The Border

by Robert McCammon

  In a few minutes Ethan came across the parking lot from the mall, followed by Nikki and Major Fleming. The major was carrying a small olive-green drawstring bag.

  “Okay,” Fleming said, as Ethan and Nikki took seats behind Olivia and JayDee. “Good luck to you.” He focused on the boy, who still scared the shit out of him, but his rock-solid demeanor would never show it. “I hope you find whatever you need to find.” He gave the bag to Dave. “Four fragmentation grenades in there, model M67. Just pull the pin and throw, like in the movies. You can throw ’em about forty meters, but get in cover because the pieces can travel more than two hundred meters. Don’t blow yourselves up, save ’em for the enemy.”

  “Thanks,” Dave said.

  “We appreciate everything,” Olivia told him. “Especially the work on the bus, and the fuel.”

  “Did what we could. Ethan, take care of these people if you can.”

  “I will, sir,” Ethan answered. He was feeling the Cypher presence, had felt it since long before dawn and their breakfast of bread and canned pork’n beans, but he knew what it was and there was no point in mentioning it until they got on the road west. It was not a forthcoming attack, it was something different.

  “Right,” said Major Fleming. “Wish us luck, too. We’re going to hold out here until somebody says otherwise.” He gave them a quick salute. “Good-bye, folks,” he said, and when he left the bus Hannah closed the door and started the engine. It fussed and rumbled, just like Hannah had when she’d been awakened around four o’clock, but like her, it was ready to go.

  The metal-spiked entrance doorway to the fortress was hauled upward on its chains and the yellow school bus with the names of forty-two soldiers and a captain and a major on its sides passed underneath and along the road lined with concertina wire. Vultures were picking at the half-eaten Gray Men corpses splayed amid the coils. The sun shot crimson rays through holes in malignant-looking black clouds. The broken towers of Denver lay to the south, and so also did the ramp onto I-70.

  The fortress doorway was lowered. Hannah said, “We’re on our own now, kiddies.”

  Ethan could still feel the Cypher presence. It was like a prickling of his skin, a shadow in his mind, and he knew what it was because the alien within him knew.

  “We’re being followed,” he said. “It’s a Cypher tracking device. High altitude.”

  “Christ!” Jefferson swiveled around to face the boy as best he could. “Are they coming after us?”

  “Just following, for now. But it’s sending out signals, so…they’ll be along, sooner or later.”

  “The Cyphers want you too?”

  “Yes,” said Ethan. “The one that got away probably communicated with its central command. They want me just like the Gorgons do.” He offered the man the semblance of a smile. “They don’t know what I am, and they’re trying to figure me out. But…it’s good to know that they’re afraid of me.”

  “They’re not stupid,” said Jefferson. “But do you even know what you are?”

  “Not everything. I think I—what’s in me—must be a soldier, too.” Ethan tapped the symbols over his heart. “I think I’m growing my own uniform, and this is my designation. I’m—it—is getting stronger by the day. Maybe by the hour. Which means…when they come after me, they’re going to send their best.”

  “Yeah, and the worst for us!” Jefferson was beginning to think he would’ve been better off staying at the mall, getting a gun or two and putting his back into a corner, but Ethan said, “I’m going to need you before this is done. I don’t know how, but you’re going to have a chance to help me. To help us. Do you believe that?”

  “I don’t know what to believe. But why bring the girl?” He directed his attention to Nikki. “What’s your story?”

  “I want to be with Ethan. I trust him. That’s all.”

  “No, I mean your eye. What happened?”

  “Shut your mouth now, Jericho,” Dave said, leaning forward, “or I’ll shut it for you. How many more teeth would you like to lose?”

  “The war happened,” said Nikki, with queenly dignity. “I’m lucky to be alive.”

  “Lucky,” Jefferson repeated, and he gave a bitter laugh. “Yeah, we’re all really lucky, aren’t we?”

  “We’re alive and we have a chance to do something important,” said JayDee. “I trust Ethan too. Now maybe you’d be better off if you did shut up for awhile.”

