The Harder They Come (29 page)

First thing he did was climb up over the lip of the bunker, which was three feet high, just exactly right for cover and defense both, and get down on all fours to puke, and then he dug out one
of the little yellow giardia pills and washed it down with spring water because no one was going to tell him
this
spring was contaminated because if it was then the whole planet was just a big cesspool and the aliens could have it and welcome to it. For a long while he sat there wet and shivering on the near wall of the bunker, which was constructed of bark-on logs he’d dragged from a long ways out so as to cover his tracks if anyone should come upon the stumps. And no, it wasn’t anything like the forts he and Cody and Billy Julian built when they were like ten years old, just hammering anything together they could find, but the real deal, straight out of the U.S. Army Field Manual, Chapter 20: “Survival Movement in Hostile Areas,” most of which he could have quoted verbatim if somebody asked him, but really all you had to know was the acronym BLISS:

B—Blends in with the surroundings

L—Low in silhouette

I—Irregular in shape

S—Small in size

S—Secluded

Secluded, that was for sure, and you had to be secluded or they’d find you with their car doors slamming and their barking worked-up irate old man’s voices crowing,
What do you think you’re doing in there?
He never did get a chance to answer that day, whenever it was, a long time ago or maybe not, but if he’d had the chance he would have said, “I think I’m getting away from assholes like you.” That’s what he should have said and he was saying it now to the dripping trees and thinking about starting a little campfire to heat up a can of beef stew or just boil some water for freeze-dried chicken cashew curry, hungry now, hungry all over again since he’d just puked up a whole wad of nothing, not even chunks, just mucus, and he went around doing that, gathering up twigs that weren’t too sodden and some scraps of newspaper and
then laying some of the bigger stuff he kept under his tarp across the top of it. He didn’t like showing smoke in hostile territory—a thing Colter would never have done—but he wanted something hot. And besides, the war really hadn’t started yet.

It was when he was dishing up the beef stew (blowing on it, actually; it was still too hot to eat) that an ugly thought occurred to him. It was the kind of thought a groundhog might have had studying his own burrow from outside in the hard light of day, a gnawing, paranoid kind of feeling that poisoned the smell of the beef stew and killed his mood dead. He shifted uneasily. His crotch was wet and it was going to start itching with the crotch fungus that made it feel as if your balls were on fire if he didn’t change into something dry pretty soon—and what was he going to do, go to the drugstore every day? But here came that thought roaring into his head and he cursed himself again.
Fucker. Idiot. Moron. Shit for brains
. Here he’d been sitting around in hospital waiting rooms and fucking Sara in the dark and jawing away with a random old lady like some—it hurt to have to say it—like some
mental
case, and not a thought to the plantation, which he hadn’t laid eyes on for two full days now.

He had to get a grip. There’d been a storm, rain falling in sheets and beating like a whole ship full of aliens on that old lady’s split-shake roof, and what if it had damaged the plants? What if it had broken the stems supporting the pods that were only viable now, right now, because the growing cycle was something like ninety days and he’d been late receiving his seeds in the mail and then getting them in the dirt of his two hundred twenty-seven gopher-proof pots? Worse, what if the whole thing had washed away, the pots and plants and the brown balls of opium in the screw-top jar hidden in the secret recess behind the back wall of the bunker? What then?

The stew was hot, too hot to eat, but he ate it anyway, the wheel cranking round now as if it had no stop on it, as if it was going to break loose and tear right out of his head like a freak
accident on the roller coaster. He didn’t bother to scrape the can, just threw it down in the mud. The spoon too. And then he had his pack on, the rifle shouldered and the knife strapped to his thigh, and he was heading downhill, double time becoming triple time and then quadruple time till he was running full-out, running like Colter.

S
O MAYBE HE SLIPPED
and fell a couple of times, the mud slick underfoot, the tread of his boots clogged with it till he might as well have had no tread at all, everything rushing downward and the rain starting in again. His pants were filthy, basted with mud and long filarial streaks of some green shit he didn’t know what it was, and he’d managed to tear the sleeve of his shirt slamming into a tree to keep from pitching headlong into a ravine like some clumsy-ass motherfucker, but it was nothing more than what you would expect out here this time of year when the rain started in and just kept on coming, the kind of thing the average person didn’t even know about or even suspect because the average person was sitting in front of a TV in a dry house with a remote in one hand and a bag of wasabi peas in the other. Plus he was on a mission here and whether he broke a leg or both legs or not really didn’t enter into it—if he couldn’t keep on his feet and hurtle every obstacle then he didn’t deserve to have a plantation or live free or even think of calling himself a mountain man. So what he did was let his instincts take over and just go for it.

