The Border

The tremendous bulk of the Gorgon ship shivered. Around it now could be seen maybe a hundred or more of the small black craft of the Cyphers, each hardly big enough to carry a human-sized pilot, with swept-back, vibrating wings, and a sharply pointed nosecone. Their skins glistened wetly, as they darted in and out and the white spheres of flame shot from the wings six at a time. They moved fast and silently, stopping to hover for a second or jink to one side or another like flying insects. Occasionally one was hit by a blue spark of energy and exploded into flying tatters, but there were too many.

Still screaming, the Gorgon ship had lost its equilibrium. It began to tilt to the left, and as it did some of the Cypher craft became blurs of incredible speed and speared themselves into the belly of the beast. They then exploded in white fireballs that scorched the eyes and burned more holes into the ship, and now from the craft’s belly came bursts of dark liquid that spattered down upon the bones of the vulture-plucked Gray Men still reaching from their graves in the earth.

One of the men in a machine-gun tower began to fire at the descending ship, which was like throwing wads of paper at concrete. Ethan’s mind was racing, putting together speeds and trajectories of which he had no knowledge of learning; he realized the ship was going to clear the wall but that the apartment complex was doomed. Even as he thought this and the Gorgon craft continued on in its death drop, he was aware of figures emerging through the stones of the wall like ghosts, then becoming solid again. The Cypher soldiers had arrived. There were dozens of them, skeleton-thin and seven feet tall. Their black featureless non-faces looked to neither right nor left. Their black fleshy weapons with two barrels connected to their bodies by fluid-carrying veins were held at the ready, as they likely always were. Some of them blurred onward toward the apartments, while others stalked forward at a more cautious pace. Now pistol and rifle shots were ringing out as the inhabitants of Panther Ridge tried to defend themselves, but the bullets—if any hit their targets—had no effect.

Olivia cringed down and held a scream behind her teeth as the Gorgon craft hissed overhead and plowed into the ground just short of the first level of apartments. Its mass and speed dug a plume of concrete and earth before it as it continued up the hillside, crossing the tennis courts and the swimming pool and slamming nearly dead center into the first building, which crumpled before it as if made of the cheapest cardboard. Both Ethan and Olivia realized the hospital and JayDee’s apartment had just been destroyed. The dying Gorgon ship cleaved completely through the first level and smashed into the second building. Ethan knew his own apartment—and Dave’s and Olivia’s too—had just been reduced to kindling. The dust of ages swirled up into the air. The Gorgon craft stopped just short of the third building, which like the fourth was unoccupied. The damage had been done. Now the Cypher soldiers were closing in to make sure there were no Gorgon survivors.

Something had caught fire in the crushed midsection of the second level. Red flames were starting to curl upward. Screams came from the shattered buildings, along with more gunshots. The Gorgon ship lay still, its life liquid pouring from burned holes in the skin and steam rising up around it.

Someone had opened the metal-plated door and people who could still move were running and hobbling out to escape the battleground. “Oh,” Ethan heard Olivia gasp, and she held onto his shoulders as if fearful of being flung off the world. “Oh no…oh no…”

“Come on!” he said, and took her hand to lead her toward the open door. Cypher soldiers were still coming in, blurring their way through the wall and then reforming. They moved past the terrified people trying to get out, and someone fired a pistol point-blank at one of them but it vibrated out to invisibility an instant before the slug could connect.

Olivia pulled free. Her face was drawn as tightly as a mask; her eyes wore the shine of near-madness and tears had run down to her chin. “No,” she said, her voice low and strained. “I’m not…not going.”

“Yes you are!” Ethan grabbed at her hand again but once more she pulled free.

“I have to…find something,” she told him, and she began to walk not toward the way out but toward the crumpled and burning apartments. In her mind Vincent was in Apartment 227, and he was holding for her something he wanted her to have, and she would have it and then go, after everyone else had left. She would take from him the Magic Eight Ball, that joke gift, the gift that had laughter and love attached to it, because she realized even in her fugue that she could survive no longer without love and laughter, and she must have that gift from him or she would this night perish of a doubly broken heart.

“Olivia!” Ethan cried out. “Don’t go back there!”

But if she heard him she did not respond; she was as much a determined wraith as the Cypher soldiers who blurred past her through the billowing yellow dust. She kept going, step after step, her eyes swollen with both desperate sadness and the rage she had pushed down and pushed down and pushed down and did not know what to do with for she could not fight these creatures from other worlds. She kept going with the smell of fire and the dead-snake smell of the Gorgon ship in her nostrils and in her lungs, and she kept going unaware that Ethan Gaines walked at her side, silent also in his anger, his blue eyes glinting like the edges of blades in a strong light.

Bloodied and staggering survivors passed them, struggling on toward the wall. A few stopped and tried to turn Olivia away from the wreckage, but they gave it up when they saw her sightless eyes. Through the dust and the smoke, she continued on with Ethan beside her, and they walked alongside the downed Gorgon ship with its mortal wounds of burnt holes and within them a glimpse of raw red meat formed into hexagonal-shaped corridors, wet and gleaming with unknown fluids. The way ahead was blocked by rubble. Olivia chose another way, and still Ethan followed. What had been a balcony was on fire. Glass crunched underfoot. A mass of timbers and a stainless steel kitchen sink lay ahead. A railing was twisted like a piece of melted licorice. In the smoky gloom the shadows of Cypher soldiers moved about as flames chewed on broken chairs and coffee tables.

“We can’t get through!” Ethan said. “There’s no way!”

But there was a way. Olivia knew there must be. Vincent was waiting for her, and he was all right, so there must be a way. She walked past the remnant of a standing wall on which still hung a metallic-looking plastic Horn Of Plenty. Ethan saw there was nothing but rubble, smoke, dust, and destruction ahead of them. Beside them loomed the dead Gorgon craft, and they passed a gaping hole from which the dark red liquid had poured to make a swamp of alien blood around the mangled belongings of men.

A Cypher soldier was standing in front of them, its weapon trained and ready.

“Go away,” Ethan said, his voice weak but carrying enough strength to be heard over the crackling of flames. The soldier did not move for a few seconds, and then it stalked off into the ruins. Ethan knew it hadn’t understood him, but what was working behind that faceless mask was the belief that the inhabitants of this world were not worth the waste of energy.

“We have to go back,” Ethan told the woman, who had begun to sob and stumble as her resolve collapsed. He reached out for her hand, caught it and held her. “Olivia. Please. We have to go back…get out of here.”

“Not yet,” she answered, weeping. “Not yet…I’ve got to…find…Vincent. Vincent?” she called, into the dark cavern of despair. And louder: “Vincent?”

And that was when Ethan saw it coming, behind Olivia.

Through the smoke and dust, through the bloody swamp, through the tangle of timbers and broken walls…

…and it was not Olivia’s Vincent.

It was crawling at first…slithering…and then it began to rise up from the wreckage, and it was not a Cypher soldier either. It moved with what might have been a serpentine grace, a strange kind of fascinating beauty, yet as it came closer a cold terror gripped Ethan’s heart and his face contorted, and though he could not fully see the thing he could see enough to know that such a creature was so alien to men that it caused fear to freeze the body and the soul, that the guts drew tight and the stomach lurched, and he wanted to run from this transfixing horror but he could not leave Olivia and she had not seen yet…she had not seen but she saw his face and she was just about to turn and see what should not be seen by human eyes lest they be burned blind.

“NO!” the boy shouted.

And his free hand came up, palm outward, just as Olivia was turning, and to save the last of her sanity he wanted the Gorgon pilot to disappear, to be wiped from the face of this earth, and just in that instant his brain seemed to catch fire and the fire whipped down along his arm and into his hand. His palm burned as if it had been splashed with a bucketful of boiling oil. Did the air between himself and the creature contort? Did it change shape, become solid like a battering ram? Did it sparkle with flames that shot between himself and the alien like a thousand burning bullets?

Maybe all those.

Because in the next second the creature blew to pieces and Ethan was thrown backward, as if slammed by the recoil of an elephant gun. He had the sense to release Olivia’s hand before he broke her arm. He went down into the debris, felt a nail go through his jeans into the back of his right thigh, felt the breath whoosh out of his lungs and his burning brain throb as if it were about to explode.

Olivia’s arm had been nearly jerked out of its socket and would have been had Ethan not let go. She was full up with pain and yet she knew something had been there that was no longer there. She blinked into the gloom as the tears ran from her eyes and her mouth drooled threads of saliva. “What is it?” she asked, clenching a hand to her shoulder. “What is it? What is it?”

She dared not take another step forward, because something terrible had been there and now it was in pieces she did not want to see.

Ethan got himself loose from the nail, struggled up and fell again to his knees. His head was pounding, he felt sick to his stomach and in his mouth was the taste of bitter ashes. With a true force of will he commanded himself to stand, and he did. Olivia stared at him, wide-eyed; she shivered and wavered on her feet, as if about to pass out. Beyond her, just at the edge of recognition, Ethan saw something else slither away through the debris. He tried to speak, could not find his voice, tried again, and said, “We have to go now.”

“Go,” Olivia repeated dully. Then: “Yes. We have to go.”

Ethan looked at the palm of his hand that had seemingly been on fire. He expected to see it either covered with blisters or as one huge blister. Was the flesh a shade or two more red and maybe swollen a little? He couldn’t tell for sure. The burning sensation was gone from his hand, arm and shoulder. He was tired, and his brain ached. He didn’t look over at the thing that had been blown to bits; he just wanted to take Olivia’s hand and guide her out of here. He realized he had the alien blood—the ship’s blood—on his clothes. It smelled of the dead snake, and he wanted to be sick but there was no time for that because maybe the Cypher soldiers could smell it on him. They might swarm after him, and no insignificant humanity could save him.

He grasped Olivia’s hand and started them back the way they’d come, and now there were other figures walking near them but they were not Cyphers or Gorgons, they were bloodied and ragged survivors picking their way out of the debris. Ethan couldn’t recognize anyone. A man carried a little boy, and a woman staggered alongside, and all of them were battered and nearly nude for the clothes had been torn off them in the storm of destruction. An older man wearing a blood-covered shirt suddenly stopped walking and just sat down in a wicker chair as if waiting for the next bus to come along.

Olivia stared straight ahead, her crying now done, her face drawn and waxy. “We’ll be all right,” he told her, but he heard his voice tremble, and it sounded like the most stupid thing that had ever been said in the world. Where was Dave? What had happened to JayDee? What about Roger Pell, Kathy Mattson, Gary Roosa, Joel Schuster, and three or four other people he had at least spoken with? He doubted very many had lived through this…but…he was alive, and so was Olivia Quintero.

He thought that if the Gray Men came now, alerted by the noise and maybe the smell of blood, everything would be over. As it was…the Panther Ridge Apartments were finished as a refuge. The survivors were going to have to move, whether they wanted to or not.

The White Mansion, he thought.

Refuge or not, it was pulling at him harder than ever. He had to get there. Had to…but how? Who would help him on that journey, which seemed impossible? And he didn’t know what he would find there, but…

I just blew up a Gorgon, he thought. With my mind. Because I wanted to.

And he remembered John Douglas, in the hospital, sitting in that chair and asking What exactly are you, because I don’t think you’re human.

“I am,” said the boy, to no one, and Olivia was listening only to distant screams and cries for help and realizing she had come to her end as the leader of this sad fortress. “I am,” he said, and again with more force, “I am.”

But at the same time he knew.

No human could cause earthquakes by wanting them to happen. No human could destroy a horror as he had just done, by willing it hard enough.

Ethan began to cry, silently. He was lost, even as he guided Olivia onward. He was lost, and somehow…someway…

…he must find out who and what he was, or die trying.

Two.

The

Ant Farm

Eleven.

Even though they slept in separate beds, she knew when he got up. She knew why, without looking at the clock. She heard him draw a long, shuddering breath that spoke volumes. She kept her eyes closed, because she did not want to look at him, did not want him to know she was awake. She hated him. He was on his own.

The man who was known as Jefferson Jericho walked into the bathroom and closed the door before he turned on the light. His wife, Regina, remained exactly where she was. Maybe she squeezed her eyes shut a little tighter. She was remembering that morning in April, two years ago, when she decided she could take no more of it, not a minute more. He was out sitting in his blue Adirondack chair on the lawn, under the big oak, with his mug of coffee that had god is a high roller imprinted upon it. He drank his coffee black, with a half-spoonful of sugar. As always, he was sitting in that same place where the shadows cooled the Tennessee pasture. Horses pranced for him beyond the fence. She watched him stretch his legs out and grin at the sun and she thought I can’t take this anymore, not a minute, not a second.

So she left the porch that wound around the big English-styled manor of a house and she went to his office and opened the drawer where he kept his Smith & Wesson .38. She had watched him at his target practice, and she knew where the safety was and how to load the cylinder. She had been born on a farm, had come up the hard way into these riches that now tormented her, and by Christ she could fire a pistol if she had to.

And now Regina figured she had to.

With the gun loaded and ready and her yellow silk nightgown flagging around her in the morning’s sweet breeze, she walked off the porch and along the flagstone path that led past the decorative well and the gazebo. She dimly remembered that it was the third day of April and she had some dry cleaning to pick up, but fuck that.

Today was the day she was going to kill the preacherman.

The liar. The bastard. The twister of truth until you thought yourself a liar, and that your eyes and ears were no more than broken tools. She hated the way he grinned, hated the way he won everything, hated his luck and his handsomeness and his hand always outstretched to make some wayward young girl into a better Christian. And if she was pretty enough and pliable enough he could show her a glimpse of Heaven, but she had to be a High Roller, just like himself. Had to be a Dreamer and a Dare Taker and all those other buzzing buzz words and names and phrases meant to make people feel more important so they could be controlled just that much more easily.

Preacherman, Regina thought, and realized she was maybe crazy and maybe a little drunk still from the bourbon binge last night, my loyal husband and lover, companion and fiend of the night…it’s time for you to pack that fucking grin away.

But most of all she was disappointed and destroyed, and she could not live like this or let him live another day. It was right, maybe, that they went together. The sixteen-year-old girl, the one who had the meth problem and had committed suicide, was the worst. That sad tear-stained piece of notebook paper Regina had found when she’d been gathering his suits for the dry cleaning. Had he wanted her to find that? Had he placed it there in the inner pocket so she would find it and realize how little she meant to him, and that she had better keep her mouth shut or all these High Roller riches would turn into smoke and ashes? And to find out he had been looting those girls and women, the ones who came to him burdened and life-beaten and begging his help? The ones from the drug program, and the unwed mothers, and the abused girls with the bruised eyes and the bleeding hearts that needed love?

Regina had known that girls who had trouble with their fathers were always looking for love, wherever they could find it. They were starved for it, and they needed to be filled. She knew, because she was one of them. And there grinning at the morning and all he surveyed from his favorite blue Adirondack chair sat the oh-so-handsome and oh-so-holy and oh-how-fucking-fatherly Jefferson Jericho, whose walls were about to fall because his farmgirl wife—older now, in her late thirties, ridden hard and put to bed wet—had suddenly found religion.

These walls were diseased. They were tainted and ugly, they were riddled with cracks and infested with vile creeping things.

A bullet would clean things right up. And then Regina would go back into the house, sit at the master’s desk and write the story of why she had done this and every dirty thing the detective agency had told her after their investigation, and at the end she would write down Jefferson’s real name so the world would know how the sins of Leon Kushman had taken him to a slab in the morgue.

She walked barefoot across the emerald Bermuda grass and came up silently behind him. She saw the vista he was seeing: below the hillock on which the Jericho house sat and beyond the pasture where the horses played was the town. His town, the one he’d envisioned and built. It was bathed this morning in sunlight and its copper-accented roofs glowed like heavenly gold. The town was named—appropriately for the woman who was about to cast the man out—New Eden. It was built to resemble an American town of the 1950s, though hardly anyone remembered what they had looked like anymore; it was a fantasy state of mind, if anything. The houses came in several different styles and sedate colors. They sat on small but expensive lots on streets that made radials all leading to the central, largest and most elaborate building, the Church of the High Rollers. From here, it seemed to Regina that the building was made not of milk-white stone but of milk-white wax, and to her it was worth about as much as a puddle of goo.

New Eden sat on what had been rolling hills and farmland thirty-six miles south of Nashville, Tennessee. Occasionally an entertainer who had been paid big bucks to embrace the High Roller doctrine came to give a concert on the equally big stage. That usually pulled in more of the artist’s fans. There was a waiting list to get into New Eden as long as a country road. There was even a waiting list to be hired as part of the groundskeeping service or the security patrols. Everybody, it seemed, wanted in through the gilded gates.

Today, Regina thought, there would be a vacancy in a very high place.

She started to speak, to say something like You greedy bastard, or I know everything, or I’m not letting you do this any longer, but she decided to let the gun do the talking. As soon as the shot was heard down below, the security men in their golden Segway chariots would be racing up the long curving drive. So she wouldn’t have a lot of time to write her letter and finish herself off. It was time. Time time time…way past time.

She aimed the revolver at the top of Leon Kushman’s head of thick mink-brown hair and her finger started to squeeze the trigger. Her heart was beating very hard. She wondered if she should shield her face with her other hand, because she didn’t want any of his brains on her. No, no, she decided; she needed both hands to steady the gun.

Do it, she told herself.

Yes.

Now.

But just as Regina Jericho, the former Regina Clanton, began to put some strength into the trigger pull the sky blew up.

The noise was not the solemn voice of God speaking out to save the life of Jefferson Jericho. It was more like the ear-splitting blast of a thousand demonic voices shouting at once in harsh and unknown tongues, an explosion at the zenith of a Tower of Babel in Hell, and then it turned into the low dark mutterings of a madman in a basement, speaking in riddles.

Jefferson had fallen out of his chair. The entire chair had gone over. The noise had made Regina whirl around in time to see a fiery red flash in the sky to the west, maybe twelve thousand feet up over the green fields and rolling pastures. And from the center of this flash, as if making itself whole as it slid out of nothingness, was a huge triangular monster mottled with yellow, black, and brown. Staring at it, transfixed by this scene that froze her with a horror she had never known, not even when her father in his Baptist rages locked her in a dark closet while he beat his wife—her mother—with the buckle end of a belt, Regina felt the gun fall from her fingers into the yielding Bermuda grass.

And Jefferson’s voice rose up, the voice that thousands upon thousands depended on for wisdom, sustenance and wealth. Except now he spoke in what was almost a whimper. He said, “God save us.” Then he first looked into Regina’s face and next saw the gun on the ground. He reached for it with a shaky hand, and when he picked it up he gave her an expression that made her think of a closet door shutting in her face. And click went the lock.

Now, in her bed in that same English manor house overlooking the same yet terribly changed New Eden, Regina Jericho pressed her hand against her mouth because she wanted to scream. It would be daylight soon; the new gods would make it daylight, except it would be like the light Jefferson had just switched on in the bathroom. It would be a little too bright and a little too blue, and it would offer no real comfort or warmth. But the citizens of New Eden were alive, and they were well taken care of. They were accepted, in the new order of things. And now Regina heard the water running in the bathroom sink, and she knew also that the water was different; it was clean and clear, yes, but it left an oily texture on the skin that could not be towelled or wiped or scrubbed away. The water was running, and Jefferson was splashing his face before he shaved with his electric razor.

He had told Regina, in one of his hollow-eyed confessions of the thing, that she liked him to be clean-shaven when he arrived. After she called him, and that little tingling began at the back of his neck. Of course no one had any of those fancy razors with four or five blades anymore. Not even a razor with a single blade. There were knives in the kitchen, yes; but when Regina had tried to cut her throat with one last December, it had turned to something as soft as rubber and couldn’t have cut a chunk of melting ice cream. Then it had turned back to a sharp blade again when she’d returned it to the drawer.

