“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.
“April the third,” JayDee said, picking up the recollections and emotions. He felt a hammer blow to his heart, and he thought he had progressed past that pain, but he had not. There was so much pain, for everyone. His wife of thirty-two years had died in their apartment here, in March. He had watched her slowly lose her mind, cry for her mother and father and tremble like a little child when the aliens were fighting in this area and their explosions shook the earth. Deborah had stopped eating and dwindled away, a victim of lost hope. He had tried to feed her, tried his best, but she lay in bed day after day and stared at the stained ceiling and the part of her that had known joy and freedom was already gone. And as he sat at her bedside and held her hand in the deepening twilight with the oil lamps lit, she had looked at him with her weary and watery eyes and asked one question in the voice of a child imploring her father: Are we safe?
He had not known what he was about to say, but he had to say something. Though before he could speak he heard the wave of them coming, the shriek of their approach, the thunder of their headlong rush against the walls of Panther Ridge, and he heard the first rifle shots and the chatter of machine guns, and when he looked at Deborah again she had left this earth because she could no longer bear what it had become.
At that moment John Douglas had faced a choice. It involved either the rifle or the pistol he owned. It involved what he intended to do in the next few minutes, as he stared at the dead woman who had been the love of his life and had raised for them two daughters and a son. It involved whether he had the strength to go out there and join the fight, or whether he needed in his heart and soul to follow Deborah to whatever Promised Land lay beyond life, because this one had become a blighted and corrupted nightmare.
The minutes had passed slowly, and not without its thorny seconds. But in the end he had left Deborah sleeping alone, and he had taken his rifle and pistol out to defend his fortress.
“That day,” JayDee said quietly. “April the third. It was about ten in the morning. Oh, I remember the time exactly. It was eighteen minutes after ten. I was in my office, doing some paperwork. One of my nurses ran in, said for me to come look at the TV out in the waiting room. CNN, Fox, MSNBC, all the local channels were covering it. Huge explosions in the skies across the world. What looked like fiery meteors blowing up, and out of them were coming…those Gorgon ships. Nobody was calling them ‘Gorgon’ yet, I mean. That was later. But they were coming out of the blasts…just gliding out, and then the fighter planes went up and they were shot to pieces, and that went on for…I don’t remember how long.”
“Two days,” Dave offered. He flicked his Bic and lit a cigarette without asking permission, because nobody gave a damn anymore whether you smoked or not. “It was over in two days. I know you don’t remember Nine-Eleven,” he said, speaking to Ethan, “but this was…like…a thousand Nine-Elevens, one after another. The Gorgons finished off our Air Force and the Army and Navy, too.” He blew smoke through his nostrils, like a furious dragon, though his eyes were blank and nearly dead. “It was the same all over the world. Nothing could hurt those ships. At least nothing we had. Nothing created on earth. The Gorgons hit some of the cities, but not all. New York was blasted, so was Atlanta and Dallas and Los Angeles…Moscow…Tokyo…Berlin…Beijing. A show of power, is what the big dogs at the Pentagon said. But the big dogs were suddenly not so big. Suddenly…nobody was very big.” He focused once more on the boy through the drift of smoke. “You don’t remember any of this?”
“No,” said Ethan. If it had ever been there, it was all gone. And maybe, he thought, it was better that way.
“A cloaking device,” said JayDee, “is what the scientists said got the Gorgons close enough to our atmosphere to enter without being detected. And by then they were calling them ‘Gorgons’, so that name stuck.”
“Why that name?”
“Somebody at Fox News came up with it,” Dave answered. “Supposed to be so terrible to look at you’d turn to stone. The idea was there…that the Gorgons must be so different from us…it would drive a person insane to see one. Anyway, once that name was out there, it was used in all the newscasts.”
JayDee remembered images of the worldwide panic. People were running, but where would they run to? The President of the United States urged calm, and then he disappeared into a “secure location”, as did every other elected official in Washington. Elsewhere around the world, the so-called leaders fled their positions and roles. All civil order broke down and all police forces were overwhelmed. The television networks and radio stations hung on as long as they could. Within forty-eight hours of the first Gorgon ship being documented as it slid from its fiery womb, amateur videos were taken of what appeared to be swirling black portals opening in the air, and from them emerged the huge, sleek bat-like shapes of what came to be known as the Cypher ships.
