The Border

by Robert McCammon

  Olivia lifted the lantern to view his face as if she’d never really studied it before. Ethan’s sharp blue eyes glinted; his jaw was set. He looked ready for something, but she didn’t know what. He looked expectant. He shifted his weight from foot to foot, and seemed as uneasy as a horse sensing the killing blade. “Walk with me,” she said, and started off. She was still limping a little and her knee was taped up under the jeans, but otherwise she was okay if one didn’t consider the nightmares that had interrupted her sleep since that morning in the library. More than once she’d awakened in a cold sweat as a wave of mutated flesh and biting teeth had rolled up at her from a broken floor, and in those nightmares there was no Dave McKane to help her.

  Ethan walked with her, noting the limp. “JayDee said you hurt your knee.”

  “It’s nothing. Need to walk to keep the blood moving.”

  They had gone only a few paces more when something glowing bright blue streaked across the sky above Panther Ridge. It was maybe four or five hundred feet up, and it moved in a blur but soundlessly. Ethan and Olivia watched it disappear into the clouds beyond. In about three seconds there was a faint hum that became louder and louder still until it became a high-pitched shriek that would have left no one in the complex asleep, and suddenly a red and pulsing sphere with a fiery halo around it came out of the clouds and darted after the blue object. It, too, was quickly lost from sight.

  “They’re active tonight,” Olivia said tonelessly. She saw candles and oil lamps going on in what remained of windows across the complex. There would be no more sleeping this night. Many times they had seen the battling lights in the night sky, seen and heard distant explosions and the otherworldly sounds of alien weapons at work, but how could anyone get used to it? “Come on, let’s keep walking,” she told Ethan, since both of them had stopped to watch the quick and deadly spectacle. “Okay,” she said after a moment more. “About the White Mansion.”

  “I have to get there.” In his voice there was no hesitation. “Soon.”

  “All right.” Olivia wondered if the glint of his eyes meant he was feverish. “How do you figure on getting there? Walking?”

  “It would take too long.” What he said next just came to him, like a memory, or like another voice speaking through him. “I have to get there soon or the chance might be lost.”

  “Chance?” She frowned, a little unnerved by this word. “What chance do you mean?”

  He opened his mouth, about to speak but not knowing exactly what he was going to say. He had no choice but to trust in whatever was guiding him, whatever was trying to pull—or push—him on this dangerous and maybe crazy journey. He opened his mouth, but before any words could come out a sizzling white-hot thing shot across the sky above Panther Ridge and then another and another and suddenly dozens of them, sounding like bacon fat in a skillet, until the sky was crisscrossed with them and they left trails that burned the eyeballs. Up in the clouds there was thunder and lightning and then lightning and thunder but the lightning was red and blue and the thunder was the deep boom of ocean waves crashing against a jagged shore…harder and harder, louder and louder.

  “Jesus,” Olivia whispered, her eyes on the heavens. Beside her, Ethan’s muscles had tensed and his heart was pounding. His lungs did hurt, he thought. Have to tell the doc about that…but in the next instant he thought too late…too late…

  “Too late,” he heard himself say, as if from a vast and unfathomable distance.

  “What?” she asked him, a frantic note in her voice. And again, when he didn’t answer: “What?”

  From the clouds descended a monster.

  Ethan figured it was nearly twice as big as the Gorgon ship he’d seen destroyed over the muddy field. It was the same triangular shape with the same prehistoric monster markings of brown, yellow, and black, but yet not wholly the same because each craft was different. It was razor-thin, had no openings nor ports and six of the eight electric-blue orbs that pulsed at its belly had gone dead black. Dozens of spheres of white-hot energy were attacking it from all sides, and the orbs tried to explode as many as they could but the ones getting through were burning red-edged holes in the reptilian hide. There was an electric smell in the air and the smell of charred meat that had been placed on a grill when it was already three days rotten. It was a swampy smell, the odor of firebombed rattlesnakes that had been left to decay under a hot August sun. There came the high-pitched, fingernail-on-blackboard and viper hiss of agony. The Gorgon ship was coming down upon the Panther Ridge Apartments. Olivia realized it a few seconds after Ethan, because her brain was stunned. It had seized up, run out of the lubrication of reality. Others realized what was about to happen too, for a sudden screaming and wailing arose from the apartment complex like voices of the doomed from the very center of Hell.

