Invasion of The Body Snatchers

new highway. Leaving us with one practically impassable road, and with the winter rains coming on, there's no point fixing it now.' The rear bumper guards scraped dirt, as the back wheels lurched out of a hole, and Jack cursed and complained steadily until eleven-thirty, when we passed the black-and-white Santa Mira City Limits sign, population 3,890.

Chapter twelve

I don't know how many people still live in the towns they were born in, these days. But I did, and it's inexpressibly sad to see that place die; far worse than the death of a friend, because you have other friends to turn to. We did a great deal, and a lot of things happened, in the hour and fifty-five minutes that followed; and in every minute of it my sense of loss deepened and my sense of shock grew at what we saw, and I knew that something very dear to me was irretrievably lost. Moving along an outlying street, now, I had my first actual feeling of the terrible change in Santa Mira, and I remembered something a friend had told me about the war, the fighting in Italy. They would come, sometimes, into a town supposedly free of Germans, the population supposedly friendly. But they'd enter with rifles at the ready, just the same, glancing around, up, and back, with every cautious step. And they saw every window, door, alleyway, and face, he'd told me, as something to fear. Now, home again in the town I was born in – I'd delivered papers on this very street – I knew how he'd felt entering those Italian villages; I was afraid of what I might see and find here.

Jack said, 'I'd like to run up to our place for a few minutes, Miles; Teddy and I need some clothes.'

I didn't want to go with them; I was sick with the thoughts and feelings moving through me, and I knew I had to see this town, to look at it up close, hoping to be able to tell myself that it was still the way it always had been. I had no Saturday office hours to worry about, so I said, 'Let us out, then, Jack, and we'll walk. I feel like it, if Becky doesn't mind, and we'll meet you at my place.'

So Jack let us out on Etta Street, south of Main; maybe a ten-minute walk from my house. Etta is a quiet residential street, like most of the others in Santa Mira, and as the sound of Jack's car died, Becky and I walked along toward Main, and there wasn't a soul in sight, and hardly a sound but our shoes on the walk; it should have seemed peaceful.

'Miles, what's wrong with you?' Becky said irritably, and I stared at her. She smiled a little, then, but there was still a little edge of irritation in her voice. 'Don't you know I'm awfully close to being in love with you; can't you tell?' She didn't wait for an answer; she just looked at me as though I were simple-minded, and added, 'And you'd be with me, if you'd just relax and let go.' She put a hand on my arm. 'Miles, what's the matter?'

'Well,' I said, 'I hadn't wanted to tell you this, but there's a curse on my family; we Bennells are doomed to walk alone. I was the first in generations to try marriage, and you know what happened. If I tried again, I'd turn into an owl, and so would anyone who tried with me. I don't mind for myself, but I wouldn't want you to be an owl.'

She didn't answer for a few steps, then she said, 'Who are you afraid for, you or me?'

'Both.' I shrugged. 'I wouldn't want either of us to get on a first-name basis at our neighbourhood divorce court.'

She smiled. 'And you think that would happen to us?'

'My record's perfect so far. I might be the type who makes it a habit. How can I tell?'

'I don't know. I don't know how you can tell; your logic is flawless. Miles, I'd better move home.'

'I'd tie you down first,' I said. 'You're not moving anywhere. But from now on, we won't even shake hands' – I grinned at her maliciously – 'wonderful as it was sleeping with you.'

'Go to hell,' she said, and grinned.

We walked on, then, not talking about anything important, for half a dozen blocks, and I looked around me at Etta Street. I'd driven the streets of Santa Mira every day; I'd been in this very block not a week before. And everything I was seeing now had been here to see then, except that you don't really see the familiar until it's thrust on you. You don't actually look, you don't notice, until there's a reason to do so. But now there was a reason, and I looked around me, really seeing the street and the houses along it, trying to soak up every impression they could give me.

I couldn't possibly describe any specific way in which anything I saw seemed different; yet it did, in a way words can't explain. But if I were an artist, painting the way Etta Street seemed to me, walking along now with Becky, I think I'd distort the windows of the houses we passed. I'd show them with half-drawn shades, the bottom edge of each shade curving downward, so that the windows looked like heavy-lidded, watchful eyes, quietly and terribly aware of us as we passed through that silent street. I'd show the porch rails and stair rails hugging the houses like protective arms, sullenly guarding them against our curiosity. I'd paint the houses themselves as huddled and crouching, alien and withdrawn, resentful, evil, and full of icy malice against the two figures walking along the street between them. And somehow I'd depict the very trees and lawns, the street and sky above us, as dark – though it was actually clear and sunny – and give the picture a brooding, silent, fearful quality. And I think I'd make every colour just a shade off-key.

I don't know if that would convey what I felt, but – something was wrong, and I knew it. And then I knew that Becky did, too.

'Miles,' she said in a cautious, lowered tone, 'am I imagining it, or does this street look – dead?'

I shook my head. 'No. In seven blocks we haven't passed a single house with as much as the trim being repainted; not a roof, porch, or even a cracked window being repaired; not a tree, shrub, or a blade of grass being planted, or even trimmed. Nothing's happening, Becky, nobody's doing anything. And they haven't for days, maybe weeks.'

It was true; we walked three more blocks, to Main, and saw not a sign of change. We might have been on a finished stage set, completed to the last nail and final stroke of a brush. Yet you can't walk ten blocks on an ordinary street inhabited by human beings without seeing evidences of say, a garage being built, a new cement sidewalk being laid, a yard being spaded, a picture window being installed – at least some little signs of the endless urge to change and improve that marks the human race.

We turned onto Main, and while there were people on the sidewalks, and cars angled in at the parking meters, somehow the street seemed surprisingly empty and inactive. Except for the occasional slam of a car door, or the sound of a voice, the street was very nearly silent for as much as half a block at a time; the way it is late at night, with the town asleep.

A great deal of what we saw then, I'd seen before, driving along Main on my way to house calls; but I hadn't really noticed, hadn't really looked at this street I'd been seeing all my life. But I did now, and I suddenly remembered the empty store I'd seen near my office. Because now, in the first few blocks – our footsteps plainly audible on the walk – we passed three more empty stores. The windows had been whitened, and through them, dimly, we could see the interiors littered and uncleaned, and they looked as though they'd been empty for some time now. We passed under the neon Pastime Bar and Grill sign, and the letters st, in Pastime, had gone out. The windows were fly-specked, the crepe-paper decoration and cardboard liquor signs badly sun-faded; these windows hadn't been touched for days. There was only one customer, sitting motionless at the bar – the doors were open, and we glanced in as we passed – and neither the radio nor television was on; the place was silent.

Maxie's Lunch was closed up – for good, apparently, because the counter stools were unbolted and lying on their sides on the floor. Across the street, the Sequoia had put a placard in the closed box office, and it read Open Saturday and Sunday Evenings Only. A shoe store still had some Fourth-of-July advertising in the window, some children's shoes grouped around it, and over the polish of their leather lay a fine layer of dust.

I noticed again, as Becky and I walked along the street, how much paper and litter there was; the city trash baskets stood full, and torn sheets of newspaper and tiny drifts of dust lay in the corner of store entrances, and at the bases of street lamps and mailboxes. In the vacant lot between Camino and Dykes, the weeds were high, untended for days, though there was a city ordinance against it. Becky murmured, 'The popcorn wagon's gone,' and I saw that it was; for years a red-wheeled, glass-and-gilt popcorn wagon had stood by the sidewalk at the front edge of this lot, and now there were only weeds.