The Border

by Robert McCammon

  Once more the squares turned white. The upper symbols altered themselves to the representation of Nearest Distance, which would be the time in hours and minutes.

  Ethan recalled JayDee saying I remember the time exactly. It was eighteen minutes after ten.

  That was when John Douglas had been alerted by a nurse to watch the explosions in the sky on the television newscasts and the Gorgon ships were beginning their ominous arrival around the planet. Ethan decided to input the time as ten o’clock, 1111101000 in binary code. The timepiece was aligned to the S-4 installation’s twenty-four-hour clock and would correctly read that number as morning and not night.

  “When I enter this,” he told them, “the process will start. I don’t know what it will feel like to you. I do know I’ll have no more need for this body, and I’ll release it. Are you ready?”

  “Ready,” said the President. His facial tic had stopped, but a muscle worked in his jaw.

  “I am,” Jefferson said. He was glassy-eyed. “Christ…I hope this does what you say it will.”

  Foggy Winslett nodded.

  “Yes,” Derryman said.

  Ethan looked at Olivia. “Are you ready?”

  She stared down at Dave and then she lifted her weary, shocked eyes to his. “Will…everyone who died…will they be alive again?”

  “That’s the plan,” he answered.

  “Vincent,” she said, “and Dave too. All of them.” The tears crept down her cheeks. “Oh, my God.”

  “I’m going to finish this.” He sensed activity beyond the steel door. “Goodbye, Olivia,” he said, and he wanted to hug her and thank her for all she had done but the river of time was moving. He quickly reached out to the cube in Jefferson’s hand to input the final code.

  He had entered seven digits when the enemy came.

  Before Ethan could react, two Cypher energy spheres tore into the room through the door. One hit Derryman in its passage, blasting away most of the upper part of his body. Derryman’s legs and lower torso staggered and the single remaining arm reached around as if searching for its missing parts, the rags of its suit jacket on fire. The next two spheres blew the mangled door inward along with much of the wall. The slab of steel and chunks of broken concrete edged with fire hurtled into the room. A shockwave took everyone off their feet and the sheet of plate-glass shattered. Jefferson went down as a fist-sized piece of concrete broke his collarbone on the right side. The cube fell to a floor that was suddenly littered with flaming debris.

  Ethan was on his knees. Blood streamed from a gash above his left eye, and a small fragment of concrete had scorched a streak across his left cheek. His broken arm had come out of its sling and hung uselessly. The pain that thrummed through him was nearly paralyzing. He was stunned, just on the edge of losing consciousness. He made out a figure striding through the ragged opening: a single Cypher soldier, its blaster ready for another burst of double fire. He recognized the small red glyph of an honored killing machine etched on the lower right slope of the faceplate; this was the soldier that had executed Bennett Jackson.

  Deathbringer’s circuits worked. The soldier was aware of its primary target ahead and slightly to the left, in a posture of helplessness though that was deceiving. But there was something else of importance here; it gave off an electrical vibration Deathbringer had never before experienced. This object was shaped like a cube and was lying near the primary target. The object bore two illuminated squares. In an instant Deathbringer’s schematics identified this object as an unknown threat to be destroyed, and the Cypher soldier altered the aim of its blaster to burn this cube into melted ruin.

  A piece of concrete hit Deathbringer’s faceplate and caused a second’s disruption.

  “No,” the President gasped from where he’d pulled himself up from the rubble, half of his face a mask of blood. Ethan felt something else enter the room. It was behind him. It was cold, deadly, and unspeakable.

  The Cypher soldier felt it too and swiveled to take aim with its energy weapon, but before that could happen a spear of liquid was already in the air and had passed over the peacekeeper.

  Deathbringer began to vibrate out. It was quick, but this time it was not quick enough. The liquid splattered across its faceplate and instantly started burning through it. The vibration ceased; the Cypher ghosted back in, and as the acid melted through the faceplate material and destroyed the underlying schematics and life directives, the soldier’s body began to writhe and twist as if to tear itself to pieces. The blaster fired as the trigger finger convulsed. A pair of burning spheres shot between Ethan and Jefferson and smashed into the operating room’s equipment. The soldier twisted in two directions as if upper and lower parts of its body were coming unscrewed in the middle. The energy weapon fired again, and the spheres tore through the wall behind Olivia, who clung to the floor and to the tattered remnants of her sanity.

