Invasion

caught
        Toby by the shoulder and stopped him and pulled him all the way around.
        He swung at me a second time.
        I ducked the blow.
        As he pulled back to swing again, gazing through me with lifeless eyes, I threw both arms around him and lifted him off the ground.
        He kicked me in the stomach.
        The breath rushed out of me like air exploding from a pin-pricked balloon. I lost my balance, and we both collapsed in a heap.
        He pulled loose and scrambled away.
        I went after him on my hands and knees, which felt like four blocks of ice. I saw him, closed the gap, lunged, and brought him down with a tackle. I rolled with him, holding him close, holding him tightly so that he couldn't get hurt-and so he couldn't kick and punch.
        He bit me.
        Hard.
        But that was all right with me because I pretty much had been expecting it and had steeled myself against both the pain and the surprise of it. As he chewed viciously at my shoulder, surely drawing blood but making no sound whatsoever, I clambered laboriously to my feet, still holding on to him.
        A
        thin crust of snow had frozen in my eyelashes, welding them into a pair of brittle plates. Every time I blinked it felt as if two heavy wooden shutters were crashing into place. Furthermore, my face was numb, and my lips felt as if they had cracked and were bleeding.
        I took several uncertain steps through the soft drifts until I grasped that I was moving downhill rather than up-and thus away from the farmhouse. I searched for the house, for the light in the living room-and saw, instead, a dozen or more radiant eyes, amber eyes, glowing at me from thirty yards away, strange circles of warm light that pulsed like beacons through the blizzard. Crying out involuntarily, I whirled and ran uphill as fast as I could lift and put down my ice-caked legs.
        Toby squirmed against me, stopped biting, tried to use his knees and elbows to injure me. But I was holding him too tightly for him to get any leverage.
        A familiar pressure bloomed suddenly around my head, sought entrance, quickly found a way in to me, and danced over the surface of my brain…
        No!
        I resisted the contact.
        Bones.. . think of bones…
        I picked up speed.
        Fear welled up in me as the pressure increased inside my skull; and it was a hideously potent fear, that biological terror that had made a raging madman of me in the forest earlier in the day. But
        I couldn't afford to lose my wits now. If I began to run blindly in circles, shouting and throwing punches at the empty air, the aliens would capture Toby and me; and before long they would go into the house and get Connie as well. Now that they had attempted to steal Toby from us, I was prepared to give serious consideration to that melodramatic and trite science fiction concept which I previously had found, if not impossible, highly improbable: that they viewed us as nothing more than a rich and convenient source of protein. Our survival, therefore, might well depend upon two things: how successfully I could resist the insistent mental probes-and how successfully I could cope with the disabling fear, the shattering terror, which the probes sparked in me.
        Toby continued to struggle.
        Clutching him against my chest, I managed to keep going.
        The alien tried to sink thought-fingers into my mind, but I pinched and jabbed and scratched at his mental front, resisted and resisted and resisted.
        Mindless fear slammed at me like hurricane seas, like gigantic waves battering a seawall. I held against them.
        I kept running.
        Lights were switched on ahead of me.
        I could see the house, the sun porch.
        Fifty feet. Maybe less.
        I was winning.
        Then I fell.
        Still holding Toby-who had quieted considerably over the last few seconds I sat up in the snow and looked down the hill toward the forest. The amber eyes were closer than they had been only half a minute ago, no more than thirty or thirty-five feet away from us now.
        Images formed behind my eyes, fragments of light and brilliant colors, alien scenes…
        No! Stay out of me!
        Fear… crushing fear… terror… things in my head… spiders in my skull, things eating away in my brain…
        I had to fight it and I did fight it and I was nonetheless sure that I