The Harder They Come

36

THE COTTONWOOD TREES ALONG the river waved like flags, their leaves struck yellow and flapping in the breeze that came down out of the north, not much to look at really, but to Colter, running, it was the most beautiful sight he’d ever seen. He was bloodied, his feet were like pincushions and his legs were growing heavier, and yet with each stride he was closer to making it out of this alive. He was within sight of the river now and the Indians were somewhere behind him. Hooting. Cursing. Running as fast as their legs could carry them, reinvigorated by hate and the thirst for revenge. If before this was all a kind of game to them, now it had gotten personal.

Colter never broke stride, the dried-out scrub giving way to the denser vegetation of the riverbank, to dogwood, sumac, wild grape and the shining coppery leaves of poison ivy, then to the weeds and sedges taking root in the sandbars, then to damp earth, then to mud, and in the next moment he was launching himself into the water in a knifing fluid dive. It was a shock. The water, snowmelt from the big blunt mountains above, was like liquid ice, but Colter was generating his own kind of heat, beating across the river to an island that had been pushed up out of the current in a time of flood. There was a huge raft of uprooted trees there, hundreds of them, the whole interlarded with smaller debris, and that was what he was making for. And what was he thinking, his brain fueled by the adrenaline of the chase that was like cocaine running through his veins? He was thinking that if he could get to that heap of debris before the Indians appeared on the bank, he could find a place somewhere in the water beneath it to hide himself. Of course, that was a big if, because he could hear them shrieking now, pounding closer, sure they would find him floundering in some backwater where he’d be as easy to spear as a buffalo fish.

He was almost there, the thatch of logs taking on color and dimension, the bark slick and black, branches splintered and trailing in the water and the water dark and swift where it fought to pull the whole mess back out into the river. Snatching a breath, he plunged under, gliding like a beaver, but this was no beaver lodge and he couldn’t find a place to surface and breathe. Desperate, his lungs burning, he had no choice but to back out and thrust his head up again even as his eyes raked the shore: if they saw him, he was doomed. No one there yet. But here they came, hooting, hooting. He took the deepest breath he could hold and went back down again, feeling along the bottom of the pile for a gap, a hole, a crevice, and still nothing. Were his lungs bursting? Yes, yes, they were, but he kept on, his hands frantically digging at the debris, ready to drown rather than give himself up, but he was Colter and he was legendary and to be legendary you had to be lucky too. And he was. At the last possible moment, when he was about to give up and fill his lungs with another medium altogether, the medium only fish could make use of, not humans, he found an air pocket and surfaced.

He was too worked up to feel the terrible life-sucking chill of that water yet and because he was Colter and because he’d escaped, at least for the moment, he couldn’t help smiling to himself there in that dark hole where the water-run thatch filtered the light and held him in tenuous suspension. Their voices came to him then, the war whoops giving way to a querulous snarl of disbelief as they came to the deserted bank and saw that their quarry had eluded them, and though he couldn’t fully understand what they were saying, there was a lot of blame being thrown around, a lot of contention. Some of the braves, judging from the direction of their voices, had already started down the bank, poking through the reeds, searching the shallows, straining their eyes to see the glistening ball of his head bobbing with the current so they could draw a bead on it and put an arrow through one ear and out the other. Let them go. That was fine with him. He smiled wider.

But then he froze. There was a noise above him, a heavy footfall, voices. Two, three, four of them had apparently swum across to the island and they were probing the raft, tearing at branches now, thrusting their spears into the gaps and all the while jabbering and arguing with each other, probably along the lines of You shithead and I told you so. That was a hard moment. Colter never made a sound, even when a spear thrust came within a foot of him. He barely even breathed. What he was thinking was that one of them would get in the water and start searching the underside of the pile, same as he had, and his mind started playing tricks with him, the water itself, the very branches, feeling like the skin of an enemy come to discover him. But no enemy discovered him and a good thing too because that brave, though he might have sent up the alarm, would have been throttled and drowned in a heartbeat.