  As Deathbringer spun and convulsed and the acid ate its lifeforce away, Ethan turned his head and caught sight of what stood behind him.

  It was only a brief glimpse before it changed into the image of a human woman with long, lank brown hair and sad eyes in a face that used to be pretty. She wore jeans and a white blouse edged with pink around the collar. An instant before the illusion was created, the creature had been a nightmare thing whose scaly yellow flesh was banded with black and red. It had worn a shapeless, leathery black gown, and the scarlet pupils of the unblinking eyes were both repulsive and hypnotic.

  The sad-eyed woman spoke.

  “My Jefferson,” she said, with a Southern accent. “Betrayed his lover. Such a bad boy.”

  Jefferson saw Regina standing there, but he knew what this really was and so did the peacekeeper. A pulsing pain began at the back of Jefferson’s neck; in another heartbeat it had grown to a force that squeezed the tears of agony from his swollen eyes. He thought it was about to blow his head off.

  “You,” said the Gorgon queen. Her gaze shifted to Ethan. “Caused us concern. What are you?”

  Ethan was barely able to answer. There was blood in his mouth, his lungs were hitching for breath and this body was all but done.

  “Not your toy,” he managed to whisper. “Your master.”

  She smiled faintly and with great contempt.

  But her smile faltered when four more Cypher soldiers came through the broken wall, and the peacekeeper knew it was his moment.

  The cube was within reach. There were three digits of the binary code to enter: three zeroes. The illuminated squares were on top of the cube; they were always on top, no matter how the cube lay.

  He reached out and was able to enter two zeroes before the queen realized that what he was doing was a threat. The face rippled, and the mask fell away like a shimmering mirage. Revealed there was the hideous, cobra-like visage that could freeze the heart of any human, and as Jefferson Jericho’s head pulsed toward explosion and the Cypher soldiers aimed their energy weapons, the queen of the Gorgons hissed a stream of acid from her fanged mouth, flying at the face of the boy who defied her.

  The peacekeeper entered the final digit as acid splattered across the forehead, nose and into the silver eyes.

  He saw the squares turn red before his eyes were burned out.

  He burst free from the ruined body, a being of total energy like a writhing electrical storm that shot out bolts of lightning in all directions and grew larger to fill the room, the level, the entire installation, the sky from horizon to horizon, and to envelop the entirety of the embattled planet Earth.

  The walls of reality warped.

  Holes began to break through the construction that separated the Present and the Past. Olivia had the sensation of her body no longer on the floor of this destroyed room. It seemed to her that her body had not moved, but the room itself had suddenly fallen away. She was drifting in a twilight world where unrecognizable shapes and images rushed past her, and their motion caused her to spin as if all gravity had ceased to exist. She was on a Tilt-A-Whirl at a carnival, s
pinning so fast she couldn’t catch her breath, and she wanted someone to stop it…stop it please…but it didn’t stop, and she tried to cry out, but her voice was gone, everything had become a gray blur, and all sounds were muffled thunder.

  She spun and spun and spun, and she thought she would sue someone when this was over, she would sue the owners and Vincent would help her, because nobody could stand this, she couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t speak, it wasn’t right that someone didn’t stop this, no human could bear it, and as strange and horrible pictures tumbled through her mind she feared for her sanity, and she thought in panic God help me I’m coming apart…

  THIRTY-FIVE.

  HE WAS WORKING ON THE WOODEN FENCE ON THE WESTERN EDGE of his property that the March wind had gnawed down last week. He wore his dark blue baseball cap, old comfortable jeans, a brown t-shirt, and a tan-colored jacket. In like a lamb, out like a lion, he thought. It had been one hell of a lion this—

  And then Dave McKane staggered and dropped his hammer, because something terrible was coming. He looked at his wristwatch, a gift from Cheryl on their tenth anniversary. It was one minute after ten. Something was coming from the sky. It was crazy, yeah…crazy…because the sky was cloudless and blue and the sun was warming up and…

  Something was coming.

