Invasion (9 page)

    Mindless fear slammed at me like hurricane seas, like gigantic waves battering a seawall. I held against them.

    I kept running.

    Lights were switched on ahead of me.

    I could see the house, the sun porch.

    Fifty feet. Maybe less.

    I was winning.

    Then I fell.

    Still holding Toby-who had quieted considerably over the last few seconds I sat up in the snow and looked down the hill toward the forest. The amber eyes were closer than they had been only half a minute ago, no more than thirty or thirty-five feet away from us now.

    Images formed behind my eyes, fragments of light and brilliant colors, alien scenes…

    No! Stay out of me!

    Fear… crushing fear… terror… things in my head… spiders in my skull, things eating away in my brain…

    I had to fight it and I did fight it and I was nonetheless sure that I was losing where I had been winning an instant ago.

    I started to get up. My feet slipped out from under me. I fell again and saw that the amber eyes were even closer, twenty feet away and moving rapidly in on me, and I saw that I was not going to get away and I started to cry and -

    - and then Connie appeared beside me, stepping like a stage actress through the snow curtain. She was carrying the pistol that I had left at the head of the stairs. She was wearing a coat over her night gown, and her long hair was matted with snow that was crystalizing into ice. Bracing herself against the wind, holding the pistol with both hands, she fired at the approaching creatures.

    The wind swallowed most of the sound of the shot.

    Although none of the aliens appeared to have been wounded, they seemed to realize that they were being fired upon, and they seemed to view the pistol as a very real danger. After she got off her second shot- again hitting nothing-they stopped where they were and stared at us with those huge, unblinking eyes. Apparently, there was at least one blessing for which we could be grateful: these things were evidently not all-powerful, not invincible and unstoppable, as years of horror movies had conditioned me to think they would be.

    The pressure abruptly evaporated in my skull. The mental probes were discontinued.

    Squinting, I tried to see what sort of beings lay behind the amber eyes-however, the darkness and the snow defeated me. For all that I could tell, they consisted only of eyes, great disembodied discs of light adrift on the wind.

    Shouting in order to be heard above the storm, Connie said, "Are you all right?"

    "Good enough!" I shouted back at her.

    "Toby?"

    "He's okay, I think."

    I got up.

    The aliens stayed where they were.

    "Do you want the gun?" she asked.

    "You keep it," I said. "Let's get moving. But don't turn your back on them."

    I was half-frozen. My muscles felt as if they were on fire although the flames were icy, and my joints were arthritic from the fierce cold. Each step was a miracle and an agony.

    As if we were playing a child's game, we backed slowly toward the farmhouse. We kept our eyes on the alien eyes, and we tested the treacherous ground behind us before committing ourselves to each step. Gradually, a gap opened between us and our otherworldly visitors. We stepped into the square of wan light that spilled out through the sun porch windows -and in no more than two minutes we were safely inside.

    "Lock the door," I told her.

    "Don't worry about that."

    I carried Toby into the kitchen and put him on the table while she bolted the sun porch door as well as the door that connected the porch to the kitchen.

    "Did they come after us?" I asked, wondering if they were now pressing against the sun porch's glass walls.

    "I didn't see them. I don't think they did."

    The house was warm, but we suddenly felt colder than we had when we'd been out in the storm. It was the contrast, I suppose. We began to shake, twitch, and shiver.

    "We have to get Toby out of those pajamas," Connie said, hurrying out of the room. "I'll get a fresh pair for him-and some towels."

    Toby appeared to be asleep. I touched his wrist and counted his pulse. The beat was steady, neither too fast nor too slow.

    A

    moment later Connie returned with clean pajamas and a huge stack of towels. I dried my hair while she attended to Toby. As she wrestled him out of his soaked, frozen pajamas, she said, "He's bleeding."

    "It's okay," I said, my voice quivering with a chill.

    "There's blood around his mouth," she insisted.

    "It's my blood, not his."

    When she had him free of his pajamas and wrapped in two big bath towels, she wiped his face and saw that what I said was true. "Your blood?"

    "They took control of his mind," I said, recalling the nightmare battle in the snow. "And they made him bite me when he was trying to get loose and go to them."

    "My God!"

    "They almost had him."

    She swayed.

    I went to her and took the towel out of her hand. "Get your coat off. Dry your hair. You'll catch pneumonia standing around like that." I began to dry Toby's hair. I was staying on my feet only by dogged determination. I tasted my own blood: my lips had split from the cold, and now they burned and itched.

    She said, "Are you all right?"

    "Just cold."

    "The bite?"

    "It's not much."

    "Your lips-"

    "That's not much either."

    Staring down at Toby, putting one slender hand against his face, she said, "Is he just unconscious?"

    "Get out of the coat and dry your hair," I told her again. "You'll catch your death."

    "Is he just unconscious?"

    "I don't know."

    "He'll be all right, won't he?"

    "I don't know."

    She glared at me, her pretty jaw suddenly set as firm as if it had been cast in concrete. She was wild-eyed, her delicate nostrils flared. She raised her hands: they were curled into small fists. "But you must know!"

    "Connie-"

    "When they took control of him did they shatter his mind in the process?"

    I finished drying his hair, tried not to look at her, tried not to think about what she had said, which was what I had been saying to myself for the last couple of minutes.

    She was determined to get an answer out of me. "Is he just a vegetable now? Is that at all possible? Is that what they've done to him?"

    As my hands warmed up they began to itch and go numb on me. The towel slipped out of my hands.

    "Is it?" she demanded.

    Toby said,

    "Mom? Dad?"

    She grabbed the edge of the table.