  “Good thing, so I can concentrate through this damned viewslit,” Hannah told them. “We’ve got a mess of wrecked and abandoned cars in front of us. Gonna have to slow down and ease our way through, so everybody just sit tight.”

  It was a torturous route. Fifty or so cars, SUVs and trucks jammed this stretch of Federal Boulevard. A few had caught fire and burned into unrecognizable masses of metal. A thirty-foot-wide crater near the intersection of Federal and West 80th Avenue told the story of damage done by either Gorgon or Cypher weapons that had heightened the panic and caused people to leave their vehicles. Buildings had been burned out on either side of the boulevard and some had collapsed into piles of melted black rubble. Hannah had to thread the needle several times, scraping the bus between cars, erasing some of the names on the paint. “Come on baby, come on baby,” Hannah urged Number 712, as she had no choice but to guide the bus over dangerous shoals of broken glass and pieces of metal. It occurred not only to her but to everyone else on the bus that this could be a very short trip if a couple of tires blew.

  “Hang on, this one’s nasty,” Hannah said, as Number 712 slowly scraped between a burned metro bus and an overturned Hormel meats truck. She got hung up on something, and she had to back up and try the approach again. The sound of rending metal made Jefferson Jericho lean his head forward and squeeze his eyes shut in a vain attempt to escape the noise. Nikki clutched Ethan’s hand in a grip that he thought could crush a Jaguars linebacker’s hand at—

  “D’Evelyn High School,” he said suddenly, with a flash of recognition. “Right here in Denver. That’s where I went to school.”

  “What?” Olivia asked.

  “I remember,” Ethan said. “The science class was at D’Evelyn High School. Where I was going to show my Visible Man.” Was he babbling now? He didn’t know. “The teacher’s name was Mr…” It was close, but still not there. “My mom’s name was…” That, too, was not there. But something was there. “I’m from Lakewood,” he said. “I lived at…it was a number with two eights in it. My house—” He was trying hard to remember, while the scraping sound of metal went on and on and the school bus shuddered as Hannah pushed their way through. “There was a park down the street. A huge park, with a lake in it. I think it was called…Belmar Park.” He nodded, as the name came back to him. “Kountze Lake. I remember that. I used to go fishing there.” He looked into Nikki’s face and felt the return of a small amount of joy. “I can remember a little bit!” he said, almost tearfully. “I know where I’m from!”

  The horrendous sound of metal against metal ceased. Hannah let loose a whoosh of breath. “We’re through! Damned if this road’s not a mess. Dave, I’m seeing signs to I-70 West but everything’s blocked up pretty bad.”

  “Figured it would be. Just do the best you can.”

  While Ethan tried to struggle to recall more of the life he used to know, he was also aware that the alien part of him was alert and questing for the presence of enemies. It was like he was a highly sophisticated radar, searching for many miles in all directions for approaching blips on a mental screen. He could envision the Cypher tracker: a glowing red triangular shape about half the size of the bus, slowly rotating around and around near the edge of the atmosphere, its crimson eye of energy directed down upon him and a multitude of calculations going out across the Cypher network. They would have already sent a team after him. They would strike at their own time, at the place they felt held the most advantage, but for the moment he couldn’t feel them anywhere near. Neither were the Gorgons anywhere near, but neither would they
give up trying to capture him. It helped that they feared him, for sure, and they weren’t going to blunder into the range of his weapons without calculating the odds of success. They were coming, though; it was only a matter of time. And if they could figure out what he was and what he was trying to do…they weren’t going to slink quietly away, they would try to destroy him with everything they had.

  “Ramp’s blocked,” Hannah announced after awhile longer of weaving in and out of tight places. “Maybe we can get up the next one.”

  “You can’t levitate the bus out of here, can you?” Dave asked Ethan, only half jokingly.

  Ethan thought about it. Could he? The answer was quick in coming. “No, sorry. I can’t do that. I can’t move us by any kind of mental transportation, either. Hannah’s in charge of this trip.”

  “Thanks, Spacekid,” she replied.

