Invasion

instead, it occurred to me that these creatures might have been taking specimens of earth's fauna. And yet… If that were the case, why wouldn't they want the bones along with everything else? Why wouldn't they take the whole animal as it had been in life? Perhaps they had been seeking neither food nor specimens. They might well have reasons that only they could ever understand, motivations that I (or any other man) would find incomprehensible.
        It was craziness.
        Of course: the world is a madhouse: most people are lunatics: the laws of the universe are irrational, insane: the other lesson from the last war.
        I looked up at the lofts on both sides.
        Nothing was looking back down at me.
        At the other end of the barn, the big sliding door was all the way open. Snow and spicules of ice were sheeting inside. The bare skeleton of Garbo, Ed Johnson's German shepherd, made a graceless heap on the sill, lying both in and out of the building. The lupine skull had been shattered at the very top and then cracked into surprisingly even halves from brow to tip of snout, as if the dog had suffered a sudden, brutally sharp blow with a length of iron pipe directly between and above the eyes. Its yellow-white teeth, as pointed as needles, appeared to be bared in a hideous snarl, but that was nothing more than the naked rictus common to any skull, whether human or animal, when it was revealed without the adornment of flesh.
        If the aliens finally got to me, I would look exactly like that: grinning/snarling at eternity.
        That's how
        Connie would look, too.
        And Toby.
        Premonitions…
        I stepped over Garbo and walked outside where I found what remained of Ed Johnson. Just his bones, of course. His battered pickup truck stood twenty feet away, facing the barn door.
        A drift had built up all along the passenger's side, as high as the window and into the cargo bay. The driver's door was open, pressed back against the front fender by the steady wind; and a man's skeleton was crumpled in the snow beside the truck. Snow was drifted over parts of it and filled up the empty rib cage.
        One macabre arm was raised from the elbow, and the fingers appeared to be grasping the winter air.
        In the stable that stood behind the barn and beyond the abandoned pickup truck, there were three horses as well as a cat that had been named Abracadabra (for the way it had made mice disappear from the house and barn within a week after it had taken up residence with the Johnsons): now four skeletons. While it was no less horrifying than my first encounter with the aliens hideous litter (poor Blueberry's bones in that forest clearing yesterday afternoon, discarded as a human camper might thoughtlessly discard the remnants of a chicken dinner), this last scene had very little effect on me. I was sated with horror, bored with it, jaded.
        The large shed in which Ed had kept all of his tools, his work bench, and emergency power generator was attached to the south wall of the stable, and it was there that I came across the most curious sight that the farm had to offer. A massive black bull -not merely the skeleton but the entire carcass, frozen, as hard as ice, its eyes opaque with frost- was slumped against the machinery. One of its horns had broken off and flipped onto a nearby window sill where it gleamed dully in the cloud-filtered December light. The animal had suffered other injuries. Its head, shoulders, and thick haunches were marked by deep cuts and abrasions and frozen blood as dark as grape juice. The generator was in no better condition than the bull. Thin sections of the housing had been punctured by the horns, and the thicker plates of steel were badly bent and dented. Wires and cables had been torn loose. The four big batteries had been toppled from their stands. Clearly, the animal had killed itself in a fierce, mindless battle with the machinery.
        It was like Don
        Quixote in reverse. A near-sighted bull out to prove his worth against a man but mistaking a machine for his real adversary.
        Why?
        Why not?
        Be serious.
        I am serious.
        Then why?
        Why not?
        That's no answer!
        As good as any.
        Why did the bull do it? I insisted.
        I reminded myself: the world is a madhouse, and don't you ever forget it. Don't let it upset you. Flow with