Invasion

by Dean R. Koontz

  One buck fed at the edge of the herd. He nibbled on strips of peeling birch bark.

  The wind was high above the trees, a distant howling like wolves held at bay by mounted hunters.

  Now and again one of the deer would look up into the darkness overhead, never with fear but with curiosity.

  The pine boughs-for this part of the forest was mostly pines-protected the deer from the worst of the storm.

  The alien moved noiselessly through the trees.

  The buck paused in his meal.

  The alien came closer.

  The buck stopped chewing, blew steam, drew breath, tilted his magnificent head, listened, snorted, went back to the birch bark.

  The alien closed in on him.

  Suddenly aware of the foul odor of ammonia, the buck finally raised its proud head. It sniffed and shook its antlers and let a half-chewed mouthful of bark drop to the ground.

  Some of the other deer turned to watch it.

  The buck sniffed again.

  By now all twenty-odd members of the herd had caught the ripe scent. None of them were interested in food any longer. They were motionless, except for their long eye lashes which trembled and except for their nostrils which, beaded with moisture, also trembled. They were waiting for the worst, hearts racing, ears pricked up

  The alien stopped ten yards away.

  Snowflakes melted on the buck's nose.

  The wind moaned. It seemed a bit louder than it had been a moment ago.

  The buck stood very still for a while until it saw the huge yellow eyes that were fixed on it. It froze for an instant, then panicked.

  The alien moved in quickly.

  The buck snorted and reared up on its hind legs — and the alien reached out and took full control of the simple animal mind.

  One of the does squealed.

  Then another: contagion.

  The herd thundered away down the forest trail, white tails puffed up behind them, their hoofbeats silenced by the blanket of snow that misted up around them.

  Only the buck remained.

  The alien came out from the deep brush, shoving aside the jagged brambles and blackberry vines, snow pluming up from its many legs. It stepped onto the narrow path between the pines and approached the deer.

  The buck blinked, quivered.

  The other being immediately soothed it. Standing before the animal, the alien carefully examined it for all of half a minute, as if learning the uses of the beast, then turned away and lumbered down the trail in the direction that the herd had gone.

  Head lowered, large brown eyes wide, the buck followed without hesitation. Its tongue lolled between its lips. Its tail was tucked down now: brilliant white side concealed, dull gray-brown side re vealed.

  The two creatures eventually left the woods and came out on a long slope where five other yellow-eyed beings were waiting for them.

  The buck snorted when it saw the others.

  Its heart thundered, threatened to burst.

  The alien responded quickly, stilled the terror, slowed the heart-and kept rigid control.

  Silently, they climbed the hill.

  The buck was forced to jump through a number of deep drifts that nearly proved too much for it. It kicked and heaved. Its thick haunch and shoulder muscles bunched painfully. Steam spurted from its black nostrils.

  Steam rose, too, from the broad, dark, slanted, shiny backs of the six aliens.

  Shortly, a house came into sight atop the hill.

  A farmhouse.

  Timberlake

  Farm.

  The attack had begun.

  15

  I took a quick, hot shower, sluicing away some of the chill which had curled like a segmented worm of ice deep inside of me. The worm had anchored it self with a thousand tendrils and could not be entirely torn loose. When I came out of the shower, I discovered that Connie had left a double shot of whiskey, neat, in a squat glass tumbler on the edge of the sink. I sipped at the first shot while I toweled off and dressed. Just before I went downstairs, I finished the second shot in one fiery gulp that scorched my throat and made my eyes water.

  However, not even the whiskey-although it brought a bright flush to my face-could burn out every segment of the ice worm.

  Connie and Toby were in the kitchen. They had both eaten earlier, but she was re-heating some homemade vegetable soup for me. Toby was sitting at the table, intently studying a large, half-completed jigsaw puzzle; I winced when I saw that it was a snow scene.

  Even a stranger, stepping into that room without knowing anything about our situation, could have seen that we were living under siege conditions. The curtains had been drawn tightly over the window, and the sun porch door was closed, locked, and chained. The rifle lay on a chair near the table, and the loaded pistol was beside the water glass at the place Connie had set for me. But most of all there was an air of expectancy, a thinly masked tension in all of us.

  I sat down, and she put a bowl of soup before me. I drew a deep breath of the fragrant steam and sighed. I had not been very hungry until the food was before me; and now I was ravenous.

  While I ate Connie dried, dismantled, and oiled the shotgun which had taken a beating in the blizzard.

  Toby looked up from his puzzle and said, "Hey, Dad, you know what happened?"

  "Tell me."

  "Mom put a spell on me."

  "A spell?"

  "Yeah."

  I looked at Connie. She was trying to suppress a smile, but she didn't glance up from the shotgun on which she was working. I asked Toby: "What sort of spell?"

  "She made me sleep all day," he said.

  "Is that so. After you slept all the night before?"

  "Yeah. But you know what else?"

  "What else?"

  "I don't believe it was a spell at all."

  Now Connie looked up from her gun.

  I said, "It wasn't a spell?"

  Toby shook his head: no. "I think she slipped me one of her sleeping capsules in my breakfast orange juice."

