“This conversation is way over my wintry head, gents,” Hannah said. “I’m just along for the ride. And I’m lettin’ you know I’m lookin’ at another on-ramp right now that’s a jammed-up parkin’ lot, no way are we gettin’ up that.” She wheeled the bus in another direction. “Well…no cops around, so let’s try the off-ramp.”
That was how Hannah got them up onto I-70 and westbound. The eastbound traffic during the incident that had caused all this chaos—likely the first battle that had devastated the central part of the city—had been virtually nil. There were a few wrecked cars and a big tractor-trailer truck that had slid into three other wrecks and caught fire, but Hannah was able to get them around the mangled blockage. She worried most about the glass and pieces of metal in the roadway, but the streetsweepers had been off-duty for a good long while and there wasn’t a damned thing she could do but to grit her teeth and dance the bus along as best she could.
The interstate started a slow ascent. Mountains stood on both sides, and ahead were the looming giants of peaks—now partially obscured by an ugly yellow mist—that had been born eighty million years ago. Ethan wondered how old the being was inside him, what it had seen and where and how it had been born, if the Rockies had been specks in the eye of God when it had first come to life, and what Life meant to it. He had the feeling from what it had shown him that it was a lonely creature, one of a limited or dying race, but above all it clung to its duty. And here was its truth and its meaning of existence, as clear as if the alien was sitting at his side telling him these things: the futility of wars was known to all but never accepted by those who held power as their God. Pride, arrogance, and stupidity were not just the worst traits of the human kind but were spread across the span of galaxies as the price to be paid for the desire to be held in esteem, or recognized as better than any other civilization, or simply the appetite to conquer and control. Ethan felt a sadness and heaviness in what might have been the heart and mind of the alien—now becoming his heart and mind as well—in that it knew it fought a losing battle. Yet here, right here on the border—this young world that might not make much difference in the unfolding of a galaxy old beyond the meaning of Time—a stand must be made, and with that stand a message to be sent to the warlords of Now and Forever who assemble soldiers, weapons and ships for dispatch to destinations of destruction and misery.
That message might be futile, but it was the creature’s duty to make it known: I am the guardian of this sector. I was old before your civilization took root in swamp or was created by machine. If you reject peace and insist upon the satisfaction of horror, then prepare you to be satisfied in the horror of your own making.
Ethan could feel the tracker following them, far above at the atmosphere’s edge. Its Cypher eye was fixed directly upon him.
They would be coming soon. They would find their place and time to try to take him…but he knew it would be soon.
And the Gorgons?
They would be coming soon too. What the controllers could not control, they would attempt to contain or destroy.
He was not ending up on the dissection table of any reptile or robot, and neither were the people he knew to be his friends on this endangered planet.
I will be—
“Ready,” said Ethan.
Nikki asked him what he had said, and he shrugged and explained that he was thinking out loud, and then he smiled at her and squeezed her hand and thought that nothing Cypher or Gorgon was going to harm these creatures that had been hurt so much already. A great battle was ahead…he could feel their forces of destruction massing, for they too would be ready.
The bus went on, westbound in the eastbound lanes, as I-70 steepened toward the gigantic mountains, and the boy with a silver eye now realized he was more alien than human, and so mused upon both the question of destiny and what his mother would think if she could see him now.
Twenty-Four.
Lightning struck so close it filled the bus with dazzling blue light, and then the following crash of thunder made Number 712 shiver to its rusted bolts.
“Great night to be out on a drive,” said Jefferson Jericho in a hollow voice. No one answered him. Hannah was concentrating on the highway ahead through her viewpane and the others were in their own worlds or else too tensed by this building storm to have any use for talking. Jefferson shrugged; he couldn’t do a thing about his circumstances, and he figured he was better off here under Ethan’s protection than at the mall. The device at the back of his neck was not filling him up with the flames of agony, he felt he was—for the moment at least—out of Her reach, and so what was a little thunderstorm? Still…Hannah was having a tough time, creeping along I-70 at about fifteen miles an hour because of the thickness of this yellow mist they’d run into up here at the high altitude with the jagged mountains all around. Beyond the guardrails were steep dropoffs that could swallow up earthmen and spacekids alike.
“Hey, Ethan!” he called back.
“Yes?” The boy had been mentally observing the Cypher tracker, which continued to pinpoint his location even as the large battlecraft of both sides fought each other at the threshold of space.
“This storm natural? Or is it them?”
“Natural,” Ethan replied. “But their weapons have screwed up the atmosphere. So all storms will be many times amplified in violence.”
Amplified in violence, Jefferson thought. That wasn’t how a kid talked. That was the alien talking. How did it know English? Reading the boy’s mind, he figured. An alien who could come to this world without a spaceship and enter a boy’s dead body…that had to be some kind of weird. Well, no weirder than Her. Or the Ant Farm. Or Microscope Meadows. He had not allowed himself to think much about Burt Ratcoff. He remembered the guy saying I think they hollowed me out and put somethin’ else inside me. Poor dumb bastard, Jefferson thought. But Ratcoff probably didn’t know what hit him and he was out of this nightmare now, so…good for him.
Jefferson scratched his beard. His hands were free. A few hours ago, the conversation between he and Dave was: Okay, I have to pee. Want me to go ahead and do it here, or can we pull the bus over for a minute?
Good idea, Hannah had said. I’ve gotta go too. Might as well pull over while we can, everybody take a break.
So, Jefferson had asked Dave, are you going to cut these things off my wrists or do you want to hold it for me?
They had stopped at a lookout point with a view to the forest below, and one by one they all saw the wreckage of the crashed United States Air Force fighter jet amid the burned trees.
Jefferson flinched at the next strike of lightning, because it too had been close. Up here in the high mountains, the weather had gone berserk. He’d tried hard not to think too much about Regina or the people at the Ant Farm. There was nothing he could do for them. They might all be dead by now, swept away into space, or left on their unprotected own. Which would be the better fate? He wished he’d had a chance to smooth things with Regina, to make her understand that a special man like himself with special gifts could not be expected to live a normal life, constrained by a society of dumb sheep. No, he had to make his mark and take what he needed when he needed it; that was just how he’d been born, and who could change that? But…it was too late now with Regina. Maybe that day she’d nearly shot him in the back of the head would’ve been the best, he thought. Wouldn’t be here right now, in this bus in a rising storm with a damned itchy beard and an alien boy, heading for God only knew what. He hoped Regina had died quickly. She was all right, she just hadn’t recognized that the gifts he’d been given had to be used. He hoped she had died in one quick second of being cast off into airless space, because in his way he had loved her. Whether he could ever come to tears about her passing, he didn’t know nor did he care to dwell on it very much longer; after all, if she was dead she—like Burt Ratcoff—was in a hell of a better place and he was still here in this shitmess.