“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 w
earing 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.
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.