But even so, he rejected the hand and stood up on his own.
He began walking again up the hillside to his crumbling apartment, more slowly now, with the labor of intense deliberation, and after a moment meant to give Dave McKane his space, the boy followed nearly in his footsteps.
SEVEN.
NEAR MIDNIGHT, DAVE SPOKE THE WORDS HE’D BEEN TRYING TO GET out for awhile but they hadn’t come. They were ready now.
“What if there’s a real place called the white mansion?”
“Surely there is,” John Douglas answered. “A town somewhere. Or used to be a town. Could be in another country.” He placed his tiles upon the Scrabble board to spell the word oasis, and then he took five more tiles followed by a long drink from his full cup of fresh water. “But just because Ethan heard it supposedly spoken to him in a dream…that doesn’t mean very much. Does it?” He peered across the board at Dave. Two oil lamps and a candle lantern burned in the doctor’s apartment, number 108, which had sustained shattered windows and a half-dozen fissures down the walls. The door had been reshaped with a handsaw to fit the warped frame. In any other circumstance, the entire apartment complex would have been evacuated and yellow-taped off as a condemned property, but the beggars here could not be choosers.
Olivia Quintero studied the board on the scarred table between them. A rifle leaned against the chair at her side. The Gray Men had not come tonight, in the pouring rain. They might yet attack before dawn, but for now they were quiet. She needed to go to sleep, but Dave had asked her to join him and the doctor here, and it was at least a way to relax a little. The best she could do was add an E and an L to the word bow. She chose two more tiles, a T and a blank. “What do you think about the story?” Her question was directed to JayDee. “About Ethan lying dead?”
“I think the man was in a mental state and he missed the heartbeat and pulse.”
“Maybe so. But after what you told me in my office…about the bruises. You were thinking the boy was caught in a shockwave and he ought to be dead. Isn’t that right?”
“I didn’t put it exactly like that.”
“You didn’t have to.” She watched as Dave put an R in front of oar. “That was your meaning. As I recall, you were amazed he didn’t at least have major internal injuries, and he could still walk.” She leaned back in her chair, the better to judge the expressions of both men. “Dave, what are you thinking?”
Dave took his time. He watched JayDee add with before the word draw. Then he said, without looking at Olivia, “I’m not sure Ethan is what he seems to be. I don’t know what the hell he is, but I’d say…if he really did cause those quakes…somehow…by using some force we don’t—”
“Impossible!” scoffed the doctor.
“Is it?” Dave took a drink from his own cup of water. “Look, what do we know about anything anymore? What can we be sure of? All this the last two years…it defies everything humans ever believed in. And the Gray Men…mutating so fast. Who would have ever thought it was possible? And it wouldn’t have been possible, without the aliens. Without whatever it is they’ve infected the world with. Okay…” He turned his chair to more directly face the doctor. “What if…Ethan is something different. Maybe an experiment the Cyphers or Gorgons made—”
“His blood didn’t fry,” JayDee reminded him.
“That’s right, but still…something different. Something more advanced.”
“Not human?” Olivia asked. “He looks like a boy, but he’s not?”
“I don’t know. I’m just trying to—”
“Talk yourself into believing Ethan Gaines has come to Panther Ridge to save us?” JayDee’s white eyebrows went up. “To deliver the mighty earthquakes to keep the Gray Men from eating us alive? If that’s so, even Ethan has to understand that one more tremor like that, and Panther Ridge is a pile of rubble.”
“It’s a pile of rubble already,” Dave shot back. He took down another swallow of water and imagined it tasting like Beam, but it was plenty good enough as it was. “More than that. It’s a graveyard.”
Neither JayDee nor Olivia spoke. The doctor shifted uncomfortably in his chair, and Olivia regarded her little rack of letter tiles as if she actually was concentrating on the game and not just trying to avoid thinking too much about the onrushing future.
