The Border

by Robert McCammon

  “Sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. Go ahead.” He waited for Les to shut the warped door behind him, as much as it would shut. Cracks from the earthquake riddled the walls. JayDee said, “You can put your shirt back on,” and Ethan did. “Have a seat.” JayDee motioned toward a chair, but Ethan said, “I’m okay standing.”

  “Well, I’m sitting down then.” JayDee eased himself into the chair. Something creaked; either the chair or his weary bones. The doc stretched his legs out before him and, staring at Ethan, rubbed his clean-shaven chin.

  “You know what I’m going to say,” JayDee ventured.

  Ethan shrugged, but he knew.

  “At a time like this, a man needs a good stout drink of rye whiskey,” JayDee said. “That was my drink of choice. In the quiet of the evening, before a nice fire in the hearth…a little Frank Sinatra on the stereo…way before your time, I know…and all was right with the world. Deborah…my wife, bless her soul…would sit with me and listen to the music or read. Oh, maybe that sounds boring to you. Does it?” This time his white eyebrows did not go up; it was a question that did not expect an answer. “Well, it was a life,” he went on. “A damned good life.” He gave a sad, crooked smile. “What I wouldn’t give for that again, and as boring as you please. For two years now…Hell has visited earth. In many forms, too terrible to recount.” His smile that was not really a smile faded and the expression in his eyes sharpened. “Tell me about the white mansion,” he said. “I mean…Dave’s already told me. But you tell me. All right? Wait…before you say anything…I’ll tell you that a couple of days ago Dave and Olivia went down to the high school’s library to find maps to help figure out where this white mansion might be. Dave’s thinking it might be the name of a town. Somewhere.” He added a little sarcasm to that word. “They did find a road atlas. They won’t talk about what happened over there, but Olivia hurt her knee a little bit. While she was in here she started shaking and crying, and she was about to go to pieces. I gave her a sedative, the best I could do. Dave won’t talk about it either. So I want you to know, Ethan…that something terrible happened to them down there…while they were…let’s say…acting on your behalf. It had to be bad…because I saw how bad it was in Dave’s face. And when you can read that in his face…brother, it was a whole big bag of bad.”

  Ethan nodded. He didn’t know what to say. The best he could manage was, “I didn’t ask them to do that.”

  “No, you didn’t. But…you see…it’s this white mansion thing. And the earthquake you said you caused. And that Dave believes that somehow you knew the spring was there under the swimming pool. Those things. Kinda hard for a rational person to swallow, isn’t it?”

  “I guess.”

  “But,” JayDee went on, his brow furrowed, “Dave has a point. What’s rational anymore? What makes sense? I’ve seen what looks like a man explode into something covered with black spikes, right in that secure room you were locked up in when you first got here. Seen a teenaged girl’s face implode, and suddenly it was a mouth filled with greedy little teeth that tried to bite my head off, until Dave shot the thing to pieces. Does that make sense? Well…maybe it does if you’re a Gorgon or a Cypher. See, I think they’re making weapons out of what used to be human beings. Experimenting on them. On us. They’ve got a real slam-bang weapons program going on, they’re wanting to see what works and what doesn’t. Maybe they’re just doing it because they can, and that’s their way. What do you think, Ethan? You brought that up about the Gorgons and Cyphers fighting over the border. That’s what you said, right?”

  “Yes,” said Ethan quietly.

  “Why did you say that? What information do you have that I, Dave, Olivia and everyone else here doesn’t have?”

  Ethan didn’t answer for a moment. Then he said, just as quietly, “I know it’s true. It’s what they’re fighting over. The border between their—”

  “What are you?” JayDee suddenly asked, and he drew his legs back as if they might be in danger of black spikes or a mouthful of little daggers. “You and I both know…those injuries you have…they should’ve killed you. And the bruises are worse, aren’t they? Yet your blood pressure is fine, your lungs are in good shape, and your heart’s just ticking along. And let me tell you…your lungs ought to be so clogged full of blood you couldn’t draw a breath, and I still don’t know how you’re walking. God, if I only had an X-ray machine and some power to run it! So…young man who doesn’t know his name or remember anything about his life before he suddenly woke up running across a field…what exactly are you, because I don’t think you’re human.”

