by David Coy
The pants were a little more difficult but she finally found a pair of denims she thought would fit pretty good and put those on. Socks were a real problem: socks were underwear, and she refused to put on someone else’s underwear. She dug around until she found a matching pair of high-top canvas basketball shoes and put them on—without socks. The shoes were big, but to hell with it, at least they’d keep her feet off the sticky floor. The pants were long, so she bent over and rolled them up a time or two. She looked down at the effect. She liked the look.
There, she thought. Sweet enough to kiss.
When she turned around she saw Tom Moon sitting in the curve of the wall. He had that shit-eating little smirk on his face and it occurred to her that he had been there silently watching and smirking all the time she was getting dressed. Her anger flared up, but she kept a lid on it. There was no way she would let this wiry little prick get to her. Better to let him think he was so insignificant that he had exactly no impact on her, even when he watched her naked.
“Can’t you announce your presence, creep,” she said easily.
She ambled over to within a few feet of him and continued to button her shirt, hoping the stringy prick would get a last little glimpse of her tit—just as she covered it up from his nasty gaze.
“When I want to,” he said.
Mary saw a piece of goo on his cheek. On Tom it looked oddly like an identifying badge or namesake. She grinned at it.
“You’ve got some slime on your face.”
Tom found it with his fingers and wiped it from his face to his pants leg. She was sure that in his former life, he’d made the habit of wiping food there in the same way.
“There, you happy now?” he grinned back.
“No, but the slime’s off your face.”
“How come you don’t like me? You don’t like me, do you?” he said, sneering.
“Not much.”
“I bet if we was back on Earth, you’d like me just fine. I bet I could make you like me.” A look of lasciviousness crossed his broad, thin mouth.
Something inside her groaned. He was at least thirty years old, and she was fairly certain he hadn’t been raised on Mars. She considered him for a second, shaking her head in disbelief. Not only was he thinking about sex in this place, he was thinking about it with her, Mary Pope, who had felt a male’s stubble on her mouth—for the first and last time—at age thirteen.
Mary smiled big and innocently and blinked. That was it. He was plumb stupid. The wiry bastard was all wound up, like springs inside, with hate and mean desire, and he capped it all off with stupidity. She wished she could feel sorry for him. She’d seen lots like him drifting through Trader in the fall and early winter, all wrapped up in ratty clothes and dirty caps with cigarettes behind their ears. They’d stop in Trader long enough to panhandle some money, eat and catch a lift westward. The musky fuckers could live for a week on a couple of Twinkies and some pond water. She’d always known his kind were capable of survival anywhere, and this particular drifter was absolute proof of it. For all she knew, this might be the best, warmest place Tom Moon had slept in for years.
“I doubt it,” she said and headed toward the tube out of the chamber. “Get those thoughts out of your little head,” she added over her shoulder, “It ain’t healthy.”
She could feel his close-set eyes on her butt as she walked out. Amazing, she thought. She hoped he’d die right there where he sat. She stuffed the borrowed shirt in her pants as she walked and guessed it was feeding time because she was suddenly hungry.
Maybe there’ll be cigarettes today, she thought. I’m almost out.
* * *
The night was Phil’s favorite time on the mountain, moonless nights especially. When there was no moon the stars shone their brightest and God the number of them. Some ninety miles from any significant light source, and conveniently shaded from stray light from L.A. by the Tehachapi mountains to the south, the undiluted view of the stars from High Ridge was incredible. Phil was somewhat nearsighted, not to the point where he wore glasses all the time, mind you, just enough to lose some of the heavenly detail he so enjoyed. He got a kick out of going outside, looking skyward, slipping on his old horn rims and seeing the stars and Milky Way pop into sharp focus.
He walked some fifty feet from the cabin and its view-obscuring trees, to a spot that gave him an unrestricted panorama.