“We’re all going to die here,” Dave went on. “We can’t hold out. That’s what’s impossible.” He fired a quick dark glance at JayDee. “I’ve been asking around, if anybody has ever heard of ‘the white mansion.’ So far, nothing. I’ve asked if anybody’s got a road atlas, but again…no. Maybe somebody’ll come up with something, maybe not. In the meantime, I know there’s a library at the high school.” From the high school is where much of JayDee’s medical supplies had come, and some of the canned food, but Dave’s last trip there had been months ago. “I’m taking a horse over there in the morning, and I’m going to see if I can find anything…some maps, maybe…anything that could help.”
Olivia said, “You can’t go out alone. You shouldn’t have gone out alone after Ethan. It was foolish. And you know you shouldn’t go out at all, unless you’re looking for food and ammo.”
“Yeah, but I’m going anyway. I won’t ask anybody to go with me, I can handle it.”
Olivia paused, examining her tiles again. She decided to save her blank and placed dart on the board, then she chose three more tiles, one a dreaded Z. “You believe in this?” she asked quietly, as the oil lamps made soft guttering sounds. “That Ethan is wanting to go to a real place? That he’s feeling…what would the word be…summoned? And that this white mansion place isn’t halfway around the world?”
“Summoned?” JayDee managed a crooked smile but it quickly slipped away. “Summoned by what? A voice in a dream? That’s what you have to go on?” The question was aimed at Dave.
“I have to go on what the boy tells me,” Dave replied firmly. “Sure, that’s all I’ve got…but I do know I saw the earthquakes. Felt ’em, too. I believe he knew the spring was there before it came up. I think he sensed it. Don’t ask me, I can’t explain.” He leaned forward slightly, looking from John Douglas to Olivia and back again. “He’s asked me to help him find this place. He thinks it’s real enough, and he says it’s pulling at him. Can it be found?” Dave shrugged. “Is it fifty miles away? A hundred? A thousand? Don’t know. I have to get to that library tomorrow and try to find some maps. That’s the best I can do. And John…you know what those bruises looked like on his chest and back. You said it yourself…you were surprised his lungs hadn’t burst and he was still breathing.”
“True, I did,” JayDee answered, but there was a note of pity in his voice. “I am amazed he’s alive. But Dave…that doesn’t mean he died and has risen from the dead.”
Dave was silent for awhile. The rain thrashed harder against the crooked roofs and broken walls of the Panther Ridge Apartments, whose glory was a distant memory.
Dave looked directly into JayDee’s eyes. He said in a low, restrained voice, “But what if it does?”
JayDee slapped the edge of the table with both hands, upsetting all the little tiles of all the little words. He stood up, a frown etched across his face. “I’m not listening to this. Thank you for the company. I’m getting some sleep now, goodnight to you both.” He motioned toward the door. “Push hard, it sticks.”
Dave and Olivia said goodnight to JayDee. Dave picked his Uzi in its holster up from the floor beside his chair and Olivia hefted her rifle. Dave did have to push hard against the door. In the outside corridor, they walked together toward the stairs.
“It seems to me,” Olivia said, breaking their silence, “that you want to believe in something very badly.”
“Yeah, that’s probably right. Sad, huh?”
“Not sad. I have to say…I wonder about Ethan myself. John does too, only he doesn’t want to say so directly. It’s hard to believe in very much anymore. That there’s a purpose to anything.” She stopped walking, and so did Dave. “So
you believe that Ethan has a purpose? And it’s beneficial to us, somehow? What might that be?”
“No idea. But the things he’s done so far have helped us. I don’t know what he is or why he’s here, but I say…if he can help us…then I need to help him do what he’s asking. If that means following a direction he heard in a dream, to the best of my ability…yeah, I’m for it. You should be too. We all should be. Otherwise, we’re just waiting to fill up the graveyard, and I don’t want to wait for that anymore.”
“Hm,” said Olivia, and she pondered that before she spoke again. Rain was pouring off the roof to their right. Lightning flickered across the troubled darkness. “I suppose…maybe I’m afraid to believe. That would mean opening yourself up again, wouldn’t it? I guess it’s safer to sit in a room with a picture of your dead husband and think…not too much longer now, and we’ll be together.”
