Jefferson realized Vope had turned his head slightly to gaze upon him, reading the thoughts as they crashed between the walls of a fearful mind. Was there the hint of an arrogant smile upon the Gorgon’s mouth, or was it Jefferson’s imagination? Did Vope even know how to smile?
Whatever. It was gone now, and Vope looked away from him.
Behind Dave and Olivia, in the middle of the crowded bus, Ethan had come to the conclusion that he had to do something. He could not wait for the three men to strike, because that was the feeling he was getting: a poisonous snake about to strike from the depth of shadows. And just like that he knew: one of them is a Gorgon, hiding in human form.
Everyone in the bus was in danger. He had to do something, and he had to do it now.
He started pushing his way forward. “Sorry,” he said. “Excuse me. Can I get past, please? Sorry…sorry…”
And on between the survivors of Panther Ridge until he reached Dave and Olivia, and then he saw the three men standing at the front of the bus facing toward the blacked-out city, and slowly one of the men turned his head and a pair of small dark eyes like pieces of flint above a black beard caught and held him, and Ethan knew the enemy on sight.
“Dave?” Ethan said.
“What is it?” Dave asked, a note of tension in his voice because he could hear the tension in the boy’s.
The Gorgon stared at him, and suddenly one of the other men turned to also take Ethan in. This man had unruly brown hair and a growth of brown beard, and he was dirty and haggard-looking, but Ethan thought there was something about his face that was too soft, too handsome, to have fully known the hardships of life during wartime. He looked like he, too, was cloaked in a disguise. But this man was human…as was the third man, with the bald and sweating head…and yet…
“What’s wrong?” Olivia asked, when Ethan didn’t reply to Dave’s question.
The human with the brown beard had a look of recognition in his eyes. His face was frozen for a few seconds, and then he smiled like the parting of clouds before the sun. “Hi there,” he said. “What’s your name?”
“Big effing crater ahead,” Hannah announced loudly. “I’m dodgin’ it. Everybody hang on!”
The bus veered to the right. The light revealed a UPS tractor-trailer truck that had crashed through the railing on the right lane, and as Hannah gritted her teeth and steered for safety the bus scraped along the rear of the UPS trailer with a ragged shriek of distressed metal. A few people cried out in alarm, if they had the energy to do so, and Hannah called back, “Hush up, you babies!”
“You want to come up front?” Jefferson Jericho asked Ethan. Here is the boy, he knew. Nothing particularly special about him…or was there? “Come on, then!” He beckoned with the fingers of an upraised hand, though the hand trembled just a bit with frightened anticipation of what might happen.
“Don’t talk to him,” Dave told the man. “He doesn’t know you, and you don’t know him. Just don’t.”
“I thought he might want to come up here where he can breathe better. It looks mighty tight back there.”
“He can breathe fine. What do you want, Ethan?”
Ethan, Jefferson thought. His eyes narrowed. Come on, Ethan, let me get my hands on you.
The Gorgon was staring at Ethan again. The creature blinked rapidly…one two three…and again…one two three. Ethan felt a shock…something like cold fingers reaching into his brain and trying to rummage through it as a burglar might rummage through drawers in a search for valuables.
I won’t let you go there, he thought, and instantly something like a metallic wall of tight bricks appeared in his mind, and though he could still feel the fingers scrabbling at the bricks, trying to find a weak place, the Gorgon was unable to reach in and pluck out what he wanted.
Ethan found he could give his attention to Dave, formulate thoughts, and the wall of bricks remained solid. The fingers were getting more insistent, and stronger and stronger, but they could not break through.
He was about to say The man with the black beard is a Gorgon but he checked himself. Instead he envisioned his own hand, but the hand he saw glowed silver, was long-fingered and more slender than the one at the end of his own arm. He envisioned the silver-glowing hand reaching out like a coil of mist past Dave and Olivia, and the long slim fingers probing into the head of the creature that wore a black beard, and then piercing through the alien-constructed skull of some unknown material he saw—
—a landscape of swamp with yellow and brown tree-like growths protruding up through a soup of wet fog, their forms tortured into shapes more like cactus and having skins across which rippled spikes rose and fell as if the vegetation breathed the miasmic air. Birds of prey with gray flesh and long beaks studded with teeth roamed the clouds, swooping down upon things that resembled crabs and eels sliding through the red-tinged liquid, which shimmered not like water but like quicksilver. There was a change of scene…the skipping of frames as if a movie had suddenly sped up…and there stood under double moons a massive city with thousands of low-slung buildings like sculpted adobe mud-dwellings, but engineered by an alien eye and created by alien tools. Blue globes of light moved back and forth across the city, illuminating figures half-walking, half-slithering through narrow alleys. Another skipping of frames and change of scene…and there a darkness, a cavity, a place where machines thrummed and creations strange and fearful to the eyes of an earthman took shape. Ethan had the sensation that it was deep underground, in what might have been a nest, now becoming a place of shadows and flickering blue light, a place of explorations into the imaginations of warriors ever-seeking new and more powerful weapons of destruction, a place of power unknown to the human mind where the walls breathed with artificial life and were mottled with the colors of their warships.
In the nerve center of pulsing machines and the flicker of blue energy stood a form that seemed to be beckoning him with a scaly, five-clawed hand, a figure draped in leathery black robes. Above the robes was a dark, dimly seen head and face that brought sweat out upon Ethan’s flesh even as he knew he was only probing the memory pictures of a Gorgon, and in that face was a pair of narrow eyes with hypnotic, red-slitted pupils that, unblinking, bade him mentally to come closer and closer, until he was drawn in so near he saw a cobra-like grin that exposed sharp, wet fangs and felt a freezing terror that might well have turned a human to stone.
He could take no more. He got out but it was not easy, as if having to pull the silver hand out of a mass of clinging mud.
He felt a tremendous power coiled within the Gorgon who stood only a few feet away from him, with Dave and Olivia between them. He felt a destruction that could savage everyone in the bus, that could destroy the bus itself as completely as if it were a child’s playtoy. But as their eyes held, Ethan had a sudden strange thought that broke through his fear, and almost without his bidding the thought seeped through the metallic wall and on toward the Gorgon’s mind, and that thought was: I can destroy you.
The Gorgon blinked blinked blinked.
“Hey!” Hannah said suddenly. “I think I see a light! There’s a glow in the sky over—” Something hit the right side of the bus with a jarring thump.
“What the hell…?” she said, interrupted in her directions. She weaved the bus back and forth a little. “What’d we hit?”
A small, spindly figure crawled up the side of the bus and stuck to one of the windows about midway back. There was a stunned silence from the passengers. The creature’s fingers and toes had flattened into suction cups. The thing looked to be a nine- or ten-year-old boy, dressed in tattered rags and with a completely bald and mallet-shaped head, its eyes sunken so deeply into the face they could not be seen. The creature was as gray as the ash from an all-consuming fire, and looking through the window into the bus the thing suddenly grinned as if delighted to see all the traveling meat, and then its head struck forward and shattered the window to pieces.