V 14 - The Oregon Invasion

by Jayne Tannehill (UC) (epub)

  “Hadad, I won’t leave you here.”

  “You are being foolish.”

  “Maybe.”

  It was easier to see the road now that their eyes had adjusted to the darkness. Ruth started the car and edged forward, watching the growth beside the road to find turns. She drove slowly. They both listened for a change in the drone above them.

  “Why don’t they open fire on us? They must know we are here.”

  “They know.”

  “Then why don’t they get it over with?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The road began to descend into the valley beyond. Once again they found patches of pavement with white lines that glowed in the minimal light, edging the one-lane road.

  And then there was a thunderous crack above their heads, and a flash of intense blue light that illuminated everything for an instant and then disappeared, leaving everything darker than before. Ruth screamed and jammed her foot onto the brake, throwing them both against the dashboard, hitting her head against

  the rim of the steering wheel. Hadad felt the rigidity in all of his muscles, the impulse to freeze compounded by the movement of his body in the car. He was certain the ship above them had opened fire and missed. But the sound was directly above them, and he knew the ship’s weaponry was too accurate to come that close without doing damage.

  He looked out into the darkness. They were alive. He was not certain how or why, but they were alive.

  And then it began to rain.

  Ruth leaned against the steering wheel, her head against the rim. Hadad worried that she was unconscious and moved across the seat to examine her injuries. She was not bleeding and was not unconscious, but her breathing was shallow. As he pulled her back from the wheel, she started to cry. He did not stop her. Now he held her, cradling her head between his cheek and shoulder, holding her torso with his strong arms, letting her sobs release the tension. He wished he, too, could cry.

  The drone above them was gone.

  There was only the persistent hammering of rain powering down on the roof and hood of the car.

  It is likely that for a moment they both fell asleep. Hadad could not remember feeling his shoulder beginning to tingle where her head rested, but now he felt the numbness. The rain was still beating on the metal of the car, steady and strong.

  “Ruth . . . Ruth, wake up.”

  “Hmmm?”

  “Wake up. We have to get off the mountain.”

  “What?”

  “It was only lightning. We are alive.”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know. The hover craft is gone. We can turn the lights on. We are tired. Let’s go.”

  “Let me sleep.”

  “Ruth, the water is deep in the road now, and moving fast. The road may flood. We would be washed down the mountain. We have to try to get to your friend.”

  Ruth wailed a reply, trying to return to sleep.

  “Ruth, listen to me. We must get off the mountain.”

  Hadad reached across her and opened the window, then he pushed her body toward the door and thrust her head out into the cooling rain. She woke instantly, struggling to pull away from the water, away from his grasp.

  “What are you doing to me?”

  “Good, you are awake. Now you can drive us away from here.”

  Ruth started the car, turned on the windshield wipers and the lights, and started through the storm. She did not seem to remember her resistance to waking, and Hadad did not remind her.

  They had driven slowly before without lights. Now they drove more slowly with them. Water puddled on the road, ran gushing over the side and down the embankments, fell in torrents from the clouds above, from the overhanging cliffs above, dripping from the trees around them. Carefully they picked their way.

  The road branched in front of them and Ruth became confused. The left fork seemed more traveled and so Hadad suggested they turn that way. Ruth did not resist.

  The night was too long. The air became chilled suddenly and Hadad and Ruth both reached immediately to close the windows that had been left slightly open to reduce the steaming of the windshield.

  “It will be dawn soon.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “The chill. It comes just before dawn on your planet.”

  The road began to descend quickly and the path they traveled was now a raging river as well. The brakes were of little help and so Ruth put the car into the lowest forward gear the automatic transmission offered. They did not talk. And though he did not know how to operate an automobile with his body, Hadad thought the car’s maneuvers, concentrating on the turns of the road, as intensely as Ruth.

  They crossed a bridge and a few hundred yards later saw the first sign they had been able to recognize. One arrow pointed ahead of them Detroit 12, the other back the way they had come, highway 22 13. Again they crossed a bridge and then to the left they could see, even in the dark rain, the open expanse of a lake.

  The road twisted between the lake and the steep hill to the right, down, closer and closer to the water. Trees guarded the lakeside, and dirt roads and driveways led to campgrounds and boat ramps.

  The road became more level and Ruth relaxed more as she drove. The rain slowed and seemed almost to stop, and then suddenly there was a flash of lightning over the lake, and the sky was laced with tiny white lines for just an instant and then dark again. The thunder cracked the sky and echoed from the hills across the lake. They reached a stretch along the lake where the road, though just as wide itself, crossed a narrow stretch between the water and the hillside. Lightning struck and illuminated the road ahead and gave them warning. For there, jackknifed across the narrow pavement, was a logging truck, laced together with long newly stripped trees, and then piled high with boxes and bundles tied with tarpaulins binding them to the log framework improvising the bed of a truck.

  The truck had struck the pole supporting power lines that led down to the campground. Now the wires lay on the roof of the cab, and its occupants leaned out the window waving frantically, shaking their heads, yelling sounds unintelligible in the fury of the storm.

