The Border

by Robert McCammon

  “Because they’re human beings and they’re in need, that’s why. We never turned anyone away from Panther Ridge.”

  “Sure we did. We killed the ones who weren’t really human. How do we know these three are? And how about that Vope guy? Gives me the creeps. He looks like he might go nuts any minute.” Dave shook his head. “Olivia, we can’t test them with the saline. There’s no way we can know if they’re really human or not.”

  Jefferson had seen the man shake his head. The rock was holding steady. Jefferson said, “Can I ask where you’re going?”

  “To Denver,” Olivia answered. “We’ve got a lot of wounded people on board and we’re trying to find medical supplies.”

  “Maybe I can help,” said the salesman, who had already decided his pitch when he heard the word wounded. “I’m a doctor.” He decided to give the lie more texture. “I was a cardiologist in Little Rock.”

  “I’ve been to Arkansas,” Dave said, which was his own lie. “Who’s the President who was governor there?”

  “William Jefferson Clinton,” said Leon Kushman, who had taken the name ‘Jefferson’ from that very person, after getting an autographed picture of himself as a seventeen-year-old, grinning political volunteer standing between Bill and Hillary at a fund-raising banquet. He would always remember what Clinton had said to him: You’re a comet with your tail on fire, aren’t you? That was the same weekend he’d wound up at a party smoking weed and discussing porn films with a law student named Andy Beale, who had become a Missouri senator and now—or was—President of these Used To Be United States. “Otherwise known as ‘Bubba’ or ‘Slick Willie’,” Jefferson went on. He frowned. “Is this a test?”

  This joker was a human, Dave thought. Had to be. Still…he had a bad feeling about this. The weird guy blinked a few more times in rapid succession. The short bald guy was moving from foot to foot as if standing on a hot griddle. “Damn,” Dave said under his breath. They had to get moving, the sun was going down.

  “We’ve got to go.” Olivia had read the situation just as he had. “All right, get aboard,” she told the three.

  “But you’ll stand at the front,” Dave added. “Where I can watch you.”

  “Thank you,” Jefferson said. He gave more texture to the spin: “I don’t really care to go back to Denver, but I guess there’s not too much ahead, is there?”

  “Just get on the bus and keep quiet. And watch your buddy there, I don’t want him freaking out and hurting anybody. Any trouble from him and you’re all off.”

  “As you say.” If you only knew, Jefferson thought. Idiot.

  “I’m Olivia Quintero and he’s Dave McKane,” Olivia said as they walked to the bus. “We’ve been holed up in an apartment complex. Early this morning a Gorgon ship crashed into it.” She shuddered inwardly, with a memory of something half-seen and totally repulsive. She asked, “You men have your own food and water in the backpack?”

  “Food, yes,” Jefferson said. “Water, no.”

  “I’ll get you some. I guess you need it.”

  “We sure do!” Ratcoff gasped. “I’m parched!”

  They got aboard. Hannah gave the three newcomers the evil eye and when Olivia nodded she put her pistol away and closed the door. “We’re movin’!” she called to everyone, and then she started them forward again on the long road that in a few miles curved to a ramp onto I-25 south to Denver.

  Olivia passed the word back to send up a plastic jug of water. Dave stood right behind the three men and he kept his Uzi in hand just in case. “Where’d you stay last night?” he asked, directing the question to Ratcoff.

  “A farmhouse,” Jefferson said. “But—”

  “I asked him. You shut up until I tell you to talk.”

  “Look.” Jefferson turned toward Dave. Their faces were only inches apart. The preacherman glanced down at the submachine gun that was aimed somewhere south of his navel, into God’s country. “What’s your point, Dave? Can I call you Dave?”

  “You can call me Mister Careful. We’ve seen things that try to pass themselves off as human, and they ain’t pretty. They’re things either the Gorgons or the Cyphers have made in their Frankenstein labs. So that’s why this gun is still out and it’s staying out.”

  “I hope you have the safety on. You could make a real mess when we hit the next bump, Dave.”

  “Ratcoff, where’d you stay last night?” Dave persisted.

