The lights were still on in this section of the mall where the generators were working. A mass of people occupied tents, cots and sleeping bags. Some were playing cards or dominoes, some were reading, talking or praying, others just lying and staring blankly at the walls or the ceiling. Children played with toys taken from the Learning Center or the Disney Store. As it had been at Panther Ridge, there were all ages and seemingly all races: a true melting pot, in this Land That Had Been Plenty. It appeared that the mall had been ransacked in the early days of the war, because some of the windows were broken out and all the clothing and shoe stores were empty holes, even the mannequins picked clean.
Ethan slowed his pace. The soldier was right behind him. “Just a minute,” he said, as he saw who he was looking for. He went past the dry fountain and stood before the Gorgon, Jeff Kushman, and the short bald man. Kushman had popsicle-stick splints and tape wrapped around the two broken fingers; he had already staked out his area and was sliding into his sleeping bag. The Gorgon stood with a rolled-up sleeping bag as if he intended to stand there all night, and the bald man was sitting on the floor with his shoes off, rubbing his feet and grimacing.
Of course the soldier followed Ethan’s footsteps, but he knew that would happen. Kushman, eyes heavy, looked up at him from the sleeping bag. The Gorgon’s head turned, and the flinty black eyes took him in. The bald man paid him no attention, so intent was he on his own two problems.
“You men all right?” Ethan asked. Before anyone could answer, he spoke to the Gorgon: “Don’t you know how to use a sleeping bag?”
“Sure he does,” Kushman said. “Just put it down anywhere, Jack. Right over here would be fine.”
The Gorgon obeyed, moving slowly and stiffly as if the lubrication of his joints was drying out.
“Jack?” Ethan repeated. “That’s funny, he doesn’t look like a ‘Jack’.”
“Shouldn’t you be getting some sleep, Ethan?” Jefferson Jericho offered a smile that didn’t have a lot of wattage behind it. “Is that your real name?”
“Real enough. Dave told me you three came from Denver. Right?”
“That’s right, son.”
“How’d you make it past all the Gray Men?”
“We were lucky.” Jefferson had already asked Joel Schuster what those horrors had been. There were none of those monsters in New Eden, and being so close to the things gave him extra incentive, if any more was needed. “We never saw any.”
“Captain Walsh said there are thousands here. You must’ve been lucky.”
“Yeah.” Jefferson watched Vope figuring out how to unroll and unzip the sleeping bag. He wondered if the Gorgon even needed sleep. One thing, they could mimic human habits pretty quickly.
“So everybody passed the blood test,” Ethan continued. He tried to probe Kushman’s mind with the silver hand, but again the bright blue sphere would not be pierced. “That’s a good thing. I wouldn’t want to think we were traveling with any aliens in human skin.”
“Me neither. That would be very disturbing, wouldn’t it? Listen…Ethan…I’m really tired, okay? Let’s talk tomorrow, I’ve got to get some sleep.” Jefferson saw that, to Vope’s credit, there had been no reaction and no reaction from Ratcoff either. But he thought: Ethan knows. The question being: if the boy knows, why hasn’t he done anything about it? He zipped up his sleeping bag as best he could, one-handed. “Goodnight,” he said as he settled in, and he gratefully closed his eyes against the overhead lights though there was still more than an hour before lights out. He would get another chance at the boy later, he thought, but at the moment the pain pills were putting him under.
“Night, Mr. Kushman,” Ethan said, and with the soldier at his back he walked toward the area where Olivia, Dave, and JayDee were sacked out. Dave had already been asleep when Ethan announced his bathroom trip to the trooper, and Olivia had been drifting that way. He was almost to them when someone touched his right arm.
He turned to face Nikki. The soldier stopped also, and being a sensible guy he backed up a few paces to give them a little more of that precious privacy.
“Hi,” Ethan said.
“Hi.” The overheads made the rhinestone star on her eyepatch glitter. “You found a place?”
“Yeah, I’m over there. You?”
“Over that way. Not far.”
