The doorbell rang, causing him to almost jump through his skin. Who would it be at this hour? Only one guess—
And, indeed, it was one of his neighbors, Ed Trillian. Or no, there was George Montague back there in the shadows, too.
He opened the door for them. Nobody spoke. As he was taking them into the den, the bell rang again. This time it was Adam Dane and Tom Ford. So that was the street, except, of course, for Carter himself. But he wasn’t around anymore. He’d gone under with the collapse of Capital Fiscal. The house was in foreclosure. The block was being busted by the guy’s damn bank.
He got the guys into the den, closed the door and locked it. He already knew what he was going to propose, and there was absolutely no way Shirley was going to hear one damn word of it. She’d start shrieking like a banshee, and he did not need that. “Obviously,” he said, “we’re in trouble.”
“I’m under water on my mortgage,” Adam said.
“We’re in escrow here and in Dallas,” Tom added. He’d recently gotten a new job there. “If we lose this sale, then we also can’t close down there. We’re up on cinder blocks.”
Ed Trillian said, “I find them fascinating.”
“Yeah, I had an ant farm when I was a kid,” Jake said. “They were fascinating, too. You just didn’t want the damn things in bed with you.” He shook his head. “You know, before this all happened, I thought I hated al Qaeda. I thought I hated the Taliban. Raghead bastards. I have to tell you, though, I had no damn idea what hate was. And I hate these things—good God damn, but I do hate them.”
“Okay, we all do, Jake. But we gotta focus on our problem.”
Tom could not have been more right. “Absolutely,” Jake said. “And God willing, we will hurt them somehow.”
“Yeah, maybe, but what we gotta do is sell out,” George announced.
Jake saw red. Just saw red. He knew he was advancing on George, he knew he was yelling and George was cringing—and then he felt strong arms gripping him, felt himself being pulled back—and there was George sitting on the floor with blood trickling out of his gaping, astonished mouth, and Jake’s right fist hurt like hell.
“Jesus, Jake!”
“Sorry! Sorry! But—George.” He shook off Tom and Ed. “Lemme go, I got it. I got it under control.” He looked down at George. “Buddy—sorry—you just—man! You shocked me there! SELL OUT? No. What we gotta do is tear out some goddamn throats. That’s the question on the table.”
Tom said, “The only offers we’re gonna get will be from the bastards who just busted this block, and they will be for pennies on the dollar.”
“But . . . my mortgage is a hundred and eighty grand,” George said. “That’s my absolute minimum.”
Was the man a moron? Born yesterday? Jake did not suffer fools gladly, but this fool was still rubbing his jaw, so it was time to try to tone himself down. “George,” he said in as reasonable a tone as he could manage, “you will be lucky if they offer you fifteen thousand dollars. Ten. If that.”
George stared. Silent. He had finally realized that he would be left renting a trailer and paying off a mortgage on a house he no longer owned. Just like the rest of them.
“Maybe it won’t be that bad,” Ed said. “ ’Cause I already have my offer. It’s for about half the value of the house. Take it by eight tonight or forget it.”
Jake felt his stomach kind of congeal, a sensation he’d never experienced before. He knew exactly why Ed had gotten a slightly decent offer.
“I could do that,” George said. “I could live with that. With half.”
“That would work for me,” Tom added. “Just. If I put the savings I have left into the closing up here, I think I could still make it.”
Jake saw that he had to play this out carefully. “Okay,” he said, “who here does not have a mortgage?”
There was a silence. Finally, Ed said, “Well, I guess I’m about paid off. Next month, in fact.”
“Which is why they made you a real offer. Us, they don’t need to stroke. We’re all under water on our mortgages. They want us to walk away from our houses. If we’re foreclosed, the banks will sell our places for ten cents on the dollar. That’s how block busting works.”
George turned a desperate face to Ed Trillian, who looked at the floor. “Just telling you guys is all,” Ed said. “But I gotta take it.”
