“You won’t get around me with sarcasm either.” He was stubborn. “You won’t get around me at all, so quit trying. Go back to Wes. Whatever share of the blame you did earn needs to be worked out with Wes.”
She stared at him hard, and her green eyes were wild and sparking. “If you think I’ll ever come to you again—” she began, then stopped. “You’re a fool, Linc. An absolute, pitiful fool! You’ve never felt true emotion in yourself, so you can’t recognize it in anybody else. Go ahead and walk into that hole tomorrow. Kill yourself. I’ll be the last to mourn.”
He heard her feet running up the stairs, and then the creak of old flooring as she went in to Wes. He sat down again and ate the chicken. Perhaps he hadn’t been fair to her, but he cared little about it. The debt he owed to Wes excluded everything else.
Morning was cold. Linc could see his breath in the air when he took Ichabod out for his morning walk. It was a good morning, clear and clean, ready to accept his new start. And the natural chill of the air hid the unnatural chill of his bones when he thought about the next hours.
He fortified himself with a heavy breakfast, storing energy for the battle that lay ahead. At nine o’clock, he was ready. He climbed the stairs to Wes’ room and went in. As he did, Kelly came out. He walked to the bed and stared down at his friend. Wes was paler, weaker, sighing more frequently. The radiation was eating him alive, and he hadn’t much time left.
He took Wes’ limp hand in his own and whispered, “Wait for me, friend. Wait for me to come back, because I will come back, with revenge for you and victory for all of us. I promise you that. If I can’t win it, then I won’t come back at all.”
Linc squeezed the hot hand once more, then laid it gently upon the sheet. “I’ll see you soon,” he said, and left the room.
He passed Kelly at the head of the stairs, and she said nothing. She wished him neither good luck nor bad, and he felt a little empty without it.
He got into his car, drawing his bulky car coat close about him, and reached into the glove compartment for the flimsy weapons he had stored there the night before. Two tear gas bombs. As frail as they were, they might give him a valuable minute at some point or other and mean the difference between success or failure. He put them in his right-hand pocket, and started the car. As he drove off down Colt Street, he noticed Kelly watching him from the upstairs window. She didn’t wave.
Just outside the city limits, he swung into Linc with five other cars, heading out under evacuation orders. He prayed that he had chosen correctly—that his group was one of those to be captured, not one that would manage to get through.
Two miles down the road, an Eye appeared, zooming across the open fields. The cars ahead of him surged forward. He could hear screams and see hands pointing skyward from the cars, and he kept pace. He wanted the capture, but he must pretend to be unwilling.
The car before him suddenly swerved in to the ditch, and stalled halfway up the other side. Following suit, he turned the wheel and swung off the road, feeling the jolt as the car lurched into the ditch and up again, coming to rest at the edge of a barren cornfield. He waited, sitting quietly, taking his cue from those in the other cars. All five of them were off the road, and silent. The doors of a blue sedan opened, and three people got out: a man, a woman and an old woman. They stood in the field, limp in the cold sun, waiting.
Linc climbed out of his car, and dropped his hands to his sides, hoping they looked properly limp and insensitive. He let his shoulders droop, and his head fall forward. The Eye was now in the cornfield, hovering six feet off the ground, rolling its brown eyeball back and forth, gathering its people in. Clouds and shadows and swirls ebbed around him, and he was familiar with them and fought them but gently. Too strong a resistance would arouse suspicion. The Eye would feel it and recoil, as the one in the lab had done.
The people were walking now, and he joined them, falling into step with the nearest man. They walked blindly, stumbling over the dead rubble of cornstalks, heads down, sightlessly following deeper and deeper into the field.
Linc could see where he was going; he could see the people if he peered up from under his eyelids; and he could see the Eye leading them, bobbing above them one moment, coming to rest the next. It blinked its giant lids and the lashes made a little breeze that ruffled the feather on one of the women’s hats.