  To his credit, Ratcoff hesitated only a few seconds. “Like Jeff said…a farmhouse. I don’t know how many miles away it was, but we walked a long time. My feet are killin’ me.”

  “Why didn’t you stay there?”

  Ratcoff shrugged, still keeping his composure. “The place was half burned down. We were tryin’ to find people. Not crazy ones. And…you know…just us three alone…how long were we gonna make it?”

  Good man, Jefferson thought. Listen and learn from the master.

  Vope was immobile at his side. That was good too, Jefferson decided. Let everybody think the idiot was in shock and couldn’t talk. The Gorgons didn’t understand contractions, and everything Vope said came out as stiff as a high schooler trying to speak Shakespeare’s English. At least he had the blinking part taken care of, mostly. So just let him keep his mouth shut. When the plastic jug of water arrived, Jefferson took a drink and also took the opportunity to look around. The bus was so crowded it was hard to see beyond the people standing behind McKane and the woman. He saw a young blonde-haired kid who was maybe nineteen or so, with a bloody rag wrapped around his head, his eyes bleary, but that wasn’t who they were seeking. He remembered his starlet harlot saying You will know the boy when you find him, my Jefferson as he drifted into a dreamless narcotic sleep in the room that was not a room in the false French mansion. He wondered if in that sleep they had added some sensor device to him along with the pain stimulator in his neck, because he was absolutely sure the young man with the injured head was not the boy. He could see no one else who might be the boy, so the boy must be further at the back. The kid was here, though; if he wasn’t, Vope wouldn’t have wanted to stop the bus. Oh yeah, he was here. When the chance to take him came, Jefferson would know that too. Only he hoped the Gorgons would teleport them out of range of that Uzi before McKane could get the safety off.

  “One drink and pass it on,” Dave said.

  “Sure.” Jefferson gave the jug to Ratcoff, who drank noisily. Then came the moment when Ratcoff put the red cap back on the jug and offered it to Vope, and the Gorgon just stood there looking at it like it was a half-gallon of Cypher piss.

  “Don’t you want a drink, Jack?” Jefferson asked, his voice full of concern for a brother of the road who had lost his mental bearings. “Here, let me open it.” He was aware that not only McKane and the woman were watching, but others were too. He removed the red cap and said as if to a pitiful imbecile, “Open your mouth, Jack.”

  Vope’s hands came up. He took the jug. There might have been a little angry spark deep in the black eyes.

  “I know what to do,” Vope said. “Idiot.”

  The Gorgon tipped the jug into his open mouth, as he’d seen the two humans do. Only Jefferson saw the creature flinch just a fraction, as if the liquid tasted vile. A small amount was taken and then allowed to slowly dribble from the sides of the mouth down into the black beard.

  Vope gave the jug back to Jefferson, who recapped it and returned it to Olivia. “Thank you kindly,” he said, giving her just a glimpse of his Southern charm but not enough to fire anyone’s jets. The bus was moving on, curving toward the I-25 ramp. Jefferson noted that McKane’s gun had moved away from his proud parts. “I imagine you people have been through a lot,” he said to Olivia. “Like we have. Like everyone has.”

  She nodded. “We’re glad you came along. You can help JayDee with some of these people when we find supplies. He’s our doctor.”

  “Oh.” His blink was maybe a little too slow. “Right.”

  About fifteen feet away from Jeffer
son Jericho, standing amid other survivors who hung onto whatever handhold they could find as the bus turned onto I-25, Ethan couldn’t see the three new arrivals for the crush of bodies around him, but his heartbeat had picked up and the flesh of his chest and back had begun tingling. The bruised parts, he thought.

  It came to him very clearly.

  An alarm had been set off.

  Why? he wondered.

  He had not seen the three men, but he thought that they were not who—or what—they appeared to be. His first impulse was to pass it forward that he needed to talk to Dave, but in another moment he decided against it. Dave likely couldn’t get back to him, and he would have to leave Olivia, and whatever the “men” were, they might have alarms too. If those went off, they might…what? Tear the bus apart and kill everyone?