They’re watching us, Jefferson had told her. Always watching. They won’t let us hurt ourselves.

But why? she’d asked, in one of her panic states. Why? What do they want with us?

They like us, Jefferson had answered. She likes us.

And then he’d given the grin that might be a ghost of itself because his soulful dark brown eyes were so haunted, but it was still the grin of a High Roller who wanted always to be on the winning side, and he’d said quietly She likes me. And everything and everyone else is like…a child with an ant farm, I guess. Just watch the ants and see what they do. The ants go round and round and think they’re going somewhere. Think they have freedom. Or whatever that means to an ant. Baby, I think I’m going crazy.

No, Regina had said, with the fire of hatred and disgust in her eyes. I am not your baby anymore.

She kept her eyes closed and lay as still as death. It was the only way to keep on living, if this was really life. The citizens of New Eden had no choice. They were all ants, and the ant farm was in its own little box somewhere far away from all that had been known before. Somewhere that made the mind want to stop thinking, because there was no answer to the question of where.

She heard Jefferson suddenly choke and throw up into the toilet. After a minute or so he flushed it and the fouled artificial water went to…where? He was afraid, she knew. Deathly afraid. If she reached over and touched his bed, she would feel the dampness of the sweat that had leaped from his pores as soon as he had heard—felt—the call. But he would go, because if he did not the pain would start at the back of his neck until it felt as if his skull might shatter. He’d told her this, as if she cared.

Go on, get dressed, she told him mentally. Get dressed and get the fuck out of here and go to the arms of your ultimate mistress…

She assumed the thing had arms. She had never asked, and Jefferson had never said. But when he got back—and that might be days, because he said time was messed up in that place beyond knowing—he would be sick again and cry like a little boy curled up in a corner, a little boy in a big man’s skin and suit. Regina would have no sympathy for him. Not an iota, because the real God of this Universe had decided to bring down the house on the High Rollers, and all of New Eden had been cast from the garden in the shadow of the snake.

Just let me sleep, she thought. Please…God…let me sleep.

But Regina would not sleep until her husband had emerged from the bathroom, had gotten himself dressed in a dark blue suit, white shirt, and tastefully-patterned tie—which he had a hell of a lot of trouble tying, as usual—and then left the room to go downstairs. He walked heavily in his shiny black wingtips, as if on the way to his own hanging.

Go to hell, she thought. You deserve it.

Then he was gone, and she did go back to sleep after a few long minutes of silent weeping, because the ant farm was a cruel, cruel place.

H

Jefferson Jericho opened the glass doors that led out to the rear terrace. He walked out upon the terrace and then down the stone steps to the backyard, which seemed to go on forever. Looking up into the dark, he saw no stars. There were never any stars. He continued to walk out further and further across the lawn, his heart racing, his mouth dry, his boyishly handsome face drawn into a tight mask and his teeth gritted so hard they might crack under the pressure. Several already had. His front teeth had broken into jagged edges, but in a few days they were just fine again.

He kept walking, and waiting for it to happen.

Then, with a single step, he walked into another world.

One second he was in the darkness of his own backyard, and the next…

Tonight it was a bedroom from what might have been a French mansion. It was maybe from around the year 1890 or so, he thought. But he was no student of historical furnishings; it just looked like something from a movie set…French mansion, 1890, white candles of many sizes burning all around, heavy purple drapes at the window, an opulent canopied bed also purple, on the wall a large tapestry of a woman offering an apple to a unicorn, about eight feet above his head a chandelier with a dozen more lighted candles in it. Under his shiny shoes, a thick, red rug, had been thrown down upon a hardwood floor. The walls were made of polished wood and across the room was a single door.

The summons at the back of his neck was still throbbing a little. His body felt as if it had been stretched and then compressed. His bones ached. His clothes smelled faintly burnt, as did his flesh. At the pit of his stomach was the same queasiness, and he was sweating again. He looked at the drapes that hid the window and wondered what he would see if he moved them aside. The last time, the room had been all-white, futuristic, with pulsing rays of light crisscrossing the ceiling. He wondered if they had somehow captured old movies and were watching them for ideas, or if they were reading minds or if…whatever they were doing, they were very good at creating these elaborate fantasies.

Jefferson Jericho stood waiting. He decided to take a backward step, to see if he would return from whence he came. He took the step but no, he did not return. God was punishing him big time, he thought. Big time for putting New Eden together in a series of Ponzi schemes. Big time for his calculations and deceptions and desires. If he saw something—or someone—he wanted, he took it. That was his way. And if God had wanted to punish him for that, he thought, then why had God given him the tongue and personality to talk anyone into doing anything he wanted, and why had God given him the will to find an outlet for his raging sexual fevers at every opportunity, and why had God given him this firm body and handsome face that could cause investors to open their wallets without question and teenage virgins to open their legs as if hypnotized by his glowing male persona?

The thing was, he was good. Good at every damned thing he did. Good at planning, at money management, at public speaking, at persuasion, at sex. Very good at that. Very inventive, and always wanting to experiment on new flesh. And if God was punishing him for all this, then why had God made so many frustrated women who were looking for the kind of thrills he enjoyed giving? Why had God made so many gullible people who listened, but did not hear, and so gave Jefferson Jericho just the challenge he desired to pick their pockets clean?

And everything had been so easy. Since the rainy Monday fourteen years ago at the car lot in Little Rock, Arkansas, when the shimmering rainbow had come out and the thirty-year-old Number One Salesman Of The Month Leon Kushman had stared at it from the window in his cramped little office and had a revelation.

To Hell with selling cars. If a man wants to make himself some real money, he gives the people rainbows.

What he does is…he creates a religion.

He rolls the dice for high stakes, and he gets people to believe in the words that flow from his mouth like a torrent of sweet wine.

I can do that, Leon Kushman decided. Me, the son of a failed furniture salesman who wrecked our family and went out feet first on a week-long alcohol binge in a cheap little motel.

By God, I can rise above. I can give them rainbows…I can make them high rollers, masters of their own destinies. Well…let’s say they will think of themselves in that way…but isn’t that what a good leader does?

Yes. Yes. Regina will go for it, and she might have some good ideas too.

Yes!

The door across the room slowly opened, like a tease.

Jefferson Jericho felt the sweat bead on his forehead. He felt a cold shiver travel the length of his spine. He couldn’t help it; his six-foot-two-inch, husky body trembled with fear.

She had come to play with her toy.

Twelve.

She came into the room elegantly, dressed in a gown of black and gold. Tonight she was a brunette…long black hair in curly ringlets, her eyes pale blue under arched brows, her full, lush lips wet with a promising smile. She had been blonde last time, except she had had Asiatic almond-shaped brown eyes and heavy breasts. The time before that…brown hair in a ponytail, tawny flesh, petite, something between a Brazilian beach girl and a California Gidget. He understood that she was trying on different skins just as he might try on different clothes to match his mood. But surely they were watching movies, in some strange theater in the sky, and their inspiration came from the world’s shadowplays.

“My Jefferson,” she said, and maybe he imagined a slight hiss in that name, or maybe not. She approached him in what was nearly a gliding motion. Suddenly she was standing before him as if frames had been removed from the scene. She was as tall as he tonight, and nearly too slim. Her eyelashes were very thick. He wondered if they were also reading the fashion magazines of the 1970s and storing the images away for later use.

She was beautiful, in this disguise. Yet Jefferson knew that sometimes the disguises slipped, and when that happened he felt the fear curdle within himself and something abhorrent stir in the most primitive part of his being. As he looked into her face he thought that her eyes were too pale. They were almost white, and the pupils were more catlike than round. As soon as he thought this, the color of her eyes became more warmly blue and the slits of the pupils rounded.

“Is that more pleasing?” she asked, in a voice that mixed a husky taunt with a little girl’s high, soft register.

Sometimes, also, she couldn’t get the voice right at first.

He thought he said yes. He didn’t know for sure, because this was all dreamlike to him and blurred around the edges and very often he only heard himself speak as if in an echo from an unfathomable distance.

“You are looking much pleasing yourself,” she told him. She fingered the knot of his necktie. Her fingers were maybe a little bit too long and the nails looked like white plastic. “Much pleasing for me to look upon.” The face came closer to his and the intense blue eyes peered deeply, as if choosing a starting point for dissection. “My Jefferson, come to play with his harlot.” Her mouth gave a twitch. “I mean to say…starlet.”

Yes, he thought he answered. Starlet.

Her hands—had the fingers corrected themselves?—fluttered to his face and slowly ran over his cheeks and down to his jawline. Her smile never changed, but it was a cunningly human smile, with cunningly perfect human teeth behind the lips. What most unnerved him was that she never blinked. Never. And maybe she couldn’t, because even though he sometimes thought Please blink…please blink in a kind of panic-edged plea, she did not, and she didn’t mention it though he knew she was always reading his mind.

He could feel her in there, exploring. Always curious. Lifting up the rocks of his life and observing what scuttled from beneath. She knew everything about him, had likely known from their very first meeting. When was that? Time was rubbery, a foreign object. Two months after that day with Regina and the pistol? When he, Alex Smith, Doug Hammerfield and Andy Warren had taken one of the pickup trucks out of New Eden to try to find gasoline somewhere. That night in late June, when the sky was streaked with blue lightning and after a few miles heading south Doug said nervously from the backseat, “Jeff…we’d better turn around. We’ve gone too far. Don’t you think?”

Everything was dark except for flashes in the sky. They had containers in the back and hoses to siphon gas with if they found any. The regular stations around New Eden had long before gone dry and shut down. And the problem was, the men from New Eden were using up too much gasoline in the search for more, having to go further and further away from their refuge. Everything was dark in the world but for the cones of the headlights, and one of those was growing dim.

“Let’s go back,” Alex had said. “There’s nothing out here.”

“Try again tomorrow,” Doug added. “When we can see something.”

“Yeah,” Jefferson agreed. “Yeah, okay.”

He steered the truck onto a dirt road to back up and turn around, and suddenly there in front of them, standing in the glare of the dim-eyed headlights, was a group of twelve faceless, black-garbed Cypher soldiers. The creatures were staring up at the tortured sky, their weapons also upraised.

“Oh shit!” Andy shouted, and Doug shouted frantically Shut up, shut up. Jefferson tried to slam the truck into reverse and peel Firestones, but something slipped, and the gears ground together with a noise to wake the Confederate dead in their moss-covered graves. Several of the Cyphers took note of this, and turned their faceplates and their weapons upon the shuddering truck.

“They’re gonna kill us!” Alex yelled, nearly in Jefferson’s ear.

Jefferson saw no way out but the way he had always known: plow forward and damn it all. He found first gear and sank his foot to the floorboard. The truck crashed into some of the Cyphers even as others were blurring away, into whatever zone or dimension they were able to enter. Brown liquid splattered across the windshield. The dim headlight blew out. “Go, go, go!” Alex shouted. They were speeding along a dirt road at over seventy miles an hour, hitting every bump between here and the lap of Jesus.

Looking back through the swirl of dust, Doug gave a strangled moan.

Jefferson saw in the sideview mirror a rush of white-hot flame coming at the truck, like a floodwater of fire. In an instant it was upon them, too fast for him to avoid; there was no outrunning the speed of that flame, no way to escape it. The fire ate the back of the truck and melted the tires and exploded the gas tank, and as it turned the interior into a blast furnace Jefferson Jericho…

…found himself sitting on a terrace overlooking a green-shadowed garden. At the center of the garden was a silvery pond. Yellow and red fruit that resembled apples, but were strangely shaped, hung from the trees. The air smelled of air conditioning, a little metallic. He realized he was wearing a white robe of some kind of silky material, and on his feet were white sandals that might have been rubber. He looked at his unburnt hands and ran a hand through his unburnt hair, and he gasped aloud at the idea that indeed—in spite of all of his sins—he had been admitted to Heaven. He nearly wept.

And that was when she glided out onto the terrace, wearing a gown that sparkled with a million colors under the artificial sun, and she smiled at him with a mouth that still needed some work, and she said in a voice that was like listening to a dozen voices in a dozen registers at once, “I have been reading. It is written…the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Is that not correct, Leon Kush Man? Or prefer you do Jeffer Son Jericho?”

As Jefferson tried to stand up and, off-balance, fell to the glistening stones that floored the terrace, she stood over him with a blinding white glare at her back, and she lifted her too-long arms toward him and said, “No fear of me. I have saved you. Do I speak well?”

Yes…yes…you speak well…yes.

“I am learned. Learn ing,” she corrected herself. “So much to…” She cast about for the right word. “Absorb,” she said. “I am a…” Again there was a pause while she gathered her words. “…lowly student,” she went on, her voices rising and falling while Jefferson Jericho thought he had not entered Heaven but had been pulled into Hell. “Ah!” she said, with a faint smile below the unblinking red-tinged eyes. “You must explain to me that concept.”

Somewhere in that time, he slept. When he awakened he was sitting in his blue Adirondack chair overlooking New Eden in the morning light, dressed in the same clothes he’d been wearing when he and the three other men had left the night before, and there was a little irritation—like a Tennessee mosquito bite—at the back of his neck. He felt woozy and weak; what was wrong with the sunlight? Where was the sun? The light had a blue cast, and the sky was white and featureless. And the clothes he had on…the same, but not the same. The material of his shirt…the same gray-on-white stripes, but…the fabric had a faintly oily feel, as did the khaki trousers, as if they’d been manufactured from an unknown synthetic.

“Regina!” he called as he stood up and stumbled toward the house. “Regina…baby!”

He learned he’d been gone for two days. Doug Hammerfield, Alex Smith and Andy Warren had not returned. And something had changed about New Eden. It was soon discovered that trying to drive, walk, or bike out of New Eden brought you right back to New Eden. There was no way out. It was an eternal circle, one for Dante’s appreciation. And the damnedest thing was, you were just turned around without realizing it, and there you were…home again, in the realm of the High Rollers.

At six o’clock in the morning, twelve noon and six o’clock in the evening white squares of what appeared to be chunks of tofu appeared on the dinner tables, along with smooth metal receptacles of a chalky milk-like substance. No one could stand and watch the items appear; they were just there, between breaths and eyeblinks. No one could likewise watch the receptacles disappear and yet they did, even put in a box and locked away in a cupboard. They could not be dented or crushed. The food and drink had a slightly bitter taste, yet they filled the stomach and even became habit-forming. Some said they believed this food gave them the most beautiful dreams, and they began to sleep their lives away.

There was no rain, no storms, no change of weather. It was always a blue-tinged sunny day with a featureless white sky. The light bloomed in the morning and faded in the evening. The grass stopped growing but remained green, like artificial turf. The leaves on the trees never changed, and never fell. The Fourth of July was Halloween was Thanksgiving was Christmas was New Year’s Day was Valentine’s Day, no difference. New Eden had running water and electricity. Bulbs never burned out. Toilets never stopped up or overflowed. Nothing needed painting, unless you wanted to paint. Nothing in the houses—dishwashers, garage doors, clocks, DVD players, washing machines—ever broke down. When the garbage was taken out, it was removed from the green bins by unseen and unheard maintenance crews.

New Eden had become the most perfect place not of this earth, for Jefferson Jericho and the others had come to grasp the truth through many late night council sessions. Their dream town now existed in some other dimension, some other slice of space and time, protected by the Gorgons from the war that ravaged the real world.

Protected, as well, from the Cyphers. From all pressures and worries of the tormented earth. Food and drink were supplied, and all the essentials of human life down to soap and dishwashing detergent. Even the toilet paper never ran out, but was on a continuous roll that replenished itself when necessary. Some found the paper to be very thin, and smelling somewhat like the disinfectant of a hospital room.

No woman had become pregnant, in the time since New Eden had been transported. No one had died, not human nor pet. Marianne Dawson’s cervical cancer had simply vanished, and Glenn O’Hara’s emphysema had gone away. Though eighty-four-year-old Will Donneridge still walked with a cane due to his hip implant, he was doing fine and walked the streets almost every day.

Many people walked the streets, almost every day.

And some, sleepless, also walked at night. Sometimes the dogs howled at night too, but it was a noise one had to get used to.

Our ant farm, Jefferson thought as he looked upon the creature in her elegant gown of black and gold, with her long black hair and her pale blue eyes that, unblinking, saw and knew everything. Here is our creator.

Whether she was one entity or many in one flesh, he did not know. Whether she was truly female or not, he dared not guess. And what she really looked like, without the disguise…he dreaded the thought and had to banish it as best he could.

Because here she was, his harlot starlet from the stars, and as she stroked his cheeks and played with the heroic-looking cleft in his strong and noble chin, she also began to feed him the mind-pictures that were his undoing. She knew all of his past deeds and misdeeds; she knew the face, aroma, and touch of every MILF and every drug- or pain-addled teenaged girl in every motel room he had ever paid for with his hidden account Visa card. She now offered them up to him, the ferrago of fleshly feasts that had over time become the central obsession of his life, and so potent were these pictures of his passionate past that—alien creature or not, female or not—Jefferson Jericho was responding to these mental images, and this was the true power he had come to know because it was not so much about the sinning as it was about the winning.

You know I compel to disrobe you.

Had she spoken with words, or with her mind? Her mouth had not moved; her understanding of the human language was still fractured, but her understanding of her toy was perfection itself.

Her fingers were working at his tie. He knew she enjoyed undressing him; it seemed almost an ecstatic ritual to her, for as she let his Ben Silver tie drop, took off his coat, and began to unbutton his Brooks Brothers shirt, her eyes were aflame like meteors in the night. As she unbuckled his belt and unzipped his trousers, her face in her ecstasy seemed to suddenly become like soft wax and shift on its bones, and Jefferson had to quickly look away lest he lose his hard-on…but she sensed this in an instant, and flooded his mind so thoroughly with memories of past conquests, moans, and orgasmic shivers from a legion of females who had fallen under his spell, that he quite simply was himself spellbound.

My Jefferson. Take my hand.

He held up his trousers with one hand and with the other took hers. It was, as always, almost the feel of human flesh but not quite. She led him to the bed, where he sat down to allow her to remove his polished shoes and his socks, which she did slowly…again, almost as an ecstatic ritual. Then she—slowly, slowly—pulled off his trousers and his blue-checked boxers, and she commanded him mentally to lie on his back upon the bed while she slid down beside him. Once in position, she began to play with that large part of him that she seemed to find as fascinating as any female who had never flown between the stars.

When Jefferson’s mind began to betray him, the Gorgon mistress injected him with fresh memories. She made the dalliances of twenty years ago as real as the moment, and all he could do was drift in a territory of heated sexual dreams while she pulled and stretched and twisted him between her hands as if testing the strength of the material he was made of. Then suddenly the frames skipped once more and she was undressed, and her not-quite-human-flesh was pressed hard against him. When he dared to look into her face in the yellow candlelight he saw unwanted shadows there and he quickly looked away, but all the time she was feeding him his own past, the parade of images from a life of lustful debauchery, scenes contained within the walls of countless motels and apartments and the occasional back room of a strip club. She gave him back the world he had made for himself, and he was proud of his accomplishments, proud of his power to move at his whim any female object, proud of his abilities and attributes and gifts from God, proud of his silver tongue and golden persona, proud proud proud until he was nearly bursting aflame with pride.

The flame lit him up. She was trying to kiss him but she didn’t know how to kiss, it was all open mouth that belonged to a hollow mask but he couldn’t think that, couldn’t go there that this creature mounting him was not human and oh oh back to a steamy shower in a Motel Six with a German exchange student named Jana who had come in wanting a good deal on a used Jeep Wrangler, and the wetness and softness and murmuring enveloped him and stole him away.

He was inside her now, pounding her as he would have any human female, a mindless rhythm that built to an explosive release. She was damp within, and it passed through his feverish mind that this was false too, part of the disguise, some kind of artificial lubricant developed in an alien lab…and then he was plunged back into a memory, examining a birthmark in the shape of a cat’s paw on the left breast of a blonde woman named Georgia May who used to work at his bank in Little Rock.

