The Border

by Robert McCammon

  “That was the office,” Dave said as they passed an open doorway. “Lunchroom is up this way. I found the medical supplies in a room a little further along. The library must be past that.”

  Olivia nodded. The falling water tap…tap…tapped. Puddles washed around discarded notebooks and debris that had spilled from open lockers in the students’ panic to get home on that day in April. She could imagine the teachers and the principal trying to keep order, the intercom system crackling, the parents swarming these halls in search of their children while the newscasts showed the Gorgon ships destroying cities all over the world. Only ghosts remained here now, she thought. The ghosts of a way of life; the ghosts of not only the American Dream, but the dream of the Family of Man.

  “You okay?” Dave asked.

  She said, “Yes,” but he knew she was not so he replied, “We won’t be in here too long,” and she said nothing else.

  They kept moving forward into the yellowed gloom. A tarnished trumpet lay on the warped floor. Gideon has left the building, Olivia thought. That almost made her laugh, but there was too much sadness in this ruin, too much expectation and promise gone and lost. She dared not let herself think about what might have happened to many of the students, parents and teachers. Some of them might have been among the Gray Men…if not here, then somewhere else.

  “This,” Dave said, “must be the place.”

  He had stopped in the hallway just ahead of her. On either side of rows of lockers was a door marked LIBRARY with a cracked glass inset. “Let’s take a look,” Dave told her, but before he opened the door he slid the .357 Magnum revolver out of his belt holster and clicked off the safety.

  Olivia followed him in, and left the door open behind them.

  It was a pretty mess. A complete disaster. The windows were broken out and the rain and wind had swept in and all the standing shelves had gone over. Everything was scattered and drenched. Yellow and green mold grew in patches on the walls and the floor, and both the visitors knew not to touch that. There was a sickly-sweet odor in the air, a vile miasma of corruption. Part of the ceiling had collapsed and wires and pipes were hanging down. On the floor the books were everywhere, locked together by dampness and mold.

  They stood looking at the room in silence.

  “Jeez,” Dave finally said. He frowned and wished he had a cigarette. “I guess none of the bastards like to read, huh?”

  Now that did strike Olivia. She laughed, a pure and hearty laugh, and Dave liked the sound of it. He gave a tight, passing smile and shrugged. The light was bad in here. He didn’t like the idea of getting on his knees in that muck and weird mold and hunting for road maps. The place looked like somebody had turned it upside down and shaken it a few times. He thought they needed a shovel to go through all this, or at least rubber gloves. He cursed himself for not thinking of that. But they were here now, so where to begin?

  Good question.

  He began to try to move books aside with his foot, and this worked okay at first but at the lower level things had turned gluey and were stuck to the floor. Some of the books looked to have nearly melted away, and there was no telling what they once had been. He saw nothing of maps or road atlases, and he asked himself how would he know any if he saw them in this wet mess?

  “Would this do?” Olivia had placed her foot on a battered world globe that lay on the floor.

  “I don’t think so. I don’t know.” Dave heard a note of resignation in his voice. “Even if we found maps, I don’t know what we’d be looking for. Christ…this didn’t exactly turn out like I thought it would.” He kicked some melted books aside. “Stupid, I guess.”

  “Not stupid,” said Olivia. “Hopeful.”

  “Yeah. Well…maybe that’s as stupid as you can get these days.”

  Olivia began moving the fragments and wet skeletons of books aside with her booted foot as well. So much for the ideas and intellect of men, she thought. She uncovered some blue-bound Hardy Boys mysteries, and at that she almost teared up again. Stay strong, she told herself. Easy to say, tough to do. “I’ve known you long enough,” she said, “to know you’re the kind of man who doesn’t believe in…let’s say…miracles. But this boy has changed your mind? Dave, if this is even a real place, it could be anywhere. And why? What’s telling him to go there?”

  “He’s a weird kid,” was all Dave could offer, as he continued to search through the sodden mess.

  “Yes, I get that. But sometimes…you know…dreams are just dreams. I’ve had plenty of bad ones. Sure you have too.”

