Invasion

waiting for them.
        The buck snorted when it saw the others.
        Its heart thundered, threatened to burst.
        The alien responded quickly, stilled the terror, slowed the heart-and kept rigid control.
        Silently, they climbed the hill.
        The buck was forced to jump through a number of deep drifts that nearly proved too much for it. It kicked and heaved. Its thick haunch and shoulder muscles bunched painfully. Steam spurted from its black nostrils.
        Steam rose, too, from the broad, dark, slanted, shiny backs of the six aliens.
        Shortly, a house came into sight atop the hill.
        A farmhouse.
        Timberlake
        Farm.
        The attack had begun.

----

    15
        
        I took a quick, hot shower, sluicing away some of the chill which had curled like a segmented worm of ice deep inside of me. The worm had anchored it self with a thousand tendrils and could not be entirely torn loose. When I came out of the shower, I discovered that Connie had left a double shot of whiskey, neat, in a squat glass tumbler on the edge of the sink. I sipped at the first shot while I toweled off and dressed. Just before I went downstairs, I finished the second shot in one fiery gulp that scorched my throat and made my eyes water.
        However, not even the whiskey-although it brought a bright flush to my face-could burn out every segment of the ice worm.
        Connie and Toby were in the kitchen. They had both eaten earlier, but she was re-heating some homemade vegetable soup for me. Toby was sitting at the table, intently studying a large, half-completed jigsaw puzzle; I winced when I saw that it was a snow scene.
        Even a stranger, stepping into that room without knowing anything about our situation, could have seen that we were living under siege conditions. The curtains had been drawn tightly over the window, and the sun porch door was closed, locked, and chained. The rifle lay on a chair near the table, and the loaded pistol was beside the water glass at the place Connie had set for me. But most of all there was an air of expectancy, a thinly masked tension in all of us.
        I sat down, and she put a bowl of soup before me. I drew a deep breath of the fragrant steam and sighed. I had not been very hungry until the food was before me; and now I was ravenous.
        While I ate Connie dried, dismantled, and oiled the shotgun which had taken a beating in the blizzard.
        Toby looked up from his puzzle and said, "Hey, Dad, you know what happened?"
        "Tell me."
        "Mom put a spell on me."
        "A spell?"
        "Yeah."
        I looked at Connie. She was trying to suppress a smile, but she didn't glance up from the shotgun on which she was working. I asked Toby: "What sort of spell?"
        "She made me sleep all day," he said.
        "Is that so. After you slept all the night before?"
        "Yeah. But you know what else?"
        "What else?"
        "I don't believe it was a spell at all."
        Now Connie looked up from her gun.
        I said, "It wasn't a spell?"
        Toby shook his head: no. "I think she slipped me one of her sleeping capsules in my breakfast orange juice."
        "Why, Toby!"
        Connie said.
        "It's okay, Mom," he said. "I know why you did it. You thought as long as I was asleep the aliens couldn't get me to run away again. You made me sleep to protect me."
        I started to laugh.
        "Boy child," Connie said to him,
        "you're really too much for me. You know that?"
        He grinned, blushed, and turned back to me. "You going to tell us some more about what all you found over at the
        Johnson farm?"
        The only thing I had told them thus far was that the aliens had been there ahead of me and that Ed and Molly were dead.
        Connie quickly said,
        "Let your father eat his dinner, Toby. He can tell us later."
        When I'd finished three bowls of soup, I told them about the skeletons at the Johnson farm and about the dead bull lying in the generator shed. I tried to stay calm, tried to leave out most of the adjectives and adverbs, but now and then I let the tale become too vivid, so vivid that they recoiled slightly from me.
        After I had finished Toby said, "Then I guess we have to hold them off all by ourselves. We can do it."
        Connie said, "I'm not so sure of that, general."
        She looked at me, crow's