He nodded. “Good to be in a safe place tonight.”
“Yeah. You get some food?”
“Somebody brought me a couple of pieces of bread and a can of Sprite. That’s all I need right now.” The somebody being a runner for Captain Walsh.
Nikki didn’t say anything for awhile. They both looked around at the people getting themselves and their children ready for a night’s rest. Then Nikki said, “It was bad…what happened to Mr. Roosa. I was standing right there almost beside him. He was a pretty good guy. It was bad, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Ethan. “Real bad.”
“Do you think they’ll come here tonight?”
He heard the fear in her voice. She looked pale and shaken, and maybe she was just hanging on. “I don’t think so,” Ethan answered. “No, probably not.”
“I don’t think so either.” She seemed to relax a little, at the confidence in Ethan’s voice. “Seems like if anybody would know, you would.”
He didn’t care to follow up that comment, which for sure dealt with his being—in her eye, at least—part alien. He had a sudden thought, though, and it involved a need to know. He said, “Would you come with me for just a minute? Let’s get away from some of these people?”
“Why?”
“I want to show you something and I want to ask you something. It’ll just take a minute. Okay?”
Nikki hesitated. She looked from him to the trooper and back again. “I don’t know, Ethan. Where would we go?”
“One of the bathrooms. I just need a minute.”
“No way,” the trooper said. “You had your bathroom time.”
Ethan had had enough. He gave the young soldier a look that might’ve melted iron. “Listen, I know you’re doing your job, but I need to ask this girl something in as private a place as there is around here. You can come in and stand there, if you want to, but I’m doing this. Shoot me if you need to.” His anger welled up. “I don’t give a fuck,” he said. And he took the girl’s elbow and began steering her back toward the bathroom. Amazingly for Ethan, Nikki let him guide her. The soldier started to say something else but closed his mouth and followed along right at their heels.
In the less-than-fragrant bathroom, with the soldier standing back a distance to give them the privacy Ethan had requested, Ethan said to Nikki, “Get ready. Okay?”
“Ready for what?”
“This.” Ethan lifted his t-shirt to show her the four upraised silver symbols. She gave a quiet gasp and stepped back a couple of paces, and for a few seconds she stared at the markings without speaking.
Then she said, with sort of a dazed but true admiration, “Cool.”
“They just happened,” he explained. “I was itching on the bus, maybe they came up then. But what I want to ask you…you said your friend was studying to be a tattoo artist, right?”
“Yeah.”
“So I guess you saw some of his tattoo books and stuff? Have you ever seen anything like this?”
“Well…maybe. I remember him showing me…like…way old lettering. Like ancient, I’m saying. But something like that exactly, I don’t remember. That one there…it looks like an ‘R’.”
The soldier was trying to edge closer to take a peek. Ethan let his t-shirt fall back into place. “They don’t hurt,” he said. “But they’re upraised, almost like they were burned on.” He felt a place within himself start to crack and break, and he feared that if it happened he would fall to pieces in front of Nikki and the guard. All he could do was stare at the floor until he could shake the feeling off and get control again. “I’m some kind of big time freak now, huh?” he said, not without bitterness.
“I guess Olivia and the others know about this? That’s why you’ve got the guard on you?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I wish I could help you more.”
“It’s okay.” Ethan shrugged. “I mean…it is what it is, right? That’s what my mom used to tell me, whenever I was feeling down about anything.” He had a sudden start, because he remembered that…his mother’s voice, speaking to him. It is what it is. And did she speak his name when she said that? Yes, she did. It was so close…so close…yet still so far away. “Nikki,” he said, quietly choked, “I don’t know what I’m turning into but I swear to you—I swear—I used to be just a regular guy. I am human. Was human, I mean. Now…what am I?” Pain leaped from him, and he felt it enter her.
Nikki took a step forward.
She put a finger to his lips.
She said, “You’ll figure it out. Don’t let it knock you down, Ethan. One thing I do believe…whatever you are, you’re on our side.”
He nodded. When Nikki withdrew her finger, he could feel the burn of it across his mouth.
