The Border

by Robert McCammon

  “Hell,” Dave McKane said, “sometimes I forget my own name too.” His voice was quieter now, not so harsh. There was a quaver in it that he killed by clearing his throat. “It’s just the times. Right, Doc?”

  “Right,” said John Douglas. He reached out and touched Ethan’s arm; it was the gentle touch of a pediatric surgeon. “The times,” he said, and Ethan blinked away his tears and nodded, because tears would win no battles and right no wrongs.

  “She’ll want to see him,” Dave said, speaking to the doc. “If you’re sure?”

  “I’m sure. Ethan, you can call me JayDee. Okay?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “All right. Let’s get out of this hole.”

  They took him out through the metal-reinforced door and into the yellow-misted light. A half-dozen people—thin, wearing clothes that had been patched many times and washed only a few—were standing around the door, waiting for the little drama within to play out, and they retreated up the stairs as Ethan emerged.

  “This way.” JayDee directed Ethan to the left as they reached what had been the lowest building’s parking lot. The rain had stopped and the sun was hot through the jaundiced clouds. The air smelled of electricity before a thunderstorm. That and the air itself was heavy and humid. There was no hint of a breeze. As Ethan followed the three men across the parking lot, past a disused set of tennis courts and a swimming pool that had debris in it but only a small puddle of rainwater at its deepest end, he saw that people of many different generations were gathered here in the protection of this makeshift fortress. There were women of many ages holding babies and young children, there were older children and teenagers and on up to the elderly, people maybe in their seventies. Some of these people were working, the strong-backed chopping wood and stacking the lengths in neat piles, others laboring on the outer walls to strengthen places that looked damaged, and doing various other tasks in this fortress community. Most of the inhabitants paused in their work to watch Ethan and the men pass by. Everyone was thin and moved slowly, as if in a bad dream, their expressions blank and hollow-eyed, but they were survivors too. Ethan counted eight horses grazing in a corral on a brown-grassed, rocky hillside up near the highest point. A small wooden barn, surely not original to the apartment complex, stood nearby. With no gasoline available, true horsepower would be the only way to travel.

  “Up here,” said JayDee, motioning Ethan up another flight of stairs at the central building. The walls had been painted with graffiti slogans in red, white and blue that proclaimed among other silent shouts We Will Not Die, This World Is Ours, and Tomorrow Is Another Day. Ethan wondered if the people who had painted those slogans were still alive.

  He climbed the stairs behind JayDee, with Dave McKane and Roger Pell following him, and on the next level the doctor stopped at a door with the number 227 on it and knocked. Just before it opened something screamed past overhead, so fast it was nearly invisible, just the quickest impression of a yellow-and-brown-blotched triangular shape cutting through the air and then gone, and everyone but Ethan flinched because he was tired of running and if he was going to die today it would be without shrinking from his fate.

  The door opened and a slim, pallid-faced man with a mass of curly reddish hair and a ginger-colored beard peered out. He was wearing glasses held together with electrical tape. The lenses magnified his gray eyes. He wore a pair of dirty overalls and a brown-checked shirt, and he was holding at his side a clipboard with a pad of yellow paper on which Ethan caught sight of lines of numbers. He had the stub of a much-chewed-upon pencil clenched in the left side of his mouth.

  “Afternoon, Gary,” JayDee said. He motioned toward Ethan. “We have a new arrival.”

  The man’s magnified eyes studied Ethan. His reddish brows went up. “Fell in some mud?” he asked, and Ethan nodded.

  “Someone new?” came a woman’s voice from behind Gary, who wore a pistol in a holster at his waist just as did John Douglas. “Let’s have a look.”

