The Border

by Robert McCammon

  “Not that I can tell.” Worrying about if I can see through her clothes? he wondered, but he didn’t care to violate her privacy by wandering around in her mind.

  “Get yourself something to eat, sit down and join us,” JayDee said, nodding toward the fourth chair. “Looks like we’ve scared everybody else away.”

  “Thank you,” Nikki told him, “but I just need to speak to Ethan for a few minutes.”

  “Is that our cue to disappear?” JayDee asked, with a spoonful of soup halfway to his mouth.

  “No sir,” said Ethan, “we’ll move to another table.” He took his soup bowl and his cup of water and followed Nikki to a table across the food court, because though he didn’t want to peer into her mind, he knew this was something she needed to speak to him alone about. When they were settled, sitting across from each other, Nikki looked from one eye to the next as if trying to figure out which one to talk to.

  “I can see through both of them,” he explained. “One’s just…like you said, freaky.”

  “How did that happen? Did you feel it happen?”

  “No, I didn’t.” Just more evidence, he thought, of the change he was going through. Whatever the alien force was inside him, it was asserting itself more and more. “I didn’t feel anything. I was too busy.”

  “Wow,” she said. She pushed a drift of blonde hair off her forehead. “That was like crazy amazing! But…do you mind if I ask you something?”

  What does it feel like? she was going to ask, but he nodded and let her ask it anyway.

  “It feels…like all I have to do is concentrate on something, and I can do it. It’s getting easier, but I wouldn’t say it’s really easy. I just have to want to do it…in a way I can’t explain. Like…life or death. You know?”

  “I guess.”

  “Let me ask you a question. When I killed those spider things, and the Cypher soldiers, did you see anything come out of me? Like come out of my hand, I mean. Where it was aimed at those things. Did you see anything?”

  “No, there was nothing.”

  “To me it looked like bolts of lightning or…I don’t know…burning bullets is how I would describe them, I guess. Thousands of them. They just come out of me when I need them. And the air does something funny too. It seems like it twists between me and what I’m aiming at. It’s like my whole body’s a gun, or an energy weapon…and everything comes out here.” He showed her his right palm, which looked like the ordinary palm of any teenaged boy. “I’m thinking I’m the only one who can see that?”

  “I couldn’t see it,” she said. “I was right there, and I couldn’t.”

  Ethan figured what he was seeing might be beyond the range of normal human vision. Maybe that had something to do with the change in his eye, and his visual spectrum was also changing. “That dude who caught fire and started flinging it,” he said. “If he hadn’t done that…I’m not sure I would’ve been able to handle them all. His name was Ratcoff. I just found that out. He was a human—mostly—but the Gorgons got to him and made him like that.” Ethan took a sip of water and put the cup aside. He looked into her good eye. He asked quietly, “How come you’re not afraid of me? Really.” He thought her eye was the color of a chocolate brownie, which made him hungry for something sweet. “Everybody else is, except for my friends. How come you’re not?”

  Because I’m your friend, she said.

  But Ethan did not reply until Nikki actually spoke it: “Because I’m your friend.”

  I am, right?

  “Sure you are,” he said, before the words came out. “It’s just…you know…how I’m changing. It’s way beyond weird. And now, with this eye…”

  He knew what she was getting ready to say, the words were there in her mind, and he made himself focus just on her face and her mouth because it wasn’t right to be there in her head, but he couldn’t help it, it was too easy, it was becoming so natural for him…

  “You want to see mine?” she asked, in a small voice.

  He knew she wanted him to, so he answered, “Yes.”

  She took a long deep breath of courage, and then she started to lift up her eyepatch, but then she stopped and there was a lopsided grin on her mouth but a terrible sadness in her good eye, and she said…

  “I’m sure,” Ethan told her.

  “It’s not very pretty,” Nikki said.

  He shrugged. “Do you think mine is pretty? When I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror I almost fell down. Hey, I don’t even know how I can see through it!”