As he turned her over on the bed or she turned him over, which was difficult to say who did what because the frames were skipping, Jefferson plunged deeply inside her and heard her give a soft hissing noise. He kept driving into her with all his strength and with all his past amours tumbling through his mind. He had endurance, he could keep this up until he decided they both had had enough; it had never been love, with anyone, it had always been the winning of something or someone, the praise, the attention, the admiration that had kept him going from one to the next to the next. And so too, did he perversely enjoy this admiration from his starlet harlot.

Then, as sometimes happened, as Jefferson plunged into his Gorgon mistress, a hot fleshy thing clamped upon him, there in her wet depths, and held him fast. He felt a shiver of panic, of terror, that passed away in the wiry embrace of a small-boned Asian stripper named Kitten who always smelled to him of burning leaves. And then, as sometimes happened in the heat of their encounters, small tentacle-like things began to slide around the backs of his thighs to hold him more firmly still, and here he squeezed his eyes shut and gave himself up fully to the memories she offered, for even in the bedrooms of the past, Jefferson Jericho could feel her coming apart at her seams, and things slithering out of her false body to snake-grip his own.

No memory she offered up, however lush, was enough to overcome this part of it. But she tried, and as she pumped his mind full of decadent opiates of his own making, a tentacle wound around the base of his balls and tightened there while another flicked and played with them, and deep inside her the fleshy thing clamped hard once…twice…a third time and he came to the tune of a blonde vagabond named Marigold sitting on a bed naked playing “Greensleeves” on a beat-up acoustic guitar.

The thing inside his Gorgon mistress—as strong as another hand—milked him. The tentacles writhed and whipped. He had never seen these things, but he knew what they must be. She was gracious enough to put them away when she was done with him. When she had wrung him out the fleshy clamp released him, and in a dazed and drifting dream-state he wondered if they were using his seed to make hybrids of human and…what? But it was no matter to him now, for though he feared this creature, and when she called him by that device planted in the back of his neck, he had to go into the bathroom and throw up, he was so afraid…he had to admit in the long-lingering afterglow that she was one great lay.

He had screwed women who needed to have bags over their heads. At least this one—this pretend woman—was beautiful and changed her skin and hair and eyes and always made him come like a champ. She liked him. What was so bad about that?

He would think that way until she sent him back, and then the reality would hit him and he would go into his ant farm house, throw up in his ant farm toilet, strip off the clothes that always smelled a little burnt and crawl into a corner. He would stay there, hollow-eyed and shivering as if from the most terrible nightmare, until Regina said Get up, you pig. Or something worse.

“My Jefferson?”

He was lying naked on his back on the rumpled bed. His eyes had been closed. Now he opened them to the dim candlelight. She was standing beside the bed, dressed again in her elegant gown of gold and black. Her face was a pool of shadows, but he could see her eyes glinting. Maybe he imagined it, but the pupils seemed to be blood-red. He thought that her disguise was beginning to melt.

“For you we have a task,” she said.

He lay still, listening, yet too weak and drained to move.

“There has been…” She paused, rapidly searching through what she knew of his language. “An incident,” she went on. “Four of your hours ago.”

Was she taller than before? Larger? A looming presence that was as hard and cold as the darkness of the universe? All those, it seemed. And her voice…many voices in one, many registers and echoes, many ghosts upon ghosts.

“We require you,” she said, “to help us.” When he didn’t respond, the voices asked sharply, “Hearing us?”

“Yes,” he answered, newly unnerved. And again, so she—it—knew he was paying attention, though he did not want to look at her. “Yes, I am.”

“What you would call a boy has…disturbed us. He has aided our enemy. We wish to know more about this boy. You will find him and bring him back to us.”

“What?” Jefferson sat up, still groggy but clear-headed enough to process what she was saying. Her eyes with their red pupils—slit-shaped, now—seemed to hang in the dark over a large and strangely misshapen body in a gown that had changed dimensions to fit the form, and he felt the stirrings of dread and terror in the roots of his guts. He had started sweating; he had to look away again. “A boy? What boy?”

“Our questions must be answered,” came the reply, in many octaves. “He is with others of your kind. They protect him. You are a…” Again, there was a pause while she searched. “Persuader,” she said. “Grow their trust.”

Gain their trust, he thought.

“Yes,” she said. “Exactly that.”

“I don’t…I don’t know…what you’re—”

“You do know. Penetrate their protection. Reach this boy. Put your hands upon him and bring him back to us.”

“I…can’t…listen…listen…why can’t you do it, if he’s so important?”

“This needs,” she replied, “the human touch. We would be…how would you say…exposed. My Jefferson, you are very good at what you do. You are very…” A pause of a few seconds, searching. “Skilled. Put your hands upon him, flesh to flesh. Then you will bring him back to us.”

“Bring him back to you? How can I do that?”

“We will manage the journey. My Jefferson, how you tremble! Be not feared, we will watch over you.”

“How?” He shook his head, defying the hurtful device buried in the back of his neck. “I can’t do this! You’re saying…you want to send me out there? Out in that war?”

Did she sigh, as if with human exasperation? Her voices were cold when she replied. “We require the boy. We require you to bring him to us. You will have protection. One of our own, and one of yours. This male has been…” Once more the search of language. “Modified. He will react to a certain level of threat. You need not worry yourself over this. Am I not speaking well?”

“Yes,” he said, as he always did when she asked this question. He could not look at her; he was too afraid of seeing some part of what she might truly be under the disguise.

“The boy,” she continued, “is in a place called Col O Raydo. Do you know this place?”

“Colorado,” he corrected her. “Listen…no…please, I can’t—”

“You can and you will. We have given you much, my Jefferson. Much. And much given can be much taken away. You will be removed from this place and sent to find the boy. It will be up to you to carry out our command.” She was silent for a moment, and then the voices said, “Our wish. Once this is done, you may go home and all will be well.”

Jefferson almost laughed at that one, but what came out was more of a choked gasp. “All will never be well,” he managed to say.

“We intend to win this conflict.” The Gorgon’s face was shadowed in the candlelight, her voices rising and falling. “We will be beneficent rulers. But now…we need the boy, and you must sleep for a time.”

Jefferson was aware that the thing at the nape of his neck had begun a soft throbbing. It was like having his neck and shoulders rubbed by warm hands, and the sensation began to move down his back and along his arms, down his spine, into his hips and his legs.

“Sleep,” said the Gorgon. And Jefferson darted a glance up into where the face must be but saw only a black hole above the shimmering gown. “Sleep,” urged a thousand voices. The comforting warmth of the implant soothed him, lulled him, filled his head with the memory of the beauty this female creature had been a short while ago. He felt sleep coming upon him and he couldn’t fight it; he didn’t want to fight it. He lay down upon the bed of this fictitious French mansion room again, stretched himself out and closed his eyes, and breathing deeply and steadily the last thing he heard her say—and maybe this was spoken in his mind directly from hers—was:

You will know the boy when you find him, my Jefferson. Now sleep in peace. You have earned it.

Thirteen.

“Oh,” Olivia whispered, and in that soft, terrible sound was the noise of a world falling to pieces.

The smoky light of a weak sunrise revealed all. It was disaster upon disaster. It was fire and dust and death. It was a massive dead reptile in the living room, and no one could take it out to the garbage. As the wounded continued to stumble out and the dead were carried out, Olivia sat down on the cracked parking lot pavement almost in the shadow of the crashed Gorgon craft, and she put her hands to her face and wanted to cry, wanted to let everything go, but Ethan was still with her and so she did not because she was still the leader of this wreckage. Ethan had not left her side, and he was standing nearby watching bloody and dust-covered figures emerge from the murk.

Ethan had seen a few Cypher soldiers still moving about. He knew there was another Gorgon up in the complex somewhere, probably hidden low in the ruins, and the Cyphers were not going to leave until they’d destroyed the creature. He was dusty and tired and his damp clothes smelled of Gorgon-reek. Already the craft was losing its markings, the colors fading into a grim, grayish cast. In a few days, the odor of rot would be unbearable. Even so, tonight the Gray Men might come looking for meat and even a dead alien ship might do for a feast. He shuddered at the thought of that, and at the memory of what his brief glimpse of the Gorgon had been.

He had blown the thing up. Completely destroyed it, just by wanting it to happen. His hand was back to normal, his arm, his brain, everything. Back to normal. But he was thinking that normal for him was far different than for anyone else who had survived that crash. He thought he remembered seeing what looked like fiery wasps or burning bullets striking the Gorgon and tearing the thing to shreds. And that recoil, knocking him down as if he’d actually fired a wickedly powerful rifle. He examined the palm of his right hand again, as he had several times already. Nothing there but the lines of fate.

And then Ethan let himself think it, and let it sink deep.

I am not just a boy. JayDee is right. I’m something different.

Something…but not totally human anymore.

Survivors were still emerging from the ruins. A few of them, bloodied and battered, stood around Olivia waiting for her to speak, to take control, to make Panther Ridge a secure fortress again, but she could not, and so they passed on. The wooden door covered with metal plates was opened, and people began to leave. Some refused, even as they were urged on by friends or loved ones; dazed and hopeless, they sat down on the ground and could not be moved. An occasional shot was fired up in the remaining apartments, but whether someone was shooting at Cypher soldiers or the slithering Gorgon or taking their own lives was unknown.

“Oh my God! Olivia!” A figure wearing a blood-spattered white t-shirt and khaki trousers came hobbling toward Olivia and Ethan. John Douglas had found a rusted length of rebar and was maintaining a precarious balance on a sprained right ankle. He had a few bumps and bruises, but otherwise he was all right. The blood on his shirt had come from others he’d helped out of the ruins. He had escaped death by going out his front door to watch the show of alien fireworks, had seen the ship coming down, and with a shout of warning to anyone who could hear, he’d thought to get into the hospital for whatever he could grab. The door was chained and padlocked, as usual after dark. The ship seemed to be coming right at him. There was no time to get the key. Other people were already running past him. A collision with Paul Edson had twisted his ankle, but Paul had helped him get clear of the crash. “Jesus,” he said to Olivia, his voice hoarse and harsh. “I thought you were likely dead!” His swollen eyes went to Ethan. “You,” he said, and maybe there was a hint of accusation in it. But then he took a long breath to regain his composure and his focus, and he asked, “You all right?”

“Yes sir,” Ethan answered. The nail-puncture wound at the back of his thigh was nothing, not compared to the wounds he’d seen on people coming out of the ruins…and there were eleven dead bodies covered with bloody sheets and blankets lying about twenty feet away.

“John!” said Olivia, as if she’d just recognized him. “I was trying to find Vincent. He was calling for me. I heard him calling…but I couldn’t find him. Did you hear him?”

JayDee glanced quickly at Ethan and then back to the woman. “No, Olivia, I didn’t.”

“Ethan was with me,” she explained, her voice steady and earnest but her eyes sunken and wild. “He took care of me. I think…there was something bad up in there. Something…” She struggled to find meaning. “Bad,” she repeated. “I think Ethan…kept it away from me.”

“A Gorgon from the ship,” Ethan told the doctor. “Up in the ruins.”

“You kept it away from her? How?”

It was time to tell the truth, no matter how incredible it might sound. When Ethan spoke, he stared directly into the doctor’s eyes, and he spoke like a man instead of a boy. “I killed it. I tore it to pieces.” He followed that up with, “I wanted it to be destroyed, and it was. But there’s another one up there somewhere. The Cyphers are looking for it. I wouldn’t want to see one of those again.”

JayDee gave no reply. His face was pallid except for a purple bruise on his chin where someone’s elbow had hit him in the confusion of escape. “Well,” he managed to say, “I’ve never seen one, and I sure as hell don’t want to. Spare me any more details, won’t you?”

Ethan nodded, and that seemed to close the subject.

Someone suddenly moved past Ethan and sat down beside Olivia, hugging her and then beginning to sob. It was the young blonde girl with the eyepatch that Ethan had seen lying on the ground, studying the stars last night. He saw now that the stick-on rhinestones formed a star on her eyepatch. It was, he thought, an effort at making the best of a bad thing. An eyepatch as a fashion statement, or a statement of attitude. Her long blonde hair and her face were dirty with dust and smoke. She was wearing jeans, a dark red blouse and blue Nikes that were all the worse for wear but maybe as clean as any clothes Ethan had seen on anyone so far. As the girl hugged Olivia and continued to cry, Olivia sobbed a little bit too and then she got herself under control; she put her arms around the girl and asked in a voice that was nearly strong, “Nikki, are you hurt?”

The girl shook her head, her face buried against Olivia’s shoulder.

“All right,” Olivia said. “That’s good.” She gently stroked the girl’s hair, her own eyes reddened by tears. “We’re going to get out of this,” she said. “We’re not done yet.”

Ethan took stock of the apartment complex, while JayDee hobbled over to give whatever aid he could to a bloodied Hispanic couple who was being helped along the road toward them. A little boy about seven or eight was holding onto his mother’s hand. The father had suffered a gash across his face, his hair whitened by dust. Ethan said quietly, “We have to leave here. We have to get out before dark.”

“Just where are we going to go?”

It had been spoken by the girl with the eyepatch. She was staring up at Ethan as if she thought he was insane. “Who are you?” she asked sharply. Then: “Wait…wait. You’re the boy they brought in a few days ago. Your name is…Ethan?”

“Yeah. Ethan Gaines. Well…” He shrugged. “It’s a made-up name. I can’t remember my real one.” He tried to find the semblance of a smile, but could not.

“I was a sophomore at the high school,” she replied. “How’d you pick that name?”

“Just did. Saw the sign, I guess. As good as any. You’re Nikki…what?”

“Stanwick.” Her good eye, though bloodshot from dust and smoke, was chocolate brown.

“Where are your folks?”

“Both dead,” she answered, without emotion. Ethan figured it had happened in the early days. “My older sister, too.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Me too. How about yours?” It was asked matter-of-factly, as if they were discussing brands of sneakers. It had become a hard world, Ethan thought, and those who survived had seen and endured much. If they weren’t hard by now, they would have already died.

“I can’t remember that, either.” Ethan noted a scar just above her eyepatch and several small scars on her cheeks. A deeper scar on her chin ran up to just beneath her lower lip.

“Nikki’s been with us a long time,” Olivia said. “She came in that first summer. I need to stand up. Can you help me?”

Both Ethan and Nikki helped Olivia to her feet. Olivia wavered a little bit, and Ethan was ready if she fell, but she held herself steady. “Thank you,” the woman said. She saw a group of six people walking down the road in their direction, two of them nearly carrying a third. She recognized among them Joel Schuster, Hannah Grimes, Gary Roosa, and…

“Dear God,” she said, her voice choked with emotion. “There’s Dave!”

Ethan’s heart gave a jump. Dave McKane was one of those supporting a thin elderly man with a white beard and long white hair braided into a ponytail. Dave was dusty and dishevelled but he looked like he’d come through the catastrophe intact; he was wearing his jeans, a black t-shirt torn almost to tatters and his usual dark blue baseball cap. His brown beard edged with gray was made more gray by dust. He had his Uzi in its holster at his side and, around his waist, the holster with the .357 Magnum in it. His face was grim and there was a bloody cut across the bridge of his nose. He saw Olivia, Ethan, Nikki Stanwick, and JayDee and nothing about his face changed; he gave them a nod of recognition and said in a husky voice, “Let’s set Billy down here. JayDee, I think his right leg’s broken. How about you?”

“Twisted ankle. Nothing much.” JayDee shrugged, but in truth his ankle hurt like blazes. “Billy, how’re you feeling?”

“Like shit on a cracker,” the old man said through gritted teeth. “Fellas with broke legs usually don’t feel so good. Don’t need a doc to know that. Ow, Jesus…be careful with my old ass!”

Olivia hugged Dave and wound up squeezing him so hard he gave a grunt of pain. Dust puffed off him in the embrace. “Oh my God, I thought you were dead!”

“I might’ve been,” he said, returning the hug but not so firmly in respect of her bones. “I was sitting on my balcony, thinking. I saw the spheres, and then I heard that thing plowing in and getting louder and louder. I had time to get my guns and then I jumped. After that, I don’t know what happened. I do remember running like a jack rabbit.” His eyes found Ethan. He would not tell Ethan that he’d jumped not from his own balcony but from Ethan’s after he’d kicked the door open to try to get the boy out. He stared darkly at the row of bodies under the sheets and blankets. “Any idea how many?”

“No idea yet,” she said. “But many.”

“Shit! Shit! Shit!” Billy Bancroft had been lowered to the grass and was fuming as the fingers of a gnarled hand felt along his injured leg. “Seventy-six years old and I never had a fuckin’ broken bone in my life!” His eyes, bright blue, turned upon the row of corpses. He was silent for awhile, and then he said, speaking to everyone and no one in particular, “Jake Keller in there anywhere? Joel, take a look for me, will you?”

“I’ll do it,” Dave offered. He went about the task quickly and efficiently. The third body was particularly bad, and the fifth was worse. The ninth body was…“Jake’s here.”

“Damn it.” Billy’s voice was tight. “Little bastard got away owin’ me fifty dollars from our last poker game. Well,” he said, “rest in peace. Cheater.”

“We can’t stay here,” Ethan said, and was surprised at the power of his own voice; again, it carried the strength of a man’s. He fixed his attention on Dave. “You know we can’t. We don’t even have time to bring all the bodies out and—”

“Where are we going to go?” Nikki sounded on the edge of panic. “Out there? This is our home…our protection…we can’t…we can’t…” And then she looked at the huge Gorgon craft sitting at the center of the destruction, and her remaining eye went glassy. Her knees buckled. Before she fell, Ethan reached her first and then Joel Schuster, and together they lowered her gently to the ground as she moaned and put her hands to her face. She began to cry again, and once more Olivia sat down beside her to stroke her hair and soothe her.

“She lived a few miles away, in a regular neighborhood,” Olivia said, speaking mostly to Ethan. “Westview Avenue, she told me. She said the whole area caught fire one night. The houses started blowing up. When she walked in, she was in rags, in shock, and badly injured. So…this was her home. At least her shelter, for whatever it was worth.”

“Ethan’s right.”

Dave had not spoken, though he’d been about to.

John Douglas limped forward on his makeshift crutch. “That thing…that smell…of dead meat. It’s going to bring the Gray Men tonight. We’ve got to get out while we can. Find some other place. We won’t have time to bury the bodies or do much more searching through the wreckage.” He frowned. “All these wounded people can’t be left behind. Damn if I know how they’re going to travel, though. And myself included in that.” He looked up at the top of the hill, where the seven horses grazed. They were jumpy, and when two brushed each other one kicked and galloped away. Seven horses…but no magnificent seven in this bunch.

Everyone was silent. Then Ethan knew what he should say, and he said it. “We’ve got to find a truck. Something big enough to carry…I don’t know…fifty or sixty people, I guess.”

“You mean a semi?” Dave asked. “With a trailer big enough? Yeah, right! Like we’re going to find one…” He was about to say sitting around out there, but he stopped himself. It might be possible to find a tractor-trailer truck at a loading dock or parked near a warehouse. An industrial area wasn’t but about three miles away. And as for fuel…

“Diesel,” he said. “I’ll bet there’s still diesel left in some of the gas stations’ tanks. Or maybe at the truck terminals. If we can find a barrel pump somewhere we can get fuel from a diesel tank. Have to find ten to twelve feet of hose. Maybe there’s a hardware store that hasn’t been cleaned out. Have to be careful, though. There are other people hiding in their holes and they’re armed and scared. Crazed, too. You remember.” He directed this to Olivia, referring to a time last August when he’d gone out with Cal Norris searching for food and water, and Cal had been shot in the neck from the window of a house and bled to death on West Skyway.