  "Why, Toby!"

  Connie said.

  "It's okay, Mom," he said. "I know why you did it. You thought as long as I was asleep the aliens couldn't get me to run away again. You made me sleep to protect me."

  I started to laugh.

  "Boy child," Connie said to him,

  "you're really too much for me. You know that?"

  He grinned, blushed, and turned back to me. "You going to tell us some more about what all you found over at the

  Johnson farm?"

  The only thing I had told them thus far was that the aliens had been there ahead of me and that Ed and Molly were dead.

  Connie quickly said,

  "Let your father eat his dinner, Toby. He can tell us later."

  When I'd finished three bowls of soup, I told them about the skeletons at the Johnson farm and about the dead bull lying in the generator shed. I tried to stay calm, tried to leave out most of the adjectives and adverbs, but now and then I let the tale become too vivid, so vivid that they recoiled slightly from me.

  After I had finished Toby said, "Then I guess we have to hold them off all by ourselves. We can do it."

  Connie said, "I'm not so sure of that, general."

  She looked at me, crow's feet of worry around her lovely eyes. "What are we going to do?"

  I had been doing a great deal of thinking about that. "Just one thing we can do. Get out of here."

  "And go where?"

  "East."

  "The county road?"

  "That's right."

  "You think it's been plowed open?"

  "No."

  She screwed up her lovely face. "Then you intend to walk to the nearest house?"

  "We're all going to walk to the nearest house," I said. "The big white frame place in toward Barley."

  "That house is four miles from here."

  "I know."

  "We already discussed that possibility-"

  "We did?" Toby asked.


  "Last night," she told him patiently, "when you were sleeping on the couch."

  "I miss the interesting stuff," he said.

  She said to me: "Toby can't walk four miles on snowshoes in this weather."

  "I'm tough," he said.

  "I know you are," she said. "But this is a blizzard. You aren't that tough."

  The hall clock struck midnight.

  Toby thought about it as the chimes rang, then nodded hi agreement. "Well, yeah Maybe I'm not quite that tough. But almost."

  "And we can't carry him," she reminded me. "Neither one of us has had enough sleep. And after your trek to the Johnson farm We'd never get through alive if we had to carry him."

  "He'll walk as far as he can, and then we'll carry him the rest of the way," I said. "We don't have any choice. If we stay here we'll end up like Ed and Molly."

  "Hey," Toby said, "you won't have to carry me. I can ride on a sled!"

  16

  While Connie and Toby and I talked about escape, there was movement outside, the first stages of the attack.

  The continuation of that unhuman scene:

  There was no light other than the vague, pearly phosphorescence of the deep snow fields, a ghostly glow like the skin of an albino in a dark room.

  Snow and tiny granules of ice sheeted on the wind.

  Drifts rose to dunelike peaks.

  (Von Daniken, visionary or true crazy, would certainly have appreciated the other element of this special night: six yellow-eyed gods-or devils-although the look of them would have blown most of his theories into dust. Somehow the gods who are supposed to have driven von Daniken's "chariots" all come off as very Nordic types, blond and handsome and clear-eyed and obviously cut out for movie stardom; but in reality, the universe does not repeat its own designs, and it has a few insane jokes up its sleeve as well )

  Five of the aliens stopped on the brow of the hill, just thirty yards from the farmhouse. They studied the door of the sun porch, studied the curtained kitchen window, studied the bright lamps that burned behind the living room windows

  Snow fell on them-however, it did not melt from their flesh as quickly as it would have melted from human skin. Indeed, the snow clung to them as it would have clung to fence posts or rocks or any cool, inanimate objects. A thin layer of snow sheathed them and quickly formed into a brittle crust. The crust turned to ice before it finally and gradually slid away in delicate, thin, transparent sheets-to be replaced by a new crust of snow that was still in the process of turning to ice.

  Nevertheless, the steam rose from the pores on their broad and shiny backs.

  The sixth creature stalked off toward the stable, away from its companions.

  The buck followed the lone alien. It leaped out of a four-foot drift and fell into even deeper snow. It heaved and it twisted, its eyes bulging with the effort that it had to expend to free itself.

  The alien turned and stared.

  The buck struggled.

  The alien calmed it, made it more purposeful.

  The buck broke loose, wheezing.

  The alien continued toward the stable. At the stable door it stopped again, slipped the bolt, pushed the door open, and quickly stepped out of the way.

  The buck toddled forward, unsteady, not unlike a fawn first finding its legs.

  The alien allowed it to rest for a moment, then gave it new purpose.

  Having regained some of its strength, the buck entered the building in much the same sort of trance that had afflicted poor Blueberry when she had walked out of there on her way to becoming a pile of bones.

  There were no lights inside the barn. And only one rather small window admitted the minuscule light of the snow fields.

  This did not seem to bother the buck. Its eyes had been designed to insure survival when the big northern wolves prowled by night.

  The alien-amber eyes aglow, emitting some light of their own-was not disturbed by the darkness either. It watched the buck through the open door.

  There was no wind in the barn, but the long gallery was cold, for the electric heaters had been switched off over twenty-four hours ago.

