Jeff glanced at me, looking knowingly at my hand. “Itches, doesn’t it?” he asked.

I still couldn’t remember what was underneath that bandage. Only that it was bad, somehow; only that it wasn’t human, or hadn’t been, when recast through the forest’s lens. “It does,” I admitted.

“I think it’s the signal. I think when we hear it, it speeds some things up that were pretty slow before. It’s not going to hurt you. This is what’s supposed to happen.”

“How do you know?”

“Because a flower ate me, and then I couldn’t stop telling people I was an alien invader,” he said matter-of-factly. “Clearly, that sort of compulsion is a ‘supposed-to’ thing, or it wouldn’t have been there. I was supposed to warn everyone I spoke to that the invasion was coming, and I was supposed to do it while I looked just like the kid next door. While I was the kid next door. Now there’s a signal from space, and I recognize it, I know it like I wrote it, and it’s making me itch and doing strange things to my body. So that must be a ‘supposed-to,’ like the compulsion. It doesn’t make sense otherwise.”

“Not unless the invaders are totally incompetent.” I made the statement lightly.

There was nothing light in the look Jeff leveled on me. “I don’t think they are. Do you?”

“No,” I admitted, and we drove on in silence, me rubbing the inside of my elbow, the green world rolling by around us.

2.

It took a little over thirty minutes to reach Jeff’s “safe house”: a rickety-looking old colonial home standing in the center of a clearing, surrounded on all sides by trees. There was a detached barn slightly off to one side and behind the main structure. Moss grew green on its roof, and the door stood ajar, allowing me to catch a tempting glimpse of some mysterious machine. Signs were posted along the drive, indicating that we were crossing onto private property, and trespassers would be prosecuted.

“Home sweet home,” said Jeff, parking in front of the house and turning off the engine. Sitting up a little straighter, he called into the back, “We’re here. Don’t touch anything until I’ve turned off the security system, and do not try to walk across the field.”

“Gopher holes?” I asked.

“Sure, if by ‘gopher holes’ you mean ‘land mines,’” he said, and opened the door, sliding out of the van.

I hurried to do the same, careful to keep my feet on the paved drive as I ran around the front of the van to catch up with Jeff. “Land mines?” I demanded. “What the hell do you mean, land mines?”