“Vope,” he said as he ate the alien fodder, “who’s this boy you’re after? Why’s he so important?”
“What boy?” Ratcoff asked. Obviously he knew nothing about the parameters of this mission.
“They,” Jefferson said with emphasis, “want me to bring a certain boy back to them. He’s supposed to be here, somewhere.” He cast his gaze around at the desolation. “So who is he, Vope? And if you can do what you did back at that house…then why don’t you find the boy and take him yourself?”
“My orders stand,” said the Gorgon.
“I don’t care how many humans are protecting him,” Jefferson went on. “You could destroy them all, if you wanted to. Why do you need me?”
Vope didn’t reply, and Jefferson thought he was going to remain silent, but after a few seconds the alien spoke. “He would resist force.”
“So? Maybe he would, but…” And then it struck Jefferson Jericho, quite clearly. “Oh my God,” he said. “You—she—whatever you are…you’re afraid of him, aren’t you?”
Vope’s face turned away, his gaze directed to the distance.
“You’re afraid,” Jefferson continued. “And that must mean…is he a Cypher in disguise?”
“No sense is made of that.”
“Your enemy. Whatever you call it. Is he the enemy, in disguise? He must’ve done something really—” Awesome, he was about to say, “—bad, to get you—her, it—so bound to lay your hands on him. My hands, I mean. What did he do? Kill a couple dozen of—”
“Refrain your curiosity,” the Gorgon interrupted, “or I will give you pain. We are moving now.” He began to stride away, and Jefferson and Ratcoff felt little sharp tinglings at the backs of their necks and so were compelled to follow.
Jefferson thought he would never survive this. If the boy was a Cypher in disguise he must be like a special forces soldier, and if the Gorgons were afraid of him…no telling what destructive powers this so-called ‘boy’ was capable of. Lay hands on a Cypher commando and expect to whisk him back to Gorgon-land for a little torture session? Right. The first thing that would happen is, an ex-car salesman named Leon Kushman was going to be blasted out of this world as quickly as if he’d taken a gunshot to the back of the head.
“They keep me in a place that looks like a suburb with little houses like from the fifties,” Ratcoff said as he struggled to walk alongside Jefferson. Ratcoff’s head was wet with sweat and sweat stained the front of his shirt and his armpits. Jefferson knew the man was terrified and had the need to talk, so he just listened as best he could with his own death sentence hanging over his head. “There’re seventy-eight people in that place, brought from all over the States. We call it—”
“The Ant Farm?” Jefferson asked.
“Huh? No. We call it Microscope Meadows. Know why?”
“Because you always feel you’re being watched from above?”
“Yeah, that’s right. But we’ve got everything we need to live. Electricity, water, cars that don’t need gasoline or oil anymore, that white shit they feed us with and some other weird stuff you drink…and the weather never changes. It’s like…always early summer. But know somethin’ really weird?”
You can never leave, Jefferson thought.
“You can’t get out,” Ratcoff said. “You can drive and drive, and pretend you’re goin’ somewhere…but all of a sudden you turn a corner and you’re right back where you started from. Weird, huh?”
“Yes,” said Jefferson. The Ant Farm, Microscope Meadows…he wondered what the Japanese, the Russians, the Norwegians and Brazilians called their prisons. The Gorgons were students of humans, just as some scientists were students of insects. He wondered also what they had done to Ratcoff when they’d taken him apart, and what they’d added to make him so valuable to this little jaunt. He hoped he wouldn’t have to find out.
“I miss the stars,” Ratcoff said, in a quietly reverential voice. “My Dad and me…long time back…used to camp out in our backyard, in Jersey. Used to put up a tent. I was a Boy Scout, believe that or not. So after we cooked our hotdogs and had our Indian blood—that’s what my Dad used to call mixing up grape juice, Pepsi, and root beer—we would say goodnight to Mom when she came out to the back porch, and then we’d go to sleep. Us guys. You know?”
“Sure,” said Jefferson, whose memory of his father involved breath that smelled like cheap whiskey, a crooked grin on a slack-jawed face and a salesman’s empty promise that tomorrow would be a better day.
“But…long after midnight,” Ratcoff went on, “I always crawled out of that tent and lay on my back looking up to count the stars. And where we lived…you could see a lot of ’em. Just shining and shining, like rivers of light. I thought I was the luckiest kid in the world, to be where I was. Only now…when I go out to my backyard and lie down in the dark…I can’t see any stars. Not one, in all that dark. My Dad died a few years back and my Mom had a condo in Sarasota. I called her that first day, to make sure she was okay. I wanted to fly down there, but you know all the airplanes were grounded. I told her to get to one of the shelters the National Guard was setting up. That was the last I heard from her. I hope she made it. You think maybe she made it, Jeff?”
Jefferson Jericho heard the pleading. He was many things in this life—a manipulator, a con man, a man who always put his needs and desires first, a man who disdained the weaknesses of others and played upon them, a money-hungry and power-hungry and sex-hungry ‘fiend of the night’, as Regina would have said—but at this moment, in this fearful world with a Gorgon leading him onward to what was possibly his death and at his side another human being wounded in heart and soul—he found something in himself he did not recognize, and it was so foreign to him he could not name what it was.
He said, “Sure she made it, Burt. No doubt. The National Guard…those guys knew what they were doing. They got people to safety. Lots of people. And your mom too, no doubt.”
“Yeah,” said Ratcoff, with a quick smile. “That’s what I think too.”
Jefferson Jericho was always amazed at how easily people could be led. How when they wanted to believe, the job was halfway done. It was even easier if they needed to believe. Sometimes you met a rock who refused to be turned, but mostly it was like this, especially when he wore his minister’s suit. And that scam about finding and deciphering verses in the Bible that told an investor what stocks to buy and sell…well, it was helpful to have inside traders working for you, and maybe when the info was faulty and money was lost by the High Rollers, Jefferson could say it was the will of God, the teaching of humility and above all patience, and that even he—Jefferson Jericho—was being taught a lesson too. But mostly things went as planned, and when the High Rollers paid the Jericho Foundation the voluntary yearly fifteen percent commission off their God-given and Bible-verse-directed earnings, as well as whatever they wished to give from the heart, the used-to-be Leon Kushman looked at the stained-glass window in his office and regarded the rainbow depicted there.
The last he’d heard, those shelters the Guard had set up had first been pits of panic that descended into chaos and violence among the human kind. It was likely some had been destroyed in the battles between Cypher and Gorgon. It was very likely Burt Ratcoff’s mother had perished in the first few months, if not the first few weeks, and like hundreds of thousands—millions?—of others around the world, the bones and ashes would be found only when the war was over and the human survivors crawled out of whatever hole they’d been hiding in. To be what? Slaves for the victors? Experiments in human genetics and mutations? The creation of new weapons for new wars on more worlds?