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 h
e 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 p
rairie 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?
The Harder They Come Page 33