  Ruth stopped the car comfortably behind the jackknifed truck and they got out to investigate. Now they could hear the shouts.

  “Don’t touch the truck.”

  Hadad recognized the danger and held Ruth back from the side of the vehicle.

  “Do not touch it. You would ground the current.” “But they’re okay in the truck.”

  “They are not grounded. You are. We must lift the cable from the truck.”

  “How?”

  Hadad began to search the forest beside the cab. The man in the truck shouted advice. His wife and two sons huddled on the seat beside him.

  “You folks, you’d best turn back. We’re stuck here. We can’t get out.”

  Hadad heard the panic in his voice.

  “You are safe in the cab. You must do as I say. Do not try to leave the cab. We will find a way to remove the wires. But you must stay there. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.” The man quieted, more in response to the authority in Hadad’s voice than in response to the words.

  Hadad found the tree he was looking for and went back to where Ruth was standing.

  “We need tools.”

  “Most of them are still . . .”

  “We need an ax.”

  “I have a small one in my backpack.”

  “It will have to do.”

  Hadad took the short-handled hatchet that Ruth dug from the backpack and examined its edge. The blade was sharp. What it lacked in size it compensated for in quality. It was not an ax, but it would do.

  He returned to the forest near the front of the cab and scaled up the tree he had chosen for the task. When he reached the level of the roof of the cab he began stripping the branches, revealing a fork in the limb that could hold the wires as had the pole nearby.

  When he had prepared the tree sufficiently he climbed down, clinging to the
side of the tree below the branches. When he reached the ground he looked up at the people in the cab to be sure they were not trying to get out. He saw the same look as he had seen on the Earth ones when he did the pushups. And then he realized that he had climbed as a lizard, not as a man would climb. He looked away from the dumbstruck faces. He did not have time for their confusion now.

  Ruth had been watching from the road, her hair now soaked, plastered to her face. He pulled her back to the car.

  “I’m all right. I don’t mind being wet.”

  “Get in. I need your help.”

  They each got into the front seat and Hadad paused, considering alternatives.

  “I need a large hook of some kind. Something that will hold the wires.”

  “You’re not going to try to lift those wires, are you? They’re still live. You could . . .”

  “Ruth, I need a hook, a large hook. Do you have anything that will work as a hook?”

  “Hadad, all I have is my leather tools.”

  “Let me see them.”

  She kneeled and leaned over the back of the seat. From the floor behind her she pulled a leather bag. She settled back onto the seat and opened the drawstring, pulling the bag out into a large circle on which the tools lay.

  The punch opened in a V shape. Nothing else even resembled a hook. Hadad took the punch and tested its rigidity. It was sprung open. It would work.

  “Is that all you need?”

  “No. Now I need a cord that will not conduct electricity.”

  “I can’t help you.”

  “Yes, you can. The plastic that covers my body. It will not conduct electricity. It will burn. But if it is thick enough, it will not burn quickly, even if the cable sparks. The thing you call braid, you can do that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  Hadad took the leather clothes and pulled them away from his body. He took the leather-cutting knife from the array of tools and began carefully to cut the strips away from his legs and then to cut thin strips up his chest, handing the strips to Ruth as fast as he could cut them.

  At first she sat confused, but gradually she began to understand what he wanted, and as he handed her strips, she worked them into a long braid fastened at one end to one handle of the leather punch. He continued to cut until she had braided a strip about three feet long. It had taken strips from his legs, from his torso, from his upper arms, from his sides and buttocks and part of his back, but the cord was made and it was strong.

  He dressed again in leather, now able to feel even more intensely the roughness of the wet skins.

  He took the rope from Ruth and left the car, feeling the rain again against his body, colder now in the wet leather.

  A tree grew beside the tree he had shaped, this one taller, broader, with limbs leaning out over the road, almost reaching to the truck itself. This tree he climbed, this time remembering to climb as a man would climb, finding the lodgings for feet in the lower branches. He climbed out the limb toward the truck and gauged his body weight so that he did not go out so far that the limb would touch the cab.

  Carefully then he lowered his flesh-colored rope down from the branch. There was a dip in the wires right behind the cab. He aimed the V-shaped hook down that crevice and pulled up, hoping to catch the wires. He missed.

  He moved a little farther out on the branch. He tried again.

  This time he caught the wires, but as he pulled up on the rope they slipped from the notch in the tool.

  He tried again. This time he caught them and they stayed just on the lip of the punch handle. Slowly he pulled them up and over, off the cab, to the notch in the tree beside him.

  A shout rose from the cab, but it was immediately drowned in thunder as lightning struck the tree that had suspended Hadad over the road, and flames licked instantly through the branches, burning the tree to its core despite the wet branches, sizzling the wet needles.

  Hadad dropped to the ground, the leather shirt and pants charred and smoldering, burned through in places, revealing his mottled skin below.

  The family poured from the cab and Ruth came running from the car. Hadad opened his eyes to see them ripping pieces of the burning shirt from his chest. He waited for the realization of who he was to follow, for the accusation and the terror. But there was none.

