and she gave a quick little laugh that she tried to stop with a hand over her mouth, but too late. “I mean…it looks kind of cool. It doesn’t make you have…like…X-ray vision or something?”

“Not that I can tell.” Worrying about if I can see through her clothes? he wondered, but he didn’t care to violate her privacy by wandering around in her mind.

“Get yourself something to eat, sit down and join us,” JayDee said, nodding toward the fourth chair. “Looks like we’ve scared everybody else away.”

“Thank you,” Nikki told him, “but I just need to speak to Ethan for a few minutes.”

“Is that our cue to disappear?” JayDee asked, with a spoonful of soup halfway to his mouth.

“No sir,” said Ethan, “we’ll move to another table.” He took his soup bowl and his cup of water and followed Nikki to a table across the food court, because though he didn’t want to peer into her mind, he knew this was something she needed to speak to him alone about. When they were settled, sitting across from each other, Nikki looked from one eye to the next as if trying to figure out which one to talk to.

“I can see through both of them,” he explained. “One’s just…like you said, freaky.”

“How did that happen? Did you feel it happen?”

“No, I didn’t.” Just more evidence, he thought, of the change he was going through. Whatever the alien force was inside him, it was asserting itself more and more. “I didn’t feel anything. I was too busy.”

“Wow,” she said. She pushed a drift of blonde hair off her forehead. “That was like crazy amazing! But…do you mind if I ask you something?”

What does it feel like? she was going to ask, but he nodded and let her ask it anyway.

“It feels…like all I have to do is concentrate on something, and I can do it. It’s getting easier, but I wouldn’t say it’s really easy. I just have to want to do it…in a way I can’t explain. Like…life or death. You know?”

“I guess.”

“Let me ask you a question. When I killed those spider things, and the Cypher soldiers, did you see anything come out of me? Like come out of my hand, I mean. Where it was aimed at those things. Did you see anything?”

“No, there was nothing.”

“To me it looked like bolts of lightning or…I don’t know…burning bullets is how I would describe them, I guess. Thousands of them. They just come out of me when I need them. And the air does something funny too. It seems like it twists between me and what I’m aiming at. It’s like my whole body’s a gun, or an energy weapon…and everything comes out here.” He showed her his right palm, which looked like the ordinary palm of any teenaged boy. “I’m thinking I’m the only one who can see that?”

“I couldn’t see it,” she said. “I was right there, and I couldn’t.”

Ethan figured what he was seeing might be beyond the range of normal human vision. Maybe that had something to do with the change in his eye, and his visual spectrum was also changing. “That dude who caught fire and started flinging it,” he said. “If he hadn’t done that…I’m not sure I would’ve been able to handle them all. His name was Ratcoff. I just found that out. He was a human—mostly—but the Gorgons got to him and made him like that.” Ethan took a sip of water and put the cup aside. He looked into her good eye. He asked quietly, “How come you’re not afraid of me? Really.” He thought her eye was the color of a chocolate brownie, which made him hungry for something sweet. “Everybody else is, except for my friends. How come you’re not?”

Because I’m your friend, she said.

But Ethan did not reply until Nikki actually spoke it: “Because I’m your friend.”

I am, right?

“Sure you are,” he said, before the words came out. “It’s just…you know…how I’m changing. It’s way beyond weird. And now, with this eye…”

He knew what she was getting ready to say, the words were there in her mind, and he made himself focus just on her face and her mouth because it wasn’t right to be there in her head, but he couldn’t help it, it was too easy, it was becoming so natural for him…

“You want to see mine?” she asked, in a small voice.

He knew she wanted him to, so he answered, “Yes.”

She took a long deep breath of courage, and then she started to lift up her eyepatch, but then she stopped and there was a lopsided grin on her mouth but a terrible sadness in her good eye, and she said…

“I’m sure,” Ethan told her.

“It’s not very pretty,” Nikki said.

He shrugged. “Do you think mine is pretty? When I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror I almost fell down. Hey, I don’t even know how I can see through it!”

She nearly laughed at his inflection of helplessness, but a laugh was hard to come by. She still felt dazed by what had happened in the mall, and by the attack of the Gray Men and Gary Roosa’s death last night, and sometimes she thought she had to go numb to deal with all the horrors of life now, and with all the bad and sad memories, all the people she knew who had died. But what happened when you went too numb, and you lost all your feeling, and you couldn’t find your way back from that dark and empty place?

She wanted him to see what the eyepatch hid, because she needed a connection with someone. She needed someone to know the pain she had gone through…not that it was any worse than what most had experienced…but she needed Ethan to see it, maybe as a way to keep the numbness from taking over more and more of her until she was just a mindless, soulless cinder on this burned and wrecked earth. She needed a human touch, from this boy who was no longer truly human…or maybe, more human than most because he had an aim and a purpose, and she needed that too.

“Go ahead,” he told her.

She lifted the eyepatch and showed him the crimped socket where the destroyed orb had been removed by Dr. Douglas before infection set in. The scar began just below the socket and continued up almost to her eyebrow. “A piece of glass got me, is what the doctor says. I don’t remember that. I just remember fire and houses blowing up on Westview Avenue.

“It was at night and they were fighting in the sky. I was cut up pretty bad in other places—my face a little bit—but most of the worst are under my clothes. Some of my hair was burned off, they told me, but it grew back. I guess I was lucky, huh? Not to be all burned up.”

“Yeah,” Ethan said.

Nikki let the eyepatch down again. The little rhinestone star sparkled. “Some people came in to the apartments, early on, who were really burned. They didn’t last very long. A family came in with two little boys who were twins, and they were both burned really bad on their arms and legs. One died during the day, and the other one died almost exactly twelve hours later. I heard Olivia and Dr. Douglas talking about it. It was like…when one twin died, the other one quit wanting to live. The mother and father didn’t live very long after that, either. A lot of people killed themselves. I almost did, too, but Olivia stopped me. Twice.”

“I’m glad she did,” said Ethan.

“Hm,” the girl answered, in a way that told Ethan she wasn’t sure if she was glad or not. “Olivia brought these rhinestones for me, for my patch. Know who had them? The mother of those twins. Where she got them from, I don’t know. A Dollar General, maybe. Just picked up a pack of something she thought was pretty. People do crazy things when they need to hold on to something, I guess.”

Ethan nodded. It was the truth, and what was there to say? He knew what Nikki needed: a listener, and so he waited for her to go on without reading the scenes of her story before she could tell them.

“My sister’s name was Nina,” Nikki said. “She was a year older. Wow, could she ride a horse! Well, we both could…but she was way better than me. She was a junior at the high school. Was going to go to Colorado State and major in fun, is what she told me. But she really wanted to be a vet and work with horses. Maybe she would’ve gotten there, she was good at math and chemistry and stuff. I was a dud at those things, ’cause I was the real partier.” Nikki stared off into space for a moment, and Ethan let her take her time.

“Sometimes,” Nikki said, “I see my sister in my dreams. She’s always pretty and smiling and happy…not burned up or hurt at all, and she says, Nikki-tick, you can make it out of this. You’re not one to be wanting to give up, so tell Olivia about those sleeping pills you found after Mr. and Mrs. Estevez passed on. And tell her about the knife with the serrated blade in the bottom drawer of your dresser, under the red blanket. And I say back, Quit bossin’ me, you always liked to do that and who made you the queen of me? But she just grins a big queenly grin and she answers, Put a cork in it, ’cause you’re the last of our family…the Stanwick family of 1733 Westview Avenue, and Dad always said he didn’t raise quitters. So, she says, find your way. And I didn’t know what she meant, until now.”

Ethan was silent; he allowed himself not a peek into her thoughts, but he had an idea of where she was headed.

“If a person doesn’t have hope,” she said, “they die. Inside, first. If they don’t find a way, they’re finished.” Her chocolate-brown eye focused on him. “I don’t want to stay here and wait to die, Ethan. If I’m going out, I want to go trying to find my way. I know you need to get to this mountain in Utah. I know it’s important.” She paused, maybe readying herself if he denied her this path. “Will you let me go with you?”

He had no hesitation. He said, “I want you to go.”

“You do? Really?” It was spoken with an outrush of breath. “I know it won’t be safe, but—”

“No place is safe,” he reminded her. “No place will ever be safe while this goes on.”

She nodded. “Do you know what’s on the mountain?”

“No. I don’t think I’ll know until we get there, and it reveals itself.” It reveals itself? He realized his thinking was changing too, and the way he spoke…it wasn’t how a human boy thought or spoke…it was the alien thinking and speaking, becoming more and more dominant. “I may be really different soon,” he told her, and offered a faint smile. “Like I’m not already. But I may not be Ethan Gaines much longer. That part of me may just go away, or go to sleep…I don’t know. But I don’t want you to sit here and wait to die, either. Your sister is right. We’ve got to find our way, so…I’m glad you want to come with us.” He motioned toward the unattended pot of soup. “You’d better get something to eat while you can.”

“I will, thanks.”

Ethan was weary and needed to find a place to rest. The battle against the spider-shapes and the Cypher soldiers had depleted him. There was some part of him now that was always on alert, and he trusted that to let him know if the Gorgons or the Cyphers were anywhere near. For the moment, he felt they were not. He wound up taking his sleeping bag into the empty storeroom of the Brookstone and stretching out on the floor there, and he was asleep within a few minutes.

But something within him did not sleep, did not need the solace of rest in this realm of misery, and it spoke to Ethan with four words: This is my world.

Ethan saw in the eye of his mind a rugged gray landscape strewn with boulders and cut by wide crevasses. The sky was milky white, shot through with streaks of vivid purple lightning, and just visible through the stormy atmosphere was a massive, clouded planet encompassed by three shimmering rings of debris and dust. Ethan had the sensation of standing on a mountaintop with a fierce, dry wind that smelled of alkali blowing into his face, and looking out across a wide valley, he could see a huge silver obelisk, thin but thousands of feet tall, with a spire that was slowly and silently rotating. Ethan had the sense that it was a watchtower of a kind, or a lighthouse sending out not beams of light but energy and messages that were far beyond his understanding. Messages were also coming in to this particular way station, and why he thought of the tower as a way station between worlds or dimensions he did not know, but he was sure there were others of its kind on more planets. It was a lonely place. He was struck by its loneliness and desolation, and he knew that the keeper here was an ancient creature who had either been chosen or had chosen itself to give up another kind of life for this duty it carried out. It was a double-edged sword: an honor to be a soldier in this service, but a lifelong responsibility. Time here was not Earthtime, nor Life governed by the laws of Earth. Ethan was unsure that the creature who was hosting him, and who he hosted, was capable of a physical body or not. The creature might be the construct of pure energy and intelligence, and though this part of its origin and nature was not allowed to be known, Ethan was sure that it did possess two things that made it akin to the human kind: what would be termed compassion, and a sense of justice. Those seemed to be its driving forces, as well as an innate curiosity about the workings of the universe that even it was not allowed to be fully understood by the wisdom of a higher power.

