“I know the President. I knew him when he was a law student. What did he mean about going on tele—”
“Shut your hole and sit down.” The second Marine put his rifle’s barrel right in Jefferson’s face and the little red laser dot glowed on his forehead.
Jefferson sat down. There would be time later to try to contact Jason Beale, if the President could remember who he was, but for now the preacherman decided to ask no further questions. He wanted to stay alive, and if two Marines with rifles were standing guard over him, it suited him just fine to stay exactly where he was.
H
“Damn,” said Vance Derryman as he took stock of the decimated garage level. How the hell were they going to get that carcass out of here? And how would the entrance be repaired? Bennett was dead, some of the others had been carried to the infirmary, the level was wrecked, and up in the sky the Gorgon and Cypher ships were still fighting though the boy—check that, the alien who looked like a boy—had told him their battle was moving away from the White Mansion. His head was pounding and his nerves were shot, everything was muffled, and he thought his insides had been hurt because he’d thrown up blood a few minutes ago. That alarm…piercing even through the damage to his hearing. “Somebody cut the alarm!” he shouted. His voice sounded like the murmur of someone speaking underwater. “Jesus, stop that noise!” He couldn’t think, he couldn’t reason any of this out. Reasoning had been his strong suit before the aliens had brought their war to this world. Everything was cut-and-dried, everything had a rational explanation. When he was briefed about Area 51, he had closed his mind to it. That was someone else’s responsibility; he could listen to the briefing and hear about extraterrestrials and ships from other planets and artifacts that were being researched at S-4 for the military, but he could be masking all that with mentally replaying a golf game at Hidden Creek or thoughts on why Rachmaninoff’s First Symphony had been so savagely panned by the critics in 1897. On the third day of April two years ago, the steadiness of his life had been destroyed. He’d asked his younger brother to get Linda to a shelter, because he had a duty to the President, and he had no time. He’d gotten a cell call that they’d made it and were with the National Guard in a warehouse complex outside Reston, but then the satellites had come down and the towers went out and that was the end of all communication.
General Winslett staggered up to him and said something. Derryman only caught bits and pieces of it that made no sense. Winslett’s face was florid and sweating. His eyes looked like they were swimming in blood. The general stood staring at the headless monstrosity that lay across the floor, and very suddenly he turned away and made a couple of steps before he threw up. One of the soldiers came to help him, and Foggy let himself be guided to the infirmary.
They were going to have to chop that thing up, he decided. Have to chop it into a thousand pieces and haul it out of here piece by piece.
Dave McKane was at his side. He spoke, but Derryman shook his head.
Dave tried again, leaning in and speaking louder: “Can we talk?”
Derryman pointed to an ear. “I can hardly hear a damned thing!” The alarm had ceased, though; its shriek had stopped driving a spike into his brain. There were too many there already. “Give me some time!”
Dave nodded and moved away. He went carefully across the chunks of rubble and then outside, where the air did not smell of smoke or burned reptilian flesh but instead of bitter ozone. Ethan and Olivia were standing together at the guardrail, watching the distant flashes of blue and red bursts up in the clouds. Hannah and Nikki had both been taken to the infirmary not long ago. Both had been holding themselves together pretty well considering, but it was the huge carcass in the garage and the man’s grisly remains that finally did them in. Nikki had collapsed soon after she’d seen the carnage and might have hurt herself in the fall if Ethan hadn’t caught her, and after realizing what the monster had been Hannah said she thought she needed a little something to steady her nerves. Then the tough old bird sat down on the mountain’s edge and began to sob, and Olivia had gone to find someone to help. As she was being led away, Hannah had given them a crooked smile from the wrinkled, tear-damp face, and said if she could get half a bottle of whiskey she would be as right as rain, which sounded good until you thought about what was in the rain these days.
“Has Jefferson turned up?” Olivia asked when Dave reached them.
“I’m sure he will. Bad pennies always do.” Dave watched the flashes of light. In the far distance, pieces of something rippling with blue flame fell into the forest, and almost at once, smoke began to curl up from amid the dead trees. “Are they getting any closer?”
“Still moving away,” Ethan said. His head pounded, the nerves of this body were still on fire and his hearing impaired, but he was able to ‘hear’ with his mind much more clearly than with his damaged audio receptors. “I believe they’re too occupied with each other to think about me. For the moment,” he added. His voice was muffled, alien even to himself. He thought also he should tell them what else he believed to be true. “They know now that they can’t take me alive. The next time they come, it will be to destroy me.”
Ethan let that sit for a few seconds and then he turned to face Dave. “That’s why I have to get to this Area 51 as soon as possible.” He’d already explained to both Dave and Olivia that he suspected—but was not sure—there might be something at the S-4 installation he could use. What that might be, he didn’t know, but human weapons would not stop this war. In fact, Ethan doubted that any weapon could stop the war, short of a device that would blow up the world…but then again, it was the line in space that the Cyphers and Gorgons fought over, so even if this planet was blown to pieces the contested border would still remain.
“I don’t know how you think you can stop this,” Dave said, as astutely as if he’d learned how to read Ethan’s mind. “To do that you’d have to destroy both of them, wouldn’t you? I mean…both their civilizations. Or even their worlds. How are you going to do that? Wouldn’t that be…like…against your purpose or something?”
“Yes,” the peacekeeper said. “My purpose is not to destroy worlds, but to save them.”
“So…if you’re looking for an alien weapon…how is that going to help you stop the war?”
Ethan shook his head. “What I believe…is that I was brought here for a purpose by the greater power. The only further purpose I can see is persuading your President to get me into the S-4 installation.” He was silent for a moment, watching the fires of battle in the sky and calculating that their conflict was moving them further and further away from the White Mansion. “It’s the only thing that makes sense to me,” he said. “Something of value I can use must be there. Only the President can get me in, and as I told you, he’s both mentally impaired and suicidal.”
“I think it’s hopeless,” Olivia said.
“Don’t talk like that.” Dave saw how dark her eyes were, how they were sunken in pools of darkness, how her expression was blank with shock and grief and how close she was to falling over the edge of her own cliff. He put his arm around her shoulders, because it occurred to him that one step and she would be gone. “We can’t give up,” he said. “We have to trust Ethan.”
“Trust Ethan,” she repeated tonelessly. “There must be many millions of Gray Men out there. Around the world,” she said. “China…Russia…South America…everywhere. Maybe a billion or more. Even if Ethan can stop this…what about the Gray Men? And millions more who’ve been driven to madness, or have had to live like animals these last two years. What about them, Dave? How can even Ethan fix that? Things can never go back to what they were, before.” She stared at the guardrail, and Dave imagined she was thinking that crossing it and throwing herself from this height would at least take her away from the misery. “We’ve lost too much,” she said. “Way too much.”