All right. But Colter was shivering now and they didn’t seem to be moving on. They kept jabbering and arguing and tugging at one log or another, and that was when a new thought entered his head: What if they set fire to the raft? Wasn’t that the way to flush out a rat? He’d die of smoke inhalation before the flames even got to him because he wasn’t going to move no matter what — he’d rather go that way, rather burn if it came to it, than give them the satisfaction of flushing him out so they could spear him like a muskrat. That water was cold. Cold enough to induce hyperventilation. Cold enough to kill. And they weren’t going away. On the positive side, though, they didn’t seem inclined to come into the water and get underneath the thing — and they didn’t seem to want to bother setting fire to the whole business. Or maybe they just didn’t think of it, maybe that was it.

Three hours. That was how long Colter stayed under that raft. Eventually the braves treading overhead moved on to search the rest of the island and probe both banks going upstream and down, looking for the place where he would have left the water. They didn’t find that place, of course, because he hadn’t left the water and now night was coming on. How did Colter survive? Once they’d moved on and he calculated it was safe, he began to widen the crevice he’d found so that eventually he was able to raise his torso out of the water, though it took a feat of strength and determination to hold himself there till his muscles must have locked on him. Plus, he was still naked and still shivering and he had no sustenance of any kind or any way to get it.

When it was fully dark and he hadn’t heard a voice for as long as he could remember, Colter slipped out from beneath the debris — and what fortitude it must have taken to get back in that water, what toughness, what balls — and started downstream, careful to keep his hands beneath the surface so as to make as little noise as possible, to make no noise, to let the river carry him through a long looping mile till finally he could make his way out of the water and up the bank and hide himself in the bushes. Could he rest? Could he pluck the cactus spines out of his feet and wrap his feet in bark? Eat? Sleep? No, of course not. He had to run and keep running because they would be on his trail at first light.

37

HE LAUGHED TOO, SAME as Colter, because they might have squeezed him into a tight spot but he outwitted them and one-upped them royally — piss on them, really, just piss on them — because for all their swagger and body armor and big-time SWAT-team training they were just bloated Dorito-sucking Boy Scouts who sat around on their couches all day long with a remote in their hand while he double-timed it up the ravines and climbed sheer cliffs with only his boots and his fingernails just to show himself he could do it. And he could. And he did. All the time. So maybe they had the element of surprise when he was coming up that trail that cut across the logging road all the way down there where he’d tried to set up Camp 2 before the alien came slamming out of his car and lost his life for it and maybe he wasn’t as alert as he should have been because he was listening to a raven at that moment and having a real breakthrough like Doctor Dolittle because he could understand what it was saying and what it was saying was Meat here, meat, but it’s mine, mine, mine. Okay. So if he wasn’t exactly taken by surprise, he had to admit he was surprised to see the two cop vans there and the cops themselves hauling their crap out of the back and restraining their dog on a leash because the hostiles were massing and they might as well have been Blackfeet warriors for all it mattered to him.

One of them saw him, eye-to-eye, right there where the path cut across the road, not two hundred feet away. “Halt!” the alien shouted. “Drop your weapon!” And here were all the other aliens another hundred feet beyond that, clustered by the vans without even the most basic regard for tactical advantage or even protecting their rear, and they all swung their heads like elongated lizards in his direction. The raven fell silent. And a good thing too, because in the next instant the Norinco was doing the talking, and if he missed the alien that was his failure and he might have cursed himself for it but the alien missed him too, chukka chukka, the bark just flying off the trees.

Now it got good. Because he was gone like smoke, and not running from them the way they would have expected, but driving through the undergrowth on silent feet, hurtling really, almost flying as if he’d gotten inside the raven and mastered its spirit, and while they were all down on their bellies in the dirt of the road and training their weapons on the place he’d already vacated, he was moving into position behind them, and it was only the weird angle of the shot and the sun in his eyes that prevented another alien from biting the dust. It was that close. The initial burst must have passed right between two of them because he saw it slam into the van — pepper it, peppered van, peppered Potts — and the next burst chew up the dirt while they scrambled mad to cover their sorry asses. Okay. Okay. Time to suck it up and run like Colter. Which he did before they set the dog on him because he knew enough to understand how important it was to put distance between him and them before the dog got into the act.

He ran. And if he was wearing the smaller pack, the daypack, which didn’t really have all that much vital matériel in it — a bottle of gin he’d liberated from a cabin just that morning before dawn though he didn’t even like gin, plus some Hershey’s Kisses and.22 shells and whatnot — that was all to the good. It just meant he could go faster. It just meant that the full pack, the one with all his essentials, the lion’s share of his ammo, his razor, the packets of food and his two Colter paperbacks, was safe back at Camp 2, the real and actual Camp 2, not the aborted one, the camp they’d never find even if they had a whole pack of dogs. Which they didn’t. Anyway, he was running, and he’d probably gone a mile, more than a mile, before the dog came for him.

