The Border Copyright © 2015
by The McCammon Corporation.
All rights reserved.
Dust jacket and interior illustrations Copyright © 2015
by David Ho.
All rights reserved.
Interior design Copyright © 2015
by Desert Isle Design, LLC.
All rights reserved.
Electronic Edition
ISBN
978-1-59606-704-2
Subterranean Press
PO Box 190106
Burton, MI 48519
subterraneanpress.com
Table of Contents
Part One
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Part Two
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Part Three
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty One
Twenty Two
Part Four
Twenty Three
Twenty Four
Twenty Five
Twenty Six
Twenty Seven
Twenty Eight
Part Five
Twenty Nine
Thirty
Thirty One
Thirty Two
Thirty Three
Thirty Four
Thirty Five
To Uncle Carlos
One.
Last Stand
At Panther Ridge
One.
The boy who was running ran into the rain.
He came suddenly into its stinging shower. Within seconds it became a small storm of torment, like the fierce prick of a hundred hot needles. He looked back as he ran and saw through the moving haze the tops of mountains explode in the distance. He saw chunks of rock as big as buildings fly into the diseased air, crash back upon the earth and crack into tumbling fragments. Above the mountains flickered the electric blue lightning that put terror into the heart of the bravest man and made the weaker man fall to his knees.
The boy kept running, into the rain.
The field was wide and long. The field was barren. Its mud
began to pull at the boy’s shoes. He was wearing dirty Pumas, once white. He couldn’t remember where they had come from, or when he’d put them on. He couldn’t remember where his dirty jeans had come from, or his grimy dark red shirt that was missing its right sleeve. He couldn’t remember much at all.
He knew, though, that he had to run. And he had to hope he would live through this day.
For though his memory flapped like a tattered flag, he knew what was behind him. He knew he was in Colorado. He knew why the mountains, as old as time, were being torn to jagged pieces. He knew what the blue lightning was, and why soon there would be pulses of red flame floating up from tortured earth to angry sky. They were fighting there. They had found another border to contest. And between them, they would destroy it all.
He ran on, breathing hard, and sweating in the sultry air, as the rain began to hammer down.
The mud took him. It trapped his shoes and made him stumble and down he went into its embrace. It was sticky and hot and got on his face and up his nose. Dark with mud, he struggled up to his knees. Through the curtains of rain, he saw the movements on both sides of him, to left and right in the wide barren field, and he knew one army was on the march.
The boy flattened himself in his muddy pool. He lay like the dead, though his heart was very much alive in its pounding and twisting on a root of terror. He wished he could cover himself with the mud, that he could sink into it and be protected by its darkness, but he lay still and curled up like an infant just out of the womb and stunned by life itself.
He had seen them before. Somewhere. His mind was wrecked. His mind had crashed into some event that had left him half-brainless and groping for memory. But to left and right he saw the blurred smears of their presence as they moved across the field like swirls of gray smoke, like formless but deadly ghosts.
He lay still, his hands gripped into the earth as if in fear of being flung into nothingness.
And suddenly he realized one of them had stopped its advance, and in stopping its body caught up with itself and took form, and suddenly one of them was standing only a few feet to his left and was staring at him.
The boy couldn’t help but stare back, his face freighted with mud. There was no protection to be found here. There was no protection to be found anywhere. The boy’s blue eyes stared into the black featureless slope of the creature’s face, or mask or helmet or whatever it might be. The creature was thin to the point of skeletal, its body about seven feet tall. It was similar to the human body in that it had two arms and two legs. Black-gloved hands with ten fingers. Black boots on human-shaped feet. Whether this was a construction or a real thing born from egg or womb, the boy did not know and could not guess. The black skin-tight suit showed no inch of flesh, and small veins laced the suit carrying rushes of dark reddish fluid. The creature did not seem to be breathing.
The creature held a weapon. It was black also, but it looked fleshy. It had two barrels, and was connected to the body by the fluid-carrying veins.
The weapon was held down at the creature’s side, but aimed at the boy. A finger was on a spiky pod that might be a trigger.
The boy knew his death was very close.
A vibration keened the air. It was felt rather than heard, and it made the hairs on the back of the boy’s neck ripple. It made his skin crawl and his scalp of unruly brown hair tighten, for he knew what was to come without knowing how he knew.
The creature looked behind it, and upward. Other creatures halted their blurred, ghostly motion and became solid. They too looked upward and their weapons raised in unison toward the enemy.
Then the boy heard it, through the noise of falling rain. He turned his head and angled his face up into the downpour, and through the low yellow clouds came the thing that made a noise like the quiet movement of gears in a fine wristwatch or the soft ticking of a time bomb.
It was huge, two hundred feet across in a triangle shape, and mottled with colors like the hide of a prehistoric predator: brown, yellow, and black. It was as thin as a razor and had no ports nor openings. It was all muscle. It glided forward with what the boy thought was an awesome and nearly silent power. Yellow tendrils of disturbed air flowed back from the flared wingtips, and four electric-blue orbs the size of manhole covers pulsed at its belly. As the craft continued to advance slowly and almost silently, one of the creatures on the ground fired its weapon. A double gout of flame that was not exactly flame, but had something white-hot at the center of its two scorching red trails, shot up toward the craft. Before it reached meat or metal—whatever the craft was made of—a blue spark erupted and snuffed out the flames and its two centers of destruction as easily as damp fingers on a matchhead.
Instantly, as the boy watched and shivered in spite of his frozen posture, the creatures turned their weapons on the craft and began to fire…faster and faster, the gouts of alien flame flaring up in dazzling incandescent ropes, hundreds of them, all to be extinguished by the leaping and sizzling blue spark.
The boy knew, without knowing how he knew. His mind echoed with things he could not exactly hear nor understand. He seemed to have come a long way from where he’d started, though where that had been he did not remember.
But he knew this, though he could not remember his own name or where he’d been running from or to or where his parents were: The creatures with the weapons…soldiers of the Cyphers.
The craft above…piloted by the Gorgons.
Names humans had given them. Their real names unknown. Their silence impenetrable.
The blue spark jumped and danced, putting out the white-hot flames with almost dismissive ease. The rain poured down and the yellow clouds swirled. The Cypher soldiers began to lower their ineffective weapons and vibrate again into blurs, and suddenly the boy was alone in the muddy field. The monstrous craft floated above him, its blue orbs pulsing. He felt as small as an insect on a windshield, about to be smashed into pulp. He tensed to jump up and run again, as far as he could get in this mud and downpour, and then the craft drifted on past him and he felt its force diminish as it gained speed. In his mouth there was the taste of mud and something like the tang of running the tongue across rusted metal. He heard a sharp sizzling noise—bacon in a frying pan—and turning his head in the direction of the parting craft he saw bolts of electric-blue energy striking out from the vehicle’s underside. Small explosions—bursts of black matter—showed hits on the Cypher soldiers even as they blurred themselves into near-invisibility.