Chapter 15
Sarah Foley put a blanket over Dr. Brunk as he slept. He had a history of heart trouble, she knew, and she wouldn’t permit him to do anything very strenuous, though he often complained vociferously about her pandering. It was hard to convince him that the strain on his heart from recent events was enough, perhaps too much. He had to be careful, what with the human race dependent on his survival.
Closing the cabin door softly behind her, Sarah went for a walk. Long twilight shadows fell across the pine-needle bed around the cabin. The days were getting shorter now that fall was coming in. There was a chill in the air that hadn’t been noticeable a week ago. Well, chopping firewood would give her something to do in the days to come, she thought.
Entering the shadowy forest, she thought about the events of recent days. As the Visitors had moved into rural areas, they had come to Cutter’s Cove in a small group, apparently thinking they could easily terrorize such a provincial outpost. They had been surprised at the anger with which the local citizenry responded. A number of skirmishes had broken out, one of them right on Union Street.
The Visitors had killed the sheriff, but they lost a number of soldiers themselves. One of those was only wounded, and he had been taken to Brunk Labs, where Dr. Brunk was working on a new toxin. He used the alien as a guinea pig, extracting a virus from him that he then
recombined with new genetic material. The virus he came up with was almost impossible to fight, hiding in the aliens’ nerve endings while dormant and lethal when active. At least that was what was hypothesized. Unfortunately, the alien died of wounds substained in the fight, and Dr. Brank was never able to test it on him.
The resistance was to send a friendly Visitor who would voluntarily take his place, but the day he was to arrive they had received word that the aliens knew about what was going on at Brunk Labs, and they had been forced to desert the compound.
Sarah followed the markings on trees that Dr. Brunk had pointed out to her. The woods were so thick that nobody would ever guess people were living here. Even if someone came to the island, they might explore it without ever finding the cabin. It was almost invisible, unless you knew where it was. Designed for solitude, it provided them with the perfect hiding place while the Visitors searched for them.
A hare leaped across her path, startling her a little.
“That’s no lizard,” she said aloud. And yet there was a lot of wildlife on the few square miles of this island. Dr. Brunk had told her there were bears and that they should always bolt the door at night when the big beasts came rummaging about looking for food. Sarah wondered how the bears had ever got out here. She imagined them as symbols of the tenacity of life. Had a pregnant female bear swum out here long ago in search of a blueberry patch, and then decided it was too nice a spot to leave?
She assumed that if she didn’t bother the bears, they wouldn’t bother her. Maybe she would even put out food for them, if they were here for a few days.
But the didn’t know how long they were going to be here, of course. They had no way of telling how things were going on the mainland. Perhaps the Visitors had been repulsed again. And then again, perhaps not.
Sooner or later, they would have to go back to the mainland. They had brought virtually nothing out to the island with them, just a few things that had been lying around in the laboratory, including some bread and cold cuts out of the refrigerator in the lounge. Such a small amount of food wouldn’t last very long. There were some fishing rods and tackle in the cabin, of course, and they could always share the blueberries with the bears.
Sarah hoped it wouldn’t come to that. The resistance would surely make it safe for them to go back to the mainland soon.
She tried not to think of the alternative as she walked. In a while she came to the shore, the salt air invigorating as she looked at the choppy waves.
The boat was down a little farther, well hidden between two big rocks. Gulls cawed over the mainland in the distance, over a mile away. Here and there, heavily wooded islands projected like green beards out of the glittering sea. She wondered how many of them had cabins on them. Most likely nobody would be on them this late in the year, even if there were cabins.
The water lapping the big glacial rocks made a soft, susurrant sound, soothing and beautiful.
Suddenly she caught a glimpse of something on the horizon. Before she could tell what it was for certain, it disappeared behind an island.
Something that big and reflecting the dying sunlight that way could only be a ship. But no ship would be this close to the shore, unless it was a very large yacht. But something told her it wasn’t as innocent as that.