  “So let me ask you a question or two, Ethan,” Jefferson said. “If you don’t mind?” He had asked this of Dave, who shrugged his shoulders in such a way that told the preacherman to go ahead but to be careful with his mouth. “We’re going to this mountain that you feel you need to get to, but you don’t know why. You started out a human boy but now you and everybody knows there’s a…a thing in you that’s not Gorgon or Cypher, and they’re afraid of you because you…this thing in you…has the power to destroy them and they don’t understand it. Am I right so far?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. You say this thing in you is a soldier. How do you know that?”

  “It’s just what I feel. What it lets me understand, if that’s the right way to put it. Only…maybe…it’s not a soldier in the way we would think of.”

  “I think of a tough-assed bastard who’s trained to fight and to win a war. What other kind of soldier is there?”

  “There’s another kind,” said JayDee, who’d been thinking about this ever since Ethan had used the word. “There’s a peacekeeper. Like the soldiers who wear the blue helmets for the United Nations. They have to be tough too, but they don’t fight to win wars…if they have to fight, their purpose is to end a conflict.” He nodded toward Ethan. “If Ethan…if the being that’s keeping Ethan going, when he should’ve by all rights been dead a long time ago, is trying to stop this war, I’d say he…it…whatever…is like a universal peacekeeper. A galactic United Nations soldier, I guess I’m trying to say.” JayDee shrugged. “Maybe this war upsets the balance of things, on a cosmic scale. Maybe the Gorgons and Cyphers have been at this for hundreds or thousands of years, and this United Nations of the cosmos has decided it’s gone far enough. So…why did the peacekeeper pick a young boy instead of a man? I don’t know, and who can say? Maybe it was a good fit. Possibly there were things already in Ethan’s personality that the soldier could use. Hey, I’m just from Earth…I don’t know the answers to the mysteries and I’m not saying all this is fact, but…there it is: my opinion, and that only.”

  “God, this is crazy,” Jefferson said. But he couldn’t think it was too very crazy, because of what he’d experienced himself. The boy with the silver eye was staring at him, likely reading his mind again, tromping through the memory of all the rotten flowers in there. “So how did this thing get into you?” he asked. “How’d it get here? By flying saucer or what? And if it really wants to stop this war, why didn’t it come with an army? And why doesn’t it just tell you what it wants you to find, if it knows so much? Doesn’t this thing know what we’re supposed to be looking for? Why doesn’t it just spell everything out for you?”

  “Maybe it doesn’t know everything,” Olivia offered. She’d been thinking about this question too, and why Ethan seemed to be being fed by bits and pieces from the alien intelligence. “Maybe it has an idea, but doesn’t know for sure. Maybe, too…it doesn’t want to overload Ethan too much, because he’s still got the mind of a boy. A limited mind, as any human mind would be. That’s why it’s been a gradual process, and the thing didn’t take him over all at once.”

  “Didn’t want to shellshock him,” Dave said. “I get that.”

  Ethan said nothing. It was interesting, in a way, to be talked about like this, but disturbing too. There was so many questions; he doubted there would ever be answers to them all, because Olivia was right. The limited human mind could not fully understand this alien force, how it had arrived here and chosen him and how it was growing stronger, no more than he could understand how the power exploded out of him to create an earthquake or to blow Cyphers and Gorgons to pieces. It just was there when he—when the alien inside him—demanded it. He noted that this last encounter with the spider-shapes and the Cypher soldiers had left some pain and stiffness in his joints, like he was becoming an old man, so there was a price to be paid from the human flesh. He wondered if he could use his left hand too, as a double-barreled weapon. Anyway, it seemed to him that even though the alien power within him was incredibly strong, there was still a physical weakness inherent in the human body that was wearing him down. But if he was dead and the alien was keeping him alive…had taken control of this version of the Visible Man and was powering heart, lungs, blood pressure, digestion, and all the rest of the systems, he figured when the soldier had completed its mission—if that was possible—he was done for, and no doctor on Earth could change that. At last Ethan said, “I don’t think it needs an army, but I do think it needs us.”

  “Needs us? How?” Jefferson asked.