The spire rotated. The wind blew and purple lightning streaked across the milky sky, but the image was fading. When that vision of another world vanished entirely, the human part of Ethan fell deeper into a dreamless sleep, yet the alien being within him remained silently and tirelessly vigilant, for that was the only way it had ever known.

Four.

Westward

Twenty-Three.

“Is this really necessary?” Jefferson Jericho asked as Dave McKane fastened the black plastic zipcuffs to his wrists, basically tying the man’s hands together. Dave didn’t answer. He pushed Jefferson up the steps into the bus and wished the bastard would fall down and break his beak.

Hannah Grimes was sitting behind the wheel. She had decided that driving this bus to their destination in Utah might be the last driving she would ever do, but there was not much else on her social calendar that seemed important, and Dave had convinced her that this indeed was an important trip. So she was in it, for better or for worse; she figured Dave would’ve driven the bus off the road at the first hairy curve, anyway. The meager light of a rainy dawn had begun to crawl across the horizon. Already aboard were JayDee and Olivia, and they were waiting now for Ethan and Nikki. Major Fleming had returned their guns, canned food, and jugs of water to them and told them he wished he could do more, that he could spare some soldiers and one of the armored cars as an escort but he couldn’t abandon the people here. He’d decided to top off the bus’s tank from their own dwindling supply. Otherwise the most he could do was give them a longer hose to help siphon fuel along the way, scavenge a headlight from one of the trucks and make repairs and improvements to the bus.

A work team had labored all night under the glare of generator-powered arc lamps. They’d replaced the shattered windshield with a piece of metal that had a rectangular glass inset through which the driver could see the road. Nothing could be done about the window the Gray Child had broken through, except for a sheet of plastic duct-taped over the aperture. Other windows bore bullet holes from all the firing that had gone on, but again nothing could be done for those. The main work had been the construction and welding of a cowcatcher-like cage attached to the front of the bus and studded with iron spikes. All the metal was going to make the bus heavier and so use more fuel, the major had told Dave, but if they ran into any more Gray Men this might help them get through without the cavalry coming to their rescue…which, out there in the Rockies on I-70, was definitely not happening. He said if they’d had time and ammunition to spare he would’ve put a machine-gun turret up top, but again there was the weight to consider, and they needed the ammo and every available M240 at the watchtowers. A wiper blade had been fixed to keep the glass inset clear, and the last thing the major and his troops could do was clean the interior of the bus of all bloodstains and fleshy parts, both human and gray. Sorry we don’t have any air freshener, Fleming had said, but maybe you can find a pine strip when you stop for gas.

What the major had not told any of them, and they’d only seen this on their way to the bus from the mall, was that every soldier had signed his or her name on the sides of the bus in black or red spray paint, and maybe every soldier didn’t fully understand the importance of this journey, but both Fleming and Captain Walsh did and they had been the first to sign. From the major also had come the wrist zipcuffs, a pair of shears, and a suggestion to keep Jefferson Jericho bound up for awhile, just in case.

“Sit there,” Dave said, pushing the preacherman into a seat on the left side of the bus a few rows behind Hannah. Olivia and JayDee had taken seats on the right side, and Dave sat down behind Jefferson Jericho, so he could slap the dude on the back of the head if he needed to, or just wanted to. His Uzi felt good in its shoulder-holster, and in his belt holster was the .357 Magnum revolver that had helped save him and Olivia from the Gray Men in the high school library. He figured these weapons might not stop a Cypher or a Gorgon, but they would do the job on anything else and…if he really wanted to be truthful about it…they would save their owner from capture by the aliens if they came in numbers too many for Ethan to hold back, and they would save Ethan, Olivia, and the rest of them too if it came to that.

He reached forward and slapped Jefferson across the back of the head. “Shut up!”

“Ow, Jesus! Did I say anything?”

“No, but you’re thinking of talking. So shut up.”

Olivia’s .45 automatic had been returned, along with a supply of two packs of ammo given up by Joel Schuster, who had the same make and model of weapon. John Douglas got an Army-issue M9 Beretta that had not been his, since his weapons were lost at Panther Ridge, but Captain Walsh had given the gun to him as well as four extra clips. A couple of rifles and boxes of bullets had been “confiscated” by the soldiers and left aboard, along with two high-powered flashlights. Hannah Grimes had her hogleg revolver and a few cylinder loads. A machine-gun turret would’ve been a nice extra, Dave thought, but they had to go with what they had. At the back of the bus were plastic containers, a hand pump and a twelve-foot hose for siphoning fuel, along with the prybar Dave had used to crack the underground diesel tank’s fill cap.

In a few minutes Ethan came across the parking lot from the mall, followed by Nikki and Major Fleming. The major was carrying a small olive-green drawstring bag.

“Okay,” Fleming said, as Ethan and Nikki took seats behind Olivia and JayDee. “Good luck to you.” He focused on the boy, who still scared the shit out of him, but his rock-solid demeanor would never show it. “I hope you find whatever you need to find.” He gave the bag to Dave. “Four fragmentation grenades in there, model M67. Just pull the pin and throw, like in the movies. You can throw ’em about forty meters, but get in cover because the pieces can travel more than two hundred meters. Don’t blow yourselves up, save ’em for the enemy.”

“Thanks,” Dave said.

“We appreciate everything,” Olivia told him. “Especially the work on the bus, and the fuel.”

“Did what we could. Ethan, take care of these people if you can.”

“I will, sir,” Ethan answered. He was feeling the Cypher presence, had felt it since long before dawn and their breakfast of bread and canned pork’n beans, but he knew what it was and there was no point in mentioning it until they got on the road west. It was not a forthcoming attack, it was something different.

“Right,” said Major Fleming. “Wish us luck, too. We’re going to hold out here until somebody says otherwise.” He gave them a quick salute. “Good-bye, folks,” he said, and when he left the bus Hannah closed the door and started the engine. It fussed and rumbled, just like Hannah had when she’d been awakened around four o’clock, but like her, it was ready to go.

The metal-spiked entrance doorway to the fortress was hauled up-

ward on its chains and the yellow school bus with the names of forty-two soldiers and a captain and a major on its sides passed underneath and along the road lined with concertina wire. Vultures were picking at the half-eaten Gray Men corpses splayed amid the coils. The sun shot crimson rays through holes in malignant-looking black clouds. The broken towers of Denver lay to the south, and so also did the ramp onto I-70.

The fortress doorway was lowered. Hannah said, “We’re on our own now, kiddies.”

Ethan could still feel the Cypher presence. It was like a prickling of his skin, a shadow in his mind, and he knew what it was because the alien within him knew.

“We’re being followed,” he said. “It’s a Cypher tracking device. High altitude.”

“Christ!” Jefferson swivelled around to face the boy as best he could. “Are they coming after us?”

“Just following, for now. But it’s sending out signals, so…they’ll be along, sooner or later.”

“The Cyphers want you too?”

“Yes,” said Ethan. “The one that got away probably communicated with its central command. They want me just like the Gorgons do.” He offered the man the semblance of a smile. “They don’t know what I am, and they’re trying to figure me out. But…it’s good to know that they’re afraid of me.”

“They’re not stupid,” said Jefferson. “But do you even know what you are?”

“Not everything. I think I—what’s in me—must be a soldier, too.” Ethan tapped the symbols over his heart. “I think I’m growing my own uniform, and this is my designation. I’m—it—is getting stronger by the day. Maybe by the hour. Which means…when they come after me, they’re going to send their best.”

“Yeah, and the worst for us!” Jefferson was beginning to think he would’ve been better off staying at the mall, getting a gun or two and putting his back into a corner, but Ethan said, “I’m going to need you before this is done. I don’t know how, but you’re going to have a chance to help me. To help us. Do you believe that?”

“I don’t know what to believe. But why bring the girl?” He directed his attention to Nikki. “What’s your story?”

“I want to be with Ethan. I trust him. That’s all.”

“No, I mean your eye. What happened?”

“Shut your mouth now, Jericho,” Dave said, leaning forward, “or I’ll shut it for you. How many more teeth would you like to lose?”

“The war happened,” said Nikki, with queenly dignity. “I’m lucky to be alive.”

“Lucky,” Jefferson repeated, and he gave a bitter laugh. “Yeah, we’re all really lucky, aren’t we?”

“We’re alive and we have a chance to do something important,” said JayDee. “I trust Ethan too. Now maybe you’d be better off if you did shut up for awhile.”

“Good thing, so I can concentrate through this damned viewslit,” Hannah told them. “We’ve got a mess of wrecked and abandoned cars in front of us. Gonna have to slow down and ease our way through, so everybody just sit tight.”

It was a torturous route. Fifty or so cars, SUVs and trucks jammed this stretch of Federal Boulevard. A few had caught fire and burned into unrecognizable masses of metal. A thirty-foot-wide crater near the intersection of Federal and West 80^th Avenue told the story of damage done by either Gorgon or Cypher weapons that had heightened the panic and caused people to leave their vehicles. Buildings had been burned out on either side of the boulevard and some had collapsed into piles of melted black rubble. Hannah had to thread the needle several times, scraping the bus between cars, erasing some of the names on the paint. “Come on baby, come on baby,” Hannah urged Number 712, as she had no choice but to guide the bus over dangerous shoals of broken glass and pieces of metal. It occurred not only to her but to everyone else on the bus that this could be a very short trip if a couple of tires blew.

“Hang on, this one’s nasty,” Hannah said, as Number 712 slowly scraped between a burned metro bus and an overturned Hormel meats truck. She got hung up on something, and she had to back up and try the approach again. The sound of rending metal made Jefferson Jericho lean his head forward and squeeze his eyes shut in a vain attempt to escape the noise. Nikki clutched Ethan’s hand in a grip that he thought could crush a Jaguars linebacker’s hand at—

“D’Evelyn High School,” he said suddenly, with a flash of recognition. “Right here in Denver. That’s where I went to school.”

“What?” Olivia asked.

“I remember,” Ethan said. “The science class was at D’Evelyn High School. Where I was going to show my Visible Man.” Was he babbling now? He didn’t know. “The teacher’s name was Mr.…” It was close, but still not there. “My mom’s name was…” That, too, was not there. But something was there. “I’m from Lakewood,” he said. “I lived at…it was a number with two eights in it. My house—” He was trying hard to remember, while the scraping sound of metal went on and on and the school bus shuddered as Hannah pushed their way through. “There was a park down the street. A huge park, with a lake in it. I think it was called…Belmar Park.” He nodded, as the name came back to him. “Kountze Lake. I remember that. I used to go fishing there.” He looked into Nikki’s face and felt the return of a small amount of joy. “I can remember a little bit!” he said, almost tearfully. “I know where I’m from!”

The horrendous sound of metal against metal ceased. Hannah let loose a whoosh of breath. “We’re through! Damned if this road’s not a mess. Dave, I’m seeing signs to I-70 West but everything’s blocked up pretty bad.”

