No rainbows here, folks, not even after the hardest rain. Move along…nothing to see.
Sitting a few rows behind Jefferson Jericho, Ethan felt himself drifting away. It was like he was becoming a spectator to his own life. He realized his speech was changing, no way he talked or thought like an earthkid anymore. Maybe he hadn’t, really, since all this had started. It was really weird now, though, because he knew the Big Change was happening. There was nothing he could do about it, it was for the best but…the Big Change was death for him, for the boy who’d called himself Ethan Gaines, and when the alien—the peacekeeper—had done what it needed to do, Ethan Gaines was finished. As the lightning flashed and the thunder crashed outside the bus, Ethan tried very hard to concentrate on that day at D’Evelyn High School—the third of April, the morning the first sonic booms had announced the coming of the Gorgons—when he had been waiting to take his Visible Man to the front of the class and make his presentation. The details of that had always been hazy; now they were becoming truly clouded, and more and more out of reach. He tried very hard to hold onto that morning and onto the memory of his dark-haired mother looking in on him in his room the night before, but it was all slipping away. His father…was there even a memory of him? The man had been gone a long time, it seemed. There were no memories of fights or shouting or anything that spelled out divorce. There was just the feeling that his father had left many years ago, and his mother had not remarried. She had soldiered on and given the boy the best life she could. Who could ask for much more than that?
As the alien’s powers strengthened and what had been the personality of a human boy continued to disappear, Ethan found himself trying to hang on, but knowing it was like being very tired and trying to stay awake after a very hard day. Sooner or later, he must give himself fully up to sleep; it would take him, no matter how hard he tried to fight it. And fighting it was not only useless, but wrong. The peacekeeper had a job to do. This body was just a vessel. The peacekeeper had raised him from the dead, had kept him alive so far, but the boy who called himself Ethan Gaines was a small grain of sand in the cosmos. He was a means to an end, and he understood this and accepted it. Not without sadness, though; he was still human enough to feel that, and he knew he would miss life no matter what it had become.
The alien presence within him gave him strange benefits. Not only could he clearly envision the Cypher tracker and sense the heat of its eye directed on him, or know how close or far away the Gorgon and Cypher armies and ships were, but he could feel the huddled humanity in a few of the small towns they’d passed, nestled up within the mountains on roads off I-70. He could see rooftops and a church steeple or two, and just in a matter of seconds he could know there were humans hiding there, always in some central location where community meant survival and isolation was death. The peacekeeper had great respect for these humans, who had held out so much longer than they should have against such overwhelming odds. The peacekeeper would have liked to have stopped and made sure these ragged and weary humans had enough food and water, but the larger picture was what needed attention. And Ethan was aware that there was a time factor involved…a need to get to the White Mansion as quickly as possible, though maybe even the peacekeeper itself did not fully understand why.
Most of the small towns they’d passed, and which could be seen from the interstate, felt to Ethan cold and lifeless. To him they gave off the rusted iron smell of violence, of human turned against human in the battle for food and shelter. Or they gave off the rotting flesh smell of Gray Men, hiding in the basements and in the dark damp places.
Beside Ethan, Nikki shifted uneasily in her seat in the aftermath of another close lightning strike. She couldn’t see anything out there, darkness had claimed the world. Her hand found Ethan’s again. She had been very afraid of him at one time, and so close to telling Olivia that she thought he should be put off the bus and left behind. Now she felt ashamed of that. She’d been so afraid that he was a Gorgon or a Cypher in disguise, and now she understood he was a human boy but not really, that he’d been a human boy, and he was now working for another alien who was trying to stop the war, but this was all so beyond her it spun her head. It was like looking up at the stars and trying to imagine how big the universe was. She longed for the simplicity of planning her next tattoo, hitting the Bowl-A-Rama on Saturday nights, flirting with hot guys, and sneaking a beer or a joint with her friends Kelly and Rita and Charmaine who were all probably very much dead. Or worse.
She missed her family. Who’d have ever thunk she would miss her mother’s sharp-edged voice getting after her for whatever reason and her father in his recliner with a beer in his hand and his eyes glued to the football game on the fifty-two-inch flatscreen? Or her older sister’s snitty ways of getting her in trouble with the Duke and Duchess of Denial, as they called their parents. But she missed them, because they were her blood and now they were all gone and nobody—nobody—deserved to die like that.
“No, they don’t,” said Ethan quietly, and Nikki did not answer. At first she thought she must’ve spoken aloud but then she realized she had not, and how long he’d been reading her mind she didn’t know but now she—
“Not long,” he told her. “Don’t worry, I’m not in there all the time. It just happens.”
She pulled her hand away and he let her. He understood. The mind was a sacred place, it should not be spied upon but it was one of the least of the peacekeeper’s powers. That’s why you live alone, he told the entity. You scared everybody else away.
And the answer came back to him, in his own voice but different, a little more adult, sadder and darker in that way: I wish it were so simple as that.
Rain suddenly began to pelt down. It was not a shower, it was a deluge.
Hannah turned the wiper on and found that the Army meant well but this was not their specialty. The motor sounded like a man moaning with a toothache and the wiper’s action couldn’t keep the glass clear. “I can’t see a damned thing!” she growled. “We’re gonna have to stop and wait it out!”
No one tried to second guess Hannah, who put on the brakes and eased the bus to a halt. She cut the engine, noting that with the bus’s extra weight and the inclines they’d been climbing, they were getting about six miles to a gallon. “Light us up a couple of lamps, somebody,” she said. “No need to run the battery down.”