  She nearly laughed at his inflection of helplessness, but a laugh was hard to come by. She still felt dazed by what had happened in the mall, and by the attack of the Gray Men and Gary Roosa’s death last night, and sometimes she thought she had to go numb to deal with all the horrors of life now, and with all the bad and sad memories, all the people she knew who had died. But what happened when you went too numb, and you lost all your feeling, and you couldn’t find your way back from that dark and empty place?

  She wanted him to see what the eyepatch hid, because she needed a connection with someone. She needed someone to know the pain she had gone through…not that it was any worse than what most had experienced…but she needed Ethan to see it, maybe as a way to keep the numbness from taking over more and more of her until she was just a mindless, soulless cinder on this burned and wrecked earth. She needed a human touch, from this boy who was no longer truly human…or maybe, more human than most because he had an aim and a purpose, and she needed that too.

  “Go ahead,” he told her.

  She lifted the eyepatch and showed him the crimped socket where the destroyed orb had been removed by Dr. Douglas before infection set in. The scar began just below the socket and continued up almost to her eyebrow. “A piece of glass got me, is what the doctor says. I don’t remember that. I just remember fire and houses blowing up on Westview Avenue.

  “It was at night and they were fighting in the sky. I was cut up pretty bad in other places—my face a little bit—but most of the worst are under my clothes. Some of my hair was burned off, they told me, but it grew back. I guess I was lucky, huh? Not to be all burned up.”

  “Yeah,” Ethan said.

  Nikki let the eyepatch down again. The little rhinestone star sparkled. “Some people came in to the apartments, early on, who were really burned. They didn’t last very long. A family came in with two little boys who were twins, and they were both burned really bad on their arms and legs. One died during the day, and the other one died almost exactly twelve hours later. I heard Olivia and Dr. Douglas talking about it. It was like…when one twin died, the other one quit wanting to live. The mother and father didn’t live very long after that, either. A lot of people killed themselves. I almost did, too, but Olivia stopped me. Twice.”

  “I’m glad she did,” said Ethan.

  “Hm,” the girl answered, in a way that told Ethan she wasn’t sure if she was glad or not. “Olivia brought these rhinestones for me, for my patch. Know who had them? The mother of those twins. Where she got them from, I don’t know. A Dollar General, maybe. Just picked up a pack of something she thought was pretty. People do crazy things when they need to hold on to something, I guess.”

  Ethan nodded. It was the truth, and what was there to say? He knew what Nikki needed: a listener, and so he waited for her to go on without reading the scenes of her story before she could tell them.

  “My sister’s name was Nina,” Nikki said. “She was a year older. Wow, could she ride a horse! Well, we both could…but she was way better than me. She was a junior at the high school. Was going to go to Colorado State and major in fun, is what she told me. But she really wanted to be a vet and work with horses. Maybe she would’ve gotten there, she was good at math and chemistry and stuff. I was a dud at those things, ’cause I was the real partier.” Nikki stared off into space for a moment, and Ethan let her take her time.

  “Sometimes,” Nikki said, “I see my sister in my dreams. She’s always pretty and
smiling and happy…not burned up or hurt at all, and she says, Nikki-tick, you can make it out of this. You’re not one to be wanting to give up, so tell Olivia about those sleeping pills you found after Mr. and Mrs. Estevez passed on. And tell her about the knife with the serrated blade in the bottom drawer of your dresser, under the red blanket. And I say back, Quit bossin’ me, you always liked to do that and who made you the queen of me? But she just grins a big queenly grin and she answers, Put a cork in it, ’cause you’re the last of our family…the Stanwick family of 1733 Westview Avenue, and Dad always said he didn’t raise quitters. So, she says, find your way. And I didn’t know what she meant, until now.”

  Ethan was silent; he allowed himself not a peek into her thoughts, but he had an idea of where she was headed.

