“God forbid,” said the preacherman. He stood up, took the pistol with his left hand and hefted it to get used to the weight. “Yeah, I can handle this.” Then he aimed the gun directly at Dave’s chest. “You know, I don’t like being treated like dirt.”
“Lower your weapon,” Ethan said, his voice quiet but sternly persuasive.
“Can you stop a bullet from this distance?” Jefferson asked him. “I’d like to see that trick.”
“You’re not going to shoot me.” Dave turned his flashlight right into Jefferson’s eyes. “Number one, Hannah would take you down in about half a second, because she’s already got her gun pointed at you. Number two, you don’t have a damned place to go and I really don’t think you want to stay here. And…number three, we’re the only friends you’ve got right now. So Mr. Jefferson Jericho the TV star, I’d say you ought to do as Ethan says. We’ve got to put gas in this bus, and we’ve got to do it fast. You’re wasting time. Now come on, let’s get the gear.” Dave started walking toward the rear of the bus.
“Please,” said Olivia, who looked to Ethan to be in a state of numbed shock. “Just do what he asks, all right?”
Jefferson hesitated for a few seconds. He glanced at Ethan and then lowered the pistol, which was aimed at empty air where Dave had been standing. “All right,” he told Olivia, in a voice that was partly forlorn and partly belligerent. “Because you asked me nicely.” He found the Beretta’s safety, thumbed it on and slid the gun into the waistband of his dirty and pee-stained jeans.
They got the containers, the hose, and the hand pump out, and Dave used the prybar to crack open the tank’s fill cap. While Dave cranked up diesel into one of the containers, Jefferson nervously watched the darkness where the houses lay, and Ethan stood nearby, his senses probing for any movement beyond. He was satisfied he could protect everyone from the Gray Men if need be; the question for him was, what could this physical body withstand? The heartbeat was good and the lungs were working, everything was all right for the moment, but Ethan knew that this body was not built for the strain of such combat even though the energy was only mental until it left the body, and then became a physical force on its way to a target. “You see anything?” Jefferson asked, as Dave continued to draw the fuel up.
“Nothing. Relax. I’ll let you know if something’s coming.”
“Relax, he says. Right!” Jefferson had his pistol out and aimed toward the houses. “How’d you get here without a spaceship? Did you ride in on a beam of light or something?”
“A close proximation,” Ethan answered. “There are dimensions you can’t comprehend and methods of traveling that are also beyond you.”
“Forgive us for being so backward and stupid.”
“It’s not that. It’s just that you’re a very young civilization. You’re focused on issues that speak to your youth. You couldn’t be expected to understand these things for…oh…a few hundred more years.”
“If we last that long,” said Jefferson.
“Yes,” Ethan agreed. “Very true.”
“Jericho, help me get this gas in the tank!” Dave said, and the preacherman left Ethan’s side to oblige.
Ethan scanned the darkness, left to right and back again. He could smell the foulness of the Gray Men, he knew they were in those houses, but how many, he couldn’t say.
“Hold it steady, don’t spill it!” Dave told Jefferson.
Suddenly Ethan felt them in a prickling of the boy’s flesh and maybe what was an electric charge up the spine.
It was a strange movement in the dark. Low to the ground. Not moving as a human being would. He picked out three shapes, running fast toward them. There was a glint of wet eyes that his flashlight caught…again, low to the ground.
They were very hungry.
“They’re coming,” he said, facing the attack. “Three. Not human-sized, though.”
“What are they?” Jefferson asked, and as he tried to turn around he caused fuel to be spilled from the container down the side of the bus.
“Careful, damn it!” Dave said.
The shapes were almost upon them, but they were avoiding the cone of Ethan’s light. They were circling around to attack from another angle.
“They’re dogs,” said Ethan. “What used to be, I mean.”
Jefferson tried to draw his gun. Dave commanded, “Keep your mind on this!”
Ethan followed the arc of their movement. Three dogs, somebody’s pets. Two were faster than the third, which seemed to be heavier and bulkier, likely burdened under plate armor. Ethan imagined that over the span of two years, humans in that community might have become Gray Men too, and the animals had eaten them and probably any other dogs there. In a matter of time, they would probably turn on each other. Ethan jabbed his light in the direction from which they were coming, and they veered away from contact with it. Again the wet eyes glistened…five of them. The third creature had not yet caught up with the first two.
“Let’s go, let’s go!” Jefferson urged, but the fuel into the tank would not be hurried.
“We need to draw up some more,” Dave said. “Ethan, you got an eye on those things?”
“I’m watching them. Right now they’re afraid of the light.” Jefferson drew his pistol, thumbed the safety off and fired two shots in the direction Ethan’s flashlight was aimed. A bullet ricocheted off concrete but there were no animal cries of pain.
“Let’s move, the faster the better,” Dave urged, and Ethan went with them back to the opening of the underground tank while more fuel was siphoned up.
The things began to growl, out just beyond the edge of the light. They’d been joined now by the third dog. Ethan couldn’t see the bodies but he saw the shine of seven eyes. The growling was low and ragged, more like the sounds of cement mixers in action. Whatever kind of dogs they were, they were big.
“Come on, man!” Jefferson said, but Dave was doing the best he could. Another five gallons in each of the two containers and then in the bus’s tank, and they’d be done.
Hannah came off the bus with her hogleg. She saw what the situation was and positioned herself beside Ethan, aiming her Colt toward the ominous noise of mutated beasts ravenous for fresh meat.
A shape ran through the light. It was gray and hairless and looked to have a row of spines protruding along its backbone. A second distorted and hairless gray shape came darting in, its teeth bared and drooling saliva. Its three eyes glinted red. Before Hannah could get off a shot, it turned back and sped away.
“I think that thing had two mouths,” Hannah said, visibly shaken.
“It did,” Ethan answered.
“Hurry it up, gents,” Hannah advised quietly, as she held the Colt steady with both veiny hands.
The creatures were coming in from another direction. Ethan swivelled around to use his light as a weapon, but something was there at the edge of illumination even as he aimed the flashlight. It was the third beast, what might have been an Alaskan Husky at one time, now gray and hairless and wrinkled, its back and sides covered with interlocking scales of plate armor. The creature’s face had distorted, the jaw underslung and showing rows of sharklike teeth, the eyes not exactly what they should have been, and an extra two legs growing from the armor of its left flank. As the thing rushed in toward Ethan and Hannah, its extra legs also moved as if in a dream of running.
Hannah made a choking noise and fired twice, the Colt spitting flame. One bullet whined off the concrete and the second went to parts unknown, and the creature was right there upon them, its underslung jaw opening and the teeth sliding out to take hold of Hannah’s leg.
Ethan thrust his right hand forward. All the alien had to do was visualize the force necessary, and it was delivered. There was a heated shimmer of air between his palm and the mutated dog, and in the next instant the beast was hurled backward head over scabrous tail and into the darkness again.