“We don’t necessarily need a truck,” Olivia said. Her face had taken on a firmness once more and there was life in her eyes. “We can use a school bus or a metro bus. Whatever we can find that maybe still has some gas in it, and a battery that works.”

“Right.” A battery that works, he thought. That was going to be a trick. But he couldn’t let it throw him, not yet. “Hold on. We? No, ma’am, you’re not going out on this one. Joel, can you ride a horse?”

“Haven’t since I was a kid, but I’m game.”

“I can ride,” Nikki said. She had wiped her face and no longer needed to lean on Olivia. “I had a horse before all this.”

“I need somebody with a gun.” He had already noted the .45 in Joel’s belt holster. “I’d like a third rider, though. Gary, you’re elected.”

“Okay, but I hate horses and they hate me.”

“I’ll go,” the wizened older woman named Hannah Grimes said. Her hair was white and wild, as if perpetually blown by a tempest. She held up a pistol that looked as big as her head, locked in a hand full of blue veins. “This elect me, Mr. President?”

“By a landslide.” Or earthquake, Dave thought. He looked at Ethan and could almost see the gears turning in the boy’s mind. White Mansion mountain. Got to get there, somehow. “Finding a hand crank pump is going to be a tough one right there. Then we find a truck. The battery’s going to be long dead, but pray we can find a spare,” he said, and found himself speaking only to Ethan. “If we can find a truck that’s already got some gas in it, enough to get to a station with some diesel left, all the better.” Tall orders, he thought. Little wonder they hadn’t tried this before. But before, there was no Gorgon ship sitting on top of them. “After that,” he went on doggedly, “we find medical supplies in a hospital, a pharmacy, or a Doc-in-the-Box. We may have to head south. Got that?”

“Got it,” said Ethan, who understood exactly what Dave was talking about.

“Have to get all this done before dark,” Dave said to Olivia. “Better gather up all the food, water, and weapons we can find. Anything else of use.” He cast a doubtful eye toward the smoky ruins and the huge rotting carcass of the Gorgon ship. A storm of vultures was beginning to gather overhead. “Don’t let anybody go too far in, though,” he told Olivia, who quickly nodded agreement. He added, “There’s been enough people dead for one day.”

He hoped.

Fourteen.

Jefferson Jericho, past master of New Eden, awakened on a park bench in an unknown city, under a sick yellow sun and a leprous gray sky. He sat bolt upright, catching from skin and clothes the burnt smell that he was so familiar with. Only he realized that maybe the smell was not just coming from whatever transformative power the Gorgons possessed, for around him were the black, twisted skeletons of burned trees and, further on, a mass of ashes and broken structures that might once have been a neighborhood.

As soon as he stood up, he threw up…but there was nothing in his stomach, so nothing came up. Then, wiping the saliva from his mouth, he realized he had a beard…not a large one, but scraggly…maybe two weeks’ worth. Had he been “out” that long, or was the beard something the Gorgons could force from his pores just as she forced him to take that last step into the realm of the unknown? And his clothes…

“Jesus!” he said, in utter amazement. He was wearing a sweat-stained brown t-shirt and a pair of dirty jeans. On his feet were sneakers with holes in them. He was wearing no socks. He looked at his hands and arms. The fingernails were caked with dirt and his arms were grimy. When he looked at his palms he saw the lines there were like filthy roads leading across the plains. He had never been so dirty in all his life. He was sure that if he had a mirror he would see the rest of the disguise the Gorgons had given him; he probably still looked like himself under the beard, but they had made him appear to be a homeless survivor of the cosmic war. The clothes felt slippery somehow…the fabric was not quite right. He had the feeling that he was trapped in snakeskin, and terror leaped up within him. Nearly whimpering, he started to pull the offending t-shirt off and over his head.

There was a noise, and Jefferson stopped with the t-shirt halfway off because something had just happened that he knew he and his hammering heart would not like.

It was hard to say what the noise was. Maybe it was a soft whistling, like the displacement of air. Maybe it was a whirring sound, like a little machine in motion. Whatever it was, it came from behind him—very close—and Jefferson pulled the t-shirt back down off his eyes so he could see, and he turned to face his future.

A man was there, standing beside the skeleton of a burned tree. He was a large man, square-built and broad-shouldered, though his face had taken on the appearance of someone in need of food; his cheekbones and eyes were beginning to hollow out. He had a flat-nosed boxer’s face, a tangle of shoulder-length black hair, and two months’ growth of black beard. His dark blue t-shirt, gray trousers, and black sneakers were just as filthy as Jefferson’s clothes, if not more so. The eyes in the hungry face were small and dark, like chips of flint. He wore a backpack, an olive green one, likely from an Army surplus store.

The man just stared at him impassively, and he did not blink.

“Who are you?” Jefferson’s voice was far from the strong baritone bell that tolled for the congregation of the High Rollers, that had been caught and carried on the GHR network to a hundred and fifty-six markets. God’s High Rollers. That seemed like an age ago…him on the podium with the dozen-screened light show going on behind him, his inspired grin casting further illumination, his arms outspread, and the message delivered as only a salesman as himself could deliver it… The secret to being rich—just tearing that ol’ stock market up—is a code in the Bible that I have deciphered…

“Vope,” said the man.

“Vope? What kind of name is that?”

“It is the one,” came the answer, “you can pronounce.”

“You’re a Gorgon? Sent to protect me?”

“I am a creation,” Vope said. “What I am does concern you not. But…yes, I am here to protect and guide you.” The small flinty eyes scanned the sky. “There are no enemies in this sector, in this frame of time. We can move freely.”

“To where? Where are we going?”

“Follow,” said Vope, and he began striding quickly and purposefully across the destroyed park, past an overturned swing set and a group of seesaws turned black by alien fire. Jefferson followed. They crossed a street and went past burned and wrecked houses and crossed another street, the same. Jefferson knew they were walking in the direction of a metropolitan area because he could see larger buildings. A couple of them had been sheared off as if by a gigantic and very sharp blade.

“Where are we? What town?”

“Fort Col lins,” Vope answered, putting a pause where there should be none. “Col O Raydo.”

“What do you know about this boy I’m supposed to find?” He was having to hurry to keep up, and—enemies in the sector or not—he kept scanning the sky and the ground around them. “I’m a salesman,” he said, before Vope could reply. “I shouldn’t be out here. I’m not a soldier!” Vope didn’t respond. “I sell things,” Jefferson went on, sounding desperate even to himself. “Do you even know what that means?”

Vope was silent. Doesn’t give a shit, Jefferson thought. They were going through another neighborhood that had survived total destruction; only a few houses here and there were demolished. Some were boarded up, or had been boarded up. The boards had been broken into. To Jefferson, most of the houses looked like coffins. Like so many others, this was a town of the dead.

“Stop,” Vope suddenly said, and immediately Jefferson halted.

They were standing in front of a wood-framed house with six steps leading up to a porch. On the porch was a single rocking chair. The address was 1439. The windows were broken out, and the darkness was very deep within.

“It will happen here,” Vope announced.

“What will happen?”

There was no answer from the Gorgon in its disguise of human flesh.

A moment slipped past. In the distance Jefferson heard dogs barking and then howling, and he thought that wild dogs could kill a person just as easily as a death ray.

The rocking chair moved, just a fraction. It creaked. And as Jefferson Jericho watched, a form began to materialize in the chair. It began first as a barely discernible whorl, as if the air itself was becoming solid and an invisible finger had stirred it. There was that soft hissing or whispering or metallic sound that Jefferson had heard in the park. This is Star Trek shit, he thought…but within three seconds—and in total silence—a body came into being in the chair, first as a ghostly, paled-out form outlined by what might have been flickers of blue energy, and then fully realized and solid. The rocking chair creaked back and forth, and the man in it stared at both Jefferson and Vope with huge frightened eyes under a bald dome that sparkled with sweat.

“Lemme alone!” he croaked. “Please…Jesus…lemme alone!” Looking about himself and getting some idea of where he was, his hairy hands gripped hold of the chair’s arms and locked his body there.

“Come with us,” Vope commanded.

“Listen…listen…I don’t know where I am. Okay? I don’t know who you are. I’m stayin’ right where I am, I ain’t movin’.”

“You will move,” said Vope.

“No,” the new arrival protested, and instantly he winced and grasped at the back of his neck. “Please…please lemme alone,” he begged, as tears bloomed in his eyes. “Don’t hurt me anymore.”

“You will move,” Vope repeated, with a robotic tone in his—its?—voice.

The man gritted his teeth. He frantically rubbed the back of his neck, as if that would cancel the pain spreading through him from the implanted device. But Jefferson knew it would not. Two more heartbeats, and the man stood up and gasped, “Okay! Yeah…make it stop!” He came down the steps, breathing hard and wheezing just a bit. “Christ…oh my God…what a world,” he said, as his terrified brown eyes surveyed the scene. He was a short man, maybe five-foot-seven, and he had been fat at one time because he had heavy-hanging jowls that quivered as he spoke. Under his dirty white shirt and black pants, the man’s flesh seemed to be loose and hanging off him. He, too, was in need of food. Or…maybe, Jefferson thought, the Gorgons wanted him to look that way. He had a grizzled gray beard and was probably in his late forties. He had spoken with a Brooklyn accent, or at least that’s what it sounded like to Jefferson. On the man’s feet were black loafers, scuffed all to hell and back, that probably at one time had been expensive.

“Nice shoes,” Jefferson said. “Used to be, I mean. You need some sneakers. More comfortable.”

“Yeah, right.” The man narrowed his eyes, taking Jefferson in. “Who are you? You human?”

“Jeff,” came the answer. “From Nashville, Tennessee,” he decided to say. “I’m human.” Don’t ask Regina that question, he thought. Don’t ask Amy Vickson, either. But Amy was dead, killed herself “but left my undying love,” the note had said. Lucky little bitch, is what she was.

“Burt Ratcoff,” said the man. “From Queens, New York.” Burt’s gaze moved to Vope. “Yeah, you’re one of them. Where you from? Fuckin’ Mars?”

“You make no sense,” said the Gorgon. “You will call me Vope. From this point on, both of you will do as I command.” The flinty eyes were lifeless, and horrible in their unblinking fixation on his subjects. “To fail to obey is to receive pain. Follow me.” He turned and began walking toward the metropolitan area again, and Jefferson and Ratcoff obeyed.

“How’d they get you?” Ratcoff asked.

“It’s a long story.”

“They got me when my apartment buildin’ was shot to hell. They lifted me out of it, as it was fallin’ down around my head. I woke up…” He stopped speaking and shook his head. “They did things to me. You know you used to hear when people got abducted and all that, they got needles put in their bellies and metal rods up their asses? Well…I remember a table. Freezin’ cold. Maybe metal, but different. But…it was like the table was alive…’cause it moved underneath me. Like it…shifted. It rippled, like flesh. I was on that table and there was nothin’ holdin’ me down but I couldn’t move. And…the figures around me. More like shadows than real. They didn’t walk…they just…like…I don’t know…it was like bein’ in a room with snakes that could stand up…or slither, or glide, or whatever the hell. But they did things to me, Jeff…can I call you Jeff?”

“Yes.”

“They did things. They opened me up. I think…I remember seein’ somethin’ pullin’ my insides out…like ropes. Bloody. I think they hollowed me out…and put somethin’ else inside me.”

“I’ve got that implant at the back of my neck too.”

“No…no. More than that. More,” Ratcoff said forcefully. And then, quietly, “That kind of thing could drive a man crazy. You know?”

“I know,” Jefferson answered.

“Silence,” Vope said. “Your chatter urinates me.”

“You’d better get your language straight,” Jefferson dared to say. “You want to pass as a human, you need some more lessons.” And those unblinking eyes…a dead giveaway. So the Gorgons weren’t as smart as they thought they were, at least not in the area of disguise.

For this remark, there was a little twinge of pain at the back of Jefferson’s neck, just a pinch and a quick burning of nerves to let him know who was the master and who was the slave.

They were nearly halfway along the next street when a door banged open. Two thin, bearded, and dirtied men with rifles emerged from a dilapidated house. “Hold it, hold it!” the taller of the two said. “Not a step more, mister!”

Vope did understand this much English. He stopped, and so did Jefferson and Ratcoff.

“Inside,” the man said, motioning quickly with his weapon. “Come on, move it!”

“Sir,” Jefferson began, “we don’t—”

“Shut up! Get your asses inside that house! Go!”

“You are interfering,” said Vope. “That is not permitted.”

“Hell, I’ll shoot you all down right here! Who’s first?” The rifle swung toward Ratcoff. Jefferson could tell the little man wanted to run for it, and he said in his most golden salesman’s tone, “I don’t believe that would be wise, Burt. Vope, I personally do not want to be shot down in the street today. We should do what they say. You need us.”

Vope stared at him for what seemed an eternity. Jefferson thought the rifles were going to go off at any damned second. Then Vope said, “Correct.” They entered the house, with Vope leading the way. In the dingy little front room, empty food cans and other trash littered the floor. A third man was in there, brandishing a revolver. He had a burn scar across the left side of his face, and his sunken eyes were either wild or crazy. A skinny woman also occupied the dismal room, with its faded and peeling wallpaper the color of dust; it was hard to tell her age or anything about her because her lank brown hair hung in her face and she held her arms around herself. Every so often she shivered as if at a memory of winter.

“Where’d you come from?” The leader’s rifle went up under Vope’s throat.

“A distance.”

“Where from, idjit?”

“Fuck that,” said the man with the revolver. He held the gun against Vope’s head. “You got food? Take off that backpack and let’s have a look.”

“Hey, I’m from Queens, New York,” said Ratcoff, holding his hands up. The sweat glistened on his head. “I don’t want—”

“Shut up!” the second man with the rifle snapped. He was gray-haired, long-jawed, and wore glasses held together with duct tape. The right lens was cracked. “Did you hear what Jimmy told you? Take off the backpack!”

“There is food,” Vope said. “For you, not.”

“The hell you say! We’re starvin’ in here! Take it off now or we’ll kill you where you stand!”

“No,” Vope answered.

“How come he don’t blink?” the woman suddenly spoke up, in a thin, high, and possibly also crazed voice. “His eyes…he don’t blink.”

The leader lowered his rifle, grasped Vope’s backpack and started to wrench it off him. Vope stood motionlessly, unblinking, with Jimmy’s pistol against the right side of his head.

“I wouldn’t do that,” said Jefferson gently, but he could not sell them on this. They were too desperate, and they couldn’t eat words. The manufactured framework of Vope’s face seemed to shift and change for the briefest of seconds; it looked to Jefferson as if the mask was beginning to slip and what was underneath it was trying to push its way out. Jefferson felt some kind of power coiling in the room, something getting ready to strike, and he began to hunch his shoulders forward in an effort to brace himself against it.

Suddenly a boy came into the room from a hallway. He was about fourteen, Jefferson judged, and he had shoulder-length blonde hair. There was a dirty bandage on his jaw and his left arm was in an equally dirty sling. His eyes were dazed and dark-circled, and he went to the woman and put his good arm around her.

Jefferson asked, “Is he the boy?”

Vope didn’t answer. The backpack was being pulled off him. His face had stopped moving. His eyes staring at nothing.

“Is he the boy?” Jefferson asked again, louder.

Vope’s right arm changed. It became a mottled, scaly yellow thing striped with black and brown. Where the hand was there was no longer a hand but a yellow spike that erupted with small black spikes, and those smaller spikes were barbed and writhing as if each one was a separate living weapon. The arm that was no longer an arm punched forward with ferocious power and the spiked thing that was no longer a hand ripped into Jimmy’s guts and on through his body to come out the other side in an explosion of gore that spattered the dusty wallpaper with bits of lungs, kidney, stomach, and all the makings of man. The vertebrae broke with a noise like a broomstick, and as Jimmy collapsed his finger spasmed on the trigger and the revolver fired into the side of Vope’s face. What looked like human blood ran from the wound, but still the Gorgon did not blink nor did it register pain.

Vope’s appendage picked Jimmy up off his feet and, as the leader and the others fell back in stupefied horror, Vope threw Jimmy’s body so hard against the opposite wall that the broken young man smashed through it.

The leader had his back to another wall and raised his rifle. Vope’s left arm, also transfigured into a killing machine with the yellow, black and brown markings, struck out like a snake and lengthened by at least four feet. The hand of this arm had become a black reptilian head with slitted red pupils and fangs that gleamed like metal. The teeth caught the man’s rifle, wrenched it from his grip in a heartbeat, and destroyed his face with one tremendous blow from the rifle’s butt, at the same time the spiked weapon of the right arm whipped out to pierce the other rifleman’s chest and on out his back like a twisting buzzsaw. Again, Vope threw the body aside like a piece of bloody garbage.

As Jefferson and Ratcoff watched in frozen terror, Vope’s snake-hand closed on the woman’s head as she turned to run with the boy. The jaws crushed her skull and facial bones with obscene ease. The brains ran out onto the floor as she fell, her face compressed to a knotty bleeding lump.

The boy was running, trying to get into the hallway. He was whimpering. Jefferson thought it was the worst sound he’d ever heard. Something went dark inside his mind as if to turn off the lights to spare him any more.

Because he knew Vope was not done.

The spiked arm lengthened, a scaly mottled python sliding out of Vope’s shoulder, going after the boy, and so fast it was nearly a blur the spike drove through the boy’s back, through his chest, and impaled him. His legs were kicking, and his body twitched as the Gorgon lifted him up, and then—almost gracefully, with a smooth show of power—the boy was thrown through the next wall, which Jefferson did not fail to notice was decorated with a faded portrait of Jesus in prayer. The impact caused the portrait to fall and the dusty glass to shatter.

The man with the destroyed face was lying on his back, moaning through a distorted mouth that had neither lips nor teeth.

Vope’s left arm drew itself back in and began to return to counterfeit flesh. The black reptilian head with the metallic teeth became a fist, which Vope opened and closed several times as if to test its elasticity.

The right arm drew itself back into the shoulder. The spiked murder weapon began to change to something that resembled a forceps, still mottled with the color of what was maybe the true Gorgon flesh. The forceps entered the wound in Vope’s head and searched there. Vope’s face did not change, and registered nothing. In another moment the forceps emerged with a slug. Vope examined this with interest. Then he walked to the ex-leader on the floor. His small eyes stared down at the man on the floor as someone would consider a roach about to be crushed.

With incredible speed and power, the forceps-hand whipped forward and sent the used slug into the man’s forehead with easily the velocity of a gun, if not many more times so. The man shivered once, and moved no more.

Vope’s right arm and hand returned themselves to what passed for normality in a matter of seconds. Then Vope drooled slimy spittle into the cup of his right hand and began to rub the liquid into the bullet wound. It took him a few drools and the hand rubbed in maybe two dozen circles, but when he was done the wound was no longer there, just the remnant of Gorgon blood that had leaked down his neck and onto his t-shirt.

“Now we go,” Vope said to Jefferson of Tennessee and Ratcoff of New York, who had pressed themselves against the far wall as if to push their own bodies through the wallpaper and plaster. “And…no,” he told Jefferson as he straightened his backpack like any day hiker would, “that was the boy, not.”

Fifteen.

The boy in question was waiting. He stood up on a guard tower with Gary Roosa, watching the road that led from town to the ruins of Panther Ridge. Dave, Joel, and Hannah had been gone almost eight hours. The yellow sunlight had gotten hotter. There was a sticky, otherworldly dampness in the air. Somewhere in the distance, thunder echoed in the low gray sky. Ethan’s eyes ticked in the direction of the noise. Just thunder, he thought. Presently no enemies in this sector.

He caught himself.

What?

I don’t talk like that, he thought. I don’t think like that. But how come I know it was just thunder and not the sounds of their war?

He just knew.