  The statement tainted the air. Ethan felt a spark of anger grow into a flame. “You think I’m something they made? Like…a secret weapon? That I’m supposed to explode or grow two heads or something? Is that it?”

  “I’d say somebody who can create an earthquake just by wanting to make it happen already has got a little secret weapon in him. My question is, what else is in there you don’t know about?”

  Ethan stared at JayDee. Did a little heat ripple in the air between them? Ethan said, “Kidneys, stomach. Large intestine, small intestine, pancreas. Liver, spleen, lungs. Brain, heart. Those are things I know I have. I am human, sir. And I’m remembering something, too. It’s getting clearer and the details are filling in. I’m in a room, sitting at a desk under a green desk lamp, and I’m putting together a model of the Visible Man. You know what that is?”

  “I had one. Every kid who ever grew up to be a doctor probably put that thing together.”

  “Okay. I’m looking at my desk, and that’s what I see lying there. The parts. Kidneys, stomach, large intestine, small intestine, pancreas, liver, spleen, lungs, brain, and heart. I’ve got them arranged in that order, to be painted. My jars of paint are sitting there. The brand is Testors. A woman with dark hair comes into the room…and she starts to speak, but I can’t hear what she says.” Sadness pierced him like a blade; not only sadness, but a deep sense of desperation. Tears burned his eyes. “I want to hear, but I can’t. And…what I want most of all…most of all…is for her to speak my name, because I think she’s my mother, but…if she does say it, I can’t hear it. Or maybe I just can’t recognize it anymore.” He wiped his eyes and stared at the floor. A shiver passed through him, quick and then gone. “I’m human. I know I am.” And then he looked up into the careful eyes of John Douglas, and Ethan said what he was really thinking: “I’ve got to be.”

  It was another moment before JayDee spoke. “You have no idea what the white mansion is? You just believe it’s a place you have to get to?”

  Ethan nodded.

  “Well,” said JayDee, as thickly as if he had a mouthful of sand, “Dave believes it too. Maybe Olivia does. She’s not saying much lately. But I know Dave’s been going through that road atlas. There’s no town in these United…in this country,” he corrected himself, “bearing that name. Dave took my magnifying glass—the last one I have, incidentally—and he’s been going through that atlas page by page. He must be nearly blind by now. I hear he’s not sleeping very much either. I just wanted you to know.”

  “Okay,” said Ethan, who thought he should respond in some way.

  “You can go now, if you want to. Me, I’m just going to sit here for awhile and think…or maybe try not to think.”

  Kidneys, stomach. Large intestine, small intestine, pancreas. Liver, spleen, lungs. Brain, heart.

  Sitting in the broken recliner in the apartment of a dead man, with the thin sickly light of morning coming through the duct-taped windows, Ethan can see those plastic organs lying before him on the desktop. The dark-haired woman comes in. She is smiling, and Ethan thinks she is pretty, but her face is really just a blur. And what he wants to say is Speak my name, but he does not and she does not, and he returns his gaze to the shell of the Visible Man that he so desires to make complete.

  He heard a tapping at the door, which like so many others had been sawed so that it closed firmly in the misshapen
frame.

  “Who is it?” he called.

  The voice was a tired mumble. “Dave. Got something.”

  At once, Ethan was up and opening the door. Dave came in looking like he’d been on a three-day binge. He was wearing dirty jeans and a faded brown t-shirt that had so many holes in it a pitbull could have been using it as a chewrag. His hair was a tousled mess, and his eyes were weary, swollen maybe from deciphering too much small print. In his right hand was a page torn from the road atlas and in his left was the magnifying glass. “Might have something,” he amended, holding up the page. “Want you to take a look.” He came in as Ethan stepped aside. Dave went to the candle lantern. “Map of southeastern Utah,” he said. “You probably won’t need the magnifier, but I sure as hell did.”

  Ethan took the page as Dave offered it.

