The Border

by Robert McCammon

  Then they were just a mass of misshapen figures running and hobbling and shambling across the nightscape down at the bottom of the hill, and in another moment they were gone from sight.

  The quakes had ended.

  Ethan had taken his hands away from the stones. His task—however incredible it had been—was done. His palms and fingers felt burning hot. He had broken out in a cold sweat and was breathing hard, he was scared to death, he was dazed and disoriented but he had felt the awesome power that had emerged slide back into its hiding place deep within himself and become still and silent. And whatever he had been for the last few moments, he was once again only the boy who had wanted to build a very cool Visible Man.

  FIVE.

  “SEVEN DEAD, TWELVE WOUNDED,” SAID JOHN DOUGLAS IN THE yellow lamplight. “Got six people with broken bones. Jane Petersen is not going to survive her wounds. And I think we should move Mitch Vandervere’s body as soon as possible, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Olivia, her eyes weary and dark-circled. She was sitting at the desk in her apartment, with the damning yellow legal pads before her and a few ballpoint pens in a black leather holder. She had taken from a bottom drawer of her desk something that Vincent had given her as a joke on her fiftieth birthday four years ago: the Magic Eight Ball with its black ink inside and its floating icosahedron. She had set it before her on the desk, just as an element of the past. An element that had survived many terrors and tumults up until now. An element of Vincent, and their life together that now seemed like a magical fantasy, a time of joy that was very hard to remember. Yet the Magic Eight Ball brought some of it back. A little bit. La parte más pequeña. She made no decisions using it, but sometimes…sometimes…she thought she might, because it could be Vincent trying to speak to her, to guide and comfort her, through the black ink of the unknown.

  “I liked Jane very much,” she heard herself say, hollowly. “A very kind woman. Yes, we should move Mitch’s body. Will you take care of that?” She was asking Dave McKane, who had sprawled himself out on the tattered brown sofa and was staring up at the cracked ceiling. The series of bizarre quakes had knocked the hell out of the old buildings. Some of the stairs had given way, part of the eastern wall had crumbled, just about every window was broken and was held together only by the duct tape, and some of the roofs had fallen in. Dave had already seen the dozens of cracks in the walls of his own apartment. He figured it was only a matter of time before the damned place collapsed. The floor of his bedroom had gone so crooked it was like walking across the deck of a ship at sea pitched at a dangerous angle by a rogue wave.

  “I’ll get to it,” he said listlessly.

  JayDee had splotches and streaks of other people’s blood on his shirt and his khaki trousers. The hospital—two apartments with the wall removed between them—was in the lower building and was being staffed by two nurses, one who had worked for a veterinarian in Fort Collins and one who had been a dental assistant when she was a young woman in Boise, Idaho, about thirty years ago. The make-do medical resources consisted of Band-Aids in various sizes, bottles of aspirin and sedatives, antiseptic, some plaster bandages to make casts, some wooden splints, a few surgical instruments such as probes and forceps and some dental tools, and a few bottles of pain-killers like Demerol and Vicodin.

  “We need to do another bullet count,” Olivia said. She was trying very hard to keep her voice strong and steady. There were three other people in the room beside Dave and JayDee, all of whom shared some measure of responsibility for keeping track of supplies and the ammo. “Find out what everybody’s got left.”

  “I’ve got five clips,” Dave answered. “Thirty-two bullets each. After that, I’m done.” He sat up on the sofa and took his baseball cap off. His face was deeply lined and his eyes dazed. “We can’t take another one like that. There are too many now. If those quakes hadn’t happened…they would’ve gotten in. No way we could’ve turned ’em back.”

  “The quakes,” said Carmen Niega, a thin Hispanic woman who’d been a tax attorney in Denver. She had lived here a little less than four months, arriving with a half-dozen other wanderers. “Has anything like that ever happened before?”

  “Never,” Olivia said. She looked toward the door, which hung open because it was now impossible to close in the crooked frame. Ethan Gaines was standing on the threshold, peering in. Behind him, the first dank yellow light of dawn had begun to filter through the thick soup of clouds. “You all right?” she asked him.

