The door opened and a slim, pallid-faced man with a mass of curly reddish hair and a ginger-colored beard peered out. He was wearing glasses held together with electrical tape. The lenses magnified his gray eyes. He wore a pair of dirty overalls and a brown-checked shirt, and he was holding at his side a clipboard with a pad of yellow paper on which Ethan caught sight of lines of numbers. He had the stub of a much-chewed-upon pencil clenched in the left side of his mouth.
“Afternoon, Gary,” JayDee said. He motioned toward Ethan. “We have a new arrival.”
The man’s magnified eyes studied Ethan. His reddish brows went up. “Fell in some mud?” he asked, and Ethan nodded.
“Someone new?” came a woman’s voice from behind Gary, who wore a pistol in a holster at his waist just as did John Douglas. “Let’s have a look.”
Gary stepped aside. JayDee let Ethan enter the apartment first. There was a woman sitting behind a desk and behind her there was a wall with a large, expressionist painting of wild horses galloping across a field. The glass sliding door that led to the balcony and facing the distant mountains that had exploded behind Ethan not long ago was reinforced with a geometry of duct tape. On the floor was a crimson rug, there were two chairs, a coffee table and a brown sofa. Everything looked like junk shop stuff, but at least it made the place comfortable. Or maybe not. On another wall was a rack of three rifles, one with a scope. A few oil lamps were set about, their wicks burning low. A second woman was sitting in a chair in front of the desk, and before her was another clipboard and a pad of yellow paper with figures written on it. Evidently some kind of meeting had been in progress that involved number crunching, and as Ethan approached the desk he had the distinct feeling that the numbers were not good.
Both women stood up, as if he were worth the respect. He figured maybe he was, for getting here without being killed by either Gorgon monsters or Cypher soldiers. The woman who was behind the desk was the older of the two. She was dressed in a pale blue blouse and gray pants and around her neck she wore a necklace of turquoise stones with a silver crucifix in the middle. She said, “What do we have here?” Her dark brown eyes narrowed and quickly went to JayDee.
“He’s human,” the doctor said, answering her unspoken question. But in his voice there was something else. As far as I can tell, was what Ethan heard. “One problem, though. He doesn’t know his—”
“My name is Ethan Gaines,” said the boy, before JayDee could get that out.
“His history,” the doctor went on. The apartment door had been closed by Gary, after Dave and Roger had come in. The noise of work outside was muffled. “Ethan has no memory of where he came from or where his parents are. He is…shall we say…a mystery.”
“Hannah saw him through her binoculars,” Dave added. His voice was less gruff but still hard-edged. He removed his baseball cap, showing brown hair that stuck up with multiple cowlicks and had streaks of gray at the temples. “I made the decision to go out after him. Didn’t have time to bring it to you or anybody else.”
“Brave or crazy, which one is it?” said the woman behind the desk, speaking to Dave with a hint of irritation as if she valued his life greater than a horseback jaunt into the battlefield. Her gaze went to the boy again. “Ethan,” she said. “I am Olivia Quintero. I suppose I’m the leader here. At least that’s what they tell me. I guess I should say…welcome to Panther Ridge.”
Ethan nodded. He figured there were plenty of places worse to be. Like anywhere out there beyond the walls. He took a good long look at Olivia Quintero, who radiated a comforting confidence, or a strength of will and purpose. He thought that was why she was the leader here. She looked to be a tall woman, slimly built and likely made more slim by lack of food. But she was sinewy and tough in the way she held herself, her face placid and composed, her forehead high under a crown of short-cut white hair. Ethan thought she was maybe in her mid-fifties, her skin tone slightly darkened by her Hispanic heritage. Her forehead was lined and there were deeper lines at the corners of her eyes, but otherwise she wore the roads and travels of her life well. She looked like what he thought she must have been before all this happened: a high school principal, but one who had experienced some “stuff” in her own younger years and might let things slide if you explained yourself the right way. Maybe she’d been the principal at Ethan Gaines High, who knew? Or a businesswoman, maybe. Someone who had come up from a poor family and made a fortune selling real estate, the kind of houses that used to look like little castles before there was a need for fortresses. And how he knew this about the little castles he couldn’t remember, so he just let it go because no daylight was breaking through his night.
He felt her examining him, too. And she saw him as a muddied boy about fourteen or fifteen years old with a mop of unruly brown hair that hung over his forehead and nearly into his eyes, which were the light blue color of the early morning sky at the ranch she had owned with her deceased husband Vincent about twenty miles east of here, back when there was sanity in the world. She noted Ethan’s sharp nose and chin and the equally sharp—nearly piercing—expression in those eyes, and she thought he was an intelligent boy who must have been born under a very lucky star, to have survived what he must’ve gone through out there. Or…tal vez no tan afortunado, because maybe the lucky ones had all died early, along with their loved ones and their memories of what Earth had been.
Thinking about that too much was a dark path to Hell, and God only knew all of the survivors here had suffered aplenty, with more suffering yet to come. The suicide rate was getting higher. There was no way to stop someone who wanted to leave, and with so many guns around…
The loss of hope was the worst, Olivia knew. So she could let no one else know how close she was to taking a gun, putting it to her head in the middle of the night and joining her husband in what must surely be a better place than this.
But Panther Ridge needed a leader, someone who pressed on and organized things and said tomorrow is another day and would never show her terror and hopelessness. And she was it, though deep in her soul she wondered how much longer she could be, and why there was any point to any of it.
“Have you ever killed anyone?” Ethan suddenly asked her.
“What?” she replied, a little startled by the question.
“Killed anyone in that room I was put in,” Ethan went on. “I saw claw marks and bullet holes in the walls. What looked like bloodstains, too. I’m thinking people were taken in there and killed.”
Dave stepped closer, between Ethan and Olivia. “Yeah, we’ve killed some things in there. Maybe they were people once, but they sure weren’t when we killed them. It had to be done. Then we scrubbed up the blood the best we could. Don’t you know?”
“I know about the Gorgons and the Cyphers. I know they’re fighting. Tearing the world apart. That’s all I can remember.”
“And you don’t remember how you know?” Olivia asked. “Not anything?”
“Nothing,” said the boy.
Olivia glanced at John Douglas, who lifted his white eyebrows and shrugged, saying I have no idea. She directed her attention back to the new arrival. “I don’t know where you’ve been or how you survived out there, but I think there’s a lot you need to grasp. And much more than about the Cyphers and Gorgons. Are you hungry? I hope you don’t mind horse meat.”
“I don’t mind.”
“We do what we can here. Make do or do without. Mostly do without. But we keep going.” Why? she asked herself even as she said it. What is it that we think will change the way things are? She quickly pushed those questions away. She also saw no point in mentioning yet that on some nights true Hell was visited upon the wrack and ruin of this Earth. “Dave, take him to the mess hall. Get him fed. Find him a place to stay.”