“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.”
Je
fferson 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 star
ted 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?”