Thirty-Five.
He was working on the wooden fence on the western edge of his property that the March wind had gnawed down last week. He wore his dark blue baseball cap, old comfortable jeans, a brown t-shirt, and a tan-colored jacket. In like a lamb, out like a lion, he thought. It had been one hell of a lion this—
And then Dave McKane staggered and dropped his hammer, because something terrible was coming. He looked at his wristwatch, a gift from Cheryl on their tenth anniversary. It was one minute after ten. Something was coming from the sky. It was crazy, yeah…crazy…because the sky was cloudless and blue and the sun was warming up and…
Something was coming.
He ran for the house, calling his wife’s name. He ran past the pickup truck and the camper, which for some strange reason he envisioned scorched with flame and sitting on four melted tires. He was losing his mind. Right out of the blue, on a beautiful day, he was going insane.
“Dave! What’s wrong with you?” Cheryl said when he burst like a wild man through the screened door and took it off its hinges on his way into the kitchen. He tossed it aside. He was all nerves, had the shakes, needed a drink, a cigarette, wow was he screwed up. Thank Christ the boys were in school, they couldn’t see their old man the bad-ass scared shitless because he was, and that was God’s truth.
“Dave? Dave?” Cheryl, a small-boned woman who had the biggest heart Dave had ever known, followed her husband through the house to the front room. He kept checking his watch, but he wasn’t sure why. He picked up the remote control, dropped it, fumbled to pick it up again, and turned on the flatscreen.
“What is wrong with you?” she asked. “You’re actin’ crazy!”
“Uh-huh.” He turned the channel to CNN. The newscaster was talking about a protest movement in Washington, a few thousand people had gathered who wanted to go to a flat tax, and spokesmen for both parties were saying they liked that idea, but Dave knew they were lying, both parties were full of liars who didn’t care about anything but their own wallets and their grip on power, they were fighting all the time and it was an endless war with the citizens caught in the middle. “Wait,” he told Cheryl, and he checked the Bulova again. “Just wait.”
He changed the channel to Fox News. Over there two men and a woman were arguing that the President shouldn’t go on his European trip with all these problems at home, he was shirking his duty to the American people, he was pandering to Europe, he was a Missouri Democrat who didn’t know the meaning of responsibility, he was weak-willed and anyway his wife was no Jackie Kennedy, Laura Bush, or for that matter no Michelle Obama. Then they ended with laughter over the statement that Beale had better get ready for a “Repeal” and they went on to the stock market reports from Indonesia.
Dave turned back to CNN. The timestamp on the network said it was 10:09. His watch was one minute slow. Now the newscaster had gone on to a report of an American cargo ship being threatened by Somalian pirates last night but they’d been turned away by a patrol boat.
“Lordy!” Cheryl said. “What’s so important about watching the news today?”
“Something’s coming,” he told her before he could stop it from getting out.
“What?”
“Coming from the sky. Listen…I don’t know…I feel messed up.”
“You’re scaring me,” she said. “Cut it out.”
He lit a cigarette with his Bic and drew it in as if it were the last smoke he would have in this world.
“What happened out there? Dave, talk to me!” She put her arm around his shoulders and found he was trembling, which really put the fear in her. Her husband wasn’t scared of anything, he would fight the Devil if he thought it was right. But now…
“This is the third of April?” he asked.
“You know it is! Your birthday is in two weeks, you’ve been—”
“Wait.” Dave blew smoke through his nostrils. “Wait and watch.”
She waited, her heart pounding and her arm around the trembling shoulders. He made a soft noise like a cry down deep in his soul, and that sound almost put her on the cell phone for an ambulance because she had never, ever seen him like this before.
Another long and terrible minute went past, during which Dave smoked in silence and Cheryl said nothing.
The CNN newscaster then began to talk to a specialist in the housing market about mortgage rates and such, and what would happen if this or that took place and how people were going to cope.
“I don’t know what we’re supposed to be waiting for,” Cheryl said.
Dave rubbed a hand across his forehead. Bits and pieces were coming back; it was like a big jigsaw puzzle of memories in his head, and some slid right in but some wouldn’t fit. He wanted to throw up because his stomach roiled, but he was afraid to leave the TV.
That portion of the news ended, and the newscaster turned to the anti-government protests in Bangkok that had started last week and had so far caused three deaths and twelve injuries in clashes between protesters and police. A young man with slicked-back black hair and wearing studious-looking glasses came on; it was night, with a few lights burning behind him. Dave didn’t know how many hours Thailand was ahead of Colorado but he figured it had to be nearly the next day over there.
The young man was asked the question, “What’s the situation there tonight, Craig?”
Craig started to speak into his microphone but then stopped; his face was pale and his eyes were both dazed and terrified behind the glasses. He looked up toward the sky and then back to the camera, and suddenly there was a noise like two or three sonic booms overlapping each other, and Craig threw up a hand as if to shield his face from some horrible sight. “Oh Jesus, oh Jesus!” he cried out, nearly sobbing, and he lurched from the scene as the camera turned from him to scan the sky. At first there was nothing in the sky but darkness. The camera searched back and forth, enough to make any viewer ill with motion sickness. It found the half moon and what appeared to be the lights of a passing jetliner.
“We’re having a situation there, evidently,” the newcaster said over the visual, his voice tight but measured and calm in the way that all newscasters must sound to ease the fears of their audience. “Some kind of situation. We may have just heard a bomb explosion. Craig, are you there? Craig?”
The camera jiggled back and forth, turning the nightime lights into blurry ribbons of color. It picked out Thai people on the street, some standing in groups talking, others walking around as if just waking up from a bad dream. A man who appeared to be wearing a sleep robe suddenly ran past the camera hollering and shrieking with his hands in the air.
Craig was back on-camera. “Jim?” he said. He spoke with a British accent. A lock of black hair had come free and hung over one eye. “Jim, can you hear me?”
“We can hear you, go ahead.”
“This is crazy,” Cheryl said, and Dave drew hard on his cigarette again.
“They didn’t come!” Craig sounded choked. “Jim, they didn’t come!”
“I’m sorry, I’m not getting that! What?”
“They didn’t come!” Craig repeated, and now he had begun to weep. “Oh Christ…Jesus…they didn’t come…like they did last time, and I was standing right here…right here, the very same. I heard the noise, but they didn’t come!”
Ethan, Dave thought. The peacekeeper. The alien timepiece at the S-4 installation. It worked. And he said he would keep the Gorgons from coming through, and if they didn’t come neither would the Cyphers.
“Jim, don’t you remember?” Craig called out. Behind him a car rocketed along the street, its driver wildly honking the horn.