“You’re destroying us. You know that,” Adam Dane said.
“You’re my friends—”
“Then tell the bastards no!” Jake shouted.
“Our houses are worthless!” Ed said.
“Not yours,” Jake said, forcing calm into his voice. “Yours is gonna bring you a cool hundred grand!”
“Which I have to take! And don’t you come at me, Jake. Don’t you get physical. And I’m sorry for you guys. I am so genuinely sorry. But I don’t make the laws.”
Jake realized that he’d played that card. “Look, do us a favor and just get outta here.”
“Guys, I had to.” He backed toward the door. “It’s a hundred grand, don’t you see that?”
Nobody said anything. Nobody could, because it was indeed a hundred grand, and they did, indeed, see that.
He slipped out. And now, Jake saw, the way was clear. “Okay, guys, I’m going to propose something. It will be a shock, but before you start yelling, I want you to think. Carefully. What I am going to propose is that we burn them out.”
“Burn . . . the Trillians?”
Dear heaven, how did Tom Ford manage to make the money he did? Did the man even have an IQ? “No, Tom, leave him be. He’s doing exactly what any one of us would do if we had the chance. I am talking about our new neighbors.”
All three men looked at him, and, one by one, he met their eyes with his determination and his defiance and the purity of the hate he felt for the vile creatures who were invading their beautiful world.
Nobody spoke until, finally, Adam said, “You’re not gonna get away with a thing like that.”
“Look, it’s been done. A lot, in fact.”
“A lot? Jake, that’s more like once,” George said. “And eleven guys went to jail, as I recall.”
“The neighborhood was saved. If the scum get burned out, they give up. That’s the message of the Michigan Eleven.”
“I’m not going to jail,” George said. “Screw that.”
The general assent told Jake he was in trouble with these guys, and that must not be. The filth had to be kept out of the neighborhood. Period. Life-or-death struggle. “First off, we don’t have to get caught, and if we do it right, we won’t.”
They just stared at him. Did not believe a word of it. He thought fast. “Okay, we’ll vote. But let’s base it on an assumption.”
“No assumptions, Jake.”
“Hear me out, George. Jesus! Assume that I have a plan that absolutely, convincingly will not get us caught. Would you do it then?” Jake thrust up his own hand. Tom started to raise his, then stopped. George never even started. Adam fidgeted with one of the many coasters Shirley kept on the damn table. “Guys?”
“It’s a crime,” Adam said.
“Wait a second, now. Let’s be clear. There has been a crime committed, no question about that. The crime is that this block has been busted. That’s the crime. People protecting their homes, I’m sorry, but I feel no guilt.” He looked at Adam. “You know it’s true.” Slowly, Adam raised his hand. Then Tom. Then, finally, George. And thank you, God.
Now for the next step. Burning the empty house wasn’t going to be enough, and Jake knew this. “Now we’re together. But this has to be handled very, very carefully. First, my best guess is that the cops are going to be keeping an eye on the house.”
“Do we know that?” Adam asked.
“We assume it.” And here came the crucial twist in logic that was either going to work or it wasn’t. And it had to. He needed these guys, he could not do this alone. “Right now, if we do the house like in Michigan, the cops are gonna be watching and
we will get caught.”
“So how do we solve that?”
“Do it later. After the garbage has moved in. Because once they’ve arrived, no cop is gonna come near the place. No need.”
The silence was that of death, of the tomb, of profound human fear.
Finally, George whispered, “We can’t go near it, either. My God.”
“But we can, George. Nobody expects it, but to us, our homes and our families are more important even than our fear.”
Adam crossed and uncrossed his legs. Tom went over to the little fridge and pulled out a beer. “Okay,” he said. George nodded.
“We let them settle in. And here’s the beauty of it. Who’s to know they didn’t start the fire themselves? An accident. Nobody knows what they do in their houses because nobody goes near them. Plus, who’s going to investigate, and what would they look for? Nobody knows. No, if we do this while they’re inside, we’re not going to have a problem.”
