“Grenade launcher!” Dave said, his voice rough and ragged.
The armored car was painted steel-gray and had a massive front bumper-cage defended by iron spikes. The machine guns were still firing as the searchlight revealed more mutants running along the highway. A second grenade was launched and exploded about fifty yards away. Then the guns were silent and the armored car turned so it was directly in front of bus number 712, its heavy-duty ribbed tires crunching over malformed bones and heads and smashing hard armored flesh into paste. The searchlight swung over to illuminate the interior of the bus brighter than daylight had been for a long time.
A loudspeaker crackled.
“Nice night for a firefight.” It was a woman’s sarcastic voice. “Somebody come out and talk to us, but watch out for shit on your shoes.”
Dave said to Olivia, “I’ll go.” He glanced quickly at a grim-faced Ethan, then took stock of the other passengers. Some were sobbing, but most were in shock. He saw JayDee, who was being helped by Joel Schuster and Diego Carvazos down to give aid to Gary Roosa, though it was obvious Gary had escaped this madhouse by a tough way to go, but escaped it nevertheless. A belt had been used as a tourniquet for Aaron Ramsey’s chewed-up arm, and two women were tending to Lila Conti’s face, but the wounds were severe.
Ethan saw that the Gorgon had not moved. Dave was going to have to pass him to get out of the bus. Look at me, he commanded.
The Gorgon did.
Touch this man and you’ll die, Ethan said in his mind. How he would do that he didn’t know…but he was sure beyond a doubt that he could wish this creature to an explosion just as he’d blown the Gorgon pilot to pieces, and to demonstrate it he sent an image of that moment into the Gorgon’s head on its mist of silver fingers.
The creature remained still, nothing to be read on the hard, expressionless face.
Dave went past Jack Vope and out of the bus when Hannah cranked the door open.
The highway was a mess of gray bodies, some half-smashed and still trying to crawl away. “Put your weapon on the hood and stay in the light,” the woman on the speaker said. He obeyed the first command, and the second one as he picked a path through a grisly landscape of gray arms, legs, torsos and heads.
A hatch opened next to the armored car’s turret. A slim figure in Army camouflage and wearing an olive-green helmet with a headset microphone pulled itself out and then came down a series of foot-and-handgrips to the pavement. The searchlight shifted a few degrees, out of Dave’s face, but the soldier switched on a small flashlight and kept that directed at him.
“Good shooting,” Dave said. Inside, he felt like crumpling into a shivering ball at the soldier’s boots, but he kept all fear out of his face and shakiness out of his voice, which was very hard to do after the last few minutes.
“That wasn’t me at the guns,” said the woman who’d addressed them over the loudspeaker. “I’ll pass the compliment on to Juggy. Any casualties?”
“One dead. One man with nearly a severed arm and a woman with facial wounds. But we’ve got a lot of wounded on board, some very bad. Can you help us?”
“Copy that.” She was speaking not to him, but into her headset. “Okay, what’s your name?”
“Dave McKane.”
“Follow us, Dave. We’ll keep it slow and we’ll keep the guns ready. There are thousands of those freakies in this city. What used to be a city. Mount up,” she said, and as she turned toward the armored car something that pulsed bright blue shrieked across the sky about a mile high, followed by four red balls of flame that were spinning around and around each other like atoms in a molecule. The female soldier never looked up.
Welcome to Denver, Dave thought. He was so glad to see an American soldier with some firepower that he wanted to sob with relief, but that wouldn’t do for anyone to witness, so as he picked his way back through the gray garden of death, he wiped the wet from his eyes with the back of a hand. He retrieved his Uzi from the bus’s hood. Weary to his bones, but knowing he had to keep going a little longer, he mounted up.
Eighteen.
There was indeed a glow in the sky. Beneath it had once been a large shopping mall. Now it was a fortress that dwarfed by many times the puny fort of Panther Ridge.
Tangles of concertina wire surrounded the place except for the road in. Beyond the wire were log barricades and beyond that a twenty-foot high wall of bricks, stones, pieces of jagged metal, broken bottles, and whatever else was strong, sharp, and nasty. The moldering corpses of a dozen or so Gray Men lay amid the concertina wire’s razors. A few had been flattened into gray jelly on the road. Flat-roofed watchtowers with machine guns stood all along the walls. Generators were at work, powering two searchlights that followed the armored car and the school bus in their approach. A huge door covered with metal spikes was hauled upward on chains, like that of a medieval castle, for the vehicles to pass under and then allowed to settle back into place.
Part of the mall was lit up. There were many cars and several Army trucks in the parking lot, as well as a second armored car. As Hannah followed the first armored car toward what appeared to be the mall’s main entrance, she—as well as Dave, Olivia, and Ethan—saw a welcoming committee of ten soldiers with automatic rifles waiting for them. There was a sobbing of relief from many in the bus, but Ethan was watching both the Gorgon and the man who it seemed had been trying to grab hold of him. The human was sitting in a seat nursing what looked to be an injured right hand, while the Gorgon had hardly moved during the journey from the highway to this refuge. The bald-headed man who remained huddled on the floorboard next to Hannah was also a human, Ethan thought, but he felt some kind of strange vibration from him and saw in the man’s mind a terrified confusion of darkness and half-glimpsed, gliding shapes.
The man with the injured hand kept glancing at Ethan and then clasping his knuckles. Sweat was on his face. Broken fingers? Ethan wondered. He had sent the silver hand out to explore and discovered an impenetrable sphere that seemed to be protecting the man’s thoughts: past, present, and future. The sphere was incandescent blue, and so bright it burned the mind’s eye. He’d had to call the silver hand back, but he knew now…this man was for some reason helping the Gorgons and they were shielding his mind with immense power, because…why?
Because, Ethan thought as his gaze slid from the Gorgon’s pawn to the Gorgon and back again, they didn’t want someone like him seeing why the man was really here?
Something to do with me, Ethan decided. The man had tried to grab hold of my arms. What would have happened if he had?
He was so close to telling Dave. To saying it was probably better that all three of these creatures were dumped off the bus, or now turned over to whoever was running this place. But he thought that if he did, the Gorgon might not like it…and, for now, he had the Gorgon in control. They wanted something that must be very important, to have put on all these disguises of body and mind.
Me? he wondered.
And then: Yeah. Me.
The bus stopped. Hannah opened the door. Immediately two soldiers with their automatic rifles came up the steps to cover everyone. They were followed by a Hispanic man with a black goatee and a stubble of hair. He was wearing civilian clothes and had a pen in the pocket of his tan-colored shirt. “Who’s in charge here?”
“I…guess I still am,” said Olivia. “I’m Olivia Quintero.”
“Okay. I’m Dr. Hernandez. Any other doctors here?”
“Right here. John Douglas,” JayDee answered. “Sprained ankle and all.”