A memory came upon him…or a dream of a memory. It came upon him so fast he was left nearly breathless.

He was in a classroom. The sun—bright sun in an unblighted blue sky—shone through the windows. He was sitting at his desk. The girl in front of him had red hair. Her name was…that was lost. At the front of the classroom was the teacher’s desk, and at it sat a man wearing a white shirt and a dark blue bowtie with gold stripes. The man’s name was…

Think hard.

The man was slim, had a sharp chin, and wore horn-rimmed glasses. He had brown hair with a lock of white at the very front, as if a finger dusted in flour had touched there. His name was…Nova-something? Novak?

Science teacher.

Yes, Ethan thought. A science teacher, at…what was the school? And where was the school? Lost…all lost. But on the desk before Ethan was his Visible Man, ready for the demonstration. All the organs painted, the veins painted, everything ready. In a few minutes, he would stand up and take his Visible Man to the front of the class, where he would remove the organs and explain their function one by one as he rebuilt his human…wouldn’t he? Wasn’t that right? Or was this a tainted dream, and it had never happened?

Up at the front already, casting a shadow in the golden sunlight, was a boy wearing a black jersey with something in silver written across it. The boy was Hispanic and had long black hair and thick eyebrows. Written on the jersey was…

Remember…remember…please remember…

And there it was, as if through a dark glass: Jaguars.

The boy was talking, and gesturing over a model of…the universe? No…not the universe as it is…but the universe as someone in ancient Rome had envisioned it. The earth was the center of the universe. The boy had rigged an electric motor to his model, and turning on a little switch showed how the painted Styrofoam balls of planets revolved around the earth on their wires. A geocentric universe, it was called. Ethan remembered that. Somebody named Claudius something had come up with it. Ethan thought that the Hispanic boy—no name, no name—had done a pretty good job, and this would be a hard act to follow and he needed at least a B for his presentation. Ethan’s eye followed the shadow of a gesturing hand, and it fell upon a calendar page that read April 3. He would be going up soon, the presentation of the geocentric universe was almost done.

Ethan—not his name, his name was something else—looked at the clock and saw it was four minutes after ten. Ethan would be the second up; they were going in alphabetical order.

Alphabetical order, he remembered. It was the first day of science project presentations.

The Hispanic boy’s name was…what?

Last name… ‘A’?

It came to him like a blow to the stomach. Allendes. First name…no, that was lost. But Ethan realized his real last name must end in either an ‘A’ or a ‘B’, because there were twenty-six other students in the class and—

“Can I come up?”

Both Gary and Ethan turned around to see Nikki Stanwick hanging onto the ladder that led up. She was just a couple of rungs shy of pulling herself onto the platform.

“Come on,” Gary said, and he went over to help her.

She came up smoothly and spent a moment brushing the dust off the knees of her jeans. Then she walked over beside Ethan and looked along the road, the rhinestones of the star in her eyepatch glittering with a fragment of captured light.

“They’ve been gone a long time,” she said.

Ethan nodded. The wounded were being cared for as best as possible, but there were some like Billy Bancroft who just couldn’t walk. There were a few dying ones, and a number who’d passed away since they’d been found in the wreckage. Ethan figured there were maybe sixty people left and half of those were wounded in some way, about ten in really bad shape. Seventeen people, including Roger Pell, Roger’s wife, and their surviving child had started off on their own with their guns and remaining ammunition, a few plastic jugs of water and some of the last of the canned food. They had taken, as well, the rest of the horses. No one had tried to stop them. They were going cross-country, heading east toward…they knew not what, but they didn’t put much faith in the search team finding a vehicle or any fuel, and they didn’t want to wait any longer.

“I hear that if they find a truck, we’re going to Denver.” Nikki was speaking to Ethan.

“Who told you that?”

“Olivia.”

“Hm,” Ethan said. He remembered what Dave had told him after finding White Mansion Mountain in the road atlas: Going south to Denver, crossing the Rockies on I-70, with the Gray Men and the aliens everywhere. Did that mean Olivia and Dave were going to take him there? That they believed, as he believed, that he must find this place?

“Denver is gone. They started fighting over Denver and tore it up about three months after the war started. Don’t you know that?”

“I don’t know much of anything.”

“That’s what people who got out of Denver said. Some survivors who came here. You can ask Mrs. Niega. She saw the buildings fall. There’s nothing left, so why do we want to go to Denver?”

The gateway to I-70, Ethan thought. “Where would you like to go?” he asked her.

“Out of this nightmare. Home again. With everything like it was. My Mom and Dad, and my sister. All of them alive again.” Nikki’s voice was getting strained and her face had flushed. “I’d like my eye back. So, I guess I’d like to go to the one place nobody can go.”

Ethan waited without speaking.

“The past,” she said. “But that’s gone, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Ethan agreed. “It’s gone.”

“Hey, something’s coming,” Gary said. “Look there!” He gave over his binoculars to Ethan.

H

Nearly eight hours before, a rifle bullet struck the left side of Hannah Grimes’ horse and a follow-up whined off the pavement of Windom Street, about two miles from Panther Ridge. Hannah jumped clear as her mount fell. The sniper was in a boarded-up house among rows of boarded-up or abandoned homes, but exactly where the slug had come from was impossible to tell. Hannah braved another attack to put the horse down with a shot to the head, then she took Dave’s hand and pulled herself up behind him, and they went on, and that was how things were these days. After another twenty minutes, they came across four tractor-trailer trucks parked at a lumber company at the intersection of South College Avenue and Carpenter Road, but no keys were in the ignitions, and the facility’s main office was locked. A brick through a pane of smoked glass cleared that obstacle, but a search still turned up no keys and there were too many locked desk drawers to tackle.

“Listen,” Hannah said, “I wanted to come along because Olivia said we could use a school bus. I drove one for a couple of years as a volunteer. I know where the depot is, and I know there’s a diesel tank. Got a workshop there too, and I figure they may have some kind of pump we can use. It’s a ways from here, but I think that’s our best bet.”

“Hell, yes!” Dave answered, and so they started off under Hannah’s direction north toward the school bus depot on LaPorte Avenue. They were getting into areas that had been ripped apart by alien weapons, whole neighborhoods burned to ashes, cars melted into shapeless hunks of metal, shopping malls and stores gutted and merchandise spilled out over the flame-scorched parking lots, a few larger buildings chopped in half as if by surgical lasers and debris blocking the streets. They passed three abandoned metro buses, the first lying on its side, the second with three flat tires and a shattered windshield, and a third with most of the two upper floors of the First National Bank covering it. The downtown Ace Hardware store on South College Avenue was crushed as if by a gigantic boot, ending Dave’s hopes of finding a barrel pump before they reached the depot.

“We’ve got another mile to go,” Hannah announced, and nothing more needed to be said.

Though in an area of burned buildings, charred trees, and more wreckage, the depot had escaped the flames of war. There were twelve buses in the lot, rusted by the rain and parked haphazardly by their rattled drivers. Four of them were sitting on flats, so those were out. Either someone had already gone at the gates with a chain-cutter, or the gates had been left unlocked on what had seemed like the last day of the world.

First problem: finding the keys to these vehicles. Were there any in the ignitions or up under the sun visors? No, there were not. But the door to the office had been broken open, likely in a search for firearms. Hannah went to a metal cabinet on the wall and tried to open that but the lock was secure. “Keys are in there on hooks with numbers that go with the numbers of the buses.” She’d drawn her six-shooter. “Seen this done in the movies plenty of times, but in real life I figure you can blow your own head off if you’re not careful. Both of you step back.”

It was a wise move. It took two bullets to do the job, and even then the lock was more mangled than agreeable and the whole thing had to be nearly torn off the wall. But there were the keys, and the numbers, and the buses outside. It didn’t take long for another problem to assert itself as they’d started opening up the hoods and looking at the engines: the two large, heavy-duty batteries in every bus was gunked up with yellow sulphur deposits and likely stone-cold dead.

“Damn it!” Dave fumed, as reality bit deep. “We’re not going anywhere in one of these!”

“Okay, son,” Hannah said, a little caustically. “You think there’s never been dead batteries in this lot before? Think nobody’s ever screwed up and left batteries in a school bus over a Christmas holiday or a spring break? How about all summer? Yeah, it’s happened. They keep spare batteries in the workshop.” She motioned toward a long flat-roofed red brick building with closed-up garage bays. There were no windows. A green-painted metal door was closed at the top of a set of cement stairs. Dave figured that if all these entrances were locked, it was going to be a bitch to break into. Alongside the building were two diesel fuel pumps, and in the oil-stained concrete, a yellow fill cap that indicated the underground tank. “You want to stop wastin’ time, get in there, and see what’s what?” Hannah asked.

“Yeah. Have you got any explosives on you?” Dave looked at Joel. “You got any ideas?”

“We can try the door,” Joel answered with a shrug. “If it’s locked, try to blow it open, the Hannah Grimes way.”

“Or maybe,” Hannah said, “we can walk around to the other side of the building. There’s one window in this place, and it’s in the shop manager’s office. Used to overlook a flower garden.”

“How do you know all this?” Dave asked.

She smiled, the deep lines crinkling up around her eyes. The smile was of a memory, and Dave thought it softened her hard face enough to reveal someone who had once been almost pretty. Almost. “Kenny Ray was my honey for awhile,” she said. “I planted the flowers so he’d have somethin’ nice to look at when I wasn’t around.”

“So that’s why you volunteered to begin with, I’m figuring?” Joel asked.

“Maybe. Never know who you’ll meet at your neighborhood bar. Time’s movin’, friends.”

The window was positioned just above Dave’s head and was broken out. The flower garden had long gone to the corrosive rain and the twists of time. Dave figured that if someone had broken in this way, they’d probably come out through the door but had closed it behind them. A scavenger with a sense of order, in a mad, disordered world.

“Let’s try the door,” he said.

As he went up the steps, Dave felt like asking God for a favor. He wasn’t religious, was far from it, and if he’d been at all religious before the death of his family, that terrible event had wiped the visions of Heaven out of his head. He knew Hell existed, though. No doubt about that. It was everywhere now, burst from its realm of space and time. God, Dave thought as he reached the top of the stairs, if there’s anything to you, how about giving us a break? How about manning up and helping us?

They needed so much to get one of those buses moving. They needed luck and about eight feet of hose, a hand crank pump of some kind, and two new batteries. They needed a probe to find out if there was already fuel in any of the buses, tanks so they wouldn’t be wasting their time on a dry hole. They needed so much, and there were so many people depending on them.

But right now they needed for that door to open.

Dave reached out for the handle.

He felt his face tighten in preparation for disappointment. But even if this damned door is locked, he thought, we’ve got the broken window. Old Kenny Ray’s window, looking out at the flowers of love.

Help us, he thought, and tears stung his eyes. Please.

He grasped the door’s handle and pulled.

H

Through the binoculars, Ethan saw what was coming.

It had once been a yellow school bus, but the rain had done its damage. The top of the bus was rusted brown, and brown streaks of rust had dripped down the sides. Poudre School District was imprinted on the bus in faded letters, and the number 712. The bus was going slow, in allowance for the two horses whose reins were tied to the rear bumper.

“They found a school bus!” Gary shouted to the people who waited below. There was a stir of activity as even some of the severely wounded managed to haul themselves to their feet. JayDee, Olivia, and and a few of the others had been trying to give them comfort, as much as could be done without medical supplies. Gary took the binoculars from Ethan once more and watched the bus approach. “Christ, I never thought they’d find anything!”

Ethan said, “I believe in Dave.”

In another moment, the bus pulled into the open entranceway, came up the quake-cracked road, and stopped where the survivors had gathered near the swimming pool, in the shadow of the dead Gorgon ship.

The doors opened, and Joel was the first one off, followed by Dave and then Hannah. All of them were dirtier than before, if that was possible. They looked wrecked. Dave staggered and had to catch hold of Joel’s shoulder to keep from falling. As those who could walk crowded around, Dave caught sight of Ethan standing up on the tower with Gary and Nikki, and he gave a slight nod that said, I haven’t forgotten.

“Let’s get these people on board,” Dave said to Olivia, who came up to him with a plastic jug of water. He took a swig and passed it to Hannah. “Sorry, we lost one of your horses.”

“We lost the rest to a group who decided to go on. No matter, we can’t keep them.” Her eyes looked bruised, but her voice was steady. “I’m going to untie those two.”

Dave nodded. The important thing now was getting everyone out of here. Bus 712 had had a little more than a quarter tank of fuel already in it before Dave had used the pry bar, rubber hose, and metal containers he’d found to siphon diesel out of the underground tank. There had been four boxed-up heavy-duty batteries in the workshop; now two were in the bus and two were still in their boxes at the back of the bus. While they were at it, they’d put new oil in the engine, and though the thing still ran rough after being awakened from its long sleep, it did run, the wheels turned, it had an uncracked windshield, and six pretty good tires, and Dave thanked God for the Blue Bird bus company. He thanked God also for Hannah, who had gotten them around a lot of debris without tearing up the tires.

“Couldn’t get to Poudre Valley North. Every way we tried was blocked,” he told JayDee as he helped get people aboard. “We went to Poudre Valley South, but every drug in the storeroom was gone. Hell, I wouldn’t know what to get if there’d been anything there but empty shelves. We stopped at a CVS and two Walgreen’s, both cleared out. Figure we might do better down the road.” Billy Bancroft was still cursing as he was carried on, but Dave knew it was to mask a lot of pain. A small number of canned goods had been recovered, as well as a few pistols, rifles, and some ammunition. Four oil lamps and two bottles of fuel made the cut. A dozen plastic jugs of water were put aboard. There was not going to be room in the bus for the heavy machine guns, and the ammunition was almost gone for those, so Dave and Olivia made the tough decision to leave them.

Ethan, Nikki, and Gary stood up on the tower as the bus was being loaded, and finally Gary gave a sigh and said, “I’m not going to say I’ll miss this place, but it kept us alive.” He put a hand out to stroke the machine gun on its swivel. “I’d take this, if I had my way. Just hope we don’t wish we had it, wherever we’re going.” He cast one more look around at the sorry fate of the Panther Ridge Apartments, and then he went down the ladder.

Ethan was alone with Nikki.

She was staring at him, and her silence was making him nervous. “We’d better go,” he said. He started for the ladder.

“I’ve heard things about you,” she said, and he stopped. “I’ve heard somebody say you think you caused the quakes that night.”

He shrugged, but he didn’t look at her. “Who told you that?”

“Somebody who heard it from somebody who heard it from somebody else. People think you must be…like…whacko.”

“Good word,” he said. “Maybe that fits.” He remembered he had said I think I caused the earthquakes in front of a roomful of people. No, more than that. He’d said I know I caused them.

“People say you’re spooky,” Nikki went on, her single eye fixed on him.

“Yeah, another good word.” He turned to face her, and he pulled up a smile and gave it to her. “If I’m so whacko and spooky, why did you climb up here to see me?”

She said nothing for a moment. Then she blinked, and it was her turn to shrug. “Maybe…I like whacko and spooky. ’Cause maybe I am, too.” She rubbed at an imaginary spot on the boards with the toe of a dirty blue Nike. “My folks said I was. After I got my third tattoo. They’re like…skulls and vines and stuff, on my back. You know, a little freaky. A friend of mine was studying to be a tat artist, so he did ’em for free. But I don’t have a tramp stamp,” she said quickly. “That would be a little much.”

“I guess so,” Ethan agreed.

“You got any?”

“Tattoos? No.”

She approached him. “You’ve got a bad bruise…right there.” She could see the dark purple of it just above the neck of his t-shirt, and she touched her own neck. “I mean…it looks real bad. What happened?”

“I’m not sure. That’s something I can’t remember.” Or don’t want to remember, he thought.

“Does it hurt?” Maybe impulsively, Nikki reached out with her right hand and the index finger touched the bruise. Then, immediately, she gasped and stepped back. Her hand went to her mouth. “Oh…wow,” she said. “I mean…look at that!”

He tried to, but he couldn’t see it. He didn’t like the tremor in her voice. “What is it?” His own voice had climbed.

“Where I touched…my finger…the place turned silver. It’s starting to fade now. Wow,” she repeated. Her eye was wide. “Pull up your shirt.”

Ethan did. Exposed was the ebony bruise that covered his chest.

“Can I touch you again?” she asked.

“Go ahead, it doesn’t hurt,” he answered, but he was scared, and his heart was pounding.

Nikki reached out again, slowly, spread her fingers, and touched them to Ethan’s chest. Ethan felt nothing but her touch, though it appeared that the flesh seemed to shimmer around her fingertips. When she pulled her hand away, the fingermarks remained there in silver.

Quickly, they began to fade. Ethan saw the look of wonder on Nikki’s face abruptly change. She stepped back from him in fear, as if she were about to leap from the tower, and he said in an outpouring, “I’m human. I am. It’s just…there’s something different about me that I don’t understand. I’m okay, I’m not going to hurt you.” He pressed a thumb into his chest and watched the silver mark it left melt back into the darkness of the bruise. “Listen,” he told her, “I’m not an alien. Like…one of their experiments. I’m not.”

Her voice was very quiet when she spoke. “If you don’t know who you are or where you came from…how do you know what you are?”

That was a question Ethan couldn’t answer. He lowered his shirt. “Please don’t tell anybody about this. Not yet. Okay?”

She didn’t reply; she had backed away and was almost to the platform’s edge.

“Please,” he said, and didn’t care that he was begging. “I feel like there’s someplace I have to go, and something I have to do. It’s so strong in me, I can hardly sleep. The place is White Mansion Mountain, and it’s in Utah. Dave found out where it is for me. I have got to get there. Nikki…I think maybe…there’s something that wants me to go, because there can be an end to this.”

“An end? An end to what?”

“Their war. I’m just saying…I feel like if I can get to that mountain, and find out why I’m being called to go there…there can be an end to it. Do you understand?”

“No,” she said, very quickly.

“Ethan!” It was Dave, calling for him from below. “We’re loading up! Come on!”

“Okay, I don’t either,” he told the girl, “but please…please…don’t say anything about this.”

“Maybe you’re turning into a Gray Man,” Nikki answered. “Maybe that’s what’s happening to you, and I ought to go down there right now and tell them, and they’ll take care of you before we pull out.”

“You mean shoot me? Listen…Dave trusts me. So does Olivia…and I think Dr. Douglas kind of does. I’m telling you…I have got to get to that mountain, and if I do…when I do…I think something important is there for me. Either to have, or to know.”

“What, you think you’re Jesus or somebody? Like you’re supposed to lead your believers out of this…this shit…somehow?”

“I’m not Jesus,” Ethan said. And I’m not really Ethan either, he thought. “Just give me a chance, okay? You tell people about this, and it’ll scare them. I don’t need that. Nobody does.”

“Maybe we should all be scared of you.”

He was done. He could go no further with her. He said grimly, “Do what you want to do. Either tell them, or not. But I’m saying…I feel like I have a purpose. A reason to be here. Maybe we all do, but we don’t know yet what it is. The only things I want to hurt are the Cyphers and the Gorgons. I want them gone off this earth.”

“We all want that.”

“Yeah, I know.” Ethan had to look away from her frightened and accusing eye. “I’m going down to the bus,” he told her, in as calm a voice as he could manage. “Whatever you want to do…do it.”

She didn’t wait for him. She was down the ladder so fast she nearly blurred out like a Cypher. I’ve freaked out the freak, he thought. He climbed down, expecting…he didn’t know what to expect. But the last group of people were being helped or herded into the bus, and Nikki Stanwick was among them. She didn’t look back at Ethan or speak to Dave as she went past him and Olivia.