There were twelve people—men, women and children—in the march beside himself. He made thirteen. He wanted more. Twelve wasn’t enough cover.
The corn stubble ended and gave way to tall, browning grass, and their feet made swishing noises as they passed through it. Swish and crunch. Swish and crunch. He focused his mind on the sound, keeping away from the swirls of the Eye.
The swirls eddied stronger and there was a tug at him that almost drew his head up, ready to fight back. He grabbed hold of himself and resumed the limp pose, but resistance was somehow harder. The shadows buffeted at the door of his mind, demanding entrance.
Peeking upward, he saw the reason for the new strength in the hypnotic pull. Another Eye, a green one, had joined his brown captor, and they were sailing together, backward across the grass toward the woods. Following the green Eye was a large mass of people. He estimated thirty at a quick count. He breathed easier. This number would give him safety.
The two groups joined, and headed toward the game preserve. Each step forward brought more swirls to pommel him, as the Eyes gathered, reinforcing each other, and led their herd of the helpless to their lair. He felt like a man on a blind walk, on a walk among the dead. There wasn’t a sound around him. Even the birds were silent, having fled before the monstrosities that had taken over their skies. Crunch and swish went the feet of the mob, and that was all. It was eerie and he felt immensely alone, immensely frail. The struggle to keep from succumbing to the hypnotic power grew steadily harder and more desperate.
As long as they weren’t aware of him, he was all right. As long as they didn’t sense his difference, his immunity, and gang up on him, he would be safe. But he doubted that he could stand against a joint attack. Together, they were too strong.
The sun was two hours in the sky, and his breath ceased to be visible. The day was warming, and he was sweating inside the car coat, sweating from heat, and struggle, and fear. They were approaching a road. Cars were stalled along the sides of it—empty cars.
A woods rose on the other side, and far to his left, another road cut into it. He recognized it and shuddered. This was the road where he had found Wes in that one spurt of joy, and then had sunk into despair when he had turned him around. The game preserve was near. The hole was near. The end of his walk had almost come.
Then he was on the worn path he had seen from the fire tower; the path made by the thousands of zombie feet, walking toward the hole. “A few more minutes,” he told himself, “a few more minutes and the hole will open before you, and you’ll know.”
He fought harder against the shadows that beat at him.
It was an almost physical feeling upon his brain; tugging, pulling, drawing him close, flagellating his mind with soft shafts of thought; and he fought it, harder now because it was so concentrated.
Beside him a crack of thunder pealed out, and he jerked erect.
Along the path, both hidden and unhidden were National Guardsmen. They were entrenched here, bravely ringing the mouth of the hole. The thunder had been the crack of a rifle.
He had come into the middle of a foray against the Eyes, and the woods erupted about him into gunshots and yelling. Soldiers popped out from behind trees, and Eyes reeled as they were stung. But he couldn’t watch; he couldn’t pay attention. He was too engrossed in his own battle against hypnosis.
The fight raged, then subsided as he walked through it, pretending to be unaware. He saw, as the quiet descended, that the group was being joined by more and more uniformed figures. Whatever the Guard had tried this time, they h
ad failed again.
The people in front of him seemed to grow shorter. He hesitated. They weren’t growing shorter, they were going down into the earth. They had reached the hole.
Linc braced himself, and took the first of his own steps down the dirt ramp that led from the sunshine to the depths of the pit. There was no longer room for fear in him. It was crowded out by terror and apprehension.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The earth slanted under Linc’s feet and he journeyed down it toward the approaching blackness. It was a huge ramp that met his steps; fifty feet wide, smoothed over by the thousands of feet which had traversed it previously. Down and down it went, until the sunlight from the rear became dim, and dimmer, and then was gone entirely. Down, down into the innards of the earth. How far? he wondered. And how would he see in the pitch blackness of inner earth?
The zombie people around him had no need to see. They were being led. He was not. Now he was truly a blind man walking among the dead.
