The Border

by Robert McCammon

  “We don’t know that yet,” Dave said. “We don’t know why some things come in here looking like humans. Maybe they were humans once, and they’re being engineered by them.” He made a motion toward the horizon’s flickering lightning. “Playing with the human toys, maybe. There’s just a hell of a lot we don’t know.”

  “But that’s not all, is it?”

  “No,” Dave said. “Not all.”

  “Tell me.”

  “First get out of there.” Dave aimed his Uzi at the ground and retreated a few paces as Ethan came up the pool’s steps.

  “What else?” Ethan prompted.

  Dave said, “The Gray Men come at night.”

  “The Gray Men,” Ethan repeated. He didn’t like the sound of that, not from Dave’s mouth or from his own. And then he had to ask: “What are they?”

  “Mutated humans.” Dave pulled no punches and he wasn’t about to start now. “Some of them are…way mutated…into things that don’t look human anymore. We don’t know what causes it. Maybe it’s something in the atmosphere, in the rain, maybe it’s a disease they brought. The Gray Men come at night. Not every night, but when they do try to get in here…it’s bad. We think—JayDee thinks—their skin can’t take sunlight anymore. Or something that keeps them hidden during the day. Like I say, we don’t know for sure and we haven’t met anybody who does.”

  Ethan had a jumble of questions in his mind, all trying to be first. He started with, “Why are they called Gray Men?”

  “Because they are gray. Or near enough. They’ve lost all their flesh color. I don’t know who first called them that, but it suits ’em. They started coming about three months ago. Only a few at first…then more and more. I think they have some kind of radar or sense or whatever that draws them together…maybe they can smell each other.” Dave offered a thin, pained smile. “We don’t have much ammo left. Glad you joined our happy group?”

  “Better than being out there.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, the Gray Men try to get at us because they’re meat eaters. They drag their dead away, so we figure they eat the corpses. That keeps them satisfied for awhile.”

  Ethan nodded. “But I’m not gray and I’m not mutated. So why did you take me to that room where you’ve killed things?”

  “We took you to the Secure Room because we’ve had…let’s call them intruders. They’re creatures who look like humans, and maybe they used to be or they still think they are…but now they’re another kind of lifeform. JayDee’s opinion—and Olivia’s too—is that they’re humans who’ve been picked up by the aliens and experimented on. Then they’re let loose. Like alien time-bombs, I guess. Let’s just say we’ve had some real interesting reactions to the saline. We had another doctor here. He killed himself and his wife and son last December, but it was his idea to get something in the bloodstream to test all new arrivals. Thank God he came up with that, or we would’ve let some real horrors in here without knowing it until too late.”

  “The rain,” Ethan said. “You think that’s what makes the Gray Men? If that’s so, hasn’t anybody here ever started changing?”

  “Yes, they have. It starts out as gray, ashy-looking blotches. The blotches get bigger, fast…and then the bones start changing. We kept the first victim under watch while it happened. We had to chain her up, which was cruel as hell but we had to.” Dave stared darkly at the boy before he went on. “After a couple of days, when she was twisted and deformed, she started growing a second head that was all mouth and little needle teeth. That’s when her father stepped in and shot her. She was twelve years old.”

  “Oh,” said Ethan, or thought he did.

  “We had four others. They had to be taken care of before it got too bad. There has to be poison in the atmosphere,” Dave said. “Sometimes the rain falls dirty brown or piss yellow, but we’re not sure that causes the mutations. Nobody’s sure of anything. But yeah…that’s why we’re depending on the bottled water. We shelter the horses but we know they’re getting exposed to the rain, and we’re eating the horses, and the rain’s eating through the roofs and walls and leaking in…so there’s no way to avoid it. The doc thinks it takes time for the effects to show up, and maybe it depends on a person’s chemistry too. Like any virus, or cancer. Some get it, some don’t.” Dave shrugged. “What are you gonna do?” He answered his own question: “Die, eventually. It’s just…how long you want to wait.”

  “Why have you waited?” Ethan glanced pointedly at the submachine gun.

