Later, other sounds drifted to him, the night sounds of the desert, hoots and whines and screeches that might have been coming from owls and coyotes, but probably weren’t. He thought he heard noise just outside his shack, people moving around doing something, but he was too groggy to get up and see what was going on. At last he fell into a sort of stupor and lay floating in it until dawn. Just before morning he dreamed he was a boy again, with his mother and father still alive and Dave and Bud and the girls just babies and Tom not yet even born. He and his dad were out on the plains hunting Spooks, vast swarms of gleaming vaporous Spooks that were drifting overhead as thick as mosquitoes, two brave men walking side by side, the big one and the smaller one, killing the thronging aliens with dart guns that popped them like balloons. When they died they gave off a screeching sound like metal on metal and released a smell like rotting eggs and plummeted to the ground, covering it with a glassy scum that quickly melted away and left a scorched and flaking surface behind. It was a very satisfying dream. Then a flood of morning light broke through the slats and woke him.

  Emerging from the shack, he discovered a small tent pitched about twenty yards away that hadn’t been there the night before. A huge mottled yellow animal was tethered nearby, grazing on weeds; something that might have been a camel except there weren’t any camels the size of elephants, camels with three shallow humps and great goggling green eyes the size of saucers, or knees on the backs of their legs as well as in front. As he gaped at it a woman wearing tight khaki slacks and a shirt buttoned up to the collar came out of the tent and said, “Never seen one of those before?”

  “You bet I haven’t. This is my first time across.”

  “Is it, now?” she said. She had an accent too. It wasn’t as strange to Demeris as the village boy’s but there was some other kind of spin to it, a sound like that of a tolling bell beneath the patterns of the words themselves.

  She was youngish, slender, not bad-looking: long straight brown hair, high cheekbones, tanned Anglo face. It was hard to guess her age. Somewhere between 25 and 35 was the best he could figure. She had very dark eyes, bright, almost glossy, oddly defiant. It seemed to him that there was a kind of aura around her, a puzzling crackle of simultaneous attraction and repulsion.

  She told him what the camel-thing was called. The word was an intricate slurred sound midway between a whistle and a drone, rising sharply at the end. “You do it now,” she said. Demeris looked at her blankly. The sound was impossible to imitate. “Go on. Do it.”

  “I don’t speak Spook.”

  “It’s not all that hard.” She made the sound again. Her eyes flashed with amusement.

  “Never mind. I can’t do it.”

  “You just need some practice.”

  Her gaze was focused right on his, strong, direct, almost aggressive. At home he didn’t know many women who looked at you like that. He was accustomed to having women depend on him, to draw strength or whatever else they needed from him until they were ready to go on their way and let him go on his.

  “My name’s Jill,” she said. “I live in Spook City. I’ve been in Texas a few weeks and now I’m on my way back.”

  “Nick Demeris. From Albuquerque. Traveling up that way too.”

  “What a coincidence.”

  “I suppose,” he said.

  A sudden hot fantasy sprang up just then out of nowhere within him: that instant sexual chemistry had stricken her like a thunderbolt and she was going to invite him to travel with her, that they’d ride right off into the desert together, that when they made camp that evening she would turn to him with parted lips and shining eyes and open her arms and beckon him toward her—

  The urgency and intensity of the idea surprised him as much as its adolescent foolishness. Had he really let himself get as horny as that? She didn’t even seem that interesting to him.

  In any case he knew it wasn’t going to happen. She looked cool, self-sufficient, self-contained. She wouldn’t have any need for his companionship on her trip home and probably not for anything else he might have to offer.

  “What brings you over here?” she asked him.

  He told her about his missing brother. Her eyes narrowed thoughtfully as he spoke. She was taking a good long look, studying his face with great care, staring at him as though peering right through his skull into his brain. Turning her head this way and that, checking him out.

  “I think I may know him, your brother,” she said calmly, after a time.

  He blinked. “You do? Seriously?”

  “Not as tall as you and stockier, right? But otherwise he looks pretty much like you, only younger. Face a lot like yours, broader, but the same cheekbones, the same high forehead, the same color eyes, the same blond hair, but his is longer. The same very serious expression all the time, tight as a drum.”

