Invasion

feet of worry around her lovely eyes. "What are we going to do?"
        I had been doing a great deal of thinking about that. "Just one thing we can do. Get out of here."
        "And go where?"
        "East."
        "The county road?"
        "That's right."
        "You think it's been plowed open?"
        "No."
        She screwed up her lovely face. "Then you intend to walk to the nearest house?"
        "We're all going to walk to the nearest house," I said. "The big white frame place in toward Barley."
        "That house is four miles from here."
        "I know."
        "We already discussed that possibility-"
        "We did?" Toby asked.
        "Last night," she told him patiently, "when you were sleeping on the couch."
        "I miss the interesting stuff," he said.
        She said to me: "Toby can't walk four miles on snowshoes in this weather."
        "I'm tough," he said.
        "I know you are," she said. "But this is a blizzard. You aren't that tough."
        The hall clock struck midnight.
        Toby thought about it as the chimes rang, then nodded hi agreement. "Well, yeah… Maybe I'm not quite that tough. But almost."
        "And we can't carry him," she reminded me. "Neither one of us has had enough sleep. And after your trek to the Johnson farm… We'd never get through alive if we had to carry him."
        "He'll walk as far as he can, and then we'll carry him the rest of the way," I said. "We don't have any choice. If we stay here we'll end up like Ed and Molly."
        "Hey," Toby said, "you won't have to carry me. I can ride on a sled!"

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    16.
        
        While Connie and Toby and I talked about escape, there was movement outside, the first stages of the attack.
        The continuation of that unhuman scene:
        There was no light other than the vague, pearly phosphorescence of the deep snow fields, a ghostly glow like the skin of an albino in a dark room.
        Snow and tiny granules of ice sheeted on the wind.
        Drifts rose to dunelike peaks.
        (Von Daniken, visionary or true crazy, would certainly have appreciated the other element of this special night: six yellow-eyed gods-or devils-although the look of them would have blown most of his theories into dust. Somehow the gods who are supposed to have driven von Daniken's "chariots" all come off as very Nordic types, blond and handsome and clear-eyed and obviously cut out for movie stardom; but in reality, the universe does not repeat its own designs, and it has a few insane jokes up its sleeve as well…)
        Five of the aliens stopped on the brow of the hill, just thirty yards from the farmhouse. They studied the door of the sun porch, studied the curtained kitchen window, studied the bright lamps that burned behind the living room windows…
        Snow fell on them-however, it did not melt from their flesh as quickly as it would have melted from human skin. Indeed, the snow clung to them as it would have clung to fence posts or rocks or any cool, inanimate objects. A thin layer of snow sheathed them and quickly formed into a brittle crust. The crust turned to ice before it finally and gradually slid away in delicate, thin, transparent sheets-to be replaced by a new crust of snow that was still in the process of turning to ice.
        Nevertheless, the steam rose from the pores on their broad and shiny backs.
        The sixth creature stalked off toward the stable, away from its companions.
        The buck followed the lone alien. It leaped out of a four-foot drift and fell into even deeper snow. It heaved and it twisted, its eyes bulging with the effort that it had to expend to free itself.
        The alien turned and stared.
        The buck struggled.
        The alien calmed it, made it more purposeful.
        The buck broke loose, wheezing.
        The alien continued toward the stable. At the stable door it stopped again, slipped the bolt, pushed the door open, and quickly stepped out of the way.
        The buck toddled forward, unsteady, not unlike a fawn first finding its legs.
        The alien allowed it to rest for a moment, then gave it new purpose.
        Having regained some of its strength, the buck entered the building in much the same sort of trance that had afflicted poor Blueberry when she had walked out of there on her way to becoming a pile of bones.
        There were no lights inside the barn. And only one rather small