Collected Short Fiction, page 1290
On this side, though, everything was a realm of magic and mysteries.
He was able more or less to make out the basic raw material of the landscape, the underlying barren dry New Mexico/Texas nowheresville that he had spent his entire life in. But here on the far side of the barrier the invaders had done some serious screwing around with the look of the land. The jag-edged buttes and blue-green arroyos that Demeris had glimpsed through the barrier field from the other side were no illusions; somebody had taken the trouble to come out here and redesign the empty terrain, sticking in all sorts of bizarre structures and features. He saw strange zones of oddly colored soil, occasional ramshackle metal towers, entire deformed geological formations—twisted cones and spiky spires and uplifted layers—that made his eyes hurt. He saw groves of unknown wire-leaved trees and arroyos crisscrossed by sinister glossy black threads like stitches across a wound. Everything was solid and real, none of it wiggling and shifting about the way things did inside the barrier field. Wherever he looked there was evidence of how the conquerors had put their mark on the land. Some of it was actually almost beautiful, he thought; and then he recoiled, astonished at his own reaction. But there was a strange sort of beauty in the alien landscape. It disgusted him and moved him all at once, a response so complex that he scarcely knew how to handle it.
They must have been trying to make the landscape look like the place they had originally come from, he told himself. The idea of a whole world looking that way practically nauseated him. What they had done was a downright affront. Land was something to live on and to use productively, not to turn into a toy. They didn’t have any right to take part of ours and make it look like theirs, he thought, and anger rose in him again.
He thought of his ranch, the horses, the turkeys, the barns, the ten acres of good russet soil, the rows of crops ripening in the autumn sun, the fencing that he had made with his own hands running on beyond the line of virtually identical fencing his father had made. All that was a real kind of reality, ordinary, familiar, solid—something he could not only understand but love. It was home, family, good clean hard work, sanity itself. This, though, this—this lunacy, this horror—
He tore a strip of cloth from one of the shirts in his backpack and tied it around the cut on his arm. And started walking east, toward the place where he hoped his brother Tom would be, toward the big settlement midway between the former site of Amarillo and the former site of Lubbock that was known as Spook City.
He kept alert for alien wildlife, constantly scanning to front and rear, sniffing, watching for tracks. The Spooks had brought a bunch of their jungle beasts from their home world and turned them loose in the desert. “It’s like Africa out there,” Bud had said. “You never know what’s going to come up and try to gobble you.” Once a year, Demeris knew, the aliens held a tremendous hunt on the outskirts of Spook City, a huge apocalyptic round-up where they surrounded and killed the strange beasts by the thousands and the streets ran blue and green with rivers of their blood. The rest of the time the animals roamed free in the hinterlands. Some of them occasionally strayed across the border barrier and went wandering around on the Free Country side: while he was preparing himself for his journey Demeris had visited a ranch near Bernalillo where a dozen or so of them were kept on display as a sort of zoo of nightmares, grisly things with red scaly necks and bird-beaks and ears like rubber batwings and tentacles on their heads, huge ferocious animals that seemed to have been put together randomly out of a stock of miscellaneous parts. But so far out here he had encountered nothing more threatening-looking than jackrabbits and lizards. Now and again a bird that was not a bird passed overhead—one of the big snake-necked things he had seen earlier, and another the size of an eagle with four transparent veined wings like a dragonfly’s but a thick moth-like furry body between them, and a third one that had half a dozen writhing prehensile rat-tails dangling behind it for eight or ten feet, trolling for food. He watched it snatch a shrieking bluejay out of the air as though it were a bug.
