He had no hesitation. He said, “I want you to go.”
“You do? Really?” It was spoken with an outrush of breath. “I know it won’t be safe, but—”
“No place is safe,” he reminded her. “No place will ever be safe while this goes on.”
She nodded. “Do you know what’s on the mountain?”
“No. I don’t think I’ll know until we get there, and it reveals itself.” It reveals itself? He realized his thinking was changing too, and the way he spoke…it wasn’t how a human boy thought or spoke…it was the alien thinking and speaking, becoming more and more dominant. “I may be really different soon,” he told her, and offered a faint smile. “Like I’m not already. But I may not be Ethan Gaines much longer. That part of me may just go away, or go to sleep…I don’t know. But I don’t want you to sit here and wait to die, either. Your sister is right. We’ve got to find our way, so…I’m glad you want to come with us.” He motioned toward the unattended pot of soup. “You’d better get something to eat while you can.”
“I will, thanks.”
Ethan was weary and needed to find a place to rest. The battle against the spider-shapes and the Cypher soldiers had depleted him. There was some part of him now that was always on alert, and he trusted that to let him know if the Gorgons or the Cyphers were anywhere near. For the moment, he felt they were not. He wound up taking his sleeping bag into the empty storeroom of the Brookstone and stretching out on the floor there, and he was asleep within a few minutes.
But something within him did not sleep, did not need the solace of rest in this realm of misery, and it spoke to Ethan with four words: This is my world.
Ethan saw in the eye of his mind a rugged gray landscape strewn with boulders and cut by wide crevasses. The sky was milky white, shot through with streaks of vivid purple lightning, and just visible through the stormy atmosphere was a massive, clouded planet encompassed by three shimmering rings of debris and dust. Ethan had the sensation of standing on a mountaintop with a fierce, dry wind that smelled of alkali blowing into his face, and looking out across a wide valley, he could see a huge silver obelisk, thin but thousands of feet tall, with a spire that was slowly and silently rotating. Ethan had the sense that it was a watchtower of a kind, or a lighthouse sending out not beams of light but energy and messages that were far beyond his understanding. Messages were also coming in to this particular way station, and why he thought of the tower as a way station between worlds or dimensions he did not know, but he was sure there were others of its kind on more planets. It was a lonely place. He was struck by its loneliness and desolation, and he knew that the keeper here was an ancient creature who had either been chosen or had chosen itself to give up another kind of life for this duty it carried out. It was a double-edged sword: an honor to be a soldier in this service, but a lifelong responsibility. Time here was not Earthtime, nor Life governed by the laws of Earth. Ethan was unsure that the creature who was hosting him, and who he hosted, was capable of a physical body or not. The creature might be the construct of pure energy and intelligence, and though this part of its origin and nature was not allowed to be known, Ethan was sure that it did possess two things that made it akin to the human kind: what would be termed compassion, and a sense of justice. Those seemed to be its driving forces, as well as an innate curiosity about the workings of the universe that even it was not allowed to be fully understood by the wisdom of a higher power.
The spire rotated. The wind blew and purple lightning streaked across the milky sky, but the image was fading. When that vision of another world vanished entirely, the human part of Ethan fell deeper into a dreamless sleep, yet the alien being within him remained silently and tirelessly vigilant, for that was the only way it had ever known.
Four.
Westward
Twenty-Three.
“Is this really necessary?” Jefferson Jericho asked as Dave McKane fastened the black plastic zipcuffs to his wrists, basically tying the man’s hands together. Dave didn’t answer. He pushed Jefferson up the steps into the bus and wished the bastard would fall down and break his beak.
Hannah Grimes was sitting behind the wheel. She had decided that driving this bus to their destination in Utah might be the last driving she would ever do, but there was not much else on her social calendar that seemed important, and Dave had convinced her that this indeed was an important trip. So she was in it, for better or for worse; she figured Dave would’ve driven the bus off the road at the first hairy curve, anyway. The meager light of a rainy dawn had begun to crawl across the horizon. Already aboard were JayDee and Olivia, and they were waiting now for Ethan and Nikki. Major Fleming had returned their guns, canned food, and jugs of water to them and told them he wished he could do more, that he could spare some soldiers and one of the armored cars as an escort but he couldn’t abandon the people here. He’d decided to top off the bus’s tank from their own dwindling supply. Otherwise the most he could do was give them a longer hose to help siphon fuel along the way, scavenge a headlight from one of the trucks and make repairs and improvements to the bus.
A work team had labored all night under the glare of generator-powered arc lamps. They’d replaced the shattered windshield with a piece of metal that had a rectangular glass inset through which the driver could see the road. Nothing could be done about the window the Gray Child had broken through, except for a sheet of plastic duct-taped over the aperture. Other windows bore bullet holes from all the firing that had gone on, but again nothing could be done for those. The main work had been the construction and welding of a cowcatcher-like cage attached to the front of the bus and studded with iron spikes. All the metal was going to make the bus heavier and so use more fuel, the major had told Dave, but if they ran into any more Gray Men this might help them get through without the cavalry coming to their rescue…which, out there in the Rockies on I-70, was definitely not happening. He said if they’d had time and ammunition to spare he would’ve put a machine-gun turret up top, but again there was the weight to consider, and they needed the ammo and every available M240 at the watchtowers. A wiper blade had been fixed to keep the glass inset clear, and the last thing the major and his troops could do was clean the interior of the bus of all bloodstains and fleshy parts, both human and gray. Sorry we don’t have any air freshener, Fleming had said, but maybe you can find a pine strip when you stop for gas.
What the major had not told any of them, and they’d only seen this on their way to the bus from the mall, was that every soldier had signed his or her name on the sides of the bus in black or red spray paint, and maybe every soldier didn’t fully understand the importance of this journey, but both Fleming and Captain Walsh did and they had been the first to sign. From the major also had come the wrist zipcuffs, a pair of shears, and a suggestion to keep Jefferson Jericho bound up for awhile, just in case.
“Sit there,” Dave said, pushing the preacherman into a seat on the left side of the bus a few rows behind Hannah. Olivia and JayDee had taken seats on the right side, and Dave sat down behind Jefferson Jericho, so he could slap the dude on the back of the head if he needed to, or just wanted to. His Uzi felt good in its shoulder-holster, and in his belt holster was the .357 Magnum revolver that had helped save him and Olivia from the Gray Men in the high school library. He figured these weapons might not stop a Cypher or a Gorgon, but they would do the job on anything else and…if he really wanted to be truthful about it…they would save their owner from capture by the aliens if they came in numbers too many for Ethan to hold back, and they would save Ethan, Olivia, and the rest of them too if it came to that.