“Figured it would be. Just do the best you can.”

While Ethan tried to struggle to recall more of the life he used to know, he was also aware that the alien part of him was alert and questing for the presence of enemies. It was like he was a highly sophisticated radar, searching for many miles in all directions for approaching blips on a mental screen. He could envision the Cypher tracker: a glowing red triangular shape about half the size of the bus, slowly rotating around and around near the edge of the atmosphere, its crimson eye of energy directed down upon him and a multitude of calculations going out across the Cypher network. They would have already sent a team after him. They would strike at their own time, at the place they felt held the most advantage, but for the moment he couldn’t feel them anywhere near. Neither were the Gorgons anywhere near, but neither would they give up trying to capture him. It helped that they feared him, for sure, and they weren’t going to blunder into the range of his weapons without calculating the odds of success. They were coming, though; it was only a matter of time. And if they could figure out what he was and what he was trying to do…they weren’t going to slink quietly away, they would try to destroy him with everything they had.

“Ramp’s blocked,” Hannah announced after awhile longer of weaving in and out of tight places. “Maybe we can get up the next one.”

“You can’t levitate the bus out of here, can you?” Dave asked Ethan, only half jokingly.

Ethan thought about it. Could he? The answer was quick in coming. “No, sorry. I can’t do that. I can’t move us by any kind of mental transportation, either. Hannah’s in charge of this trip.”

“Thanks, Spacekid,” she replied.

“So let me ask you a question or two, Ethan,” Jefferson said. “If you don’t mind?” He had asked this of Dave, who shrugged his shoulders in such a way that told the preacherman to go ahead but to be careful with his mouth. “We’re going to this mountain that you feel you need to get to, but you don’t know why. You started out a human boy but now you and everybody knows there’s a…a thing in you that’s not Gorgon or Cypher, and they’re afraid of you because you…this thing in you…has the power to destroy them and they don’t understand it. Am I right so far?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. You say this thing in you is a soldier. How do you know that?”

“It’s just what I feel. What it lets me understand, if that’s the right way to put it. Only…maybe…it’s not a soldier in the way we would think of.”

“I think of a tough-assed bastard who’s trained to fight and to win a war. What other kind of soldier is there?”

“There’s another kind,” said JayDee, who’d been thinking about this ever since Ethan had used the word. “There’s a peacekeeper. Like the soldiers who wear the blue helmets for the United Nations. They have to be tough too, but they don’t fight to win wars…if they have to fight, their purpose is to end a conflict.” He nodded toward Ethan. “If Ethan…if the being that’s keeping Ethan going, when he should’ve by all rights been dead a long time ago, is trying to stop this war, I’d say he…it…whatever…is like a universal peacekeeper. A galactic United Nations soldier, I guess I’m trying to say.” JayDee shrugged. “Maybe this war upsets the balance of things, on a cosmic scale. Maybe the Gorgons and Cyphers have been at this for hundreds or thousands of years, and this United Nations of the cosmos has decided it’s gone far enough. So…why did the peacekeeper pick a young boy instead of a man? I don’t know, and who can say? Maybe it was a good fit. Possibly there were things already in Ethan’s personality that the soldier could use. Hey, I’m just from Earth…I don’t know the answers to the mysteries and I’m not saying all this is fact, but…there it is: my opinion, and that only.”

“God, this is crazy,” Jefferson said. But he couldn’t think it was too very crazy, because of what he’d experienced himself. The boy with the silver eye was staring at him, likely reading his mind again, tromping through the memory of all the rotten flowers in there. “So how did this thing get into you?” he asked. “How’d it get here? By flying saucer or what? And if it really wants to stop this war, why didn’t it come with an army? And why doesn’t it just tell you what it wants you to find, if it knows so much? Doesn’t this thing know what we’re supposed to be looking for? Why doesn’t it just spell everything out for you?”

“Maybe it doesn’t know everything,” Olivia offered. She’d been thinking about this question too, and why Ethan seemed to be being fed by bits and pieces from the alien intelligence. “Maybe it has an idea, but doesn’t know for sure. Maybe, too…it doesn’t want to overload Ethan too much, because he’s still got the mind of a boy. A limited mind, as any human mind would be. That’s why it’s been a gradual process, and the thing didn’t take him over all at once.”

“Didn’t want to shellshock him,” Dave said. “I get that.”

Ethan said nothing. It was interesting, in a way, to be talked about like this, but disturbing too. There was so many questions; he doubted there would ever be answers to them all, because Olivia was right. The limited human mind could not fully understand this alien force, how it had arrived here and chosen him and how it was growing stronger, no more than he could understand how the power exploded out of him to create an earthquake or to blow Cyphers and Gorgons to pieces. It just was there when he—when the alien inside him—demanded it. He noted that this last encounter with the spider-shapes and the Cypher soldiers had left some pain and stiffness in his joints, like he was becoming an old man, so there was a price to be paid from the human flesh. He wondered if he could use his left hand too, as a double-barreled weapon. Anyway, it seemed to him that even though the alien power within him was incredibly strong, there was still a physical weakness inherent in the human body that was wearing him down. But if he was dead and the alien was keeping him alive…had taken control of this version of the Visible Man and was powering heart, lungs, blood pressure, digestion, and all the rest of the systems, he figured when the soldier had completed its mission—if that was possible—he was done for, and no doctor on Earth could change that. At last Ethan said, “I don’t think it needs an army, but I do think it needs us.”

“Needs us? How?” Jefferson asked.

“It needs us to…” Ethan paused, considering how to phrase this. “It needs us to give a damn,” he went on. “As humans, I mean. I think…it wanted to know first if any of us even wanted to fight back. If we were strong enough to keep going. Dave, I think that’s why it didn’t tell me where the White Mansion was. It needed…it needs…to know that any of us care enough to stand up and fight, instead of waiting to die in a hole somewhere. So if you and Olivia hadn’t gone out that day to find a map…if you’d said I was crazy and the earthquakes and finding the water were just things that happened, and I couldn’t make you believe anything else…then maybe it would’ve figured we weren’t worth helping. Maybe it would’ve just gone away, and I would’ve died and the Cyphers and Gorgons would keep on fighting until the whole world was destroyed, because nobody here cared anymore.” He looked from Dave to Olivia, to JayDee, to Nikki and then back again to Dave. “That’s what I think,” he finished.

“This conversation is way over my wintry head, gents,” Hannah said. “I’m just along for the ride. And I’m lettin’ you know I’m lookin’ at another on-ramp right now that’s a jammed-up parkin’ lot, no way are we gettin’ up that.” She wheeled the bus in another direction. “Well…no cops around, so let’s try the off-ramp.”

That was how Hannah got them up onto I-70 and westbound. The eastbound traffic during the incident that had caused all this chaos—likely the first battle that had devastated the central part of the city—had been virtually nil. There were a few wrecked cars and a big tractor-trailer truck that had slid into three other wrecks and caught fire, but Hannah was able to get them around the mangled blockage. She worried most about the glass and pieces of metal in the roadway, but the streetsweepers had been off-duty for a good long while and there wasn’t a damned thing she could do but to grit her teeth and dance the bus along as best she could.

The interstate started a slow ascent. Mountains stood on both sides, and ahead were the looming giants of peaks—now partially obscured by an ugly yellow mist—that had been born eighty million years ago. Ethan wondered how old the being was inside him, what it had seen and where and how it had been born, if the Rockies had been specks in the eye of God when it had first come to life, and what Life meant to it. He had the feeling from what it had shown him that it was a lonely creature, one of a limited or dying race, but above all it clung to its duty. And here was its truth and its meaning of existence, as clear as if the alien was sitting at his side telling him these things: the futility of wars was known to all but never accepted by those who held power as their God. Pride, arrogance, and stupidity were not just the worst traits of the human kind but were spread across the span of galaxies as the price to be paid for the desire to be held in esteem, or recognized as better than any other civilization, or simply the appetite to conquer and control. Ethan felt a sadness and heaviness in what might have been the heart and mind of the alien—now becoming his heart and mind as well—in that it knew it fought a losing battle. Yet here, right here on the border—this young world that might not make much difference in the unfolding of a galaxy old beyond the meaning of Time—a stand must be made, and with that stand a message to be sent to the warlords of Now and Forever who assemble soldiers, weapons and ships for dispatch to destinations of destruction and misery.

That message might be futile, but it was the creature’s duty to make it known: I am the guardian of this sector. I was old before your civilization took root in swamp or was created by machine. If you reject peace and insist upon the satisfaction of horror, then prepare you to be satisfied in the horror of your own making.

Ethan could feel the tracker following them, far above at the atmosphere’s edge. Its Cypher eye was fixed directly upon him.

They would be coming soon. They would find their place and time to try to take him…but he knew it would be soon.

And the Gorgons?

They would be coming soon too. What the controllers could not control, they would attempt to contain or destroy.

He was not ending up on the dissection table of any reptile or robot, and neither were the people he knew to be his friends on this endangered planet.

I will be—

“Ready,” said Ethan.

Nikki asked him what he had said, and he shrugged and explained that he was thinking out loud, and then he smiled at her and squeezed her hand and thought that nothing Cypher or Gorgon was going to harm these creatures that had been hurt so much already. A great battle was ahead…he could feel their forces of destruction massing, for they too would be ready.

The bus went on, westbound in the eastbound lanes, as I-70 steepened toward the gigantic mountains, and the boy with a silver eye now realized he was more alien than human, and so mused upon both the question of destiny and what his mother would think if she could see him now.

Twenty-Four.

Lightning struck so close it filled the bus with dazzling blue light, and then the following crash of thunder made Number 712 shiver to its rusted bolts.

“Great night to be out on a drive,” said Jefferson Jericho in a hollow voice. No one answered him. Hannah was concentrating on the highway ahead through her viewpane and the others were in their own worlds or else too tensed by this building storm to have any use for talking. Jefferson shrugged; he couldn’t do a thing about his circumstances, and he figured he was better off here under Ethan’s protection than at the mall. The device at the back of his neck was not filling him up with the flames of agony, he felt he was—for the moment at least—out of Her reach, and so what was a little thunderstorm? Still…Hannah was having a tough time, creeping along I-70 at about fifteen miles an hour because of the thickness of this yellow mist they’d run into up here at the high altitude with the jagged mountains all around. Beyond the guardrails were steep dropoffs that could swallow up earthmen and spacekids alike.

“Hey, Ethan!” he called back.

“Yes?” The boy had been mentally observing the Cypher tracker, which continued to pinpoint his location even as the large battlecraft of both sides fought each other at the threshold of space.

“This storm natural? Or is it them?”

“Natural,” Ethan replied. “But their weapons have screwed up the atmosphere. So all storms will be many times amplified in violence.”