  He nodded, his face wan and rock dust whitening his hair and clothes.

  “Told you to get away from there,” she said. She glanced at the doctor. “John, I think he’s in shock. Would you—”

  “No, I’m not,” Ethan replied before JayDee could speak. He came into the room, stumbling a little bit because he realized he probably was in shock. “I wanted to tell you. Tell all of you.” He paused, trying to figure out exactly what it was he wanted to say.

  “Tell us what?” Dave prompted, the harshness back in his voice because he was dead tired, and he had to go put together a detail to bury people including the headless body of a pretty good guy who used to remember a few jokes and play poker with him and some of the others.

  Ethan said, “I think…I caused the earthquakes.” He frowned. “I know I caused them.”

  There was a moment’s silence. Then JayDee said quietly, “Ethan, let’s go to the hospital where you can lie down and rest, and I can give you some water and a seda—”

  “I said…I caused the quakes,” Ethan repeated.

  “Sure you did.” Dave put his cap back on and ran a hand across his bearded chin. “Oh yeah, you did a great job. Ran the Gray Men off, yeah. Also almost destroyed our complex here, but…hey…I don’t mind sleeping in a room that’s about to fall in. If my ceiling doesn’t collapse first. What’s wrong with you, kid? You lost your marbles along with your memory?”

  “Stop it, Dave,” Olivia cautioned. She stood up. “Ethan, I want you to go with the doctor. Will you—”

  “No, I won’t go.” Ethan came forward into the room with such a deliberate stride and such a determined expression that Carmen Niega, Russ Whitcomb and Joel Shuster backed away to give him room. He passed JayDee and walked up to the edge of Olivia’s desk. In the lamplight his eyes were bright blue and nearly frightening to Olivia in their fierce intensity. “I’m telling you. I knew to touch the rocks in the wall and…I don’t know, exactly…but…I saw what would happen, in my head. It was like I was making a command, and the earth did what I wanted. What I saw. Only…it was stronger than I thought it would be. Does that make any sense?”

  “No, Ethan…it doesn’t. It just happened, that’s all. Why it happened at that moment, I don’t know. We were very lucky. But you didn’t cause the quakes. Now, I really do want you to go to the hospital. I want you to be quiet and rest down there, if you can.”

  JayDee gave a grunt. It was going to be hard to rest, with all those injured people in there needing attention. Still, he could give the boy a swallow of the precious bottled water and two sleeping pills and that would take care of him for about twelve hours.

  “Hey…listen!” Kitt Falkenberg had come to the door. She was about thirty years of age, had dirty blonde hair and a tall, lean physique and had been a star volleyball outside hitter at the University of Colorado. In her voice was the high, breathless strain of both excitement and tension. “I heard it from Tommy Cordell and then I saw it myself! The swimming pool! The quakes cracked it right down the middle. Only…it’s filling up!”

  “What?” Dave roused himself to his feet.

  “The pool,” Kitt repeated, her green eyes nearly luminous in her dirt-smudged face. “Water’s flooding in…coming up through the crack! Come on, you’ve gotta see it!”

  It took them a few minutes to get out of the crooked apartment and down the hill. Olivia was first. JayDee walked at the back of the group alongside Ethan. About forty people had already gathered around the pool. In the yellow
light of oncoming dawn Olivia pushed through the throng, with Dave behind her. They saw what Kitt had already seen: the pool had a jagged crack right along its center, from the drain to the shallow end, and water was streaming up from below. A man—Dave and Olivia recognized him as Paul Edson, who in his previous life had been a musician in a jazz band and played a very mean saxophone—was standing in the shallow end, and was leaning over to touch the water as it gurgled up.

  “It’s cold,” Paul said. He cupped a handful and tasted it. “My God!” he said. “I think it’s spring water!”