  Gary stepped aside. JayDee let Ethan enter the apartment first. There was a woman sitting behind a desk and behind her there was a wall with a large, expressionist painting of wild horses galloping across a field. The glass sliding door that led to the balcony and facing the distant mountains that had exploded behind Ethan not long ago was reinforced with a geometry of duct tape. On the floor was a crimson rug, there were two chairs, a coffee table and a brown sofa. Everything looked like junk shop stuff, but at least it made the place comfortable. Or maybe not. On another wall was a rack of three rifles, one with a scope. A few oil lamps were set about, their wicks burning low. A second woman was sitting in a chair in front of the desk, and before her was another clipboard and a pad of yellow paper with figures written on it. Evidently some kind of meeting had been in progress that involved number crunching, and as Ethan approached the desk he had the distinct feeling that the numbers were not good.

  Both women stood up, as if he were worth the respect. He figured maybe he was, for getting here without being killed by either Gorgon monsters or Cypher soldiers. The woman who was behind the desk was the older of the two. She was dressed in a pale blue blouse and gray pants and around her neck she wore a necklace of turquoise stones with a silver crucifix in the middle. She said, “What do we have here?” Her dark brown eyes narrowed and quickly went to JayDee.

  “He’s human,” the doctor said, answering her unspoken question. But in his voice there was something else. As far as I can tell, was what Ethan heard. “One problem, though. He doesn’t know his—”

  “My name is Ethan Gaines,” said the boy, before JayDee could get that out.

  “His history,” the doctor went on. The apartment door had been closed by Gary, after Dave and Roger had come in. The noise of work outside was muffled. “Ethan has no memory of where he came from or where his parents are. He is…shall we say…a mystery.”

  “Hannah saw him through her binoculars,” Dave added. His voice was less gruff but still hard-edged. He removed his baseball cap, showing brown hair that stuck up with multiple cowlicks and had streaks of gray at the temples. “I made the decision to go out after him. Didn’t have time to bring it to you or anybody else.”

  “Brave or crazy, which one is it?” said the woman behind the desk, speaking to Dave with a hint of irritation as if she valued his life greater than a horseback jaunt into the battlefield. Her gaze went to the boy again. “Ethan,” she said. “I am Olivia Quintero. I suppose I’m the leader here. At least that’s what they tell me. I guess I should say…welcome to Panther Ridge.”

  Ethan nodded. He figured there were plenty of places worse to be. Like anywhere out there beyond the walls. He took a good long look at Olivia Quintero, who radiated a comforting confidence, or a strength of will and purpose. He thought that was why she was the leader here. She looked to be a tall woman, slimly built and likely made more slim by lack of food. But she was sinewy and tough in the way she held herself, her face placid and composed, her forehead high under a crown of short-cut white hair. Ethan thought she was maybe in her mid-fifties, her skin tone slightly darkened by her Hispanic heritage. Her forehead was lined and there were deeper lines at the corners of her eyes, but otherwise she wore the roads and travels of her life well. She looked like what he thought she must have been before all this happened: a high school principal, but one who had experienced some “stuff” in her own younger years and might let things slide if you explained yourself the right way. Maybe she’d been the principal at Ethan Gaines High, who knew? Or a businesswoman, maybe. Someone who had come up from a poor family and made a fortune selling real estate, the kind of houses that used to look like little castles before there was a need for fortresses. And how he knew this about the little castles he couldn’t remember, so he just let it go because no daylight was breaking through his night.

  He felt her examining him, too. And she saw him as a muddied boy about fourteen or fifteen years old with a mop of unruly brown hair that hung over his forehead and nearly i
nto his eyes, which were the light blue color of the early morning sky at the ranch she had owned with her deceased husband Vincent about twenty miles east of here, back when there was sanity in the world. She noted Ethan’s sharp nose and chin and the equally sharp—nearly piercing—expression in those eyes, and she thought he was an intelligent boy who must have been born under a very lucky star, to have survived what he must’ve gone through out there. Or…tal vez no tan afortunado, because maybe the lucky ones had all died early, along with their loved ones and their memories of what Earth had been.