Amplified in violence, Jefferson thought. That wasn’t how a kid talked. That was the alien talking. How did it know English? Reading the boy’s mind, he figured. An alien who could come to this world without a spaceship and enter a boy’s dead body…that had to be some kind of weird. Well, no weirder than Her. Or the Ant Farm. Or Microscope Meadows. He had not allowed himself to think much about Burt Ratcoff. He remembered the guy saying I think they hollowed me out and put somethin’ else inside me. Poor dumb bastard, Jefferson thought. But Ratcoff probably didn’t know what hit him and he was out of this nightmare now, so…good for him.

Jefferson scratched his beard. His hands were free. A few hours ago, the conversation between he and Dave was: Okay, I have to pee. Want me to go ahead and do it here, or can we pull the bus over for a minute?

Good idea, Hannah had said. I’ve gotta go too. Might as well pull over while we can, everybody take a break.

So, Jefferson had asked Dave, are you going to cut these things off my wrists or do you want to hold it for me?

They had stopped at a lookout point with a view to the forest below, and one by one they all saw the wreckage of the crashed United States Air Force fighter jet amid the burned trees.

Jefferson flinched at the next strike of lightning, because it too had been close. Up here in the high mountains, the weather had gone berserk. He’d tried hard not to think too much about Regina or the people at the Ant Farm. There was nothing he could do for them. They might all be dead by now, swept away into space, or left on their unprotected own. Which would be the better fate? He wished he’d had a chance to smooth things with Regina, to make her understand that a special man like himself with special gifts could not be expected to live a normal life, constrained by a society of dumb sheep. No, he had to make his mark and take what he needed when he needed it; that was just how he’d been born, and who could change that? But…it was too late now with Regina. Maybe that day she’d nearly shot him in the back of the head would’ve been the best, he thought. Wouldn’t be here right now, in this bus in a rising storm with a damned itchy beard and an alien boy, heading for God only knew what. He hoped Regina had died quickly. She was all right, she just hadn’t recognized that the gifts he’d been given had to be used. He hoped she had died in one quick second of being cast off into airless space, because in his way he had loved her. Whether he could ever come to tears about her passing, he didn’t know nor did he care to dwell on it very much longer; after all, if she was dead she—like Burt Ratcoff—was in a hell of a better place and he was still here in this shitmess.

No rainbows here, folks, not even after the hardest rain. Move along…nothing to see.

Sitting a few rows behind Jefferson Jericho, Ethan felt himself drifting away. It was like he was becoming a spectator to his own life. He realized his speech was changing, no way he talked or thought like an earthkid anymore. Maybe he hadn’t, really, since all this had started. It was really weird now, though, because he knew the Big Change was happening. There was nothing he could do about it, it was for the best but…the Big Change was death for him, for the boy who’d called himself Ethan Gaines, and when the alien—the peacekeeper—had done what it needed to do, Ethan Gaines was finished. As the lightning flashed and the thunder crashed outside the bus, Ethan tried very hard to concentrate on that day at D’Evelyn High School—the third of April, the morning the first sonic booms had announced the coming of the Gorgons—when he had been waiting to take his Visible Man to the front of the class and make his presentation. The details of that had always been hazy; now they were becoming truly clouded, and more and more out of reach. He tried very hard to hold onto that morning and onto the memory of his dark-haired mother looking in on him in his room the night before, but it was all slipping away. His father…was there even a memory of him? The man had been gone a long time, it seemed. There were no memories of fights or shouting or anything that spelled out divorce. There was just the feeling that his father had left many years ago, and his mother had not remarried. She had soldiered on and given the boy the best life she could. Who could ask for much more than that?

As the alien’s powers strengthened and what had been the personality of a human boy continued to disappear, Ethan found himself trying to hang on, but knowing it was like being very tired and trying to stay awake after a very hard day. Sooner or later, he must give himself fully up to sleep; it would take him, no matter how hard he tried to fight it. And fighting it was not only useless, but wrong. The peacekeeper had a job to do. This body was just a vessel. The peacekeeper had raised him from the dead, had kept him alive so far, but the boy who called himself Ethan Gaines was a small grain of sand in the cosmos. He was a means to an end, and he understood this and accepted it. Not without sadness, though; he was still human enough to feel that, and he knew he would miss life no matter what it had become.

The alien presence within him gave him strange benefits. Not only could he clearly envision the Cypher tracker and sense the heat of its eye directed on him, or know how close or far away the Gorgon and Cypher armies and ships were, but he could feel the huddled humanity in a few of the small towns they’d passed, nestled up within the mountains on roads off I-70. He could see rooftops and a church steeple or two, and just in a matter of seconds he could know there were humans hiding there, always in some central location where community meant survival and isolation was death. The peacekeeper had great respect for these humans, who had held out so much longer than they should have against such overwhelming odds. The peacekeeper would have liked to have stopped and made sure these ragged and weary humans had enough food and water, but the larger picture was what needed attention. And Ethan was aware that there was a time factor involved…a need to get to the White Mansion as quickly as possible, though maybe even the peacekeeper itself did not fully understand why.

Most of the small towns they’d passed, and which could be seen from the interstate, felt to Ethan cold and lifeless. To him they gave off the rusted iron smell of violence, of human turned against human in the battle for food and shelter. Or they gave off the rotting flesh smell of Gray Men, hiding in the basements and in the dark damp places.

Beside Ethan, Nikki shifted uneasily in her seat in the aftermath of another close lightning strike. She couldn’t see anything out there, darkness had claimed the world. Her hand found Ethan’s again. She had been very afraid of him at one time, and so close to telling Olivia that she thought he should be put off the bus and left behind. Now she felt ashamed of that. She’d been so afraid that he was a Gorgon or a Cypher in disguise, and now she understood he was a human boy but not really, that he’d been a human boy, and he was now working for another alien who was trying to stop the war, but this was all so beyond her it spun her head. It was like looking up at the stars and trying to imagine how big the universe was. She longed for the simplicity of planning her next tattoo, hitting the Bowl-A-Rama on Saturday nights, flirting with hot guys, and sneaking a beer or a joint with her friends Kelly and Rita and Charmaine who were all probably very much dead. Or worse.

She missed her family. Who’d have ever thunk she would miss her mother’s sharp-edged voice getting after her for whatever reason and her father in his recliner with a beer in his hand and his eyes glued to the football game on the fifty-two-inch flatscreen? Or her older sister’s snitty ways of getting her in trouble with the Duke and Duchess of Denial, as they called their parents. But she missed them, because they were her blood and now they were all gone and nobody—nobody—deserved to die like that.

“No, they don’t,” said Ethan quietly, and Nikki did not answer. At first she thought she must’ve spoken aloud but then she realized she had not, and how long he’d been reading her mind she didn’t know but now she—

“Not long,” he told her. “Don’t worry, I’m not in there all the time. It just happens.”

She pulled her hand away and he let her. He understood. The mind was a sacred place, it should not be spied upon but it was one of the least of the peacekeeper’s powers. That’s why you live alone, he told the entity. You scared everybody else away.

And the answer came back to him, in his own voice but different, a little more adult, sadder and darker in that way: I wish it were so simple as that.

Rain suddenly began to pelt down. It was not a shower, it was a deluge.

Hannah turned the wiper on and found that the Army meant well but this was not their specialty. The motor sounded like a man moaning with a toothache and the wiper’s action couldn’t keep the glass clear. “I can’t see a damned thing!” she growled. “We’re gonna have to stop and wait it out!”

No one tried to second guess Hannah, who put on the brakes and eased the bus to a halt. She cut the engine, noting that with the bus’s extra weight and the inclines they’d been climbing, they were getting about six miles to a gallon. “Light us up a couple of lamps, somebody,” she said. “No need to run the battery down.”

Dave got up, went to the back of the bus where some oil lamps were stored in a box, and used his Bic to light two of them. He brought them up front and set them where the glow would be a comfort, and Hannah turned off the interior safety lights. Rain was hammering down on the roof, a noise that further tested the nerves. Dave returned to his seat and stretched his legs out in the aisle. “I figure we’re about seventy or so miles from the turnoff to Highway 191.” That was the road in Utah that would take them south to the White Mansion. From I-70, the distance to their destination was about one hundred miles. “That what you figure?”

“Near it,” said Hannah. She stood up and stretched her back. “We’ll need to fuel up again real soon.”

“Right.” Dave had had no illusions that they’d be able to get to the White Mansion on a full tank of fifty gallons. “We’re about a quarter tank now?”

“Little less.”

“Okay.” Dave looked out the window nearest him and saw only rainswept darkness; they were vulnerable here to whatever might be lurking in the night, but in this downpour they couldn’t move. “You all right?” he asked Olivia.

“I’ve been better. But…yes, I’m all right.”

“JayDee? How you holding up?”

John Douglas had known Dave was going to ask him this, and the truth was that he was not holding up well at all. His bones ached. His joints seemed to be on fire. It had begun early this morning as little jabs of knife-like pain here and there and had gotten worse through the day. He’d tried to let it go as his age or being worn out or whatever…but he was afraid it was much more than that. Pain was shooting up his right leg, and it was more than the sprained ankle. He said, “I don’t think I’m doing so well. Would you bring one of those lamps a little closer?”

Dave did. JayDee caught Ethan watching him, and he thought the boy knows. Just as I know, because I’ve seen it happen. JayDee pulled up his pants leg to check his injured ankle.

There on the thin calf of his leg was a splotch of gray. It was about eight inches in length and four in width. It was upraised just a bit, like a keloid scar.

No one said anything.

JayDee stood up. “I’m going to take off my shirt,” he said in a calm and quiet voice though his heart was pounding. “Let’s check my chest and back.”

His chest was clear. But when he turned around to let Olivia and Dave check his back he knew because he heard her catch her breath.

“Is it just one or many?” he asked.

It was a moment before anyone answered. Then Dave said, “Just one.”

“How large?”

“I guess…twelve or thirteen inches across. About ten inches long. Almost right between your shoulder blades.”

JayDee made a noise—a mumble of assent, a grunt, a muffled curse. Even he didn’t know exactly what it was. The rain was a torrent and a torment. He felt light-headed but was keenly aware of all the pricklings of pain in his body. “I don’t think there’s any need to take my pants off,” he said, trying for some levity that did not lift off. He put his shirt back on, buttoned it with hands that were remarkably steady, and tucked the shirttail neatly into his pants. He said, “Thank you, Dave. You can put the lamp down now.”

“What is it?” Jefferson asked, his voice tense. “What’s that thing on his back?”

“Shut up,” Dave told him. “Nobody said you could talk.”

“Yeah, well…I think I have a right to—”

“I said SHUT THE FUCK UP!” Dave roared, and was on Jefferson Jericho before anyone could stop him. Both Olivia and Hannah tried to get in the way, but Dave had hold of the man’s dirty brown t-shirt and was shaking him like a mad dog with a bloody bone. For a moment it looked as if Dave might smash him in the face with the oil lamp he was holding. “Shut up shut up shut up!” Dave shouted, and Jefferson cringed down in his seat because he thought the guy had gone crazy, and both the women were pulling at Dave and over the noise of Dave’s shouting and the rainfall crashing down JayDee said, “It’s not his fault. It’s not anyone’s fault. Let him go, Dave. Come on, let him go.”

