Suddenly a boy came into the room from a hallway. He was about fourteen, Jefferson judged, and he had shoulder-length blonde hair. There was a dirty bandage on his jaw and his left arm was in an equally dirty sling. His eyes were dazed and dark-circled, and he went to the woman and put his good arm around her.
Jefferson asked, “Is he the boy?”
Vope didn’t answer. The backpack was being pulled off him. His face had stopped moving. His eyes staring at nothing.
“Is he the boy?” Jefferson asked again, louder.
Vope’s right arm changed. It became a mottled, scaly yellow thing striped with black and brown. Where the hand was there was no longer a hand but a yellow spike that erupted with small black spikes, and those smaller spikes were barbed and writhing as if each one was a separate living weapon. The arm that was no longer an arm punched forward with ferocious power and the spiked thing that was no longer a hand ripped into Jimmy’s guts and on through his body to come out the other side in an explosion of gore that spattered the dusty wallpaper with bits of lungs, kidney, stomach, and all the makings of man. The vertebrae broke with a noise like a broomstick, and as Jimmy collapsed his finger spasmed on the trigger and the revolver fired into the side of Vope’s face. What looked like human blood ran from the wound, but still the Gorgon did not blink nor did it register pain.
Vope’s appendage picked Jimmy up off his feet and, as the leader and the others fell back in stupefied horror, Vope threw Jimmy’s body so hard against the opposite wall that the broken young man smashed through it.
The leader had his back to another wall and raised his rifle. Vope’s left arm, also transfigured into a killing machine with the yellow, black and brown markings, struck out like a snake and lengthened by at least four feet. The hand of this arm had become a black reptilian head with slitted red pupils and fangs that gleamed like metal. The teeth caught the man’s rifle, wrenched it from his grip in a heartbeat, and destroyed his face with one tremendous blow from the rifle’s butt, at the same time the spiked weapon of the right arm whipped out to pierce the other rifleman’s chest and on out his back like a twisting buzzsaw. Again, Vope threw the body aside like a piece of bloody garbage.
As Jefferson and Ratcoff watched in frozen terror, Vope’s snake-hand closed on the woman’s head as she turned to run with the boy. The jaws crushed her skull and facial bones with obscene ease. The brains ran out onto the floor as she fell, her face compressed to a knotty bleeding lump.
The boy was running, trying to get into the hallway. He was whimpering. Jefferson thought it was the worst sound he’d ever heard. Something went dark inside his mind as if to turn off the lights to spare him any more.
Because he knew Vope was not done.
The spiked arm lengthened, a scaly mottled python sliding out of Vope’s shoulder, going after the boy, and so fast it was nearly a blur the spike drove through the boy’s back, through his chest, and impaled him. His legs were kicking, and his body twitched as the Gorgon lifted him up, and then—almost gracefully, with a smooth show of power—the boy was thrown through the next wall, which Jefferson did not fail to notice was decorated with a faded portrait of Jesus in prayer. The impact caused the portrait to fall and the dusty glass to shatter.
The man with the destroyed face was lying on his back, moaning through a distorted mouth that had neither lips nor teeth.
Vope’s left arm drew itself back in and began to return to counterfeit flesh. The black reptilian head with the metallic teeth became a fist, which Vope opened and closed several times as if to test its elasticity.
The right arm drew itself back into the shoulder. The spiked murder weapon began to change to something that resembled a forceps, still mottled with the color of what was maybe the true Gorgon flesh. The forceps entered the wound in Vope’s head and searched there. Vope’s face did not change, and registered nothing. In another moment the forceps emerged with a slug. Vope examined this with interest. Then he walked to the ex-leader on the floor. His small eyes stared down at the man on the floor as someone would consider a roach about to be crushed.
With incredible speed and power, the forceps-hand whipped forward and sent the used slug into the man’s forehead with easily the velocity of a gun, if not many more times so. The man shivered once, and moved no more.
Vope’s right arm and hand returned themselves to what passed for normality in a matter of seconds. Then Vope drooled slimy spittle into the cup of his right hand and began to rub the liquid into the bullet wound. It took him a few drools and the hand rubbed in maybe two dozen circles, but when he was done the wound was no longer there, just the remnant of Gorgon blood that had leaked down his neck and onto his t-shirt.
“Now we go,” Vope said to Jefferson of Tennessee and Ratcoff of New York, who had pressed themselves against the far wall as if to push their own bodies through the wallpaper and plaster. “And…no,” he told Jefferson as he straightened his backpack like any day hiker would, “that was the boy, not.”
Fifteen.
The boy in question was waiting. He stood up on a guard tower with Gary Roosa, watching the road that led from town to the ruins of Panther Ridge. Dave, Joel, and Hannah had been gone almost eight hours. The yellow sunlight had gotten hotter. There was a sticky, otherworldly dampness in the air. Somewhere in the distance, thunder echoed in the low gray sky. Ethan’s eyes ticked in the direction of the noise. Just thunder, he thought. Presently no enemies in this sector.
He caught himself.
What?
I don’t talk like that, he thought. I don’t think like that. But how come I know it was just thunder and not the sounds of their war?
He just knew.
A memory came upon him…or a dream of a memory. It came upon him so fast he was left nearly breathless.
He was in a classroom. The sun—bright sun in an unblighted blue sky—shone through the windows. He was sitting at his desk. The girl in front of him had red hair. Her name was…that was lost. At the front of the classroom was the teacher’s desk, and at it sat a man wearing a white shirt and a dark blue bowtie with gold stripes. The man’s name was…
Think hard.
The man was slim, had a sharp chin, and wore horn-rimmed glasses. He had brown hair with a lock of white at the very front, as if a finger dusted in flour had touched there. His name was…Nova-something? Novak?
Science teacher.
Yes, Ethan thought. A science teacher, at…what was the school? And where was the school? Lost…all lost. But on the desk before Ethan was his Visible Man, ready for the demonstration. All the organs painted, the veins painted, everything ready. In a few minutes, he would stand up and take his Visible Man to the front of the class, where he would remove the organs and explain their function one by one as he rebuilt his human…wouldn’t he? Wasn’t that right? Or was this a tainted dream, and it had never happened?
Up at the front already, casting a shadow in the golden sunlight, was a boy wearing a black jersey with something in silver written across it. The boy was Hispanic and had long black hair and thick eyebrows. Written on the jersey was…
Remember…remember…please remember…
And there it was, as if through a dark glass: Jaguars.
The boy was talking, and gesturing over a model of…the universe? No…not the universe as it is…but the universe as someone in ancient Rome had envisioned it. The earth was the center of the universe. The boy had rigged an electric motor to his model, and turning on a little switch showed how the painted Styrofoam balls of planets revolved around the earth on their wires. A geocentric universe, it was called. Ethan remembered that. Somebody named Claudius something had come up with it. Ethan thought that the Hispanic boy—no name, no name—had done a pretty good job, and this would be a hard act to follow and he needed at least a B for his presentation. Ethan’s eye followed the shadow of a gesturing hand, and it fell upon a calendar page that read April 3. He would be going up soon, the presentation of the geocentric universe was almost done.