“Don’t give up,” Dave said.
“Trust in a boy who has no memory? Trust in three words from a dream? That’s hanging on with your fingernails, I think.”
“Sure it is. But it is hanging on.”
Olivia nodded and smiled faintly. There was so much pain behind the smile that Dave had to lower his head and look away. “I’ll go with you tomorrow,” she told him.
“You don’t have to. No need for two of us to ride out.”
“Maybe I also want to hang on a little longer. Besides, they’re my horses.” The herd had come from the ranch she’d owned with Vincent. Watching them being slaughtered and eaten, one after the other, had been at first devastating, and now a matter of survival.
“Okay.” Dave put a hand on her shoulder. “Meet at the corral at eight?”
“I’ll be there.”
Dave had no doubt she would be. Shielding themselves as best they could from the downpour, they parted ways at the bottom of the steps. Dave returned to his apartment and his sleeping bag on the gray sofa. Olivia went to her apartment, touched a match to the wick of a lamp and sat at her desk, and there she picked up the Magic Eight Ball Vincent had given her. She turned it between her hands, remembering the day this had come to her wrapped in red paper with a silver ribbon. It had been, it seemed, a lifetime ago.
And now, against all logic and reason, she had to ask a question. It was whispered, as if into Vincent’s listening ear.
“Should I believe?”
She shook the ball and then turned it over.
The little white plastic die emerged from its inky soup.
Maybe it was Vincent answering her, maybe it was Fate, maybe it was only happenstance, which she certainly thought was the most likely.
But the answer was: You may rely on it.
She took the lamp with her, and she went into the next room and undressed. She slid into her bed where good dreams and belief in miracles did not come easily, but that always had a pistol tucked under the pillow.
EIGHT.
A BROODING YELLOW SKY STRETCHED OVERHEAD. THERE WAS NO wind, but the air smelled burnt. The horses were skittish, nervous to the touch. Dave rode alongside Olivia as they went through the metal-plated door that had been opened for them. As soon as they were descending the road, the door was closed and locked again, according to Olivia’s orders. At each corner of the wall that had been rebuilt and fortified around the Panther Ridge Apartments the machine gunners sat behind their weapons, scanning both the silent sky and the ominous earth.
The two riders headed toward the high school down in the valley below. Occasionally on the hillside they passed a hand, arm, or head of a nightmarish creature, caught like strange flowers in fissures in the ground. The vultures were busy; Dave thought that they didn’t care what meat they ate, and so even those things were likely to be corrupted and turned into…what?
He had his Uzi in his shoulder holster and in a holster at his belt, a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolver that had belonged to Mitch Vandervere. Mitch’s apartment had yielded four boxes of bullets, twenty each, and the gun held five rounds. That was the way of things. When someone fell, you drew straws or cards with whoever else was on the burial detail and took the departed’s weapons and ammo, no fighting or squabbling allowed, and Dave had won high card over Mitch’s headless corpse. So in Dave’s possession were 80 Magnum rounds and five clips of thirty-two slugs each for the Uzi, and that was it for now. Olivia had her rifle slung across her shoulder, along with a small black leather bag holding thirty more bullets.
They didn’t speak as they rode. They had not talked about their mission before they’d left. A few men had offered to ride with them, as extra protection, but the offerings had been half-hearted, and Olivia had said no, they’d manage this by themselves.
They crossed open ground scarred by craters with edges seared crusted and black by the alien weapons. The road’s asphalt was cracked and also cratered, and Olivia thought the Earth was being transformed into a planet the Cyphers and Gorgons perhaps better understood: a ruined charnel house of war that in another year or two would no longer be suitable for human life. Everything would be contaminated, if it wasn’t already. And now she had to stop these thoughts before they overwhelmed her, and she had tears in her eyes and a deep, sick sadness in her heart and that old ticking time bomb in her mind that said it would be so easy and so right to join Vincent. Her spirit was so near to being extinguished. Her life force, tattered and destroyed. She could feel it leaving her, day by day. When she and Dave got back behind the walls, she knew two or three more people would probably have shot themselves. They were losing more and more, and it was getting faster now.
