Invasion

it.
        The bull's ice eyes glared at me from beneath blood-crusted brows and savaged flesh.
        I thought: death is real and final.
        Hey, you've got it now, I told myself.
        Numbed by more than the cold air, I went out of the shed and closed the door.
        Going around the barn in order to avoid the display of bovine biology within it, I started toward the farmhouse. But on the hill, halfway between the two structures, I wound down like a toy soldier, stepping slower and slower and slower and slower still until
        I wasn't moving at all. Letting the wind slap my upraised face, I stared around at the silent farm and felt nervous shock finally give way to fear and then to terror.
        The house was a crypt.
        The barn was a mausoleum.
        The stable was a charnal house.
        The Johnson farm: a graveyard.
        I had walked more than two miles through a raging blizzard, had fought the wind and the snow and the biting cold and the steep terrain all in order to find help for Connie, Toby, and me. But now it seemed that there was no help, no help anywhere near enough for it to matter.
        I had come all this way to enlist our neighbors in a miniature war of the worlds that was nonetheless deadly for its limited scope. But now I knew that our only neighbor was Death-who would let me borrow a cup of eternity.
        I wanted to lie down. Go to sleep. Yes. Sleep… Slip down into a lovely darkness where there would be no yellow-eyed creatures from beyond the stars, where there would not be any trouble of any sort, where there would be nothing, nothing…
        As frightened of these negative thoughts as I was of the aliens, I bent and scooped up handfuls of snow and pushed them in my face. I gasped and coughed and spluttered, recovered enough to stagger toward the farmhouse once more.
        But what next?
        Toby…
        Connie…
        How could I save them?
        Or were they already dead?
        And as before I thought:
        The Johnson farm was a real pain, and at the same time it was also a clairvoyant vision, a psychic-flash premonition of our own fate: a warning that there was no possible future but this one for
        Connie, Toby, and me.
        The gigantic face of Death lay beneath me, the obscene mouth opened wide; and I balanced precariously-in the style of bespectacled
        Harold Lloyd, but grimly, grimly-on the dark and rotting lips.
        And my feet were slipping.

----

    13.
        
        In only five minutes I had a stack of logs burning in the big living room fireplace. They crackled, hissed, popped, and sent thin smoke up the stone flue. The flames were yellow-orange and danced wildly in the draft. Not surprisingly, the room looked about one thousand percent cheerier in the warm, flickering light.
        Although I had no appetite, I went out to the kitchen to look for food. If I had to hike all the way back to Timberlake Farm after resting for only one hour, then I needed to eat something, pack in fuel to replace what I'd burned up getting here. Molly Johnson's pantry was well-stocked-however, most of the food had been ruined by the long deep freeze that had begun soon after the electric power had failed. Fruit, vegetables, and other goods that had been packaged in jars were now unedible, for they had frozen, expanded, and shattered the containers: shards of glass now prickled the frozen contents. Most of the cans were swollen and would have been the end of any can opener. I found a homemade chocolate cake in the bread box, however, and a half -gallon of vanilla ice cream in the refrigerator. I took the cake and the ice cream-both of which were like lumps of granite-to the fireplace to thaw them out a bit. Soon, the ice cream melted, and the cake grew soft. I managed to finish two respectable portions of each. Then I brought snow in from outside and melted it in a bowl. I drank the warm water which turned out to be the best part of the lunch and made me feel better than I had in hours.
        (Why such a lengthy description of a meal that was something considerably less than a gastronomic delight? Because I don't want to get on with what remains of the story? Quit stalling, Hanlon. Put it down on paper, every last terrible twist and turn of it, down on paper and out of your system in the very best tradition of self-analysis. Then you can go quietly mad.)
        In the den I examined all of