Just as he was about to slip his glasses on, his teeth started to vibrate in his mouth. It was the damndest sensation. He thought at first it must have been a rocket or jet engine test from Edwards Air Force Base southeast of Mojave. The sound was almost omni-directional but as he turned his head from side to side, he thought he could isolate it coming from somewhere up the canyon to the north. The sound stopped as abruptly as it started. He waited for a minute to see if it would start again, and it did. This time the sound was louder and coming distinctly from the southern end of the canyon. The southern sound stopped, too, and Phil dismissed it finally as some engine somewhere or some aberrant event he didn’t understand.
He slipped on his glasses and stood on the rim of the pad gazing up.
Look at them there stars, he thought.
2
B ailey and Jim Hall knew they were trespassing. Haight canyon was private property, but it was also the most fantastic place to camp. Not only were there great hiking areas, but two fresh water streams in the canyon, one of which emptied into a crystalline pool the locals called “Diana’s Bath.” It was just the place for newlyweds to frolic and enjoy the outdoors. Jim was sure they could spend the entire weekend there and not run into another person. He’d done it plenty of times. There was just the single cabin up on the ridge at the far end, but that was at least three miles away.
He had driven the bus up the canyon road and passed all the dozens of Nazi “No Trespassing” signs and turned off along a barely visible trail just wide enough to let him by. He’d stopped about a hundred feet in, then Bailey and him had run back; and using pine branches off the convenient tree, had brushed away the tracks to hide their passage. With that bit of “woodsy trickery,” as Bailey called it, they had disappeared in the canyon. Completely undetected.
Diana’s Bath was just a ways down the draw and the gentle trickle of the stream that fed it was so restful at night. It was Bailey’s first time at Jim’s secret grotto getaway, but Jim knew right away that she had taken to it as quickly as he had. They’d had sex as soon as camp was made, and then made a bitchin’ meal of barbecued steaks with big potatoes that they wrapped in foil and baked in the coals. Jim had no idea, until that very moment, that Bailey was such a damn good cook. He had never felt so good after eating that meal and later with his woman under his arm walking barefoot in the cool little stream. He thanked the stars for her.
They made love again just after dark, and full of food and fresh air and tired from the sex, they curled up like kittens in the double sleeping bag and went fast asleep.
At about 11:00 p.m., had they been watching, they would have seen those pans and utensils with iron content, the ones Bailey had left by the dwindling fire, twitch as the alien craft drifted silently over their camp site, just fifty feet above the ground.
* * *
Phil watched the stars until his neck got tired of craning up. He’d folded his arms around himself and wondered whether it was from the night’s chill or the overwhelming sense of vastness above that he’d done it.
He took off his glasses and turned to go back inside when he heard the long, low grunt coming from the southern end of the canyon. It was faint, but he easily heard it. It sounded a lot like one of Westberger’s steers, but not quite. One of the peculiar advantages of his high, virtually unobstructed view of the canyon from High Ridge was the fact that sound traveled up to him on the ridge as if it were traveling over water.
He cocked his head so an ear was pointing south just as he heard the faint high-pitched feminine squeal from the same spot and the male yelling and some more screa
ming, then nothing. He didn’t like that much. He didn’t care for raucous sounds in his canyon late at night. It sounded like a squabble, but it could have easily been horseplay. They could chase themselves around at night somewhere else. He’d talk to them on the way out Sunday if they were still there.
He started back to the cabin and swore at himself again for walking around in the dark without a light. This was serious snake country. Walking around at night was the best way in the world to get bitten. He hoped that’s not what he just heard down in the canyon.
He went to bed about eleven thirty and lay there naked thinking of Linda. She’d be there tomorrow before nine, practically careening up the road to get there. She wasn’t careless or reckless, she was a no-nonsense woman who knew how to get from here to there and usually did it in a hurry. She was the one who’d flash her brights on your ass if you didn’t get out of her way on the freeway and was the first to give you the finger if you challenged her.