  “Yes,” Demeris said, with growing wonder. “That’s him. It has to be.”

  “Don, that was his name. No, Tom. Don, Tom, one of those short little names.”

  “Tom.”

  “Tom, right.”

  He was amazed. “How do you know him?” he asked.

  “Turned up in Spook City a couple of months back. June, July, somewhere back then. It isn’t such a big place that you don’t notice new people when they come in. Had that Free Country look about him, you know. Kind of big-eyed, raw-boned, can’t stop gawking at things. But he seemed a little different from most the other Entrada kids, like there was something coiled up inside him that was likely to pop out any minute, that this trip wasn’t just a thing he was doing for the hell of it but that it had some other meaning for him, something deeper that only he could understand. Peculiar sort of guy, actually.”

  “That was Tom, yes.” The side of Demeris’s face was starting to twitch. “You think he might still be there?”

  “Could be. More likely than not. He was talking about staying quite a while, at least until fall, until hunt time.”

  “And when is that?”

  “It starts late next week.”

  “Maybe I can still find him, then. If I can get there in time.”

  “I’m leaving here this afternoon. You can ride with me to Spook City if you want.”

  “With you?” Demeris said. He was astonished. The good old instant chemistry after all? His whole little adolescent fantasy coming to life? It seemed too neat, too slick. The world didn’t work like this. And yet—yet—

  “Sure. Plenty of room on those humps. Take you at least a week if you walk there, if you’re a good walker. Maybe longer. Riding, it’ll be just a couple of days.”

  What the hell, he thought.

  It would be dumb to turn her down. That Spook-mauled landscape was an evil place when you were on your own.

  “Sure,” he said, after a bit. “Sure, I’d be glad to. If you really mean it.”

  “Why would I say it if I didn’t mean it?”

  Abruptly the notion came to him that this woman and Tom might have had something going for a while in Spook City. Of course. Of course. Why else would she remember in such detail some unknown kid who had wandered into her town months before? There had to be something else there. She must have met Tom in some Spook City bar, a couple of drinks, some chatter, a night or two of lively bed games, maybe even a romance lasting a couple of weeks. Tom wouldn’t hesitate, even with a woman ten, fifteen years older than he was. And so she was offering him this ride now as a courtesy to a member of the family, so to speak. It wasn’t his tremendous masculine appeal that had done it, it was mere politeness. Or curiosity about what Tom’s older brother might be like.

  Into his long confused silence she said, “The critter here needs a little more time to feed itself up. Then we can take off. Around two o’clock, okay?”

  ***

  AFTER BREAKFAST THE BOY WENT over to him in the dining hall and said, “You meet the woman who come in during the night?”

  Demeris nodded. “She’s offering me a ride to Spook City.”

  Something that might have been scorn flickered across the boy’s face. “That nice. You take it?”

  “Better than walking there, isn’t it?”

  A quick knowing glance. “You crazy if you go with her, man.”

  Frowning, Demeris said, “Why is that?”

  The boy put his hand over his mouth and muffled a laugh. “That woman, she a Spook, man. You mean you don’t see that? Only a damn fool go traveling around with a Spook.”

  Demeris was stunned for a moment, and then angry. “Don’t play around with me,” he said, irritated.

  “Yeah, man. I’m playing. It’s a joke. Just a joke.” The boy’s voice was flat, chilly, bearing its own built-in contradiction. The contempt in his dark hard eyes was unmistakable now. “Look, you go ride with her if you like. Let her do whatever she wants with you once she got you out there in the desert. Isn’t none of my goddamn business. Fucking Free Country guys, you all got shit for brains.”

  Demeris squinted at him, shaken now, not sure what to believe. The kid’s cold-eyed certainty carried tremendous force. But it made no sense to him that this Jill could be an alien. Her voice, her bearing, everything about her, were too convincingly real. The Spooks couldn’t imitate humans that well, could they?

  Had they?

  “You know this thing for a fact?” Demeris asked.