  “Yeah,” Dave said. He looked at Olivia in the dim yellow light. “I know it’s crazy. I know being here, doing this, is crazy. But still…you know Ethan is right. JayDee does too. We can’t hang on much longer. We’re going to have to move…find some other place, if we want to stay alive.”

  “You think the White Mansion is that place?”

  “Hell if I know, but Panther Ridge is about done.” He took his dirty baseball cap off, wiped the small beads of sweat from his forehead and then put the cap back on. “Ethan is different, Olivia. Whether that’s good or bad, I don’t know. But he’s helped us so far…I believe that. Call me stupid or crazy or whatever you like, but I’m here…that’s all I know.”

  She had no answer for any of that. She saw the librarian’s office and the check-out counter across the room. A rack of DVD movies had fallen over and plastic cracked under her feet as she approached the counter. In all this chaos a small metal statue of a football player stood upright on the countertop, holding a little paper American flag in one fist and a football cradled in the other arm like a beloved child.

  With Olivia’s next forward step, the floor beneath her suddenly sagged. There was a thick wet sound of something rotted giving way. She cried out as her right leg went through the floor. She thought she was going all the way through into the basement and she nearly let go of her rifle to grab at the tiles around her but then she stopped, just the one leg dangling down into darkness.

  Dave was there at her side in an instant, helping her up. “Easy, easy,” he said. “You okay? Hurt your leg?”

  “Bumped my knee pretty good. That’s about it. Watch the floor, it bites.”

  “Yeah, I see.” Dave peered into the hole but could really see nothing but dark. Water dripped down there and from the basement rose an acrid, musty odor as if from a diseased garden of poison mushrooms. “Careful.”

  “You too. Hey,” she said, having seen something of interest. “There’s a file cabinet behind the counter. Worth opening up.”

  “Right. Come on, stay with me.”

  They went around behind the check-out counter to the file cabinet, which appeared to have survived undamaged through whatever storm had raged in here. Dave opened the top drawer to find what appeared to be a couple of years’ worth of school newspapers, the Gazette. The second drawer held boxes of supplies like pencils, pens, rubber bands, gem clips and the like. The third drawer was mostly empty except for a few pads of printer paper, and the fourth and last drawer held two mousetraps.

  “More drawers behind the check-out counter,” Olivia noted, and she found herself limping over there because she really had taken a hard shot to the knee. Thing’s going to swell up on me, she thought. Magnifico! Just what she needed, to have to hobble around for a few days like an old grandmother.

  She opened the top drawer behind the counter and found another supply of pens, notepads, paper clips and someone’s stash of several flavors of Orbit gum. The next drawer held a thick red-and-gold yearbook The Mountaineer from the past year, a couple of old cell phones that must have been confiscated on The Day, and…nearly hidden under the yearbook was something else. She lifted The Mountaineer out and saw the cover of a highway twisting through a pine forest. It was a Rand-McNally United States Road Atlas, three years old. A dead roach had been smashed flat between The Mountaineer and McNally. “Here!” Olivia said, as she took the road atlas out. A librarian’s stern command was written across th
e cover in red Sharpie: Not To Leave This Room.

  “Got what you need,” she told Dave, with not just a little measure of triumph.

  Dave came over to see. “Yes!” He was aware he hadn’t sounded excited in a very long time, and this note in his voice surprised him. “Okay, then. Good! It’s a start, at least.” He rolled the atlas up and stuck it into the waistband of his jeans. “I don’t know what we’ll be looking for, but—”

  The floor cracked. Just a quiet noise, but an ominous one.

  “I think we should—” get out of here, Olivia was going to say, but she didn’t have the chance.

  Something was crawling up from the hole in the library floor.

  It came up, swaying like a cobra. It was thin and gray-fleshed and had been a woman at one time, for the sagging exposed breasts and the scraggly patches of long, white hair. The sunken eyes in the skull-like face darted here and there, seeking either the sources of the human voices or where the smell of the fresh meat was coming from. The claw-like hands scrabbled to pull the body completely free but something seemed to be obstructing it, and the thing’s mouth twisted with frustration and a little rattling noise came from the dry throat. Olivia started to cry out but checked herself. No time for that. Grim-lipped, she swung her rifle up to fire instead.