George drank beer, sucking nervously. Tom turned on the TV and surfed, clicking the remote with an angry, jabbing motion.
“So,” Jake continued, “we make a plan, then we wait until they’re in, then—poof.” He tried to laugh. It did not work. He cleared his throat.
Finally, Adam said, “We can’t kill them.”
“Of course not,” Jake said. “We’ll start it in the basement. Give them time to get out. Plenty of time.”
“They’ll call the fire department,” Tom said. “It’ll get put out. They’ll demand a police investigation.”
“They do not make phone calls,” Jake said.
“You know this?” George asked.
He didn’t, but the whole idea of their using things like emergency services struck him as just damn improbable. “I know it.”
Tom surfed awhile longer. George cracked another beer and left with it. Then Adam and Tom took off. Jake went up to bed. Shirley was already asleep. He lay close to the edge on his side, his back turned to her. He thought long thoughts about life as it was now, and the world and what it was coming to, and how a man had to make his success because there was damn well nobody else who was going to do it for him.
When morning came, both of the Trillians’ cars were gone and there was a black panel truck in front of the Carter place. Nobody was wasting any time, it seemed. As he backed out of his garage on the way to work, Jake thought that they ought to burn the Trillian place, too. Useless gesture, but satisfying.
Just before noon, he found one of the mailroom guys standing in his doorway with a FedEx envelope. When Jake saw that it was from City Savings and Trust, he stuffed it into his briefcase. It was their demand letter, of course.
On the way home, he stopped at Lowe’s and bought some emergency candles. As he drove up the street, he saw that the Carters’ pretty lawn was now covered with that black goop they sprayed everywhere, and workers from some government agency were coating the house with it. Black, black, black, inside and out—that was their only color. The junk smelled like—well, a dead neighborhood. Ruined lives. Or, to be more precise, sewage mixed with burned hair.
He moved through Friday like a zombie, doing his work, which consisted of filling out requisition forms for his new desk, office chair, curtains, you name it—the list was long and the budget generous.
That afternoon, he stopped in the middle of Alta Vista and looked carefully and long at what had been the Carter place. What was it now, a hovel? Call the damn thing a slum.
Saturday morning dawned, and Jake woke up to Pete and Lissa’s excited shouts from the front yard. One glance out the window and he was into his sandals and downstairs. “Shirley, the kids are out there!”
Shirley came in from the kitchen. “It’s no big deal, they don’t hurt people.”
“There could be radiation, anything!” He went out onto the front porch. “Come on, boobalas,” he said gently. “We can watch from inside.”
At that moment, the sun went out. Jake looked up to see a vast blackness spreading across the sky like a gigantic lid coming down on the world. The air became still and dense, as if a storm was brewing. This was followed by the first whiff of the legendary stench that accompanied the bastards, and when he caught the fetid, rotten scent, Jake had to choke back his loathing.
Up and down the street, doors slammed as people came out. George and his wife, Tom and his kids, Adam and Tina Dane.
“The thing,” Shirley said, “isn’t it . . . decrepit?”
“It’s filthy,” Jake said. “Their junk is all filthy.”
You could see open areas with gridwork behind them, places where it had been gouged by something, other places where big, black panels were hanging off.
“Has it been attacked?” Pete asked.
“Nobody knows what happens out there,” Jake explained. “It’s a total unknown.”
Added to the stink from across the street, a smell of hot metal and burning plastic wafted down from what Jake was increasingly coming to think of as an interstellar jalopy. The thing clanked like a busted washing machine.
With a gigantic, echoing creak, a big trapdoor slowly opened onto a dark maw.
“We need to go inside right now,” Jake said. Somehow, being exposed to that opening—being seen by them—was making him darned uncomfortable. Who knew what they were capable of? Maybe they read minds, who knew? “Get inside,” Jake shouted up and down the street. “Everybody! NOW!”