  The buck sniffed the dead air-and sensed the body of the horse that lay within one of the stalls on the right-hand side. Its tightly controlled mind turned over like a sick stomach, and rebellion flickered in it.

  The alien clamped down hard.

  The buck staggered sideways, stumbled, and fell onto its forelegs; bleating in pain.

  The alien waited.

  The buck was still.

  At last the alien eased up on the mental reins.

  The buck knelt where it was, dazed.

  The alien gave it instructions: quick, silent pulses of thought.

  The animal got its forelegs under it again, and it walked down the stable row.

  To the generator.

  It sniffed.

  The generator hummed.

  The buck backed up a few feet and lowered its antlers.

  17

  "A sled?" Connie asked.

  "My Red Runner out on the sun porch," Toby said.

  She took hold of his hand and gently squeezed it. "That's good thinking, honey." Then she looked at me and said, "That would work, wouldn't it? A sled?"

  Toby was excited and pleased with himself. "I could walk some of the way.

  Maybe a whole mile. And then when I just couldn't walk one step more, you could take turns pulling my sled until I got rested up real good. That wouldn't be so hard as carrying me. Hey, Dad? What do you think?"

  "The runners are going to sink through the drifts and get bogged down," I said.

  Toby said, "Bet they won't."

  "They will," I assured him. "But that doesn't mean that your idea is a bad one. A sled's the perfect answer. We just have to use the right kind of sled- one without runners."

  "Without runners?" Toby said.

  "A length of heavy plastic with ropes tied to it. You could lie down on the plastic, flat out on your belly, spreading your weight over a larger area than a pair of runners.. "

  "Great!" Toby said.

  "You really think it'll work?" Connie asked.

  "I really do."

  "Fantastic!"

  Connie leaned forward, propped her arms on the table, and said, "Where do we get a sheet of plastic?"

  "We could use the bags that we get our clothes in from the dry cleaners," Toby suggested.

  "No, no," I said. "That's much too thin. That would tear to pieces before we'd towed you a hundred feet."

  "Oh, yeah." He frowned at his own suggestion and began to look around the room for a source of sturdy plastic.

  I folded my hands around a coffee cup and thought and couldn't find a solution. I was tired and stiff and sore. I wanted to sleep.

  After three or four minutes of silence, Connie said, "Does it have to be plastic?"

  "I guess not."

  "Wouldn't a length of heavy canvas do the job just as well?"

  "Sure," I said.

  "Well, all that stuff the owners have stored in the basement-it's all wrapped up in canvas tarps. We can unwrap something. If the tarp's too large, we can cut it down."

  "Perfect," I said.

  "Where will you get the rope?"

  I thought a moment. Then: "Wire will be just as good as rope. There's a big roll of that down in the tool cabinet."

  "When do we leave?"

  "Now?" Toby asked.

  "We'd get lost in the dark," I said.

  "You didn't get lost when you came home in the dark from the Johnson!s," he said.

  "Dumb luck."

  "I think you're great, Dad."

  That compliment lifted my spirits higher than I can say. For the first time I realized that, because of this ordeal, I had the chance to prove myself to Toby, to erase his memories of the way I had looked in the hospital, much faster than I could have done without the current crisis. "Thank you," I said. "You're not too bad yourself, chief."

  He grinned broadly, blushed brightly, and
looked down at his jigsaw puzzle.

  "Maybe by morning," Connie said,

  "the wind and the snow will have stopped."

  "Maybe. But don't count on it. We'll leave at first light, and we'll expect the weather to be against us every step of the way."

  "What about sleep?" Connie asked.

  "I'm not sleepy," Toby said. "I slept last night, and then Mom doped me up this morning. I'm just getting awake."

  "Well, you'll have to try to sleep anyway," I said. "When we start out tomorrow, you'll need to be refreshed." I turned to Connie, who, like me, had bags under her eyes. She'd had only one hour of sleep in the last thirty-six hours, and I had not had much more than that, perhaps three hours. We were both on the verge of collapse. "We'll sleep in shifts again," I told her. "You go first. I'll go down to the basement and see about the tarp."

  "Can I come along?"

  Toby asked.

  Getting up from the table, I said, "Sure. You've got to give me a hand with this job."

  Connie got up, came into my arms, and hugged me for a moment. Then she kissed my neck and stepped back, turned, started toward the living room arch.

  "I'll wake you in three hours," I said.

  She turned. "Sooner than that. You've had a rougher time of it than I have. Besides, you've always needed more sleep than me."

  "Three hours, and don't argue," I said. "Go hurry up and sleep. Morning's coming too fast."

  18

  This method has become compulsive: this careful step-by-step breakdown of that most crucial hour of my life, this prolonged narrative of events which certainly moved much more swiftly than this in real life. (Yes, in fact it had all happened much too fast.) But there is no other way that I can tell it, obsessed with it as I am, ruled by it as I am, broken and destroyed by it as I am Once more, therefore, let the imagination flow, look outside the farmhouse and return to the barn where the alien now stands at the open door looking inside:

  The buck lowered its antlers. It snorted and pawed at the earthen floor much like a bull will stroke the arena as a warning to the matador.