When he was about three hours into the Occupied Zone he came to a cluster of bedraggled little adobe houses at the bottom of a bowl-shaped depression that had the look of a dry lake. A thin fringe of scrubby plant growth surrounded the place, ordinary things, creosote bush and mesquite and yucca. Demeris saw some horses standing at a trough, a couple of scrawny black and white cows munching on prickly pears, a few half-naked children running circles in the dust. There was nothing alien about them, or about the buildings or the wagons and storage bins that were scattered all around. Everyone knew that Spooks were shapeshifters, that they could take on human form when the whim suited them, that when the advance guard of infiltrators had first entered the United States to prepare the way for the invasion they were all wearing human guise. But more likely this was a village of genuine humans. Bud had said there were a few little towns between the border and Spook City, inhabited by the descendants of those who had chosen to remain in the Occupied Zone after the conquest. Most people with any sense had moved out when the invaders came, even though the aliens hadn’t formally asked anyone to leave. But some had stayed.
The afternoon was well along and the first chill of evening was beginning to creep into the clear dry air. The cut on his arm was still throbbing and he didn’t feel much like camping in the open if he didn’t have to. Perhaps these people would let him crash for the night.
When he was halfway to the bottom of the dirt road a gnomish little leathery-skinned man who looked to be about ninety years old stepped slowly out from behind a gnarled mesquite bush and took up a watchful position in the middle of the path. A moment later a boy of about sixteen, short and stocky in torn denim pants and a frayed undershirt, emerged from the same place. The boy was carrying what might have been a gun, which at a gesture from the older man he raised and aimed. It was a shiny tube a foot and a half long with a nozzle at one end and a squeeze-bulb at the other. The nozzle pointed squarely at the middle of Demeris’s chest. Demeris stopped short and put his hands in the air.
The old man said something in a language that was full of grunts and clicks, and some whistling snorts. The denim boy nodded and replied in the same language.
To Demeris the boy said, “You traveling by yourself?” He was dark-haired, dark-eyed, mostly Indian or Mexican, probably. A ragged red scar ran up along his cheek to his forehead.
Demeris kept his hands up. “By myself, yes. I’m from the other side.”
“Well, sure you are. Fool could see that.” The boy’s tone was thick, his accent unfamiliar, the end of each word clipped off in an odd way. Demeris had to work to understand him. “You making your Entrada? You a little old for that sort of thing, maybe.” Laughter sparkled in the boy’s eyes, but not anywhere else on his face.
“This is my first time across,” Demeris said. “But it isn’t exactly an Entrada.”
“Your first time, that’s an Entrada.” The boy spoke again to the old man and got a long reply. Demeris waited patiently. Finally the boy turned back to him and said, “Okay. Remigio here says we should make it easy for you. You want to stay here your thirty days, we let you do it. You work as a field hand, that’s all. We even sell you some Spook things you can take back and show off like all you people do. Okay?”
Demeris’s face grew hot. “I told you, this isn’t any Entrada. Entradas are fun and games for kids. I’m not a kid.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“Trying to find my brother.”
The boy frowned and spat into the dusty ground, not quite in Demeris’s direction. “You think we got your brother here?”
“He’s in Spook City, I think.”
“Spook City. Yeah. I bet that’s where he is. They all go there. For the hunt, they go.” He put his finger to his head and moved it in a circle. “You do that, you got to be a little crazy, you know? Going there for the hunt. Sheesh! What dumb crazy fuckers.” He laughed and said, “Well, come on, I’ll show you where you can stay.”
l
The place where they put him up was a tottering weatherbeaten shack made of wooden slats with big stripes of sky showing through, off at the edge of town, a hundred yards or so from the nearest building. There was nothing in it but a mildewed bundle of rags tied together for sleeping on. Some of the rags bore faded inscriptions in the curvilinear Spook script, impenetrable to Demeris. A ditch out back served as a latrine. A little stream, hardly more than a rivulet, ran nearby. Demeris crouched over it and washed out his wound, which was still pulsing unpleasantly but didn’t look as bad as it had at first. The water seemed reasonably safe. He took a long drink and filled his canteens. Then he sat quietly in the open doorway of the shack for a time, not thinking of anything at all, simply unwinding from his long day’s march and the border crossing.
