MOMENT HE STEPPED THROUGH the fringes of the field he felt it starting to attack him. It came on in undulating waves, the way he imagined an earthquake would, shaking him unrelentingly and making him slip and slide and struggle to stay upright. The air around him turned thick and yellow and he couldn’t see more than a couple of yards in any direction. Just in front of him was a shimmering blood-hued blur that abruptly dissolved into an army of scarlet caterpillars looping swiftly toward him over the ground, millions of them, a blazing carpet. They spread out all around him. Little teeth gnashed in their pop-eyed heads and they made angry, muttering sounds as they approached. There was no avoiding them. He walked in among them and it was like walking on a sea of slime. A kind of growling thunder rose from them as he crushed them under foot. “Bad dreams,” Bud was saying, in his ear, in his brain. “All they are is a bunch of bad dreams.” Sure. Demeris forged onward. How deep was the boundary strip, anyway? Twenty yards? Fifty? He ached in a dozen places, his eyes were stinging, his teeth seemed to be coming loose. Beyond the caterpillars he found himself at the edge of an abyss of pale quivering jelly, but there was no turning back. He compelled himself into it and its substance rose up around him like a soft blanket, and a wave of pain swept upward through him from the scrotum to the back of his neck: to avoid it he pivoted and twisted, and he felt his backbone bending as if it was going to pop out of his flesh the way the fishbone comes away from the filleted meat. Stinking rain swept horizontally over him, and then hot sleet that raked his forehead and drew howls of rage from him. No wonder you couldn’t get a mule to cross this barrier, he thought. Head down, gasping for breath, he pushed himself forward another few steps. Something like a crab with wings came fluttering up out of a steaming mudhole and seized his arm, biting it just below the elbow on the inside. A stream of black blood spurted out. He yelled and flapped his arm until he shook the thing off. The pain lit a track of fire all along his arm, up to the shoulder and doubling back to his twitching fingers. He stared at his hand and saw just a knob of raw meat with blackened sticks jutting from it. Then it flickered and looked whole again.
Demeris felt tears on his cheeks, and that amazed him: the last time he had wept was when his father died, years ago. Suddenly the urge arose in him to give up and turn back while he still could. That surprised him too. It had always been his way to go plunging ahead, doing what needed to be done, even when others were telling him, Demeris, don’t be an asshole, Demeris, don’t push yourself so hard, Demeris, let someone else do it for once. He had only shrugged. Let others slack off if they liked: he just didn’t have the knack for it. Now, here, in this place, when he absolutely could not slack off, he felt the temptation to yield and go back. But he knew it was only the barrier playing devil-tricks with him. So he encapsulated the desire to turn back into a hard little shell and hurled it from him and watched it burn up in a puff of flame. And went onward.
Three suns were blazing overhead, a red one, a green one, a blue. The air seemed to be melting. He heard incomprehensible chattering voices coming out of it like demonic static, and then disembodied faces appeared all around him, jittering and shimmering in the soupy murk, the faces of people he knew, his sisters Ellie and Netta, his nieces and nephews, his friends. He cried out to them. But everyone was horridly distorted, blobby—cheeked and bug-eyed, grotesque fun-house images. They were pointing at him and laughing. Then he saw his father and mother pointing and laughing too, which had to be impossible, and he understood. Bud was right: these were nothing but illusions or maybe delusions. The images he saw were things that he carried within him. Part of him. Harmless.
He began to run, plunging on through a tangle of slippery threads, a kind of soft, spongy curtain. It yielded as he ripped at it and he fell face down onto a bank of dry sandy soil that was unremarkable in every way: mere desert dirt, real-world stuff, no fancy colors, no crazy textures. More trickery? No. No, this was real. The extra suns were gone and the one that remained was the yellow one he had always known. A fresh wind blew against his face. He was across. He had made it.
He lay still for a minute or two, catching his breath.
Hot pain came stabbing from his arm, and when he looked down at it he saw a jagged bloody cut high up near the inside of the elbxow, where he had imagined the crab-thing had bitten him. But the crab-thing had been only a dream, only an illusion. Can an illusion bite? he wondered. The pain, at any rate, was no illusion. Demeris felt it all the way up through the back of his throat, his nostrils, his forehead. A nasty pulsation ran through the whole arm, making his hand quiver rhythmically in time with it. The cut was maybe two inches long, and deep enough to see into. Fresh blood came dribbling from it every time his heart pumped. Fine, he thought, I’ll bleed to death from an imaginary cut before I’m ten feet inside the Occupied Zone. But after a moment the wound began to clot over and the bleeding stopped, though the pain remained.
Shakily he stood up and glanced about.
Behind him was the vertical column of the barrier field, looking no more menacing than a searchlight beam from this side. Dimly he saw the desert flatlands of Free Country beyond it, the scrubby ordinary place from which he had just come.
On this side, though, everything was a realm of magic and mysteries. He was able more or less to make out the basic raw material of the landscape, the underlying barren dry New Mexico/Texas nowheresville that he had spent his entire life in. But here on the far side of the barrier the invaders had done some serious screwing around with the look of the land. The jagged buttes and blue-green arroyos that Demeris had glimpsed through the barrier field from the other side were no illusions; somebody had taken the trouble to come out here and redesign the empty terrain, sticking in all sorts of bizarre structures and features. He saw strange zones of oddly colored soil, occasional ramshackle metal towers, entire deformed geological formations—twisted cones and spiky spires and uplifted layers—that made his eyes hurt. He saw groves of unknown wire-leaved trees and arroyos crisscrossed by sinister glossy black threads like stitches across a wound. Everything was solid and real, none of it wiggling and shifting about the way things did inside the barrier field. Wherever he looked there was evidence of how the conquerors had put their mark on the land. Some of it was actually almost beautiful, he thought; and then he recoiled, astonished at his own reaction. But there was a strange sort of beauty in the alien landscape. It disgusted him and moved him all at once, a response so complex that he scarcely knew how to handle it.
They must have been trying to make the landscape look like the place they had originally come from, he told himself. The idea of a whole world looking that way practically nauseated him. What they had done was a downright affront. Land was something to live on and to use productively, not to turn into a toy. They didn’t have any right to take part of ours and make it look like theirs, he thought, and anger rose in him again.
He thought of his ranch, the horses, the turkeys, the barns, the ten acres of good russet soil, the rows of crops ripening in the autumn sun, the fencing that he had made with his own hands running on beyond the line of virtually identical fencing his father had made. All that was a real kind of reality, ordinary, familiar, solid—something he could not only understand but love. It was home, family, good clean hard work, sanity itself. This, though, this—this lunacy, this horror—!
He tore a strip of cloth from one of the shirts in his backpack and tied it around the cut on his arm. And started walking east, toward the place where he hoped his brother Tom would be, toward the big settlement midway between the former site of Amarillo and the former site of Lubbock that was known as Spook City.
He kept alert for alien wildlife, constantly scanning the landscape, sniffing, watching for tracks. The Spooks had brought a bunch of their jungle beasts from their home world and turned them loose in the desert. “It’s like Africa out there,” Bud had said. “You never know what’s going to come up and try to gobble you.”
Once a year, Demeris knew, the aliens held a tremendous hunt on the outskirts of Spook City, a huge apocalyptic round-up where they surrounded and killed the strange beasts by the thousands and the streets ran blue and green with rivers of their blood. The rest of the time the animals roamed