He was in a ravine, a cut sharp as a knife blade, the creek there shifting and shimmering and a whole lot of water-run debris scattered along its length like pick-up sticks, when here came the dog, humping fast and absolutely silent but maybe having trouble with the debris, with getting over and under and around the logs and the quick-grabbing branches, but a quadruped for all that and everybody knew that four legs were better than two. The fastest human alive, the Olympic champion, ran the hundred-meter sprint in just under ten seconds and a dog could do it in half that. Nobody could outrun a dog. Not even Colter. But what the aliens didn’t figure on here is that a human being is a whole lot smarter than a dog, even a big-shouldered fur-fanned thing like this Malinois coming up the ravine, and that a human being, if he’s trained and resourceful enough and can keep his head in a tight situation, can slam that dog in the face with his backpack and let the dog with his three-hundred-pound bite force take hold of that while the human being, with nothing other than his boots and fingernails, scales the cliff right here in front of him. And let’s see the dog do that. Let’s see him grow wings. Let’s see him race on back to the aliens with a backpack clenched in his jaws and find out whether they’re going to feed him his kibble for being such a good dog or just take him out and shoot him because he failed in his mission. Because he’s stupid. Because he’s a dog.

That was one day. The day the war started in true and earnest. And the next day, the very next day, he was fifteen miles to the south, on the other side of the Noyo, raiding cabins to get whatever he wanted, whether it was booze (no more gin, gin was shit) or canned peaches or toilet paper to wipe his ass with. The cops were nothing to him. They were clowns, fools, amateurs. And if one of those cabins had a security camera videotaping everything coming in and out the front door he didn’t rip it off its support and smash it with the butt of the Norinco, which he could easily have done and thought about doing too. Instead, he just brought his face right up to it and gave the camera a big shit-eating grin. Then he backed off a couple of feet, just to get things in proportion, and gave them the finger, two fingers, one on each hand, jabbing at the air in a long withering Fuck you!

Some nights passed. Days too. It might have rained. He kept going, every day, all day, and half the nights, and every time he circled back to Camp 2, the only camp left to him now since Art Tolleson and the Dog-Face had blown his cover at Camp 1, which was its own kind of disaster because he’d been weak and stupid and unprepared and had let the Dog-Face get away so it was absolutely one hundred percent certain the pigs had tramped in to confiscate his plants and his supplies and everything else he had there, he settled in beneath the camo tarp over his new and improved bunker and ate his meals cold and slept with real satisfaction. He could have used more drugs, though he had found and liberated a fat prescription bottle of medical marijuana (Pink Kush) from one of the cabins he’d broken into, so he was all right there, at least for the time being.

But what was it like? What was it like now, finally, to be running — or more to the point, what was it like in the dark, the dark absolute, in the nights that were getting longer and colder too and no recourse but to lie there huddled in the Boy Scout sleeping bag and see his grandmother hovering over him, see Sara with her big tits, see faces come out of the rain, people are strange, see Colter, see the Blackfeet in their paint, see his own self lift out of his body to drift over the whole continuous redwood forest and watch the hostiles scramble below in their vans and body armor with their dogs at their side and their weapons laid out like an armory? It was like peace. Like a kind of peace.

In a way it was like the scene at the Chinese consulate, or the scene he’d hoped for, anyway. He’d been suing for peace, that was what he’d been doing, but the Chinese were aliens and the aliens were the new hostiles and they saw it as an act of war. Unfortunately. Because when you’re fired upon, you fire back, don’t you? That was a no-brainer. Fight fire with fire, come out swinging and may the best man win. What he’d done was drive across the Golden Gate Bridge and into San Francisco where he’d been all those times with Cody and some of his other buds when they were still his buds, cruising North Beach, scoring drugs, watching totally nude women on a little stage shaking their big tits and not-so-big tits, eating what, pot stickers, Chinese dumplings, and washing it down with Tsingtao and that weird Chinese liquor that smelled like dirty underwear. This time he was alone. And it must have been before the playground thing because he still had his car then.