“Meeting done?” the trooper asked.
“Done,” Ethan answered, though he would’ve wished to talk to Nikki longer, to get to know her…really know her…but he thought black bruises and silver tattoos and general weirdness was not going to endear him to anyone.
“Out of here, then,” came the command.
They obeyed. Out in the mall, Ethan walked with Nikki back to where her sleeping bag was. He said goodnight and then returned to his own place. Dave and Olivia were both gone to the world. JayDee was staring up at the ceiling, lost in thought, but his eyelids were drooping. Ethan crawled into his sleeping bag with a final glance toward the area where the Gorgon, Kushman, and the short bald dude were sacked out. The guard took a position nearby, leaning against a wall and cradling his rifle. He had a flashlight on his belt, which he would use many times during the night to check on his charge.
Rain began to hammer on the roof, the noise thrumming through the mall. It sounded as if they were all trapped within a gigantic bass drum. Ethan’s eyes were starting to close, but before he gave himself up fully to sleep some mechanism within him was triggered and also went on guard-duty, so he would know instantly if while he was in a sleep-state any threat got too near.
He was slipping away. Again he asked himself…why not tell Dave or Olivia or JayDee or Captain Walsh or Major Fleming what he knew to be true about the Gorgon, and about the blue sphere that protected Kushman’s mind? It wasn’t that they wouldn’t believe him. So…why not?
He knew.
If they had come to find him, then they had some idea of what he was, or what he might be. If he revealed them to anyone, his chance to know might be lost. And, also, people might be injured by the powerful serpentine presence he felt coiled within Jack the Gorgon. He thought that he shouldn’t tell what he knew just yet, for the sake of the safety of others. But he could handle the Gorgon; he was sure he could. He didn’t fear the thing, and he understood that Jack the Gorgon knew it.
So…wait. Just wait, and see what happens tomorrow.
The rain beat down. Ethan’s eyes closed. After awhile someone on a loudspeaker announced lights out, and the mall’s overheads went dark. The flashlights of patrolling soldiers played back and forth over the sleeping survivors of many days and nights of alien war, and like the survivors of any war some cried out and moaned and wept in their restless slumber while the earth turned toward another morning.
It was barely the dawn of a stormy day when Ethan felt his alarms going off. His body tingled and his brain said wake up and defend. He came fully awake almost instantly, and it seemed he recalled for just a few seconds a boy who liked to curl up in his bed and sleep late on a Saturday morning until his mother coaxed him out with breakfast of a waffle and bacon.
That boy was nearly gone.
The rain was still pouring down on the roof. Thunder boomed—real thunder, not alien weapons. Yet Ethan knew the alien presence was very close, and this sensation of alarm was not coming from the black-bearded Gorgon, Jeff Kushman, or the short bald guy. Other people were waking up, but not with Ethan’s sense of urgency. His guard was sitting cross-legged on the floor against the wall with his rifle beside him. The man was awake, either had just awakened—improbable—or had been watching Ethan and occasionally checking the boy with his flashlight all night, which was likely the case.
Ethan heard the crackle of walkie-talkies and several other soldiers rushed past, heading for the mall’s main entrance. This flurry of activity caused a stir of unease among others who had awakened, and they in turn awakened their family members or friends around them. One soldier came running along the pathway that was kept clear of sleeping bags and tents on the far side of the corridor; he was talking on his walkie-talkie in a voice that though unintelligible was charged with tension. Ethan’s guard stood up; he seemed torn between his duty here and his desire to go find out what was happening. He clicked on his own walkie-talkie, which had been hooked to his belt. “Chris, you there? What’s going on?”
Dave was waking up. He unzipped his sleeping bag and stretched so hard his joints cracked. Then he was aware of the commotion and he looked dazedly around, his need for sleep still not fully supplied. Olivia, too, had begun to stir. “What’s up?” Dave asked Ethan, who shook his head.
The soldier listened to his friend, and then he said to Ethan, “I’m off guard duty now. Something’s going on outside.”
