“Got it,” said Ethan, who understood exactly what Dave was talking about.
“Have to get all this done before dark,” Dave said to Olivia. “Better gather up all the food, water, and weapons we can find. Anything else of use.” He cast a doubtful eye toward the smoky ruins and the huge rotting carcass of the Gorgon ship. A storm of vultures was beginning to gather overhead. “Don’t let anybody go too far in, though,” he told Olivia, who quickly nodded agreement. He added, “There’s been enough people dead for one day.”
He hoped.
Fourteen.
Jefferson Jericho, past master of New Eden, awakened on a park bench in an unknown city, under a sick yellow sun and a leprous gray sky. He sat bolt upright, catching from skin and clothes the burnt smell that he was so familiar with. Only he realized that maybe the smell was not just coming from whatever transformative power the Gorgons possessed, for around him were the black, twisted skeletons of burned trees and, further on, a mass of ashes and broken structures that might once have been a neighborhood.
As soon as he stood up, he threw up…but there was nothing in his stomach, so nothing came up. Then, wiping the saliva from his mouth, he realized he had a beard…not a large one, but scraggly…maybe two weeks’ worth. Had he been “out” that long, or was the beard something the Gorgons could force from his pores just as she forced him to take that last step into the realm of the unknown? And his clothes…
“Jesus!” he said, in utter amazement. He was wearing a sweat-stained brown t-shirt and a pair of dirty jeans. On his feet were sneakers with holes in them. He was wearing no socks. He looked at his hands and arms. The fingernails were caked with dirt and his arms were grimy. When he looked at his palms he saw the lines there were like filthy roads leading across the plains. He had never been so dirty in all his life. He was sure that if he had a mirror he would see the rest of the disguise the Gorgons had given him; he probably still looked like himself under the beard, but they had made him appear to be a homeless survivor of the cosmic war. The clothes felt slippery somehow…the fabric was not quite right. He had the feeling that he was trapped in snakeskin, and terror leaped up within him. Nearly whimpering, he started to pull the offending t-shirt off and over his head.
There was a noise, and Jefferson stopped with the t-shirt halfway off because something had just happened that he knew he and his hammering heart would not like.
It was hard to say what the noise was. Maybe it was a soft whistling, like the displacement of air. Maybe it was a whirring sound, like a little machine in motion. Whatever it was, it came from behind him—very close—and Jefferson pulled the t-shirt back down off his eyes so he could see, and he turned to face his future.
A man was there, standing beside the skeleton of a burned tree. He was a large man, square-built and broad-shouldered, though his face had taken on the appearance of someone in need of food; his cheekbones and eyes were beginning to hollow out. He had a flat-nosed boxer’s face, a tangle of shoulder-length black hair, and two months’ growth of black beard. His dark blue t-shirt, gray trousers, and black sneakers were just as filthy as Jefferson’s clothes, if not more so. The eyes in the hungry face were small and dark, like chips of flint. He wore a backpack, an olive green one, likely from an Army surplus store.
The man just stared at him impassively, and he did not blink.
“Who are you?” Jefferson’s voice was far from the strong baritone bell that tolled for the congregation of the High Rollers, that had been caught and carried on the GHR network to a hundred and fifty-six markets. God’s High Rollers. That seemed like an age ago…him on the podium with the dozen-screened light show going on behind him, his inspired grin casting further illumination, his arms outspread, and the message delivered as only a salesman as himself could deliver it… The secret to being rich—just tearing that ol’ stock market up—is a code in the Bible that I have deciphered…
“Vope,” said the man.
“Vope? What kind of name is that?”
“It is the one,” came the answer, “you can pronounce.”
“You’re a Gorgon? Sent to protect me?”
“I am a creation,” Vope said. “What I am does concern you not. But…yes, I am here to protect and guide you.” The small flinty eyes scanned the sky. “There are no enemies in this sector, in this frame of time. We can move freely.”
“To where? Where are we going?”
“Follow,” said Vope, and he began striding quickly and purposefully across the destroyed park, past an overturned swing set and a group of seesaws turned black by alien fire. Jefferson followed. They crossed a street and went past burned and wrecked houses and crossed another street, the same. Jefferson knew they were walking in the direction of a metropolitan area because he could see larger buildings. A couple of them had been sheared off as if by a gigantic and very sharp blade.
“Where are we? What town?”
“Fort Col lins,” Vope answered, putting a pause where there should be none. “Col O Raydo.”
“What do you know about this boy I’m supposed to find?” He was having to hurry to keep up, and—enemies in the sector or not—he kept scanning the sky and the ground around them. “I’m a salesman,” he said, before Vope could reply. “I shouldn’t be out here. I’m not a soldier!” Vope didn’t respond. “I sell things,” Jefferson went on, sounding desperate even to himself. “Do you even know what that means?”
Vope was silent. Doesn’t give a shit, Jefferson thought. They were going through another neighborhood that had survived total destruction; only a few houses here and there were demolished. Some were boarded up, or had been boarded up. The boards had been broken into. To Jefferson, most of the houses looked like coffins. Like so many others, this was a town of the dead.
“Stop,” Vope suddenly said, and immediately Jefferson halted.
They were standing in front of a wood-framed house with six steps leading up to a porch. On the porch was a single rocking chair. The address was 1439. The windows were broken out, and the darkness was very deep within.
“It will happen here,” Vope announced.
“What will happen?”
There was no answer from the Gorgon in its disguise of human flesh.
A moment slipped past. In the distance Jefferson heard dogs barking and then howling, and he thought that wild dogs could kill a person just as easily as a death ray.
The rocking chair moved, just a fraction. It creaked. And as Jefferson Jericho watched, a form began to materialize in the chair. It began first as a barely discernible whorl, as if the air itself was becoming solid and an invisible finger had stirred it. There was that soft hissing or whispering or metallic sound that Jefferson had heard in the park. This is Star Trek shit, he thought…but within three seconds—and in total silence—a body came into being in the chair, first as a ghostly, paled-out form outlined by what might have been flickers of blue energy, and then fully realized and solid. The rocking chair creaked back and forth, and the man in it stared at both Jefferson and Vope with huge frightened eyes under a bald dome that sparkled with sweat.
“Lemme alone!” he croaked. “Please…Jesus…lemme alone!” Looking about himself and getting some idea of where he was, his hairy hands gripped hold of the chair’s arms and locked his body there.
“Come with us,” Vope commanded.
“Listen…listen…I don’t know where I am. Okay? I don’t know who you are. I’m stayin’ right where I am, I ain’t movin’.”