The white mansion, she thought as they neared the high school. Ethan’s name right up there on the weather-beaten sign. The building itself a wreckage. And in the parking lot…what was that? Three huge…things…lying there covered with vultures like dark rippling skins…the thick, hideous bodies burned to crisps and seeping black fluids like scorched engine oil. And here and there the outlines of where smaller bodies had been lying, only now they were reduced to a residue of shiny ebony material like shreds of rubber. She knew what those were, she’d seen them before. The remnants of Cypher soldiers, bubbling and melting away to nothingness. But those creatures…those monsters…Olivia’s mind had to fix on something else, and quickly. “Dave?” she said in a weak voice, “what happened to the cars? The ones that used to be here?”
“Don’t ask,” he said, because Hannah Grimes had told him what she’d seen through the binoculars and he’d informed Hannah—a tough old bird if there ever was one—to keep that pinned under her wig, for the sake of Christ. So far Hannah wasn’t talking, but it was probably just a matter of time. Creating alien flesh out of earthly metal was a new one; when that got around Panther Ridge, Katie bar the fucking door.
The horses nickered and shivered and would not go into the parking lot. “Go on, go on,” said Dave to his mount but the animal’s eyes had gotten wild and it rumbled like an avalanche deep in its lungs, the message being You may be a damned fool but I am not. No further, bucko.
“What are those?” Olivia had finally made herself fix on the monsters, even as her horse began to back away as if fearful of stepping into a tarpit. “Dave?”
“Whatever they were, they’re dead.” He got down from the saddle and looked for a place to tie his horse. Last time he’d been here, a few months back, he’d used the front fender of a pickup truck. That same truck had recently walked away and might be lying over there plucked by vultures. He noted the impressions in the asphalt that might have been caused by the weight of those things. Flesh from metal. Life from an inanimate object. A good trick, if you could do it. He recalled something he’d read maybe in a book at his own high school, but it had stuck with him because he’d thought it had sounded cool. How did it go? Something like…“Any super-advanced technology seems like magic.” Was that it? No, but close enough. Well, here was the super-advanced technology on full magical display.
Damn ’em, he thought. Their weapons were getting stranger and more deadly. An a
rms race, Ethan had said. “Yeah, and we’re stuck right in the fuckin’ middle,” Dave said to that thought, which made Olivia ask, “What?” and he just shrugged and walked the horse to a STOP sign that stood near the entrance to the lot. It had been bent almost in half by possibly the same concussion that had blown out the school’s windows. “You want to stay here, that’s fine with me,” he said. “I can find the library.”
Olivia was already dismounting. She walked her jittery horse over and tied it up to the sign as well. Her eyes were fixed on Dave, but they wanted to slide over to look at the dead creatures again, and she knew she couldn’t stay out here alone.
She unslung the rifle from her shoulder, a smooth move she was getting good at. Never in her life would she have believed she might become a warrior. But here she was, ready to fight if she had to.
“Let’s go,” she said. They followed a cracked concrete path up to stone stairs that entered the building. One door had been blown inward off its hinges, the other hung crookedly like a Saturday night drunk. Or, Dave mused, how Saturday night drunks used to hang. The light within was murky, stained yellow like the ugly sky. Glass crunched under their boots, a noise that seemed to Olivia to be terribly loud in this silent place.
But not quite silent. Water dripped from the ceiling in a hundred places. Wet papers had grown to the floor and turned the color of strong tea. The floor tiles gave a little as Dave and Olivia walked; the floor itself felt spongy, as if upheld by rotten beams just on the verge of collapse. They passed what had once been a trophy case, the pride of the high school’s sports teams, now shattered and the trophies darkened by waterstains. A huge mural on one wall that had likely been painted by students depicted the world and figures surrounding it linked arm in arm. The mural was blotched by large brown scabs where the wall’s plaster had fallen away, but the faded message “The Family Of Man” was still legible.