Grass tickled the creature's cloth-wrapped abdomen. A flock of sparrows swooped over the creek. The creature spun, two noodly limbs shooting upright and tracking the vector of the birds' cheeping flight. Walt eased himself off the rock into the cold water. Slick rocks clacked under his soles. He crouched low, submerging himself until the rushing water soaked the back of his head, face upturned to clear his nose. He steadied himself against the rock with one hand and brought his knife to just below the surface.
Grass threshed. A three-fingered, stick-like limb parted the green wall at the bank of the creek. The creature glided forward, limbs splashing in the shallows. Rocks clonked beneath it. Walt's fingers tightened around the knife. The thing tapped the rock he'd sunned on with two brown-gray arms, planted them firm, and leaned its disclike body and bulbous, octopine head over the gurgling water. Walt took a good long look at the ridges of its neck, a supple thing that broadened to a fat stock where it connected to the body, which was shaped like one of the water-smoothed pebbles under his feet. A collar of fine fabric wrapped the base of its neck, flowing into a skintight blue wrap of its body with long holes on both sides to sleeve its several arms. It craned forward, slowly turning the two rubbery arms through a wide arc. The creek jangled.
The arms withdrew. The creature retreated from the rock into the grass and padded back for the clump of trees, disappearing from sight. Walt slipped from the cold water, sun beating his skin, until he could see the back of the creature's head. An instant after he'd risen, the being whirled and tore straight for him.
Walt shouted and warded one arm in front of him, knife hand close to his chest. The thing turned sideways as it closed, sticking a bushel of slapping arms and kicking legs between Walt's body and its head and two noodly arms. A leg struck Walt's shin. He grimaced and slashed at an incoming arm, flaying the tough skin down to its bone. Yellow fluid spattered the grass. The creature made no noise beyond the tapping of its feet on the stones. It picked up a rock in a pair of narrow claws and swung for Walt's head. He ducked, jabbing at its nearest leg. The thing reared up and bulled forward, knocking them both into the water.
The current pulled him downstream. The thing planted its thinner legs between submerged stones, poling along while its flatter tentacles threshed water. It closed on him in moments. He'd kept a death grip on the knife, which he waved in tight, fast flicks at a probing arm. A claw snaked in from the side and grabbed his wrist. Pain circled his arm as it crushed his tendons against his bones. He strained his trapped wrist closer to his chest, extending its arm, and slammed his other palm into its joint.
A nauseating crack shot over the burble of the water. The thing let go of his wrist and paddled backwards against the current, still silent despite its broken bone. Walt leaned into the stream, jogging forward in exaggerated strides to clear his knees of the water, and grabbed a trailing limb. He pulled down hard as he leapt out of the water, leveraging himself onto its back. His knife blade thunked against a hard skull. As arms whipped his back and clubbed the back of his head, he grabbed the creature's neck, dug in with his nails, and stabbed down hard into one wide, unblinking eye.
The thing bucked, spraying white slashes of water to all sides, flinging Walt back into the hustling creek. He tucked his head. His ribs jarred down on a rock, stealing his breath. He thrashed for his footing; before he could stand, the still-writhing body of the thing knocked him off his feet. He plunged under the water, taking an involuntary breath at the cold shock. For a panicked moment he couldn't tell which way was up. Sunlight. Air on his waving arm. He bumbled into a smooth, protruding rock, and, toes slicking over the moss, clambered his naked body up to its damp surface. He coughed, spitting water. Downstream, the slowly tumbling body lodged in the reeds at a bend in the creek.
Once he'd found his breath, Walt laughed.
He waded across the stream and dragged the corpse through the grass to dry land. There, he scanned a full arc of the light woods and meadows and the low mountains behind him. Wind shushed the grass. The stream tinkled. A bird chirred. He went back for his gear and dried himself off and put on pants and socks and shoes. He shouldered his stuff and lugged it back to the body. He laid a pistol on top of his duffel bag, spread out a tarp, selected a butcher knife and a paring knife, and rolled the creature's damp body onto the blue plastic.