  Thinking about that too much was a dark path to Hell, and God only knew all of the survivors here had suffered aplenty, with more suffering yet to come. The suicide rate was getting higher. There was no way to stop someone who wanted to leave, and with so many guns around…

  The loss of hope was the worst, Olivia knew. So she could let no one else know how close she was to taking a gun, putting it to her head in the middle of the night and joining her husband in what must surely be a better place than this.

  But Panther Ridge needed a leader, someone who pressed on and organized things and said tomorrow is another day and would never show her terror and hopelessness. And she was it, though deep in her soul she wondered how much longer she could be, and why there was any point to any of it.

  “Have you ever killed anyone?” Ethan suddenly asked her.

  “What?” she replied, a little startled by the question.

  “Killed anyone in that room I was put in,” Ethan went on. “I saw claw marks and bullet holes in the walls. What looked like bloodstains, too. I’m thinking people were taken in there and killed.”

  Dave stepped closer, between Ethan and Olivia. “Yeah, we’ve killed some things in there. Maybe they were people once, but they sure weren’t when we killed them. It had to be done. Then we scrubbed up the blood the best we could. Don’t you know?”

  “I know about the Gorgons and the Cyphers. I know they’re fighting. Tearing the world apart. That’s all I can remember.”

  “And you don’t remember how you know?” Olivia asked. “Not anything?”

  “Nothing,” said the boy.

  Olivia glanced at John Douglas, who lifted his white eyebrows and shrugged, saying I have no idea. She directed her attention back to the new arrival. “I don’t know where you’ve been or how you survived out there, but I think there’s a lot you need to grasp. And much more than about the Cyphers and Gorgons. Are you hungry? I hope you don’t mind horse meat.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “We do what we can here. Make do or do without. Mostly do without. But we keep going.” Why? she asked herself even as she said it. What is it that we think will change the way things are? She quickly pushed those questions away. She also saw no point in mentioning yet that on some nights true Hell was visited upon the wrack and ruin of this Earth. “Dave, take him to the mess hall. Get him fed. Find him a place to stay.”

  “Sure,” said Dave, stone-faced. “Another happy addition to our little family.”

  “How many people are here?” Ethan asked the woman.

  “A hundred and twelve by last count. It changes sometimes, day to day.”

  Ethan’s gaze went to the yellow pad on the desk. He saw that numbers had been written, scratched out and scrawled again by a nervous hand.

  “That’s not people,” Olivia said, noting Ethan’s interest. “That’s circumstances. We’ve been here nearly two years. Our supplies are running out.”

  “Food and water?” Ethan asked.

  “Canned food and bottled water, both stockpiles pretty low. That’s why we’ve had to start eating the horses, and we don’t trust the rainwater. So, that’s how things are,” she finished.

  Bad, Ethan thought. He could see the end of things, deep in her eyes. As if she felt that, she looked away at Dave once more. “Take him and get him fed. Ethan, I’ll see you later. Okay?”

  He nodded, and Dave and Roger led him out of the room and shut the door.

  John Douglas stayed behind, as Kathy Mattson took her chair again and Gary Roosa regarded his clipboard and yellow pad with all the figures of doom upon them. Olivia sat down, but she knew there was a reason the doctor had stayed and so she said, “What is it?”

  “Interesting young man,” said JayDee.

  “Tough to think what he must’ve gone through. But others have made it too. We had a few survivors in a couple of a days ago, didn’t we?”

  “We did. Hard to survive out there, but not impossible.” The doctor frowned. “It’s just that…I wish I had a decent lab set up. Wish I had some way to really give Ethan a thorough exam.”

  “Why?” A trace of fear tightened her mouth. “Because you think he may not be—”

  “I think,” JayDee interrupted, “he’s human and clean. But I also think—and this stays in this room, please—that he sustained some injuries that…well, I don’t know how he’s walking around, with all the bruises he has under his clothes. And ought to have, at least in my opinion, some major internal injuries. I think he was caught in a shockwave. It’s just…very strange, that he’s so…”

  “Alive?” Olivia prompted.

