The white mansion, he thought as he strode up the hill. It was crazy. Made no sense. Nothing did anymore. The white mansion, my ass, he thought.
But he also thought how resolute the boy’s voice had been, when Ethan had said I think I have to go there.
And more unsettling…I believe something is telling me to go there.
Dave looked back and saw Ethan following, a slim figure almost obscured by the rain. He started to pause and wait for the boy, but he kept going. He didn’t know if he thought Ethan was crazy, or…
…something else?
Nobody could make an earthquake, Dave thought as he walked through the downpour. And that weirdness about the swimming pool, and the white mansion, and now the boy lying dead in the bricks of a destroyed strip mall, wearing the one-sleeved dark red shirt he’d had on yesterday.
But still…the boy, saying I believe something is telling me to go there.
Go where? And why? And how would anybody even figure out what the damned place was, and where it was?
Would be nice, Dave thought, for this so-called voice that Ethan is hearing to tell him the whole story and not just bits and pieces.
For all his toughness, for all his hardness and bitterness about what this world and his life—all their lives—had turned into, Dave McKane was suddenly overcome.
He felt himself stagger. He felt his knees buckle. He felt the hard rain beating on his back, driving him down. He had the crazed feeling that he was coming apart at the seams, himself becoming a Gray Man in this poisoned land, and once a certain threshold was crossed in that change he could never return to what he’d been.
Suddenly he was on his knees on the roadway, and he pressed his hands to his mouth to contain a cry for mercy, not just for himself but for all of them, all who had suffered and lost loved ones and become prisoners here waiting to die. He felt tears burning his eyes, but they were quickly washed away. He thought that if he let himself cry he would go over the edge, and all his pretend strength would fly away and be gone, baby, gone.
So he just knelt there in the pouring rain, and he hung on to whatever he had left.
“You need some help?”
Dave looked up. Ethan was standing over him. The boy offered a hand.
Dave wanted to believe in something. Anything, to get him to tomorrow. He asked himself if it was wrong to believe—at least in this moment—that Ethan Gaines could make the earth quake, that he had felt the movement of a spring beneath the pool’s concrete and earth’s rock, that he had been dead and brought back to life by some force unknown, and that he was being directed to go to a place called the white mansion?
Was it wrong, in this moment?
He didn’t know, but at least in this moment with aliens battling across the world and nightmare creatures being spawned from their energies and poisons, he did believe. Just a little, just enough to get him to tomorrow.
But even so, he rejected the hand and stood up on his own.
He began walking again up the hillside to his crumbling apartment, more slowly now, with the labor of intense deliberation, and after a moment meant to give Dave McKane his space, the boy followed nearly in his footsteps.
Seven.
Near midnight, Dave spoke the words he’d been trying to get out for awhile but they hadn’t come. They were ready now.
“What if there’s a real place called the white mansion?”
“Surely there is,” John Douglas answered. “A town somewhere. Or used to be a town. Could be in another country.” He placed his tiles upon the Scrabble board to spell the word oasis, and then he took five more tiles followed by a long drink from his full cup of fresh water. “But just because Ethan heard it supposedly spoken to him in a dream…that doesn’t mean very much. Does it?” He peered across the board at Dave. Two oil lamps and a candle lantern burned in the doctor’s apartment, number 108, which had sustained shattered windows and a half-dozen fissures down the walls. The door had been reshaped with a handsaw to fit the warped frame. In any other cirmcumstance, the entire apartment complex would have been evacuated and yellow-taped off as a condemned property, but the beggars here could not be choosers.
Olivia Quintero studied the board on the scarred table between them. A rifle leaned against the chair at her side. The Gray Men had not come tonight, in the pouring rain. They might yet attack before dawn, but for now they were quiet. She needed to go to sleep, but Dave had asked her to join him and the doctor here, and it was at least a way to relax a little. The best she could do was add an E and a L to the word bow. She chose two more tiles, a T and a blank. “What do you think about the story?” Her question was directed to JayDee. “About Ethan lying dead?”
“I think the man was in a mental state and he missed the heartbeat and pulse.”
“Maybe so. But after what you told me in my office…about the bruises. You were thinking the boy was caught in a shockwave and he ought to be dead. Isn’t that right?”
“I didn’t put it exactly like that.”
“You didn’t have to.” She watched as Dave put an R in front of oar. “That was your meaning. As I recall, you were amazed he didn’t at least have major internal injuries, and he could still walk.” She leaned back in her chair, the better to judge the expressions of both men. “Dave, what are you thinking?”
Dave took his time. He watched JayDee add with before the word draw. Then he said, without looking at Olivia, “I’m not sure Ethan is what he seems to be. I don’t know what the hell he is, but I’d say…if he really did cause those quakes…somehow…by using some force we don’t—”
“Impossible!” scoffed the doctor.
“Is it?” Dave took a drink from his own cup of water. “Look, what do we know about anything anymore? What can we be sure of? All this the last two years…it defies everything humans ever believed in. And the Gray Men…mutating so fast. Who would have ever thought it was possible? And it wouldn’t have been possible, without the aliens. Without whatever it is they’ve infected the world with. Okay…” He turned his chair to more directly face the doctor. “What if…Ethan is something different. Maybe an experiment the Cyphers or Gorgons made—”
“His blood didn’t fry,” JayDee reminded him.
“That’s right, but still…something different. Something more advanced.”
“Not human?” Olivia asked. “He looks like a boy, but he’s not?”
“I don’t know. I’m just trying to—”
“Talk yourself into believing Ethan Gaines has come to Panther Ridge to save us?” JayDee’s white eyebrows went up. “To deliver the mighty earthquakes to keep the Gray Men from eating us alive? If that’s so, even Ethan has to understand that one more tremor like that, and Panther Ridge is a pile of rubble.”