Had they seen him? No. They were there in the distance, bending over his plants, two of them, two aliens in olive-drab rain slickers and muddy boots and he was glassing them now, picking their faces out of the misting rain that hung over everything like poison gas and he was calm, utterly calm, as calm as Colter standing there naked while they decided his fate. But nobody was going to decide his fate. He was the one in charge here, he was the one in cover and he was no trespasser—they were. One of them he didn’t recognize, or not right away, but the other one was turning his face to him now, looking up the hill toward the bunker, and that one turned out to be the Dog-Face himself, Chip Moody. He set down the binoculars and took up his rifle.
They moved across the field, making little discoveries as they went, gesturing to each other and conferring in low voices. One of them—the Dog-Face—bent down and pulled out a knife to cut through a section of black irrigation hose that had been left exposed by the rain. And now the other one did too. They kicked over a couple of the pots as if they didn’t belong to anybody, as if they were just garbage, and that made him furious, all the work he’d put in, and for what? When they got close, close enough to hear what they were saying (Mexicans? I don’t think so, to tell you the truth, because they wouldn’t bother with—) he just couldn’t hold it in any longer and before he knew what he was doing he came hurtling out of the bunker with his weapon in hand and shouting the first thing that came into his head, “FBI, FBI, you’re under arrest!” And that was stupid, he could see that in retrospect, because what he wanted was to scare them off when he should have just dropped them both right then and there so they wouldn’t go rat him out to the sheriff and all the aliens in his command and the helicopters too and the drones that were soulless metal and just kept after you till you were dead and wasted and giving up the maggots.
“What in hell?” the Dog-Face said. Or no, he barked. Just like a dog.
That was when the other one, his compadre, his backup, became very specific, his face constructing itself in a flash and never mind the hood of the slicker or the rain beads on his shoulders or the poison-gas mist drifting across the ground to conceal his person from view and his purposes too, he was the worst alien of them all, number one, pure poison himself. “Adam?” he said. “What are you—?” He didn’t get to say anything more. There was no need. Just let the Norinco do the talking. Two bursts to spin him around and one to take him down. Smell it on the air. Adios, alien.
“Art!” the Dog-Face was barking and the Dog-Face was next, of course he was, another burst, clean as thrusters, clean as going to hyperspace, but the Dog-Face was taking cover and the Dog-Face was armed with a semi-automatic pistol that talked right back and there was nothing to do but take cover too and let the poison gas bring him down. Either that or outflank him and see how fast he could run.
PART X
Big River
30.
BIG RIVER WAS THE next watercourse down from the Noyo, and it drained an area of one hundred eighty-one square miles of timberland and spread wide to empty into the ocean just below the village of Mendocino. A sawmill had been built at the mouth of the river in 1852 and for a long while it had been the busiest mill in the county, but all that went defunct in the 1930s, and the mill was gone now, replaced by nothing, by sand, and though the watershed was still viable for timber, it was divided between four companies that milled their logs elsewhere and the Jackson Demonstration Forest, which was open to the public, as were the beaches. And the views. Gaze on the hills, as Sten was doing now, and all you saw from Fort Bragg to the north to Calpurnia in the south was a continuous forest that looked as pristine and untouched as it might have been when the Indians were in possession. The ferns dripped. Banana slugs longer than your hand oozed through the leaf litter. There were patches of ground up there that hadn’t seen direct sunlight in a thousand years.
Sten was in the backyard sitting on the redwood picnic table, his forearms braced on the meat of his thighs and his feet resting on the bench, and he was gazing out on the hills so he wouldn’t have to look into the faces of Rob Rankin and his deputy, Jason Ringwald, who’d played varsity football in high school and was a real little son of a bitch who’d been in the principal’s office more times than Adam, but that was neither here nor there. What he was trying to avoid wasn’t so much their faces—the looks on their faces, stony and cold and heartless—as what they were telling him. He was having trouble with that. He was denying it. Raising every objection he could think of.
“I want you to take a look at something,” Rob was saying, and he was a little man, colorless as a transparency, and there it was in his hand, the thing—one of the things—Sten didn’t want to see. It was a plastic Ziploc bag and inside it was a length of foil that had been molded into a kind of hollowed-out cigarette or pipe. One end was blackened where the match had touched it and the other featured a rounded aperture to draw in air—smoke—which would have been where the traces of DNA would collect. From lips, tongue, fingertips. “You ever see this before? Or anything like it?”