The boy hesitated. “What’s this for?”
“A saline solution.”
“What’s it for?” the boy asked, with a little irritation.
“We’re checking to see,” said the doctor, “whether you’re fully human or not. The saline solution causes a reaction in the alien blood. It heats it up. Then things happen. Left arm, please.”
“I’m human,” the boy said.
“Do what you’re told,” the hard-faced man spoke up. “We don’t want to shoot you for no reason.”
“Okay.” The boy managed a tight smile. He offered his left arm. “Go ahead.”
The needle sank into a vein. The doctor stepped back. Both of the other men were ready with their weapons. The doctor checked the time on his wristwatch. About a minute slipped past. “Dave,” the doctor said to the hard-faced man, “I think he’s clean.”
“Sure about that?”
The doctor stared into the boy’s face. His eyes were blue, nested in wrinkles, but were very clear. “No nodules I can see. No abnormalities, no growths. No reaction to the saline. Let’s give a listen to the heart and take a bp reading.” The doctor retreived a stethoscope from his bag, checked the boy’s heartbeat and then used a blood pressure cuff. “Normal,” was the conclusion. “Under the circumstances.”
“What about the bruises?”
“Yes,” said the doctor. “What about those.” It was a statement, not a question. “Son, what’s your name?”
The boy hesitated. He was tired and hurting, and he could still taste blood in his mouth. A name? He had none to give. The men were waiting. He decided he’d better offer them something, and he thought of a name he’d recently seen. “Ethan Gaines,” he answered.
“Really?” Dave cocked his head to one side. “Funny about that. One of our lookouts spotted you through her binocs running into that high school parking lot. Funny, that it’s Ethan Gaines High School. Was, I mean. So that’s your name, huh?”
The boy shrugged.
“I think,” the doctor said, “he doesn’t know his name. He’s suffered a very violent concussive event. An explosion of some kind. Might have been caught in a shockwave. Where are your parents?”
“Don’t know,” the boy said. He frowned. “I just seemed to wake up, all of a sudden. I was running. That’s all I remember. I know I’m in Colorado…in Fort Collins, I think? But everything else…” He blinked and looked around the little prison. “What’s this place for? What did you mean…about the alien blood heating up?”
“That’s for later,” Dave said. “Right now, we’re the ones asking the questions…like where you came from?”
The boy had reached his limit with Dave. Whether the man was holding an Uzi on him on not, he didn’t care. He took a solid step forward, which made both guns train on him, and he thrust his chin out and his blue eyes glinted with anger and he said, “I told you. I don’t remember who I am, or where I came from. All I know is, I was running. From them. They were fighting over my head. All around me.” He had to pause to draw a breath into his sore lungs. “I don’t know who you people are. I’m real glad you got me out of where I was, but I don’t like guns aimed at me. Either yours or the Cyphers’.” He let that hang for a few seconds, and then he added, “Sir.”
The weapons were lowered. Dave glanced quickly at the doctor, who had stepped to one side and was wearing a small, amused smile.
“Well,” said the doctor. “Ethan, I think you can put on your clothes now. As for who we are, I am John Douglas. Was a pediatric surgeon in my previous life. Now, mostly an aspirin-pusher. This is Dave McKane,” he said, motioning toward the hard-faced man, “and Roger Pell.”
“Hi,” said Ethan, to all three of them. He started putting his clothes back on…dirty white socks, underwear that was the worse for wear, muddy jeans, the grimy dark red shirt with the torn-off right sleeve, and the dirt-caked Pumas. He thought to check the pockets of his jeans for anything that might be a clue, but searching them brought up nothing. “I don’t remember these clothes,” he told the men. And he felt something break inside him. It was sudden and quiet, and yet it was like an inner scream. He had been about to say I don’t remember who bought them for me, but it was lost and fell away. He trembled and his right hand came up to press against his forehead, to jar loose the memories that were not there, and his eyes burned and his throat closed up and everywhere he turned there seemed to be a wall.
“Hell,” Dave McKane said, “sometimes I forget my own name too.” His voice was quieter now, not so harsh. There was a quaver in it that he killed by clearing his throat. “It’s just the times. Right, Doc?”
“Right,” said John Douglas. He reached out and touched Ethan’s arm; it was the gentle touch of a pediatric surgeon. “The times,” he said, and Ethan blinked away his tears and nodded, because tears would win no battles and right no wrongs.
“She’ll want to see him,” Dave said, spreaking to the doc. “If you’re sure?”
“I’m sure. Ethan, you can call me JayDee. Okay?”
“Yes sir.”
“All right. Let’s get out of this hole.”
They took him out through the metal-reinforced door and into the yellow-misted light. A half-dozen people—thin, wearing clothes that had been patched many times and washed only a few—were standing around the door, waiting for the little drama within to play out, and they retreated up the stairs as Ethan emerged.
“This way.” JayDee directed Ethan to the left as they reached what had been the lowest building’s parking lot. The rain had stopped and the sun was hot through the jaundiced clouds. The air smelled of electricity before a thunderstorm. That and the air itself was heavy and humid. There was no hint of a breeze. As Ethan followed the three men across the parking lot, past a disused set of tennis courts and a swimming pool that had debris in it but only a small puddle of rainwater at its deepest end, he saw that people of many different generations were gathered here in the protection of this makeshift fortress. There were women of many ages holding babies and young children, there were older children and teenagers and on up to the elderly, people maybe in their seventies. Some of these people were working, the strong-backed chopping wood and stacking the lengths in neat piles, others laboring on the outer walls to strengthen places that looked damaged, and doing various other tasks in this fortress community. Most of the inhabitants paused in their work to watch Ethan and the men pass by. Everyone was thin and moved slowly, as if in a bad dream, their expressions blank and hollow-eyed, but they were survivors too. Ethan counted eight horses grazing in a corral on a brown-grassed, rocky hillside up near the highest point. A small wooden barn, surely not original to the apartment complex, stood nearby. With no gasoline available, true horsepower would be the only way to travel.
“Up here,” said JayDee, motioning Ethan up another flight of stairs at the central building. The walls had been painted with graffiti slogans in red, white and blue that proclaimed among other silent shouts We Will Not Die, This World Is Ours, and Tomorrow Is Another Day. Ethan wondered if the people who had painted those slogans were still alive.
He climbed the stairs behind JayDee, with Dave McKane and Roger Pell following him, and on the next level the doctor stopped at a door with the number 227 on it and knocked. Just before it opened something screamed past overhead, so fast it was nearly invisible, just the quickest impression of a yellow-and-brown-blotched triangular shape cutting through the air and then gone, and everyone but Ethan flinched because he was tired of running and if he was going to die today it would be without shrinking from his fate.