big-time, and if it wasn’t the anxiety attacks, she was plastered, and it made him feel like shit when she was drunk.
He heard a persistent rattling. It went lower in frequency, became more distinct, a thudding—and then he saw it coming.
It was a single light, approaching low over the trees. The tree-tops tossed about as it came.
“Oh, shit. The black chopper.”
The same one. He could see the markings on it, D-23.
And as he said
the black chopper
, a searchlight switched on, making a thin column of harsh blue shine down into the trees. A doe, with ears like a mule’s, ran from the questing blob of light.
The chopper changed direction, coming right toward him, its searchlight probing.
“Fuck this,” Waylon muttered, and started off through waist-high ferns, the trees seeming to run toward him as he skidded along the slope.
He fell, sliding on his ass through blackberry vines, feeling them burn across his skin. The chopper boomed overhead, the trees surging in its wind, leaves caught up in its private dust devil, spinning into his eyes.
He stopped hard against a mossy-slick pine tree, goose-egging his shin on it. “Shit!” he hissed, and ducked behind the tree as the searchlight swept over the bole where he’d been a moment before, and passed on. The chopper carried its wind and restlessly probing searchlight with it, back into the farther reaches of the night sky.
Heart thudding, tasting metal but feeling a certain elation, Waylon started down the hillside, skidding toward the road. His leg ached, his face stung with blackberry thorns, and he had a long walk home. Maybe his mom’d be asleep when he got there.
Suddenly he stopped, aware of hunched, stealthy movement in the shadows of the slope below him.
That deer he’d seen, probably. But he kept still and watched. After a moment, he made out two pale faces peering up toward him, catching moon and starlight where it dappled through foliage. No more of them was visible.
They were about seventy feet away from him, but he thought he knew who it was. Two of those marines who’d come to replace the cops. He had seen them earlier, from the brush close by the road.
Now they seemed to raise their heads and sniff the air, to listen like animals. It almost looked as if they were down on all fours, but they couldn’t be; it must be that they were leaning their hands on a steep part of the hillside.
They were climbing up toward him.
They came on, seeming almost to glide effortlessly up the hillside. They were so quiet, so stealthy, it was like they were on some kind of combat training exercise, creeping up on the enemy camp. And it was like they were moving in tandem—
he moves and I move,
he moves and I move
—fast as lizards up the hill.
This thing has me freaked out. I’m imagining shit,
Waylon decided. They were just climbing the regular way, looking for him because someone had seen him, and they were worried he’d spotted their crashed UFO—or whatever it was.
But suppose they caught him. Would they have to
liquidate
him, to keep the cover-up secure?
I’m just being paranoid. It was just a satellite, and they don’t want the
bad publicity. They just want to scare me o f, like the guards at Area 51
with their threats.
But even as he thought all this, he climbed back up the hillside, through the trees, and then started down again, diagonally this time. Moving laterally away from the two men. He’d seen a path on the far side of the dock, along the edge of the water, probably used by fishermen—Chinese and Latino guys who fished in every bay he’d ever seen, no matter how polluted the water was.
He reached the road and sprinted for the rocky path, made it, and ran past little poplar trees and big juniper bushes, threading between boulders and chunks of concrete left here to provide a tide break.
He paused a couple of times to see if he was being followed.
Maybe. Something was rustling back there. The doe stepped into the moonlight, then
He heard a persistent rattling. It went lower in frequency, became more distinct, a thudding—and then he saw it coming.
It was a single light, approaching low over the trees. The tree-tops tossed about as it came.
“Oh, shit. The black chopper.”
The same one. He could see the markings on it, D-23.
And as he said
the black chopper
, a searchlight switched on, making a thin column of harsh blue shine down into the trees. A doe, with ears like a mule’s, ran from the questing blob of light.
The chopper changed direction, coming right toward him, its searchlight probing.
“Fuck this,” Waylon muttered, and started off through waist-high ferns, the trees seeming to run toward him as he skidded along the slope.
He fell, sliding on his ass through blackberry vines, feeling them burn across his skin. The chopper boomed overhead, the trees surging in its wind, leaves caught up in its private dust devil, spinning into his eyes.
He stopped hard against a mossy-slick pine tree, goose-egging his shin on it. “Shit!” he hissed, and ducked behind the tree as the searchlight swept over the bole where he’d been a moment before, and passed on. The chopper carried its wind and restlessly probing searchlight with it, back into the farther reaches of the night sky.
Heart thudding, tasting metal but feeling a certain elation, Waylon started down the hillside, skidding toward the road. His leg ached, his face stung with blackberry thorns, and he had a long walk home. Maybe his mom’d be asleep when he got there.
Suddenly he stopped, aware of hunched, stealthy movement in the shadows of the slope below him.
That deer he’d seen, probably. But he kept still and watched. After a moment, he made out two pale faces peering up toward him, catching moon and starlight where it dappled through foliage. No more of them was visible.
They were about seventy feet away from him, but he thought he knew who it was. Two of those marines who’d come to replace the cops. He had seen them earlier, from the brush close by the road.
Now they seemed to raise their heads and sniff the air, to listen like animals. It almost looked as if they were down on all fours, but they couldn’t be; it must be that they were leaning their hands on a steep part of the hillside.
They were climbing up toward him.
They came on, seeming almost to glide effortlessly up the hillside. They were so quiet, so stealthy, it was like they were on some kind of combat training exercise, creeping up on the enemy camp. And it was like they were moving in tandem—
he moves and I move,
he moves and I move
—fast as lizards up the hill.
This thing has me freaked out. I’m imagining shit,
Waylon decided. They were just climbing the regular way, looking for him because someone had seen him, and they were worried he’d spotted their crashed UFO—or whatever it was.
But suppose they caught him. Would they have to
liquidate
him, to keep the cover-up secure?
I’m just being paranoid. It was just a satellite, and they don’t want the
bad publicity. They just want to scare me o f, like the guards at Area 51
with their threats.
But even as he thought all this, he climbed back up the hillside, through the trees, and then started down again, diagonally this time. Moving laterally away from the two men. He’d seen a path on the far side of the dock, along the edge of the water, probably used by fishermen—Chinese and Latino guys who fished in every bay he’d ever seen, no matter how polluted the water was.
He reached the road and sprinted for the rocky path, made it, and ran past little poplar trees and big juniper bushes, threading between boulders and chunks of concrete left here to provide a tide break.
He paused a couple of times to see if he was being followed.
Maybe. Something was rustling back there. The doe stepped into the moonlight, then
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