“Sir?”
“I want to believe,” Fleming said. “Dear God…I want to believe.” He gave a sigh that sounded to him like wind past a tomb, but maybe…maybe…there were seeds of hope in that wind, and they would be scattered and take root on fertile earth. The border, the kid had said. That’s what they’re fighting over. The thing was…that sounded right. Fleming did believe him. And only something from beyond this world would know that. “You’ve got patients to take care of,” he said. “Long night ahead.”
“Yes sir,” the doctor answered, and left the office.
Fleming sat for awhile, staring at that particular landmark on the map of Utah. After a few more minutes he switched off the desklamp with a hand that no one ever saw tremble. It would be lights out in two hours, except for the hospital that was set up in what used to be a Gap store, and then the mall would be patrolled by soldiers with flashlights. He sat in the dark, thinking of what his hometown of Seattle used to be, and the wreckage of what it was now. He imagined that the rest of the world was like that, and how could it ever return to what it had been? Without comm to the outside, there was no way to know. Had all the nuclear plants been shut down by the book, or had a few of them been abandoned and melted down with no humans to control the cooling elements? And what about the hundreds of thousands—millions?—of “freakies,” as Captain Walsh termed them, loose in the ruins of the cities? Even if the war was stopped, what about all that?
But did the fate of the earth depend on the boy who had been standing before him?
If so…if it was at all possible…Major Fleming would not be the one to stand in his way. There would be plenty of things eager and hungry to do that job.
Nineteen.
Ethan found he couldn’t go to the bathroom without the soldier following him. No water was running, so in the green-tiled bathroom between what had been an Abercrombie and an American Eagle aluminum cans stood in for urinals and black garbage bags for toilets. The smell was rank, but at least there was toilet paper. The soldier looked away while Ethan was doing his business, but when it was done the young trooper was all bird-dog again.
The lights were still on in this section of the mall where the generators were working. A mass of people occupied tents, cots and sleeping bags. Some were playing cards or dominoes, some were reading, talking or praying, others just lying and staring blankly at the walls or the ceiling. Children played with toys taken from the Learning Center or the Disney Store. As it had been at Panther Ridge, there were all ages and seemingly all races: a true melting pot, in this Land That Had Been Plenty. It appeared that the mall had been ransacked in the early days of the war, because some of the windows were broken out and all the clothing and shoe stores were empty holes, even the mannequins picked clean.
Ethan slowed his pace. The soldier was right behind him. “Just a minute,” he said, as he saw who he was looking for. He went past the dry fountain and stood before the Gorgon, Jeff Kushman, and the short bald man. Kushman had popsicle-stick splints and tape wrapped around the two broken fingers; he had already staked out his area and was sliding into his sleeping bag. The Gorgon stood with a rolled-up sleeping bag as if he intended to stand there all night, and the bald man was sitting on the floor with his shoes off, rubbing his feet and grimacing.
Of course the soldier followed Ethan’s footsteps, but he knew that would happen. Kushman, eyes heavy, looked up at him from the sleeping bag. The Gorgon’s head turned, and the flinty black eyes took him in. The bald man paid him no attention, so intent was he on his own two problems.
“You men all right?” Ethan asked. Before anyone could answer, he spoke to the Gorgon: “Don’t you know how to use a sleeping bag?”
“Sure he does,” Kushman said. “Just put it down anywhere, Jack. Right over here would be fine.”
The Gorgon obeyed, moving slowly and stiffly as if the lubrication of his joints was drying out.
“Jack?” Ethan repeated. “That’s funny, he doesn’t look like a ‘Jack’.”
“Shouldn’t you be getting some sleep, Ethan?” Jefferson Jericho offered a smile that didn’t have a lot of wattage behind it. “Is that your real name?”
“Real enough. Dave told me you three came from Denver. Right?”
“That’s right, son.”
“How’d you make it past all the Gray Men?”
“We were lucky.” Jefferson had already asked Joel Schuster what those horrors had been. There were none of those monsters in New Eden, and being so close to the things gave him extra incentive, if any more was needed. “We never saw any.”
“Captain Walsh said there are thousands here. You must’ve been lucky.”
“Yeah.” Jefferson watched Vope figuring out how to unroll and unzip the sleeping bag. He wondered if the Gorgon even needed sleep. One thing, they could mimic human habits pretty quickly.
“So everybody passed the blood test,” Ethan continued. He tried to probe Kushman’s mind with the silver hand, but again the bright blue sphere would not be pierced. “That’s a good thing. I wouldn’t want to think we were traveling with any aliens in human skin.”
“Me neither. That would be very disturbing, wouldn’t it? Listen…Ethan…I’m really tired, okay? Let’s talk tomorrow, I’ve got to get some sleep.” Jefferson saw that, to Vope’s credit, there had been no reaction and no reaction from Ratcoff either. But he thought: Ethan knows. The question being: if the boy knows, why hasn’t he done anything about it? He zipped up his sleeping bag as best he could, one-handed. “Goodnight,” he said as he settled in, and he gratefully closed his eyes against the overhead lights though there was still more than an hour before lights out. He would get another chance at the boy later, he thought, but at the moment the pain pills were putting him under.
“Night, Mr. Kushman,” Ethan said, and with the soldier at his back he walked toward the area where Olivia, Dave, and JayDee were sacked out. Dave had already been asleep when Ethan announced his bathroom trip to the trooper, and Olivia had been drifting that way. He was almost to them when someone touched his right arm.
He turned to face Nikki. The soldier stopped also, and being a sensible guy he backed up a few paces to give them a little more of that precious privacy.
“Hi,” Ethan said.
“Hi.” The overheads made the rhinestone star on her eyepatch glitter. “You found a place?”
“Yeah, I’m over there. You?”
“Over that way. Not far.”
He nodded. “Good to be in a safe place tonight.”
“Yeah. You get some food?”
“Somebody brought me a couple of pieces of bread and a can of Sprite. That’s all I need right now.” The somebody being a runner for Captain Walsh.
Nikki didn’t say anything for awhile. They both looked around at the people getting themselves and their children ready for a night’s rest. Then Nikki said, “It was bad…what happened to Mr. Roosa. I was standing right there almost beside him. He was a pretty good guy. It was bad, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Ethan. “Real bad.”
“Do you think they’ll come here tonight?”
He heard the fear in her voice. She looked pale and shaken, and maybe she was just hanging on. “I don’t think so,” Ethan answered. “No, probably not.”
“I don’t think so either.” She seemed to relax a little, at the confidence in Ethan’s voice. “Seems like if anybody would know, you would.”
He didn’t care to follow up that comment, which for sure dealt with his being—in her eye, at least—part alien. He had a sudden thought, though, and it involved a need to know. He said, “Would you come with me for just a minute? Let’s get away from some of these people?”