The thing emerged, not beside the island, but over it. It hummed with a power never heard of on this world. It was a Visitor craft—a skyfighter.
Sarah backed away from the water’s edge and headed toward the woods before it could spot her. She ran through the woods, falling once over a gnarled root, to warn Dr Brunk that the Visitors were coming to get them.
Chapter 16
“I’m so sorry, Pythias,” Jane said, standing in the front doorway of the Day home. “How can a woman live almost sixty years and never learn not to shoot off her mouth?”
“Stop criticizing yourself, and come in,” Pythias said. He led her into the living room. “I was just about to have a cup of coffee. Would that suit you?”
“Thank you.” She sat down after Pythias took her coat.
Pythias disappeared for a moment and returned bearing two mugs filled with steaming coffee. He set one down on an end table next to the couch where Jane was sitting, and held the other as he joined her.
“You couldn’t know I had arrested John Ellis,” Pythias said. “And even if you had known it, you couldn’t possibly have predicted that his cousin would show up today and bail him out.”
“What a coincidence,” Jane said dryly.
“That’s what I’ve been thinking too.” Pythias sipped his coffee. “Heck of a coincidence—and I could swear I’ve met Bill Ellis before, even though he says he’s never laid eyes on me in his whole life.”
“I don’t see that it makes much difference,” Jane said. “What’s important is that he bailed John out.”
“Cold, hard cash. Something I couldn’t have foreseen when I arrested him. I suppose I could arrest him again— drunk and disorderly, carrying a concealed weapon, something like that. But he’ll just call his cousin if I do
and be back out on the street again before you couid spit on the sidewalk.”
“Which I have no intention of doing, Pythias.”
He favored her with one of his rare smiles. “Call me Pyth.”
“Pyth? I never heard anybody call you that.” She nearly laughed.
“My Jeannie used to.”
Jane nodded, understanding that this was quite a compliment he was paying her. He was putting her on the same exalted plane as his late wife. Her first impulse had been to laugh, but now she was touched. As far as she knew, Pythias had taken up with no other woman since Jeannie Day’s death seven years ago.
She was deeply moved.
“The question is,” Pythias said, as though nothing had passed between them, “where do we go from here?” He didn’t seem to notice her wiping away a tear with the back of her hand. “Well,” she replied, “where do we go from here—Pyth?”
“I thought you’d never ask.” He smiled again, showing strong white teeth amid the shaggy beard. “We go out to that island before the Visitors do. After all, they don’t know which island it is, and there’s a lot of them around Cutter’s Cove.”
“Good idea, except that I don’t know which island it is either. ”
This stopped him cold. “You don’t?”
“No, I only remember that Sarah once told me Dr. Brunk owned a little island off the coast. A place where he goes to relax and fish in the summertime.”
Pythias’ brow furrowed in deep thought. “Somebody around here must know where it is.”
/> “I don’t think so,” said Jane. “He’s a very private man.”
“Well, we’ve got to find it, one way or another.”
Pythias set down his coffee cup. “I’ve got some maps here that show the islands along the coast, along with the inlets and bays. Maybe we can at least figure out where to start by taking a look at ’em.”
“Maybe,” Jane said, trying to sound hopeful.
“If we could get a helicopter or a plane,” Pythias mused, “we could fly low over those islands and spot ’em, but since the Visitors have been skulking around here, all the public safety departments are shorthanded, so it’s not likely we can do something like that on short notice.”
“What, then?”
“We’ll have to go by sea.”
“Pyth, that might take too long.”
He looked at her with genuine regret. “Jane, I don’t know what else we can do.”
He went to a glassed-in cabinet and pulled out a number of scroll-like, rolled-up maps.
“Remember,” he said as he smoothed them out, “the Visitors don’t know this area as well as we do, and they don’t know which island they’re on either.”
