His path had eventually brought him here to the fortress that the Panther Ridge Apartments had become, and though every day he prodded himself to take some supplies, saddle up a horse and go out on a journey to Cedar Rapids to see if his mother and father were still alive, the truth was he thought they were dead and any journey out there would be a torturous trip through an unbelievable Hell. He figured he wouldn’t make it two nights out, with the Gray Men on their search for fresh meat. Either that, or he might be caught in some battle between the aliens, and he would die burned to black ashes as Cheryl, Mike, and Steven had died.
Did that mean he was at heart a coward? he had asked himself. That for all his bar fights and bad-assedness and bravado, he was inside a frightened little shadow of what he portrayed himself to be?
Because, really…he was afraid. He was terrified. His friends were here. He was useful in this place. It was where he knew he would die, eventually. And from the numbers of Gray Men that had stormed the fortress last night, death was only a matter of using up five Uzi clips. Then it would all be over for him. Would it be tonight? Tomorrow night? One night next week? Impossible to know, but soon. And when it was over for him, it would likely be over for everyone else here, because not for very long would even freak earthquakes banish hunger for human meat from the bellies of those monsters.
Dave lay in his sleeping bag on his sofa and wished he had the last bottle of Jim Beam he’d finished off about a month ago. He could not make himself sleep. He could not let go of two things.
Ethan, saying with fierce conviction The earth did what I wanted.
And the fact that where the boy had walked at the bottom of the swimming pool, a crack had opened up to give them clean water.
They didn’t have to worry about rationing the bottled water anymore. Sure, there was plenty to worry about, but…not about water anymore.
The earth did what I wanted, he’d said.
And only Dave knew about Ethan walking the length of the pool, and when challenged the reply was I felt like I needed to come here.
A simple statement. But…there was something more to it. Much more. Dave had his own feelings, and abruptly he got out of his sleeping bag and put on his shoes and cap. He had seen black-helmeted soldiers glide through the walls of his house and seen monstrous things that used to be God-fearing, hard-working American citizens tearing at barbed wire for the taste of human meat and seen the glowing trails of alien battleships in the night sky, and he realized that things he had never dreamt could possibly be true were true, and forevermore nothing in this nightmare world could be considered impossible. Dave left his apartment and started down the hill toward the hospital, because he had some questions to ask a mysterious boy.
Six.
Even in the stronghold of sleep, Ethan was not safe.
He was standing atop the wall again, watching the multitude of distorted, disfigured and decaying figures swarming forward up the hillside. Guns were firing all around him and cut many of them down, but just as many of the Gray Men caught hold of the rocks, hooking spiked toes and fingers into the cracks and climbing up with the speed and determination of rabid hunger. They began to climb over the barbed wire, some pressing the coils down with their bodies so more could get over, others tearing with maddened fury through the wire to get at the defenders beyond.
The walls were about to be conquered. Guns were running out of ammo and falling silent. Some of the defenders were caught between ripping claws and torn by saw-blade teeth, others jumped in panic from the platform to the ground and fled to find shelter. Ethan backed away from spiny figures crawling over the wire before him. He was balanced on the edge of the platform, and suddenly an ashen-colored hand darted through the coils and caught him by the throat. Ethan saw a slender thing that might have been half-human and half-serpent pushing itself over the wire, and he was pulled toward it with terrible strength. A yellow-eyed face blotched with warty gray scales and topped with a shock of black hair stared into Ethan’s own face, and the thin-lipped mouth opened to show teeth already sharpened and broken by gnawing on human bones.
The mouth opened. The teeth glinted.
The creature spoke, in a rattling whisper.
“Go,” it said, “to the white mansion.” Then a bullet hit the side of its head and the black blood ran. The yellow eyes blinked, as if in indignant surprise. The hook-nailed hand released Ethan’s throat and the creature fell back across the barbed wire leaving pieces of gray flesh hanging from the barbs.
“Ethan? Ethan?”
Someone was shaking his shoulder. He felt himself flinch, and realized in his darkness that he was coming out of a solid sleep. He opened his eyes to the glow of an oil lamp on the table next to him. Curtains had been drawn over the windows to filter the afternoon’s hazy light. Rain was falling outside, thrashing at the broken glass which had been covered over with sheets of styrofoam. Water dripped from the ceiling at a half-dozen places. Ethan had no idea how long he’d been sleeping in this narrow bed in the small room that was part of the hospital. Someone had pulled a chair up next to his bed. Ethan saw a hard-lined face with a hawk’s beak of a nose. Dave McKane had removed his baseball cap, his multiple cowlicks sticking up. The man smelled like a wet dog.
“JayDee let me in,” Dave explained quietly. The door between this room and the other part of the hospital was closed, mostly. “Said you’d had enough rest, you oughta be okay.”
Ethan sat up on the bed. His body still ached and his mind was a little foggy. Three words were echoing around in his brain: the white mansion. He nodded. “I’m okay. Better, I guess.”
Dave grunted. He wore the pained expression of someone in desperate need of either a cigarette or a drink of whiskey, and the doctor had forbidden him to smoke in here and that last bottle of Beam was a golden memory. “I have to ask you some questions.” His voice was not harsh, but rather imploring. He paused and studied the knuckles of his hands for a moment. Rainwater glistened on the baseball cap, which was hung on the back of his chair. The rain itself had felt oily and hot on Dave’s skin as he’d walked from his apartment to the hospital, and he wondered how many alien poisons were in it.
“Go ahead,” Ethan said, sensing the man’s indecision of where to begin.
“Yeah,” Dave answered. “Okay. You said you caused the quakes. How is that possible? I mean…you’re a boy, right? A human? Aren’t you?”
“You must think so. You didn’t bring your machine gun.”
“I’m going to believe you’re human. Not something that looks human. Some experiment the Cyphers or the Gorgons made. But…if you caused the quakes, how did you do that?”
“I don’t really know,” Ethan said, and in his mind he thought the white mansion. He was trying to push that away, but it would not be pushed away, and stronger and stronger it was becoming. “I wanted it to happen. I put my hands on the wall. I wanted the earth to shake the Gray Men off. That’s all I could think to do.”
“You put your hands on the wall? And you just thought of what you wanted to happen, and it did?”
“Yes.”
“Uh-huh. Okay, then. Move my hat off the back of the chair and put it on my head.”