“Why’d they choose you?” Dave asked.
“They chose me because they thought a real human could get to him easier. Just like Vope said, they want to study him. But they’re afraid of him, too.” Jefferson tensed, ready for pain to be delivered to him at any second for his failure and his betrayal, but no pain came. He realized he had truly been abandoned, She had turned Her back on him, and probably everybody in New Eden had been destroyed like ants beneath a crushing boot, the Ant Farm whirled away into space or some other dimension and burned into nothingness. “I thought…he must be a Cypher weapon or something, but…what he did out there…killing those soldiers…he can’t be one of them.”
“Ethan is something different,” said Olivia, who had regained her composure. “Becoming something different,” she corrected herself.
“A third kind of alien,” JayDee said, and surprised himself by voicing the thought. “He believes he can stop this war. I say, give him the chance.”
“Right.” Jefferson nodded strenuously. “A chance. Yes. Absolutely. But…listen…nobody can stay here. Vope says they’ll be coming to burn this place to the ground. They can do it. They will do it.”
“I’ll know when they’re coming,” said Ethan.
“How will you know? ESP or something?”
“You can call it that. I’ll just know when they get close enough.” Ethan turned his attention to the major. “If I’m gone, there’s no need for them to attack this place. They may do it just because they can, but like JayDee said…the sooner we get on the road, the better.”
“Okay, but give us time to work tonight. If I were you I wouldn’t want to head off after dark, anyway. It’s too risky.”
“It’s a risk to stay here,” Ethan said, but he knew that night travel was pushing even his powers of survival and certainly they didn’t want to run into any more armies of Gray Men.
“I’m not staying here!” Jefferson Jericho stood up and staggered but held himself upright. “Hell, no! I didn’t ask for any of this! You want to lock me up with the Gorgons coming to kill everybody? And execute me, for trying to save the lives of my people? How was I supposed to know that the boy wasn’t a Cypher weapon? I didn’t know he was a human!” He glanced at Ethan and the boy’s silver eye, which sent a shiver up his spine. “If you can call that human!”
“Before we go,” Dave said to Major Fleming, “I’d like the job of putting a bullet through this scumbag’s head.”
“What do you mean, your people?” Olivia asked, disregarding Dave’s remark. “What people? And where?”
“In Tennessee. I…had a housing development, near Nashville.” Jefferson decided not to reveal too much about himself, in case the Southern soldier’s mother had lost her bankroll betting on the book and DVD of God’s High Rollers’ System For Riches And Happiness, forty-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents but for a few dollars more could be delivered overnight by Federal Express. “The whole development…everything…was scooped up by the Gorgons. Put somewhere so they could study us. I was taken by one of them…she looked like a woman, she could change her face and her shape…and she told me if I didn’t bring the boy back, our protection would be gone. That’s why I did it. For my people, like I said. And I swear to God I thought he was a Cypher weapon. I thought that’s why they wanted him.” He turned his agonized eyes upon Ethan and figured if he ever needed an iota of salesmanship he needed a ton of it now. First, the build-up: “I know you’ve got a fantastic power…I’ve never seen anything like that…what you did out there. You saved everybody.” He brought upon his face the expression of a desperate supplicant, which was closer to reality than he cared to admit. “Can you stop this war?”
Ethan probed the man’s mind and found that, not surprisingly, the blue sphere was gone. His Gorgon keeper had left him to his own resources in penalty for failure. The silver hand of Ethan’s curiosity roamed through a landscape of scenes from the man’s past that in some places were hard to view; he found bits and scraps that told him the real name was Leon Kushman but the man went by another—Jefferson Jericho—and there were scenes of adoring crowds and stacks of money being counted and women, many women, who—
Ethan had the complete picture of Jefferson Jericho in the time it took between the words Can and war. He saw the Gorgon creature in its many guises and knew all. He saw a rainbow through a window and knew the sudden elation of a car salesman with a grand idea to make himself rich. He saw Jericho’s wife—her name Ramona? No…Regina—with a pistol, and knew how close this man had come to paying for his many sins with a bullet to the head…but saved by the Gorgon ship blasting into view over the Tennessee pastures.
“You were lucky that day she was going to shoot you,” Ethan said, and saw the blood drain from the man’s face. “Or maybe not, because here you are with us.”
Jefferson touched his right temple, as if he could feel Ethan moving around in there but the silver hand had already gone. “You know what I’m telling you is true, don’t you?” He heard a little begging in his voice, but that was all right; the boy might respond to it.
“That part is true. Some of the rest of it, not so much. And to answer your other question: I’ll know more about that when we get where we’re going, White Mansion Mountain in Utah.”
“Are you done bulling the shit?” Dave asked, speaking to Jefferson. “Time you got locked up or put down with a bullet.” He looked again to the major. “I’ll do it, if nobody else will.”
“This man has done some bad things,” Ethan agreed, “but he doesn’t deserve to be killed for this one. His real name is Jefferson Jericho, and he was a—”
“God dog it!” said the Southern soldier. “I knew he was familiar! My momma watched him, nine o’clock every Sunday night, bought his book too! I should’ve known from his voice!”
“A preacher, of a kind,” Ethan went on. “He sold dreams. Some turned out good and some went wrong. There’s no point in locking him up, either. His Gorgon protection is gone. He has nowhere left to go.”
“That,” said Jefferson, “is unfortunately correct.” He maintained eye contact with the boy, as difficult as that was for him. “By this time, my people and my town are gone, too.” His tongue finally worked the loose tooth out and he spat it to the floor along with a spatter of blood. “You know what we called my town?”
“New Eden,” Ethan said.
“Why did I even have to ask?” Jefferson worked up a tight smile. “Well, the snake got in it.”
“You mean another snake got in it?”
“Yeah. That’s what I mean.” The preacherman should’ve felt trapped, backed into a corner, but instead he felt strangely free and strangely strong. With this boy able to read his mind, there was no longer any reason to pretend, to put on a show, to hide behind any façade. It was almost, in a way, a relief. “I didn’t ask to be here. So do whatever you want with me. Like you say, I have nowhere else to go. A rifle bullet now or blown to pieces by the Gorgons later…what’s the difference?”
“None,” said Dave. “So I say the rifle bullet.”
“You give up very easily,” Ethan said, “to be such a good talker.”