“Let’s go,” Dave said to Ethan as he approached. “Squeeze in back there.” Seats had been removed starting from about the middle of the bus back to the rear, thanks to the toolkit Darnell Macombe had saved from destruction, but still the bus was packed. The badly wounded were lying down or being supported by other people. The hardest part of this was the fact that JayDee had pronounced three wounded too severely torn up or bone-crushed to travel, and that their deaths were imminent. No other way, JayDee had said as he held himself up on his crutch. They may pass in an hour or two, or they may hold on for another five or six hours, but they don’t know where they are. It’s reality. There’s nothing I can do for them but suggest mercy.

And just who’s going to do that, Doc? Dave had asked. Who’s going to pull the trigger three times and live with that?

They shouldn’t be left alive here, JayDee had answered. In the dark, alone.

Shit, Dave had said. Is there absolutely nothing you can do?

I can’t even give them any pain pills. Only thing I’ve got is one bottle of hydrogen peroxide. I can’t fix Neal’s punctured lungs, and I can’t fix Dina’s broken back and her shattered legs, and I can’t give Asa a new brain to fix the one inside his crushed skull. I’ve got too many others that I can at least help…but…I guess what I should do…is…give out the medicine of mercy, because we don’t want any of our friends left behind—alive—if the Gray Men come tonight. So I’m going to take a pistol, and I’m going to walk over there where they’re lying, and I’m going to do what a doctor is sometimes called upon to do…play God. An imperfect, tortured, and feeble God…but someone has to do this. Now excuse me, Dave, while I finish my rounds.

Inside the cramped bus with the last residents of Panther Ridge, Ethan heard three shots. No one spoke about them, and no one asked any questions of JayDee when Dave helped him up into the bus. Last on was Olivia, who eyes were bloodshot and who looked as if twenty years of heartache and despair had been burdened on her overnight, which Ethan thought was probably true. He stood up so others could sit. He caught a glimpse of Nikki, standing further at the back and staring a hole through him, but he quickly looked away.

The terrible thing was…he knew he was changing. He was becoming something unknown…some kind of nightmare creature…and if he was anything human at all, he was in defiance of the Visible Man, because he figured he had died in the shockblast of a strip mall, and his bruises told the story, but he was not yet dead—as humans used to know death to be—and now his injuries were beginning to speak to him in another language, with a tongue of silver.

“Everybody hold on to somethin’ or someone,” said Hannah as she slid behind the wheel. She turned the lever that closed the door, as she must’ve done a thousand times. She started the engine and heard it knock and complain, but then the wheels started turning, and they were moving away from Panther Ridge, moving out through the wall and the metal-plated door, out into the violent world of cosmic war, out upon the road that led south to Denver and hopefully to pharmacies or hospitals that had not yet been fully looted. And hopefully, then, to some kind of refuge from the madhouse that had claimed the earth, and some kind of safety, wherever that might be. JayDee, sitting with his injured knee outstretched, stared into empty space, and Ethan noted that his blue eyes were moist, and where they had been very clear, they were now dimmed and clouded.

They passed within sight of a neighborhood burned black, everything looking like a firestorm had whirled through. Ethan saw Nikki staring out at it, and he figured her house used to be out there and now there were only ashes and bones, like the rest of the world.

“Looky here, looky here,” said Hannah. She was speaking to Olivia and Dave, who stood near her as the bus rumbled and jounced along. “Three fellas walking our way in the road. One of ’em’s waving us down. Want to stop, or go right on through ’em?”

Both Dave and Olivia could see the three figures ahead, walking in the middle of the road. The one at the center was waving his arms. On one side was a stocky man with long black hair and a beard and on the other a short bald-headed gent in a white shirt who might have been a banker out for his afternoon stroll, except he was filthy and staggering.

“Run ’em down?” Hannah asked. “Take no chances?” She was keeping her foot on the accelerator.

It came to both Olivia and Dave that three people had just been executed—and call it mercy if you want to, but that didn’t make it any easier. Three friends of theirs who had pulled the weight just like everyone else and at the end had been crushed by it. The bus hardly had room for one more person, let alone three…and there was always the chance that these were only counterfeit humans.

But there they were, right in front of the bus, and they weren’t getting off the road and Hannah wasn’t slowing down, and the decision had to be made in a matter of seconds.

Olivia took a deep breath to clear her head, and she made it.

They were not animals yet, and certainly not killers of human beings who could be helped. They had a dozen loaded guns if they needed to use them. They had accepted plenty of wanderers into Panther Ridge. What was the difference now?

“Stop for them,” Olivia said. “Let’s see what the story is. But,” she added, “let’s keep our guns ready.”

Hannah let up on the gas and mashed the brake pedal. The bus neared the three figures and began to slow down. Toward the back of the bus, Ethan was standing in the aisle with people packed all around him, and he could see nothing, but someone passed the word back that there were three men on the road. As the bus stopped with a squeal of protest, Hannah opened the door and pointed her big-ass pistol at the doorway. She called out matter-of-factly, “Any trouble and the first bullet comes from my cannon!”

The three men were talking and made no effort to approach the bus. Olivia said, “Dave, let’s find out what they want,” and they went out, cautiously, with Dave’s Uzi drawn and a .45 Colt automatic in Olivia’s right hand. Her finger was on the trigger, and her mind was set that they could spend only a few minutes here, and whatever these three wanted, they’d better have a good salesman among them.

Sixteen.

“I used to be…like they say…pretty well fixed,” said Burt Ratcoff, as he and Jefferson Jericho followed Vope on the long road that led through destroyed suburbs where no lawnmower would ever growl again and no summer lemonade would ever be poured. “My wife left me six years ago, but I learned to live with it. Kept in touch with our son. Lives in Glendale, California, he’s an insurance adjuster. That one with the talkin’ gecko.” Ratcoff nodded. “Yeah. I bet he’s okay. Him, Jenny, and the girls. They’re okay, I bet. They found someplace to hide, they’re gonna make it. Hey, spaceman! You’re killin’ my legs, I can’t keep up with you! Can you slow down a little…shit!” he said, wincing, and touched the back of his neck.

“I wouldn’t get him angry,” Jefferson said, but he too was short of breath, and his legs were starting to cramp. Had they walked across this entire damned city? It seemed like it. Vope had picked up the pace in the last half hour, as if eager to get to a certain place at a certain time. “Vope!” Jefferson called. “We’re going to have to rest awhile.” There was no response, and the pace did not falter. Jefferson said, “Vope, we’re only human. We’re not…as strong as you are. Our bodies give out, because we’re weak. Will you have some pity on us and let us rest for a few minutes?”

Vope suddenly stopped and turned toward them, and on the disguised face there was a second’s fleeting expression of haughty disdain. “You are weak,” he answered. “You do not deserve a world you are unable to hold. Even…” He paused, searching for a word from his inner dictionary of their language “…slaves are stronger than you.”

“I bow before you knowing I am weaker than a slave,” said Jefferson, keeping his voice light and easy. “But may I ask if we can rest? We’ll be useless to you if our fragile bodies are worn out.”

Vope’s small dark eyes slid toward Ratcoff.

“What he said,” was the New Yorker’s comment.

“Rest, then,” said Vope. “Eat.” He shrugged off his backpack, opened it and brought out two small cubes of the white tofu-like substance that Jefferson knew so well. He held them out to his captives.

“That shit again?” Ratcoff moaned. “What is this, your kind of dog food?”

“Take it and eat it,” Jefferson advised. “I don’t know what it is, but it’ll keep your energy up.” He took one and Ratcoff took the other, and they stood eating the manufactured nutrients under the low yellow sky in the land of the dead. The sun, a faint glow in the humid murk, was on its descent. Jefferson could feel darkness coming, and he didn’t care to be out here with a Gorgon—even one who was supposed to be his protector but had taken the role of master—when night fell.

“Vope,” he said as he ate the alien fodder, “who’s this boy you’re after? Why’s he so important?”

“What boy?” Ratcoff asked. Obviously he knew nothing about the parameters of this mission.

“They,” Jefferson said with emphasis, “want me to bring a certain boy back to them. He’s supposed to be here, somewhere.” He cast his gaze around at the desolation. “So who is he, Vope? And if you can do what you did back at that house…then why don’t you find the boy and take him yourself?”

“My orders stand,” said the Gorgon.

“I don’t care how many humans are protecting him,” Jefferson went on. “You could destroy them all, if you wanted to. Why do you need me?”

Vope didn’t reply, and Jefferson thought he was going to remain silent, but after a few seconds the alien spoke. “He would resist force.”

“So? Maybe he would, but…” And then it struck Jefferson Jericho, quite clearly. “Oh my God,” he said. “You—she—whatever you are…you’re afraid of him, aren’t you?”

Vope’s face turned away, his gaze directed to the distance.

“You’re afraid,” Jefferson continued. “And that must mean…is he a Cypher in disguise?”

“No sense is made of that.”

“Your enemy. Whatever you call it. Is he the enemy, in disguise? He must’ve done something really—” Awesome, he was about to say, “—bad, to get you—her, it—so bound to lay your hands on him. My hands, I mean. What did he do? Kill a couple dozen of—”

“Refrain your curiosity,” the Gorgon interrupted, “or I will give you pain. We are moving now.” He began to stride away, and Jefferson and Ratcoff felt little sharp tinglings at the backs of their necks and so were compelled to follow.

Jefferson thought he would never survive this. If the boy was a Cypher in disguise he must be like a special forces soldier, and if the Gorgons were afraid of him…no telling what destructive powers this so-called ‘boy’ was capable of. Lay hands on a Cypher commando and expect to whisk him back to Gorgon-land for a little torture session? Right. The first thing that would happen is, an ex-car salesman named Leon Kushman was going to be blasted out of this world as quickly as if he’d taken a gunshot to the back of the head.

“They keep me in a place that looks like a suburb with little houses like from the fifties,” Ratcoff said as he struggled to walk alongside Jefferson. Ratcoff’s head was wet with sweat and sweat stained the front of his shirt and his armpits. Jefferson knew the man was terrified and had the need to talk, so he just listened as best he could with his own death sentence hanging over his head. “There’re seventy-eight people in that place, brought from all over the States. We call it—”

“The Ant Farm?” Jefferson asked.

“Huh? No. We call it Microscope Meadows. Know why?”

“Because you always feel you’re being watched from above?”

“Yeah, that’s right. But we’ve got everything we need to live. Electricity, water, cars that don’t need gasoline or oil anymore, that white shit they feed us with and some other weird stuff you drink…and the weather never changes. It’s like…always early summer. But know somethin’ really weird?”

You can never leave, Jefferson thought.

“You can’t get out,” Ratcoff said. “You can drive and drive, and pretend you’re goin’ somewhere…but all of a sudden you turn a corner and you’re right back where you started from. Weird, huh?”

“Yes,” said Jefferson. The Ant Farm, Microscope Meadows…he wondered what the Japanese, the Russians, the Norwegians and Brazilians called their prisons. The Gorgons were students of humans, just as some scientists were students of insects. He wondered also what they had done to Ratcoff when they’d taken him apart, and what they’d added to make him so valuable to this little jaunt. He hoped he wouldn’t have to find out.

“I miss the stars,” Ratcoff said, in a quietly reverential voice. “My Dad and me…long time back…used to camp out in our backyard, in Jersey. Used to put up a tent. I was a Boy Scout, believe that or not. So after we cooked our hotdogs and had our Indian blood—that’s what my Dad used to call mixing up grape juice, Pepsi, and root beer—we would say goodnight to Mom when she came out to the back porch, and then we’d go to sleep. Us guys. You know?”

“Sure,” said Jefferson, whose memory of his father involved breath that smelled like cheap whiskey, a crooked grin on a slack-jawed face and a salesman’s empty promise that tomorrow would be a better day.

“But…long after midnight,” Ratcoff went on, “I always crawled out of that tent and lay on my back looking up to count the stars. And where we lived…you could see a lot of ’em. Just shining and shining, like rivers of light. I thought I was the luckiest kid in the world, to be where I was. Only now…when I go out to my backyard and lie down in the dark…I can’t see any stars. Not one, in all that dark. My Dad died a few years back and my Mom had a condo in Sarasota. I called her that first day, to make sure she was okay. I wanted to fly down there, but you know all the airplanes were grounded. I told her to get to one of the shelters the National Guard was setting up. That was the last I heard from her. I hope she made it. You think maybe she made it, Jeff?”

Jefferson Jericho heard the pleading. He was many things in this life—a manipulator, a con man, a man who always put his needs and desires first, a man who disdained the weaknesses of others and played upon them, a money-hungry and power-hungry and sex-hungry ‘fiend of the night’, as Regina would have said—but at this moment, in this fearful world with a Gorgon leading him onward to what was possibly his death and at his side another human being wounded in heart and soul—he found something in himself he did not recognize, and it was so foreign to him he could not name what it was.

He said, “Sure she made it, Burt. No doubt. The National Guard…those guys knew what they were doing. They got people to safety. Lots of people. And your mom too, no doubt.”

“Yeah,” said Ratcoff, with a quick smile. “That’s what I think too.”

Jefferson Jericho was always amazed at how easily people could be led. How when they wanted to believe, the job was halfway done. It was even easier if they needed to believe. Sometimes you met a rock who refused to be turned, but mostly it was like this, especially when he wore his minister’s suit. And that scam about finding and deciphering verses in the Bible that told an investor what stocks to buy and sell…well, it was helpful to have inside traders working for you, and maybe when the info was faulty and money was lost by the High Rollers, Jefferson could say it was the will of God, the teaching of humility and above all patience, and that even he—Jefferson Jericho—was being taught a lesson too. But mostly things went as planned, and when the High Rollers paid the Jericho Foundation the voluntary yearly fifteen percent commission off their God-given and Bible-verse-directed earnings, as well as whatever they wished to give from the heart, the used-to-be Leon Kushman looked at the stained-glass window in his office and regarded the rainbow depicted there.

The last he’d heard, those shelters the Guard had set up had first been pits of panic that descended into chaos and violence among the human kind. It was likely some had been destroyed in the battles between Cypher and Gorgon. It was very likely Burt Ratcoff’s mother had perished in the first few months, if not the first few weeks, and like hundreds of thousands—millions?—of others around the world, the bones and ashes would be found only when the war was over and the human survivors crawled out of whatever hole they’d been hiding in. To be what? Slaves for the victors? Experiments in human genetics and mutations? The creation of new weapons for new wars on more worlds?

My brothers and sisters, Jefferson thought, there are no rainbows in this window. We are caught in the middle of two power-mad forces, and no matter who wins we are screwed.

“Yes,” said the preacherman, “I’m sure your mom is just fine.”

And then he saw something on the road ahead, approaching.

He thought he was seeing things. A mirage, maybe. But…a yellow school bus?

Vope halted. His head seemed to vibrate so fast that for two seconds he was headless.

“We will stop that vehicle,” he said.

“The boy’s in it?” Jefferson asked.

“Yes,” came the answer. And again: “We will stop that vehicle.”

To Jefferson it didn’t look at if the driver of that bus intended to stop. Vope began striding forward again, with Jefferson beside him and just behind, and on the other side Ratcoff winced and staggered along on his blistered feet and aching legs. Jefferson lifted his arms and waved them back and forth as the bus drew nearer.

“They’re not stoppin’,” said Ratcoff. “We better get off this road.”

But Jefferson continued to wave and suddenly the bus began to slow down. He heard the shriek of old brakes engaging.

Vope said, “Hear me. Do as you’re instructed. If there is any…” He paused, searching for the word. “Difficulty,” he continued, “I will kill every one of your kind in that vehicle.”

“It may not be that easy,” Jefferson answered.

“We will take the boy,” Vope repeated. “If there is any difficulty I will kill—”

“No, you will not,” said the preacherman, and the alien turned toward him with a blank face but Jefferson knew what was going on behind it. The pain couldn’t be delivered as Vope would like, or the humans in that bus would see him fall to his knees. “I’m supposed to put my hands on him, isn’t that right?” The bus was stopping a dozen yards in front of them. “Then we’ll be teleported or whatever back to…wherever? If I’m supposed to get past whoever is protecting him, you have to leave it to me. You want that boy delivered alive. Yes?”

“Yes.”

“Then don’t set off any alarms. Do you know what that means? It means you stand back and let me do what I do.”

Vope seemed to be thinking about this; Jefferson could tell the alien gears were turning.

The bus’s door was opening. A woman’s rough voice called out, “Any trouble and the first bullet comes from my cannon!”

“They have weapons,” Jefferson said. “Primitive to you, deadly to me and Burt. You don’t have to worry about being shot in the head, but we do. You’re going to let me take charge of this if you want it to be successful. Hear me?”

Vope said nothing, but neither did his arms grow to be snakelike monsters nor did any pain clench the back of Jefferson’s neck.

“Do you understand that a human being blinks his eyes every few seconds?” Jefferson asked. He saw a man and woman coming out of the bus; the man had a submachine gun and the woman carried a .45 automatic. “You don’t blink, they’re going to know you’re not human real quick. So do it, keep quiet, and let me talk.”

Then he turned his full attention to the man and the woman, and he said with a great exhalation of relief, “Thank God we’ve found somebody who’s not totally insane! We’ve been wandering all day, trying to—”

“What are you doing out here?” Dave asked sharply, keeping the Uzi’s barrel pointed at the ground between himself and Olivia and the three men.

“Well,” said Jefferson, “we’re not walking for our health, sir. We’ve been trying to find safe shelter before nightfall.”

“Is that so? And where the hell have you come from?”

Jefferson realized this rough-edged man in his torn black t-shirt, his faded jeans and a dirty dark blue baseball cap would rather shoot them all than spend any more time jawing. The man had a crust of blood from a cut across the bridge of his nose, and he might be a rock that refused to be turned. “We have come from Hell,” Jefferson answered, in a voice as grim as the grave. He kept his eyes fixed on the man’s. “A few days ago there were ten of us. We’re what’s left, after…” He lifted his chin just a fraction, as if in defiance of the world and this man’s Uzi. “After we were attacked on the road from Denver. I guess you know there are gangs of men driven insane out there. They fell on us and they shot our friends to pieces. We got away with one backpack, but we lost the rest of our supplies, our clothes, everything.” He made a point of eyeing the Uzi and the automatic. “I wish we’d had more guns, we could’ve fought back.”

“You don’t have guns? Why not?”

“I did have a gun,” Jefferson offered. “A Smith & Wesson .38. A nice piece.” He let his gaze slip toward the tall, slim woman, who was Hispanic and probably in her fifties. She had short-cut white hair and her face was tense, but Jefferson thought she’d been very attractive in the life that used to be. “When I ran out of bullets and couldn’t find any more, I traded my gun for a few cans of vegetables and some canned soup to keep my wife and daughter alive. That was in Kansas, four months ago.” The lies came so easily when one had a story-line. He gave the woman a sad and bitter smile. “I wish I could say my wife and daughter had made it out of Kansas with us, but…”

“What happened to them? Exactly,” growled the man, who still looked as if he wanted to shoot first and ask questions later.

Jefferson decided to go for the high roll, a shocker quickly conceived to back the bastard off. “Regina was raped and murdered in a basement by a madman who hit me over the head with a shovel and tried to bury me alive,” he said, his gaze steady. “When I crawled out of there and got to my gun, I used my last bullets on him. Amy wasted away. After her mother died, she lost the will to live. You want more details, sir?” He turned his full and intense power on the woman, who he perceived to be more malleable than the hard-ass. “My name is Jeff Kushman. This is Burt Ratcoff, and…” Don’t pause, he told himself. “Jack Vope.”

He had not earned his place in the world by being slow of mind or timid at launching tales to suit his purpose, and with two guns pointed in his direction his mind was going a hundred miles a second. He intended to stay alive as long as possible. He looked at Vope and launched not a tale but a searing thought that reached out like a slap to the face: Blink, idiot!