Dave did not, though he stopped making the brain rattle in Jefferson’s skull.

“Let him go,” JayDee repeated, and this time it was spoken with a grim finality that made Dave remove his hand from the other man’s shirt and step back.

“Why?” Dave asked. It was not a question directed to anyone on the bus, for no one could answer it. It was directed to God, or Fate, or whatever threw the dice in this insane game of Life. Ethan had seen the gray patches on JayDee’s leg and back as clearly as anyone else, and he knew what that meant. It looked as if the blood had stopped circulating on those places and the flesh had begun to die. A new Gray Man was about to be born; this was just the beginning of the changes.

“Well,” said JayDee, and he couldn’t look at anyone so he stared at the floor. He gave a quiet sigh of resignation. “My friends…I don’t think I’ll be finishing this trip with you.”

“Do something.”

Dave had fired this command at Ethan, who stared blankly at him not knowing how to respond. “Yes,” Dave said. “You. Master of the Universe or whatever the fuck you are.” Dave’s eyes were black and his mouth twisted with helpless anger. “Heal him. Fix him. Whatever. Don’t let him be one of them.”

All attention was concentrated on Ethan, who felt their nearly overwhelming pain. John Douglas was more than a friend to Dave, Olivia, Hannah and Nikki; he was as dear to them as the loved ones they had lost. He had been a journeyer with them over this landscape of despair, and he had been there when they needed him. They could not bear this moment, it crushed their hearts because they did love him, and they knew…they knew…

“He can’t fix this,” said JayDee, who lifted his gaze to Dave. “Don’t put that on him.”

“He’s from outer space,” came the answer, as if it was really an answer. “If he can make earthquakes and kill monsters with his mind…he can heal you. Can’t you, Ethan?” The last three words had left the sound of begging in the bus, which might have been the supreme gesture from a man with the stony countenance of Dave McKane.

And Ethan’s answer, the answer he was given when he asked himself if he could do this, was No, you cannot. He didn’t have to speak it out loud, though, because John Douglas spoke it for him. “He can’t do that, Dave. God…I wish he could. But if he could do that…he would’ve helped those three people I had to…” He stopped for a moment, steadying himself. Rain thrashed the bus and lightning streaked amid the mountains. “I had to leave behind,” the doctor finished. “Don’t ask him about this anymore. It’s not what he’s here to do.”

Dave started to protest, to keep going like a bull the only way he knew how to go, but he looked back and forth to Ethan and JayDee and he saw that, no, the alien could do things that were miraculous, could come to this planet on a beam of light or through the door of a different dimension, could raise an earth boy from the dead or from near-death and keep him breathing and powered like a puppet on galactic strings for the task it had to carry out, could sense fresh water and cause the earth to quake and do other things that were so far beyond the human kind it made all the technological advances and scientific miracles of this planet seem pathethic and childlike in contrast, but—no—the alien could not save Dr. John Douglas from becoming a Gray Man, and don’t ask him about this anymore, said the doomed man, because it’s not what he’s here to—

“I want you to try,” Dave said to Ethan. “I’m telling you to try. Heal him. Don’t let him turn into one of those things.”

Ethan didn’t know what to say to this, so suddenly the peacekeeper spoke.

It was his voice, but different in its inflections and its knowledge, and Ethan was made an observer to the moment.

“I’m not sure how you become infected with this, but the doctor is right. Once it…takes hold, let’s say…there’s no stopping it. Or healing that can be done.”

“What…you can destroy life, but you can’t create it?” Dave was fully aware who he was speaking to now, and he gave the creature both barrels. “You’re in the body of a dead boy! You raised it up, didn’t you?”

“He was almost dead,” said the peacekeeper. “His will to live, his youth, and strength of mind suited my purpose.”

“Okay, whatever. Are you like a spirit or something? Is that it?”

“I am an entity you wouldn’t comprehend. I needed flesh to work with, and I took the opportunity. I knew that our destination was close. More than that would be damaging to your mind to hear, because it’s beyond your limits.”

“I’ll second that,” said JayDee. “I figure we’re not very intelligent as a species, compared to you.”

“Olivia is also right,” came the reply. “I don’t know everything and I am not infallible. I know something of importance is on this mountain…in the mountain, actually, but I’m not sure what it is, and I’m not sure why it’s so vital. But it is, and that’s what I know.”

“In the mountain?” Jefferson asked. “What does that mean?”

“Exactly what I say. It’s something inside the mountain. It will only be revealed when we get there.” The peacekeeper turned one blue eye and one silver eye upon John Douglas, and said with a depth of sadness, “I’m sorry, JayDee. I can’t stop what’s going to happen to you.”

The doctor nodded. Thunder rumbled so heavily the bus vibrated with the bass boom of it. Rain was still thrashing against the roof and the windows. JayDee knew from seeing the progress of this—and he was aware that Dave and Olivia also knew—that by tomorrow morning he would be in agonizing pain as the changes in his bones and bodily structure progressed. Then the changes would speed up, as if the humanity had been conquered and the disease was in a rush of victory to distort the body into an alien horror show. Two or three days at most, and those spent in increasing torment. JayDee recalled watching the transformation happen to the first person at Panther Ridge, the twelve-year-old girl whose father had shot her when she began to grow a second head. He was having none of that. It was time to take a walk in the rain.

“Damn it,” he said quietly. He had been through so much—they all had, of course—and he felt cheated at this last moment, of not being able to witness what the White Mansion held for the peacekeeper. He could hang on, maybe, as he lost his human structure, but it seemed to him that now he ought to get off this bus and go find Deborah while he could still walk like a man. Limp like a man, that is.

He said, “I’ll trade you the Beretta for one of those grenades in the bag.”

“You don’t have to do anything right now,” Olivia said. “No, JayDee. Please. Not right now.”

“Hush,” he told her, but gently. “I’m not sure there’s ever a good time for this. But…my God…I took the lives of those three people back at Panther Ridge because there was nothing else I could do for them. I made the decision for them…now I need to make it for myself.”

“Please,” Olivia repeated, though she knew there was nothing else to say.

“Christ on a cracker!” said Hannah. “Why don’t you at least wait until the rain stops, you old fool?”

JayDee had to smile at that and give a crippled little laugh. He was aware of the pain beginning to lance through his nerves and muscles. He recalled that the little girl had been unable to stand up after the first day, but he’d wanted to observe what was happening to her in a safe place and her father had agreed. They’d chained her up in the Secure Room and he had made notes as the changes progressed. Which seemed terribly cruel and medieval both then and now, but it had been important to give him a reference as to how these fractures and rearrangments of bones and growth of new and strange flesh happened.

He was aware also of fiery sensations and stitches of sharp pain on his back, on his left calf, and at the back of his left thigh. The gray tissue there was growing, leeching deep.

“Let me have a grenade,” he said.

“What if I say no?”

“I’d answer that I’d do it with the gun, but you may need it and the grenade will do the job just fine. Also that…” He felt something close to breaking inside him—maybe his heart, but that had been broken so many times it must look like a specimen from Frankenstein’s lab. He had to wait a moment to compose himself with decorum. “Also,” he went on, “that I want to go out remembering all of you, and remembering who I am. I don’t know when my memory would start going, or what my thought processes would be. I don’t know what this does to the brain. It may be that when the changes really begin, the disease removes all thought but that of animal survival…so one of you would have to kill me, just as we’ve had to kill the others. Which one of you would do that very necessary job?”

“If you say one word,” Dave told Jefferson, “I swear to God I will kill you and drag your body out on the road.”

“I’m not saying anything! Did you hear me speak?”

Dave ignored him. “I’ll do it when the time comes,” he told JayDee. “The time is not now.”

“Maybe it would be tomorrow, then?” JayDee gave up a sad smile. In the lamplight, he thought his old skinny, wan and worn-out self must already appear to be a ghost. “After eight o’clock and before noon?” He nodded toward the peacekeeper. “He’ll get you where you’re going, God willing. I’m getting off the bus here.”

“Jesus,” said Dave, but he could say nothing more.

“Give me a grenade. Dave, do I have to say please?”

Dave hesitated, but he knew the exchange had to be made. It was a mercy, really. The Beretta was given for the grenade. JayDee inspected it, making sure it was as simple a procedure as he hoped it would be. The rain was still falling hard; it was a hard rain everywhere these days.

“I’ll walk with you,” Dave said.

“No, you won’t. There’s no use in both of us getting out there.”

“I will walk with you.”

The peacekeeper had spoken in a voice that was decisive.

“All right,” JayDee answered after a short pause of thought. Maybe it wouldn’t do to be jumped by anything out in the dark before he could pull that pin. “Just a little ways, though. No need to drag this out.”

Olivia had begun to weep. She put her arms around John Douglas and he hugged her, and he told her to stop crying, but she couldn’t stop, and he told her that he was proud to have known her and proud to have known Dave and Hannah and Nikki too, and that she and Dave had been right about Ethan and good thing they hadn’t listened to his scientific objections, because all this was far beyond any science he’d ever learned in school. And now, if the alien within the body of Ethan could stop this war, it would be a second chance for Earth given from the stars or from a realm unknown to the human mind. So be it, said JayDee. He reached out to shake Dave’s hand, but Dave pulled him in and hugged him too, and Hannah and Nikki said their goodbyes, both tearfully, as Jefferson Jericho watched from his seat and figured one word from him would be his death sentence because the rock was ready to roll over him.

Then the peacekeeper was there at JayDee’s side with a flashlight, and the boy who had been known as Ethan was looking out as if through a window edged with fog. He had had a moment of being afraid, as the alien took him over, but now…it was not fear he felt, but peace.

He remembered his mother’s name. It was Nancy, otherwise known as Nan. And his own name?

He had a memory of the science class at D’Evelyn High School on that third day of April, just before a shaken Mrs. Bergeson from the office had come to Mr. Novotny’s room to tell him that the “kids,” as she put it, were going to be leaving school early. Something is happening, she’d told Mr. Novotny. It’s on all the news, everywhere. Something is happening, and the kids will be leaving school early.

Which interrupted his demonstration of the Visible Man right as he was talking about the brain, and it pissed him off mightily but it scared him too, because Mrs. Bergeson’s voice was trembling, and she looked very afraid.

“I’ll open the door myself,” JayDee told Hannah, and he did. Then he looked with watery eyes at the others and he said, “What we’ve been through…this is a walk in the park. Good luck and God bless and keep you.” He gave them a tough old smile. “You are all my heroes,” he said, and then he went down the steps on his rebar cane into the force of the driving downpour. The peacekeeper followed just behind him, directing the light so JayDee could see his way.

Somewhere on their walk into the turbulent darkness on the strip of I-70 that no car had traveled in a very long time, the boy who had called himself Ethan Gaines went off upon his own journey. It was a journey, like the one JayDee was about to take, that no human expected to return from. It was a voyage into mystery, but the peacekeeper told Ethan he was going to be all right, and there was nothing for him to fear anymore, nothing at all.