  Others entered the pool to also touch and taste the water. Olivia descended the steps and cupped a handful, then put it to her mouth. Her eyes found Dave. She said, nearly as breathlessly as Kitt had spoken, “We’ve been living here with a spring under the swimming pool. All this time. Clean water.” She brought herself back to her leadership role, and she pulled herself up straight and took on the mask again. “Everyone, get bottles or buckets or whatever you can find and fill them! Come on, hurry! Tell everyone else you see to get over here!” She didn’t have to tell anyone twice, and from the strength of the water rising from its underground channel there was really no need to hurry, except to beat the next contaminated rainfall. She thought they needed some kind of covering for the pool, something to keep the rain out, and she looked to Dave again to tell him that but Dave had retreated from the pool’s edge.

  He was standing a few feet to Ethan’s right, staring at the boy. It had occurred to Dave that Ethan had said I felt like I needed to come here after Dave had seen him walking the length of the pool. Dave had realized that the crack had followed Ethan’s trail; the pool had broken open directly where the boy had been walking.

  Ethan watched, his eyes heavy-lidded, as the water continued to stream in. He felt very tired, drifting toward sleep. Is this what shock feels like? he wondered. He watched the other people moving quickly to go get their bottles and buckets, and then he was aware of Dave McKane standing at his side, staring fixedly at him as if he had never really seen the boy before.

  “What is it?” Ethan asked.

  “I’m just looking,” Dave answered.

  “At what?”

  “I don’t know yet,” said Dave, and it was the truth. He turned away to get to his misshapen apartment and find whatever bottles he could. There was still the task of burying Mitch to take care of, as well as burying the other dead.

  John Douglas decided it was time to guide the obviously dazed boy to the hospital and get him sedated and resting, and then with the help of his nurses tend to the broken bones and other wounds. It was going to be a rough morning…but then again, they all were.

  Olivia came out of the pool and asked a couple of the men to devise some kind of canopy that might deflect the rain, but even as she proposed this idea she thought of the dwindling supply of food and ammunition, the damaged walls and the growing hordes of Gray Men. Panther Ridge could not hold out much longer, even with an unlimited supply of clean water. She looked up at the dull yellow clouds of dawn. Somewhere out there, and all around what remained of the world, the Cyphers and Gorgons were still fighting. Maybe it would be an endless war, she thought; at least it would be a war that she and likely none of the defenders of Panther Ridge would ever see ended.

  “All right,” she said to herself. There was so much to do, so much to take care of. She could not break, on this misty yellow morning. The pool was yielding a bounty of fresh water. That was kind of a miracle, wasn’t it? Just a little pond of hope, growing deeper by the moment.

  “All right,” Olivia repeated, because it sounded good and strong. And then she turned away from the pool and went off to find her own bottles with which to collect a little of a liquid miracle.

  The dead were buried by a detail of men, among them Dave McKane, who thought they were used to such a task but they never were. Dave worked hard and steadily and spoke to none of the others, and when the new graves were filled he lit a cigarette and walked over to the pool to smoke in silence and watch the water gush forth. He liked the noise it made, like the sound of a stream moving through a quiet forest. He had six cigarettes left and he was down to his last Bic lighter. Nasty habit anyway, he thought; ought to give it up someday. A low peal of thunder echoed off in the clouds above. Either that, or one side had just scored a hit on the other.

  At the hospital, Ethan slept in a darkened room with the aid of two zaleplon capsules. In another room, John Douglas and the two nurses worked on the injured. The morning moved on. The fallen watchtower was being rebuilt, and the eastern wall repaired, and workers began to fill in damaged places in the other walls with more rocks and mortar. The sun remained a faint smear. Around noon a light rain began to fall, but by then a green canvas canopy had been put up on a wooden frame over the pool, which continued to be filled by the underground spring.

  In his apartment, Dave McKane had looked up at the pipes and dead wires that hung from the cracked ceiling over his bed and he had crossed the crooked floor to the closet and gotten out his sleeping bag. He had taken off his shoes and baseball cap, unrolled the sleeping bag onto his gray sofa and pushed himself into it. One hour after trying to get some sleep, he was still awake and thinking.

