Ethan didn’t know what to say to this, so suddenly the peacekeeper spoke.
It was his voice, but different in its inflections and its knowledge, and Ethan was made an observer to the moment.
“I’m not sure how you become infected with this, but the doctor is right. Once it…takes hold, let’s say…there’s no stopping it. Or healing that can be done.”
“What…you can destroy life, but you can’t create it?” Dave was fully aware who he was speaking to now, and he gave the creature both barrels. “You’re in the body of a dead boy! You raised it up, didn’t you?”
“He was almost dead,” said the peacekeeper. “His will to live, his youth, and strength of mind suited my purpose.”
“Okay, whatever. Are you like a spirit or something? Is that it?”
“I am an entity you wouldn’t comprehend. I needed flesh to work with, and I took the opportunity. I knew that our destination was close. More than that would be damaging to your mind to hear, because it’s beyond your limits.”
“I’ll second that,” said JayDee. “I figure we’re not very intelligent as a species, compared to you.”
“Olivia is also right,” came the reply. “I don’t know everything and I am not infallible. I know something of importance is on this mountain…in the mountain, actually, but I’m not sure what it is, and I’m not sure why it’s so vital. But it is, and that’s what I know.”
“In the mountain?” Jefferson asked. “What does that mean?”
“Exactly what I say. It’s something inside the mountain. It will only be revealed when we get there.” The peacekeeper turned one blue eye and one silver eye upon John Douglas, and said with a depth of sadness, “I’m sorry, JayDee. I can’t stop what’s going to happen to you.”
The doctor nodded. Thunder rumbled so heavily the bus vibrated with the bass boom of it. Rain was still thrashing against the roof and the windows. JayDee knew from seeing the progress of this—and he was aware that Dave and Olivia also knew—that by tomorrow morning he would be in agonizing pain as the changes in his bones and bodily structure progressed. Then the changes would speed up, as if the humanity had been conquered and the disease was in a rush of victory to distort the body into an alien horror show. Two or three days at most, and those spent in increasing torment. JayDee recalled watching the transformation happen to the first person at Panther Ridge, the twelve-year-old girl whose father had shot her when she began to grow a second head. He was having none of that. It was time to take a walk in the rain.
“Damn it,” he said quietly. He had been through so much—they all had, of course—and he felt cheated at this last moment, of not being able to witness what the White Mansion held for the peacekeeper. He could hang on, maybe, as he lost his human structure, but it seemed to him that now he ought to get off this bus and go find Deborah while he could still walk like a man. Limp like a man, that is.
He said, “I’ll trade you the Beretta for one of those grenades in the bag.”
“You don’t have to do anything right now,” Olivia said. “No, JayDee. Please. Not right now.”
“Hush,” he told her, but gently. “I’m not sure there’s ever a good time for this. But…my God…I took the lives of those three people back at Panther Ridge because there was nothing else I could do for them. I made the decision for them…now I need to make it for myself.”
“Please,” Olivia repeated, though she knew there was nothing else to say.
“Christ on a cracker!” said Hannah. “Why don’t you at least wait until the rain stops, you old fool?”
JayDee had to smile at that and give a crippled little laugh. He was aware of the pain beginning to lance through his nerves and muscles. He recalled that the little girl had been unable to stand up after the first day, but he’d wanted to observe what was happening to her in a safe place and her father had agreed. They’d chained her up in the Secure Room and he had made notes as the changes progressed. Which seemed terribly cruel and medieval both then and now, but it had been important to give him a reference as to how these fractures and rearrangments of bones and growth of new and strange flesh happened.
He was aware also of fiery sensations and stitches of sharp pain on his back, on his left calf, and at the back of his left thigh. The gray tissue there was growing, leeching deep.
“Let me have a grenade,” he said.
“What if I say no?”
“I’d answer that I’d do it with the gun, but you may need it and the grenade will do the job just fine. Also that…” He felt something close to breaking inside him—maybe his heart, but that had been broken so many times it must look like a specimen from Frankenstein’s lab. He had to wait a moment to compose himself with decorum. “Also,” he went on, “that I want to go out remembering all of you, and remembering who I am. I don’t know when my memory would start going, or what my thought processes would be. I don’t know what this does to the brain. It may be that when the changes really begin, the disease removes all thought but that of animal survival…so one of you would have to kill me, just as we’ve had to kill the others. Which one of you would do that very necessary job?”
“If you say one word,” Dave told Jefferson, “I swear to God I will kill you and drag your body out on the road.”
“I’m not saying anything! Did you hear me speak?”
Dave ignored him. “I’ll do it when the time comes,” he told JayDee. “The time is not now.”
“Maybe it would be tomorrow, then?” JayDee gave up a sad smile. In the lamplight, he thought his old skinny, wan and worn-out self must already appear to be a ghost. “After eight o’clock and before noon?” He nodded toward the peacekeeper. “He’ll get you where you’re going, God willing. I’m getting off the bus here.”
“Jesus,” said Dave, but he could say nothing more.
“Give me a grenade. Dave, do I have to say please?”
Dave hesitated, but he knew the exchange had to be made. It was a mercy, really. The Beretta was given for the grenade. JayDee inspected it, making sure it was as simple a procedure as he hoped it would be. The rain was still falling hard; it was a hard rain everywhere these days.
“I’ll walk with you,” Dave said.
“No, you won’t. There’s no use in both of us getting out there.”
“I will walk with you.”
The peacekeeper had spoken in a voice that was decisive.
“All right,” JayDee answered after a short pause of thought. Maybe it wouldn’t do to be jumped by anything out in the dark before he could pull that pin. “Just a little ways, though. No need to drag this out.”
Olivia had begun to weep. She put her arms around John Douglas and he hugged her, and he told her to stop crying, but she couldn’t stop, and he told her that he was proud to have known her and proud to have known Dave and Hannah and Nikki too, and that she and Dave had been right about Ethan and good thing they hadn’t listened to his scientific objections, because all this was far beyond any science he’d ever learned in school. And now, if the alien within the body of Ethan could stop this war, it would be a second chance for Earth given from the stars or from a realm unknown to the human mind. So be it, said JayDee. He reached out to shake Dave’s hand, but Dave pulled him in and hugged him too, and Hannah and Nikki said their goodbyes, both tearfully, as Jefferson Jericho watched from his seat and figured one word from him would be his death sentence because the rock was ready to roll over him.
Then the peacekeeper was there at JayDee’s side with a flashlight, and the boy who had been known as Ethan was looking out as if through a window edged with fog. He had had a moment of being afraid, as the alien took him over, but now…it was not fear he felt, but peace.