Invasion (12 page)

    It was craziness.

    Of course: the world is a madhouse: most people are lunatics: the laws of the universe are irrational, insane: the other lesson from the last war.

    I looked up at the lofts on both sides.

    Nothing was looking back down at me.

    At the other end of the barn, the big sliding door was all the way open. Snow and spicules of ice were sheeting inside. The bare skeleton of Garbo, Ed Johnson's German shepherd, made a graceless heap on the sill, lying both in and out of the building. The lupine skull had been shattered at the very top and then cracked into surprisingly even halves from brow to tip of snout, as if the dog had suffered a sudden, brutally sharp blow with a length of iron pipe directly between and above the eyes. Its yellow-white teeth, as pointed as needles, appeared to be bared in a hideous snarl, but that was nothing more than the naked rictus common to any skull, whether human or animal, when it was revealed without the adornment of flesh.

    If the aliens finally got to me, I would look exactly like that: grinning/snarling at eternity.

    That's how

    Connie would look, too.

    And Toby.

    Premonitions…

    I stepped over Garbo and walked outside where I found what remained of Ed Johnson. Just his bones, of course. His battered pickup truck stood twenty feet away, facing the barn door.

    A drift had built up all along the passenger's side, as high as the window and into the cargo bay. The driver's door was open, pressed back against the front fender by the steady wind; and a man's skeleton was crumpled in the snow beside the truck. Snow was drifted over parts of it and filled up the empty rib cage.

    One macabre arm was raised from the elbow, and the fingers appeared to be grasping the winter air.

    In the stable that stood behind the barn and beyond the abandoned pickup truck, there were three horses as well as a cat that had been named Abracadabra (for the way it had made mice disappear from the house and barn within a week after it had taken up residence with the Johnsons): now four skeletons. While it was no less horrifying than my first encounter with the aliens hideous litter (poor Blueberry's bones in that forest clearing yesterday afternoon, discarded as a human camper might thoughtlessly discard the remnants of a chicken dinner), this last scene had very little effect on me. I was sated with horror, bored with it, jaded.

    The large shed in which Ed had kept all of his tools, his work bench, and emergency power generator was attached to the south wall of the stable, and it was there that I came across the most curious sight that the farm had to offer. A massive black bull -not merely the skeleton but the entire carcass, frozen, as hard as ice, its eyes opaque with frost- was slumped against the machinery. One of its horns had broken off and flipped onto a nearby window sill where it gleamed dully in the cloud-filtered December light. The animal had suffered other injuries. Its head, shoulders, and thick haunches were marked by deep cuts and abrasions and frozen blood as dark as grape juice. The generator was in no better condition than the bull. Thin sections of the housing had been punctured by the horns, and the thicker plates of steel were badly bent and dented. Wires and cables had been torn loose. The four big batteries had been toppled from their stands. Clearly, the animal had killed itself in a fierce, mindless battle with the machinery.

    It was like Don

    Quixote in reverse. A near-sighted bull out to prove his worth against a man but mistaking a machine for his real adversary.

    Why?

    Why not?

    Be serious.

    I am serious.

    Then why?

    Why not?

    That's no answer!

    As good as any.

    Why did the bull do it? I insisted.

    I reminded myself: the world is a madhouse, and don't you ever forget it. Don't let it upset you. Flow with it.

    The bull's ice eyes glared at me from beneath blood-crusted brows and savaged flesh.

    I thought: death is real and final.

    Hey, you've got it now, I told myself.

    Numbed by more than the cold air, I went out of the shed and closed the door.

    Going around the barn in order to avoid the display of bovine biology within it, I started toward the farmhouse. But on the hill, halfway between the two structures, I wound down like a toy soldier, stepping slower and slower and slower and slower still until

    I wasn't moving at all. Letting the wind slap my upraised face, I stared around at the silent farm and felt nervous shock finally give way to fear and then to terror.

    The house was a crypt.

    The barn was a mausoleum.

    The stable was a charnal house.

    The Johnson farm: a graveyard.

    I had walked more than two miles through a raging blizzard, had fought the wind and the snow and the biting cold and the steep terrain all in order to find help for Connie, Toby, and me. But now it seemed that there was no help, no help anywhere near enough for it to matter.

    I had come all this way to enlist our neighbors in a miniature war of the worlds that was nonetheless deadly for its limited scope. But now I knew that our only neighbor was Death-who would let me borrow a cup of eternity.

    I wanted to lie down. Go to sleep. Yes. Sleep… Slip down into a lovely darkness where there would be no yellow-eyed creatures from beyond the stars, where there would not be any trouble of any sort, where there would be nothing, nothing…

    As frightened of these negative thoughts as I was of the aliens, I bent and scooped up handfuls of snow and pushed them in my face. I gasped and coughed and spluttered, recovered enough to stagger toward the farmhouse once more.

    But what next?

    Toby…

    Connie…

    How could I save them?

    Or were they already dead?

    And as before I thought:

    The Johnson farm was a real pain, and at the same time it was also a clairvoyant vision, a psychic-flash premonition of our own fate: a warning that there was no possible future but this one for

    Connie, Toby, and me.

    The gigantic face of Death lay beneath me, the obscene mouth opened wide; and I balanced precariously-in the style of bespectacled

    Harold Lloyd, but grimly, grimly-on the dark and rotting lips.

    And my feet were slipping.

    

    In only five minutes I had a stack of logs burning in the big living room fireplace. They crackled, hissed, popped, and sent thin smoke up the stone flue. The flames were yellow-orange and danced wildly in the draft. Not surprisingly, the room looked about one thousand percent cheerier in the warm, flickering light.