The idea he had was to make peace with them, the Chinese, so he could get them to divulge their secrets, which must have involved some kind of portal (okay, maybe he wasn’t thinking absolutely as clearly as the shrink with his meds would have wanted him to, and maybe it was kind of sci-fi, but then the whole slithering browned-out world was sci-fi, wasn’t it?). Plus, they were ninjas and he had a ninja suit he’d got as a kid for Halloween one year and he figured he’d return that to them, along with the Chinese Communist stars he’d made out of cardboard with red foil stretched over it, as a gesture. As a peace offering. If they took it, there was no need to go to war, no need to run naked across the plain. Save your spears. Save your war whoops. Lock up the pigs.

So what he did, late, very late, was drive around till he found a parking spot, which had to be in somebody’s driveway because that city goes to bed early and every parking spot on every street is gone and done by eleven o’clock and how anybody could live with that, with the crowding and shitting and the noise, was beyond anything he could imagine. He was dressed in black. He was wearing a black watchcap too and he’d used greasepaint under his eyes. The wall was a wall. And no, he wasn’t going to scale it, though he could have gone right up and over it as if it wasn’t even there at all. No need for that — and he was thinking clearly at that point — because who knew how they would take it. You didn’t just blow into a Blackfoot village and expect them to like it, especially if you weren’t an alien but just somebody interested in what, communication? He tossed the ninja suit (pajamas, really) and the stars over the wall, the stars in several places, all the way around, and that would have been it except they had their cameras going and before he knew it the pigs were there with their patrol cars and their guns drawn and Down on the ground and Show me your hands. So it wasn’t peaceful. And that, right there, went a long way to explaining how things had come to this pass, to war, all-out war. Take no prisoners. Or if you did, make sure you skinned them alive.

And then there was a day after a night when he’d seen and heard things he didn’t really like and the tarp over the bunker kept changing shape on him and it rained again and he woke up feeling sick, not giardia sick, but with something like what they called a general malaise, and wasn’t he an officer in the Union Army, General Malaise? That was what he used to joke to Cody when he was reading about the Union troops after the war who went out to take on the hostiles a whole lifetime after Colter was gone—Hey, he’d say, I’m General Malaise, who are you? It was a whole routine, something you could act out when you were stoned. And they were always stoned. At least in high school. After that, he was on his own, because Cody was away in college and he was living with his grandmother because his father was a pain in the ass and his mother was his mother.

He woke up sick. Time had gone by, days and days of it. There was rain and then there wasn’t rain. He’d run short of food and put himself on half rations, so maybe that was part of it, but sick or not, there was a war on and so he got up and had some cold hot cocoa and a pouch of some shit mixed with water, shouldered his pack and his rifle, and went out to reconnoiter. What he wanted to do was get a little farther afield and find another cabin to break into, like that day with the old lady, but the hostiles were everywhere now — you couldn’t go over a ridge and not hear their helicopters and walkie-talkies and sometimes even the barking of their dogs — and it was too dangerous, not strategic, not strategic at all. A voice told him to hump north, hump all night, every night, till he was fifty or even a hundred miles up the coast in a place where there were pristine cabins, cabins untouched since the part-timers and gray goats and summer people had left, where he could sleep and eat and shower to his heart’s content, but another voice told him that that was running and you couldn’t run forever. Even Colter, the greatest runner of them all, couldn’t run forever.

Colter came out of that river shivering so hard he thought he was going to fracture his ribs, but the way to conquer the cold was to run and so he ran. All that night he ran, knowing they’d be on his trail in the morning. They’d look for him along the river, obviously, but that wasn’t where they were going to find him. He made straight for the mountains, guided only by the stars that whitewashed the sky overhead till it got milky and gave way to dawn. How many miles he’d put between himself and his pursuers he couldn’t say, but he must have lain down then and slept in fits, expecting at any moment to hear their footfalls on the shingle that lay scattered over the slope like cast-off teeth. He was chilled through to the bone and so he found a place protected from the wind where he could hunker against a slab of rock and let the sun warm him, but of course this was problematic too, not only because every moment of delay was a moment they were potentially gaining on him, but because he had to add sunburn to all his other issues. His face and hands were like leather, but the rest of him had never seen the light of day, save on those rare occasions when he went into one creek or another for a wash. Colter gave himself fifteen minutes maybe, then pushed himself on, not yet realizing that the Blackfeet had never found his trail, which was a mercy because the more he drove himself, the sooner he got back to civilization and the better his chances of survival.