As darkness fell the boy reappeared and led him to the communal eating hall. Fifty or sixty people were sitting at long benches in family groups. A few had an Anglo look, most seemed mixed Mexican and Indian. There was little conversation, and what there was was in the local language, all clicks and snorts and whistles. Almost nobody paid any attention to him. It was as if he was invisible; but a few did stare at him now and then and he could feel the force of their hostility, an almost intangible thing.
He ate quickly and went back to his shack. But sleep was a tough proposition. He lay awake for hours, listening to the wind blowing in out of Texas and wishing he was home, on his own ten acres, in his familiar adobe house, with the houses of his brothers and sisters around him. For a while there was singing—chanting, really—coming up from the village. It was harsh and guttural and choppy, a barrage of stiff angular sounds that didn’t follow any musical scale he knew. Listening to it, he felt a powerful sense of the strangeness of these people who had lived under Spook rule for so long, tainted by Spook ways, governed by Spook ideas. How had they survived? How had they been able to stand it, the changes, the sense of being owned? But somehow they had adapted, by turning themselves into something beyond his understanding.
Later, other sounds drifted to him, the night sounds of the desert, hoots and whines and screeches that might have been coming from owls and coyotes, but probably weren’t. He thought he heard noise just outside his shack, people moving around doing something, but he was too groggy to get up and see what was going on. At last he fell into a sort of stupor and lay floating in it until dawn. Just before morning he dreamed he was a boy again, with his mother and father still alive and Dave and Bud and the girls just babies and Tom not yet even born. He and his dad were out on the plains hunting Spooks, vast swarms of gleaming vaporous Spooks that were drifting overhead as thick as mosquitoes, two brave men walking side by side, the big one and the smaller one, killing the thronging aliens with dart guns that popped them like balloons. When they died they gave off a screeching sound like metal on metal and released a smell like rotting eggs and plummeted to the ground, covering it with a glassy scum that quickly melted away and left a scorched and flaking surface behind. It was a very satisfying dream. Then a flood of morning light broke through the slats and woke him.
Emerging from the shack, he discovered a small tent pitched about twenty yards away that hadn’t been there the night before. A huge mottled yellow animal was tethered nearby, grazing on weeds; something that might have been a camel except there weren’t any camels the size of elephants, camels with three shallow humps and great goggling green eyes the size of saucers, or knees on the backs of their legs as well as in front. As he gaped at it a woman wearing tight khaki slacks and a shirt buttoned up to the collar came out of the tent and said, “Never seen one of those before?”
“You bet I haven’t. This is my first time across.”
“Is it, now?” she said. She had an accent too. It wasn’t as strange to Demeris as the village boy’s but there was some other kind of spin to it, a sound like that of a tolling bell beneath the patterns of the words themselves.
She was youngish, slender, not bad-looking: long straight brown hair, high cheekbones, tanned Anglo face. It was hard to guess her age. Somewhere between 25 and 35 was the best he could figure. She had very dark eyes, bright, almost glossy, oddly defiant. It seemed to him that there was a kind of aura around her, a puzzling crackle of simultaneous attraction and repulsion.
She told him what the camel-thing was called. The word was an intricate slurred sound midway between a whistle and a drone, rising sharply at the end. “You do it now,” she said. Demeris looked at her blankly. The sound was impossible to imitate. “Go on. Do it.”
“I don’t speak Spook.”
“It’s not all that hard.” She made the sound again. Her eyes flashed with amusement.
“Never mind. I can’t do it.”
“You just need some practice.”
Her gaze was focused right on his, strong, direct, almost aggressive. At home he didn’t know many women who looked at you like that. He was accustomed to having women depend on him, to draw strength or whatever else they needed from him until they were ready to go on their way and let him go on his.
“My name’s Jill,” she said. “I live in Spook City. I’ve been in Texas a few weeks and now I’m on my way back.”
“Nick Demeris. From Albuquerque. Traveling up that way too.”
“What a coincidence.”
“I suppose,” he said.