  No, Ethan thought. They’re not here to do that.

  He was certain they were here for an unknown reason, but destroying the bus was not it.

  Best to wait, he told himself. Give it time, get a look at these three and try to figure them out.

  His heartbeat began to slow and the tingling went away, which was good because he was just about to start scratching himself and he could hardly move amid the others packed around him. He wondered what would happen if he lifted up his shirt and played tic-tac-toe in silver on the blackboard of his chest.

  Nikki was still watching him from where she stood behind him. He could feel her eye on him, drilling into his head for an answer. He knew she was still not comfortable with keeping to herself what she’d seen. She might yet crack and start shouting that in their midst there was a freak, a danger to them all, a creature that had to be thrown off the bus and shot down on the side of the road…

  …an alien among them.

  Ethan steadied himself. They passed a few wrecked cars and a bread truck that had turned onto its side. Something crunched under the tires, and Ethan wondered if Hannah had just run them over a skeleton or two the Gray Men had left behind.

  Denver lay ahead. So also did White Mansion Mountain. The boy who had been raised from the dead and was no longer fully human felt the pull of that place on him, never ceasing and growing more urgent.

  An answer was there, he thought. But it was not the answer. And why he knew this to be so he had no idea, but there it was like a flash of light in his mind. An answer was at White Mansion Mountain, but there too, were more questions.

  But first Denver, as dark began to fall and somewhere out there the Gray Men stirred, hungry for the meat of pilgrims searching for a place of peace.

  Hannah turned on the headlights. The one on the left side failed to illuminate.

  “Figures,” she muttered.

  The bus went on into the falling dark, tires occasionally crushing bones that lay scattered on the cracked pavement like ancient runes pointing the way to the heart of the mystery.

  THREE.

  LIFE DURING

  WARTIME

  SEVENTEEN.

  STEERING THE ONE-EYED BUS THROUGH THE DEBRIS SCATTERED along I-25 was no easy task, even for a driver who’d once gotten a wad of bubble gum pushed into her hair while at the wheel and another time had a kid throw oatmeal up in her lap on a rainy Monday morning. Beyond the reach of the single headlight was dark upon dark. Occasionally the shape of a wrecked and burned car loomed up, and there were many skeletons or parts of skeletons, but Hannah Grimes kept her nerves steady and the bus moving forward at about ten miles an hour. The slow speed saved their lives when the light fell upon a black-edged crater burned into the pavement. Hannah said “Shit,” under her breath and deftly got them onto the median and past the danger. She had switched on the interior safety lights, which cast a yellow glow upon her passengers.

  Dave McKane was standing watch over the three new arrivals. He didn’t like the smell of them. He didn’t like the cardiologist who talked like a car salesman, having a smooth and quick answer for every question. He didn’t like the little bald Ratcoff, who was sweating and nervous and looked to be in utter torment, and he didn’t like Jack Dope, who stood like a statue and stared ahead into the darkness with that weird double-and-triple blinking he was doing. That guy looked to Dave to be a basket case in the offering, somebody who might go berserk and start flailing at the people around him. Dave almost hoped he would so he could cold-cock the freak into the next century. But that wouldn’t happen, because he was so tired he was near collapse.

  “We ought to be seeing Denver by now,” Hannah announced. “If there were any lights, I mean.”

  Ahead lay only the night and on the pavement in front of the bus a ribcage and a skull that Hannah could not avoid. It popped like a gunshot under the right front tire.

  Jefferson Jericho had not prepared himself for this. All these human remains that littered the highway…most of them not complete skeletons, but scattered by…what? Animals that came out of their lairs to feast on the fallen? Yes, that had to be it. He stared ahead into the dark where the city of Denver should be, and he fully realized now what the Gorgons had shielded him and the residents of New Eden from. This hideous reality was nearly more than the human spirit could bear, it buckled the knees with its brutality and hopelessness. He found himself wanting to get back to New Eden, to the running water and the electricity and the false sun and everything else that might be false but was at least a comfort and a shelter. Even back to Regina’s hatred, because he thought that someday—after this war had ended—she would come around again, and understand that he was only using the gifts God had given him.