    I helped him sit up.

    Blinking like a man stepping out of a cellar into sunlight, Toby looked at me, looked at her, coughed gently, shook his head, smiled tentatively, and said, "What… what the heck happened? I feel so… awful cold. Can I have some hot chocolate?"

    Connie embraced him and started to cry.

    Feeling hot tears swelling up at the corners of my own eyes, I went across the room to the cupboards to find mugs, spoons, and the big tin of cocoa mix.

    

The Neighbors

    

    We had to get help. We had to let someone in the outside world know what was happening at Timber-lake Farm.

    Until now I had thought that we would be most well off if we remained as calm as we possibly could and stayed right where we were and waited out the storm. In time the telephone service would be restored, and we could call the sheriff in Barley to ask for help. But now I saw that, with the second snowstorm coming so fast on the heels of the first one, the phone might be out of order for three, four, or five days, even longer. By the time the lines were finally repaired, we would all have gone the way of Blueberry and Kate… When the telephone next rang there would not be anyone alive to answer it.

    The ideal solution was evident if impractical: we would all get dressed in our warmest clothes, put on our snowshoes, and walk out of here when dawn came a few hours from now. Just walk off, bold as you please. Just stroll out through the open fields, over the hills, on through another stretch of woods but not the same woods in which the aliens had landed, straightaway to the Johnsons' farm where we could call the sheriff on their telephone (which was an altogether different line from ours) and get help… It was a pleasant fantasy-but it was a long way from reality.

    The Johnsons, our nearest neighbors, lived slightly more than two miles from

    Timberlake Farm. Although Toby was very self-sufficient, he was still a child with a child's limited physical stamina. In this brutal weather he could never hike two miles on snowshoes, probably not even one mile. And neither Connie nor

    I would come through alive if we had to take turns carrying him; the burden would sap us and leave us floundering weakly in deep drifts. As with everything else in this life, the ideal was unattainable and even laughable; therefore, I would have to seek help on my own and leave the two of them behind-leave them alone in the farmhouse.

    Once we had made that decision-Connie and I sitting in easy chairs in the living room, Toby sleeping on the sofa in front of us-we had to choose between two courses of action. I could try to get help in Barley. Or I could hike to the Johnson farm and plead my case there.

    First of all: Barley. I could walk due east, along our private lane, until I reached the county road that lay a bit less than two miles from here. The first time that a snowplow came along, I could flag it down and ride in to Barley. It appeared to be a simple plan, nearly fool-proof. But there might be complications. What if there were no snowplows working the county road-no traffic moving whatsoever? After all, it was not a main route. It served a handful of rural families who expected to be snowbound for weeks every winter and who would not ordinarily be bothered if the road remained closed for several days. In a blizzard of these dimensions, the county and state highway maintenance crews might concentrate their efforts in the towns and on the superhighways and primary state routes that were more heavily used. With the wind drifting shut highways they had plowed open hours earlier, they would be kept busy with the major thoroughfares-while I might stand beside the county road for hours, waiting in vain and gradually freezing to death. If no plows came by I would have to return to the farmhouse in defeat or walk yet another two miles to the nearest house that fronted on the county road, without any guarantee that when I got there I would find someone at home and/or a working telephone.

    "If you went in that direction," Connie said thoughtfully, "I don't believe you'd find help in time. I don't think you'd make it through to Barley."

    "Neither do I."

    "Then we rule it out?"

    "Yeah." Both of us had changed into dry clothes and had drunk mugs of steaming cocoa. I closed my eyes, wishing that I could hold on to the warmth of the house and not have to go outside again. "So I'll have to go to the Johnson farm."

    "We always say it's two miles from here. But is that right?"

    "That's what Ed told us."

    "Two miles…

    But two miles as you walk-or two miles as the crow flies?"

    That was a disturbing thought. I had never walked the full route any farther than to the top of

    Pastor's Hill from which you could look out across a forest and see the Johnson farm perched on another hill in the distance. I opened my eyes and said, "If it's as the crow flies, it could be considerably more than two miles on foot.

    Might be three or four miles. Might be too far for me."

    She said nothing.

    She stared at me with those incredibly beautiful eyes, bright gazelle eyes.

    "But that has to be wrong," I said, trying hard to convince myself. "Look, when you tell someone that your nearest neighbor lives two miles away, you mean it's a two-mile walk or a two-mile drive-not a two-mile flight."

    "Yeah, I guess that makes sense. But what if you get there and discover they aren't home?"

    "They're homebodies. They'll be there."

    "But just what if?"

    "I'll break in and use their phone."

    "And if the phone isn't working?"

    "Then we're no better off than we were before I went-but we haven't lost anything by trying."

    "You're right."

    "And I'm positive they will be there."

    "I remember… Ed has a gun case. Shotguns and rifles."

    "Of course," I said, starting to feel better. "Every farmer around here goes hunting. So… Ed and I can arm ourselves… And even if the telephone lines are down at his place, we can come back here for you and Toby."

    She sat up straighter, sat on the edge of her chair. "You know, I'm beginning to think maybe there's a chance."

    "Sure. Sure, there's a chance. A good chance!"

    "When will you leave?"

    "At first light."

    "That's only a few hours away. You'll need to get some sleep before you go," she said. "I'll sit up with Toby."

    "You need to sleep too."

    She grimaced. "We can't both sleep, that's for sure. Besides, I've already slept for an hour, before Toby tried to run out on us."

    "You can't get through tomorrow on one hour of sleep."

    "And you can't hike to the Johnson farm without any sleep at all," she said, getting to her feet.