Ethan walked down the steps into the pool’s shallow end. The blue paint covering the bottom had gone dark and scabby and was coming up in wrinkled sheets. Exposed beneath it was gray concrete. He walked in a straight line at the center of the pool, down the slight decline into the deep end. His shoes found about four inches of dirty rainwater around the drain.
What was here? he asked himself.
Nothing, was the answer.
His motion in the water caused the debris to float away from him. He sloshed in a circle around the drain, because it seemed to him the thing to do. Was there something here after all? he wondered. A deep, secret movement…like the flowing together of the blue and silver squares upon the wall? He stood for awhile in the deep end, his senses questing for something he wasn’t sure of, and then he walked back up to the shallow end along the middle of the pool. He had the distinct feeling that something hidden was very near, and yet…
“What in the name of Jack Shit are you doing out here?” a hard voice suddenly asked.
Ethan looked to his right, where the figure of Dave McKane stood with his Uzi at his side, pointed somewhere just east of the boy. “I heard your door open and close,” Dave said. “My place is next to yours. What are you doing? Getting water?”
“No, sir.” Ethan saw that Dave might not have done much sleeping tonight, because he was still dressed in what he’d been wearing today and he had his baseball cap on. “I just came out walking.”
“That’s a bag of bull’s balls.”
Ethan decided the truth was best. The truth, at least, as he understood it. “I felt like I needed to come here.”
“Yeah? Midnight swimming?”
“No, sir. I just needed to come here, that’s all.”
“What? To get a drink?”
Ethan shook his head. “I’m thirsty, but Olivia said not to trust the rainwater. That’s why you only drink the bottled water.” He thought of the prison room, and the inspection he’d endured. What John Douglas had said: We’re checking to see whether you’re fully human or not. Ethan knew, but he wanted to hear it. “You think the rainwater’s poison, don’t you? Because of all the alien stuff up there?” He tilted his chin toward the lightning-shot sky. “What does it do to people? Turn them into things you have to kill?”
“We don’t know that yet,” Dave said. “We don’t know why some things come in here looking like humans. Maybe they were humans once, and they’re being engineered by them.” He made a motion toward the horizon’s flickering lightning. “Playing with the human toys, maybe. There’s just a hell of a lot we don’t know.”
“But that’s not all, is it?”
“No,” Dave said. “Not all.”
“Tell me.”
“First get out of there.” Dave aimed his Uzi at the ground and retreated a few paces as Ethan came up the pool’s steps.
“What else?” Ethan prompted.
Dave said, “The Gray Men come at night.”
“The Gray Men,” Ethan repeated. He didn’t like the sound of that, not from Dave’s mouth or from his own. And then he had to ask: “What are they?”
“Mutated humans.” Dave pulled no punches and he wasn’t about to start now. “Some of them are…way mutated…into things that don’t look human anymore. We don’t know what causes it. Maybe it’s something in the atmosphere, in the rain, maybe it’s a disease they brought. The Gray Men come at night. Not every night, but when they do try to get in here…it’s bad. We think—JayDee thinks—their skin can’t take sunlight anymore. Or something that keeps them hidden during the day. Like I say, we don’t know for sure and we haven’t met anybody who does.”
Ethan had a jumble of questions in his mind, all trying to be first. He started with, “Why are they called Gray Men?”
“Because they are gray. Or near enough. They’ve lost all their flesh color. I don’t know who first called them that, but it suits ’em. They started coming about three months ago. Only a few at first…then more and more. I think they have some kind of radar or sense or whatever that draws them together…maybe they can smell each other.” Dave offered a thin, pained smile. “We don’t have much ammo left. Glad you joined our happy group?”
“Better than being out there.”
“Uh-huh. Well, the Gray Men try to get at us because they’re meat eaters. They drag their dead away, so we figure they eat the corpses. That keeps them satisfied for awhile.”
Ethan nodded. “But I’m not gray and I’m not mutated. So why did you take me to that room where you’ve killed things?”
“We took you to the Secure Room because we’ve had…let’s call them intruders. They’re creatures who look like humans, and maybe they used to be or they still think they are…but now they’re another kind of lifeform. JayDee’s opinion—and Olivia’s too—is that they’re humans who’ve been picked up by the aliens and experimented on. Then they’re let loose. Like alien time-bombs, I guess. Let’s just say we’ve had some real interesting reactions to the saline. We had another doctor here. He killed himself and his wife and son last December, but it was his idea to get something in the bloodstream to test all new arrivals. Thank God he came up with that, or we would’ve let some real horrors in here without knowing it until too late.”
“The rain,” Ethan said. “You think that’s what makes the Gray Men? If that’s so, hasn’t anybody here ever started changing?”
“Yes, they have. It starts out as gray, ashy-looking blotches. The blotches get bigger, fast…and then the bones start changing. We kept the first victim under watch while it happened. We had to chain her up, which was cruel as hell but we had to.” Dave stared darkly at the boy before he went on. “After a couple of days, when she was twisted and deformed, she started growing a second head that was all mouth and little needle teeth. That’s when her father stepped in and shot her. She was twelve years old.”
“Oh,” said Ethan, or thought he did.
“We had four others. They had to be taken care of before it got too bad. There has to be poison in the atmosphere,” Dave said. “Sometimes the rain falls dirty brown or piss yellow, but we’re not sure that causes the mutations. Nobody’s sure of anything. But yeah…that’s why we’re depending on the bottled water. We shelter the horses but we know they’re getting exposed to the rain, and we’re eating the horses, and the rain’s eating through the roofs and walls and leaking in…so there’s no way to avoid it. The doc thinks it takes time for the effects to show up, and maybe it depends on a person’s chemistry too. Like any virus, or cancer. Some get it, some don’t.” Dave shrugged. “What are you gonna do?” He answered his own question: “Die, eventually. It’s just…how long you want to wait.”
“Why have you waited?” Ethan glanced pointedly at the submachine gun.
Dave held the Uzi up before his face and examined it as if it were a piece of deadly art. Then he let it fall back to his side. “Good question,” he allowed. “I’ve known a lot of people in here who decided not to wait. Decided that between the Gorgons, the Cyphers, the Gray Men and plain old hopelessness, it was best to pass on through the gates.” He paused for a moment, pondering an answer. “I guess,” he said at last, “I’m not ready yet. But tomorrow, I might be. Just depends on the—”
Weather, he was about to say, but he was interrupted by a red flare suddenly shooting skyward from the watchtower at the western corner of the wall.