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 someday 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 east 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.
Almost at once he heard a familiar snorting sound behind him. He turned and saw the ponderous yellow form of the elephant-camel looming up, with Jill sitting astride it just back of the front hump.
She leaned down and said, “You change your mind yet about wanting that ride?”
“I thought you were sore at me.”
“I am. Was. But it still seems crazy for you to be doing this on foot when I’ve got room up here for you.”
He stared up at her. You don’t often get second chances in this life, he told himself. But he wasn’t sure what to do.
“Oh, Christ,” she said, as he hesitated. “Do you want a ride or don’t you?”
Still he remained silent.
She shot him a quick wicked grin. “Still worried that I’m a Spook? You can check me out if you like.”
“I threw your gadget in the stream. I don’t like to have witch-things around me.”
“Well, that’s all right.” She laughed. “It wasn’t a charm at all, just an old power core, and a worn out one at that. It wouldn’t have told you anything.”
“What’s a power core?”
“Spook stuff. You could have taken it back with you to prove you were over here. Look, do you want a ride or not?”
It seemed ridiculous to turn her down again.
“What the hell,” Demeris said. “Sure.”
Jill spoke to the animal in what he took to be Spook language, a hiccupping wheeze and a long indrawn whistling sound, and it knelt for him. Demeris took her hand and she drew him on top of the beast with surprising ease. An openwork construction made of loosely woven cord, half poncho and half saddle, lay across the creature’s broad back, with the three humps jutting through. Her tent and other possessions were fastened to it at the rear. “Tie your pack to one of those dangling strings,” she said. “You can ride right behind me.”
He fitted himself into the valley between the second and third humps and got a secure hold on the weaving, fingers digging down deep into it. She whistled another command and the animal began to move forward.
Its motion was a rolling, thumping, sliding kind of thing, very hard to take. The sway was both lateral and vertical and with every step the ground seemed to rise and plunge around him in lunatic lunges. Demeris had never seen the ocean or any other large body of water, but he had heard about seasickness, and this was what it was like. He gulped, clamped his mouth shut, gripped the saddle even more tightly.
Jill called back to him, “How are you doing?”
“Fine. Fine.”
“Takes some getting used to, huh?”
“Some,” he said.
His buttocks didn’t have much padding on them. He could feel the vast bones of the elephant-camel grinding beneath him like the pistons of some giant machine. He held on tight and dug his heels in as hard as he could.
“You see those delta-winged things go by a little while ago?” she asked, after a while.
“The big dragons that were giving off the green smoke?”
“Right. Herders. On their way to Spook City for the hunt. They’ll be used to drive the game toward the killing grounds. Every year this time they get brought in to help in the round-up.”
“And the flying snakes?”
“They herd the herders. Herders aren’t very smart. About like dogs, maybe. The snake guys are a lot brighter. The snakes tell the herders where to go and the herders make the game animals go there too.”
Demeris thought about that. Level upon level of intelligence among these