When the light faded entirely, he dosed his eyes. He couldn’t stand the sense of blindness, couldn’t stand to keep them open and see nothing. So he closed them and moved close to the rest of the captives, letting their shoulders, bumping against him, be his guide.
Something touched his eyes—a pressure, a soft hint of vision—and he opened them. It was no longer dark. The ramp and the dirt side walls were lit with a wispy glow, violet and purplish. It grew stronger with each step forward, until he could see again, make out forms, then even the faces of the zombies. It was dull light, but a light that he was thankful for. And ahead the damp ended.
A sheer wall rose abruptly, marking the ramp’s end. The people spread out of their close pack, and as they did, he got a good view of the wall and what made the ramp end.
A huge, metal shape blocked the passage. It was only half visible, towering above him, the other half embedded in the dirt which had stopped its forward movement.
He studied it as unobtrusively as possible. He couldn’t be positive, but the over-all shape of the thing brought to mind a ship of some sort. A spaceship? He recalled the reports of a great roaring light passing over the town, and the explosion in the woods. Then this metal giant had made the light, and the explosion had been its impact and burrowing descent into the earth.
Someone shoved him and he moved on. The zombie people waited for no one. They plowed ahead, oblivious to anything in their path. He shuffled with them toward the ship, then at the end of the ramp, turned to the right. Before him was a large, natural cavern, and the glow from it was stronger.
As he entered the cavern, the glow bloomed brighter, and still keeping his pose of limpness, he looked up from under his eyelids to find its source.
The discovery was a surprise that sucked out his breath. Over by the wall, glowing brightly so that every movement was outlined, was a semicircle of bloated, shapeless creatures. They were huge and living, and they glowed with the violet light, which emanated from their skins, changing shade with their emotion. Beneath the glowing, they were black and shiny, with hides of a slimy leather texture. He counted quickly, and there were nine of them.
Zombies were everywhere. Sitting huddled against the walls, crouching together in groups, they seemed to fill the cavern. Some were filthy from their stay in the dirt—others had only lately arrived. They were all blank-eyed from hypnosis; and some had already taken on the idiot stare of mindlessness that Wes had acquired here in this pit.
He was sickeningly near the circled monsters now. He sank to the floor as the others did, and sat still, staring at the dirt in front of him. Out of the corner of his eye, he had a slant-eyed view of the glowing giants.
Everything they did seemed to be in slow motion; sluggish and heavy, as though they weighed a ton and could not lift their arms. Arms they had—fat, long arms of amorphous shape. And legs they had, of the same appearance. Their ears and mouths were not visible, and as he looked them over, he recoiled and had to forcibly keep his hands from flying to cover his mouth. Some of the giant things had two eyes. Some of them had only one. Yet the monsters with one had sockets for two—the socket for the missing eye glaring redly, revoltingly empty.
As he continued to watch, one of the flying Eyes floated into the cavern. It hovered, its six-foot length dwarfing Linc beneath it, and then as it had on that first day at the ball game, it began to change size. It shrank, from six to four feet, to two feet, to one. And when it reached the size of about eight inches, it floated away from him, and toward one of the monsters. It stopped before the glowing thing, turned around, and—backed into the empty socket in the thing’s face.
It was impossible! Yet he had seen it. One moment the socket had been empty, and a six-foot flying Eye had hovered near. The next, the socket was full and the flying Eye was filling it. How?
He searched frantically for some rational word that might stem the rise of panic. He found one—teleportation. The glowing creatures had the power not only to hypnotize, but to teleport part of their bodies to another place. To send their eyes out from their sockets, to skim the earth with their flying Eyes, see with them, and capture with them. The mentality behind the hypnosis, then, was within these grotesque, glowing things. The Eyes were merely their instruments.