  Dave touched the map with a forefinger. “There. About midway between the two towns of Monticello and Blanding. It’s at the eastern edge of the Manti-La-Sal National Forest. See that?”

  Ethan did. White Mansion Mtn., it read. 10,961 ft.

  “It’s over three hundred miles from here as the eagle flies. But we’re not eagles.” Dave rubbed his eyes. “That’s what I found. Ring any bells?”

  “No, nothing. But maybe that’s it?”

  Dave gave a short bark of a laugh. “Maybe? Maybe? You know what it’s like searching those maps with a magnifying glass, hour after hour?” Dave hadn’t realized until he and Olivia had gotten back to Panther Ridge that the last few maps and the index had been ripped out. It had been close work, and hoping the White Mansion wasn’t up in Canada because those were the missing maps. He had scoured everything remaining…all towns, military bases, lakes, bays, mountains, canyons, and at last had come to the name of the mountain in Utah.

  “I don’t know anything about that area,” he said, “but I know to get there would be…like…a miracle. Going south to Denver, crossing the Rockies on I-70, with the Gray Men and the aliens everywhere. So, when you say maybe that’s it…that doesn’t make me feel too very confident.”

  “How am I supposed to know for sure?” was Ethan’s next question, delivered flatly and as a matter-of-fact.

  Dave looked down at the floor as if he were trying to control an outburst. It took him a moment to get himself stabilized; he was tired, hungry, and thirsty, and he figured he’d aged his eyes by about five years in the past two days. But when he lifted his gaze to Ethan again and spoke, his face was calm, and his voice as quiet as he could force it to be under the circumstances. “That’s the only White Mansion I could find. Either that’s it or not. Either, like you say, something you don’t understand is trying to guide you there, or it was just a bad dream and it meant absolutely fucking nothing. But I’ve decided to believe in you, Ethan. I’ve decided to listen to you. Got that?”

  Ethan stared into Dave’s eyes, his own face betraying no emotion. “Have you decided to follow me?” he asked. “If I go there, are you going with me? Is Olivia? Dr. Douglas? Anyone else?”

  “You’ll never make that by yourself. God only knows how anybody could make that trip.”

  “That’s no answer. Sir,” he added.

  Dave took the map back from Ethan. He felt near collapse, near just lying down in a corner somewhere and peering into the Magnum’s barrel until he gathered enough courage to pull the trigger. But still…damn it…the White Mansion. And this boy…this damned strange boy who JayDee had said ought to be lying six feet under by now. This boy…maybe an experiment by either Cyphers or Gorgons? So why was he here, and what was to be done with him?

  “You ask too many questions,” Dave said. “Right now I’m going back to my place and get some sleep. We’ll talk about this later…when I can think straight.” So saying, he turned away from Ethan and left the apartment, half-walking and half-staggering, with the map from the road atlas in one hand and the magnifying glass in the other.

  The White Mansion, Ethan thought after Dave had gone.

  Go there. It’s important. Somehow…really important.

  And he asked himself, that if he knew it was somehow really important, then how come he didn’t know why? If his mind or whatever it was guiding him was only giving him bits and pieces, clues that right now made no sense…why wasn’t it giving him the whole picture, so he could understand?

  Over three hundred miles from here as the eagle flies, Dave had said. But we’re not eagles.

  It was a long way, to depend on a voice in a dream and a voice inside himself urging him to go. A long way, with all that out there, the Gray Men hungering for meat, and the Gorgons and Cyphers forever at war. And how were they supposed to get there? By walking? By the horses, which meant taking the last food from these people? And what would they do for food on the journey? How could it be done?

  Ethan sat down and stared at the glow of the candle lantern. The morning’s light was getting stronger, a yellowish hue. Ethan figured it was going to be what people used to call a “nice day”, considering how screwed up the atmosphere was.

  I should be dead, he thought. But I’m human. I know I am. I remember a mother and a house and a room with a desk lamp and on the table, bottles of Testors paint and the plastic organs lined up. But I should be dead…and instead of that I am here staring at a candle and wondering…

  …who will go with me, when I go?

  TEN.