“But they do have those skyfighter things, so they can spot them from the air.” Jane was chilled, thinking of what they might do to her little girl. “Oh, God.” Pythias put down the map he was looking at and turned to Jane. “Come on now, Jane. Buck up. We can’t have you falling apart now.”
Tears began welling up under her eyelids and spilling onto her cheeks. “I thought when we sent her to college, she’d be able to get a good job, and I was so happy when she ended up as Dr. Brunk’s assistant right near home. I never thought it would put her life in danger.”
Pythias didn’t know what to say as she stood there crying in his living room. Instead of speaking, he went to her and held her until her tears stopped.
John Ellis had been driving his old Ford Pinto along Route 31, inland toward the state’s interior, for a few miles. He was accompanied by his “cousin,” Bill Ellis.
“You turn east at the next intersection,” Bill Ellis said.
“You want to go back to the coast?”
“By a circuitous route,” Bill explained. “We’ll come in from the north and take the cliff road to Brunk Laboratories.”
“Who are you?” Ellis asked suspiciously. It occured to him that his savior might be working for Pythias Day. They could be trying to find out what he knew about the Visitors.
“Don’t you know me, Johnny?” Bill rasped. “I’m your faithful old cousin Bill.”
“I don’t have a cousin named Bill,” John Ellis said. He slowed to turn on a dirt road he knew from hunting trips. “This road will take us back to the ocean eventually.”
“Excellent.”
“I’ll drop you where you want to go, man, and I thank you kindly for getting me out of jail.”
“You’ll do more than thank me, John Ellis.”
There was something in the guy’s tone that chilled Ellis. “Who are you?” he repeated.
As he drove down the lonely dirt road, Ellis tried to keep an eye on his savior.
“Don’t you know who I am?”
“No.”
A bizarre hissing sound escaped Bill’s lips, and he lifted one hand to his face.
“What are you doing?”
Bill tore at the flesh on his left cheek. His nails dug in so sharply that John expected blood to spurt all over the dash.
Something else happened.
Bill pulled a piece of flesh out until it snapped off. The entire left side of his face came away, revealing a shiny dark green carapace beneath.
“Did you think I was sent by the ACLU?” Bill asked, laughing hideously.
He popped his thumb into his left eye socket. The eyeball came free, falling into his other hand. There was no optic nerve, no ganglia, no blood, just a plastic sphere lying in Bill’s hand.
“It’s a sensory scanner,” Bill said. “A neat little device, don’t you think?”
It was all John could do to keep the car on the road, much less hold a conversation about the eyeball. He was really scared, his hands shaking so badly he was having trouble steering.
“Now do you know who I am?” the creature sitting in the passenger’s seat of John Ellis’ car said.
“Ronald,” Ellis said. “You’re Ronald. I should have known.”
“You should have, indeed,” Ronald said, tearing off the rest of his pseudo-skin face.
Ellis always got a little nervous when he was this close to the alien captain. The had always met at a rendezvous point deep in the woods, where no one was likely to chance upon them. But Ronald had not shocked him as he did now.
“I am not through with you, John Ellis,” Ronald said. “Not yet.”
“That’s all right with me,” Ellis said, regaining his composure a little. “You know I’m on your side.” “You have done well, leading your men to the slaughter night before last, just as you were instructed. It more than made up for your bungled attempt at executing the traitor Willie.”
“I did what I could,” Ellis said humbly.
“Yes, and you will receive your due,” rasped Ronald, “when the time comes.”
“I can wait a little longer. I’ve been waiting all my life, growing up in that shack on the outskirts of Cutter’s Cove, my old man a drunk. I’ve been alone since I was sixteen, when he kicked off. I never knew my mother, never had a pot to piss in. But things are gonna be different when you take over around here, aren’t they, Ronald?”