  Dave held the Uzi up before his face and examined it as if it were a piece of deadly art. Then he let it fall back to his side. “Good question,” he allowed. “I’ve known a lot of people in here who decided not to wait. Decided that between the Gorgons, the Cyphers, the Gray Men and plain old hopelessness, it was best to pass on through the gates.” He paused for a moment, pondering an answer. “I guess,” he said at last, “I’m not ready yet. But tomorrow, I might be. Just depends on the—”

  Weather, he was about to say, but he was interrupted by a red flare suddenly shooting skyward from the watchtower at the western corner of the wall.

  It was followed within seconds by the wail of a crank-driven siren from somewhere else in the complex. Dave said, “Lucky you. They’re coming tonight,” in a voice both hollow and haunted.

  As Dave started running toward the wall and others with pistols and rifles began to emerge from their dwellings wearing whatever had come quickly to hand, Ethan heard the sounds of the Gray Men.

  It was distant at first, a strange murmur of discordant music, steadily growing louder. Ethan had already seen that wooden walkways had been built along the top of the wall a few feet below the coils of barbed wire, and now the defenders of Panther Ridge were using ladders to climb up. A second red flare shot from the southernmost watchtower, which Ethan figured meant the Gray Men were attacking from two directions. He had to see for himself, so he started running away from the pool, down the road and to the wall’s nearest ladder. Just as he reached it, a tall and slender older woman with a crown of short-cut gray hair got in his way to climb up first. She paused to look him in the face. Olivia Quintero had a rifle under her arm and a holstered revolver around the waist of her jeans. She had pulled on a yellow western-style blouse with blue cornflowers stitched across the shoulders.

  “Get away from here.” Her dark brown eyes were nearly ebony. “Move!” She climbed up without waiting to see if he obeyed or not. Ethan let a man with another rifle go up next. Then he climbed up to the walkway himself, because he had to see.

  The shrieking hit him like an oncoming wave. The rock wall was as high as his upper chest. As he stared out through the barbed-wire coils, he saw that the earth itself seemed to be in motion. Were there a hundred of them? More than that? They were scrabbling up the hillside toward the wall. A white star shell flare was fired from the southernmost watchtower. As it sizzled and drifted down Ethan saw that some of the attackers wore the rags of clothing but many were naked, and their nakedness revealed ashy gray flesh that drooped in gobbets off the bones like the dissolving of a nasty jelly, or ashy gray flesh that looked to be covered with scales, or ashy gray flesh that rippled with what looked to be spines or bony plate armor. The full impact of horror hit Ethan like a blow to the belly. Here were sinewy creatures with flattened skulls and hunched backs, like human battering rams. There were things that ran on legs as thick as tree trunks, things that hobbled on jellying limbs and things that crawled as decaying crablike torsos under the legs of the others.

  From the front of the unhuman wave came leaping creatures with armored backs and clawed hooks for hands. They grappled the wall and began to scramble up toward the barbed wire. Frozen with shock, Ethan saw one of the climbers look up and grin in a gray, slit-eyed face with a nose that had collapsed inward and thin lips parted from teeth like little sawblades. Then the face exploded with one of the first machine-gun bursts and the body hung twitching a few feet below the barbed wire with its hooks driven into the mortar b
etween the rocks.

  The other rifles, pistols, and machine guns opened up. Though the bodies of the Gray Men were torn by the hail of bullets, the creatures continued onward in their crashing wave against the walls of the fortress of Panther Ridge. Something hit the metal-covered door with a force that made the walkway under Ethan’s feet tremble. Dust flew from between the stones. Shots were directed at whatever was down there, and that monstrous strength hit the door again but with less power and then more shots seemed to finish it off.

  Before Ethan in the white flarelight was a sea of malformed, grotesque creatures that used to be human beings. He saw men, women, and children turned to hissing and shrieking monsters by either an alien disease or poison in the rainwater. He saw hump-backed shapes with greedy eyes and skeletal figures with gray, paper-thin flesh that looked like…

  The Visible Man.

