The Border

by Robert McCammon

He was about to say The man with the black beard is a Gorgon but he checked himself. Instead he envisioned his own hand, but the hand he saw glowed silver, was long-fingered and more slender than the one at the end of his own arm. He envisioned the silver-glowing hand reaching out like a coil of mist past Dave and Olivia, and the long slim fingers probing into the head of the creature that wore a black beard, and then piercing through the alien-constructed skull of some unknown material he saw—

  —a landscape of swamp with yellow and brown tree-like growths protruding up through a soup of wet fog, their forms tortured into shapes more like cactus and having skins across which rippled spikes rose and fell as if the vegetation breathed the miasmic air. Birds of prey with gray flesh and long beaks studded with teeth roamed the clouds, swooping down upon things that resembled crabs and eels sliding through the red-tinged liquid, which shimmered not like water but like quicksilver. There was a change of scene…the skipping of frames as if a movie had suddenly sped up…and there stood under double moons a massive city with thousands of low-slung buildings like sculpted adobe mud-dwellings, but engineered by an alien eye and created by alien tools. Blue globes of light moved back and forth across the city, illuminating figures half-walking, half-slithering through narrow alleys. Another skipping of frames and change of scene…and there a darkness, a cavity, a place where machines thrummed and creations strange and fearful to the eyes of an earthman took shape. Ethan had the sensation that it was deep underground, in what might have been a nest, now becoming a place of shadows and flickering blue light, a place of explorations into the imaginations of warriors ever-seeking new and more powerful weapons of destruction, a place of power unknown to the human mind where the walls breathed with artificial life and were mottled with the colors of their warships.

  In the nerve center of pulsing machines and the flicker of blue energy stood a form that seemed to be beckoning him with a scaly, five-clawed hand, a figure draped in leathery black robes. Above the robes was a dark, dimly seen head and face that brought sweat out upon Ethan’s flesh even as he knew he was only probing the memory pictures of a Gorgon, and in that face was a pair of narrow eyes with hypnotic, red-slitted pupils that, unblinking, bade him mentally to come closer and closer, until he was drawn in so near he saw a cobra-like grin that exposed sharp, wet fangs and felt a freezing terror that might well have turned a human to stone.

  He could take no more. He got out but it was not easy, as if having to pull the silver hand out of a mass of clinging mud.

  He felt a tremendous power coiled within the Gorgon who stood only a few feet away from him, with Dave and Olivia between them. He felt a destruction that could savage everyone in the bus, that could destroy the bus itself as completely as if it were a child’s playtoy. But as their eyes held, Ethan had a sudden strange thought that broke through his fear, and almost without his bidding the thought seeped through the metallic wall and on toward the Gorgon’s mind, and that thought was: I can destroy you.

  The Gorgon blinked blinked blinked.

  “Hey!” Hannah said suddenly. “I think I see a light! There’s a glow in the sky over—” Something hit the right side of the bus with a jarring thump.

  “What the hell…?” she said, interrupted in her directions. She weaved the bus back and forth a little. “What’d we hit?”

  A small, spindly figure crawled up the side of the bus and stuck to one of the windows about midway back. There was a stunned silence from the passengers. The creature’s fingers and toes had flattened into suction cups. The thing looked to be a nine- or ten-year-old boy, dressed in tattered rags and with a completely bald and mallet-shaped head, its eyes sunken so deeply into the face they could not be seen. The creature was as gray as the ash from an all-consuming fire, and looking through the window into the bus the thing suddenly grinned as if delighted to see all the traveling meat, and then its head struck forward and shattered the window to pieces.

  The screaming began.

  “Holy Christ!” Ratcoff yelled, and Jefferson Jericho’s infamous member peed into his jeans. Ethan saw the Gray Man—Gray Child, in this instance—climbing through the window, still grinning to show sharp little rows of serrated teeth.

  “Somebody shoot it!” Dave shouted. He drew his Uzi but there were too many people in the way. “Shoot it!” he shouted again, as the thing reached out and grabbed Carmen Niega by the hair.

