The Harder They Come

He shrugged, dark in his dark clothes. There was a slash across his face, a welt there, fresh and livid, and the first thing she thought was that he’d been grazed by a bullet, but she saw that it wasn’t that at all, more likely a mishap in the dark as he was creeping up on the place. He just stood there, his hands hanging at his sides. And where was his gun, his rifle? There, propped against the wall in the hallway that led to the back room. He looked exhausted, looked beat—beaten, beaten down.

 

She began to fear for herself then—not out of fear of him because she didn’t care what he’d done, he would never hurt her, she was sure of it, but of the cops. If they found him here, if they found even the minutest scrap of evidence that he’d been here, then she was an accomplice and all the shit they’d brought down on her already was nothing compared to what was coming. “What do you want?” she demanded.

 

“I’m hungry.”

 

“I can’t give you food, I can’t give you anything—they’ll put me in jail.”

 

“Who?” he said, his voice thick with contempt. “The hostiles? The aliens?” And then he laughed, but it wasn’t a happy laugh. “Not while I’m here they won’t.”

 

“You’ve got to get out of here,” she said. “They’ll kill you.”

 

He laughed again.

 

“I’m not kidding, Adam—they’ve been here. They tore the whole place apart. You’ve got to go. Right now. Now, hear me?”

 

“You won’t give me food?”

 

“No.”

 

“Colter would have got food,” he said. “Colter would have—”

 

She cut him off. “Enough with Colter. Colter has nothing to do with this. Colter’s dead. He’s been dead for like two hundred years and the world isn’t like that anymore, you know it, you of all people—”

 

“I want to sleep with you.”

 

They were ten feet apart and he didn’t come to her and she didn’t go to him. They were like statues, talking statues. That moment? That was the moment that tested her more than any other. And if she saw herself packing in a frenzy and sneaking him and Kutya into the car and making a run for Stateline or wherever—Canada—it was because her heart was breaking. She was his mother too. His mother and his lover. And they were going to kill him. “No,” she said. “You have to get out. Get out and never come back.”

 

The light of the TV flickered across his face, black and white, somebody dying on a ship and everything as false and artificial and make-believe as it could be.

 

“Get out,” she said, fighting to control her voice. “If you don’t get out I’m going to call the police.”

 

“Really?” he said, and still he hadn’t moved. “You’d really do that? Even to Colter?”

 

“Yes,” she said. “Yes. Even to Colter.”

 

 

 

 

 

PART XII

 

 

The Dead Zone

 

 

 

 

 

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.