Did that mean he was at heart a coward? he had asked himself. That for all his bar fights and bad-assedness and bravado, he was inside a frightened little shadow of what he portrayed himself to be?
Because, really…he was afraid. He was terrified. His friends were here. He was useful in this place. It was where he knew he would die, eventually. And from the numbers of Gray Men that had stormed the fortress last night, death was only a matter of using up five Uzi clips. Then it would all be over for him. Would it be tonight? Tomorrow night? One night next week? Impossible to know, but soon. And when it was over for him, it would likely be over for everyone else here, because not for very long would even freak earthquakes banish hunger for human meat from the bellies of those monsters.
Dave lay in his sleeping bag on his sofa and wished he had the last bottle of Jim Beam he’d finished off about a month ago. He could not make himself sleep. He could not let go of two things.
Ethan, saying with fierce conviction The earth did what I wanted.
And the fact that where the boy had walked at the bottom of the swimming pool, a crack had opened up to give them clean water.
They didn’t have to worry about rationing the bottled water anymore. Sure, there was plenty to worry about, but…not about water anymore.
The earth did what I wanted, he’d said.
And only Dave knew about Ethan walking the length of the pool, and when challenged the reply was I felt like I needed to come here.
A simple statement. But…there was something more to it. Much more. Dave had his own feelings, and abruptly he got out of his sleeping bag and put on his shoes and cap. He had seen black-helmeted soldiers glide through the walls of his house and seen monstrous things that used to be God-fearing, hard-working American citizens tearing at barbed wire for the taste of human meat and seen the glowing trails of alien battleships in the night sky, and he realized that things he had never dreamt could possibly be true were true, and forevermore nothing in this nightmare world could be considered impossible. Dave left his apartment and started down the hill toward the hospital, because he had some questions to ask a mysterious boy.
SIX.
EVEN IN THE STRONGHOLD OF SLEEP, ETHAN WAS NOT SAFE.
He was standing atop the wall again, watching the multitude of distorted, disfigured and decaying figures swarming forward up the hillside. Guns were firing all around him and cut many of them down, but just as many of the Gray Men caught hold of the rocks, hooking spiked toes and fingers into the cracks and climbing up with the speed and determination of rabid hunger. They began to climb over the barbed wire, some pressing the coils down with their bodies so more could get over, others tearing with maddened fury through the wire to get at the defenders beyond.
The walls were about to be conquered. Guns were running out of ammo and falling silent. Some of the defenders were caught between ripping claws and torn by saw-blade teeth, others jumped in panic from the platform to the ground and fled to find shelter. Ethan backed away from spiny figures crawling over the wire before him. He was balanced on the edge of the platform, and suddenly an ashen-colored hand darted through the coils and caught him by the throat. Ethan saw a slender thing that might have been half-human and half-serpent pushing itself over the wire, and he was pulled toward it with terrible strength. A yellow-eyed face blotched with warty gray scales and topped with a shock of black hair stared into Ethan’s own face, and the thin-lipped mouth opened to show teeth already sharpened and broken by gnawing on human bones.
The mouth opened. The teeth glinted.
The creature spoke, in a rattling whisper.
“Go,” it said, “to the white mansion.” Then a bullet hit the side of its head and the black blood ran. The yellow eyes blinked, as if in indignant surprise. The hook-nailed hand released Ethan’s throat and the creature fell back across the barbed wire leaving pieces of gray flesh hanging from the barbs.
“Ethan? Ethan?”
Someone was shaking his shoulder. He felt himself flinch, and realized in his darkness that he was coming out of a solid sleep. He opened his eyes to the glow of an oil lamp on the table next to him. Curtains had been drawn over the windows to filter the afternoon’s hazy light. Rain was falling outside, thrashing at the broken glass which had been covered over with sheets of styrofoam. Water dripped from the ceiling at a half-dozen places. Ethan had no idea how long he’d been sleeping in this narrow bed in the small room that was part of the hospital. Someone had pulled a chair up next to his bed. Ethan saw a hard-lined face with a hawk’s beak of a nose. Dave McKane had removed his baseball cap, his multiple cowlicks sticking up. The man smelled like a wet dog.
