Over three hundred miles from here as the eagle flies, Dave had said. But we’re not eagles.
It was a long way, to depend on a voice in a dream and a voice inside himself urging him to go. A long way, with all that out there, the Gray Men hungering for meat, and the Gorgons and Cyphers forever at war. And how were they supposed to get there? By walking? By the horses, which meant taking the last food from these people? And what would they do for food on the journey? How could it be done?
Ethan sat down and stared at the glow of the candle lantern. The morning’s light was getting stronger, a yellowish hue. Ethan figured it was going to be what people used to call a “nice day”, considering how screwed up the atmosphere was.
I should be dead, he thought. But I’m human. I know I am. I remember a mother and a house and a room with a desk lamp and on the table, bottles of Testors paint and the plastic organs lined up. But I should be dead…and instead of that I am here staring at a candle and wondering…
….who will go with me, when I go?
Ten.
With the passage of three more days, life as such went on at Panther Ridge. Water was collected from the spring that had filled up the swimming pool. Another horse was slaughtered, and on that day Olivia Quintero did not emerge from her apartment. John Douglas talked a weeping young man out of killing himself, his wife, and little boy, but while he was doing that, a middle-aged woman who used to be a watercolor artist in Loveland blew her head off with a shotgun in the dark confines of Apartment 278. Work went on to strengthen the wall, as always. Up in the machine-gun towers the nightwatchmen saw the distant flickering of either lightning or two worlds at war over the border.
On that same night, Ethan Gaines walked the perimeter, lost in thought. The pull from the White Mansion was stronger now, and it was hard to sleep. The complex was quiet; it was about two in the morning, he figured. A few other people were up, walking alone or talking in small groups. He saw a woman sobbing with her head against a man’s shoulder, and the man had a drawn, weary face and eyes that saw nothing. He saw a teen-aged girl lying on the ground staring up at the sky as if trying to pierce the mysteries there. She was hampered by that because she wore a black eyepatch over her left eye, but it was decorated with small stick-on rhinestones. She was about his age, he thought, and she had blonde hair and a pretty oval face with a small cleft in the chin. Maybe she was sixteen or seventeen, he decided. She didn’t look at him as he passed by; her study was the stars that could be seen faintly through the drifting clouds. He saw a circle of a dozen people on their knees in the grass, heads bowed and eyes squeezed tightly shut as if that would speed their prayers; maybe they stayed there all night praying, he didn’t know.
And that led to a question for him: where was God in all this?
Was the same God those people fervently prayed to the God who had created the Gorgons and Cyphers? Did God favor one civilization over the other, or were all left to the rolling of the celestial dice?
The White Mansion, he thought. It intruded upon him night and day, breaking in like an unwanted commercial in this ragged movie of his life. I’ve got to get there, somehow.
We’re not eagles, Dave had said. And Dave was not speaking to him lately, had not spoken to him since that early morning revelation. There was no plan, there was just the waiting. And Ethan saw very clearly, as he walked with the weight of the unknown burdening his shoulders, that these people were waiting to die. Their hope was running out like the sand in the hourglass. Everyone had their limit; when that limit was reached…blammo, off to meet the Maker.
This is shit, Ethan thought as he looked at the broken-down, crooked and messed-up apartment buildings. No one can stay here. If they want to live, they have to move because movement is life. Going somewhere is life. But here behind these stone walls that are worked on day and night…they are just waiting to find the limit of their hope, and it comes to everybody.
Even if you died on the road to somewhere, he thought…at least you tried.
H
“Hola,” someone said. “Can’t sleep?”
Ethan stopped. He’d almost walked right into Olivia, who was on her own circuit of the perimeter. She was carrying a lantern and was wearing faded jeans and a blue-patterned blouse. She had on a pair of sneakers the color of a bright yellow tennis ball, but dirtier. The candlelight showed a dazed look in her eyes. Ethan thought she was just barely holding herself together, but she was not too far gone to forget to wear her pistol in its holster around her waist.
“Oh,” Ethan said. “Hi. Yeah. I mean…no, I can’t sleep.”
“Me neither. Not lately. I’m out of sleeping pills. Been thinking of hitting myself in the head with a hammer, but I’m not ready for anything that drastic.”
Ethan gave her a guarded smile that did not hold very long, because there were important things to say. “Dave showed me the map. Did he tell you?”
“He did. White Mansion Mountain in southeastern Utah, a long way from here.”
“A pretty long way,” Ethan agreed.
“Maybe you and your parents visited that place once. Maybe that’s why you want to go there, because you’re remembering.”
“I don’t think so. There’s no father,” he said.
“What?”
“In the house I’m starting to remember, where I’m sitting at the desk putting together my Visible Man. Did JayDee tell you about that?”
“Yes.”
“I thought he would. Well…there’s a dark-haired woman who I think is my mother, but I don’t think I have a father. There’s just…not a presence there. I mean, I did have a father, but I think he left when I was a little boy.”
Olivia lifted the lantern to view his face as if she’d never really studied it before. Ethan’s sharp blue eyes glinted; his jaw was set. He looked ready for something, but she didn’t know what. He looked expectant. He shifted his weight from foot to foot, and seemed as uneasy as a horse sensing the killing blade. “Walk with me,” she said, and started off. She was still limping a little and her knee was taped up under the jeans, but otherwise she was okay if one didn’t consider the nightmares that had interrupted her sleep since that morning in the library. More than once she’d awakened in a cold sweat as a wave of mutated flesh and biting teeth had rolled up at her from a broken floor, and in those nightmares there was no Dave McKane to help her.
Ethan walked with her, noting the limp. “JayDee said you hurt your knee.”
“It’s nothing. Need to walk to keep the blood moving.”
They had gone only a few paces more when something glowing bright blue streaked across the sky above Panther Ridge. It was maybe four or five hundred feet up, and it moved in a blur but soundlessly. Ethan and Olivia watched it disappear into the clouds beyond. In about three seconds there was a faint hum that became louder and louder still until it became a high-pitched shriek that would have left no one in the complex asleep, and suddenly a red and pulsing sphere with a fiery halo around it came out of the clouds and darted after the blue object. It, too, was quickly lost from sight.
“They’re active tonight,” Olivia said tonelessly. She saw candles and oil lamps going on in what remained of windows across the complex. There would be no more sleeping this night. Many times they had seen the battling lights in the night sky, seen and heard distant explosions and the otherworldly sounds of alien weapons at work, but how could anyone get used to it? “Come on, let’s keep walking,” she told Ethan, since both of them had stopped to watch the quick and deadly spectacle. “Okay,” she said after a moment more. “About the White Mansion.”