  He ran for the house, calling his wife’s name. He ran past the pickup truck and the camper, which for some strange reason he envisioned scorched with flame and sitting on four melted tires. He was losing his mind. Right out of the blue, on a beautiful day, he was going insane.

  “Dave! What’s wrong with you?” Cheryl said when he burst like a wild man through the screened door and took it off its hinges on his way into the kitchen. He tossed it aside. He was all nerves, had the shakes, needed a drink, a cigarette, wow was he screwed up. Thank Christ the boys were in school, they couldn’t see their old man the bad-ass scared shitless because he was, and that was God’s truth.

  “Dave? Dave?” Cheryl, a small-boned woman who had the biggest heart Dave had ever known, followed her husband through the house to the front room. He kept checking his watch, but he wasn’t sure why. He picked up the remote control, dropped it, fumbled to pick it up again, and turned on the flatscreen.

  “What is wrong with you?” she asked. “You’re actin’ crazy!”

  “Uh-huh.” He turned the channel to CNN. The newscaster was talking about a protest movement in Washington, a few thousand people had gathered who wanted to go to a flat tax, and spokesmen for both parties were saying they liked that idea, but Dave knew they were lying, both parties were full of liars who didn’t care about anything but their own wallets and their grip on power, they were fighting all the time and it was an endless war with the citizens caught in the middle. “Wait,” he told Cheryl, and he checked the Bulova again. “Just wait.”

  He changed the channel to Fox News. Over there two men and a woman were arguing that the President shouldn’t go on his European trip with all these problems at home, he was shirking his duty to the American people, he was pandering to Europe, he was a Missouri Democrat who didn’t know the meaning of responsibility, he was weak-willed and anyway his wife was no Jackie Kennedy, Laura Bush, or for that matter no Michelle Obama. Then they ended with laughter over the statement that Beale had better get ready for a “Repeal” and they went on to the stock market reports from Indonesia.

  Dave turned back to CNN. The timestamp on the network said it was 10:09. His watch was one minute slow. Now the newscaster had gone on to a report of an American cargo ship being threatened by Somalian pirates last night but they’d been turned away by a patrol boat.

  “Lordy!” Cheryl said. “What’s so important about watching the news today?”

  “Something’s coming,” he told her before he could stop it from getting out.

  “What?”

  “Coming from the sky. Listen…I don’t know…I feel messed up.”

  “You’re scaring me,” she said. “Cut it out.”

  He lit a cigarette with his Bic and drew it in as if it were the last smoke he would have in this world.

  “What happened out there? Dave, talk to me!” She put her arm around his shoulders and found he was trembling, which really put the fear in her. Her husband wasn’t scared of anything, he would fight the Devil if he thought it was right. But now…

  “This is the third of April?” he asked.

  “You know it is! Your birthday is in two weeks, you’ve been—”

  “Wait.” Dave blew smoke through his nostrils. “Wait and watch.”

  She waited, her heart pounding and her arm around the trembling shoulders. He made a soft noise like a cry down deep in his soul, and that sound almost put her on the cell phone for an ambulance because she had never, ever seen him like this before.

  Another long and terrible minute went past, during which Dave smoked in silence and Cheryl said nothing.

  The CNN newscaster then began to talk to a specialist in the housing market about mortgage rates and such, and what would happen if this or that took place and how people were going to cope.

  “I don’t know what we’re supposed to be waiting for,” Cheryl said.

  Dave rubbed a hand across his forehead. Bits and pieces were coming back; it was like a big jigsaw puzzle of memories in his head, and some slid right in but some wouldn’t fit. He wanted to throw up because his stomach roiled, but he was afraid to leave the TV.