  A .45 automatic cracked twice and the Gray Child shuddered, two holes in its chest, but still it drew Carmen, screaming, towards its open mouth. Then a piece of rusted rebar smashed the thing across the face and Joel Schuster followed JayDee up by shooting the creature a third time in its bony head at point-blank distance. The Gray Child fell backward through the window, hissing, and took a handful of Carmen’s hair with it.

  Something hit the back of the bus with a force that bent the emergency exit inward and cracked the middle of the three rear windows like another gunshot. Hannah yelled, “Shit!” and stomped the gas pedal, no matter what obstacles lay ahead.

  The gnarled hands of another Gray Man gripped the bottom of the window broken out by the child and pulled the body up. This one was a stocky, muscular beast with curved red spikes growing out of its head, naked shoulders and chest. It made a low, rasping noise and flung itself into the bus even as Joel and Paul Edson shot it, and as the jammed-in passengers tried to get away from it the thing leaped upon Gary Roosa, impaling him on its chest spikes. A savage set of fangs ripped Gary’s throat open and began to chew through his neck until a Hispanic man with a white-streaked beard put a shotgun to the side of the monster’s head and gave it both barrels.

  Another creature, thin and wiry with a grotesque and misshapen face that was nearly all mouth with an eye just off the center of its forehead and the second on its right cheek, was clambering in through the window. Clinging to its back was a gray-haired female with a face like an axeblade and another female head growing out of her left shoulder. The passengers were trying to get away but there was nowhere to go. Those without weapons were crushing themselves up against the far side of the bus. Handguns and rifles were firing, combined with the screams a tremendous noise, but before these horrors were killed another man’s arm was nearly chewed off at the elbow and a young woman’s face gnawed to bloody tatters by the Gray Woman and her ingrown sister.

  Hannah swerved the bus wildly back and forth. Dave was trying to get back to the broken window and Ethan had gotten out of his way. Olivia stood beside Ethan, her back to the three new arrivals. Suddenly the handsome man with the brown beard gritted his teeth and started forward, his hands reaching out as if to grasp Ethan’s forearms, and in that moment Ethan looked into his eyes and saw behind them what he could only describe as a whirlpool of terror.

  “Jesus Christ!” Hannah shouted. She hit the brakes.

  Jefferson Jericho stumbled past Ethan, who had dodged aside and grabbed the back of the seat nearest him. One of the preacherman’s hands grazed the boy’s left arm and the other closed on empty air. He crashed into Olivia and fell to his knees in the aisle. The single headlight showed Hannah dozens of Gray Men swarming toward the bus, a tide of monstrosities flooding across the highway…not dozens, she realized in another moment, but hundreds. They ran and crawled and hobbled, some with jellied and hanging skin and others mutated into killing machines with clawed hands and flesh like spiny plate armor.

  In a matter of seconds they were all over the front of the bus and climbing up toward the windshield. Ratcoff had fallen to the floorboard, whimpering, while Vope stared impassively at the onrushing mass of inhuman humanity.

  “Go!” Olivia shouted at Hannah, as she saw the bus’s yellow snout being covered over by gray bodies.

  Hannah floored the thing. Bus number 712 backfired a blast of black smoke and lunged forward like a whipped horse. Gray Men tumbled off the front of the bus and the wheels jubbled as if running over a dozen speedbumps. The bumper and front grill slammed into more and more bodies and the tires slipped over the
ir slime, but ahead there was a solid wall of horrors. Two of the larger and stronger Gray Men had kept their holds on edges of metal and one of them crawled up to slam a knotty fist against the windshield. The fist came through in a shower of glass and Burt Ratcoff screamed like a woman.

  “Get off my bus!” Hannah shouted. She followed that demand with two booming shots from her six-gun that pierced the windshield and sent the mutant flying backward off the hood. She shot the other Gray Man in the head before it could use its fists, but the bullet left a hole almost in front of her face and cracks snaked across the windshield.

  Olivia realized there were too many, just as Ethan did. The things were running at the bus from all directions, and it seemed that hundreds of them were directly ahead.