  “He’s burned bad. Skin’s all putrid already, blisters everywhere. Don’t touch the skin. Here, help me lift him under the arm there. Boys, get his legs. You can manage. The man needs your help. Let’s get him back to your car, lady.”

  Hadad let them carry him, aware of the need of Earth ones to respond to the needs of others, the desperation to be needed in an emergency.

  They put him into the car and then the man began the arduous process of inching the truck away from the pole, straightening the truck bed on the narrow road without losing the back wheels into the soft water-soaked forest floor beside the road. Ruth sat beside him impatient with the delay, her hand beating nervously on the steering wheel.

  “Do not respond rapidly. I am all right. The man needs to think 1 am badly burned. Otherwise he would see the truth, that my skin is not human. Do not look at me yet.”

  “Are you sure you’re all right? The lightning.”

  “It went through me. I felt its power.”

  “And you’re all right?”

  “Yes, Ruth. It is power. But it is finite. It did not consume me.”

  “But you fell.”

  “No. I did not fall. I dropped to the ground to leave the fire.” .

  “You can do that?”

  “And so could you if your muscles were strong to absorb the impact.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Believe me, and let the man worry. He needs the worry for me to give him courage to move his truck. Otherwise he would not know how to straighten it.” “How do you know that?”

  “It is a very human thing, courage.”

  The truck veered onto the narrow shoulder and then straightened on the narrow road. He honked and waved and then set off toward Detroit, clearing the road for Ruth to follow.

  At the highway the trucker turned left; Ruth followed, but when they reached town, she turned left again and made her way down toward the school, away from the trucker and his family. When they were out of sight, she pulled to the side of the road and turned out the lights.

  The sky paled with the approaching dawn; the sky was heavy with clouds and the rain continued.

  “Your friend lives here in Detroit?”

  Ruth nodded.

  “In this house?”

  “No. He’s a ranger. He lives over behind the station.”

  She looked down at her hands twisting in her lap. “I just pulled over here to get away from the—”

  “I understand.”

  They did not speak to break the silence. Hadad watched Ruth for a few minutes and then he looked out at the sleeping village. A single signal light flashed red in all four directions at the intersection. A sign in the cafe window said “open,” though it clearly was not. The mountain hideaway had apparently been a refuge for vacationers, when there had been vacations, when there had been freedom of movement, freedom to choose travel, to choose departure from the ordinariness of survival. There were still a few who insisted that the world would go on unchanged, but most had given up first the pleasure of playfulness and then the desire for it.

  The village itself survived. No longer a playground, now it housed the hungry, the refugees. Vegetable gardens covered expanses that probably had once been lawns, corn grew hip-high where children might have ridden bicycles and played sandlot baseball. There were no vacancies. And no recreational vehicles stood loaded with equipment to amuse the idle. Now those vehicles housed families who had escaped the lowlands, and tent villages dotted the hillsides. “I’m hungry.”

  “Perhaps your friend will have food.”

  Ruth nodded and reached down to start the car again.

  “I cannot go with yo
u, Ruth.”

  She took her hand from the ignition and put it on the steering wheel, gripping it too tightly, her knuckles white.

  “I seem to have traded the skin of a person for the skin of a deer. But underneath I am the same. Your friend will not accept me any more than Jerry did. I am a Visitor, Ruth.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “Into the mountains. Eventually the red dust will put the virus in my body and I will die. Until then I will live in the mountains.” He looked out at the forests around him, seeing, as he looked, the contours of land that would welcome him best, give him shelter and food.

  “You will stay with your friend?”

  “Probably.”

  “That does not make you happy?”

  “No.”

  “He is not a good man?”

  “He’s a good man.”

  “But you are sad.”

  Ruth nodded. Hadad watched her tracing the wheel with one finger, round and round pointlessly. His arm remembered her head upon his shoulder. He watched and in time she looked up at him and again he saw the look of the deer drawing him to her.

  “I cannot give to you. I have nothing. And I will die soon, on the mountain. But I have learned to want. I have learned to want you. Will you come with me into the mountains?”

  Ruth looked down at her hands, and then slowly she shook her head from side to side.

  “I don’t deserve you, Hadad.”

  “I do not offer you anything. It is I who do not deserve.”

  “That’s not true. You are brave. You are honest. You truly care about Earth ones even though they want to kill you. You work hard. You are compassionate. And . . . you . . . love me and I do not deserve your love. Hadad, you are everything I have ever wanted in a lover and I cannot live with you. I don’t deserve you. I am not brave. I am selfish, and foolish, and I betray you and myself. And I am afraid of the mountains that you know. They are not the mountains I have lived in. And I am afraid of the death you accept so . . . passively. I want life. And everywhere around me there is death. Even with you.”

  The words came hard from her. Hadad watched as she spoke. But he did not hear her. For once he did not listen with his awareness. This time he did not hear her fears; he heard only his own. No longer was he human in appearance. The textured green skin on his chest was now exposed and showed through the holes in the shirt he wore. His face was scratched, even his hands were evident in the tears he had gotten in climbing. Only his feet, still booted, were smooth and plastic, pink and untextured. He was a lizard. And he was certain that though she would not say she found him repulsive, she must.