  “If a person doesn’t have hope,” she said, “they die. Inside, first. If they don’t find a way, they’re finished.” Her chocolate-brown eye focused on him. “I don’t want to stay here and wait to die, Ethan. If I’m going out, I want to go trying to find my way. I know you need to get to this mountain in Utah. I know it’s important.” She paused, maybe readying herself if he denied her this path. “Will you let me go with you?”

  He had no hesitation. He said, “I want you to go.”

  “You do? Really?” It was spoken with an outrush of breath. “I know it won’t be safe, but—”

  “No place is safe,” he reminded her. “No place will ever be safe while this goes on.”

  She nodded. “Do you know what’s on the mountain?”

  “No. I don’t think I’ll know until we get there, and it reveals itself.” It reveals itself? He realized his thinking was changing too, and the way he spoke…it wasn’t how a human boy thought or spoke…it was the alien thinking and speaking, becoming more and more dominant. “I may be really different soon,” he told her, and offered a faint smile. “Like I’m not already. But I may not be Ethan Gaines much longer. That part of me may just go away, or go to sleep…I don’t know. But I don’t want you to sit here and wait to die, either. Your sister is right. We’ve got to find our way, so…I’m glad you want to come with us.” He motioned toward the unattended pot of soup. “You’d better get something to eat while you can.”

  “I will, thanks.”

  Ethan was weary and needed to find a place to rest. The battle against the spider-shapes and the Cypher soldiers had depleted him. There was some part of him now that was always on alert, and he trusted that to let him know if the Gorgons or the Cyphers were anywhere near. For the moment, he felt they were not. He wound up taking his sleeping bag into the empty storeroom of the Brookstone and stretching out on the floor there, and he was asleep within a few minutes.

  But something within him did not sleep, did not need the solace of rest in this realm of misery, and it spoke to Ethan with four words: This is my world.

  Ethan saw in the eye of his mind a rugged gray landscape strewn with boulders and cut by wide crevasses. The sky was milky white, shot through with streaks of vivid purple lightning, and just visible through the stormy atmosphere was a massive, clouded planet encompassed by three shimmering rings of debris and dust. Ethan had the sensation of standing on a mountaintop with a fierce, dry wind that smelled of alkali blowing into his face, and looking out across a wide valley, he could see a huge silver obelisk, thin but thousands of feet tall, with a spire that was slowly and silently rotating. Ethan had the sense that it was a watchtower of a kind, or a lighthouse sending out not beams of light but energy and messages that were far beyond his understanding. Messages were also coming in to this particular way station, and why he thought of the tower as a way station between worlds or dimensions he did not know, but he was sure there were others of its kind on more planets. It was a lonely place. He was struck by its loneliness and desolation, and he knew that the keeper here was an ancient creature who had either been chosen or had chosen itself to give up another kind of life for this duty it carried out. It was a double-edged sword: an honor to be a soldier in this service, but a lifelong responsibility. Time here was not Earthtime, nor Life governed by the laws of Earth. Ethan was unsure that the creature who was hosting him, and who he hosted, was capable of a physical body or not. The creature might be the construct of pure energy and intelligence, and though this part of its origin and nature was not allowed to be known, Ethan was sure that it did possess two things that made it akin to the human kind: what would be termed compassion, and a sense of justice. Those seemed to be its driving forces, as well as an innate curiosity about the workings of the universe that even it was not allowed to be fully understood by the wisdom of a higher power.

  The spire rotated. The wind blew and purple lightning streaked across the milky sky, but the image was fading. When that vision of another world vanished entirely, the human part of Ethan fell deeper into a dreamless sleep, yet the alien being within him remained silently and tirelessly vigilant, for that was the only way it had ever known.

  FOUR.

  WESTWARD

  TWENTY-THREE.

  “IS THIS REALLY NECESSARY?” JEFFERSON JERICHO ASKED AS DAVE McKane fastened the black plastic zipcuffs to his wrists, basically tying the man’s hands together. Dave didn’t answer. He pushed Jefferson up the steps into the bus and wished the bastard would fall down and break his beak.

