T. Boyle - The Harder They Come

On this day, though, the present-time Colter was hungry, though maybe nowhere near in the same ballpark as what the original must have experienced on that second trek back out of the wilderness, and he went off to see what he could find. He’d put out snares for rabbits, but for some reason he’d been unsuccessful in nailing any, and then he became paranoid about the traps themselves, thinking that maybe the hostiles had found them and were waiting there for him, turning a trap into a trap. Striking out in a new direction, away from town, away from where the cabins and regular houses too sprouted up along the back roads, he went east, paralleling Route 20 but giving it a good wide berth. He wasn’t thinking of Sara, or not especially — it would be suicidal to try to get to her house — but just of seeing what was what out there, like maybe running across a daytime house on the outskirts of Willits where there was nobody home because they were at work or something like that. A place where they didn’t have any dogs. Or neighbors. Or alarms. A place where maybe they’d left a window open or a door unlocked. A garage even. A lot of people kept second refrigerators in their garages. Tools. Sometimes even guns, not that he needed another weapon, but if one came to hand — and a few rounds with it — why not?

He was beyond the noise now, beyond the helicopters and the squawk and squelch, legging uphill, up and up, nothing but trees around him and once in a while a meadow where there’d once been a clear-cut, but he skirted the meadows for tactical reasons. No sense in taking chances when all he was doing was taking chances because you had to be smart if you were going to be a one-man army. Like Colter. But these trees with the slivers of light caught up there in the tops of them like shining silver blades, they were the real thing, the thing that endures, and they’d been here long before Colter had gone into Yellowstone and if the aliens didn’t get to them they’d be here long after everybody alive now was dead. His father. His mother. Sara, with her big tits. He saw those trees — maybe he’d been in this spot before, maybe not — and just stopped and looked up into them for so long he began to go outside of himself again so that the wheel slowed and there was no hurry and hassle and paranoia, no state of war, only wonder at how they could be and how they could pull down deep and hold all these mountains together, because they were the beginning of it all, weren’t they? Or close enough.

What snapped him out of it wasn’t a noise, but something else, and not his sixth sense either because there were no hostiles anywhere near him. It was the kind of thing that happens when you’re dreaming awake and then come awake again, two textures, two worlds, slipping against each other like the plates that were one day going to slide this whole mountain range back into the ocean. Whatever it was, it made him feel refreshed suddenly, as if he’d been humping up a mountain peak in the Andes and been lifted off the snowfield and set down on the beach under a full warm tilting sun. He shook his head, tugged at the strap of his pack, and started off again.

It might have been another hour (again, time didn’t matter, not out here) and he figured he’d covered at least half the distance to Sara’s, not that he was seriously considering showing up there, but just by way of figuring. That was when he came across what at first looked to be a natural clearing where maybe a couple of the giants had fallen and the understory had taken over, but which turned out to be something entirely different. It was a clearing, all right, but it had been made by humans — and not loggers, but growers. Suddenly all his senses were on alert. He’d been playing cat and mouse with the hostiles and their dogs and here he was just about to blunder into some cartel’s plantation. They were outlaws too but they weren’t mountain men. Not even close. They were campesinos maybe, farmers, or maybe just punks recruited to suffer a little downtime in the wild. They didn’t like the hills or the trees or anything that scampered or swam or walked and breathed out here. They were scum. Booby-trappers. And they’d shoot you as soon as look at you, a whole new kind of hostile and they were worse than the Blackfeet because they didn’t know the land and only wanted to rape it. For profit. Profit only.

The voice again, the one deep inside: Skirt it. Get out . But the wheel was spinning and the other voice was saying, Fuck them. Because they can die too . For a long while, he drifted from cover to cover on the fringes of the clearing, glassing the place, looking for movement. There was none. Not so much as a bird or squirrel. In fact, as he was coming to realize, this was an abandoned operation, already harvested, the land poisoned and the garbage piled high, an irregular plot that was just dead now, a dead zone, and it wasn’t ever going to come back.

How did he feel about that? He felt that life was shit and more shit. He felt that aliens were aliens, no matter where you found them. He just wished he’d found them earlier, right in the act, so the Norinco could have had something to say about it.

THE COPS MIGHT HAVE been thick as locusts — or cockroaches, thick as cockroaches — but their ranks thinned out considerably the higher he climbed. He came up out of the dead zone shaking his head in disgust, all that crap, all that waste, poisons and pesticides and every can and wrapper of every bite they’d taken just screaming there where they’d dropped it and not even burned up in a fire ring, which even the Boy Scouts would have employed, a new tribe of hostiles up here and what were the cops and the fly fishermen and the Sierra Club nerds going to do about them ? It was getting dark, dark below already, but the light lingering here toward the crest. Double time, hut one, hut two. He moved like a spirit, moved like Colter, and the only thing that worried him now was the drones because you had no defense against drones. They were up there, way up there, alien spacecraft, Made in China, and before you suspected anything you were just meat. But still, you had to look on the bright side, and the bright side was this: it was a whole lot easier to use drones on ragheads out in the treeless desert than it was here, where the BIGGEST LIVING THINGS ON EARTH threw up their branches to shelter everything beneath. Everything that wasn’t already dead and poisoned, that is.

It was full dark by the time he reached the field across from her house because that was where he was going whether he wanted to admit it or not and he spent a whole lot of time there on his belly, glassing everything, and it was just like that night when they’d come to get her personal things because the aliens wouldn’t let them come in daylight. He felt sick still, but he chalked that up to the fact that he was hungry, starving really, just like Colter coming up naked and filthy and sore-footed on Fort Lisa. She’d make him pasta, that was what he was thinking, and then he’d fuck her in the dark and sleep in her bed and have a shower and be gone before the sun came up. The problem was the aliens. They might have thinned out their ranks way up here on the outskirts of Willits, but there was that patrol car parked up on the shoulder of the road under cover of a big flat-topped bush, and who did they think they were fooling? Willits Police. The County Sheriff. SWAT and swat again. He could have picked them off without even trying, putting two neat holes in the windshield, one on each side, just over the dash, two rounds and done with it. But he didn’t want that. He wanted Sara.

So what he did was wait while everything alive spoke to him from the deep grass and the bushes and the hollows in the dirt. Crickets. And scorpions too, rustling around in their hard shiny shells, looking for something to paralyze with that big stinger so they could have some food to put in their stomachs, same as anything else. After a while, and they were talking their many languages, he could begin to understand them, to hear them clearly, and what were they saying? They were saying Make War, Not Love . Because they were at war down there too, war that began the minute they hatched from their eggs or crawled out of their mother’s body, eat or be eaten and then go ahead and sing about it. Spiders there too, the big quick wolf spiders that made their meal of anything they could catch and overpower. And what if one of them climbed up the inside of his pantleg and bit him? What if a scorpion lanced him with that wicked stinger? He’d enjoy it. He’d welcome it. At least it would wake him up because he’d been here now, flat out on his belly, for the whole of his life.