I thank you for your help, the entity told him. You are a creature of strength and honor. There is a place where heroes rest, after their battles are done. Both you and the doctor will find comfort and peace there. I promise you.

I’m okay, said the boy. I’m a little afraid, but I’m okay.

I am going to set you free now. What remains to be done, I have to do in full command of this form. Do you understand?

I do. But…don’t I ever get to know about the White Mansion?

You’ll know, the entity replied. Both of you will. Again…my promise.

The boy started to reply, to say he knew the promise would be kept, but at the same time, he knew he didn’t have to say it…and then he went to sleep, just like in a warm bed on a cold winter’s night, and knowing that when he awakened there would be someone there to love you and say good morning to the bright new day.

“I guess this is as far as I need to go,” said the doctor, loudly against the storm.

“Yes.”

“I wish I could know what you really are. What you look like, inside there.”

“You would be surprised,” said the entity.

“Will we be okay?” JayDee asked, steadying himself as the rain beat down. “Will we survive this?”

“That’s my hope,” was the answer.

“Mine too,” said JayDee. “Protect them if you can.”

“I can.”

“Goodbye, then. Let me do this and get it over with before I drown.”

The boy’s hand clutched JayDee’s arm for a moment as a reassurance.

“You have earned my greatest respect,” said the peacekeeper. “Goodbye, my friend.” Then there was nothing else to be said, and he turned and walked away.

JayDee stood strong, holding his balance against the forces that raged around him. He thought of Deborah, and their beautiful life together before all this had happened. He hoped that someway, somehow, they could pick up where they’d been interrupted.

He dropped the rebar. It made a clanging noise against the concrete that sounded to him like a church bell in the town of his childhood.

He held the grenade against his heart.

He took in a last breath of rain-thick air, of the earth that he was leaving.

The border, he thought. And was relieved, finally, to be about to cross another border to what he was certain beyond a doubt would be a better place than this.

JayDee pulled the pin.

Twenty-Five.

They heard the explosion and saw the flash about a hundred yards away.

Olivia had returned to her seat. She put her hands to her face and lowered her head, and she mourned John Douglas in agonized silence.

Hannah opened the door. Dripping wet, the alien in the form of a boy came up the steps, his head also lowered. Hannah closed the door behind him. When the creature looked at her she saw, as Dave and Jefferson and Nikki did by the lamplight and the flashlight’s reflected glare, that both his eyes now glinted silver. The face of the earth boy was grim, something about it more gaunt yet more resolute.

“I want to know this,” Dave said. “What do we call you?”

The alien replied, “Ethan. What else?”

“But you’re not him anymore, are you? Is he gone?”

“Yes.”

Olivia looked up then and saw his eyes, and she returned to her posture of silent bereavement. Ethan switched off the flashlight to save the batteries and started toward his seat.

“Your chest,” Dave said, before Ethan could sit down. “Let’s see it.” He held a lamp up to take a look as Ethan lifted his t-shirt, and there against the dark-bruised flesh the upraised silver letters just above his heart were GUARDIAN. It seemed to be finished, for no other letters were begin-

ning to emerge from the depths. “What does that mean?” Dave asked.

“My designation,” Ethan said. “I am a soldier.”

“What are you? Like…special forces from outer space or something?” Jefferson asked, risking a fist to the teeth.

“Something like that,” Ethan answered. He noted that the rain was beginning to ease up; he noted also a new sensation, which to him was the shimmer of an image in his mind. “We’re being followed.”

“Yeah,” said Dave. “The Cyphers.”

“Your name for them. Their species name is based on mathematics of a nature unknown to you. No…this is what you call the Gorgons.”

“Following us?” That had set Jefferson’s heart pounding like a ten-ton drum. “How close are they?”

“At a safe distance yet. It’s a warship. Its tracker is focused on the device implanted in the back of your neck, Mr. Jericho.”

“Shit!” Dave exploded. He reached out to grab Jefferson’s shirt, but this time the preacherman got his hands up to ward off the punishment. Dave slapped them aside, bringing a cry of pain from Jefferson as two broken fingers took the impact. He took hold of the man’s bearded chin. “You didn’t tell us about that? Why not? Because you’re still spying for them?”

“He’s no longer a spy,” Ethan said calmly. “The device was implanted when he was first taken. They were collecting humans as subjects for experiments.”

“Yeah, I know all about those damned experiments.”

“For whatever reason,” Ethan went on, “the Gorgon queen found our Jefferson very interesting.” He knew the reason; it had to do with a curiosity about human anatomy and he didn’t care to go there. “He was spared being turned into a weapon, but a control and monitoring device was implanted. It’s likely small, the size of a pinhead in your experience, but it is powerful. He had no idea how else it could be used, except for giving him pain when he was disobedient.”

“Listen to him…listen to him,” Jefferson pleaded.

“Can we find a knife somewhere and let me cut it out of the bastard?”

“I don’t think you’d ever locate it. If you…got lucky, I think is the expression?—touching it would probably cause instant death for both of you.”

“You sure we need him? I swear I’d as soon take him out and shoot him.”

“Let him go, Dave,” Ethan said. “Whatever he was…he’s on our side now.”

“I always was. I swear, I—”

“Shut your hole,” Dave told him, and he was tempted to loosen the preacherman’s remaining teeth, but he released his grip and stepped back. “So what do we do?” he asked Ethan.

“We go on when we can. I believe the Gorgons are curious about where we’re going. The queen probably would like to know, because she must understand we wouldn’t be out in the open unless it was vital. And we have to find fuel soon, I think.” Ethan put his hand on Olivia’s shoulder, and when she looked into the strange silver eyes she saw not the coldness of space there, but the warmth of compassion. “I’m truly sorry about JayDee, and I’m sorry I couldn’t help. It was what he wanted and needed to do, whether we agreed with it or not. We have to go on as soon as we’re able.”

“You mean when I can see shit through this glass,” said Hannah. At least she had two headlights now, though the right one burned dimmer than the left.

“Yes, when you can see shit,” Ethan replied. He went along the aisle to the seat he’d left, but before he got there Nikki stood up. She was afraid of him now, really afraid, because she understood he was not the Ethan who had left the bus with John Douglas. She knew he wouldn’t hurt her—he saw that clearly—but still, there was the strangeness about him that she could not quite manage to handle anymore.

There was a tear in her eye.

“You took him away,” she said, “and you didn’t even let him say goodbye.”

“It was time,” he explained in a quiet voice. He watched the tear roll down her cheek to her chin, and the beating heart within him that kept the blood flowing and all the systems in operation felt heavy with grief, that this girl had held onto the human Ethan as long as she could and now she knew she had to let go. She had lost so much already. The images in her mind were horrific and tragic. He touched there only briefly and lightly, and then drew away, because his duty was clear.

“He understood that I’m ready,” said the new Ethan.

“I don’t. I never will. It was cruel not to let him live.”

How could he make her see that without his power, the human Ethan would’ve been dead long ago? That this thing of great cosmic importance—call it cruelty, yes—must be done to bring the end of a war, and for a race to survive?

He couldn’t. “From this point on I’ve got to be in total charge of the body and mind. The reflexes, the nervous system…everything. I can’t share those with him, Nikki.”

“Don’t speak my name.” She recoiled from him, even standing still. “You creep me out.”

There was no possible reply to that. It was the plain truth, plainly and truthfully spoken.

“I’m going to sit over there,” Nikki told him, and she turned away with what might be a shudder and went to sit directly behind Dave.

Ethan returned to his seat. Through his window, he saw that the rain was stopping. The storm had passed, but there would be others.

Hannah started the engine, turned on the headlights, and tried the wiper. The motor still made an ugly sound, but the blade was keeping the glass inset clear. She doubted it was going to hold up very long scraping across all that metal. “I guess we can move on. Everybody ready?”

No one answered.

“Giddyup,” said Hannah, speaking to herself in a raspy whisper. At a slow crawl, she put distance between themselves and the body that lay over on the westbound lanes.

They had to find a gas station, and soon. The good thing about the interstate was that, even crossing the Rockies, there were many exits and many gas stations with diesel for the long-haul truckers. It wasn’t but about another twenty minutes before the headlights made out an exit—an entrance ramp, really, since they were still traveling in the eastbound lanes—and when Hannah asked Dave if he wanted to try there he said, “Yeah, go ahead.”

Hannah pulled the bus into a truck stop. There were still some abandoned rigs and cars in the lot, and who knew what had happened to their owners? It didn’t take long for Dave’s flashlight to find that both of the stop’s diesel tanks had already been uncapped and emptied, so Hannah went on down the road to a Shell station. Again, the diesel tank had been drained. Dave recovered his hose and came back into the bus, and told Hannah to drive on.

On the other side of the interstate was a Phillips 66 station. Beyond it the headlights picked out the shapes of a few small houses in a little community, all dark. Ethan smelled the foul, sickly-sweet odors of rot and pestilence coming from one of the houses. It was something the others could not detect. “There are Gray Men here,” he said.

“Don’t stop, for God’s sake!” said Jefferson, his eyes wide. “Let’s get the hell out!”

“We’re needy, gents,” Hannah said. “Gas gauge is lookin’ sorrowful. What do you want to do, Dave?”

“Damn,” he answered. Hannah had pulled the bus to a halt under the station’s roof that overhung the two diesel pumps. Dave felt the flesh at the back of his neck crawl; he had no doubt that if the alien said there were Gray Men here, it was a fact. “How many?”

“I can’t tell. More than one, for sure.”

“Jesus!” said the preacherman. “Why are we still here?”

“Your call, Dave,” said Hannah. “We’re burnin’ fuel, just sittin’ still.”

“We shouldn’t stay,” Nikki said. Her voice quavered. “Really. We need to get out.”

“Olivia?” Dave prompted. “What do you think?”

She shook her head, her face still drawn and downcast. “I don’t know. I’m not thinking so well right now, but if we’re stuck without gas further on…it’ll be bad.”

“Right.” Dave was loading a fresh clip into his Uzi. His hand shook a little, but not too much. It had to be done. “I’m going to check first to see if the tank’s empty or not. Ethan, will you come with me? I may need some protection.”

“Yes.”

“You’re crazy!” The shine of fear sweat was already on Jefferson’s face. “Those things will smell us! It’ll be like the dinner bell ringing!”

“Just sit tight.” Dave slid the loaded Uzi into its holster. “Back in a minute.” Dave and Ethan took both flashlights out. Rainwater dripped from the roof, which slanted precariously to one side. It didn’t take but fifteen seconds for their lights to fall upon the yellow cap of the underground diesel tank. It was still in place and looked to have been undisturbed.

“Cut the engine,” Dave told Hannah when he and Ethan returned to the bus. “Jericho, I need your help.”

“Not me, I’m not getting out there! I’ve got two broken fingers, thanks to you!”