Vope returned the gaze. Something must have clicked, because suddenly Vope started blinking as if he had eyes full of gnats or the worst facial tic ever recorded. Slow down, Jefferson thought. Once every seven or eight seconds! He hoped the Gorgons were smart enough to understand Earth time, but maybe not.

“What’s wrong with him?” Dave asked. He’d seen the black-haired man start blinking like his eyes were on fire. Otherwise, the guy’s face was emotionless.

“Jack’s still in shock,” Jefferson said quickly. “He’s lost his family too.”

The blinking was still out of control. Dave thought the guy was about to have a fit. “Can’t he talk?”

“He needs some time. He’ll be all right. Settle down, Jack, you’re among friends.”

“Friends?” Dave asked. “How do you figure that?”

Jefferson brought up an expression that was partly quizzical and partly hurt. He asked the woman, “You are going to help us, aren’t you? Please say you’re not going to just leave us.”

“Yeah,” Ratcoff spoke up, finding his nerve and realizing he had to follow Jeff’s lead to get on that bus and do whatever it was the Gorgons demanded. Then at least he could get back to Microscope Meadows. “Don’t leave us, okay?”

Olivia looked from one man to the other. Jack Vope had stopped his rapid-fire blinking and he seemed to be controlling that better but still…his face was devoid of any expression, like a painted mask. She said, “Dave, let’s talk,” and she motioned him over nearer the bus.

Dave didn’t care to turn his back on these three so he retreated toward Olivia, all the time keeping watchful and ready for anything.

Olivia said quietly, “We can’t leave them. We have to—”

“Take them with us?” Dave interrupted. “Why? We don’t know them, why should we care?”

“Because they’re human beings and they’re in need, that’s why. We never turned anyone away from Panther Ridge.”

“Sure we did. We killed the ones who weren’t really human. How do we know these three are? And how about that Vope guy? Gives me the creeps. He looks like he might go nuts any minute.” Dave shook his head. “Olivia, we can’t test them with the saline. There’s no way we can know if they’re really human or not.”

Jefferson had seen the man shake his head. The rock was holding steady. Jefferson said, “Can I ask where you’re going?”

“To Denver,” Olivia answered. “We’ve got a lot of wounded people on board and we’re trying to find medical supplies.”

“Maybe I can help,” said the salesman, who had already decided his pitch when he heard the word wounded. “I’m a doctor.” He decided to give the lie more texture. “I was a cardiologist in Little Rock.”

“I’ve been to Arkansas,” Dave said, which was his own lie. “Who’s the President who was governor there?”

“William Jefferson Clinton,” said Leon Kushman, who had taken the name ‘Jefferson’ from that very person, after getting an autographed picture of himself as a seventeen-year-old, grinning political volunteer standing between Bill and Hillary at a fund-raising banquet. He would always remember what Clinton had said to him: You’re a comet with your tail on fire, aren’t you? That was the same weekend he’d wound up at a party smoking weed and discussing porn films with a law student named Andy Beale, who had become a Missouri senator and now—or was—President of these Used To Be United States. “Otherwise known as ‘Bubba’ or ‘Slick Willie’,” Jefferson went on. He frowned. “Is this a test?”

This joker was a human, Dave thought. Had to be. Still…he had a bad feeling about this. The weird guy blinked a few more times in rapid succession. The short bald guy was moving from foot to foot as if standing on a hot griddle. “Damn,” Dave said under his breath. They had to get moving, the sun was going down.

“We’ve got to go.” Olivia had read the situation just as he had. “All right, get aboard,” she told the three.

“But you’ll stand at the front,” Dave added. “Where I can watch you.”

“Thank you,” Jefferson said. He gave more texture to the spin: “I don’t really care to go back to Denver, but I guess there’s not too much ahead, is there?”

“Just get on the bus and keep quiet. And watch your buddy there, I don’t want him freaking out and hurting anybody. Any trouble from him and you’re all off.”

“As you say.” If you only knew, Jefferson thought. Idiot.

“I’m Olivia Quintero and he’s Dave McKane,” Olivia said as they walked to the bus. “We’ve been holed up in an apartment complex. Early this morning a Gorgon ship crashed into it.” She shuddered inwardly, with a memory of something half-seen and totally repulsive. She asked, “You men have your own food and water in the backpack?”

“Food, yes,” Jefferson said. “Water, no.”

“I’ll get you some. I guess you need it.”

“We sure do!” Ratcoff gasped. “I’m parched!”

They got aboard. Hannah gave the three newcomers the evil eye and when Olivia nodded she put her pistol away and closed the door. “We’re movin’!” she called to everyone, and then she started them forward again on the long road that in a few miles curved to a ramp onto I-25 south to Denver.

Olivia passed the word back to send up a plastic jug of water. Dave stood right behind the three men and he kept his Uzi in hand just in case. “Where’d you stay last night?” he asked, directing the question to Ratcoff.

“A farmhouse,” Jefferson said. “But—”

“I asked him. You shut up until I tell you to talk.”

“Look.” Jefferson turned toward Dave. Their faces were only inches apart. The preacherman glanced down at the submachine gun that was aimed somewhere south of his navel, into God’s country. “What’s your point, Dave? Can I call you Dave?”

“You can call me Mister Careful. We’ve seen things that try to pass themselves off as human, and they ain’t pretty. They’re things either the Gorgons or the Cyphers have made in their Frankenstein labs. So that’s why this gun is still out and it’s staying out.”

“I hope you have the safety on. You could make a real mess when we hit the next bump, Dave.”

“Ratcoff, where’d you stay last night?” Dave persisted.

To his credit, Ratcoff hesitated only a few seconds. “Like Jeff said…a farmhouse. I don’t know how many miles away it was, but we walked a long time. My feet are killin’ me.”

“Why didn’t you stay there?”

Ratcoff shrugged, still keeping his composure. “The place was half burned down. We were tryin’ to find people. Not crazy ones. And…you know…just us three alone…how long were we gonna make it?”

Good man, Jefferson thought. Listen and learn from the master.

Vope was immobile at his side. That was good too, Jefferson decided. Let everybody think the idiot was in shock and couldn’t talk. The Gorgons didn’t understand contractions, and everything Vope said came out as stiff as a high schooler trying to speak Shakespeare’s English. At least he had the blinking part taken care of, mostly. So just let him keep his mouth shut. When the plastic jug of water arrived, Jefferson took a drink and also took the opportunity to look around. The bus was so crowded it was hard to see beyond the people standing behind McKane and the woman. He saw a young blonde-haired kid who was maybe nineteen or so, with a bloody rag wrapped around his head, his eyes bleary, but that wasn’t who they were seeking. He remembered his starlet harlot saying You will know the boy when you find him, my Jefferson as he drifted into a dreamless narcotic sleep in the room that was not a room in the false French mansion. He wondered if in that sleep they had added some sensor device to him along with the pain stimulator in his neck, because he was absolutely sure the young man with the injured head was not the boy. He could see no one else who might be the boy, so the boy must be further at the back. The kid was here, though; if he wasn’t, Vope wouldn’t have wanted to stop the bus. Oh yeah, he was here. When the chance to take him came, Jefferson would know that too. Only he hoped the Gorgons would teleport them out of range of that Uzi before McKane could get the safety off.

“One drink and pass it on,” Dave said.

“Sure.” Jefferson gave the jug to Ratcoff, who drank noisily. Then came the moment when Ratcoff put the red cap back on the jug and offered it to Vope, and the Gorgon just stood there looking at it like it was a half-gallon of Cypher piss.

“Don’t you want a drink, Jack?” Jefferson asked, his voice full of concern for a brother of the road who had lost his mental bearings. “Here, let me open it.” He was aware that not only McKane and the woman were watching, but others were too. He removed the red cap and said as if to a pitiful imbecile, “Open your mouth, Jack.”

Vope’s hands came up. He took the jug. There might have been a little angry spark deep in the black eyes.

“I know what to do,” Vope said. “Idiot.”

The Gorgon tipped the jug into his open mouth, as he’d seen the two humans do. Only Jefferson saw the creature flinch just a fraction, as if the liquid tasted vile. A small amount was taken and then allowed to slowly dribble from the sides of the mouth down into the black beard.

Vope gave the jug back to Jefferson, who recapped it and returned it to Olivia. “Thank you kindly,” he said, giving her just a glimpse of his Southern charm but not enough to fire anyone’s jets. The bus was moving on, curving toward the I-25 ramp. Jefferson noted that McKane’s gun had moved away from his proud parts. “I imagine you people have been through a lot,” he said to Olivia. “Like we have. Like everyone has.”

She nodded. “We’re glad you came along. You can help JayDee with some of these people when we find supplies. He’s our doctor.”

“Oh.” His blink was maybe a little too slow. “Right.”

About fifteen feet away from Jefferson Jericho, standing amid other survivors who hung onto whatever handhold they could find as the bus turned onto I-25, Ethan couldn’t see the three new arrivals for the crush of bodies around him, but his heartbeat had picked up and the flesh of his chest and back had begun tingling. The bruised parts, he thought.

It came to him very clearly.

An alarm had been set off.

Why? he wondered.

He had not seen the three men, but he thought that they were not who—or what—they appeared to be. His first impulse was to pass it forward that he needed to talk to Dave, but in another moment he decided against it. Dave likely couldn’t get back to him, and he would have to leave Olivia, and whatever the “men” were, they might have alarms too. If those went off, they might…what? Tear the bus apart and kill everyone?

No, Ethan thought. They’re not here to do that.

He was certain they were here for an unknown reason, but destroying the bus was not it.

Best to wait, he told himself. Give it time, get a look at these three and try to figure them out.

His heartbeat began to slow and the tingling went away, which was good because he was just about to start scratching himself and he could hardly move amid the others packed around him. He wondered what would happen if he lifted up his shirt and played tic-tac-toe in silver on the blackboard of his chest.

Nikki was still watching him from where she stood behind him. He could feel her eye on him, drilling into his head for an answer. He knew she was still not comfortable with keeping to herself what she’d seen. She might yet crack and start shouting that in their midst there was a freak, a danger to them all, a creature that had to be thrown off the bus and shot down on the side of the road…

…an alien among them.

Ethan steadied himself. They passed a few wrecked cars and a bread truck that had turned onto its side. Something crunched under the tires, and Ethan wondered if Hannah had just run them over a skeleton or two the Gray Men had left behind.

Denver lay ahead. So also did White Mansion Mountain. The boy who had been raised from the dead and was no longer fully human felt the pull of that place on him, never ceasing and growing more urgent.

An answer was there, he thought. But it was not the answer. And why he knew this to be so he had no idea, but there it was like a flash of light in his mind. An answer was at White Mansion Mountain, but there too, were more questions.

But first Denver, as dark began to fall and somewhere out there the Gray Men stirred, hungry for the meat of pilgrims searching for a place of peace.

Hannah turned on the headlights. The one on the left side failed to illuminate.

“Figures,” she muttered.

The bus went on into the falling dark, tires occasionally crushing bones that lay scattered on the cracked pavement like ancient runes pointing the way to the heart of the mystery.

Three.

Life During

Wartime

Seventeen.

Steering the one-eyed bus through the debris scattered along I-25 was no easy task, even for a driver who’d once gotten a wad of bubble gum pushed into her hair while at the wheel and another time had a kid throw oatmeal up in her lap on a rainy Monday morning. Beyond the reach of the single headlight was dark upon dark. Occasionally the shape of a wrecked and burned car loomed up, and there were many skeletons or parts of skeletons, but Hannah Grimes kept her nerves steady and the bus moving forward at about ten miles an hour. The slow speed saved their lives when the light fell upon a black-edged crater burned into the pavement. Hannah said “Shit,” under her breath and deftly got them onto the median and past the danger. She had switched on the interior safety lights, which cast a yellow glow upon her passengers.

Dave McKane was standing watch over the three new arrivals. He didn’t like the smell of them. He didn’t like the cardiologist who talked like a car salesman, having a smooth and quick answer for every question. He didn’t like the little bald Ratcoff, who was sweating and nervous and looked to be in utter torment, and he didn’t like Jack Dope, who stood like a statue and stared ahead into the darkness with that weird double-and-triple blinking he was doing. That guy looked to Dave to be a basket case in the offering, somebody who might go berserk and start flailing at the people around him. Dave almost hoped he would so he could cold-cock the freak into the next century. But that wouldn’t happen, because he was so tired he was near collapse.

“We ought to be seeing Denver by now,” Hannah announced. “If there were any lights, I mean.”

Ahead lay only the night and on the pavement in front of the bus a ribcage and a skull that Hannah could not avoid. It popped like a gunshot under the right front tire.

Jefferson Jericho had not prepared himself for this. All these human remains that littered the highway…most of them not complete skeletons, but scattered by…what? Animals that came out of their lairs to feast on the fallen? Yes, that had to be it. He stared ahead into the dark where the city of Denver should be, and he fully realized now what the Gorgons had shielded him and the residents of New Eden from. This hideous reality was nearly more than the human spirit could bear, it buckled the knees with its brutality and hopelessness. He found himself wanting to get back to New Eden, to the running water and the electricity and the false sun and everything else that might be false but was at least a comfort and a shelter. Even back to Regina’s hatred, because he thought that someday—after this war had ended—she would come around again, and understand that he was only using the gifts God had given him.

He remembered what his harlot starlet had said in that false French bedroom: We have given you much, my Jefferson. Much. And much given can be much taken away.

He shivered. Dear Jesus, he thought as the bus moved on into the endless night. I couldn’t survive out here in this world.

So the boy must be taken. Whatever the boy was and whatever power he possessed, he must be taken and the sooner the better.

Jefferson realized Vope had turned his head slightly to gaze upon him, reading the thoughts as they crashed between the walls of a fearful mind. Was there the hint of an arrogant smile upon the Gorgon’s mouth, or was it Jefferson’s imagination? Did Vope even know how to smile?

Whatever. It was gone now, and Vope looked away from him.

Behind Dave and Olivia, in the middle of the crowded bus, Ethan had come to the conclusion that he had to do something. He could not wait for the three men to strike, because that was the feeling he was getting: a poisonous snake about to strike from the depth of shadows. And just like that he knew: one of them is a Gorgon, hiding in human form.

Everyone in the bus was in danger. He had to do something, and he had to do it now.

He started pushing his way forward. “Sorry,” he said. “Excuse me. Can I get past, please? Sorry…sorry…”

And on between the survivors of Panther Ridge until he reached Dave and Olivia, and then he saw the three men standing at the front of the bus facing toward the blacked-out city, and slowly one of the men turned his head and a pair of small dark eyes like pieces of flint above a black beard caught and held him, and Ethan knew the enemy on sight.

“Dave?” Ethan said.

“What is it?” Dave asked, a note of tension in his voice because he could hear the tension in the boy’s.

The Gorgon stared at him, and suddenly one of the other men turned to also take Ethan in. This man had unruly brown hair and a growth of brown beard, and he was dirty and haggard-looking, but Ethan thought there was something about his face that was too soft, too handsome, to have fully known the hardships of life during wartime. He looked like he, too, was cloaked in a disguise. But this man was human…as was the third man, with the bald and sweating head…and yet…

“What’s wrong?” Olivia asked, when Ethan didn’t reply to Dave’s question.

The human with the brown beard had a look of recognition in his eyes. His face was frozen for a few seconds, and then he smiled like the parting of clouds before the sun. “Hi there,” he said. “What’s your name?”

“Big effing crater ahead,” Hannah announced loudly. “I’m dodgin’ it. Everybody hang on!”

The bus veered to the right. The light revealed a UPS tractor-trailer truck that had crashed through the railing on the right lane, and as Hannah gritted her teeth and steered for safety the bus scraped along the rear of the UPS trailer with a ragged shriek of distressed metal. A few people cried out in alarm, if they had the energy to do so, and Hannah called back, “Hush up, you babies!”

“You want to come up front?” Jefferson Jericho asked Ethan. Here is the boy, he knew. Nothing particularly special about him…or was there? “Come on, then!” He beckoned with the fingers of an upraised hand, though the hand trembled just a bit with frightened anticipation of what might happen.

“Don’t talk to him,” Dave told the man. “He doesn’t know you, and you don’t know him. Just don’t.”

“I thought he might want to come up here where he can breathe better. It looks mighty tight back there.”

“He can breathe fine. What do you want, Ethan?”

Ethan, Jefferson thought. His eyes narrowed. Come on, Ethan, let me get my hands on you.

The Gorgon was staring at Ethan again. The creature blinked rapidly…one two three…and again…one two three. Ethan felt a shock…something like cold fingers reaching into his brain and trying to rummage through it as a burglar might rummage through drawers in a search for valuables.

I won’t let you go there, he thought, and instantly something like a metallic wall of tight bricks appeared in his mind, and though he could still feel the fingers scrabbling at the bricks, trying to find a weak place, the Gorgon was unable to reach in and pluck out what he wanted.

Ethan found he could give his attention to Dave, formulate thoughts, and the wall of bricks remained solid. The fingers were getting more insistent, and stronger and stronger, but they could not break through.

He was about to say The man with the black beard is a Gorgon but he checked himself. Instead he envisioned his own hand, but the hand he saw glowed silver, was long-fingered and more slender than the one at the end of his own arm. He envisioned the silver-glowing hand reaching out like a coil of mist past Dave and Olivia, and the long slim fingers probing into the head of the creature that wore a black beard, and then piercing through the alien-constructed skull of some unknown material he saw—

—a landscape of swamp with yellow and brown tree-like growths protruding up through a soup of wet fog, their forms tortured into shapes more like cactus and having skins across which rippled spikes rose and fell as if the vegetation breathed the miasmic air. Birds of prey with gray flesh and long beaks studded with teeth roamed the clouds, swooping down upon things that resembled crabs and eels sliding through the red-tinged liquid, which shimmered not like water but like quicksilver. There was a change of scene…the skipping of frames as if a movie had suddenly sped up…and there stood under double moons a massive city with thousands of low-slung buildings like sculpted adobe mud-dwellings, but engineered by an alien eye and created by alien tools. Blue globes of light moved back and forth across the city, illuminating figures half-walking, half-slithering through narrow alleys. Another skipping of frames and change of scene…and there a darkness, a cavity, a place where machines thrummed and creations strange and fearful to the eyes of an earthman took shape. Ethan had the sensation that it was deep underground, in what might have been a nest, now becoming a place of shadows and flickering blue light, a place of explorations into the imaginations of warriors ever-seeking new and more powerful weapons of destruction, a place of power unknown to the human mind where the walls breathed with artificial life and were mottled with the colors of their warships.

In the nerve center of pulsing machines and the flicker of blue energy stood a form that seemed to be beckoning him with a scaly, five-clawed hand, a figure draped in leathery black robes. Above the robes was a dark, dimly seen head and face that brought sweat out upon Ethan’s flesh even as he knew he was only probing the memory pictures of a Gorgon, and in that face was a pair of narrow eyes with hypnotic, red-slitted pupils that, unblinking, bade him mentally to come closer and closer, until he was drawn in so near he saw a cobra-like grin that exposed sharp, wet fangs and felt a freezing terror that might well have turned a human to stone.

He could take no more. He got out but it was not easy, as if having to pull the silver hand out of a mass of clinging mud.

He felt a tremendous power coiled within the Gorgon who stood only a few feet away from him, with Dave and Olivia between them. He felt a destruction that could savage everyone in the bus, that could destroy the bus itself as completely as if it were a child’s playtoy. But as their eyes held, Ethan had a sudden strange thought that broke through his fear, and almost without his bidding the thought seeped through the metallic wall and on toward the Gorgon’s mind, and that thought was: I can destroy you.

The Gorgon blinked blinked blinked.

“Hey!” Hannah said suddenly. “I think I see a light! There’s a glow in the sky over—” Something hit the right side of the bus with a jarring thump.

“What the hell…?” she said, interrupted in her directions. She weaved the bus back and forth a little. “What’d we hit?”