  “It needs us to…” Ethan paused, considering how to phrase this. “It needs us to give a damn,” he went on. “As humans, I mean. I think…it wanted to know first if any of us even wanted to fight back. If we were strong enough to keep going. Dave, I think that’s why it didn’t tell me where the White Mansion was. It needed…it needs…to know that any of us care enough to stand up and fight, instead of waiting to die in a hole somewhere. So if you and Olivia hadn’t gone out that day to find a map…if you’d said I was crazy and the earthquakes and finding the water were just things that happened, and I couldn’t make you believe anything else…then maybe it would’ve figured we weren’t worth helping. Maybe it would’ve just gone away, and I would’ve died and the Cyphers and Gorgons would keep on fighting until the whole world was destroyed, because nobody here cared anymore.” He looked from Dave to Olivia, to JayDee, to Nikki and then back again to Dave. “That’s what I think,” he finished.

  “This conversation is way over my wintry head, gents,” Hannah said. “I’m just along for the ride. And I’m lettin’ you know I’m lookin’ at another on-ramp right now that’s a jammed-up parkin’ lot, no way are we gettin’ up that.” She wheeled the bus in another direction. “Well…no cops around, so let’s try the off-ramp.”

  That was how Hannah got them up onto I-70 and westbound. The eastbound traffic during the incident that had caused all this chaos—likely the first battle that had devastated the central part of the city—had been virtually nil. There were a few wrecked cars and a big tractor-trailer truck that had slid into three other wrecks and caught fire, but Hannah was able to get them around the mangled blockage. She worried most about the glass and pieces of metal in the roadway, but the streetsweepers had been off-duty for a good long while and there wasn’t a damned thing she could do but to grit her teeth and dance the bus along as best she could.

  The interstate started a slow ascent. Mountains stood on both sides, and ahead were the looming giants of peaks—now partially obscured by an ugly yellow mist—that had been born eighty million years ago. Ethan wondered how old the being was inside him, what it had seen and where and how it had been born, if the Rockies had been specks in the eye of God when it had first come to life, and what Life meant to it. He had the feeling from what it had shown him that it was a lonely creature, one of a limited or dying race, but above all it clung to its duty. And here was its truth and its meaning of existence, as clear as if the alien was sitting at his side telling him these things: the futility of wars was known to all but never accepted by those who held power as their God. Pride, arrogance,
and stupidity were not just the worst traits of the human kind but were spread across the span of galaxies as the price to be paid for the desire to be held in esteem, or recognized as better than any other civilization, or simply the appetite to conquer and control. Ethan felt a sadness and heaviness in what might have been the heart and mind of the alien—now becoming his heart and mind as well—in that it knew it fought a losing battle. Yet here, right here on the border—this young world that might not make much difference in the unfolding of a galaxy old beyond the meaning of Time—a stand must be made, and with that stand a message to be sent to the warlords of Now and Forever who assemble soldiers, weapons and ships for dispatch to destinations of destruction and misery.

  That message might be futile, but it was the creature’s duty to make it known: I am the guardian of this sector. I was old before your civilization took root in swamp or was created by machine. If you reject peace and insist upon the satisfaction of horror, then prepare you to be satisfied in the horror of your own making.

  Ethan could feel the tracker following them, far above at the atmosphere’s edge. Its Cypher eye was fixed directly upon him.

  They would be coming soon. They would find their place and time to try to take him…but he knew it would be soon.

  And the Gorgons?

  They would be coming soon too. What the controllers could not control, they would attempt to contain or destroy.

  He was not ending up on the dissection table of any reptile or robot, and neither were the people he knew to be his friends on this endangered planet.

  I will be—

  “Ready,” said Ethan.

  Nikki asked him what he had said, and he shrugged and explained that he was thinking out loud, and then he smiled at her and squeezed her hand and thought that nothing Cypher or Gorgon was going to harm these creatures that had been hurt so much already. A great battle was ahead…he could feel their forces of destruction massing, for they too would be ready.

  The bus went on, westbound in the eastbound lanes, as I-70 steepened toward the gigantic mountains, and the boy with a silver eye now realized he was more alien than human, and so mused upon both the question of destiny and what his mother would think if she could see him now.