Added to the clanking came the sound of every dog in the neighborhood going berserk, howling, barking, making sounds you don’t often hear, the screeches and roars of dog insanity.
Jake got his family into the house, but he had to literally drag the kids, who were absolutely fascinated.
He let them watch from behind the curtains, though. And, for a few minutes, nothing happened. Then there was movement in the blackness. Slowly, objects came down on ropes. Black objects, black ropes.
“It’s furniture,” Shirley whispered.
You could see that there were chairs coming down, tables, even what looked like some kind of stove made of more black tubing than Jake had ever seen in one place before. The chairs were tall and narrow, with seats indented to fit the sitters’ bones. Everything was black.
Then rope ladders, black as night, were dropped, and first one and then another of the great, gangling creatures came slowly, clumsily down.
“My God,” Jake said, “look at them.”
“They’re fascinatingly strange.”
“They look like bugs covered with . . . what is that, some kind of . . . tar?”
At night, they flew, feeding, it was believed, on bats and owls and insects. When they took flight, they sounded the way they looked, like gigantic blowflies.
“Look at their faces,” Pete said, his voice quavering.
Jake could see the humanity in their lips. “They look like some kind of crossbreed,” he said. The eyes were insectoid, but the lips could have been on the face of anyone anywhere, they were that human.
Shirley’s hand slipped into his. “That was the bank guy. They wanted us to know we need to get our basics out.”
He hadn’t even heard the phone ring.
“I’ll get packing,” she said, tears in her voice.
“Yeah, you do that,” he said. He hoped he sounded convincing, but he was worried. He knew no more about the capabilities of the aliens than anybody else did. They were sickening, but they were also powerful, and now he had to face that power.
He watched them drag their belongings into the black, ruined house. They moved like snakes mixed with spiders, alternately writhing and jerking along. They were the ugliest things Jake had ever seen, a grotesque abortion of evolution. God only knew what sort of hideous, misbegotten world they came from.
As the sun went down, Jake went into the garage and checked the gas in his lawnmower can. Three-quarters full. He’d use a little, George would use a little, Adam would use a little, they’d do it together. Very late, after the creatures had done their night flying and
come home to roost.
The things probably wouldn’t be in any danger, but if they were—if they burned—oh, how beautiful it would be.
Shortly after eleven, Jake heard the drone of the creatures leaving the house, flying off into the night.
He texted the agreed signal: “Nice evening, let’s suck beer.”
They’d met one more time about what they now referred to as “the matter.” Jake had laid out the plan and they had arranged this signal. The fear would be incredible, they knew that. They would help one another. The Carters had been gregarious neighbors, so everybody knew the house.
The plan was to hang out here until the creatures returned, then do the deed. Move in fast, get out. Simple as that. Except for one thing: nobody was replying.
Jake repeated the text. He had expected at least one defector, probably George, but not all three, surely not all three.
Then there came a sound—tapping, very soft. He went to the front door. Tom was out there. He opened the door onto a stricken man.
“You’re not backing out,” he said.
“Jake, they’re the most awful things I’ve ever seen.”
“I know it. But we have to do this.”
“If we have to get close to them, to touch them—I just can’t do it.”
“We won’t! We won’t even see them.”
“We’ll be alone in there, Jake. With them. God knows what will happen to us, Jake. What we need to do is just get the hell out of here. Live to fight another day.”
He let him go. What else could he do? He’d just have to take all the risk himself. But this neighborhood would pay him back—it would pay him back in full. How, he did not yet know, but he would find a way.
Jake sat in the den, doing research, googling for information about them—as if he hadn’t done all this before. The problem was, there was so much crap out there, you just could not tell what to believe. What he was most curious about was their ability to read minds.
One o’clock slowly edged into two. How long did the damn things stay out? At this rate, they’d eat every bat in town in a matter of days. God, why did you have to send us these horrors? Why not beautiful white angels, or just any damn thing that isn’t so hideous?
Twilight Zone Anthology Page 34