“JayDee let me in,” Dave explained quietly. The door between this room and the other part of the hospital was closed, mostly. “Said you’d had enough rest, you oughta be okay.”
Ethan sat up on the bed. His body still ached and his mind was a little foggy. Three words were echoing around in his brain: the white mansion. He nodded. “I’m okay. Better, I guess.”
Dave grunted. He wore the pained expression of someone in desperate need of either a cigarette or a drink of whiskey, and the doctor had forbidden him to smoke in here and that last bottle of Beam was a golden memory. “I have to ask you some questions.” His voice was not harsh, but rather imploring. He paused and studied the knuckles of his hands for a moment. Rainwater glistened on the baseball cap, which was hung on the back of his chair. The rain itself had felt oily and hot on Dave’s skin as he’d walked from his apartment to the hospital, and he wondered how many alien poisons were in it.
“Go ahead,” Ethan said, sensing the man’s indecision of where to begin.
“Yeah,” Dave answered. “Okay. You said you caused the quakes. How is that possible? I mean…you’re a boy, right? A human? Aren’t you?”
“You must think so. You didn’t bring your machine gun.”
“I’m going to believe you’re human. Not something that looks human. Some experiment the Cyphers or the Gorgons made. But…if you caused the quakes, how did you do that?”
“I don’t really know,” Ethan said, and in his mind he thought the white mansion. He was trying to push that away, but it would not be pushed away, and stronger and stronger it was becoming. “I wanted it to happen. I put my hands on the wall. I wanted the earth to shake the Gray Men off. That’s all I could think to do.”
“You put your hands on the wall? And you just thought of what you wanted to happen, and it did?”
“Yes.”
“Uh-huh. Okay, then. Move my hat off the back of the chair and put it on my head.”
Ethan almost laughed, but the stony expression on Dave’s face said it would be a bad idea. “That would be a trick, wouldn’t it? I don’t think I can do that.”
“Why not? You caused a freakin’ earthquake! Using your mind, is that what you’re saying? And now you can’t use your mind to move a little hat?”
“I had to want to do it…like…because it was the only way. I don’t know how I did it. I just knew…right then…that minute…I had to try, because I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want anybody else to die. I had to do what I could…whatever I could. So…it just came out of me. I felt it. Then when it was over I felt it go back into me, and it went to sleep.”
“What did you feel? What came out of you and then went back in?” There was a note of sarcasm in the man’s voice.
“I guess…power. That’s all I can say.”
“Power.” Now the sarcasm dripped. “Yeah, right. A fifteen-year-old boy with the power to make an earthquake happen, but he can’t move a hat a couple of feet. Can you levitate yourself off the bed? See the future? Can you tell me how all this hell comes to a happy ending?”
“No,” Ethan said, his face shadowed in the lamplight. “No. And no, I can’t.”
Dave ran a hand across his forehead. He listened to the rain hammering down outside. He stared intensely into the boy’s eyes. “Did you know about the spring under the pool?”
“No.”
“Then what were you doing? Why were you walking around in there?”
“I thought it was where I ought to be.”
“Something told you that? Something spoke to you? Is that it?”
Ethan shrugged. “I don’t—”
“Why don’t you know?” Dave had almost shouted it, but he was holding himself back with a massive effort. “Or better yet…what the hell do you know? Not your real name, where you came from, or where your folks are. You just ‘woke up’ and you were running, isn’t that what you said? And suddenly you can make an earthquake, and a swimming pool cracks open right where you’ve been walking and clean water flows out? Because you thought it was where you ought to be?” Dave grinned crazily, with fury and frustration behind it. “Christ!” he said. “Okay, you found us some water! How about more food? More bullets, too. That’s what we need, because we’re not going to be able to hold off another attack. So conjure us up some more ammo, Ethan! Can you do that for us? If you can’t…we’re done for. Got it?”