  He remembered.

  Building his model of the Visible Man, with its clear plastic skin that displayed all the internal organs, veins, and arteries of a human being. Got it from…where? Wal-Mart? No, Amazon. Sitting at his desk in his room…a house somewhere…under a green desklamp…the plastic organs lined up in the order he wanted to paint them…carefully because he wanted everything about the anatomy kit to be right…a school project…and a woman coming into the room…dark-haired…and saying—

  “Get back!” shouted the woman at Ethan’s side. He realized a scale-skinned, thin monstrosity with black, sunken eyes in one head and a grapefruit-sized growth of a second head with white sightless eyes on the stalk of its neck had climbed up to the wire and was reaching through the coils for his throat, and then Olivia Quintero pushed him aside and shot the thing in the temple of its larger head so that its brains flew out and the second head chattered and gnashed its sharp little baby teeth as the body slithered down and away.

  She gave Ethan a look that would’ve cracked a mirror, and then she chambered another bullet and fired again into the mass of Gray Men bodies that were climbing relentlessly up the wall with their spiked fingers and toes. Some were getting to the wire and reaching through to grasp at whatever their claws could find before they were shot down. A gray-fleshed froglike figure with bulging eyes and the long ebony hair of a woman suddenly came leaping up and landed in the barbed wire to Ethan’s left, crushing it down, and following it was a male creature with four arms—two normal-sized and two spindly things growing from its rib cage—that moved in a frenzy, tearing the wire from its frame. Ethan saw Dave McKane fire his Uzi right in the thing’s face, but as soon as that bloodied creature fell away it was replaced by two others, one rail-thin and its ashy flesh covered with small, sharp spines, and the other a thick behemoth with a distorted skull like a hammerhead and a face that looked to be all gaping sharp-toothed mouth with eyes the size of black beads.

  The hammerhead monster gave from its hideous mouth a roar that no longer had a sound anywhere near human. It pushed itself over the barbed wire onto the walkway. Only a few feet to Ethan’s left, it grasped with spiked fingers the shoulders of a young man whose revolver went off into the monster’s chest, but the gaping mouth was already tearing hunks of flesh from the young man’s face. As the creature was shot by every weapon that could bear on it, its mouth expanded to engulf the man’s entire head, and with a violent and sickening twist, it ripped the head from the body. Then the lead storm finally sent the beast falling back over the barbed wire and the headless body toppled the other way to the ground.

  Other things were clambering up, faster and faster. They were tearing the wire loose from its framing, taking bullets and falling, and then more climbed up to take their places.

  Guns were starting to click empty. Desperate hands searched for bullets in holsters, pockets and ammo boxes. Some of the defenders had brought axes, and now they were reduced to flailing and chopping. Ethan could feel the cold spread of panic. Creatures that resembled human beings only in the depth of tortured nightmares were tearing the wire down and coming over the top. Dave McKane’s Uzi fired and fired and suddenly went silent as he frantically dug into his pockets for more clips. Olivia Quintero’s rifle spoke, knocking a dark spidery shape off the wall. She paused to slap another ammo clip into her weapon and was almost seized by a slim creature with long white hair, jellied flesh, and the jagged-toothed grin of a shark. She hit the thing in the chest with the rifle’s butt and followed that blow with a bullet to the forehead that sent it reeling off and downward, shrieking like the sound of fingernails across a chalkboard. The sweat of effort and fear glistened on Olivia’s face. She drew her pistol, took aim, and began firing slowly and methodically into the shapes that were relentlessly climbing up.

  Ethan saw.

  There were too many. Tonight the Gray Men were going to defeat this last stand at Panther Ridge. The watchtower machine guns were still firing and so too were the rifles and the pistols along the walls, but Ethan knew that soon the bullets would be gone and all guns reduced to clubs. He saw dozens of the things climbing up the walls, and dozens more out there swarming forward—a malignant army of them—so that again the earth itself seemed in turbulent motion.

  They needed to be thrown off the walls, he thought. They needed to be shaken off the hillside, devoured by the earth itself, and what power could do that?