A sudden hot fantasy sprang up just then out of nowhere within him: instant sexual chemistry had stricken her like a thunderbolt and she was going to invite him to travel with her, that they’d ride right off into the desert together, that when they made camp that evening she would turn to him with parted lips and shining eyes and open her arms and beckon him toward her—
The urgency and intensity of the idea surprised him as much as its adolescent foolishness. Had he really let himself get as horny as that? She didn’t even seem that interesting to him.
In any case he knew it wasn’t going to happen. She looked cool, self-sufficient, self-contained. She wouldn’t have any need for his companionship on her trip home and probably not for anything else he might have to offer.
“What brings you over here?” she asked him.
He told her about his missing brother. Her eyes narrowed thoughtfully as he spoke. She was taking a good long look, studying his face with great care, staring at him as though peering right through his skull into his brain. Turning her head this way and that, checking him out.
“I think I may know him, your brother,” she said calmly, after a time.
He bled. “You do? Seriously?”
“Not as tall as you and stockier, right? But otherwise he looks pretty much like you, only younger. Face a lot like yours, broader, but the same cheekbones, the same high forehead, the same color eyes, the same blond hair, but his is longer. The same very serious expression all the time, tight as a drum.”
“Yes,” Demeris said, with growing wonder. “That’s him. It has to be.”
“Don, that was his name. No, Tom. Don, Tom, one of those short little names.”
“Tom.”
“Tom, right.”
He was amazed. “How do you know him?” he asked.
“Turned up in Spook City a couple of months back. June, July, somewhere back then. It isn’t such a big place that you don’t notice new people when they come in. Had that Free Country look about him, you know. Kind of big-eyed, raw-boned, can’t stop gawking at things. But he seemed a little different from most of the other Entrada kids, like there was something coiled up inside him that was likely to pop out any minute, that this trip wasn’t just a thing he was doing for the hell of it but that it had some other meaning for him, something deeper that only he could understand. Peculiar sort of guy, actually.”
“That was Tom, yes.” The side of Demeris’s face was starting to twitch. “You think he might still be there?”
“Could be. More likely than not. He was talking about staying quite a while, at least until fall, until hunt time.”
“And when is that?”
“It starts late next week.”
“Maybe I can still find him, then. If I can get there in time.”
“I’m leaving here this afternoon. You can ride with me to Spook City if you want.”
“With you?” Demeris said. He was astonished. The good old instant chemistry after all? His whole little adolescent fantasy coming to life? It seemed too neat, too slick. The world didn’t work like this. And yet—yet—
“Sure. Plenty of room on those humps. Take you at least a week if you walk there, if you’re a good walker. Maybe longer. Riding, it’ll be just a couple of days.”
What the hell, he thought.
It would be dumb to turn her down. That Spook-mauled landscape was an evil place when you were on your own.
“Sure,” he said, after a bit. “Sure, I’d be glad to. If you really mean it.”
“Why would I say it if I didn’t mean it?”
Abruptly the notion came to him that this woman and Tom might have had something going for a while in Spook City. Of course. Of course. Why else would she remember in such detail some unknown kid who had wandered into her town months before? There had to be something else there. She must have met Tom in some Spook City bar, a couple of drinks, some chatter, a night or two of lively bed games, maybe even a romance lasting a couple of weeks. Tom wouldn’t hesitate, even with a woman ten, fifteen years older than he was. And so she was offering him this ride now as a courtesy to a member of the family, so to speak. It wasn’t his tremendous masculine appeal that had done it, it was mere politeness. Or curiosity about what Tom’s older brother might be like.
Into his long confused silence she said, “The critter here needs a little more time to feed itself up. Then we can take off. Around two o’clock, okay?”
l
After breakfast the boy went over to him in the dining hall and said, “You meet the woman who come in during the night?”
Demeris nodded. “She’s offering me a ride to Spook City.”
Something that might have been scorn flickered across the boy’s face. “That nice. You take it?”
