Invasion

happened. He'll know what's gone wrong. He'll call the telephone and the power companies. As soon as this blizzard lets up a bit, they'll start out to see about it."
        Tony grabbed hold of my sleeve and tugged on it. "Hey, Dad! Can I go out to the generator with you?"
        "No," Connie said.
        "But why, Mom?"
        "You just had a bath."
        "What's that got to do with it?" Plaintively.
        "A hot bath opens your pores," she told him, "and makes you susceptible to colds. You'll stay in here with me."
        But we both knew that was not the real reason he would have to stay inside rather than go with me to the barn where the auxiliary generator was stored.
        You're being irrational, I told myself.
        The yellow-eyed animal had nothing to do with this.
        Maybe…
        Why do you fear it so much? You haven't seen it. It hasn't tried to harm you. Instinct? That's not good enough. Well, it's as if the thing, whatever it is, emanates some sort of radiation that generates fear… But that isn't good enough either; in fact, that's downright silly.
        It's only an animal.
        Nothing more.
        Yes. Of course. But what if
        …
        What if what?
        I couldn't answer that one.
        "I'll get your coat and boots,"
        Connie said.
        I picked up one of the candles. "I'm going to the den for a minute."
        She turned around, silhouetted in the orange candlelight, her blue eyes touched with green. What-"
        "To get the pistol. It's time to load it."

----

    6.
        
        For the first time in weeks, I dreamed. It was a replay of the old, once familiar nightmare:
        I was pinned down by enemy rifle fire, lying in a meager patch of scrub brush, forty yards from the base of the long slope that was referred to on ordnance maps as Hill #898. The flatland that we held was swampy; the rain fell hard and fast, impacting with an endless snap!snap!snap! on the vegetation and on my fatigues. When it struck my face, it stung as if it were a swarm of insects.
        A bullet would feel the same as the droplets of rain felt: a brief and surprisingly sharp sting, a minute convulsion, nothing more. The only interesting difference would be in what took place afterwards. If it were a bullet instead of a raindrop, then perhaps nothing at all would take place afterwards, nothing whatsoever, only endless emptiness.
        Through the flat, shiny leaves of the waist-high dwarf jungle, I had an excellent view of the crest of the hill where the Cong had dug in. Now and again something moved up there, soliciting a burst of fire from our own positions. Otherwise, it was like a gray-green skull, that hill, featureless and dead and unspeakably alien. The rain washed down over it; thick fingers of mist sometimes obscured the summit; yet it did not seem possible that it could be a natural piece of this landscape.
        It looked, instead, as if it had come from some other world or time and had been dropped here on the whim of a celestial Power.
        When the attack finally came the scene was even less real than it had been before: twisted, grotesque, shifting and changing like a face in a funhouse mirror.
        There were thirty-seven of us in the thick tangle of rubbery plants, awaiting helicopter-borne reinforcements.
        More than a hundred and fifty of the enemy held Hill #898, and they had made the decision that we had all been afraid they would make: it was best for them if they overran us, wiped us out, and then dealt with the helicopters when they tried to land.
        They came.
        Screaming…
        That was the worst of it. They came down that hill with no regard for our return fire, a wave of them, their front ranks armed with machine guns that were used most effectively, the men in the second and third ranks holding their rifles over their heads and screaming, screaming wordlessly. In seconds, before more than a score of them could be brought down, they had gained the brush: the situation had deteriorated into hand-to-hand combat.
        The moment they had started down the hill, I had torn the sheet of thin, transparent plastic-like a dry cleaner's bag-from my rifle and let the rain hit it for the first time. But the screams so paralyzed me that I couldn't fire. Screams, distorted yellow faces, the mist, the torrential rain, the tooth of Hill #898, the rubbery plants… If I fired at them,