  It came to him, amid the shooting and the shrieking and the screams as one of the female defenders near him was attacked, that he should press his hands against the rocks of the wall before him, as if touching the earth itself beyond the wall. Of shaping the earth, or molding it. Of commanding the earth and demanding from it, and seeing in his mind the vision of what he wanted to happen.

  It was a sharp, clear inner voice that told him to do this, that it was the right thing, just as walking down into the swimming pool had been the right thing. Just touch the rocks, this voice—his own voice, but a stronger and surer voice—said; just touch the rocks, and see in your mind the power…

  …of an earthquake.

  I’m just a boy! he thought. I can’t! I can’t do that!

  But even as he thought this, Ethan knew the Gray Men were coming over the wall and more were climbing up and the bullets were running out and time was short because in just a little while they would all be dead.

  Earthquake, he thought.

  You can, said the voice. His own, but different. An older voice, maybe. One that knew things he did not, and maybe he was afraid to know. Because the fact was, he was scared almost to immobility. Paralyzed, waiting for the end.

  You can, said the voice. Obey. And try. Do it now, before the time is gone.

  He had no idea how to do this, but he realized something was expected of him. And yes, it seemed crazy to him, but he had to try. He placed his palms against the stones. He looked out upon the seething mass. He drew a long deep breath into his still-sore lungs, and when he exhaled, he saw vividly in his mind the hillside moving like the skin of a snake, and he fixed firmly upon that, and a second went by and another and another and nothing happened but the clicking of the guns going empty and the shrieks of the Gray Men climbing up and the sound of axes hitting deformed flesh…nothing…nothing at all. And when he was about to take his hands away from the stones and prepare for his own death maybe he felt a startling heat suddenly rise up from his deepest part and seem to scorch his flesh from the inside, or maybe it was like a surge of electricity that burned his ears and crackled in his hair, or maybe it was like none of these things but a sense of firm belief that he could do this, if he wanted to save himself and the others, and just that fast in the midst of this tumult and violence Ethan felt some part of him—some mystery part he did not understand—gather ferocious strength. He felt it leave his body like a whirlwind and cast its will upon the earth.

  The earth groaned like the awakening of an old man from a long and troubled slumber. And then the old man stretched and tossed, and in that instant the entire hilltop shifted.

  It was not a gentle shifting. Cracks shot across the roadway and glass
shattered in apartment windows behind Ethan. The Panther Ridge Apartment buildings made noises of wood splintering and balconies popping loose from their supports. But the walls shook off a few of the climbers and blew rock dust and fragments into the deformed faces of those below. Many of the defenders fell to their knees and some fell off the walkway, and Ethan also went to his knees but staggered up, still with his hands pressed against the stones. He had the sense of being part of the earth himself, of directing its throes through the earth element of rock, but otherwise his heart was pounding like crazy and he had already bitten blood from his lower lip. One of the watchtowers crashed over, its machine-gunner leaping out to safety. The hilltop shook again, more violently still, and more of the Gray Men lost their grips on the wall. The Gray Men fell down, monstrosity tangled up with monstrosity. The third tremor was the most violent. Dozens of rocks in the walls broke apart with the noise of small explosions. More glass blew from the apartment windows. The whole of Panther Ridge shifted, with the noise of ancient mountain stones shattering to pieces. Fissures cracked open and snaked down the hillside. Some of the Gray Men staggered and stepped into them as the fissures widened two or three feet. Many were still caught within when the fissures closed again, rock grinding against malformed flesh and crushing the alien-infected bones. Clawed hands reached up from their new graves and grasped at the air until they were still.

  This assault by the earth, which continued with more minor quakes, was enough to show that the Gray Men for the most part retained their survival instincts. They turned and fled down the hillside, many dragging dead bodies with them for later feasting. They had come shrieking but they departed silently, as if in shame. Some looked back over their spiny shoulders, and their message was nearly the same as the graffiti declaration written on the wall of the Panther Ridge Apartments: Tomorrow Is Another Night.