  The library’s floor rippled and heaved like a dirty ocean wave. The wet tiles burst open as clawed hands pushed their way free. Dave thought at first that he and Olivia had stumbled across a sleeping nest of Gray Men, and this was partly true…but in the next few seconds, as the floor continued to split apart and the glistening gray flesh slid out he realized with another start of horror that something very different had been incubating in the basement of the Ethan Gaines High School.

  Dave had worked as a teenager on a crew demolishing old houses and hauling the timbers and bricks away. Hey, hey! the foreman had called one hot August afternoon. Looky over here!

  And so Dave had seen, caught within a wall that had just been broken open, the sight of a dozen or more rats squealing and scrambling in their attempt to escape, but they had been joined and nearly knotted tail-to-tail in a circle and could not go in any one direction, and a few had died and begun to rot while the living ones continued to thrash wildly, their teeth bared, eyes glittering and breath rasping in their desperation.

  It’s a Rat King, the foreman had said. Seen only one of ’em before, my whole life. They got stuck in a little space, peed on each other, and their tails growed together. Nasty!

  The foreman had lifted his shovel and gone to work smashing the Rat King, which died in a bloody and chittering mess. To Dave had gone the honor of throwing the remains into a garbage can.

  Now, many years later in this nightmare world, Dave McKane was watching a Rat King made up of Gray Men crawling from the broken floor.

  Their legs had grown together into something resembling long, thin tentacles not unlike rat tails. Some of the bodies had been engulfed by other bodies so that they had nearly disappeared one into the other, cannibalized or absorbed, and maybe there were twenty or more of them in this Rat King circle, what had been men, women, and children, and heads and arms were not always where they were supposed to be. What remained of their clothes were sodden, dark-stained rags. Scabrous gray flesh pulled itself up from the basement. The ruined faces and misshapen heads strained on their necks. In some of the gaping mouths glinted teeth like little razor blades, and in others showed rows of sharklike rippers.

  Dave realized at once that there were two problems.

  This Rat King circle shared a common purpose and a direction, and the writhing monster lay between him, Olivia, and the way out.

  Her face a rictus of terror, Olivia had backed up and was pressed against him. The thing struggled to get free from the basement, with wet books and moldy pages plastered upon its flesh. The Rat King of Gray Men made no noise but a hissing and a slithering, and now it appeared to be gathering its tentacles beneath itself in an effort to stand. Dave thought that if they were going to get out of here they had to go now.

  He opened fire with his Magnum, which was incredibly loud and bright with its bloom of flame. Two shots, and two of the nightmarish faces were blasted away. Then Olivia’s rifle spoke, drilling a hole through the white-haired head of the female creature that had first begun to climb out. Black fluid spurted from the wound. Dave grasped Olivia’s shoulder, shouted, “Let’s move!” in the strongest voice he could summon and pulled her with him around the counter. The mass of melded-together Gray Men moved faster; it reached for them with serpentine arms. A gray mallet of a hand with seven fingers grasped Olivia’s right ankle and she would’ve fallen into the midst of them had Dave not held onto her with all his strength. Olivia sent a bullet into what might have once been a human shoulder, and she pulled free with the resolve that if she didn’t, she was dead. Dave fired again into one of the faces. Gray flesh and dark matter spattered the library walls. A low moaning like a chorus of the damned rose from the creature. The thing was hauling itself forward on elbows and gray bellies, the broken heads lolling. The tentacled appendages pushed at the floor. The bared teeth of the remaining heads snapped at Olivia and Dave, and a gray forest of arms reached out for bloody sustenance. The two humans in the room opened fire once more at a range of no further than four or five feet. Dave’s revolver went empty and he drew the Uzi from its holster, spraying the thing’s body with 9mm bullets.

