The two riders headed toward the high school down in the valley below. Occasionally on the hillside they passed a hand, arm, or head of a nightmarish creature, caught like strange flowers in fissures in the ground. The vultures were busy; Dave thought that they didn’t care what meat they ate, and so even those things were likely to be corrupted and turned into…what?
He had his Uzi in his shoulder holster and in a holster at his belt, a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolver that had belonged to Mitch Vandervere. Mitch’s apartment had yielded four boxes of bullets, twenty each, and the gun held five rounds. That was the way of things. When someone fell, you drew straws or cards with whoever else was on the burial detail and took the departed’s weapons and ammo, no fighting or squabbling allowed, and Dave had won high card over Mitch’s headless corpse. So in Dave’s possession were 80 Magnum rounds and five clips of thirty-two slugs each for the Uzi, and that was it for now. Olivia had her rifle slung across her shoulder, along with a small black leather bag holding thirty more bullets.
They didn’t speak as they rode. They had not talked about their mission before they’d left. A few men had offered to ride with them, as extra protection, but the offerings had been half-hearted, and Olivia had said no, they’d manage this by themselves.
They crossed open ground scarred by craters with edges seared crusted and black by the alien weapons. The road’s asphalt was cracked and also cratered, and Olivia thought the Earth was being transformed into a planet the Cyphers and Gorgons perhaps better understood: a ruined charnel house of war that in another year or two would no longer be suitable for human life. Everything would be contaminated, if it wasn’t already. And now she had to stop these thoughts before they overwhelmed her, and she had tears in her eyes and a deep, sick sadness in her heart and that old ticking time bomb in her mind that said it would be so easy and so right to join Vincent. Her spirit was so near to being extinguished. Her life force, tattered and destroyed. She could feel it leaving her, day by day. When she and Dave got back behind the walls, she knew two or three more people would probably have shot themselves. They were losing more and more, and it was getting faster now.
The white mansion, she thought as they neared the high school. Ethan’s name right up there on the weather-beaten sign. The building itself a wreckage. And in the parking lot…what was that? Three huge…things…lying there covered with vultures like dark rippling skins…the thick, hideous bodies burned to crisps and seeping black fluids like scorched engine oil. And here and there the outlines of where smaller bodies had been lying, only now they were reduced to a residue of shiny ebony material like shreds of rubber. She knew what those were, she’d seen them before. The remnants of Cypher soldiers, bubbling and melting away to nothingness. But those creatures…those monsters…Olivia’s mind had to fix on something else, and quickly. “Dave?” she said in a weak voice, “what happened to the cars? The ones that used to be here?”
“Don’t ask,” he said, because Hannah Grimes had told him what she’d seen through the binoculars and he’d informed Hannah—a tough old bird if there ever was one—to keep that pinned under her wig, for the sake of Christ. So far Hannah wasn’t talking, but it was probably just a matter of time. Creating alien flesh out of earthly metal was a new one; when that got around Panther Ridge, Katie bar the fucking door.
The horses nickered and shivered and would not go into the parking lot. “Go on, go on,” said Dave to his mount but the animal’s eyes had gotten wild and it rumbled like an avalanche deep in its lungs, the message being You may be a damned fool but I am not. No further, bucko.
“What are those?” Olivia had finally made herself fix on the monsters, even as her horse began to back away as if fearful of stepping into a tarpit. “Dave?”
“Whatever they were, they’re dead.” He got down from the saddle and looked for a place to tie his horse. Last time he’d been here, a few months back, he’d used the front fender of a pickup truck. That same truck had recently walked away and might be lying over there plucked by vultures. He noted the impressions in the asphalt that might have been caused by the weight of those things. Flesh from metal. Life from an inanimate object. A good trick, if you could do it. He recalled something he’d read maybe in a book at his own high school, but it had stuck with him because he’d thought it had sounded cool. How did it go? Something like… “Any super-advanced technology seems like magic.” Was that it? No, but close enough. Well, here was the super-advanced technology on full magical display.
Damn ’em, he thought. Their weapons were getting stranger and more deadly. An arms race, Ethan had said. “Yeah, and we’re stuck right in the fuckin’ middle,” Dave said to that thought, which made Olivia ask, “What?” and he just shrugged and walked the horse to a STOP sign that stood near the entrance to the lot. It had been bent almost in half by possibly the same concussion that had blown out the school’s windows. “You want to stay here, that’s fine with me,” he said. “I can find the library.”
Olivia was already dismounting. She walked her jittery horse over and tied it up to the sign as well. Her eyes were fixed on Dave, but they wanted to slide over to look at the dead creatures again, and she knew she couldn’t stay out here alone.
She unslung the rifle from her shoulder, a smooth move she was getting good at. Never in her life would she have believed she might become a warrior. But here she was, ready to fight if she had to.
“Let’s go,” she said. They followed a cracked concrete path up to stone stairs that entered the building. One door had been blown inward off its hinges, the other hung crookedly like a Saturday night drunk. Or, Dave mused, how Saturday night drunks used to hang. The light within was murky, stained yellow like the ugly sky. Glass crunched under their boots, a noise that seemed to Olivia to be terribly loud in this silent place.
But not quite silent. Water dripped from the ceiling in a hundred places. Wet papers had grown to the floor and turned the color of strong tea. The floor tiles gave a little as Dave and Olivia walked; the floor itself felt spongy, as if upheld by rotten beams just on the verge of collapse. They passed what had once been a trophy case, the pride of the high school’s sports teams, now shattered and the trophies darkened by waterstains. A huge mural on one wall that had likely been painted by students depicted the world and figures surrounding it linked arm in arm. The mural was blotched by large brown scabs where the wall’s plaster had fallen away, but the faded message “The Family Of Man” was still legible.
“That was the office,” Dave said as they passed an open doorway. “Lunchroom is up this way. I found the medical supplies in a room a little further along. The library must be past that.”
Olivia nodded. The falling water tap…tap…tapped. Puddles washed around discarded notebooks and debris that had spilled from open lockers in the students’ panic to get home on that day in April. She could imagine the teachers and the principal trying to keep order, the intercom system crackling, the parents swarming these halls in search of their children while the newscasts showed the Gorgon ships destroying cities all over the world. Only ghosts remained here now, she thought. The ghosts of a way of life; the ghosts of not only the American Dream, but the dream of the Family of Man.