Smokes with my daughter and some of the middle-schoolers. He wasn’t wandering, Martin.”
Martin turned around with the intention of going back to the house immediately—and it was then that he saw the thick column of light drop down like some kind of bright shroud on the cars of the followers.
“Oh my God,” he said.
George turned, too, and saw it. “God almighty.” He began to run, loping ahead to the wanderers, who continued on at their steady and oblivious pace. Martin’s first impulse was to follow him, but a golden shaft came down, razor-thin and quick, and George sparkled for a moment, and then dropped back, joining his pace to that of the other wanderers.
It had been that quick. Martin forced himself not to run, he forced himself to fall in with the wanderers, to pretend to be one of them. As he had on many a hike, he walked beside his wife. The screaming behind him told him that the light was doing all the followers. Their compassion and their love had been used to trap them.
Then he saw little Winnie fall and cry out, and his whole heart and soul longed to help his child, but he kept on walking.
The wanderers never slowed their pace, but every so often, he saw one or another of them fall down. The others simply walked over them.
It was a brutal—and brutally efficient—selection process, he thought. Only the strong would make it, and only the strong, obviously, would be wanted. Overhead, he once again heard the whoosh, whoosh of… something. Could it be that a big old barn owl was shadowing them? But the owl’s wing is silent.
Ahead and to his left there was leaping movement. A voice rose in a frantic salad of words, babbling and shrieking, then going silent. He looked neither left nor right, but kept on, leaving the struggle behind him. Soon the voice was silent, replaced by that odd, mechanical chuckling he’d heard in the woods around his house. Eventually, the sounds faded.
He was aware that Lindy was just beyond his touch, and that Winnie maybe had fallen aside. He forgot all his careful intellectualizations about God and prayed the Jesus Prayer over and over again, the prayer out of J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, which had been a favorite of Lindy’s. It was the repetitive prayer from The Way of the Pilgrim, “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
As the stars wheeled in their generous majesty, Martin walked to the rhythm set by repetitions. From time to time the light dropped down on another follower it had discovered in the mass of wanderers, and ripped out a soul.
The rhythm made it easier for him, but by the time two hours had passed, he knew that he could not keep up with the pace of the wanderers much longer. He was contemplating this danger, letting the prayer drop into the back of his mind, when he heard a distant voice. It had an echoing, mechanical quality to it. He listened—and then, incredibly, saw its source. A police car stood on a roadside ahead, it’s light bar flashing. Beside it stood a state policeman with an electronic bullhorn. He raised it to his lips and blared, “You are trespassing on a wildlife preservation zone. You are required to leave this area immediately. Please come up to the roadway, ladies and gentlemen. You are trespassing—”
A tongue of light snicked down out of the clouds and there appeared around him the loveliest spreading glitter of little stars that Martin had ever seen. From this distance, you could see exactly how the light made the soul literally burst out of the body. He thought that a human soul was truly a universe all its own, as the stars that had been that man’s memories, dreams, and hopes flittered into oblivion. The trooper dropped his bullhorn and turned northwest.
Martin had reached a point of crisis. He had to stop. No choice. Already, he was visibly dropping back, he couldn’t help it. “Good-bye, Lindy,” he said in his heart, “good-bye my love, and good-bye Lindy’s soul, wherever you are, and god rest you, my baby Winnie, my poor little girl never even had a life.” Then he let himself fall forward like an exhausted wanderer. He did not close his eyes, but rather continued staring straight down at the ground.
Soon, the last of the wanderers had passed him by. He heard the intimate whistle of a night bird. Then something else—that chuckling again. It was close, and there was a lot of it. Now he thought it was like a flock of geese in flight, honking back and forth to one another as they ploughed the sky.
The aliens. That must be it. This sound represented the elusive aliens, coming along behind their human herd. Drovers. Cowboys.
Then something stepped on his back. It was heavy, and it had a sharpness that penetrated his jeans and entered his thigh. He had to force himself not to move as this sharpness very painfully twisted inside his flaring muscle.
Then it was gone, and he could just glimpse what looked like the leg of an insect touching the ground beside his face, then another, and then the chuckling had gone on ahead, and with it the faint whooshing and whistling in the sky.
Then he knew that there was light all around him. He felt the most incredible rage at his defeat, and then waited to feel the light, to know what it was like to lose your soul. Did you go with it, or stay in your body—or, as he thought—just disappear?
But then there was something in his ear. Snuffling. And an odor, a familiar one. He opened his eyes, turned his head, and found himself face to face with a very large skunk.
As the tail rose, he rolled, then jumped up and ran like hell, and the skunk ran, too, wobbling off into the light, which was not the light of death, but that of dawn.
He stood up in the sunlight. It was golden, low still on the horizon, but so pure that it must be as sacred as the old Egyptians had thought, and he turned toward it and knelt as he might to God.
Then he went back along the long series of low folds in the land, heading toward his truck, hoping to find Winnie’s body somewhere, a little snatch of clothes somewhere in the prairie.
But he found an adult instead, blood-soaked, dead. This was no fallen wanderer, this person had been done violence. He looked down. The school jacket, the smoothness of the backs of the hands—this was just a kid. He turned him over, and leaped back when he realized what he was seeing, and when he fully realized it, screamed.
Instantly, he stifled it. The light did not come during the day, apparently being rendered ineffective by the sun, but there had been other things out there and he wasn’t so sure that they were particularly nocturnal.
He thought that this pitiful ruin must have been a boy. He was, at most, fifteen or sixteen, and he had been horrifically mutilated. His lips were gone, his mouth open and his tongue removed. His eyes had been gouged out, and his lower body was bloody. Martin didn’t examine him too closely, but it looked as if he had been castrated, too.
He forced himself to open the shirt, to look for the familiar mole that would mean he had found his son.
The cool gray skin was unblemished.
Martin stood up and ran a short distance, then came back and picked the poor kid up, and carried him in his arms. He carried him across a field and into an empty farmyard, and put him down in a porch swing.
“Hey! Anybody home? Hey!”
Not a sound. He went inside and found eggs in the fridge, and cracked six of them raw into his mouth. He also ate cheese and crunched into a head of lettuce. He drank warm grapefruit juice that nearly made him puke.
Then he went on, walking until the sun was high and warm, and the gladness that it brings even to the most oppressed human heart made him close his eyes and lift his face to it. “Lucky old sun,” he said.
Whereupon he found his truck…which he had left running. He jumped in and pulled the key out.
He’d damn well burned out all his gas, damned fool that he was. Fool!
Well, not quite all. There was a hairline between the edge of the gauge and the red line, so there was still a mile or so in it.
He walked back to the farm, but this was a hobby place, there was no gas tank here. Returning to the jeep, he got in and started it. He headed back toward Harrow, and had the town in sight when he ran out of gas.
He never passed Dennis Farm, but he’d been looking for it. Never saw a trace of it, must have been too far east of it, he figured.
He walked for half an hour, finally crossing the last field and climbing a final fence. Then he was in a backyard. He went down the driveway beside the house and into the dead-empty streets. A flicker of curtain in this house or that was the only indication of life here.
He was passing the bank when a familiar car pulled alongside him.