Linc closed his eyes against the sickening pull of his stomach. He had to gather strength. The swirls and shadows still waited just beyond his mind, ready to pounce and take him. He renewed his fight against them. And when he had them under control, he kept his eyes shut to give himself a chance to think—to think without constant revulsion at what he saw around him; to think sanely and logically.
The big creatures had obviously come to earth in the metal spaceship; the flying Eyes were not separate entities, but part of the creatures themselves, teleported over the earth to bring in captives; when the Eyes were wounded, the creatures who owned them, using their special mental powers, healed them; and the creatures glowed. This last fact brought his thinking up short. The creatures glowed; the violet and purple radiance emanated from their skins as though they were giving it off. But what was it?
He peered again at the zombie people. They were hypnotized now, and soon they would have the radiation sickness. Every one of the people who had returned from this hole, including Wes, was dying of radioactivity. The source of it was here—not in the hole itself, but in the glow of the creatures who inhabited it.
It made sense. These giant, sluggish things gave off a constant glow of radiation which infected their captives and killed them. Sitting here, in the glow, he was soaking up radiation, too. He would die of it, too. Hendricks had been here only a short time—a few days—and Hendricks had died. Wes had been here only three days, and Wes was dying.
He knew, then, that he had to discover whatever there was to discover quickly, and get out. If he stayed in this hole too long, he would perish.
He lifted his head, forgetting the pose. The time was short, anyway, and he had to see. The hypnotic pull was ebbing somewhat. The monsters had their captives, and they could relax, devoting only a small amount of attention to the hypnotizing, using the rest of their energies for something else.
A man rose from the group of new zombies and approached the semicircle of glowing things. He knelt down before them and remained there on his knees. At the far end of the cavern, two Eyes were sailing back and forth. They swayed in the glow of the parent creatures, weirdly violet with flashing lashes, then falling into shadow. Linc could guess where they belonged. The two giant things nearest to him were each minus an eye, lopsided with their single-orbed gaze.
He couldn’t stand this place any longer. The blackness of it, the violet glow cutting that blackness, the swaying Eyes, popping in and out of sockets, were too much to bear. He had to get out. He felt the panic and rush inside him, and got up on his knees. The man was still kneeling before the circle of creatures like a sacrifice in some ancient ritual. He had no hope of decipherin
g that ritual, and he had no time.
He leaped to his feet and ran through the cavern toward the ramp, following the glow backward from its greatest strength to its weakest. He leaped over the tired bodies of the zombie people, pushed others out of his way, toppling them over like dominoes in his wake.
Behind him, he heard a swish of air, and the new harsh pull at his mind told him the Eyes were giving chase. He made the foot of the ramp and veered to climb it. Ahead it was pitch-black. The glow faded partway up, and after that he would have to run blind.
He darted to the wall. Running his hands along the vertical dirt gave him direction. Glancing over his shoulder as he struck the blackness, he saw two Eyes coming after him, still lighted by the glow, purple and staring.
He ran harder, his legs knowing the way out of terror. Faint light washed some of the black away as he neared the sunlight. And finally he could see his path again. The vision gave him an added spurt and he clawed his way on, using his hands against the wall as leverage for his weakened legs.
When he gained the ramp entrance, a shock like a great fist struck his brain and unnatural blackness rushed to engulf him. He fell forward, his fingernails clutching the ground and filling with dirt. He fought and struggled in the prone position. He writhed to his knees and opened his eyes against the hammering that wanted to beat them shut.
He was encircled; the tiny center of a circle of six flying Eyes. They had him cornered, and united they were pounding at his consciousness, beating him into submission. He hated them, and he thrust the hate at them in great stabs, but they were too many. They absorbed the stabs and battled back. His brain was numbing, the swirls and shadows verging into hypnotic visions, and he was deathly tired.
It was an effort just to move. His limbs felt three times their normal weight. With a desperate effort he inched his hand toward his pocket, then into it. He grasped the hard shapes of the tear gas bombs.
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