Ethan frowned. He knew the seriousness of what Dave was saying, but something else was working at him and it was relentless. “The white mansion,” he said. “Have you ever heard of it?”
“What? Do you mean the White House? In Washington? What’s that got to do with—”
“The white mansion,” Ethan repeated. “Not the White House. I think it might be a real place, and I think I need to go there.”
“Really? Well, I think I need to go to the freakin’ moon. Are you crazy, kid? Is that it? You’re out of your mind?”
Ethan stared into the glow of the oil lamp. Who was he, really? Where had he come from? He didn’t know the answers to those questions, but he knew some truths and he decided to speak them. “I think I have to go there. I think something wants me to go. It’s important, but I don’t know why. This place…the apartments…it’s no good. No one can stay here. The next time they attack…it’s going to be all over for those who stay. But I believe the white mansion is a real place…and I think…I believe…something is telling me to go there.” He looked steadily into Dave’s eyes. “That name came to me in a dream. I keep thinking about it. Can you find out for me if it’s a real place, and where it is?”
“Oh, you’re having revelations in dreams now? What’s next? Water into wine? Make it whiskey, and I’m sold.”
“I’d settle for lemonade,” Ethan answered, his face solemn. “I’m telling you what you already know about Panther Ridge. Sir,” he said, so as not to sound disrespectful. “Can you please help me find out about the white mansion? Ask if anybody else has ever heard of it, and where it might be?”
“Oh, sure! We’ll check the Net, how about that?” Dave stood up. He put on his baseball cap, still damp with oily rain. He had no idea why he’d come here to ask the boy these questions, but there were no answers that suited him. Maybe he’d wanted there to be…something…some answer he could grasp and hold onto. Instead…the boy had to be crazy, and that was that.
Ethan got out of bed and followed Dave from the room. In the hospital, a few people were sitting in chairs either waiting for treatment or being treated. As in Dave’s apartment, pipes and wires dangled from the crooked ceiling. JayDee was busy applying a cast to the left arm of a weary-looking middle-aged man in a dirty white t-shirt and jeans, and the two nurses were tending to other patients.
“You okay to go?” JayDee asked Ethan as he worked on the man’s cast, and Ethan nodded. Dave was almost to the door, which like the one in Olivia’s apartment would not close in its damaged frame. “Be careful,” JayDee told Ethan. “Raining pretty hard out—”
“Hey! Just a minute! You…son!”
The man with the injured arm had spoken. He was staring at Ethan. “Wait. I know you from somewhere. Don’t I?”
Dave stopped just short of the door and looked back. Outside, the rain was slamming down.
Ethan didn’t recognize the man, who had curly gray hair, brown eyes and the patch of a bandage across his bruised forehead. “I don’t…think so.” A little spark jumped in his heart. “Do you know me?”
“From somewhere. I came in a few days ago, with my wife. It seems like I’ve seen you before. Damn, that’s hurting!” he protested to JayDee, and then he returned his attention to the boy. “I think I’ve seen you, but I can’t remember from where. Wait a minute…wait a minute…you had on…different clothes. A shirt…a dark red shirt, with one sleeve torn off.”
“That’s right.” Dave came back to stand nearer. “That’s what he was wearing when he was brought in yesterday. So where’d you see him?”
The man started to speak and then seemed to stop himself. He wore an expression of dismay.
“Go ahead, tell us,” JayDee urged, pausing in his wrapping of the plaster bandages.
