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.