Though unmarried, they’d had a long and fairly smooth relationship and were about as close and caring as two people could be. They maintained the illusion of independence; yet, their love for each other bound them tightly. They shared every behavior of the happily married save one—they refused to cohabitate. Never mind that they spent several nights each week and awoke in each other’s bed, the idea of living together never took solid shape between them.
There were many things he liked about Linda. She was his best friend; and he trusted her completely. Over the years, through some bonding mechanism he had yet to define, they had developed common speech patterns and similar ways to express ideas. In short, they sounded like each other, just like most married people.
Linda Purdy was a computer system QA analyst for AT&T in Sylmar. “Type A” personalities are invariably good at their jobs, and Linda was no exception. It was her unerring sense of what was logical that served her best. Her officially stated position on analysis of any kind was that she rarely jumped to conclusions or theorized in “advance of the facts” as she said, because it was folly to do so. “That’s what Holmes would say,” she’d argue.
Once the facts were known she could extrapolate perfectly to the extent allowed by them and could put her finger on the problem or unravel a knotty system anomaly with unparalleled precision.
It was her unfathomable leaps of intuition that perplexed and amazed her co-workers. If her logical reasoning was her staid servant, intuition was her spirited muse.
Her job was to ensure that the software that controlled the switching computers manufactured at the Sylmar facility was as bug-free as possible. Linda Purdy was the first line of defense against the inevitable “events” and “undocumented features” that create error in all software programs approaching a million lines of instructions. Since Linda did not write the code, hers were the fresh and vigorous eyes and mind that watched, worked and exercised the software for relative peanuts prior to using it for keeps when millions of dollars might be on the line. Telecommunication is a complex realm of acronyms and arcane interactions and to gain the right perspective on what the software did or ought to do, logical reasoning sometimes just isn’t enough. Imagination and visualization are tools rarely used by both the right and left sides of the brain. Phil was fairly sure that Linda’s brain used those instruments frequently and with genius. He had studied her mind for ten years, not with the cold detachment of a scientist, but as her warm and admiring friend and companion.
Phil had once misplaced his car keys and searched for hours looking for them in every pocket of every piece of clothing he owned. After a several minutes-long interview with Linda about where he was and what he had been doing, she told him his keys were in the bathroom on the back of the toilet. She said it with a calm certainty that contained no doubt about the keys’ whereabouts. That’s exactly where they were. It wasn’t as if she had seen him put them down on the back of the toilet, and the facts moved all around that particular solution without ever being cemented directly to it. She had caused that very specific event to coalesce out of the miasmic gas of one person’s behavior—his. Amused by the talent, he was made to wonder what other truths she had gathered in this way.
Being the healthy male that he was, and with the gentle breeze gliding cool over his naked body, his mind drifted back to the legs in the Honda coupe on the freeway on the way up. The Land Cruiser’s height had provided a good view into it. The woman behind the wheel was dressed in a light sleeveless cotton shift. All Phil could see, though, were her legs. Her legs were not long and perfectly shaped in a traditional sense. They were not thin but round and full with an insinuation of warm, sexual strength. The legs were smooth and the texture of alabaster—so much so that the sunlight shining in from the far direction left a bold wet kiss of luminescence on her left knee. He couldn’t see her face from his vantage, but the woman’s smooth, bare legs made her face a moot characteristic of her anatomy. The effect of the sheer cloth draped so carelessly up around her strong thighs was dizzying. He longed to experience, with those strong limbs as willing partners, if not the act of breeding, at least the slow, wet and voluptuous behavior which often leads to conception. It occurred to him suddenly and with delight that the thighs he had lusted for so were remarkably like his own Linda’s. He smiled with the thoughts of her body and her mind.
Fatigued by the week’s events, the long drive up and the hour, he drifted to sleep.
He woke with a jolt when for the second time, the loudest, lowest bass tone he had ever heard shook the bones in his head and made his teeth buzz.
