V 14 - The Oregon Invasion

by Jayne Tannehill (UC) (epub)

  The day was long enough to hold the waiting, the watching, the lingering.

  When the elk and deer had gone, he returned to the river. He crossed the footbridge and found other pools dotting a meadow on the other side.

  A skunk crossed his path, rabbits darted through the tall grass. A hawk circled high above him.

  The bear saw him before he recognized that the shadow against the forest was alive. He had not seen a bear before. And so he watched and followed, keeping the distance even between them.

  The bear ignored him, stopped for berries, explored the springs in the meadow, stretched his back against a tree to scratch, dug in the forest for insects. But when the bear had had enough of his constant companionship, he turned and growled.

  It might have been enough to stop and turn to go, but Hadad climbed. The tree was there beside him, and he found himself high in the branches. He was not pursued. The bear assessed his position, and then disappeared into the forest.

  Hadad waited. And then he returned to the cabin. By the third day Hadad began to trust the quiet rhythms of the mountains undisturbed by the life-and-death dramas of man. He hunted, and took only the food that was willing to be eaten. Ruth had gone with him the second day, and though she did not have the reflexes to take food with her hand, he found that she could stop a bird in flight with the knife she carried between her shoulders.

  She did not flinch when he ate food that was still alive, and he learned to gather berries without getting caught on the spines that protected their branches.

  In the afternoons they lay in the warm water of the large tub and she teased him about the patches of pink that he wore on his feet and that still grew to him on parts of his back and about his head and neck. The scratches healed and gradually the surfaces began to grow back over his legs, down over his shoulders.

  “How can it do that?” she asked as she examined the new tender places over his collarbone.

  “It grows.”

  “But you call it plastic.”

  “That is just my word. It is what you call symbiote.”

  “You mean symbiotic?”

  “Yes. It is a life form. It grows to cover me. It eats from my skin. I keep it alive. And it keeps me alive.” “But do you have to have it on you?”

  “No. I did not have it before I was on the ship.” “Can it grow without you?”

  “No. Without a host it will die. But on my planet there are many hosts. Here there are none but us.” “Oh. Then there are two invaders of Earth.” Hadad laughed. “You could say that.”

  “I just did.”

  They dressed to hunt. The day was warm, but the bushes were sharp and so they wore the leathers that would best protect them.

  Something disturbed the air. Hadad listened and tried to distinguish what it was, but the sound stopped and did not begin again. He finished fastening the sleeves of his shirt and watched Ruth run her fingers through her hair and shake it out behind her. She pulled the strands back and wrapped them around her hand and took a long leatherworking needle and wove it through the strands, holding the knot of hair up off her neck.

  Hadad put his fingers on the back of her neck. She was warm, his fingers soon took the heat, releasing some of their coolness to her skin.

  She turned and faced him, the eyes of the deer begging him to come closer.

  “This morning we will hunt. Come.”

  She wrinkled her nose and smiled and was the first to the door despite his urgency.

  She opened the door, saw the weapon in the hand of the uniformed lizard, and threw the knife to pin his arm against the tree behind him before he could fire. And so it was the weapon of the small female Visitor behind him that fired at the roof above her head. And only Hadad’s hand on her shoulder stopped Ruth’s forward motion before the body of the male Visitor from the roof landed on the steps in front of the door.

  Hadad recognized the fallen lizard as Jeffrey and watched as the life left him.

  There were four other shots: two beside the bedroom window, another behind the cabin, one felling the uniformed male who was running up the path toward the door. And then the firing stopped.

  “This is my battle, Ruth. They have found me. They want me, not you.” He took her in his arms and kissed her and then moved past her to the doorway.

  He stepped over the body of Jeffrey as he descended the steps.

  “Amon.” The Visitor still pinned to the tree whispered the name.

  Hadad looked up and recognized the officer as one whom he had known at The Leader’s compound on the planet he called home.

  “The people of the stars shall return to the stars.” Paul recited the ritual words.

  “And they that recognize the light shall not see death.” Hadad completed the response.

  “Amon. You have come to Earth. It is the time of the returning.”

