Dave and JayDee looked at each other, and Ethan read their unspoken question: Are you believing what you’re hearing?
“I’m really tired,” Ethan said. “Can I get some sleep somewhere?”
It took a few seconds for the spell of Ethan’s comments to break. Dave cleared his throat and said, “Sure. There are plenty of empty apartments.” He did not say that most of them had been occupied by people who had over time come to the end of their hope and killed themselves. A cemetery behind the third building held dozens of white-painted wooden crosses. Whole families had decided to let go of their lives, and who could blame them? There were two ministers—a male Presbyterian and a female Methodist—among the survivors at Panther Ridge, and they still led religious services and did what they could, but sometimes the voice of Christ could not be heard over the distant explosions and the shrieking of the nightime army.
Which Dave decided Ethan didn’t need to hear about right now. They didn’t come every night, but if they came tonight…the boy would find out soon enough.
“Come on, then.” Dave kept the stub of his cigarette between his teeth as he stood up. “Let’s get you settled in. Get you a bucket of sand to scrub some of that mud off, too.” Water being too precious a commodity to waste on washing. He would not yet tell Ethan any more about the things they had killed—exterminated would be the better word—in the Security Room, and what they had burned that at first had appeared to be human but was in reality nearly demonic.
His Uzi and its holster was never far away from him. He picked it up off the table and put it on, and he, JayDee, and the boy left the mess hall to find an apartment without human bloodstains somewhere on the walls, the floor or the furniture.
Four.
Ethan.
He woke up. It seemed that someone had called him, in the name he had chosen for himself to give him some kind of identity. Not loudly, but quietly. Enough to make him lie on the bed in the apartment he’d been given, his eyes open, and listen to the dark.
It was not entirely dark in Apartment 246. Two candle lanterns burned low. The walls were a cheap brown plasterboard, the carpet the color of wheat. On one wall was a decoration of metal squares painted blue and silver. Someone’s artistic touch, he thought. He sat up on the bed, his back against the pillows. He was hungry, thirsty, and edgy. He was wearing the dark green p.j. bottoms of somebody who was probably dead. His bones still ached, and his bruises felt heavy with gathered blood. He wanted to return to sleep, back to its peace and stillness, but he could not…because something was on his mind…something important…and he couldn’t figure out what it was.
He felt like an empty hole, waiting to be filled. With what? Knowledge? Memory? There was nothing beyond his waking up, into running across that field in the rain. Water, he thought. Thirsty. But he understood that the last of the water was being rationed, and that the people here did not want to drink the rainwater because it brought with it chemicals or poisons. They were eating the horses; the horses ate grass, and the grass was watered by the rain. So they were getting chemicals in the rain anyway. He guessed that even boiling the rainwater over a fire wasn’t enough for them to fully trust it. So the bottled water was going down and down, and when it was gone they would have to drink the rain no matter what.
Ethan understood why they feared being caught in one of the battles between the Gorgons and Cyphers, but what else was it they feared that made them cower here behind the stone walls?
He had no idea how long he’d slept. JayDee had brought him the p.j.s and some other clothes, two pairs of jeans with patched knees and a couple of t-shirts, one gray and the other purple with the clenched fist logo of the band Black Destroyer, which Ethan had never heard…or never remembered hearing. He’d scrubbed the mud off himself in the yellow-tiled bathroom with a bucket of sand. He had looked at his injuries in the mirror, by the candle’s light. His chest was black, from shoulder to shoulder. And turning around, he could angle his head and see in the mirror the mass of black bruises on his back. They looked soul-deep. He thought that maybe it was best he had no memory of what had caused them, because it seemed to him he’d been through a world of pain.
Thirsty, he thought. But there was no water in the empty taps of either kitchen or bathroom and the toilet was a dry hole. Dave had told him he was supposed to do his business in the same bucket of sand he’d been given. To get any water, he’d have to go to the mess hall where the rations were given out, and that place—Dave had told him—was locked up tight and guarded by men with guns after the nighttime meal, such as it was.
Ethan found himself staring at the blue and silver squares on the wall opposite his bed.
He could imagine them melting, and becoming streams of clear, fresh and pure water that ran down the wall and puddled on the floor.
As he stared at them, the blue and silver squares seemed to shimmer and merge into a glistening pool.
The swimming pool, he thought. Something…about the swimming pool.
But he didn’t know what. The swimming pool was mostly empty, except for some debris that looked like broken lawn furniture and a few inches of murky rainwater in the deep end.
Still…he had a strong sensation that he should get up from this bed and go to the swimming pool, and there he might understand what was drawing him. He got up, pulled on the Black Destroyer t-shirt and his Pumas, and he went out of the apartment onto an exterior corridor that led to a concrete stairway. Halfway down the stairs he saw on the horizon blue flickers of what might have been lightning but might also have been the never-ending battle. He continued down to the parking lot and walked along the curving roadway in the direction of the pool.
Quiet had fallen upon Panther Ridge. It was a warm and humid night, with the threat of more rain coming. Through the windows of some of the apartments he saw the comforting sight of little flames of oil and candle lamps, and he knew he was not the only one awake. He saw lights up on the watchtowers too; the towers were likely manned around the clock, the watchers at their machine guns. He came upon a group of six people sitting in the parking lot, with a few oil lamps at the center of their circle. They were holding hands and praying, their heads bowed. He went on. He passed a man with shoulder-length hair and no shirt or shoes, just wearing a pair of jeans, sitting on the pavement with his knees pulled up to his chin. “They might be comin’ tonight,” he said to Ethan. “But they ain’t gonna eat me. No, they ain’t.” And so saying, he lifted the automatic pistol that lay at his side, and he put its barrel to his temple.
Ethan saw the man grin. There was madness in it, and Ethan went on.
He came in another moment to the swimming pool, which was surrounded by what had once been a decorative iron fence and gate. Most of it had been knocked down, all of it rusted by the corrosive rain. The gate was open, hanging by a hinge. Ethan thought that many of the people here were also hanging by a hinge. He went to the side of the pool and looked down into it, and saw only what he’d briefly seen when he’d passed by here before: what looked like broken pieces of wooden chairs and maybe some other junk in a few inches of water in the deep end—5 feet, no diving, the pockmarked sign read—otherwise nothing else.
Nothing here, he thought.
But still…
…something.
He had the image of the blue and silver squares in his mind, as they merged and glistened and became clear water.