“Yes,” the alien hissed. “Things will be different.” Ellis kept driving, the road so narrow pine needles sometimes slapped against the windshield as the Pinto collided with low branches. He didn’t like dealing with lizards, but once they’d completed their conquest of Earth, he’d be in charge around here. And all those people who’d turned up their noses at him all his life would be taking orders from him.
“Slow this vehicle,” Ronald said. “I must put my pseudo skin back on in case someone sees us.” “Nobody’s gonna see you,” Ellis told him. “When we come out of the woods, we’ll be close by the cliff road.” “Excellent.”
“When are you going to send out a patrol to look for Brunk on the islands?”
“I have already communicated a command to that effect,” Ronald said.
“So you’ll have Brunk soon—and the girl.” Ellis thought about Sarah Foley’s soft beauty. He had wanted her ever since he was in his teens, but she’d always been unattainable, like a goddess.
Maybe Ronald would give her to him.
Chapter 18
Jake Futterman and Charlie Fitzgerald had come all the way from Manhattan to do some hunting. They had driven for hundreds of miles, rifles in the trunk of Charlie’s Cadillac, and now they were stuck in some little one-horse town on the coast of Maine.
“Do you really think we had to come this far to find good hunting?” Jake asked sarcastically. “We can’t hunt out in the ocean, you know.”
“Look. ” Charlie gestured out the window at the virgin forests bordering the little town. “There’s bound to be good hunting around here. All we need to do is find some local boy to guide us.”
“Yeah, right. I should have gone to the Poconos with Ethel.”
“Come on, Jake. We’ll get us a room, buy a bottle of bourbon. Who knows, maybe we’ll even get a little hunting in.”
Jake sighed.
“Look, right over here—Pine Tree Motor Lodge. What did I tell you?”
Charlie pulled over at the motor lodge. Safely in the parking lot, he cut the engine and opened the car door to get out.
“What if they don’t have any vacancies?” Jake said. “Are you kidding?” Charlie gesticulated with his left hand as his right held the door open. “I’m working with this guy, what? twelve years now, and he still asks me
questions like this. Jake, we came up here to have a good time. It’s gonna be all right.”
Jake muttered something
incomprehensible as he got out. Together, they walked toward the office of the Pine Tree Motor Lodge, wearing their bright orange Day-Glo hunting jackets and caps.
Inside, they were confronted with a surly Down Easterner watching wrestling on an ancient black-and-white television.
“Can we get a room?” Charlie asked.
“Why not?” the hayseed asked rhetorically. “Got plenty of ’em.”
They signed in and paid the man, and Charlie asked him where they might find a guide for hire.
“Try the tavern up on Union Street,” the wrestling fan instructed them. “Up the hill and turn right. Can’t miss it.”
“Right. Thank you.” Jake and Charlie went out to get their things out of the car, since it was obvious there was no bellboy available. Once they’d put the rifles and luggage in their room—which featured a horse-head lampshade—they set out to find the tavern.
“He didn’t even tell us the name of the place,” Jake complained.
“How many drinking establishments you think a hamlet like this has, Jake?” Charlie asked, wheeling the Caddy around the comer. “You know, you worry too much. When the Visitors came, you thought it was the end of life on Earth as we know it. You said the human race couldn’t fight against such an advanced race. But then it turned out that some scientists developed a toxin that makes it impossible for the Visitors to live in a below-freezing climate.”
“There are still some of them around.”
“Only until the first frost, pal.”
“They’ll find a cure for it.”
“Then we’ll develop something else. You know how science is.”
“Maybe,” Jake muttered.
“There it is,” Charlie said, spying Mike’s Tavern. He pulled up in front, and they got out of the car and hopped up onto the wooden sidewalk.
“Just like in a western,” Jake observed.
“I knew you’d like it here,” Charlie said, opening the tavern door.
It was dark inside, where a few old men sat with their drinks in silence. Jake and Charlie stood on the threshold for a moment and then entered.
“What can I get you, gents?” the bartender asked, eyeing their hunters’ togs.
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