“Listen up! The faster we get this done, the better! We don’t have to fill the tank. Just get us enough to make it further along. Come on now, put your balls on.”

“No way!”

“Hell, if he won’t help you I will!” Hannah got up from behind the wheel. She already had her hogleg Colt in hand. “What do you need me to do, Dave?”

“I need you to stay right here and take a break. You’re the driver, not the mule. Jefferson, get your mule-ass off that seat!”

“I’ll do what needs to be done,” said Ethan. He already knew. Dave needed somebody to cover him while he did the work of popping open the fill cap on the tank and using the hose and hand pump to bring fuel up into the containers. He just needed Jericho as the mule to help carry the stuff out there.

“Here.” Dave loaded the Beretta and held it out to Jefferson. “Can you use one of these without shooting your pecker off?”

“God forbid,” said the preacherman. He stood up, took the pistol with his left hand and hefted it to get used to the weight. “Yeah, I can handle this.” Then he aimed the gun directly at Dave’s chest. “You know, I don’t like being treated like dirt.”

“Lower your weapon,” Ethan said, his voice quiet but sternly persuasive.

“Can you stop a bullet from this distance?” Jefferson asked him. “I’d like to see that trick.”

“You’re not going to shoot me.” Dave turned his flashlight right into Jefferson’s eyes. “Number one, Hannah would take you down in about half a second, because she’s already got her gun pointed at you. Number two, you don’t have a damned place to go and I really don’t think you want to stay here. And…number three, we’re the only friends you’ve got right now. So Mr. Jefferson Jericho the TV star, I’d say you ought to do as Ethan says. We’ve got to put gas in this bus, and we’ve got to do it fast. You’re wasting time. Now come on, let’s get the gear.” Dave started walking toward the rear of the bus.

“Please,” said Olivia, who looked to Ethan to be in a state of numbed shock. “Just do what he asks, all right?”

Jefferson hesitated for a few seconds. He glanced at Ethan and then lowered the pistol, which was aimed at empty air where Dave had been standing. “All right,” he told Olivia, in a voice that was partly forlorn and partly belligerent. “Because you asked me nicely.” He found the Beretta’s safety, thumbed it on and slid the gun into the waistband of his dirty and pee-stained jeans.

They got the containers, the hose, and the hand pump out, and Dave used the prybar to crack open the tank’s fill cap. While Dave cranked up diesel into one of the containers, Jefferson nervously watched the darkness where the houses lay, and Ethan stood nearby, his senses probing for any movement beyond. He was satisfied he could protect everyone from the Gray Men if need be; the question for him was, what could this physical body withstand? The heartbeat was good and the lungs were working, everything was all right for the moment, but Ethan knew that this body was not built for the strain of such combat even though the energy was only mental until it left the body, and then became a physical force on its way to a target. “You see anything?” Jefferson asked, as Dave continued to draw the fuel up.

“Nothing. Relax. I’ll let you know if something’s coming.”

“Relax, he says. Right!” Jefferson had his pistol out and aimed toward the houses. “How’d you get here without a spaceship? Did you ride in on a beam of light or something?”

“A close proximation,” Ethan answered. “There are dimensions you can’t comprehend and methods of traveling that are also beyond you.”

“Forgive us for being so backward and stupid.”

“It’s not that. It’s just that you’re a very young civilization. You’re focused on issues that speak to your youth. You couldn’t be expected to understand these things for…oh…a few hundred more years.”

“If we last that long,” said Jefferson.

“Yes,” Ethan agreed. “Very true.”

“Jericho, help me get this gas in the tank!” Dave said, and the preacherman left Ethan’s side to oblige.

Ethan scanned the darkness, left to right and back again. He could smell the foulness of the Gray Men, he knew they were in those houses, but how many, he couldn’t say.

“Hold it steady, don’t spill it!” Dave told Jefferson.

Suddenly Ethan felt them in a prickling of the boy’s flesh and maybe what was an electric charge up the spine.

It was a strange movement in the dark. Low to the ground. Not moving as a human being would. He picked out three shapes, running fast toward them. There was a glint of wet eyes that his flashlight caught…again, low to the ground.

They were very hungry.

“They’re coming,” he said, facing the attack. “Three. Not human-sized, though.”

“What are they?” Jefferson asked, and as he tried to turn around he caused fuel to be spilled from the container down the side of the bus.

“Careful, damn it!” Dave said.

The shapes were almost upon them, but they were avoiding the cone of Ethan’s light. They were circling around to attack from another angle.

“They’re dogs,” said Ethan. “What used to be, I mean.”

Jefferson tried to draw his gun. Dave commanded, “Keep your mind on this!”

Ethan followed the arc of their movement. Three dogs, somebody’s pets. Two were faster than the third, which seemed to be heavier and bulkier, likely burdened under plate armor. Ethan imagined that over the span of two years, humans in that community might have become Gray Men too, and the animals had eaten them and probably any other dogs there. In a matter of time, they would probably turn on each other. Ethan jabbed his light in the direction from which they were coming, and they veered away from contact with it. Again the wet eyes glistened…five of them. The third creature had not yet caught up with the first two.

“Let’s go, let’s go!” Jefferson urged, but the fuel into the tank would not be hurried.

“We need to draw up some more,” Dave said. “Ethan, you got an eye on those things?”

“I’m watching them. Right now they’re afraid of the light.” Jefferson drew his pistol, thumbed the safety off and fired two shots in the direction Ethan’s flashlight was aimed. A bullet ricocheted off concrete but there were no animal cries of pain.

“Let’s move, the faster the better,” Dave urged, and Ethan went with them back to the opening of the underground tank while more fuel was siphoned up.

The things began to growl, out just beyond the edge of the light. They’d been joined now by the third dog. Ethan couldn’t see the bodies but he saw the shine of seven eyes. The growling was low and ragged, more like the sounds of cement mixers in action. Whatever kind of dogs they were, they were big.

“Come on, man!” Jefferson said, but Dave was doing the best he could. Another five gallons in each of the two containers and then in the bus’s tank, and they’d be done.

Hannah came off the bus with her hogleg. She saw what the situation was and positioned herself beside Ethan, aiming her Colt toward the ominous noise of mutated beasts ravenous for fresh meat.

A shape ran through the light. It was gray and hairless and looked to have a row of spines protruding along its backbone. A second distorted and hairless gray shape came darting in, its teeth bared and drooling saliva. Its three eyes glinted red. Before Hannah could get off a shot, it turned back and sped away.

“I think that thing had two mouths,” Hannah said, visibly shaken.

“It did,” Ethan answered.

“Hurry it up, gents,” Hannah advised quietly, as she held the Colt steady with both veiny hands.

The creatures were coming in from another direction. Ethan swivelled around to use his light as a weapon, but something was there at the edge of illumination even as he aimed the flashlight. It was the third beast, what might have been an Alaskan Husky at one time, now gray and hairless and wrinkled, its back and sides covered with interlocking scales of plate armor. The creature’s face had distorted, the jaw underslung and showing rows of sharklike teeth, the eyes not exactly what they should have been, and an extra two legs growing from the armor of its left flank. As the thing rushed in toward Ethan and Hannah, its extra legs also moved as if in a dream of running.

Hannah made a choking noise and fired twice, the Colt spitting flame. One bullet whined off the concrete and the second went to parts unknown, and the creature was right there upon them, its underslung jaw opening and the teeth sliding out to take hold of Hannah’s leg.

Ethan thrust his right hand forward. All the alien had to do was visualize the force necessary, and it was delivered. There was a heated shimmer of air between his palm and the mutated dog, and in the next instant the beast was hurled backward head over scabrous tail and into the darkness again.

“Thank you,” Hannah managed to say.

“I think you should go back inside,” Ethan told her, and she went.

As Dave was getting the second five-gallon container full, Jefferson poured gas from the first container into the bus’s tank. Some spilled, but not much; Jefferson was fixed on the task as single-mindedly as he could be with the monsters—silent now in their hunger—roaming the dark.

Another one darted in, coming at Dave. This one was smaller but had the row of spines along its back. Its teeth snapped at the air in anticipation of a feast. Ethan extended his arm, saw the creature hurtling backward and it was done. He envisioned the beast blowing apart in midair; it was done so quickly, with a burst of energy from the alien’s reserve of power, that the animal likely had no time to register pain. The pieces fell upon the concrete beyond the pumps, and the other two creatures fought each other for the scraps.

“Okay, last five gallons,” Dave said, bringing the container. “Jericho, get the gear and put it aboard.”

There was no argument.

The last of the gas went into the tank. Dave, Jefferson and Ethan went aboard the bus, the door was closed and the gear was stowed away at the back.

“Let’s go,” Dave said. He pulled his Uzi from its holster and pointed it at Jefferson’s belly. “Hand the gun over.”

“Okay, okay, take it easy.” He gave the Beretta up without complaint, and Dave took a seat beside Olivia. Ethan heard Nikki let out the breath she’d caught.

Hannah had never been so glad to start an engine. The gas gauge did not show Full, but it was enough to make another hundred and forty miles, God willing.

She switched on the headlights and started pulling out, back toward I-70. Before they could get out of the station one of the Gray Dogs—the largest one, Ethan figured—threw itself at the side of the bus in a frenzy. There was a whump that shook everyone, but then Hannah was picking up speed and they were on their way again.

Jefferson Jericho came back along the aisle toward Ethan.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Dave stood up to block his way. “Get in your seat.”

“I’d like to speak to Ethan.”

“Get in your seat,” Dave repeated.

“I’m not going to hurt—”

“I won’t tell you again.” A hand went to the Uzi’s grip.

“It’s all right,” Ethan spoke up. “He just wants to ask me a few questions.”

“I don’t want him near you,” Dave said firmly.

“I can ask you from here,” Jefferson decided. “But maybe you already know what I want to ask?”

“I do.” It was simple now to read their minds, a matter of seconds. “Dave, he wants to know about my power. Where it comes from and how I control it. Jefferson has a keen interest in power.”

“Damn straight I do,” Jefferson said. “And that’s exactly what I want to know. How do you do that?”

“Directed energy,” Ethan answered. “I can modulate the intensity. The human hand is an efficient director of energy. It’s a good aiming device. Both hands, in fact. I am a being of what you would think of as concentrated energy. I can inhabit various forms as need be. If I give a desire enough focus, it’s done. The earthquake was difficult. The boy had to be convinced that he could do it, but I wasn’t ready yet to take full control of the organism. Neither was he ready. So I led him along as best I could, and as gently as I could.”

“Organism,” Dave repeated, with a shade of bitterness. It was weird to be hearing these words come out of the mouth of what appeared to be a fifteen-year-old. “You make that sound so clinical. He was a human boy and a good person. He didn’t ask for this.”

“Should I regret my choice?” Ethan asked, and let the question hang.

“No,” Olivia replied. Her voice was still soft and sad. “It seems so unfair, after all he went through, to throw him aside.”