    Although I had no appetite, I went out to the kitchen to look for food. If I had to hike all the way back to Timberlake Farm after resting for only one hour, then I needed to eat something, pack in fuel to replace what I'd burned up getting here. Molly Johnson's pantry was well-stocked-however, most of the food had been ruined by the long deep freeze that had begun soon after the electric power had failed. Fruit, vegetables, and other goods that had been packaged in jars were now unedible, for they had frozen, expanded, and shattered the containers: shards of glass now prickled the frozen contents. Most of the cans were swollen and would have been the end of any can opener. I found a homemade chocolate cake in the bread box, however, and a half -gallon of vanilla ice cream in the refrigerator. I took the cake and the ice cream-both of which were like lumps of granite-to the fireplace to thaw them out a bit. Soon, the ice cream melted, and the cake grew soft. I managed to finish two respectable portions of each. Then I brought snow in from outside and melted it in a bowl. I drank the warm water which turned out to be the best part of the lunch and made me feel better than I had in hours.

    (Why such a lengthy description of a meal that was something considerably less than a gastronomic delight? Because I don't want to get on with what remains of the story? Quit stalling, Hanlon. Put it down on paper, every last terrible twist and turn of it, down on paper and out of your system in the very best tradition of self-analysis. Then you can go quietly mad.)

    In the den I examined all of the weapons in the gun case. I chose a rifle with telescopic sights and a double-barrel shotgun. I loaded both weapons and carried them to the living room along with two boxes of ammunition.

    By this time I was extremely anxious to get going, for I did not like to think of Connie and Toby all alone at Timberlake Farm-especially not as the day rushed toward an early winter sunset. I also didn't like to think of trekking through the woods in the dark, easy prey for Nature and the aliens. Yet

    I understood that if I were to make another long journey in the snow, I would have to stay here before the fire for an hour or until my bones as well as my clothes were warm and dry. And as impatient as I was to get moving, I sat there as long as it took for the fire to revive me. In the dancing flames I saw faces:

    Connie, Toby, and a face composed solely of two enormous yellow eyes…

    At one o'clock in the afternoon, I left the Johnson farm by way of the same hill and pasture over which I'd come.

    The rifle was strapped across my back.

    I carried the shotgun in my right hand.

    I was ready for anything.

    At least I thought I was.

    It was not easy going. And that's an understatement. The temperature had dropped fifteen or twenty degrees from where it had stood this morning and must now be hovering well below zero even without the wind chill factor figured into it. And the wind chill factor had to be considerable, for the wind was coming in from the west with the same forty-mile-an-hour punch that it had been throwing at us (except for occasional fifty-mile-an-hour gusts and sixty-mile-an-hour squalls) for nearly seventy-two hours. Furthermore, new drifts had built up everywhere, and many of them had not yet formed crusts thick enough to support my weight. I fell into them and struggled out and got to my feet and walked a few steps and fell again, pratfall after pratfall. It became monotonous. After what seemed like six or eight hours of grueling, Herculean effort, I came to a familiar limestone formation against which I had rested for a spell this morning when I had been traveling in the opposite direction. The limestone marked the halfway point through this arm of the forest, which meant that I was only one-quarter of the way back to Timberlake Farm. I allowed myself less than five minutes, then started out once more. I walked eastward, judging my direction by certain formations of land and trees and brush which I had carefully committed to memory on the way westward earlier in the day. The wind blew and the snow snowed and the cold chilled and the light gradually went out of the gray sky as if some celestial hand were slowly turning a rheostat switch up above the clouds.

    

    

    I was lying on my back under a bare elm tree, resting. I had no idea how I had gotten there; I couldn't remember lying down. And I was lying on the rifle which was still strapped across my back… Odd. Distinctly odd… But much more comfortable than I would have thought. Oh yes. So comfortable. Just lovely. I felt warm and snug. I could look up through the interlacing black branches and watch the pretty little lacy snowflakes spiraling down to the earth. So very pretty and warm and soft and pretty and soft and warm, warm, warm, warm…

    Hanlon, don't be a fool, I told myself.

    Well I like it here, I answered.

    For eternity?

    Five minutes will do.

    Eternity.

    Will you stop messing in my comfortable world?

    Get up.

    No.

    Get up!

    I rolled onto my side, sat up, clutched at the trunk of the tree, and got my numbed feet under me again. My sense of balance was functioning about as well as it would have done had I just now stepped off the biggest, fastest roller coaster in the world. The world circled around and around me… Nevertheless,

    I got going once more, head down and thrust out in front of me, teeth clenched and jaws bulging, shotgun in one hand, the other hand fisted, looking and feeling mean as a treed raccoon.

    

    

    A clump of powdery white stuff fell out of the laden pine boughs overhead and struck me in the face. I spluttered, coughed, cursed, groped around in the snow, found the shotgun just inches from my fingers, used it as a staff, and levered myself to my feet.

    I thought smugly, How about that for stamina? Huh? Now that is what you call true grit.

    But right away the pessimistic half of me leaped into the conversation with both mental feet. If that snow, I said sternly to myself, hadn't fallen smack in the middle of your ugly face, you know where you would still be? You would still be right there on the ground, under that tree; you'd be there until you finally froze to death.

    Not true!

    Sure is.

    I was resting.

    Resting?

    Conserving strength.

    Well, every minute you spend "conserving strength" is one more minute that Connie and Toby-remember them, Connie and

    Toby, wife and son?-spend all alone in the farmhouse.

    Hey, you really know how to spoil a good mood, don't you?

    Yeah.

    I guess I've rested enough.

    You better believe it.

    Determined to put an abrupt end to this interminable interior dialogue, I oriented myself, took a deep breath of air that seemed instantly to crystallize my lungs, and walked westward. Within a few minutes I came to a narrow frozen creek. I crossed it and went up the western slope of Pastor's