Which were slim. And for any other man, anybody other than Colter — or maybe Glass — wouldn’t have added up to anything more than zero. At any rate, Colter kept on, just as he had after he’d been wounded and left for dead by his so-called comrades, only this time he didn’t have his rifle or his knife or any means to make fire. Or even clothes. Clothes to protect him from the sun in the day and the cold at night. It was three hundred miles to Fort Lisa on the Big Horn. You could probably drive it in five hours today. But on foot, shoeless, facing into the wind, it took Colter eleven days of nearly continuous walking — and he paused only to dig up the roots of the plant known as prairie turnip or peel bark from a tree just to have something on his stomach — before he saw the palisades of the fort rising out of the plain like an assertion of might and right and well-being.

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.

38

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.”

This was funny, because that wasn’t what was going to happen and they both knew it, and so he started laughing then, or sniggering, actually. Through his nose.

“What?” she said. “What’s so funny?” And she was smiling for the first time since he’d walked into the room, her big soft lips spreading open across her teeth that were like polished stones in the weak light dropping out of the fixture recessed in the hood of the stove.

“First things first.”

“First things?”

“Or second things. First we eat, then we go into the bedroom.”

He might have fallen asleep. He did. He definitely did. Because she was there, shaking him awake, her voice drawn down to a whisper. “It’s quarter past four,” she said.

Black dark. Dog on the floor. Light from the clock.

“I washed your clothes.”

He didn’t say anything. And he didn’t want to get up out of that bed but he had to. First thing he did, after he got dressed and laced up his boots, was check the Norinco, eject the magazine and shove it home again. Then he shouldered the pack that had crackers in it, a loaf of bread, canned tuna, Campbell’s Chunky Chicken Corn Chowder, a bottle of red wine with a yellow fish on the label he’d go through in an hour. It was very still. The dog never stirred. And she was there, giving him a look in the gray ghosted light that was like a look of sorrow, as if she knew what was coming. He knew what was coming too. But he was a soldier. He was Colter. And when he went out the door he never looked back.

Yes. And this time he just humped across that road and that field on his two windmilling legs, no more belly-crawling for him, and if the aliens in that cruiser were awake and watching, he was ready, more than ready, to engage the enemy. But they weren’t awake and they weren’t watching. Maybe they weren’t even there. So what he had was freedom, back down into the cleft of that canyon, the light opening up around him and nobody and nothing to say where he could or couldn’t go. Maybe he would head north. Or maybe just go back to camp and wait them out. They were pussies, they were amateurs. Once winter came on, really came on, when it rained like the deluge, the original deluge that came after the original Adam, the somebody Adam, the legendary Adam, they’d forget all about him and go back to their TV remotes and their fat wives and their fat kids and, what, fat dogs too.

But the thing was, even Colter turned soft, and that was something he could never figure. Or stomach. The whole idea of it was like a sharp stick dipped in the bitterest thing there was and jabbed right through him. He just couldn’t understand how Colter, after all his feats, after his run, could just give it all up and go back to civilization, to a woman named Sallie who probably wasn’t even that good-looking, and live on a farm busting sod like anybody. And just die there, in bed, of jaundice, on a morning that lit the hills, May 7, 1812, when the Blackfeet and the Crows and all the rest of the hostiles were out after the buffalo where the buffalo grazed the spring grass and no white man dared tread.

That was how it turned out. That was how it always turned out. For everybody on this planet. You could be made out of wood and they’d set you on fire. You could be made of steel and they’d hose you down till the rust got you. You could be Colter and give up and die in bed. There was no way out and it didn’t really matter. You just had to be as hard as hard and make your own legend and let the chips fall where they may. That was what he was thinking and then he wasn’t thinking anymore, just letting the wheel spin and his legs conquer the ground, faster and faster, hut one, hut two, and if he didn’t see the two snipers camouflaged in the big mottled arms of a sycamore climbing up out of the streambed in a thick pale grove of them, that didn’t matter either.

His feet hit the dirt, his elbows pumped, double time, triple time, hostiles on the loose, hut one, hut two, got to go, got to go, the wheel churning faster and faster, and he was running now, running like Colter. . and then, abruptly, it stopped. The wheel stopped. And it was never going to start again.