“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!”