“I have to get there.” In his voice there was no hesitation. “Soon.”
“All right.” Olivia wondered if the glint of his eyes meant he was feverish. “How do you figure on getting there? Walking?”
“It would take too long.” What he said next just came to him, like a memory, or like another voice speaking through him. “I have to get there soon or the chance might be lost.”
“Chance?” She frowned, a little unnerved by this word. “What chance do you mean?”
He opened his mouth, about to speak but not knowing exactly what he was going to say. He had no choice but to trust in whatever was guiding him, whatever was trying to pull—or push—him on this dangerous and maybe crazy journey. He opened his mouth, but before any words could come out a sizzling white-hot thing shot across the sky above Panther Ridge and then another and another and suddenly dozens of them, sounding like bacon fat in a skillet, until the sky was crisscrossed with them and they left trails that burned the eyeballs. Up in the clouds there was thunder and lightning and then lightning and thunder but the lightning was red and blue and the thunder was the deep boom of ocean waves crashing against a jagged shore…harder and harder, louder and louder.
“Jesus,” Olivia whispered, her eyes on the heavens. Beside her, Ethan’s muscles had tensed and his heart was pounding. His lungs did hurt, he thought. Have to tell the doc about that…but in the next instant he thought too late…too late…
“Too late,” he heard himself say, as if from a vast and unfathomable distance.
“What?” she asked him, a frantic note in her voice. And again, when he didn’t answer: “What?”
From the clouds descended a monster.
Ethan figured it was nearly twice as big as the Gorgon ship he’d seen destroyed over the muddy field. It was the same triangular shape with the same prehistoric monster markings of brown, yellow, and black, but yet not wholly the same because each craft was different. It was razor-thin, had no openings nor ports and six of the eight electric-blue orbs that pulsed at its belly had gone dead black. Dozens of spheres of white-hot energy were attacking it from all sides, and the orbs tried to explode as many as they could but the ones getting through were burning red-edged holes in the reptilian hide. There was an electric smell in the air and the smell of charred meat that had been placed on a grill when it was already three days rotten. It was a swampy smell, the odor of firebombed rattlesnakes that had been left to decay under a hot August sun. There came the high-pitched, fingernail-on-blackboard and viper hiss of agony. The Gorgon ship was coming down upon the Panther Ridge Apartments. Olivia realized it a few seconds after Ethan, because her brain was stunned. It had seized up, run out of the lubrication of reality. Others realized what was about to happen too, for a sudden screaming and wailing arose from the apartment complex like voices of the doomed from the very center of Hell.
The tremendous bulk of the Gorgon ship shivered. Around it now could be seen maybe a hundred or more of the small black craft of the Cyphers, each hardly big enough to carry a human-sized pilot, with swept-back, vibrating wings, and a sharply pointed nosecone. Their skins glistened wetly, as they darted in and out and the white spheres of flame shot from the wings six at a time. They moved fast and silently, stopping to hover for a second or jink to one side or another like flying insects. Occasionally one was hit by a blue spark of energy and exploded into flying tatters, but there were too many.
Still screaming, the Gorgon ship had lost its equilibrium. It began to tilt to the left, and as it did some of the Cypher craft became blurs of incredible speed and speared themselves into the belly of the beast. They then exploded in white fireballs that scorched the eyes and burned more holes into the ship, and now from the craft’s belly came bursts of dark liquid that spattered down upon the bones of the vulture-plucked Gray Men still reaching from their graves in the earth.
One of the men in a machine-gun tower began to fire at the descending ship, which was like throwing wads of paper at concrete. Ethan’s mind was racing, putting together speeds and trajectories of which he had no knowledge of learning; he realized the ship was going to clear the wall but that the apartment complex was doomed. Even as he thought this and the Gorgon craft continued on in its death drop, he was aware of figures emerging through the stones of the wall like ghosts, then becoming solid again. The Cypher soldiers had arrived. There were dozens of them, skeleton-thin and seven feet tall. Their black featureless non-faces looked to neither right nor left. Their black fleshy weapons with two barrels connected to their bodies by fluid-carrying veins were held at the ready, as they likely always were. Some of them blurred onward toward the apartments, while others stalked forward at a more cautious pace. Now pistol and rifle shots were ringing out as the inhabitants of Panther Ridge tried to defend themselves, but the bullets—if any hit their targets—had no effect.
Olivia cringed down and held a scream behind her teeth as the Gorgon craft hissed overhead and plowed into the ground just short of the first level of apartments. Its mass and speed dug a plume of concrete and earth before it as it continued up the hillside, crossing the tennis courts and the swimming pool and slamming nearly dead center into the first building, which crumpled before it as if made of the cheapest cardboard. Both Ethan and Olivia realized the hospital and JayDee’s apartment had just been destroyed. The dying Gorgon ship cleaved completely through the first level and smashed into the second building. Ethan knew his own apartment—and Dave’s and Olivia’s too—had just been reduced to kindling. The dust of ages swirled up into the air. The Gorgon craft stopped just short of the third building, which like the fourth was unoccupied. The damage had been done. Now the Cypher soldiers were closing in to make sure there were no Gorgon survivors.
Something had caught fire in the crushed midsection of the second level. Red flames were starting to curl upward. Screams came from the shattered buildings, along with more gunshots. The Gorgon ship lay still, its life liquid pouring from burned holes in the skin and steam rising up around it.
Someone had opened the metal-plated door and people who could still move were running and hobbling out to escape the battleground. “Oh,” Ethan heard Olivia gasp, and she held onto his shoulders as if fearful of being flung off the world. “Oh no…oh no…”
“Come on!” he said, and took her hand to lead her toward the open door. Cypher soldiers were still coming in, blurring their way through the wall and then reforming. They moved past the terrified people trying to get out, and someone fired a pistol point-blank at one of them but it vibrated out to invisibility an instant before the slug could connect.
Olivia pulled free. Her face was drawn as tightly as a mask; her eyes wore the shine of near-madness and tears had run down to her chin. “No,” she said, her voice low and strained. “I’m not…not going.”
“Yes you are!” Ethan grabbed at her hand again but once more she pulled free.
“I have to…find something,” she told him, and she began to walk not toward the way out but toward the crumpled and burning apartments. In her mind Vincent was in Apartment 227, and he was holding for her something he wanted her to have, and she would have it and then go, after everyone else had left. She would take from him the Magic Eight Ball, that joke gift, the gift that had laughter and love attached to it, because she realized even in her fugue that she could survive no longer without love and laughter, and she must have that gift from him or she would this night perish of a doubly broken heart.