Then came another jolt of anger. Jill a Spook? It couldn’t be. Everything about her seemed human.
But why would the boy make up something like that? He had no reason for it. And maybe the kid could tell. Over on the other side, really paranoid people carried witch-charms around with them to detect Spooks who might be roaming Free Country in disguise, little gadgets that were supposed to sound an alarm when aliens came near you, but Demeris had never taken such things seriously. It stood to reason, though, that people living out here in Spook Land would be sensitive to the presence of a Spook among them, however well disguised it might be. They wouldn’t need any witch-charms to tell them. They had had a hundred fifty years to get used to being around Spooks. They’d know the smell of them by now.
The more Demeris thought about it, the more uneasy he got.
He needed to talk to her again.
He found her a little way upstream from his shack, rubbing down the shaggy yellow flanks of her elephantine pack-animal with a rough sponge. Demeris halted a short distance away and studied her, trying to see her as an alien being in disguise, searching for some clue to otherworldly origin, some gleam of Spookness showing through her human appearance.
He couldn’t see it. He couldn’t see it at all. But that didn’t necessarily mean she was real.
After a moment she noticed him. “You ready to go?” she asked, over her shoulder.
“I’m not sure.”
“What?”
He was still staring.
If she is a Spook, he thought, why would she want to pretend she was human? What would a Spook have to gain by inveigling a human off into the desert with her?
On the other hand, what motive did the kid have for lying to him?
Suddenly it seemed to him that the simplest and safest thing was to opt out of the entire arrangement and get to Spook City on his own, as he had originally planned. The kid might just be telling the truth. The possibility of traveling with a Spook, of being close to one, of sharing a campsite and a tent with one, sickened and repelled him. And there might be danger in it as well. He had heard wild tales of Spooks who were soul-eaters, who were energy vampires, even worse things. Why take chances?
He drew a deep breath. “Listen, I’ve changed my mind, okay? I think I’d just as soon travel by myself.”
She turned and gave him a startled look. “You serious?”
“Yep.”
“You really want to walk all the way to Spook City by yourself rather than ride with me?”
“Yep. That’s what I prefer to do.”
“Jesus Christ. What the hell for?”
Demeris could detect nothing in the least unhuman in her exasperated tone or in the annoyed expression on her face. He began to think he was making a big, big mistake. But it was too late to back off. Uncomfortably he said, “Just the way I am, I guess. I sort of like to go my own way, I guess, and—”
“Bullshit. I know what’s really going on in your head.”
Demeris shifted about uneasily and remained silent. He wished he had never become entangled with her in the first place.
Angrily she said, “Somebody’s been talking to you, right? Telling you a lot of garbage?”
“Well—”
“All right,” she said. “You dumb bastard. You want to test me, is that it?”
“Test?”
“With a witch-charm.”
“No,” he said. “I’m not carrying any charms. I don’t have faith in them. Those things aren’t worth a damn.”
“They’ll tell you if I’m a Spook or not.”
“They don’t work, is what I hear.”
“Some do, some don’t.” She reached into a saddlepack lying near her on the ground and pulled out a small device, wires and black cords intricately wound around and around each other. “Here,” she said harshly. “This is one. You point it and push the button and it emits a red glow if you’re pointing it at a Spook. Take it. A gift from me to you. Use it to check out the next woman you happen to meet.”
She tossed the little gadget toward him. Demeris grabbed it out of the air by reflex and stood watching helplessly as she slapped the elephant-camel’s flank to spur it into motion and started off downstream toward her tent.
Shit, he thought.
He felt like six kinds of idiot. The sound of her voice, tingling with contempt for him and his petty little suspicions, still echoed in his ears.
Baffled and annoyed—with her, with himself, with the boy for starting all this up—he flipped the witch-charm into the stream. There was a hissing and a bubbling around it for a moment and then the thing sank out of sight. Then he turned and walked back to his shack to pack up.
She had already begun to take down her tent. She didn’t so much as glance at him. But the elephant-camel thing peered somberly around, extended its long purple lower lip, and gave him a sardonic toothy smirk. Demeris glared at the great beast and made a devil-sign with his upraised fingers. From you, at least, I don’t have to take any crap, he thought.
He hoisted his pack to his shoulders and started up the steep trail out of town.
He was somewhere along the old boundary between New Mexico and Texas, he figured, probably just barely on the New Mexico side of the line. The aliens hadn’t respected state boundaries when they had carved out their domain in the middle of the United States halfway through the 21st century, and some of New Mexico had landed in alien territory and some hadn’t. Spook Land was roughly triangular, running from Montana to the Great Lakes along the Canadian border and tapering southward through what had been Wyoming, Nebraska, and Iowa down to Texas and Louisiana, but they had taken a little piece of eastern New Mexico too. Demeris had learned all that in school long ago. They made you study the map of the United States that once had been: so you wouldn’t forget the past, they said, because some day the old United States was going to rise again.
Fat chance. The Spooks had cut the heart right out of the country, both literally and figuratively. They had taken over with scarcely a struggle and every attempt at a counterattack had been brushed aside with astonishing ease: America’s weapons had been neutralized, its communications networks were silenced, its army of liberation had disappeared into the Occupied Zone like raindrops into a lake. Now there was not one United States of America but two: the western one, which ran from Washington State and Idaho down to the Mexican border and liked to call itself Free Country, and the other one in the east, along the coast and inland as far as the Mississippi, which still insisted on using the old formal name. Between the two lay the Occupied Zone, and nobody in either United States had much knowledge of what went on in there. Nor did anyone Demeris knew take the notion of a reunited United States very seriously. If America hadn’t been able to cope with the aliens at the time of the invasion, it was if anything less capable of defeating them now, with much of its technical capacity eroded away and great chunks of the country having reverted to a pastoral, pre-industrial condition.
What he had to do, he calculated, was keep heading more or less easterly until he saw indications of Spook presence. Right now, though, the country was pretty empty, just barren sandy wastes with a covering of mesquite and sage. He saw more places where the aliens had indulged in their weird remodeling of the landscape, and now and again he was able to make out the traces of some little ancient abandoned human town, a couple of rusty signs or a few crumbling walls. But mainly there was nothing at all.
He was about an hour and a half beyond the village when what looked like a squadron of airborne snakes came by, a dozen of them flying in close formation. Then the sky turned heavy and purplish-yellow, like bruised fruit getting ready to rot, and three immense things with shining red scales and sail-like three-cornered fleshy wings passed overhead, emitting bursts of green gas that had the rank smell of old wet straw. They were almost like dragons. A dozen more of the snake-things followed them. Demeris scowled and waved a clenched fist at them. The air had a tangible pressure. Something bad was about to happen. He waited to see what was coming next. But then, magically, all the ominous effects cleared away and he was in the familiar old Southwest again, untouched by strangers from the far stars, the good old land of dry ravines and big sky that he had lived in all his life. He relaxed a little, but only a little.