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.
And then some alien shut the lights out in the house up the hill from hers and the dark rushed in to fill the void and he was crawling, his weapon at the ready, crawling all the way across that field like he was in ambush training, like he was his father in Vietnam, inch by inch and nothing for anybody to see because he was invisible. Even from the drones. He had to rise to a running crouch when he crossed the road because he couldn’t risk lingering there where some car might come along with its lights and tires and three thousand pounds of steel and glass and plastic that no thing made out of flesh could resist. A car. People drove cars. He used to drive a car. But now he was in the fringe of bushes that separated her house from the house of the aliens on the hill, back to the belly, back to the crawl, and of course there was a window open in the bedroom, coolish night or not, because she liked to feel the fresh air on her face when she went to bed.
She was sitting in front of the TV. The TV flickered like gunfire. The dog, Rasta dog, cool dog, just lay wrapped up in dog oblivion, hear no evil, smell none either. “Turn out the lights,” he said.
“Adam,” she said.
“Do it,” he said.
And then there was a whole lot of discussion, but he didn’t want discussion, he wanted spaghetti and meatballs, he wanted 151, he wanted her, her big tits, her wet cunt, wanted a shower, wanted bed, wanted surcease. Or a treaty. At least for tonight. “I want to sleep with you,” he said. She said no. She said she was going to call the police if he didn’t get out. All that made him feel very weary, weary and depressed, and where was the person he used to be, the one who humped planting soil and good rich guano out to his plantation with nothing more than a good strong back, who had a grandmother and a life and built walls and one-upped the hostiles everywhere he went?
“You’re not going to call the police,” he said.
“I am. I swear I am.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Just try me.”
He tried her.
She didn’t call.
What she did was give him a look that brought out all the lines in her face because she was old, never forget that, and then she got up and flicked off the sound on the TV, though the images still jumped and shifted there on the screen till he had a moment when he couldn’t really tell what was the TV and what was the room. With her in it. And the stove. And the dog. Then she came over and took his hand, her touch there, softest thing, and led him into the kitchen. What she said was, “Right after you eat, you promise me, you’re out of here.”