  “Keep going! Keep going!” Dave yelled as he pushed his way up front. Jefferson Jericho had crawled out of the aisle on his knees, curling up on the floorboard to seek some kind of safety among the other bodies, but there was still enough of him exposed for Dave to step on the man’s right hand as he passed. There was a crunch of knuckles breaking beneath a hard-soled workboot, and in the burning flare of pain that followed the super salesman and fiend of the night realized he had just lost the use of all his fingers.

  Hannah was trying to keep going, but the bus was jamming itself up on Gray Men beneath the wheels and the undercarriage. The engine shrieked as the tires lost traction over jellied flesh and crushed armor. More were climbing up over the hood, and one with hands like bludgeons and two stubby extra arms was coming up to finish the job on the windshield.

  In the chaos, Ethan looked back to find one person.

  He saw Nikki, crushed in with others who had gotten as far away as they could from that broken window and the still-twitching bodies of the Gray Men. At least she was all right, but this battle was far from—

  A blinding white light flooded the bus.

  It was followed almost immediately by the chatter of double machine guns, and first hit were the Gray Men on the hood. Red tracers zipped through the air in front of the windshield, and now Hannah did slam her foot on the brake pedal because those slugs were just too damned close. But whoever was shooting knew their business, because the Gray Men fell away and the one with the bludgeon-hands had its head half shot off, yet no bullet hit the glass or the hood. The machine guns kept firing, mowing down the Gray Men in rows. They began to turn and run, climbing over each other to get away, while the bullets continued to tear them to pieces.

  Squinting into the harsh glare, Ethan was able to make out a vehicle coming up from the right, huge tires crunching over the guardrail.

  “Good Christ!” Dave breathed. “An armored car!”

  The vehicle’s dazzling searchlight turned to follow a knot of ten or more Gray Men running for the cover of a burned-out Yellow Cab. The double-barreled machine guns, firing from an armored turret, caught eight of them but the others scurried into the shadows on the far side of the cab. There was a hollow-sounding whump! and about three seconds later the Yellow Cab blew up into a fireball and burning gray body parts were tossed into the air.

  “Grenade launcher!” Dave said, his voice rough and ragged.

  The armored car was painted steel-gray and had a massive front bumper-cage defended by iron spikes. The machine guns were still firing as the searchlight revealed more mutants running along the highway. A second grenade was launched and exploded about fifty yards away. Then the guns were silent and the armored car turned so it was directly in front of bus number 712, its heavy-duty ribbed tires crunching over malformed bones and heads and smashing hard armored flesh into paste. The searchlight swung over to illuminate the interior of the bus brighter than daylight had been for a long time.

  A loudspeaker crackled.

  “Nice night for a firefight.” It was a woman’s sarcastic voice. “Somebody come out and talk to us, but watch out for shit on your shoes.”

  Dave said to Olivia, “I’ll go.” He glanced quickly at a grim-faced Ethan, then took stock of the other passengers. Some were sobbing, but most were in shock. He saw JayDee, who was being helped by Joel Schuster and Diego Carvazos down to give aid to Gary Roosa, though it was obvious Gary had escaped this madhouse by a tough way to go, but escaped it nevertheless. A belt had been used as a tourniquet for Aaron Ramsey’s chewed-up arm, and two women were tending to Lila Conti’s face, but the wounds were severe.

  Ethan saw that the Gorgon had not moved. Dave was going to have to pass him to get out of the bus. Look at me, he commanded.

  The Gorgon did.

  Touch this man and you’ll die, Ethan said in his mind. How he would do that he didn’t know…but he was sure beyond a doubt that he could wish this creature to an explosion just as he’d blown the Gorgon pilot to pieces, and to demonstrate it he sent an image of that moment into the Gorgon’s head on its mist of silver fingers.

  The creature remained still, nothing to be read on the hard, expressionless face.

  Dave went past Jack Vope and out of the bus when Hannah cranked the door open.

  The highway was a mess of gray bodies, some half-smashed and still trying to crawl away. “Put your weapon on the hood and stay in the light,” the woman on the speaker said. He obeyed the first command, and the second one as he picked a path through a grisly landscape of gray arms, legs, torsos and heads.

  A hatch opened next to the armored car’s turret. A slim figure in Army camouflage and wearing an olive-green helmet with a headset microphone pulled itself out and then came down a series of foot-and-handgrips to the pavement. The searchlight shifted a few degrees, out of Dave’s face, but the soldier switched on a small flashlight and kept that directed at him.