“An enigma,” JayDee said, almost to himself. “The unknowable.” He blinked, bringing himself back to the moment. “The Cyphers,” he said to Ethan, “came from what looked like black holes opening in the sky. Then…those two forces went to war. Humans were puny. We’re the bugs to be stepped on…or played with,” he added. “But their battle is with each other. Soon after the Cyphers came, power grids around the world started failing. The cell towers went out. I suppose the communications satellites were destroyed. The Cyphers must’ve done that, to silence the chatter I guess. Or another display of power.”
Ethan finished his meager cup of water and was still thirsty but satisfied at least that he’d gotten this much. He was trying to take everything in, and it was a lot to take. Dave smoked his cigarette in silence for a moment, and then he said, “I talked to somebody who heard one of the last radio broadcasts.” He regarded the cigarette’s glowing tip, and blew on it to make it flare. “Some scientists and military men were talking. Giving their ideas on what was happening. That these two civilizations—whatever they are—have been at war…like…forever. And maybe it’s the Earth they’re fighting over, and maybe not, because—”
“It’s the border,” said Ethan, who heard himself speak those words as if from a distance.
Dave and JayDee said nothing, but they both stared at Ethan with renewed interest.
“The border,” Ethan repeated. “Between them. Their worlds, or their universe or dimension or wherever they come from. Earth is on the border, and that’s what they’re fighting over.” He realized, almost startled, that he had no doubt what he was saying was true. “They’re going to keep fighting until one destroys the other. That may never happen, because…” He felt a sudden panic rise up inside him; he felt he was floating away from himself, into an area unknown. It took him a moment to draw a deep breath that hurt his lungs, and to calm himself. “They’re in an—” He cast about for the right term. “An arms race,” he said.
The silence went on, as the two men stared at the boy who had named himself after a high school.
It was JayDee who spoke first, in a tight and cautious
voice. “Now…tell us…how would you believe all that, if you can’t remember anything else? Did you hear that from someone? One of your parents?”
“No.” Ethan felt hot and sweaty, uncomfortable in his own skin. His bones were aching like sore teeth. “I don’t know who told me. I just…” He met the doctor’s puzzled stare. His own blue eyes glinted with a nearly feverish intensity. “I just know that’s the truth. We’re on the border between them, and it’s not the Earth they want. It’s a line in space.”
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 nighttime 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.
Ethan walked down the steps into the pool’s shallow end. The blue paint covering the bottom had
gone dark and scabby and was coming up in wrinkled sheets. Exposed beneath it was gray concrete. He walked in a straight line at the center of the pool, down the slight decline into the deep end. His shoes found about four inches of dirty rainwater around the drain.
What was here? he asked himself.
Nothing, was the answer.
His motion in the water caused the debris to float away from him. He sloshed in a circle around the drain, because it seemed to him the thing to do. Was there something here after all? he wondered. A deep, secret movement…like the flowing together of the blue and silver squares upon the wall? He stood for awhile in the deep end, his senses questing for something he wasn’t sure of, and then he walked back up to the shallow end along the middle of the pool. He had the distinct feeling that something hidden was very near, and yet…
“What in the name of Jack Shit are you doing out here?” a hard voice suddenly asked.
Ethan looked to his right, where the figure of Dave McKane stood with his Uzi at his side, pointed somewhere just east of the boy. “I heard your door open and close,” Dave said. “My place is next to yours. What are you doing? Getting water?”
“No, sir.” Ethan saw that Dave might not have done much sleeping tonight, because he was still dressed in what he’d been wearing today and he had his baseball cap on. “I just came out walking.”
“That’s a bag of bull’s balls.”
Ethan decided the truth was best. The truth, at least, as he understood it. “I felt like I needed to come here.”
“Yeah? Midnight swimming?”
“No, sir. I just needed to come here, that’s all.”
“What? To get a drink?”
Ethan shook his head. “I’m thirsty, but Olivia said not to trust the rainwater. That’s why you only drink the bottled water.” He thought of the prison room, and the inspection he’d endured. What John Douglas had said: We’re checking to see whether you’re fully human or not. Ethan knew, but he wanted to hear it. “You think the rainwater’s poison, don’t you? Because of all the alien stuff up there?” He tilted his chin toward the lightning-shot sky. “What does it do to people? Turn them into things you have to kill?”
The Border Page 4