* * *
Jim Hall knew the sound of a black bear snooping around camp when he heard it, and he was hearing it now. They’d mess up your camp if you didn’t shoo them away. He wanted Bailey to see it though, just to scare the shit out of her—before he chased it the hell out of camp.
He sat up and nudged her gently awake. “Bailey, wake up,” he whispered, shaking her butt. “Wake up, there’s a bear outside.” He reached over, picked up the flashlight and turned it on.
Bailey’s eyes were immediately wide open and as big as saucers.
“A bear? Outside?” she whispered back, gasping for air.
“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s a lot more afraid of us than we are of it.” He started to zip down the tent’s door. Bailey grabbed his arm.
“What exactly are you doing?” she asked incredulously.
“I’m gonna show you the bear. It’s okay, believe me,” he said smiling. “I’ll say ‘boo’ and he’ll split. Watch.”
“No,” she said firmly. “Don’t.”
They could hear the bear sniffing loudly around the door of the tent. It was awfully loud sniffing. There were some stray cattle in the canyon, and if Jim hadn’t known that cows didn’t move at night, he’d have thought it was a steer outside by the volume of the sniffing.
“Bailey, Jesus, would I let a darned bear drag you off and tear you to pieces? Besides it’s a little ‘ol black bear not a damn grizzly. Just relax.” He took hold of the zipper and started to pull it down.
The gray hunter didn’t wait for the zipper to come all the way down before it shoved its head on its long neck into the tent, right into the full beam of Jim’s light.
“Jesus . . . what the hell . . . ” Jim stuttered, yanking Bailey back away from the head. Bailey screeched so loud it hurt Jim’s ear.
It was clearly not a bear. Some automatic mechanism in Jim insisted on treating the creature as if it were a bear anyway. “Git!” Jim yelled at it. “Git!”
The head just watched them menacingly.
Jim looked closely at the head. The eyes were human, no doubt about that. Mean eyes, yes, but it was a person. He started to laugh. I get it.
“It’s a darned mask!” he said and reached out to touch it. “Who are you?”
The head snapped at the hand with its powerful mouth and bit right through Jim’s fingers.
“What the hell! Jesus Christ!” he cried, clamping his other hand over the
stubs of his fingers. Bailey screamed again and scooted as far as she could to the back of the tent.
Without thinking Jim whacked the head with the flashlight, but the head just snarled then tilted up and grunted loudly. Jim lifted his right foot up out of the sleeping bag, pulled it back and stomped hard at the head. The creature took the full force of the kick directly on its flattish face. Jim hauled back with the foot a second time and stroked down hard. This time the creature ducked around and clamped onto the side of his foot with its teeth. Jim yelled with pain. The creature shook like a terrier and pulled off half of the foot in a big chunk.
“Jesussss Chrrrrist!” he yelled. “Get ooooout!”
He raised the flashlight again to whack at it. This time the creature lunged in at Jim with its horrible mouth open wide and clamped to his gut. Jim whacked at the head and thick, strong neck with the flashlight. Bailey pressed herself into the far corner of the tent and watched as the creature shook and tore at Jim’s midsection.
“Staaaap!” he said through clenched teeth and swung the light down as hard as he could time and time again. “Stop! Stop! Stop!”
Bailey had never seen so much blood. When the head shook, the blood splattered the inside of the tent. She watched in shock as the creature bit and tore and Jim hit it with the flashlight. She watched until Jim was dead. She heard odd sounds outside the tent. They sounded something like words but made no sense to her like the big words on her father’s radio did when she was a child, just word noises.
When the creature was done it raised its bloody face and looked at Bailey. She was in shock, and not entirely in possession of her faculties, but she could have sworn that the head smiled an evil little smile at her. She heard the distant sound of an odd fog horn and thought how strange it was to hear it just then. She wondered dimly how it came to be that someone installed a nice fog horn right here in this peaceful canyon.
