“Sure,” said Dave, stone-faced. “Another happy addition to our little family.”
“How many people are here?” Ethan asked the woman.
“A hundred and twelve by last count. It changes sometimes, day to day.”
Ethan’s gaze went to the yellow pad on the desk. He saw that numbers had been written, scratched out and scrawled again by a nervous hand.
“That’s not people,” Olivia said, noting Ethan’s interest. “That’s circumstances. We’ve been here nearly two years. Our supplies are running out.”
“Food and water?” Ethan asked.
“Canned food and bottled water, both stockpiles pretty low. That’s why we’ve had to start eating the horses, and we don’t trust the rainwater. So, that’s how things are,” she finished.
Bad, Ethan thought. He could see the end of things, deep in her eyes. As if she felt that, she looked away at Dave once more. “Take him and get him fed. Ethan, I’ll see you later. Okay?”
He nodded, and Dave and Roger led him out of the room and shut the door.
John Douglas stayed behind, as Kathy Mattson took her chair again and Gary Roosa regarded his clipboard and yellow pad with all the figures of doom upon them. Olivia sat down, but she knew there was a reason the doctor had stayed and so she said, “What is it?”
“Interesting young man,” said JayDee.
“Tough to think what he must’ve gone through. But others have made it too. We had a few survivors in a couple of a days ago, didn’t we?”
“We did. Hard to survive out there, but not impossible.” The doctor frowned. “It’s just that…I wish I had a decent lab set up. Wish I had some way to really give Ethan a thorough exam.”
“Why?” A trace of fear tightened her mouth. “Because you think he may not be—”
“I think,” JayDee interrupted, “he’s human and clean. But I also think—and this stays in this room, please—that he sustained some injuries that…well, I don’t know how he’s walking around, with all the bruises he has under his clothes. And ought to have, at least in my opinion, some major internal injuries. I think he was caught in a shockwave. It’s just…very strange, that he’s so…”
“Alive?” Olivia prompted.
“Maybe that,” JayDee admitted. “From the outside, it looks like he had a massive chest injury. That alone would be enough to…” He shrugged. “But I can’t really say, because I can’t do a proper exam.”
“Then do what you can do,” Olivia said, her gaze steady. “Watch him. If it turns out he’s a different kind of lifeform…good enough to get past the saline…then we’d better know that fast. So watch him, do you hear me?”
“I hear.” JayDee started for the door.
“Keep your gun loaded,” she reminded him, as she turned her attention to the numbers of the dwindling stockpiles and the ideas of further rationing that Kathy and Gary—both ex-accountants from the previous world—had advanced.
“Yes,” JayDee replied heavily, and he went out of the room into the sick sunlight.
Three.
Dave and JayDee watched the boy eat a small bowl of horsemeat stew at a table in the room that served as the mess hall. Meals were usually staggered so as not to overwhelm the three cooks, who were doing the best they could with what they had. Everything had to be cooked outside over woodfires, then brought in. Beyond the double-locked storage room doors, the canned foods were getting low and the bottled water was almost gone. Afternoon light filtered through two windows that were reinforced with duct tape. A few oil lamps and candle lanterns were set about on the other tables. It was a dreary-looking room, but across one wall someone had painted in bright red We Will Survive. The paint had been applied with fierce—or frantic—resolve, and had dripped down in red rivulets to the linoleum-tiled floor.
The boy ate as if there were no tomorrow. He’d been given a paper cup with three swallows of water and told it was all he could have, so he was taking it easy on that. The horsemeat stew, though, was quickly history.
“Take a deep breath,” said John Douglas.
Ethan paused in his licking of the bowl to do as the doctor said.
“No pain in your lungs?”
“A little tight. Sore right in here,” Ethan answered, touching the center of his chest. He went back to getting every shred of meat his fingers and tongue could find.
“Sore neck too, I’d think.”
“Little bit.”
“I’m surprised you aren’t in more pain.” The doctor rubbed his chin; unlike most of the other men, he tried to shave as often as possible and he used deodorant. He had been fastidious about his appearance and his habits as a younger man, and as an older man in the world that used to be. It was tougher now, and the point was unclear about why one would wish to maintain as many old habits as possible, but he was a creature of order and neatness and it kept him connected to the man he used to be. It also probably kept him sane and wanting to live. “I’d think,” he offered, ‘‘that you could hardly walk after such traumas, much less run. Then again, you are a young boy. Fifteen years old, would be my guess. But still…” He paused, unable to come to any conclusion about this without a proper examination lab, and that fact made him very uneasy. Though he was certain this boy was human. Almost certain. At least the saline test hadn’t set the boy’s blood burning, and made him burst into a spiked monstrosity or a howling spider-like nightmare as had happened in previous tests when so-called ‘humans’ were brought in.
“But still,” Dave growled, though it wasn’t meant as a growl, “your story is…can I say…fucked up.” A brickmason in his previous life, also a bouncer at a Fort Collins country music bar and an all-around rough-ass dude who didn’t mind throwing himself into any kind of action that called for a bad attitude, Dave McKane minced no words. He had dirty fingernails and dirty hair and dirt in the creases of his face and he carried his responsibilities in this fortress—this last stand—very, very seriously. “If you have no memory, how come you know about the Gorgons and Cyphers? How come that wasn’t blanked out?”
Ethan sipped at his cup of water. He met Dave’s stare. “I guess I haven’t got any memory of most things, but that…I know they’re fighting.”
“Then you know how it started? You remember it? The day?”
Ethan concentrated. Nothing was there. He sipped at his water again, and found with his tongue a shred of horsemeat between two teeth. “No, I don’t remember that.”
“The third day of April, two years ago?” said Dave. He folded his hands together atop the table, and recalled praying at a kitchen table similar to this one with his wife and two sons in the little house not many miles from here yet worlds away. He had gone out alone one morning a couple of months after getting here, riding the dappled gray horse Pilgrim, daring fate and maybe wishing to commit suicide by alien weapon. They didn’t fight over one place very long but you could never tell when they would come back. The battleground shifted, and nothing was ever resolved. As far as he knew, it was the same all over the world.
Dave had ridden Pilgrim to the piece of land he and Cheryl had owned, and stood at the crater where the charred debris of the house lay. He had seen the shards of that kitchen table down at the bottom, and then he had turned away and thrown up and gotten back on his horse because Panther Ridge was his home now and Cheryl and the boys were dead. And…a Gorgon ship was coming, sliding through the yellow air, which meant the Cyphers would not be far away either.