  He had been born into a hardscrabble farmer’s life by no-nonsense parents who believed in God, the Devil, and the pride of a job well done. He’d worked for years in the family’s corn and soybean fields. When the Gorgons had appeared just after ten o’clock on the morning of April third, he’d called his mom and pop at the farm outside Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to tell them he, Cheryl, and the boys would be there in a couple of days, that everything was going to be all right and it was not the end of the world and it was crazy, sure, and scary as hell but the military was going to take care of business.

  Then CNN had shown the jets bursting into flames and falling like dead leaves, and the missiles exploding as they hit some kind of force field that protected the crafts, and the President in the Oval Office telling everyone to remain calm before he and all the rest of the government officials vanished. Around the world, panicked mobs searched for leadership and found that no one was there. Police and military forces disbanded to protect and shelter their own families and find a way to survive. Then the Cypher ships had arrived, and all cell phones, landlines, the Internet, televisions, radios, and electric power had gone dead.

  Dave, Cheryl, and his two sons had never made it to Cedar Rapids. Nor to her parents’ home south of Colorado Springs, and they had never found out what happened to them or to Cheryl’s sister in San Francisco. It had been so fast it was still unreal. It was night, they were packing to leave the house in the glow of candles and the battery-powered lanterns, and Dave was carrying a couple of suitcases through the front room out to the camper parked on the other side of their pickup truck. In the next instant faceless, black-suited soldiers with weapons growing out of them were not only in the house, but were moving through the walls like shimmering ghosts. Cheryl was in the back room with Mike and Steven, and Dave had shouted for everyone to get to the camper now, and he dropped the suitcases and was reaching for his shotgun next to the open door when a blue flash licked at the windows. He remembered an ear-cracking blast and a sensation of first being kicked in the back by a heavy boot and then falling as if into a black pit…a great distance, falling, falling…falling, it seemed, from one world into another…and when he came to he was lying on the ground next to the scorched camper with his clothes smoking, the burning house and the pickup truck had collapsed into a crater and every tree in the woods all around had become a torch that burned with an eerie blue flame.

  He had tried to get up, but his body was trembling, his nerves out of control, he couldn’t make anything work. His nose was bleeding and blood was crawling from his eyesockets. He had grabbed fistfuls of dirt and dragged himself across the ground as best he could, screaming the names of his wife and sons. In the sky above his torment, things left glowing blue and red trails that some might have call
ed beautiful as they zigzagged across the dark.

  How long it was Dave stayed at the house, after the fire had died and he had crawled down into the crater and found the blackened bodies, he didn’t know. It was a murky light, he was sitting amid the bodies in the smoking ruins trying to remember where the camper’s keys were and how he could change the four melted tires when the Cypher soldiers moved through again, silent and ghostly, on some unknown mission to an unknown destination. A couple of them looked at him as they passed by the crater’s edge, or rather their faceless, helmeted heads turned toward him and downward for the briefest of seconds. But he was nothing for them to contend with, in his burned rags with his blood-crusted nose and his bloody half-insane eyes and his mouth hanging open drooling threads of saliva.

  He was nothing, on the scale of this war.

  He remembered thinking that it was time to move. Time to go, if he was going. And he had looked at the very nice Bulova wristwatch Cheryl had given him on their tenth anniversary and seen that the crystal was gone and the hands were frozen at 9:27, and that had nearly killed the last part of his mind. But something must have kicked in to get him moving, because after that he remembered staggering along the highway in what must have been the dark of another night, with the smoke of burning trees, houses, and fields shrouding the earth. Headlights stabbed through the smoke as cars and vans with panicked people inside missed him by inches. He kept walking to his own unknown destination, and maybe he was shouting and raving about the end of the world because he thought in his ravaged mind, yes it really is.

  His path had eventually brought him here to the fortress that the Panther Ridge Apartments had become, and though every day he prodded himself to take some supplies, saddle up a horse and go out on a journey to Cedar Rapids to see if his mother and father were still alive, the truth was he thought they were dead and any journey out there would be a torturous trip through an unbelievable Hell. He figured he wouldn’t make it two nights out, with the Gray Men on their search for fresh meat. Either that, or he might be caught in some battle between the aliens, and he would die burned to black ashes as Cheryl, Mike, and Steven had died.