He was beyond the noise now, beyond the helicopters and the squawk and squelch, legging uphill, up and up, nothing but trees around him and once in a while a meadow where there’d once been a clear-cut, but he skirted the meadows for tactical reasons. No sense in taking chances when all he was doing was taking chances because you had to be smart if you were going to be a one-man army. Like Colter. But these trees with the slivers of light caught up there in the tops of them like shining silver blades, they were the real thing, the thing that endures, and they’d been here long before Colter had gone into Yellowstone and if the aliens didn’t get to them they’d be here long after everybody alive now was dead. His father. His mother. Sara, with her big tits. He saw those trees—maybe he’d been in this spot before, maybe not—and just stopped and looked up into them for so long he began to go outside of himself again so that the wheel slowed and there was no hurry and hassle and paranoia, no state of war, only wonder at how they could be and how they could pull down deep and hold all these mountains together, because they were the beginning of it all, weren’t they? Or close enough.
What snapped him out of it wasn’t a noise, but something else, and not his sixth sense either because there were no hostiles anywhere near him. It was the kind of thing that happens when you’re dreaming awake and then come awake again, two textures, two worlds, slipping against each other like the plates that were one day going to slide this whole mountain range back into the ocean. Whatever it was, it made him feel refreshed suddenly, as if he’d been humping up a mountain peak in the Andes and been lifted off the snowfield and set down on the beach under a full warm tilting sun. He shook his head, tugged at the strap of his pack, and started off again.
It might have been another hour (again, time didn’t matter, not out here) and he figured he’d covered at least half the distance to Sara’s, not that he was seriously considering showing up there, but just by way of figuring. That was when he came across what at first looked to be a natural clearing where maybe a couple of the giants had fallen and the understory had taken over, but which turned out to be something entirely different. It was a clearing, all right, but it had been made by humans—and not loggers, but growers. Suddenly all his senses were on alert. He’d been playing cat and mouse with the hostiles and their dogs and here he was just about to blunder into some cartel’s plantation. They were outlaws too but they weren’t mountain men. Not even close. They were campesinos maybe, farmers, or maybe just punks recruited to suffer a little downtime in the wild. They didn’t like the hills or the trees or anything that scampered or swam or walked and breathed out here. They were scum. Booby-trappers. And they’d shoot you as soon as look at you, a whole new kind of hostile and they were worse than the Blackfeet because they didn’t know the land and only wanted to rape it. For profit. Profit only.
The voice again, the one deep inside: Skirt it. Get out. But the wheel was spinning and the other voice was saying, Fuck them. Because they can die too. For a long while, he drifted from cover to cover on the fringes of the clearing, glassing the place, looking for movement. There was none. Not so much as a bird or squirrel. In fact, as he was coming to realize, this was an abandoned operation, already harvested, the land poisoned and the garbage piled high, an irregular plot that was just dead now, a dead zone, and it wasn’t ever going to come back.
How did he feel about that? He felt that life was shit and more shit. He felt that aliens were aliens, no matter where you found them. He just wished he’d found them earlier, right in the act, so the Norinco could have had something to say about it.
38.