“One drink and pass it on,” Dave said.
“Sure.” Jefferson gave the jug to Ratcoff, who drank noisily. Then came the moment when Ratcoff put the red cap back on the jug and offered it to Vope, and the Gorgon just stood there looking at it like it was a half-gallon of Cypher piss.
“Don’t you want a drink, Jack?” Jefferson asked, his voice full of concern for a brother of the road who had lost his mental bearings. “Here, let me open it.” He was aware that not only McKane and the woman were watching, but others were too. He removed the red cap and said as if to a pitiful imbecile, “Open your mouth, Jack.”
Vope’s hands came up. He took the jug. There might have been a little angry spark deep in the black eyes.
“I know what to do,” Vope said. “Idiot.”
The Gorgon tipped the jug into his open mouth, as he’d seen the two humans do. Only Jefferson saw the creature flinch just a fraction, as if the liquid tasted vile. A small amount was taken and then allowed to slowly dribble from the sides of the mouth down into the black beard.
Vope gave the jug back to Jefferson, who recapped it and returned it to Olivia. “Thank you kindly,” he said, giving her just a glimpse of his Southern charm but not enough to fire anyone’s jets. The bus was moving on, curving toward the I-25 ramp. Jefferson noted that McKane’s gun had moved away from his proud parts. “I imagine you people have been through a lot,” he said to Olivia. “Like we have. Like everyone has.”
She nodded. “We’re glad you came along. You can help JayDee with some of these people when we find supplies. He’s our doctor.”
“Oh.” His blink was maybe a little too slow. “Right.”
About fifteen feet away from Jefferson Jericho, standing amid other survivors who hung onto whatever handhold they could find as the bus turned onto I-25, Ethan couldn’t see the three new arrivals for the crush of bodies around him, but his heartbeat had picked up and the flesh of his chest and back had begun tingling. The bruised parts, he thought.
It came to him very clearly.
An alarm had been set off.
Why? he wondered.
He had not seen the three men, but he thought that they were not who—or what—they appeared to be. His first impulse was to pass it forward that he needed to talk to Dave, but in another moment he decided against it. Dave likely couldn’t get back to him, and he would have to leave Olivia, and whatever the “men” were, they might have alarms too. If those went off, they might…what? Tear the bus apart and kill everyone?
No, Ethan thought. They’re not here to do that.
He was certain they were here for an unknown reason, but destroying the bus was not it.
Best to wait, he told himself. Give it time, get a look at these three and try to figure them out.
His heartbeat began to slow and the tingling went away, which was good because he was just about to start scratching himself and he could hardly move amid the others packed around him. He wondered what would happen if he lifted up his shirt and played tic-tac-toe in silver on the blackboard of his chest.
Nikki was still watching him from where she stood behind him. He could feel her eye on him, drilling into his head for an answer. He knew she was still not comfortable with keeping to herself what she’d seen. She might yet crack and start shouting that in their midst there was a freak, a danger to them all, a creature that had to be thrown off the bus and shot down on the side of the road…
…an alien among them.
Ethan steadied himself. They passed a few wrecked cars and a bread truck that had turned onto its side. Something crunched under the tires, and Ethan wondered if Hannah had just run them over a skeleton or two the Gray Men had left behind.
Denver lay ahead. So also did White Mansion Mountain. The boy who had been raised from the dead and was no longer fully human felt the pull of that place on him, never ceasing and growing more urgent.
An answer was there, he thought. But it was not the answer. And why he knew this to be so he had no idea, but there it was like a flash of light in his mind. An answer was at White Mansion Mountain, but there too, were more questions.
But first Denver, as dark began to fall and somewhere out there the Gray Men stirred, hungry for the meat of pilgrims searching for a place of peace.
Hannah turned on the headlights. The one on the left side failed to illuminate.
“Figures,” she muttered.
The bus went on into the falling dark, tires occasionally crushing bones that lay scattered on the cracked pavement like ancient runes pointing the way to the heart of the mystery.
Three.
Life During
Wartime
Seventeen.
Steering the one-eyed bus through the debris scattered along I-25 was no easy task, even for a driver who’d once gotten a wad of bubble gum pushed into her hair while at the wheel and another time had a kid throw oatmeal up in her lap on a rainy Monday morning. Beyond the reach of the single headlight was dark upon dark. Occasionally the shape of a wrecked and burned car loomed up, and there were many skeletons or parts of skeletons, but Hannah Grimes kept her nerves steady and the bus moving forward at about ten miles an hour. The slow speed saved their lives when the light fell upon a black-edged crater burned into the pavement. Hannah said “Shit,” under her breath and deftly got them onto the median and past the danger. She had switched on the interior safety lights, which cast a yellow glow upon her passengers.
Dave McKane was standing watch over the three new arrivals. He didn’t like the smell of them. He didn’t like the cardiologist who talked like a car salesman, having a smooth and quick answer for every question. He didn’t like the little bald Ratcoff, who was sweating and nervous and looked to be in utter torment, and he didn’t like Jack Dope, who stood like a statue and stared ahead into the darkness with that weird double-and-triple blinking he was doing. That guy looked to Dave to be a basket case in the offering, somebody who might go berserk and start flailing at the people around him. Dave almost hoped he would so he could cold-cock the freak into the next century. But that wouldn’t happen, because he was so tired he was near collapse.
“We ought to be seeing Denver by now,” Hannah announced. “If there were any lights, I mean.”
Ahead lay only the night and on the pavement in front of the bus a ribcage and a skull that Hannah could not avoid. It popped like a gunshot under the right front tire.
Jefferson Jericho had not prepared himself for this. All these human remains that littered the highway…most of them not complete skeletons, but scattered by…what? Animals that came out of their lairs to feast on the fallen? Yes, that had to be it. He stared ahead into the dark where the city of Denver should be, and he fully realized now what the Gorgons had shielded him and the residents of New Eden from. This hideous reality was nearly more than the human spirit could bear, it buckled the knees with its brutality and hopelessness. He found himself wanting to get back to New Eden, to the running water and the electricity and the false sun and everything else that might be false but was at least a comfort and a shelter. Even back to Regina’s hatred, because he thought that someday—after this war had ended—she would come around again, and understand that he was only using the gifts God had given him.
He remembered what his harlot starlet had said in that false French bedroom: We have given you much, my Jefferson. Much. And much given can be much taken away.
He shivered. Dear Jesus, he thought as the bus moved on into the endless night. I couldn’t survive out here in this world.
So the boy must be taken. Whatever the boy was and whatever power he possessed, he must be taken and the sooner the better.