  The tremendous bulk of the Gorgon ship shivered. Around it now could be seen maybe a hundred or more of the small black craft of the Cyphers, each hardly big enough to carry a human-sized pilot, with swept-back, vibrating wings, and a sharply pointed nosecone. Their skins glistened wetly, as they darted in and out and the white spheres of flame shot from the wings six at a time. They moved fast and silently, stopping to hover for a second or jink to one side or another like flying insects. Occasionally one was hit by a blue spark of energy and exploded into flying tatters, but there were too many.

  Still screaming, the Gorgon ship had lost its equilibrium. It began to tilt to the left, and as it did some of the Cypher craft became blurs of incredible speed and speared themselves into the belly of the beast. They then exploded in white fireballs that scorched the eyes and burned more holes into the ship, and now from the craft’s belly came bursts of dark liquid that spattered down upon the bones of the vulture-plucked Gray Men still reaching from their graves in the earth.

  One of the men in a machine-gun tower began to fire at the descending ship, which was like throwing wads of paper at concrete. Ethan’s mind was racing, putting together speeds and trajectories of which he had no knowledge of learning; he realized the ship was going to clear the wall but that the apartment complex was doomed. Even as he thought this and the Gorgon craft continued on in its death drop, he was aware of figures emerging through the stones of the wall like ghosts, then becoming solid again. The Cypher soldiers had arrived. There were dozens of them, skeleton-thin and seven feet tall. Their black featureless non-faces looked to neither right nor left. Their black fleshy weapons with two barrels connected to their bodies by fluid-carrying veins were held at the ready, as they likely always were. Some of them blurred onward toward the apartments, while others stalked forward at a more cautious pace. Now pistol and rifle shots were ringing out as the inhabitants of Panther Ridge tried to defend themselves, but the bullets—if any hit their targets—had no effect.

  Olivia cringed down and held a scream behind her teeth as the Gorgon craft hissed overhead and plowed into the ground just short of the first level of apartments. Its mass and speed dug a plume of concrete and earth before it as it continued up the hillside, crossing the tennis courts and the swimming pool and slamming nearly dead center into the first building, which crumpled before it as if made of the cheapest cardboard. Both Ethan and Olivia realized the hospital and JayDee’s apartment had just been destroyed. The dying Gorgon ship cleaved completely through the first level and smashed into the second building. Ethan knew his own apartment—and Dave’s and Olivia’s too—had just been reduced to kindling. The dust of ages swirled up into the air. The Gorgon craft stopped just short of the third building, which like the fourth was unoccupied. The damage had been done. Now the Cypher soldiers were closing in to make sure there were no Gorgon survivors.

  Something had caught fire in the crushed midsection of the second level. Red flames were starting to curl upward. Screams came from the shattered buildings, along with more gunshots. The Gorgon ship lay still, its life liquid pouring from burned holes in the skin and steam rising up around it.

  Someone had opened the metal-pla
ted door and people who could still move were running and hobbling out to escape the battleground. “Oh,” Ethan heard Olivia gasp, and she held onto his shoulders as if fearful of being flung off the world. “Oh no…oh no…”

  “Come on!” he said, and took her hand to lead her toward the open door. Cypher soldiers were still coming in, blurring their way through the wall and then reforming. They moved past the terrified people trying to get out, and someone fired a pistol point-blank at one of them but it vibrated out to invisibility an instant before the slug could connect.

  Olivia pulled free. Her face was drawn as tightly as a mask; her eyes wore the shine of near-madness and tears had run down to her chin. “No,” she said, her voice low and strained. “I’m not…not going.”

  “Yes you are!” Ethan grabbed at her hand again but once more she pulled free.