  “Good shooting,” Dave said. Inside, he felt like crumpling into a shivering ball at the soldier’s boots, but he kept all fear out of his face and shakiness out of his voice, which was very hard to do after the last few minutes.

  “That wasn’t me at the guns,” said the woman who’d addressed them over the loudspeaker. “I’ll pass the compliment on to Juggy. Any casualties?”

  “One dead. One man with nearly a severed arm and a woman with facial wounds. But we’ve got a lot of wounded on board, some very bad. Can you help us?”

  “Copy that.” She was speaking not to him, but into her headset. “Okay, what’s your name?”

  “Dave McKane.”

  “Follow us, Dave. We’ll keep it slow and we’ll keep the guns ready. There are thousands of those freakies in this city. What used to be a city. Mount up,” she said, and as she turned toward the armored car something that pulsed bright blue shrieked across the sky about a mile high, followed by four red balls of flame that were spinning around and around each other like atoms in a molecule. The female soldier never looked up.

  Welcome to Denver, Dave thought. He was so glad to see an American soldier with some firepower that he wanted to sob with relief, but that wouldn’t do for anyone to witness, so as he picked his way back through the gray garden of death, he wiped the wet from his eyes with the back of a hand. He retrieved his Uzi from the bus’s hood. Weary to his bones, but knowing he had to keep going a little longer, he mounted up.

  EIGHTEEN.

  THERE WAS INDEED A GLOW IN THE SKY. BENEATH IT HAD ONCE BEEN a large shopping mall. Now it was a fortress that dwarfed by many times the puny fort of Panther Ridge.

  Tangles of concertina wire surrounded the place except for the road in. Beyond the wire were log barricades and beyond that a twenty-foot high wall of bricks, stones, pieces of jagged metal, broken bottles, and whatever else was strong, sharp, and nasty. The moldering corpses of a dozen or so Gray Men lay amid the concertina wire’s razors. A few had been flattened into gray jelly on the road. Flat-roofed watchtowers with machine guns stood all along the walls. Generators were at work, powering two searchlights that followed the armored car and the school bus in their approach. A huge door covered with metal spikes was hauled upward on chains, like that of a medieval castle, for the vehicles to pass under and
then allowed to settle back into place.

  Part of the mall was lit up. There were many cars and several Army trucks in the parking lot, as well as a second armored car. As Hannah followed the first armored car toward what appeared to be the mall’s main entrance, she—as well as Dave, Olivia, and Ethan—saw a welcoming committee of ten soldiers with automatic rifles waiting for them. There was a sobbing of relief from many in the bus, but Ethan was watching both the Gorgon and the man who it seemed had been trying to grab hold of him. The human was sitting in a seat nursing what looked to be an injured right hand, while the Gorgon had hardly moved during the journey from the highway to this refuge. The bald-headed man who remained huddled on the floorboard next to Hannah was also a human, Ethan thought, but he felt some kind of strange vibration from him and saw in the man’s mind a terrified confusion of darkness and half-glimpsed, gliding shapes.

  The man with the injured hand kept glancing at Ethan and then clasping his knuckles. Sweat was on his face. Broken fingers? Ethan wondered. He had sent the silver hand out to explore and discovered an impenetrable sphere that seemed to be protecting the man’s thoughts: past, present, and future. The sphere was incandescent blue, and so bright it burned the mind’s eye. He’d had to call the silver hand back, but he knew now…this man was for some reason helping the Gorgons and they were shielding his mind with immense power, because…why?

  Because, Ethan thought as his gaze slid from the Gorgon’s pawn to the Gorgon and back again, they didn’t want someone like him seeing why the man was really here?

  Something to do with me, Ethan decided. The man had tried to grab hold of my arms. What would have happened if he had?

  He was so close to telling Dave. To saying it was probably better that all three of these creatures were dumped off the bus, or now turned over to whoever was running this place. But he thought that if he did, the Gorgon might not like it…and, for now, he had the Gorgon in control. They wanted something that must be very important, to have put on all these disguises of body and mind.