Ethan—not his name, his name was something else—looked at the clock and saw it was four minutes after ten. Ethan would be the second up; they were going in alphabetical order.
Alphabetical order, he remembered. It was the first day of science project presentations.
The Hispanic boy’s name was…what?
Last name… ‘A’?
It came to him like a blow to the stomach. Allendes. First name…no, that was lost. But Ethan realized his real last name must end in either an ‘A’ or a ‘B’, because there were twenty-six other students in the class and—
“Can I come up?”
Both Gary and Ethan turned around to see Nikki Stanwick hanging onto the ladder that led up. She was just a couple of rungs shy of pulling herself onto the platform.
“Come on,” Gary said, and he went over to help her.
She came up smoothly and spent a moment brushing the dust off the knees of her jeans. Then she walked over beside Ethan and looked along the road, the rhinestones of the star in her eyepatch glittering with a fragment of captured light.
“They’ve been gone a long time,” she said.
Ethan nodded. The wounded were being cared for as best as possible, but there were some like Billy Bancroft who just couldn’t walk. There were a few dying ones, and a number who’d passed away since they’d been found in the wreckage. Ethan figured there were maybe sixty people left and half of those were wounded in some way, about ten in really bad shape. Seventeen people, including Roger Pell, Roger’s wife, and their surviving child had started off on their own with their guns and remaining ammunition, a few plastic jugs of water and some of the last of the canned food. They had taken, as well, the rest of the horses. No one had tried to stop them. They were going cross-country, heading east toward…they knew not what, but they didn’t put much faith in the search team finding a vehicle or any fuel, and they didn’t want to wait any longer.
“I hear that if they find a truck, we’re going to Denver.” Nikki was speaking to Ethan.
“Who told you that?”
“Olivia.”
“Hm,” Ethan said. He remembered what Dave had told him after finding White Mansion Mountain in the road atlas: Going south to Denver, crossing the Rockies on I-70, with the Gray Men and the aliens everywhere. Did that mean Olivia and Dave were going to take him there? That they believed, as he believed, that he must find this place?
“Denver is gone. They started fighting over Denver and tore it up about three months after the war started. Don’t you know that?”
“I don’t know much of anything.”
“That’s what people who got out of Denver said. Some survivors who came here. You can ask Mrs. Niega. She saw the buildings fall. There’s nothing left, so why do we want to go to Denver?”
The gateway to I-70, Ethan thought. “Where would you like to go?” he asked her.
“Out of this nightmare. Home again. With everything like it was. My Mom and Dad, and my sister. All of them alive again.” Nikki’s voice was getting strained and her face had flushed. “I’d like my eye back. So, I guess I’d like to go to the one place nobody can go.”
Ethan waited without speaking.
“The past,” she said. “But that’s gone, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Ethan agreed. “It’s gone.”
“Hey, something’s coming,” Gary said. “Look there!” He gave over his binoculars to Ethan.
H
Nearly eight hours before, a rifle bullet struck the left side of Hannah Grimes’ horse and a follow-up whined off the pavement of Windom Street, about two miles from Panther Ridge. Hannah jumped clear as her mount fell. The sniper was in a boarded-up house among rows of boarded-up or abandoned homes, but exactly where the slug had come from was impossible to tell. Hannah braved another attack to put the horse down with a shot to the head, then she took Dave’s hand and pulled herself up behind him, and they went on, and that was how things were these days. After another twenty minutes, they came across four tractor-trailer trucks parked at a lumber company at the intersection of South College Avenue and Carpenter Road, but no keys were in the ignitions, and the facility’s main office was locked. A brick through a pane of smoked glass cleared that obstacle, but a search still turned up no keys and there were too many locked desk drawers to tackle.
“Listen,” Hannah said, “I wanted to come along because Olivia said we could use a school bus. I drove one for a couple of years as a volunteer. I know where the depot is, and I know there’s a diesel tank. Got a workshop there too, and I figure they may have some kind of pump we can use. It’s a ways from here, but I think that’s our best bet.”
“Hell, yes!” Dave answered, and so they started off under Hannah’s direction north toward the school bus depot on LaPorte Avenue. They were getting into areas that had been ripped apart by alien weapons, whole neighborhoods burned to ashes, cars melted into shapeless hunks of metal, shopping malls and stores gutted and merchandise spilled out over the flame-scorched parking lots, a few larger buildings chopped in half as if by surgical lasers and debris blocking the streets. They passed three abandoned metro buses, the first lying on its side, the second with three flat tires and a shattered windshield, and a third with most of the two upper floors of the First National Bank covering it. The downtown Ace Hardware store on South College Avenue was crushed as if by a gigantic boot, ending Dave’s hopes of finding a barrel pump before they reached the depot.
“We’ve got another mile to go,” Hannah announced, and nothing more needed to be said.
Though in an area of burned buildings, charred trees, and more wreckage, the depot had escaped the flames of war. There were twelve buses in the lot, rusted by the rain and parked haphazardly by their rattled drivers. Four of them were sitting on flats, so those were out. Either someone had already gone at the gates with a chain-cutter, or the gates had been left unlocked on what had seemed like the last day of the world.
First problem: finding the keys to these vehicles. Were there any in the ignitions or up under the sun visors? No, there were not. But the door to the office had been broken open, likely in a search for firearms. Hannah went to a metal cabinet on the wall and tried to open that but the lock was secure. “Keys are in there on hooks with numbers that go with the numbers of the buses.” She’d drawn her six-shooter. “Seen this done in the movies plenty of times, but in real life I figure you can blow your own head off if you’re not careful. Both of you step back.”
It was a wise move. It took two bullets to do the job, and even then the lock was more mangled than agreeable and the whole thing had to be nearly torn off the wall. But there were the keys, and the numbers, and the buses outside. It didn’t take long for another problem to assert itself as they’d started opening up the hoods and looking at the engines: the two large, heavy-duty batteries in every bus was gunked up with yellow sulphur deposits and likely stone-cold dead.
“Damn it!” Dave fumed, as reality bit deep. “We’re not going anywhere in one of these!”