  “For a fact I don’t know shit,” the boy said. “I never see her before, not that I can say. She come around and she wants us to put her up for the night, that’s okay. We put her up. We don’t care what she is if she can pay the price. But anybody with any sense, he can smell Spook on her. That’s all I tell you. You do whatever you fucking like, man.”

  The boy strolled away. Demeris stared after him, shaking his head. He felt a tremor of bewilderment and shock, as though he had abruptly found himself at the edge of an abyss.

  Then came another jolt of anger. Jill a Spook? It couldn’t be. Everything about her seemed human.

  But why would the boy make up something like that? He had no reason for it. And maybe the kid could tell. Over on the other side, really paranoid people carried witch-charms around with them to detect Spooks who might be roaming Free Country in disguise, little gadgets that were supposed to sound an alarm when aliens came near you, but Demeris had never taken such things seriously. It stood to reason, though, that people living out here in Spook Land would be sensitive to the presence of a Spook among them, however well disguised it might be. They wouldn’t need any witch-charms to tell them. They had had a hundred fifty years to get used to being around Spooks. They’d know the smell of them by now.

  The more Demeris thought about it, the more uneasy he got.

  He needed to talk to her again.

  ***

  HE FOUND HER A LITTLE way upstream from his shack, rubbing down the shaggy yellow flanks of her elephantine pack-animal with a rough sponge. Demeris halted a short distance away and studied her, trying to see her as an alien being in disguise, searching for some clue to otherworldly origin, some gleam of Spookness showing through her human appearance.

  He couldn’t see it. He couldn’t see it at all. But that didn’t necessarily mean she was real.

  After a moment she noticed him. “You ready to go?” she asked, over her shoulder.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “What?”

  He was still staring.

  If she is a Spook, he thought, why would she want to pretend she was human? What would a Spook have to gain by inveigling a human off into the desert with her?

  On the other hand, what motive did the kid have for lying to him?

  Suddenly it seemed to him that the simplest and safest thing was to opt out of the entire arrangement and get to Spook City on his own, as he had originally planned. The kid might just be telling the truth. The possibility of traveling with a Spook, of being close to one, of sharing a campsite and a tent with one, sickened and repelled him. And there might be danger in it as well. He had heard wild tales of Spooks who were soul-eaters, who were energy vampires, even worse things. Why take chances?

  He drew a deep breath. “Listen, I’ve changed my mind, okay? I think I’d just as soon travel by myself.”

  She turned and gave him a startled look. “You serious?”

  “Yep.”

  “You really want to walk all the way to Spook City by yourself rather than ride with me?”

  “Yep. That’s what I prefer to do.”

  “Jesus Christ. What the hell for?”

  Demeris could detect nothing unhuman in her exasperated tone or in the annoyed expression on her face. He began to think he was making a big, big mistake. But it was too late to back off. Uncomfortably he said, “Just the way I am, I guess. I sort of like to go my own way, I guess, and—”

  “Bullshit. I know what’s really going on in your head.”

  Demeris shifted about uneasily and remained silent. He wished he had never become entangled with her in the first place.

  Angrily she said, “Somebody’s been talking to you, right? Telling you a lot of garbage?”

  “Well—”

  “All right,” she said. “You dumb bastard. You want to test me, is that it?”

  “Test?”

  “With a witch-charm.”

  “No,” he said. “I’m not carrying any charms. I don’t have faith in them. Those things aren’t worth a damn.”

  “They’ll tell you if I’m a Spook or not.”

  “They don’t work, is what I hear.”

  “Some do, some don’t.” She reached into a saddlepack lying near her on the ground and pulled out a small device, wires and black cords intricately wound around and around each other. “Here,” she said harshly. “This is one. You point it and push the button and it emits a red glow if you’re pointing it at a Spook. Take it. A gift from me to you. Use it to check out the next woman you happen to meet.”

  She tossed the little gadget toward him. Demeris grabbed it out of the air by reflex and stood watching helplessly as she slapped the elephant-camel’s flank to spur it into motion and started off downstream toward her tent.

  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.