“As I told Nikki, there’s no room for him here. He knew eventually I was going to have to take everything. He suited my purpose, and he did what I asked of him.”

“Organism,” Dave said again, like something nasty was caught in his mouth. “We’re a hell of a lot more than bodies for the taking.”

“I know you are, but sacrifice was required for the greater good. Surely you understand that.”

Dave did, but damned if he was going to admit it. Anyway, he figured the alien already knew what he was thinking.

“Yes,” said the peacekeeper.

“Were you born? Created? How?” Jefferson had to ask.

“Created, by a greater power. I know my duty and that I’m ancient in your measure of time, but more than that about myself I don’t know.”

“And you’re alone out there?” Olivia asked. “For all that length of time?”

Ethan didn’t reply for a moment. The silver eyes were downcast, the face solemn. “There are others like me, but distant. I receive information, process it, and send it on, and I know my duty,” he repeated.

“Your power has to have a limit,” Jefferson said. “It can’t be infinite. Can it?”

“Infinite is a matter of definition. Whatever power I have is more limited in this body than in my original form, but I need the body as a means of communication.”

“We’re back on I-70, gents,” Hannah announced. Her voice was a little shaky, after hearing these things spoken from the boy’s mouth. “She thanks you for the gas, let’s just hope our tires hold out.”

“Is there a God?” Jefferson asked quietly, his gaze fixed on Ethan. “You know…I’ve traded on Him for years. I’ve done…some pretty bad things, in the name of God. I’m kind of surprised I haven’t been struck dead by lightning or something before now, but I just kept going. And it’s like…I was testing God, maybe, because He let me keep going. So tell me if you can…is there a God?”

Ethan didn’t reply. How to explain to them that his knowledge was limited too, and there were things he was not allowed to know? They were waiting for an answer, and they thought he must’ve seen the face of the entity they called God, and maybe they believed he was what they called an ‘angel,’ in their understanding of the mysteries. He gathered his thoughts, and he said, “I can tell you that there is intelligence and direction in the cosmos. As I have seen, much is left to the will of the civilization…even to the individual, to rise or fall. Is your God the same as that known by the Cyphers and the Gorgons, or by any of the—can I tell you—billions of other civilizations ‘out there,’ as you put it? Each has its own mythology and meaning, its own structure of values. The entity you know as ‘God’ I would think would have as many names as there are languages, hearts, and minds. Understand me…I don’t have all your answers. I would likely present to you more questions, and some might be beyond the scope of your intellect to grasp. No offense meant,” he added.

“But,” Ethan continued, “I am here. I was summoned here by a power I can barely grasp myself. I was created by that power. I was given a duty and directives. My intent—and the intent of my being summoned here—is to stop this war and save your world. I am not given precise instructions as to how to achieve that, but I am given what you might call a waypoint…White Mansion Mountain. It’s up to me—and a test of your willingness to fight for survival—to reach that waypoint and proceed from there.”

“A test?” Dave said. “You mean all this…the war and all of it…could have been just a test to see if we were worthy to keep on living or not? That doesn’t sound much like God’s love, does it? And even if you can stop the war…what about the world? Our world. It’s fucked up, man! All the people that we knew and loved, dead! All those Gray Men out there, and who knows how many millions around the world! It’ll never go back to what it was!”

Ethan nodded. His mouth was tight-lipped. The silver eyes fixed on Dave.

“One thing I’ve learned in my long existence,” said the peacekeeper, “is patience. Trust that the intelligence that summoned me here and allowed the journey has a purpose. I do. If you believe anything, now is not the time to let it go.” He directed his gaze to Jefferson. “This body and its systems need rest. Is there anything else?”

“No,” Jefferson answered. “That’s all.” He returned to his seat and found himself staring at nothing, but thinking of the progress of his life and what it had meant. He couldn’t crack up now, that was for sure, and weighing too much of the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ in his past might crack him, so he would put those things aside, try to blank them out, and go on as any man must…from where he was.

Silence ruled on Number 712.

The bus went on into the fitful dark. Rain fell again, but not hard enough to overpower the wiper. Mile after mile, the distance rolled away.

Olivia slept, and dreamed of sitting with JayDee on the balcony of her apartment. JayDee took her hand, and he leaned his head close and said quietly There’s a way out of this, Olivia. There must be a way to fix things, to make things right.

Do you believe that, John? her dream-self asked. Do you really believe? He squeezed her hand and smiled, and his blue eyes glinted with not a dirty yellow sky but one that was clear and clean, and something about his face seemed much younger than she remembered.

Oh my Olivia, he said gently, you may rely on it.

Twenty-Six.

The sun was coming up, a slash of red to the east beyond the Rockies.

Number 712 was sitting on the interstate at the exit to Utah State Highway 191 south. Hannah had pulled them over after another gas stop short of the Utah line. It had been an isolated station with an uncracked diesel tank, and unlike the last stop they’d had the luxury of time to fuel the bus to its capacity. Hannah had told Dave she was tired and needed sleep, and it would be best to continue on 191 at dawn. He didn’t argue, because he needed sleep too, but he’d gotten very little of it. Ethan had awakened after about an hour and told Dave he could rest soundly, that the trackers weren’t close enough to be alarmed and he’d let everyone know if that changed.

Olivia had slept, and so had Nikki and Jefferson. Dave had drowsed for awhile and then jerked himself awake as if he were about to fall into a bottomless pit. He figured another hundred miles, give or take, to the White Mansion. Then who knew if there was even a road up the thing. Highway 191 was a four-lane and looked totally deserted from where he sat, not a single abandoned car or truck on it as far as he could see. The morning light reddening the sky showed a vista of what used to be called a western paradise, a land of low scrub and crimson rocks, distant mesas and mountains rising in the distance, arches and cathedrals of stone standing as they had for eons. It could be the surface of another planet, torn and shaped by ancient cataclysms. What a creation Earth was, Dave thought. He’d never stopped to think much about it before this war had begun, because making a living got in the way of philosophical appreciation, and he was never inclined to that, but Earth was an amazing world. From warm seas to frozen tundra, from lush grasslands and pine forests to the red rock mountains that rose from the plains along Highway 191, it was an incredibly diverse creation. And all the life it held…stunning, when you really considered it. Maybe when you lost something, Dave thought, it became that much more valuable. The life forms that would die or be malformed under this alien poison…probably in the thousands. So even if Ethan could stop the war, which Dave couldn’t imagine even as powerful an entity as Ethan being able to do, what would be Earth’s future? It looked to him like continued wrack and ruin. The world was never going to be able to recover from this.

He realized that Ethan was awake and was staring silently out a window. If the alien was reading his thoughts, there was no response.

He doesn’t know either, Dave thought. Do you? he asked, but still there was no reply. You may be a hell of a lot more powerful than us and know secrets of the universe and all kinds of shit that would knock us to our knees…but you’re not sure of anything either, are you? You’re just groping in the dark, like any ordinary human. Like this with the mountain…you don’t know what’s there because if this is a test for humanity you’re being tested too. Is that what Life really is, Ethan? A test designed by some alien we think of as God? That would be a fine laugh on the race of mankind, wouldn’t it? All the centuries of struggle and misery and everything people have had to go through, and at the end they find out whether the teacher gives them a passing grade or not?

“Centuries also,” Ethan suddenly said, “of invention, perserverance, and in many cases genius. Your race seems to always find a way to push through obstacles. That’s why you’re still here.”

“What?” Jefferson had awakened and was squinting in the morning light. “What are you talking about?”

Ethan said, “Dave and I are having a conversation.”

“Oh,” said the preacherman, and he looked puzzled, but he didn’t ask anything else.

The others began to awaken. This morning Ethan noted that Olivia was hollow-eyed and haggard. She was still mourning John Douglas, could not accept the fact that he was gone. She was also mourning the loss of the human boy known as Ethan Gaines, and maybe she’d let herself feel motherly and protective of him, so that loss was doubly painful. He could not pretend that any part of the boy was left in this shell. What could he say to soothe her that she would understand? Nothing, so she must be allowed to grieve her way to finality.

When everyone was awake, they took turns going outside the bus to relieve themselves, which Ethan had already of course observed through the boy. It was an interesting process, but in his experience all species had the need for elimination. Almost all: the half-flesh, half-robotic soldiers of what the humans called the Cyphers did not, they absorbed and recycled any wastes from the nutrition that fueled them, and he knew of three more civilizations that were machine-based, but on the whole all shared this need. He participated in it when his time came.

Afterward a jug of water was passed around, which Ethan in his true form did not need but knew it was vital to keep the body going. Dave opened up a couple of cans of pork ’n beans, a jar of peanut butter, and some stale crackers, and that was their breakfast.

The sun had climbed toward eight o’clock, but yellow-tinged clouds were closing in and the light was dimming. Ethan tried to speak to Nikki, to console her however he could, but she turned her face away from him, and he realized it was useless. She, too, had to work through her grief—what seemed in her mind to be a world of grief—and he was helpless to give her any comfort. He took his seat, knowing that everyone on the bus needed him and counted on him, but he was a strange intruder to them nonetheless and they were all, as Nikki had put it so truthfully, “creeped out.”

At last Dave regarded the deserted stretch of Highway 191 again, and he said, “Hannah, let’s move on.”

She started the engine and guided the bus off I-70 onto the road to the White Mansion.

“Ethan?” Jefferson said. “The trackers still there?”

“The Cypher tracker is nearly overhead. The Gorgon ship is…” He paused to get a correct reading on it, calculating distances from its harmonic signature. “Seventy-two miles to the east, at an altitude of…I would say…between forty-seven and forty-eight thousand feet. It’s keeping its distance, but also keeping its tracker on you.”

Jefferson nodded but said nothing else. Ethan knew he was as worried about this as everyone else, but he detected a subtle change in an element of Jericho’s thoughts. The man now was not entirely focused on himself, but had opened the cavern of his soul a little bit to allow in concern for the others and the mission ahead. Still…the man had known selfishness all his life, it was part of his being, and he used it as both sword and shield.

Number 712 rumbled on, across a landscape of surreal beauty with its red rock cliffs and formations of stone that seemed fashioned by an alien hand. Mesas and mountains loomed in the misty distance, across a plain of gray-stubbled vegetation. Ethan took it all in with as much interest as any tourist. He’d been aware of Dave’s ruminations on the planet but had lingered there only briefly. If these people knew what he had observed of worlds across the cosmos, they would be amazed by the variety but also frightened, because the physics of this planet did not hold true on others. Some of the civilizations had evolved into pure cerebral energy, others were animalish and still fighting from the mud of their beginnings. Some had found their way to interstellar travel and use of the dimensional portals, others lived in caves. There were great cities and noble rulers, there were harsh prison-states, and males and females who existed as leeches on the societies they commanded. It was out there, a billionfold. And the languages and mathematics, clothing styles and entertainments, fields of study and commerce, rites of passage and customs, mythologies and rituals, sexual practices, births and deaths…beyond counting.