He was no doctor. Despite the last few months of sporadic fish and game, he wasn't much of a butcher, either. But he was enough of a mathematician to add two and two, and either the thing in front of him had come from Earth or it hadn't; either some company had been so deep into biotech it was capable of creating humanity-erasing viruses and crab-hybrid monsters, or it had come from outer space, in which case he already had more than a few suspicions about the source of the Panhandler, too. (Though even then, there were other possibilities—if they were aliens, perhaps they were planetary vultures, and had swooped in after their monitors reported mankind was no longer an issue.)
Either way, he knew how to get to the guts of the matter.
He sliced the creature's clothes away from its body, set them aside, then stabbed the butcher knife down hard. Its skin was smooth but tough, resisting the knife like fingernails or hardened leather. Walt leaned into the blade. Clear and yellow goo slimed his hands. He sawed through the skin, knife jarring into unseen bones, some of which he was able to crack by leveraging his weight against them. Sweat beaded his brow and back. At a bone-free spot, he peeled back the hard skin and sliced it away from the membranes beneath.
The inside of the cavity looked like a mass of swollen spaghetti and meatballs colored the yellow of beached kelp and floating in a pot of watery yellow marinara. It smelled no better. He lifted out handfuls of rubbery tubes, knotted here and there by fleshy nodes the size of marbles and tennis balls. Snotty fluid glopped from his hands, pattering onto the tarp. Rubber gloves. He needed to loot some rubber gloves. The tubes and nodes hung by membranes from narrow bones.
Walt moved to the oversized head. Most of it was like the body, tough skin around fibrous lumps, but a third of the interior, including the eye sockets, was taken up by a bony ball punctured here and there by tube-choked holes. After two minutes of sawing at one of the sockets, his knife had only worn a small notch in the inner skull. He went to the creek, swooshed his hands around the cool water, and returned with a rock the size of two closed fists. The skull smashed on the third blow.
Beneath another membrane, he sorted through a pulpy, semi-solid mush of loosely connected gray-blue matter.
So at least it had a brain. All the rest of its organs, any lungs or kidneys or livers or spleens or anything like that, they were like nothing he'd ever seen before. He didn't want to believe it. Not that he didn't think they existed. He just didn't believe they'd possibly come here. But the nasty yellow muck he was covered in offered only one explanation: the thing he'd killed hadn't come from Earth.
Aliens, then. Aliens. Aliens with a bunch of small nodules instead of obviously vital targets. Headshots, he supposed. At least they had big heads.
He dragged the body into the creek and shoved it away with a long stick. The alien's clothing was spotted with pockets. He found a tin of dried, crumbling food with whiffs of salt and seaweed and rot. A pouch of water that smelled like a distant ocean. A blank pad that wouldn't respond to his touch or voice. A bag of metal balls inscribed with rings of pictographs. A gray, finger-sized tube with a small screen and what he thought might be a touchpad. And a hard rubber case filled with smooth, unyielding cards printed with shimmering figures and abstract icons. He ditched the food and water and added the rest to his bag. Whatever weapon it had been holding in its hands and claws had been lost in the water. He walked upstream and refilled his canteens and jugs.
This time, he traveled overland, paralleling the road from a distance of a couple hundred yards, skirting Albuquerque and the stretch of small towns that followed through the gently rising desert. Hostile aliens. Just that much more proof for how fucked up realit
y was. He didn't see how this changed his goals. Aside, that is, from the fact the invaders would probably nuke the shit out of the cities, or, if they were environmentally conscious, fire- or neutron- or unimaginably-advanced-alien-technology-bomb them. Then again, unless they were comically incompetent, they would have taken care of that before romping around the New Mexican wilderness. Whatever had happened to Los Angeles must have already gone down.
He tromped among the sage and yellow grass. As he descended from the foothills, the heat ascended. He napped under the shade of trees in a draw between two hills, troubled by flies, moving on in the just-warm dusk.
