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