  “I have to…find something,” she told him, and she began to walk not toward the way out but toward the crumpled and burning apartments. In her mind Vincent was in Apartment 227, and he was holding for her something he wanted her to have, and she would have it and then go, after everyone else had left. She would take from him the Magic Eight Ball, that joke gift, the gift that had laughter and love attached to it, because she realized even in her fugue that she could survive no longer without love and laughter, and she must have that gift from him or she would this night perish of a doubly broken heart.

  “Olivia!” Ethan cried out. “Don’t go back there!”

  But if she heard him she did not respond; she was as much a determined wraith as the Cypher soldiers who blurred past her through the billowing yellow dust. She kept going, step after step, her eyes swollen with both desperate sadness and the rage she had pushed down and pushed down and pushed down and did not know what to do with for she could not fight these creatures from other worlds. She kept going with the smell of fire and the dead-snake smell of the Gorgon ship in her nostrils and in her lungs, and she kept going unaware that Ethan Gaines walked at her side, silent also in his anger, his blue eyes glinting like the edges of blades in a strong light.

  Bloodied and staggering survivors passed them, struggling on toward the wall. A few stopped and tried to turn Olivia away from the wreckage, but they gave it up when they saw her sightless eyes. Through the dust and the smoke, she continued on with Ethan beside her, and they walked alongside the downed Gorgon ship with its mortal wounds of burnt holes and within them a glimpse of raw red meat formed into hexagonal-shaped corridors, wet and gleaming with unknown fluids. The way ahead was blocked by rubble. Olivia chose another way, and still Ethan followed. What had been a balcony was on fire. Glass crunched underfoot. A mass of timbers and a stainless steel kitchen sink lay ahead. A railing was twisted like a piece of melted licorice. In the smoky gloom the shadows of Cypher soldiers moved about as flames chewed on broken chairs and coffee tables.

  “We can’t get through!” Ethan said. “There’s no way!”

  But there was a way. Olivia knew there must be. Vincent was waiting for her, and he was all right, so there must be a way. She walked past the remnant of a standing wall on which still hung a metallic-looking plastic Horn Of Plenty. Ethan saw there was nothing but rubble, smoke, dust, and destruction ahead of them. Beside them loomed the dead Gorgon craft, and they passed a gaping hole from which the dark red liquid had poured to make a swamp of alien blood around the mangled belongings of men.

  A Cypher soldier was standing in front of them, its weapon trained and ready.

  “Go away,” Ethan said, his voice weak but carrying enough strength to be heard over the crackling of flames. The soldier did not move for a few seconds, and then it stalked off into the ruins. Ethan knew it hadn’t understood him, but what was working behind that faceless mask was the belief that the inhabitants of this world were not worth the waste of energy.

  “We have to go back,” Ethan told the woman, who had begun to sob and stumble as her resolve collapsed. He reached out for her hand, caught it and held her. “Olivia. Please. We have to go back…get out of here.”

  “Not yet,” she answered, weeping. “Not yet…I’ve got to…find…Vincent. Vincent?” she called, into the dark cavern of despair. And louder: “Vincent?”

  And that was when Ethan saw it coming, behind Olivia.

  Through the smoke and dust, through the bloody swamp, through the tangle of timbers and broken walls…

  …and it was not Olivia’s Vincent.

  It was crawling at first…slithering…and then it began to rise up from the wreckage, and it was not a Cypher soldier either. It moved with what might have been a serpentine grace, a strange kind of fascinating beauty, yet as it came closer a cold terror gripped Ethan’s heart and his face contorted, and though he could not fully see the thing he could see enough to know that such a creature was so alien to men that it caused fear to freeze the body and the soul, that the guts drew tight and the stomach lurched, and he wanted to run from this transfixing horror but he could not leave Olivia and she had not seen yet…she had not seen but she saw his face and she was just about to turn and see what should not be seen by human eyes lest they be burned blind.

  “NO!” the boy shouted.

  And his free hand came up, palm outward, just as Olivia was turning, and to save the last of her sanity he wanted the Gorgon pilot to disappear, to be wiped from the face of this earth, and just in that instant his brain seemed to catch fire and the fire whipped down along his arm and into his hand. His palm burned as if it had been splashed with a bucketful of boiling oil. Did the air between himself and the creature contort? Did it change shape, become solid like a battering ram? Did it sparkle with flames that shot between himself and the alien like a thousand burning bullets?