  WITH THE PASSAGE OF THREE MORE DAYS, LIFE AS SUCH WENT ON at Panther Ridge. Water was collected from the spring that had filled up the swimming pool. Another horse was slaughtered, and on that day Olivia Quintero did not emerge from her apartment. John Douglas talked a weeping young man out of killing himself, his wife, and little boy, but while he was doing that, a middle-aged woman who used to be a watercolor artist in Loveland blew her head off with a shotgun in the dark confines of Apartment 278. Work went on to strengthen the wall, as always. Up in the machine-gun towers the nightwatchmen saw the distant flickering of either lightning or two worlds at war over the border.

  On that same night, Ethan Gaines walked the perimeter, lost in thought. The pull from the White Mansion was stronger now, and it was hard to sleep. The complex was quiet; it was about two in the morning, he figured. A few other people were up, walking alone or talking in small groups. He saw a woman sobbing with her head against a man’s shoulder, and the man had a drawn, weary face and eyes that saw nothing. He saw a teen-aged girl lying on the ground staring up at the sky as if trying to pierce the mysteries there. She was hampered by that because she wore a black eyepatch over her left eye, but it was decorated with small stick-on rhinestones. She was about his age, he thought, and she had blonde hair and a pretty oval face with a small cleft in the chin. Maybe she was sixteen or seventeen, he decided. She didn’t look at him as he passed by; her study was the stars that could be seen faintly through the drifting clouds. He saw a circle of a dozen people on their knees in the grass, heads bowed and eyes squeezed tightly shut as if that would speed their prayers; maybe they stayed there all night praying, he didn’t know.

  And that led to a question for him: where was God in all this?

  Was the same God those people fervently prayed to the God who had created the Gorgons and Cyphers? Did God favor one civilization over the other, or were all left to the rolling of the celestial dice?

  The White Mansion, he thought. It intruded upon him night and day, breaking in like an unwanted commercial in this ragged movie of his life. I’ve got to get there, somehow.

  We’re not eagles, Dave had said. And Dave was not speaking to him lately, had not spoken to him since that early morning revelation. There was no plan, there was just the waiting. And Ethan saw very clearly, as he walked with the weight of the unknown burdening his shoulders, that these people were waiting to die. Their hope was running out like the sand in the hourglass. Everyone had their limit; when that limit was reached…blammo, off to meet the Maker.

  This is shit, Ethan thought as he looked at the broken-down, crooked and messed-up apartment bui
ldings. No one can stay here. If they want to live, they have to move because movement is life. Going somewhere is life. But here behind these stone walls that are worked on day and night…they are just waiting to find the limit of their hope, and it comes to everybody.

  Even if you died on the road to somewhere, he thought…at least you tried.

  “Hola,” someone said. “Can’t sleep?”

  Ethan stopped. He’d almost walked right into Olivia, who was on her own circuit of the perimeter. She was carrying a lantern and was wearing faded jeans and a blue-patterned blouse. She had on a pair of sneakers the color of a bright yellow tennis ball, but dirtier. The candlelight showed a dazed look in her eyes. Ethan thought she was just barely holding herself together, but she was not too far gone to forget to wear her pistol in its holster around her waist.

  “Oh,” Ethan said. “Hi. Yeah. I mean…no, I can’t sleep.”

  “Me neither. Not lately. I’m out of sleeping pills. Been thinking of hitting myself in the head with a hammer, but I’m not ready for anything that drastic.”

  Ethan gave her a guarded smile that did not hold very long, because there were important things to say. “Dave showed me the map. Did he tell you?”

  “He did. White Mansion Mountain in southeastern Utah, a long way from here.”

  “A pretty long way,” Ethan agreed.

  “Maybe you and your parents visited that place once. Maybe that’s why you want to go there, because you’re remembering.”

  “I don’t think so. There’s no father,” he said.

  “What?”

  “In the house I’m starting to remember, where I’m sitting at the desk putting together my Visible Man. Did JayDee tell you about that?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought he would. Well…there’s a dark-haired woman who I think is my mother, but I don’t think I have a father. There’s just…not a presence there. I mean, I did have a father, but I think he left when I was a little boy.”