“What is it?” Dave asked, reaching for his cap. His hair was a mass of cowlicks.
“Don’t know yet. You folks just stay here.” With that, the soldier was striding away.
“Hell if I’ll stay here.” Dave put his cap and his workboots on and stood up. Other people were moving toward the entrance, drawn by the unknown. Olivia was getting out of her sleeping bag and JayDee said in a voice still husky with sleep, “What’s wrong? What’s happening?”
“I’m going to find out.”
Ethan saw Kushman, Jack the Gorgon, and the short bald dude joining the throng of people who moved past. Kushman gave him a quick glance, as if to note his position, and then walked on. Ethan sat watching the procession of humanity. He saw mothers holding children, teenagers so burdened they had aged prematurely far beyond their years, men who had likely lost their entire families, women bedraggled and thin with hunger and sorrow, elderly people struggling onward. An old woman on a walker was being helped by a man about her age, and a young boy about sixteen or so was helping both of them. Here was a middle-aged man on crutches, missing his left leg from the knee down. There a man with long gray hair and beard and the look of a suffering saint. A wizened woman who was likely only in her early thirties held the hand of a little girl and clutched a baby to her chest. A black man with a bandage covering half his face staggered past, his hand gripped in the hand of a skinny white man who urged him along in a quiet, patient voice.
The survivors, Ethan thought. And what made them want to live a day or an hour or a minute longer? Why had they not left this earth already by their own hands, as so many had at Panther Ridge? What did they believe in that made them struggle on, as painfully as that might be? Many had given up, faced with what they believed to be hopeless odds, but many had stayed too, holding onto some measure of hope, however fantastic it might be.
He respected these people. These humans, struggling on in the darkest of hours. They wanted to live, and they were fighting for whatever scrap of life they could claw from this battle of ancient foes. They deserved the chance to live without the shadows of Cyphers and Gorgons oppressing them, he thought. They had been through much and suffered much, just as humanity all across this world had suffered, and now they deserved freedom.
He stood up.
“Going with you,” said JayDee as he steadied himself with his rebar cane, and both Ethan and Dave helped him to his feet. Olivia still looked dazed from an uneasy sleep, dark circles under her eyes, a
nd Ethan went to her side to make sure she didn’t fall because she looked so frail and unsteady, but she said, “I’m all right. Just hold my hand, okay?”
“I will,” he promised.
They made their way through the growing crowd to the mall’s entrance, where soldiers were trying to maintain some kind of order and failing miserably. Ethan saw people looking and pointing through the glass at something that seemed to be up in the dark, rainswept sky. He let go of Olivia’s hand and pushed his way toward the front, avoiding Kushman and the other two who stood nearby also peering through the glass. Captain Walsh was there, communicating with another soldier on her walkie-talkie, and Ethan was about to ask what was going on when he saw it himself.
A sphere of glowing red flames about five feet in diameter was hanging over the parking lot. As Ethan watched, what appeared to be red lightning bolts crackled out from it in all directions a distance of ten or twelve feet. Though the rain was still pouring down, the sphere was unaffected.
“You have any idea what that is?” the captain asked Ethan, pausing in her use of the walkie-talkie.
“I know it’s from the Cyphers.”
“How?”
“Red and blue. The Cyphers’ weapons put out red flames, the Gorgons’ blue. It’s different forms of energy.”
“Thing’s been sitting right there for the last fifteen minutes.” She levelled her gaze at him. “Any more ideas? The major’s out there with a recon team. He’d be real interested.”
He did have an idea, but how it came to him was another mystery. He just knew. “Recon,” he said, as he watched the sphere, “is right. That’s what it’s here for. It’s found something and it’s reporting back to wherever their command center is.”
“Found what? Us?” She didn’t hesitate, but shouted at another couple of soldiers, “Move these people back! Get them away from this glass!”
“You heard the captain! Come on, everybody move back! Let’s go!”
“Not us,” said Ethan, who was aware that Dave was coming up beside him.