  Hannah Grimes was sitting behind the wheel. She had decided that driving this bus to their destination in Utah might be the last driving she would ever do, but there was not much else on her social calendar that seemed important, and Dave had convinced her that this indeed was an important trip. So she was in it, for better or for worse; she figured Dave would’ve driven the bus off the road at the first hairy curve, anyway. The meager light of a rainy dawn had begun to crawl across the horizon. Already aboard were JayDee and Olivia, and they were waiting now for Ethan and Nikki. Major Fleming had returned their guns, canned food, and jugs of water to them and told them he wished he could do more, that he could spare some soldiers and one of the armored cars as an escort but he couldn’t abandon the people here. He’d decided to top off the bus’s tank from their own dwindling supply. Otherwise the most he could do was give them a longer hose to help siphon fuel along the way, scavenge a headlight from one of the trucks and make repairs and improvements to the bus.

  A work team had labored all night under the glare of generator-powered arc lamps. They’d replaced the shattered windshield with a piece of metal that had a rectangular glass inset through which the driver could see the road. Nothing could be done about the window the Gray Child had broken through, except for a sheet of plastic duct-taped over the aperture. Other windows bore bullet holes from all the firing that had gone on, but again nothing could be done for those. The main work had been the construction and welding of a cowcatcher-like cage attached to the front of the bus and studded with iron spikes. All the metal was going to make the bus heavier and so use more fuel, the major had told Dave, but if they ran into any more Gray Men this might help them get through without the cavalry coming to their rescue…which, out there in the Rockies on I-70, was definitely not happening. He said if they’d had time and ammunition to spare he would’ve put a machine-gun turret up top, but again there was the weight to consider, and they needed the ammo and every available M240 at the watchtowers. A wiper blade had been fixed to keep the glass inset clear, and the last thing the major and his troops could do was clean the interior of the bus of all bloodstains and fleshy parts, both human and gray. Sorry we don’t have any air freshener, Fleming had said, but maybe you can find a pine strip when you stop for gas.

  What the major had not told any of them, and they’d only seen this on their way to the bus from the mall, was that every soldier had signed his or her name on the sides of the bus in black or red spray paint, and maybe every soldier didn’t fully understand the importance of this journey, but both Fleming and Captain Walsh did and they had been the first to sign. From the major also had come the wrist zipcuffs, a pair of shears, and a suggestio
n to keep Jefferson Jericho bound up for awhile, just in case.

  “Sit there,” Dave said, pushing the preacherman into a seat on the left side of the bus a few rows behind Hannah. Olivia and JayDee had taken seats on the right side, and Dave sat down behind Jefferson Jericho, so he could slap the dude on the back of the head if he needed to, or just wanted to. His Uzi felt good in its shoulder-holster, and in his belt holster was the .357 Magnum revolver that had helped save him and Olivia from the Gray Men in the high school library. He figured these weapons might not stop a Cypher or a Gorgon, but they would do the job on anything else and…if he really wanted to be truthful about it…they would save their owner from capture by the aliens if they came in numbers too many for Ethan to hold back, and they would save Ethan, Olivia, and the rest of them too if it came to that.

  He reached forward and slapped Jefferson across the back of the head. “Shut up!”

  “Ow, Jesus! Did I say anything?”

  “No, but you’re thinking of talking. So shut up.”

  Olivia’s .45 automatic had been returned, along with a supply of two packs of ammo given up by Joel Schuster, who had the same make and model of weapon. John Douglas got an Army-issue M9 Beretta that had not been his, since his weapons were lost at Panther Ridge, but Captain Walsh had given the gun to him as well as four extra clips. A couple of rifles and boxes of bullets had been “confiscated” by the soldiers and left aboard, along with two high-powered flashlights. Hannah Grimes had her hogleg revolver and a few cylinder loads. A machine-gun turret would’ve been a nice extra, Dave thought, but they had to go with what they had. At the back of the bus were plastic containers, a hand pump and a twelve-foot hose for siphoning fuel, along with the prybar Dave had used to crack the underground diesel tank’s fill cap.