The plantation was a good four-mile trek from Camp 2 and it would normally take something like an hour to get there but he made it in record time, or at least that was what it felt like since he didn’t have a watch or a cellphone because no mountain man ever carried a watch and cellphones hadn’t been invented back then and plus in a state of nature you just knew the time the way the animals did, by the sun, by the shadows, by another sense altogether that wasn’t a sixth sense—that was reserved for danger—but a seventh sense, that was what it was. He liked the idea of it, seventh sense, and he began wondering if there were more senses
yet, like an eighth sense or a ninth, and what they would be. The eighth sense—that would allow you to get inside the hostiles’ heads and know what they were thinking before they did, right when they got up in the morning and were taking their first steaming piss up against a tree, and the ninth, the ninth would not only allow you to know what they were thinking but change it like tuning a radio so you could make them skin themselves alive instead of you or Potts or any white men at all.

Of course, no matter how fast the wheel was spinning he hadn’t lost all control or forgotten his tactics and so when he got close he put on the brakes and went low to the ground till he was mud all over, till he was indistinguishable from the mud, and crept up on his elbows and knees to take up a recon position and glass the plantation to be sure there were no aliens or hostiles snooping around or helping themselves to his crop. What he saw took the heart out of him. Half the pots, at least half, had been tipped over by the violence of the storm and another half of those had washed down a series of gullies that hadn’t been there the last time he’d looked. That upset him, of course it did, and maybe it made him careless too, because he jumped to his feet and just burst right out into the clearing and started righting the pots and checking on the seedpods he’d painstakingly slit in six places with a razor blade so he could milk the sap out of them, backbreaking work. Boring work. Work he’d come to hate. Which was why he’d been two days away from it, distracting himself with little yellow pills and getting laid. Stupidly.

A lot of the stems had been bent out of shape or even snapped in two when the pots tipped over and the ones that had washed downhill were just a total loss, but what he could do was salvage as many seedpods as possible, dry them out and grind them up to make a sort of tea, tea that would get you high, or at least that was what he’d heard. But then he couldn’t sell
that
and if he couldn’t sell it then it just defeated the whole purpose of trying to raise some cash out of all this work and worry so he would have
the wherewithal to do it again next year and the year after that because those little toast-brown balls of opium were his beaver hides, the modern-day equivalent of the plews that would make him independent and never have to say
Yessir, Cap’n, to no man
.

Truth be told, he was in a kind of frenzy, trying to put things right when he should have realized he’d just have to cut his losses, but every plant meant something to him because he’d grown them from the little black gnat-sized seeds he’d mixed with a handful of sand so they’d scatter nicely across the surface of the five-gallon plastic pots he and Cody had lifted from the back of a nursery one socked-in night when the only way you could see anything was with night-vision goggles. Some of the seeds never germinated. Others got chewed down to the stub by a mysterious nighttime presence he never was able to track down, whether it was bugs or rabbits or even deer. Or aliens. Could have been aliens. He wouldn’t put it past them. But then why would they attack the half-grown plants instead of waiting for the flowers and the seedpods and the milky white drip of opium that made it all worthwhile?

What you had to do was score the pods late in the day so the sap wouldn’t coagulate like blood but instead just drip in a nice wet flow all night long so you could collect it in the morning and set it aside to dry from milky white to golden brown for a couple of days and just store it up in your screw-top jar for personal use or sale on the street or maybe under the counter at the Big 5, and no, he had no interest in making heroin from it because that required boiling out the impurities and using chemicals and no mountain man wanted to go near chemicals. That wasn’t natural. That wasn’t
organic
. Dry it and smoke it, that was as far as he wanted to go, but he didn’t even want to go there, not anymore, because really all he needed was 151 and pot and maybe, when the wheel was spinning out of control, a medicinal hit of acid to bring it back into line.

But here he was, in his frenzy, everything mud and half the
plants ruined, the beautiful tall stiff green stems he’d watched climbing higher day by day till they flowered and the petals dropped off and the seed pods started nodding under their own weight now just bent and broken and pretty much useless, the rain slacking off to a mist that climbed up the back of his neck like a slug and the beef stew sitting on his stomach like its own kind of death. Talk about miserable. He just wanted to raise his face to the sky and scream till his lungs gave out. And he might have, except that soldiers didn’t complain or blame anybody for anything except themselves, and it was a good thing too because it was right then that he spotted movement at the far end of the plantation, in the treeline there, and just about jumped out of his skin. But he didn’t do that either. He kept his cool and retreated, silent and swift, sluicing uphill through the mud till he slipped over the edge of the bunker and snatched up his binoculars, and he was bummed, of course he was, but there was something inside of him that kept swelling and swelling until it began to feel like joy. This was it. Finally. Definitively. The moment he’d been waiting for since the seeds arrived on his doorstep in a neat tan box with raised silver lettering you could run your fingers over again and again just for the sheer
transference
of it:
Russo & Ayers, Horticulturists
. And wasn’t that a beautiful thing? The box? The seeds? The moment?

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.