  “It is the beginning. You have come to kill me.” “No. We have come to ask about the resistance.” “There is no resistance. There is only balance in the actions of all things.”

  “The teachings of Zon.”

  “You know them?”

  Paul looked away from him for the first time, glancing over his shoulder at the uniformed Visitors around him. Hadad looked at each of them. There was no recognition in their eyes. Only in the eyes of Paul. And then he knew the cause of Paul’s distress. He did not understand why the others did not fire on him or rush to bind him. He waited for the answer. “Yes. I know the teachings of Zon.”

  “Then you are my friend. And if these are your friends, I accept them as my own.”

  “Sir?” The small woman behind Paul spoke.

  “Yes, Patricia.”

  “If there is no resistance, that would explain the operations.”

  “Yes. Yes, it would.”

  “And it would mean that. . . that he is not part of the fifth column.”

  “Patricia, that is true. But that is not the resistance he is talking about.”

  “I do not understand, sir.”

  “Learn now the ways of Zon. This is not a priest of The Leader. This is Amon, the priest of Zon, who will release the people of Earth and return us to the stars.” He stroked her hair with his free arm, and then for the first time seemed to realize he could not move the other.

  Hadad stepped forward to the tree and removed Ruth’s knife from Paul’s sleeve.

  Patricia looked at Paul questioningly, and then she looked at Hadad and shook her head from side to side, her expression full of wonder.

  “I was the man you looked for.” Hadad tried to address the questions she had asked before, to give some orientation, some guidance, something familiar for the girl to relate to. But she just continued to shake her head from side to side and watch his face.

  The rhythm of the movement was hypnotic, and for a few moments Hadad saw only the girl. Then he became aware of the four others who stood now to his right: a woman and three men stood with weapons pointed at him, but with no intention to fire.

  Nothing in the prophecy he had heard in the night gave him any notion of what he was to do next. He stood in the middle of the path and looked back at Paul, who seemed to be the leader of the expedition. He waited for some clue as to the goal of their mission. He sensed that they had come to kill him, but that they suddenly could not. And it was suddenly very confusing to them all, for nothing at all seemed to be happening.

  No one knew what to do, and no action outside of them demanded a familiar response.

  They needed a plan. And Hadad was a leader, so he

  started creating order within the confusion he faced.

  “Paul, Ruth and I are to find the Star Child, Elizabeth. You will come with us. We will need a pilot and a craft. The rest will return to the ship and report that the priest you sought has been eliminated; he is no more. That should satisfy Diana.”

  “Justine,” Paul echoed Hadad’s authority. “Take the rest of the crew back to the ship. Patricia will go with us. Report the craft we take as destroy
ed. I’m sure you can invent ground forces sufficient to explain the casualties.”

  “Yes, sir. That will not be difficult.”

  “Remember what you have seen here, but speak of it to no one.”

  “I understand, sir.”

  “Dismissed.”

  The crew of four departed.

  “Your craft is not close by.”

  “No, we did not want to risk your escape into the forest.”

  “Bring it here.”

  “Yes, sir.” Paul and the pilot he called Patricia ran up the road in the direction the others had taken.

  Hadad returned to the cabin. He climbed the steps, over the body of the man who had been his guardian and his nemesis for so many years. He squatted on the top stair, beside the face contorted in death, broken by the edge of the step where it had landed. “Praetenama, Jeffrey. Praetenama.”

  He put his hand on the forehead of his friend and stood up, turning to find Ruth inside the door.

  He handed her the throwing knife he had taken from the tree.

  “What’s happening, Hadad? I don’t understand.” “I do not know either. All I do know is that we have to find the Star Child, Elizabeth.”

  “Can’t we stay here, just the two of us, together?”

  He reached across to her and kissed her, and then he smiled. The hover craft landed on the road behind the car.

  “I would like that too, Ruth. I am not a warrior. I do not like to walk amid the violence. But there is balance in the actions of all things. And while the Earth is at war, there is no peace. We could not save Prineville, nor the people of Vida or Detroit, but perhaps we can do something for what remains of the world.”