A small, spindly figure crawled up the side of the bus and stuck to one of the windows about midway back. There was a stunned silence from the passengers. The creature’s fingers and toes had flattened into suction cups. The thing looked to be a nine- or ten-year-old boy, dressed in tattered rags and with a completely bald and mallet-shaped head, its eyes sunken so deeply into the face they could not be seen. The creature was as gray as the ash from an all-consuming fire, and looking through the window into the bus the thing suddenly grinned as if delighted to see all the traveling meat, and then its head struck forward and shattered the window to pieces.

The screaming began.

“Holy Christ!” Ratcoff yelled, and Jefferson Jericho’s infamous member peed into his jeans. Ethan saw the Gray Man—Gray Child, in this instance—climbing through the window, still grinning to show sharp little rows of serrated teeth.

“Somebody shoot it!” Dave shouted. He drew his Uzi but there were too many people in the way. “Shoot it!” he shouted again, as the thing reached out and grabbed Carmen Niega by the hair.

A .45 automatic cracked twice and the Gray Child shuddered, two holes in its chest, but still it drew Carmen, screaming, towards its open mouth. Then a piece of rusted rebar smashed the thing across the face and Joel Schuster followed JayDee up by shooting the creature a third time in its bony head at point-blank distance. The Gray Child fell backward through the window, hissing, and took a handful of Carmen’s hair with it.

Something hit the back of the bus with a force that bent the emergency exit inward and cracked the middle of the three rear windows like another gunshot. Hannah yelled, “Shit!” and stomped the gas pedal, no matter what obstacles lay ahead.

The gnarled hands of another Gray Man gripped the bottom of the window broken out by the child and pulled the body up. This one was a stocky, muscular beast with curved red spikes growing out of its head, naked shoulders and chest. It made a low, rasping noise and flung itself into the bus even as Joel and Paul Edson shot it, and as the jammed-in passengers tried to get away from it the thing leaped upon Gary Roosa, impaling him on its chest spikes. A savage set of fangs ripped Gary’s throat open and began to chew through his neck until a Hispanic man with a white-streaked beard put a shotgun to the side of the monster’s head and gave it both barrels.

Another creature, thin and wiry with a grotesque and misshapen face that was nearly all mouth with an eye just off the center of its forehead and the second on its right cheek, was clambering in through the window. Clinging to its back was a gray-haired female with a face like an axeblade and another female head growing out of her left shoulder. The passengers were trying to get away but there was nowhere to go. Those without weapons were crushing themselves up against the far side of the bus. Handguns and rifles were firing, combined with the screams a tremendous noise, but before these horrors were killed another man’s arm was nearly chewed off at the elbow and a young woman’s face gnawed to bloody tatters by the Gray Woman and her ingrown sister.

Hannah swerved the bus wildly back and forth. Dave was trying to get back to the broken window and Ethan had gotten out of his way. Olivia stood beside Ethan, her back to the three new arrivals. Suddenly the handsome man with the brown beard gritted his teeth and started forward, his hands reaching out as if to grasp Ethan’s forearms, and in that moment Ethan looked into his eyes and saw behind them what he could only describe as a whirlpool of terror.

“Jesus Christ!” Hannah shouted. She hit the brakes.

Jefferson Jericho stumbled past Ethan, who had dodged aside and grabbed the back of the seat nearest him. One of the preacherman’s hands grazed the boy’s left arm and the other closed on empty air. He crashed into Olivia and fell to his knees in the aisle. The single headlight showed Hannah dozens of Gray Men swarming toward the bus, a tide of monstrosities flooding across the highway…not dozens, she realized in another moment, but hundreds. They ran and crawled and hobbled, some with jellied and hanging skin and others mutated into killing machines with clawed hands and flesh like spiny plate armor.

In a matter of seconds they were all over the front of the bus and climbing up toward the windshield. Ratcoff had fallen to the floorboard, whimpering, while Vope stared impassively at the onrushing mass of inhuman humanity.

“Go!” Olivia shouted at Hannah, as she saw the bus’s yellow snout being covered over by gray bodies.

Hannah floored the thing. Bus number 712 backfired a blast of black smoke and lunged forward like a whipped horse. Gray Men tumbled off the front of the bus and the wheels jubbled as if running over a dozen speedbumps. The bumper and front grill slammed into more and more bodies and the tires slipped over their slime, but ahead there was a solid wall of horrors. Two of the larger and stronger Gray Men had kept their holds on edges of metal and one of them crawled up to slam a knotty fist against the windshield. The fist came through in a shower of glass and Burt Ratcoff screamed like a woman.

“Get off my bus!” Hannah shouted. She followed that demand with two booming shots from her six-gun that pierced the windshield and sent the mutant flying backward off the hood. She shot the other Gray Man in the head before it could use its fists, but the bullet left a hole almost in front of her face and cracks snaked across the windshield.

Olivia realized there were too many, just as Ethan did. The things were running at the bus from all directions, and it seemed that hundreds of them were directly ahead.

“Keep going! Keep going!” Dave yelled as he pushed his way up front. Jefferson Jericho had crawled out of the aisle on his knees, curling up on the floorboard to seek some kind of safety among the other bodies, but there was still enough of him exposed for Dave to step on the man’s right hand as he passed. There was a crunch of knuckles breaking beneath a hard-soled workboot, and in the burning flare of pain that followed the super salesman and fiend of the night realized he had just lost the use of all his fingers.

Hannah was trying to keep going, but the bus was jamming itself up on Gray Men beneath the wheels and the undercarriage. The engine shrieked as the tires lost traction over jellied flesh and crushed armor. More were climbing up over the hood, and one with hands like bludgeons and two stubby extra arms was coming up to finish the job on the windshield.

In the chaos, Ethan looked back to find one person.

He saw Nikki, crushed in with others who had gotten as far away as they could from that broken window and the still-twitching bodies of the Gray Men. At least she was all right, but this battle was far from—

A blinding white light flooded the bus.

It was followed almost immediately by the chatter of double machine guns, and first hit were the Gray Men on the hood. Red tracers zipped through the air in front of the windshield, and now Hannah did slam her foot on the brake pedal because those slugs were just too damned close. But whoever was shooting knew their business, because the Gray Men fell away and the one with the bludgeon-hands had its head half shot off, yet no bullet hit the glass or the hood. The machine guns kept firing, mowing down the Gray Men in rows. They began to turn and run, climbing over each other to get away, while the bullets continued to tear them to pieces.

Squinting into the harsh glare, Ethan was able to make out a vehicle coming up from the right, huge tires crunching over the guardrail.

“Good Christ!” Dave breathed. “An armored car!”

The vehicle’s dazzling searchlight turned to follow a knot of ten or more Gray Men running for the cover of a burned-out Yellow Cab. The double-barreled machine guns, firing from an armored turret, caught eight of them but the others scurried into the shadows on the far side of the cab. There was a hollow-sounding whump! and about three seconds later the Yellow Cab blew up into a fireball and burning gray body parts were tossed into the air.

“Grenade launcher!” Dave said, his voice rough and ragged.

The armored car was painted steel-gray and had a massive front bumper-cage defended by iron spikes. The machine guns were still firing as the searchlight revealed more mutants running along the highway. A second grenade was launched and exploded about fifty yards away. Then the guns were silent and the armored car turned so it was directly in front of bus number 712, its heavy-duty ribbed tires crunching over malformed bones and heads and smashing hard armored flesh into paste. The searchlight swung over to illuminate the interior of the bus brighter than daylight had been for a long time.

A loudspeaker crackled.

“Nice night for a firefight.” It was a woman’s sarcastic voice. “Somebody come out and talk to us, but watch out for shit on your shoes.”

Dave said to Olivia, “I’ll go.” He glanced quickly at a grim-faced Ethan, then took stock of the other passengers. Some were sobbing, but most were in shock. He saw JayDee, who was being helped by Joel Schuster and Diego Carvazos down to give aid to Gary Roosa, though it was obvious Gary had escaped this madhouse by a tough way to go, but escaped it nevertheless. A belt had been used as a tourniquet for Aaron Ramsey’s chewed-up arm, and two women were tending to Lila Conti’s face, but the wounds were severe.

Ethan saw that the Gorgon had not moved. Dave was going to have to pass him to get out of the bus. Look at me, he commanded.

The Gorgon did.

Touch this man and you’ll die, Ethan said in his mind. How he would do that he didn’t know…but he was sure beyond a doubt that he could wish this creature to an explosion just as he’d blown the Gorgon pilot to pieces, and to demonstrate it he sent an image of that moment into the Gorgon’s head on its mist of silver fingers.

The creature remained still, nothing to be read on the hard, expressionless face.

Dave went past Jack Vope and out of the bus when Hannah cranked the door open.

The highway was a mess of gray bodies, some half-smashed and still trying to crawl away. “Put your weapon on the hood and stay in the light,” the woman on the speaker said. He obeyed the first command, and the second one as he picked a path through a grisly landscape of gray arms, legs, torsos and heads.

A hatch opened next to the armored car’s turret. A slim figure in Army camouflage and wearing an olive-green helmet with a headset microphone pulled itself out and then came down a series of foot-and-handgrips to the pavement. The searchlight shifted a few degrees, out of Dave’s face, but the soldier switched on a small flashlight and kept that directed at him.

“Good shooting,” Dave said. Inside, he felt like crumpling into a shivering ball at the soldier’s boots, but he kept all fear out of his face and shakiness out of his voice, which was very hard to do after the last few minutes.

“That wasn’t me at the guns,” said the woman who’d addressed them over the loudspeaker. “I’ll pass the compliment on to Juggy. Any casualties?”

“One dead. One man with nearly a severed arm and a woman with facial wounds. But we’ve got a lot of wounded on board, some very bad. Can you help us?”

“Copy that.” She was speaking not to him, but into her headset. “Okay, what’s your name?”

“Dave McKane.”

“Follow us, Dave. We’ll keep it slow and we’ll keep the guns ready. There are thousands of those freakies in this city. What used to be a city. Mount up,” she said, and as she turned toward the armored car something that pulsed bright blue shrieked across the sky about a mile high, followed by four red balls of flame that were spinning around and around each other like atoms in a molecule. The female soldier never looked up.

Welcome to Denver, Dave thought. He was so glad to see an American soldier with some firepower that he wanted to sob with relief, but that wouldn’t do for anyone to witness, so as he picked his way back through the gray garden of death, he wiped the wet from his eyes with the back of a hand. He retrieved his Uzi from the bus’s hood. Weary to his bones, but knowing he had to keep going a little longer, he mounted up.

Eighteen.

There was indeed a glow in the sky. Beneath it had once been a large shopping mall. Now it was a fortress that dwarfed by many times the puny fort of Panther Ridge.

Tangles of concertina wire surrounded the place except for the road in. Beyond the wire were log barricades and beyond that a twenty-foot high wall of bricks, stones, pieces of jagged metal, broken bottles, and whatever else was strong, sharp, and nasty. The moldering corpses of a dozen or so Gray Men lay amid the concertina wire’s razors. A few had been flattened into gray jelly on the road. Flat-roofed watchtowers with machine guns stood all along the walls. Generators were at work, powering two searchlights that followed the armored car and the school bus in their approach. A huge door covered with metal spikes was hauled upward on chains, like that of a medieval castle, for the vehicles to pass under and then allowed to settle back into place.

Part of the mall was lit up. There were many cars and several Army trucks in the parking lot, as well as a second armored car. As Hannah followed the first armored car toward what appeared to be the mall’s main entrance, she—as well as Dave, Olivia, and Ethan—saw a welcoming committee of ten soldiers with automatic rifles waiting for them. There was a sobbing of relief from many in the bus, but Ethan was watching both the Gorgon and the man who it seemed had been trying to grab hold of him. The human was sitting in a seat nursing what looked to be an injured right hand, while the Gorgon had hardly moved during the journey from the highway to this refuge. The bald-headed man who remained huddled on the floorboard next to Hannah was also a human, Ethan thought, but he felt some kind of strange vibration from him and saw in the man’s mind a terrified confusion of darkness and half-glimpsed, gliding shapes.

The man with the injured hand kept glancing at Ethan and then clasping his knuckles. Sweat was on his face. Broken fingers? Ethan wondered. He had sent the silver hand out to explore and discovered an impenetrable sphere that seemed to be protecting the man’s thoughts: past, present, and future. The sphere was incandescent blue, and so bright it burned the mind’s eye. He’d had to call the silver hand back, but he knew now…this man was for some reason helping the Gorgons and they were shielding his mind with immense power, because…why?

Because, Ethan thought as his gaze slid from the Gorgon’s pawn to the Gorgon and back again, they didn’t want someone like him seeing why the man was really here?

Something to do with me, Ethan decided. The man had tried to grab hold of my arms. What would have happened if he had?

He was so close to telling Dave. To saying it was probably better that all three of these creatures were dumped off the bus, or now turned over to whoever was running this place. But he thought that if he did, the Gorgon might not like it…and, for now, he had the Gorgon in control. They wanted something that must be very important, to have put on all these disguises of body and mind.

Me? he wondered.

And then: Yeah. Me.

The bus stopped. Hannah opened the door. Immediately two soldiers with their automatic rifles came up the steps to cover everyone. They were followed by a Hispanic man with a black goatee and a stubble of hair. He was wearing civilian clothes and had a pen in the pocket of his tan-colored shirt. “Who’s in charge here?”

“I…guess I still am,” said Olivia. “I’m Olivia Quintero.”

“Okay. I’m Dr. Hernandez. Any other doctors here?”

“Right here. John Douglas,” JayDee answered. “Sprained ankle and all.”

Jefferson Jericho had no choice but to lift his injured hand. “And here. Jeff Kushman…with a few broken fingers, I think. Going to be a little tough for me to do anything for awhile.” He cast a quick hard glance at Dave McKane, but inwardly he was thinking this had saved him from discovery…but how might it affect what he was supposed to do?

“We want to get the most severely wounded off first,” Hernandez said. “Clear the aisle as best you can, let’s get this done.” He gave a grimace as he saw the dead Gray Men. “No…first get this garbage out of here.”

The process continued. More soldiers were on hand to help with the wounded. Gary Roosa’s body was taken off, and the injured Lila Conti and Aaron Ramsey. Billy Bancroft cursed like a drunken sailor when he was picked up, but he sailed on into the mall where Dr. Hernandez told Olivia a hospital was set up, with plenty of medical supplies. Then the female soldier who’d been in the armored car came aboard the bus, and removing her helmet, she showed a tangle of auburn-colored hair, like the last of the leaves to catch flame in autumn. She was about thirty-five and had a haggard but strong-jawed face with high cheekbones and dark blue eyes. Her uniform bore the name Cpt. Walsh.

Ethan saw that she was standing about three feet from the Gorgon, who blandly stared at her and blinked his eyes a few times. Ethan felt the power in the creature, but no immediate threat. Tell Dave or not? he asked himself. The Gorgon then turned his head slightly to stare at Ethan, and the boy who realized he was something more than a boy thought he would be quiet for now, and let this play out as it would. He could defend his friends if he had to…that was enough to know for now.

“I’m Captain Ellen Walsh,” said the soldier. “I’m second-in-

command here. Beautiful place to hole up for a year or two, if you like malls.” There was no hint of a smile. “Or if you like safety. Relative safety,” she amended, with a quick glance at Dave. “We’ve got about three hundred civilians here and forty-two soldiers. First thing: everybody on this bus gives up their firearm when they hit the pavement. It’ll be numbered and tagged and it’ll go into a plastic bin. You can pick it up when we say so. Second thing: everybody goes to an area where you strip down and you’re inspected. We don’t worry much about privacy here. Everybody’s going to walk single-file to the entrance, and you’ll be escorted by soldiers with guns who know how to use them real well. Where’d you come from?” The question was directed at Dave.

“Fort Collins.”

“From the frying pan into the fire. We’ve got three infrared heat sensor cameras up on towers on the roof. We picked you up about a mile out. You people are lucky, Dave. Sometimes we don’t get there quick enough. Okay, let’s move.”

Ratcoff and Vope were first and second off the bus. “You!” The captain, standing on the pavement, reached out to put a hand against Vope’s chest. “Open the backpack and let’s see what you’ve got.”

Ratcoff stopped. He almost said Nothin’ special in there but he figured that would only antagonize the woman. Vope hesitated only a few seconds. He removed the backpack and opened it, showing Captain Walsh three dirty shirts and two pairs of jeans. She patted the backpack’s sides, feeling for a firearm this Silent Sam might be trying to sneak past, and found nothing. “Okay,” she said, “pass on.” Unconsciously, she wiped her hand on her fatigues.

Ethan was following Hannah out and wondered what was going to happen when the Gorgon was stripped down. He decided to stay away from Jeff Kushman, whose index and second finger of the right hand were discolored and swollen; he didn’t want to be touched by the man, he thought there was a danger in that, but exactly what it was he did not know. The blue sphere was keeping it from him. It was powerful energy he could not crack…or, maybe, he wasn’t strong enough yet to crack.

“Ethan?” Dave said when they were off the bus and he was giving up his Uzi to a couple of soldiers at a folding table to number, tag and then put into the plastic bin. “Hold up a minute. Captain, can I speak to you?”

“Speak.”

“Where we can have some privacy.”

“I said we don’t worry much about that here.”

Dave had one hand on Ethan’s shoulder. He took the receipt tag that was given to him, and he looked into Ellen Walsh’s eyes and said, “It’s important. Something you’ll want to know before we get inside.”

She looked from Dave to the boy and back again. Her face was hard and her eyes had seen sights that had left burn scars on her brain. She figured she’d better listen. “Over here,” she said, and motioned them both a few yards to the side.

“When this boy is stripped down,” Dave began, “you’re going to find something real different about him.” He caught sight of JayDee, limping on his rebar cane toward the entrance, and he called, “John! Come over here, will you? Olivia? You too, please.”

“What are we having?” Walsh asked. “A parking lot party?”

“Dr. Douglas can explain some things to you, maybe better than I can.” He waited for JayDee and Olivia to join them, and then he said, “You want to lift your shirt and show her, Ethan?”

“I guess,” Ethan answered, though he wasn’t too thrilled about it, and he realized if he was touched he would display the silver element, but he did it anyway.

“What the hell is that…?” The captain’s flashlight came on, directed at the area just above Ethan’s heart.

“Christ!” Dave eyes had widened. “I wanted you to see the bruises, but that’s new!”

“What is it?” Alarmed, Ethan looked down at the area touched by the captain’s light.

There were what appeared to be upraised silver tattoos above his heart. The tattoos were not large, but they stood out clearly against the black bruise.

There were four of them, and they read: GUAR.

JayDee dared to look closer. “Ethan, can I touch those?”

“Yes sir.” The same question Nikki had asked. “Go ahead.”

The doctor traced his finger over the symbols. They became slightly brighter with his touch. Ethan felt no pain, no sensation at all. A fifth symbol seemed to be coming up, a faint bit of silver rising from a dark pool, but it was impossible yet to make out its shape.

“We have a lot to tell you about this young man,” Olivia said. She offered him a faint smile and then gave it also to the captain. “Our hero,” she added.

Ethan dropped his shirt. He felt more like a freak than a hero. Now he could tell Nikki that he had tattoos too…but how they’d been delivered to him, he had no idea.

“Okay,” the captain said. And repeated it: “Okay.” She sounded shaken, which she was. “Let’s go see the doc. I’ll bring Major Fleming, and we’ll hear the story. I’ve seen a lot of freakies out here, but this one…okay.” She moved her flashlight to peer into Ethan’s eyes. She held his gaze for a few seconds, the flashlight roaming over his face, and then she switched it off. “Gotta be careful, folks,” she decided. “Juggy!” she called to one of the soldiers. “Come over here and bring your rifle. On the double!”