“I remember,” the man said. “We were with another group. In a strip mall. Maybe six or seven miles from here. The place was wrecked. We were trying to find a new place to hide, because our other place was torn up. They were fighting up over us…and we were trying to find somewhere to crawl into. Then…” He looked from Ethan to Dave and back again, and once more he seemed not to know what to say. “The aliens must’ve just gone through. We came to a place where there were bodies. People dead maybe a few hours…lying in the bricks where the walls had been blown apart. And…you. You were lying there, too. That’s where I saw you. Only…you were dead. Like the others. Six people, all dead. Lying in those bricks, and that’s where you were.”
“Bullshit!” Dave snapped, with rising anger. “If it was him lying there, you can see he’s not dead!”
“Yeah, but…he was dead. It looked like an explosion had thrown them around the room and blasted the walls out, but…his face…he looked like he was just sleeping, and Kay said for me to check him and make sure…because he was only a boy and we shouldn’t leave him. So…I checked his heartbeat and his pulse, and there was nothing.” His gaze found the floor. “I did check. I did. There was—”
“You were wrong,” Dave interrupted. His face had reddened. “Damned wrong! Maybe his heart and pulse were slow, but…look at him! Does he look dead to you?” And then Dave caught JayDee staring at him, and Dave remembered he and the doc standing in the Secure Room looking at the ugly black bruises on Ethan’s chest and back, and JayDee saying I think he’s suffered a very violent concussive event. An explosion of some kind. Might have been caught in a shockwave. “Wrong,” Dave repeated to the man with the broken arm, and then he turned away and walked out because questions led to questions and there were no answers and even in a madhouse world like this had become a dead boy did not rise from the dead. He kept walking, faster and faster, out into the driving rain that felt like small lead weights striking his skull, back and shoulders.
The white mansion, he thought as he strode up the hill. It was crazy. Made no sense. Nothing did anymore. The white mansion, my ass, he thought.
But he also thought how resolute the boy’s voice had been, when Ethan had said I think I have to go there.
And more unsettling…I believe something is telling me to go there.
Dave looked back and saw Ethan following, a slim figure almost obscured by the rain. He started to pause and wait for the boy, but he kept going. He didn’t know if he thought Ethan was crazy, or…
…something else?
Nobody could make an earthquake, Dave thought as he walked through the downpour. And that weirdness about the swimming pool, and the white mansion, and now the boy lying dead in the bricks of a destroyed strip mall, wearing the one-sleeved dark red shirt he’d had on yesterday.
But still…the boy, saying I believe something is telling me to go there.
Go where? And why? And how would anybody even figure out what the damned place was, and where it was?
Would be nice, Dave thought, for this so-called voice that Ethan is hearing to tell him the whole story and not just bits and pieces.
For all his toughness, for all his h
ardness and bitterness about what this world and his life—all their lives—had turned into, Dave McKane was suddenly overcome.
He felt himself stagger. He felt his knees buckle. He felt the hard rain beating on his back, driving him down. He had the crazed feeling that he was coming apart at the seams, himself becoming a Gray Man in this poisoned land, and once a certain threshold was crossed in that change he could never return to what he’d been.
Suddenly he was on his knees on the roadway, and he pressed his hands to his mouth to contain a cry for mercy, not just for himself but for all of them, all who had suffered and lost loved ones and become prisoners here waiting to die. He felt tears burning his eyes, but they were quickly washed away. He thought that if he let himself cry he would go over the edge, and all his pretend strength would fly away and be gone, baby, gone.
So he just knelt there in the pouring rain, and he hung on to whatever he had left.
“You need some help?”
Dave looked up. Ethan was standing over him. The boy offered a hand.
Dave wanted to believe in something. Anything, to get him to tomorrow. He asked himself if it was wrong to believe—at least in this moment—that Ethan Gaines could make the earth quake, that he had felt the movement of a spring beneath the pool’s concrete and earth’s rock, that he had been dead and brought back to life by some force unknown, and that he was being directed to go to a place called the white mansion?
Was it wrong, in this moment?
He didn’t know, but at least in this moment with aliens battling across the world and nightmare creatures being spawned from their energies and poisons, he did believe. Just a little, just enough to get him to tomorrow.