  That portion of the news ended, and the newscaster turned to the anti-government protests in Bangkok that had started last week and had so far caused three deaths and twelve injuries in clashes between protesters and police. A young man with slicked-back black hair and wearing studious-looking glasses came on; it was night, with a few lights burning behind him. Dave didn’t know how many hours Thailand was ahead of Colorado but he figured it had to be nearly the next day over there.

  The young man was asked the question, “What’s the situation there tonight, Craig?”

  Craig started to speak into his microphone but then stopped; his face was pale and his eyes were both dazed and terrified behind the glasses. He looked up toward the sky and then back to the camera, and suddenly there was a noise like two or three sonic booms overlapping each other, and Craig threw up a hand as if to shield his face from some horrible sight. “Oh Jesus, oh Jesus!” he cried out, nearly sobbing, and he lurched from the scene as the camera turned from him to scan the sky. At first there was nothing in the sky but darkness. The camera searched back and forth, enough to make any viewer ill with motion sickness. It found the half moon and what appeared to be the lights of a passing jetliner.

  “We’re having a situation there, evidently,” the newscaster said over the visual, his voice tight but measured and calm in the way that all newscasters must sound to ease the fears of their audience. “Some kind of situation. We may have just heard a bomb explosion. Craig, are you there? Craig?”

  The camera jiggled back and forth, turning the nighttime lights into blurry ribbons of color. It picked out Thai people on the street, some standing in groups talking, others walking around as if just waking up from a bad dream. A man who appeared to be wearing a sleep robe suddenly ran past the camera hollering and shrieking with his hands in the air.

  Craig was back on-camera. “Jim?” he said. He spoke with a British accent. A lock of black hair had come free and hung over one eye. “Jim, can you hear me?”

  “We can hear you, go ahead.”

  “This is crazy,” Cheryl said, and Dave drew hard on his cigarette again.

  “They didn’t come!” Craig sounded choked. “Jim, they didn’t come!”

  “I’m sorry, I’m not getting that! What?”

  “They didn’t come!” Craig repeated, and now he had begun to weep. “Oh Christ…Jesus…they didn’t come…like they did last time, and I was standing right here…right here, the very same. I heard the noise, but they didn’t come!”

  Ethan, Dave thought. The peacekeeper. The alien timepiece at th
e S-4 installation. It worked. And he said he would keep the Gorgons from coming through, and if they didn’t come neither would the Cyphers.

  “Jim, don’t you remember?” Craig called out. Behind him a car rocketed along the street, its driver wildly honking the horn.

  The scene went to black.

  It stayed that way for maybe six seconds.

  Then Jim the CNN newscaster came back on, and he was talking to someone off to the right but there was no sound. He shrugged and made a gesture with his arms that said I have no damned idea what’s wrong with Craig, and then the network went to a commercial for SafeLite autoglass repair.

  Dave looked at his wife through the screen of cigarette smoke. A little worry line between her eyes seemed to be a mile deep. He was about to ask her if she remembered any of it but of course she didn’t, because if she had she would’ve known that time had been reeled back, they’d been given a second chance, and the Gorgons weren’t coming. Maybe they were trying to get through, and that’s what caused the noise over Bangkok, but they were hitting the protective web the peacekeeper had created. Dave checked his watch. It was 10:17. They weren’t coming, because by this time on that morning of April third, he and Cheryl had been standing here watching the first amateur videos of the Gorgon ships sliding through the blasts, and then Cheryl had said Dear God we’ve got to go get the boys.

  Cheryl’s cell chimed. “It’s the school,” she said, and she answered it.

  Dave turned to Fox News. “…a little confused here,” said the blonde woman who sat at the desk between the two men. She was holding an earpiece in her ear with one finger, trying to get information and relay it as quickly as possible. “Okay…what we’re getting is…”

  “We’ve got to get to the school right now,” Cheryl said. She was already going for her jacket and purse.

  “What is it, baby?”

  “It’s Mike. That was Mrs. Serling in the office. Mike’s crying, he’s having some kind of fit. He’s begging to come home. Dave, what’s happening?”