Aliens. Motherfucking aliens. As a kid, he'd immersed himself in Asimov and Heinlein and Clarke, all the classics, warm possibilities where the future was positive and our stellar neighbors meant us no ill-will. (Not that Heinlein, with his killer bugs and mind-controlling slugs, envisioned a hand-holding galactic UN. Still, beneath the warfare was the sense we would prevail, if only we tried hard enough and held true to ourselves as individuals and a people. Even in the barbarian-ravaged future of Asimov, the ingenuity of brilliant men carried the day.) He'd internalized this positivism—or they'd encapsulated his inborn instincts, who could be sure—but while these future-forward feelings lingered through high school, resisting the constant rot of fact and experience, this warmth had eroded during college like the wave-worn pilings below a dock, a process hidden from his higher mind. Even then, he'd paced the unsteady surface, ignoring the creakiness of the boards under his mental feet.
Vanessa's death had swept it away like a meteor-driven tsunami. In the psychological wreckage, the revelation of aliens, of other life, was nothing more than the ridiculous gilding of the absurd lily, the duh-duh coal brought before drooling, crazy-eyed Newcastle. When the social structure of the supposed greatest nation on Earth was one of under-your-nose slavery where 1% of the country owned half its wealth, what surprise was it that an alien race would want to destroy us for their own selfish ends? It was as natural as the dust around him or the dry, nostril-clogging pollen of the desert night. Of course the aliens wanted him dead. Who didn't?
In sharp contrast to this daily horror—and, in a way, making it all the worse for offering a glimmer of something better—were the balloon trips. The couple times a year when his parents took him up in the vehicles of their business were the only days he voluntarily woke before dawn. He sipped coffee from a thermos while his mom drove them to the grassy field where the first sunlight cast the surrounding trees in shades of gray. Walt shivered in his jacket while they filled the balloon with cold air from a fan. When his dad held the balloon's mouth clear while his mom finally lit the burner, waves of heat washed his hands and face. The bright Dacron swelled, tautening in the pink dawn until the fabric lifted clear, swallowing the sky overhead.
His dad said the same thing every time they stepped into the rickety wicker basket: "Welcome to the Cloudward Express, now offering one-way travel to Heaven if you lean too far over the side. All aboard!"
His dad had started saying that when Walt was just a little kid—possibly before he was born—but even once he'd grown old enough to consider it hokey as hell, he never rolled his eyes. The acts of preparing the basket and filling the balloon were somehow spiritual, a cleansing, fiery ritual that matched the red of the rising sun. And then the balloon lifted, lurching him up in a flimsy shower-sized basket held together by ropes and crowded with two other people going about the business of keeping them afloat, and if they let the bag get too hot, or he tripped over the side, he'd be dead just like that.
But he didn't care. Not when the green grass lay so far below. Not minutes later when the roads ribboned the woods and the houses clustered the roads and he could see the Atlantic like a field of glinting mercury. It was the stillness of it all, a long, centered silence broken by tweeting birds, far-off cars, his dad's sporadic jokes, and the occasional whuff of the flame, an interruption like a watchdog rousting from sleep before settling its head back between its paws. More silence, more stillness.
In these times, maybe two hours every three months, Walt felt a simple, fragile peace. Peace and an ache inside his chest: what made the time in the balloon so special and every other moment so hard?
Soon, the balloon began to descend. With the spell snapped, his parents chattered about what they had to do for the rest of the day, pinging him with questions about school and girls and his friends. He answered from that automatic place in his head, silently pleading for the balloon to rise again. A few minutes later, the wicker basket brushed the ground.
Three days and seventy or eighty miles from the creek in the woods, a keening whine pierced the sky. Walt hunkered in the yellow brush and set his bags in the dirt. He squinted at the blue sky, eyes watering, until he picked out a black speck curving through a wide circle miles overhead.
No real cover. Just scrubby green plants clinging close to the dirt and scraggly brown brush he'd lose a few layers of skin trying to hide beneath. He tucked in beside a dry, tangy shrub, resolving to wait until the flier headed away.
It banked through another circle. By the next circuit, Walt could no longer deny it: the ship was moving in a tightening downward spiral, a black oblong sweeping the desert for—what? Survivors? The person who'd killed the alien at the stream? How would they possibly know where to look?
His heart went cold. Too angry to swear, he unzipped the pocket of the duffel where he'd stored the dead alien's things.
17