  “Maybe that,” JayDee admitted. “From the outside, it looks like he had a massive chest injury. That alone would be enough to…” He shrugged. “But I can’t really say, because I can’t do a proper exam.”

  “Then do what you can do,” Olivia said, her gaze steady. “Watch him. If it turns out he’s a different kind of lifeform…good enough to get past the saline…then we’d better know that fast. So watch him, do you hear me?”

  “I hear.” JayDee started for the door.

  “Keep your gun loaded,” she reminded him, as she turned her attention to the numbers of the dwindling stockpiles and the ideas of further rationing that Kathy and Gary—both ex-accountants from the previous world—had advanced.

  “Yes,” JayDee replied heavily, and he went out of the room into the sick sunlight.

  THREE.

  DAVE AND JAYDEE WATCHED THE BOY EAT A SMALL BOWL OF horsemeat stew at a table in the room that served as the mess hall. Meals were usually staggered so as not to overwhelm the three cooks, who were doing the best they could with what they had. Everything had to be cooked outside over woodfires, then brought in. Beyond the double-locked storage room doors, the canned foods were getting low and the bottled water was almost gone. Afternoon light filtered through two windows that were reinforced with duct tape. A few oil lamps and candle lanterns were set about on the other tables. It was a dreary-looking room, but across one wall someone had painted in bright red We Will Survive. The paint had been applied with fierce—or frantic—resolve, and had dripped down in red rivulets to the linoleum-tiled floor.

  The boy ate as if there were no tomorrow. He’d been given a paper cup with three swallows of water and told it was all he could have, so he was taking it easy on that. The horsemeat stew, though, was quickly history.

  “Take a deep breath,” said John Douglas.

  Ethan paused in his licking of the bowl to do as the doctor said.

  “No pain in your lungs?”

  “A little tight. Sore right in here,” Ethan answered, touching the center of his chest. He went back to getting every shred of meat his fingers and tongue could find.

  “Sore neck too, I’d think.”

  “Little bit.”

  “I’m surprised you aren’t in more pain.” The doctor rubbed his chin; unlike most of the other men, he tried to shave as often as possible and he used deodorant. He had been fastidious about his appearance and his habits as a younger man, and as an older man in the world that used to be. It was tougher now, and the point was unclear about why one would wish to maintain as many old habits as possible, but he was a creature of order and neatness and it kept him connected to the man he used to be. It also probably kept him sane and wanting to live. “I’d think,” he offered, “that you could hardly walk after such traumas, much less run. Then again, you are a youn
g boy. Fifteen years old, would be my guess. But still…” He paused, unable to come to any conclusion about this without a proper examination lab, and that fact made him very uneasy. Though he was certain this boy was human. Almost certain. At least the saline test hadn’t set the boy’s blood burning, and made him burst into a spiked monstrosity or a howling spider-like nightmare as had happened in previous tests when so-called ‘humans’ were brought in.

  “But still,” Dave growled, though it wasn’t meant as a growl, “your story is…can I say…fucked up.” A brickmason in his previous life, also a bouncer at a Fort Collins country music bar and an all-around rough-ass dude who didn’t mind throwing himself into any kind of action that called for a bad attitude, Dave McKane minced no words. He had dirty fingernails and dirty hair and dirt in the creases of his face and he carried his responsibilities in this fortress—this last stand—very, very seriously. “If you have no memory, how come you know about the Gorgons and Cyphers? How come that wasn’t blanked out?”

  Ethan sipped at his cup of water. He met Dave’s stare. “I guess I haven’t got any memory of most things, but that…I know they’re fighting.”

  “Then you know how it started? You remember it? The day?”

  Ethan concentrated. Nothing was there. He sipped at his water again, and found with his tongue a shred of horsemeat between two teeth. “No, I don’t remember that.”