  With a high, eerie cry that came from each mouth at the same time, the mutated horror suddenly began to retreat, pulling itself back to its cavern beneath the floor. There was room enough to get past. Dave shoved Olivia toward the door, mindful of her knee but mindful also of keeping them both alive. He fired his last bullet of the clip into the gray body and saw what looked to be a child’s distorted face in its depths, either grown into or consumed by the others. The eyes were open and the mouth, which had no lower jaw, gaped wide as if in perpetual hunger or torment. Then Dave was out the door. They ran for daylight, Olivia damning her hurt knee and moving as fast as she could. Dave stayed beside her, giving her a shoulder to lean on. He thought that if either one of them dared to look back, it would prove their sanity had been permanently checked out in the Ethan Gaines library.

  Neither one looked back, but Olivia was sobbing when she untied her horse and swung herself up. Dave was too tough to cry, but his stomach betrayed him. His breakfast of a pair of biscuits and a few spoonfuls of Spam came up. His horse smelled the mutated flesh on him and tried to run before he could get himself firmly in the saddle.

  No one had to say Ride or Go or Let’s get the hell out of here.

  They rode. Behind them, as the horses galloped toward the uncertain safety of Panther Ridge, the vultures were disturbed by the commotion. Some flew up off the burned carcasses they were consuming, but after a few moments they settled down again over the dead monsters in the parking lot like a black shroud and fought for their places at the feast.

  NINE.

  KIDNEYS, STOMACH. LARGE INTESTINE, SMALL INTESTINE, PANCREAS. Liver, spleen, lungs. Brain, heart. Ethan was sitting in a chair in his apartment. The chair was made of scuffed brown leather and used to be a recliner but the mechanism was jammed. A candle lantern burned on a small table beside him. The table was crooked because the floor was crooked. The first sickly light of morning had begun to creep through the duct-taped windows. Ethan wore his dark green p.j. bottoms and a gray t-shirt. He had slept a little during the night, maybe a couple of hours straight. Even asleep, he’d been listening for the siren that meant the Gray Men were coming back, but it had been four nights since he’d found out he could make earthquakes. He felt like a raw nerve and a twisted muscle. When he’d gotten out of bed the first time he’d gone into the bathroom with the candle lantern, lifted his t-shirt and inspected his chest in the mirror. Then as much of his back as he could see.

  The doc was right.

  He didn’t think he ought to be alive.

  John Douglas had wanted him to co
me down to the hospital yesterday afternoon for another checkup. He didn’t want to because he knew what he looked like, but he did anyway. They did the shot of saline solution while a man with a shotgun stood nearby. Just a precaution, JayDee had said. Not that I don’t trust you.

  Ethan’s blood pressure was checked. No problem. Then when JayDee asked Ethan to take off his shirt to check the heartbeat was when the doc made a noise between a choke and a gasp and it seemed for a minute that he was going to press his hand against his mouth to stop any more sounds from coming out, but then JayDee got his bearings back and he said in a tight voice, “You’ve seen yourself, I’m guessing.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Turn around, if you please.”

  “Same on my back,” Ethan said.

  “Let’s take a look.”

  Ethan obeyed. The bruises were worse. They were still as black as a midnight funeral and now they had converged. There was no area of unbruised flesh on his chest, stomach or back down to the bottom of his spine. His sides were mottled with purple and green, the tendrils of one huge bruise reaching around to connect with the other.

  “Damn,” said the man with the shotgun, whose name Ethan thought was Lester.

  JayDee approached Ethan with caution. “I’m going to listen to your heart,” he said, as if asking permission, and Ethan nodded. “Okay,” JayDee said when he’d finished that, but he still had the stethoscope plugged into his ears. “Now…I want to listen to your lungs. Just take a deep breath when I ask you, and let it out slowly. Right?”

  “You’re the doctor,” Ethan said.

  JayDee began his work. “Breathe. That hurt you any?”

  “A little.”

  He moved around to Ethan’s back. “Breathe. Coughing up anymore blood?”

  “No sir.”

  “Another deep breath, please.” When JayDee was finished he came back around to look into Ethan’s face. “Les,” he said quietly as he took off the stethoscope and put it aside, “you can leave us now.”