  He remembered what his harlot starlet had said in that false French bedroom: We have given you much, my Jefferson. Much. And much given can be much taken away.

  He shivered. Dear Jesus, he thought as the bus moved on into the endless night. I couldn’t survive out here in this world.

  So the boy must be taken. Whatever the boy was and whatever power he possessed, he must be taken and the sooner the better.

  Jefferson realized Vope had turned his head slightly to gaze upon him, reading the thoughts as they crashed between the walls of a fearful mind. Was there the hint of an arrogant smile upon the Gorgon’s mouth, or was it Jefferson’s imagination? Did Vope even know how to smile?

  Whatever. It was gone now, and Vope looked away from him.

  Behind Dave and Olivia, in the middle of the crowded bus, Ethan had come to the conclusion that he had to do something. He could not wait for the three men to strike, because that was the feeling he was getting: a poisonous snake about to strike from the depth of shadows. And just like that he knew: one of them is a Gorgon, hiding in human form.

  Everyone in the bus was in danger. He had to do something, and he had to do it now.

  He started pushing his way forward. “Sorry,” he said. “Excuse me. Can I get past, please? Sorry…sorry…”

  And on between the survivors of Panther Ridge until he reached Dave and Olivia, and then he saw the three men standing at the front of the bus facing toward the blacked-out city, and slowly one of the men turned his head and a pair of small dark eyes like pieces of flint above a black beard caught and held him, and Ethan knew the enemy on sight.

  “Dave?” Ethan said.

  “What is it?” Dave asked, a note of tension in his voice because he could hear the tension in the boy’s.

  The Gorgon stared at him, and suddenly one of the other men turned to also take Ethan in. This man had unruly brown hair and a growth of brown beard, and he was dirty and haggard-looking, but Ethan thought there was something about his face that was too soft, too handsome, to have fully known the hardships of life during wartime. He looked like he, too, was cloaked in a disguise. But this man was human…as was the third man, with the bald and sweating head…and yet…

  “What’s wrong?” Olivia asked, when Ethan didn’t reply to Dave’s question.

  The human with the brown beard had a look of recognition in his eyes. His face was frozen for a few seconds, and then he smiled like the parting of clouds before the sun.
“Hi there,” he said. “What’s your name?”

  “Big effing crater ahead,” Hannah announced loudly. “I’m dodgin’ it. Everybody hang on!”

  The bus veered to the right. The light revealed a UPS tractor-trailer truck that had crashed through the railing on the right lane, and as Hannah gritted her teeth and steered for safety the bus scraped along the rear of the UPS trailer with a ragged shriek of distressed metal. A few people cried out in alarm, if they had the energy to do so, and Hannah called back, “Hush up, you babies!”

  “You want to come up front?” Jefferson Jericho asked Ethan. Here is the boy, he knew. Nothing particularly special about him…or was there? “Come on, then!” He beckoned with the fingers of an upraised hand, though the hand trembled just a bit with frightened anticipation of what might happen.

  “Don’t talk to him,” Dave told the man. “He doesn’t know you, and you don’t know him. Just don’t.”

  “I thought he might want to come up here where he can breathe better. It looks mighty tight back there.”

  “He can breathe fine. What do you want, Ethan?”

  Ethan, Jefferson thought. His eyes narrowed. Come on, Ethan, let me get my hands on you.

  The Gorgon was staring at Ethan again. The creature blinked rapidly…one two three…and again…one two three. Ethan felt a shock…something like cold fingers reaching into his brain and trying to rummage through it as a burglar might rummage through drawers in a search for valuables.

  I won’t let you go there, he thought, and instantly something like a metallic wall of tight bricks appeared in his mind, and though he could still feel the fingers scrabbling at the bricks, trying to find a weak place, the Gorgon was unable to reach in and pluck out what he wanted.

  Ethan found he could give his attention to Dave, formulate thoughts, and the wall of bricks remained solid. The fingers were getting more insistent, and stronger and stronger, but they could not break through.