  Maybe all those.

  Because in the next second the creature blew to pieces and Ethan was thrown backward, as if slammed by the recoil of an elephant gun. He had the sense to release Olivia’s hand before he broke her arm. He went down into the debris, felt a nail go through his jeans into the back of his right thigh, felt the breath whoosh out of his lungs and his burning brain throb as if it were about to explode.

  Olivia’s arm had been nearly jerked out of its socket and would have been had Ethan not let go. She was full up with pain and yet she knew something had been there that was no longer there. She blinked into the gloom as the tears ran from her eyes and her mouth drooled threads of saliva. “What is it?” she asked, clenching a hand to her shoulder. “What is it? What is it?”

  She dared not take another step forward, because something terrible had been there and now it was in pieces she did not want to see.

  Ethan got himself loose from the nail, struggled up and fell again to his knees. His head was pounding, he felt sick to his stomach and in his mouth was the taste of bitter ashes. With a true force of will he commanded himself to stand, and he did. Olivia stared at him, wide-eyed; she shivered and wavered on her feet, as if about to pass out. Beyond her, just at the edge of recognition, Ethan saw something else slither away through the debris. He tried to speak, could not find his voice, tried again, and said, “We have to go now.”

  “Go,” Olivia repeated dully. Then: “Yes. We have to go.”

  Ethan looked at the palm of his hand that had seemingly been on fire. He expected to see it either covered with blisters or as one huge blister. Was the flesh a shade or two more red and maybe swollen a little? He couldn’t tell for sure. The burning sensation was gone from his hand, arm and shoulder. He was tired, and his brain ached. He didn’t look over at the thing that had been blown to bits; he just wanted to take Olivia’s hand and guide her out of here. He realized he had the alien blood—the ship’s blood—on his clothes. It smelled of the dead snake, and he wanted to be sick but there was no time for that because maybe the Cypher soldiers could smell it on him. They might swarm after him, and no insignificant humanity could save him.

  He grasped Olivia’s hand and started them back the way they’d come, and now there were other figures walking near t
hem but they were not Cyphers or Gorgons, they were bloodied and ragged survivors picking their way out of the debris. Ethan couldn’t recognize anyone. A man carried a little boy, and a woman staggered alongside, and all of them were battered and nearly nude for the clothes had been torn off them in the storm of destruction. An older man wearing a blood-covered shirt suddenly stopped walking and just sat down in a wicker chair as if waiting for the next bus to come along.

  Olivia stared straight ahead, her crying now done, her face drawn and waxy. “We’ll be all right,” he told her, but he heard his voice tremble, and it sounded like the most stupid thing that had ever been said in the world. Where was Dave? What had happened to JayDee? What about Roger Pell, Kathy Mattson, Gary Roosa, Joel Schuster, and three or four other people he had at least spoken with? He doubted very many had lived through this…but…he was alive, and so was Olivia Quintero.

  He thought that if the Gray Men came now, alerted by the noise and maybe the smell of blood, everything would be over. As it was…the Panther Ridge Apartments were finished as a refuge. The survivors were going to have to move, whether they wanted to or not.

  The White Mansion, he thought.

  Refuge or not, it was pulling at him harder than ever. He had to get there. Had to…but how? Who would help him on that journey, which seemed impossible? And he didn’t know what he would find there, but…

  I just blew up a Gorgon, he thought. With my mind. Because I wanted to.

  And he remembered John Douglas, in the hospital, sitting in that chair and asking What exactly are you, because I don’t think you’re human.

  “I am,” said the boy, to no one, and Olivia was listening only to distant screams and cries for help and realizing she had come to her end as the leader of this sad fortress. “I am,” he said, and again with more force, “I am.”

  But at the same time he knew.

  No human could cause earthquakes by wanting them to happen. No human could destroy a horror as he had just done, by willing it hard enough.