Midnight

Aikhorn, father of the brats. "Neeeeeeeeeeed," it said, in a voice half Aikhorn's and half an insectile keening. It leaped at him, and as it came, a wickedly sharp stinger telescoped from its repulsive body. Even before that yard-long serrated spear skewered his belly and thrust all the way through him, Pack knew that the days of beer and bologna sandwiches and Fritos and disability checks and game-show girls with perfect hooters were over.
    * * *
    Randy Hapgood, fourteen, sloshed through the dirty calf-deep water in an overflowing gutter and sneered contemptuously, as if to say that nature would have to come up with an obstacle a thousand times more formidable than that if she hoped to daunt him. He refused to wear a raincoat and galoshes because such gear was not fashionably cool. You didn't see rad blondes hanging on the arms of nerds who carried umbrellas, either. There were no rad girls hanging on Randy, as far as that went, but he figured they just hadn't yet noticed how cool he was, how indifferent to weather and everything else that humbled other guys.
    He was soaked and miserable—but whistling jauntily to conceal it—when he got home from Central at twenty minutes till five, after band practice, which had been cut short because of the bad weather. He stripped out of his wet denim Jacket and hung it on the back of the pantry door. He slipped out of his soggy tennis shoes, as well.
    "I'm heeeeerrreeeee ," he shouted, parodying the little girl in Poltergeist .
    No one answered him.
    He knew his parents were home, because lights were on, and the door was unlocked. Lately they'd been working at home more and more. They were in some sort of product research at New Wave, and they were able to put in a full day on their dual terminals upstairs, in the back room, without actually going in to the office.
    Randy got a Coke out of the refrigerator, popped the tab, took a swig, and headed upstairs to dry out while he told Pete and Marsha about his day. He didn't call them mom and dad, and that was all right with them; they were cool. Sometimes he thought they were even too cool. They drove a Porsche, and their clothes were always six months ahead of what everyone else was wearing, and they'd talk about anything with him, anything , including sex, as frankly as if they were his pals. If he ever did find a rad blonde who wanted to hang on him, he'd be afraid to bring her home to meet his folks, for fear she'd think his dad was infinitely cooler than he was. Sometimes he wished Pete and Marsha were fat, frumpy, dressed out of date, and stuffily insisted on being called mom and dad. Competition in school for grades and popularity was fierce enough without having to feel that he was also in competition at home with his parents.
    As he reached the top of the stairs, he called out again, "In the immortal words of the modern American intellectual, John Rambo: 'Yo!'"
    They still didn't answer him.
    Just as Randy reached the open door to the workroom at the end of the hall, a case of the creeps hit him. He shivered and didn't stop, however, because his self-image of ultimate coolth did not allow him to be spooked.
    He stepped across the threshold, ready with a wisecrack about failure to respond to his calls. Too late, he was flash-frozen in place by fear.
    Pete and Marsha were sitting on opposite sides of the large table, where their computer terminals stood back to back. No, they were not exactly sitting there; they were wired into the chairs and the computers by scores of hideous, segmented cables that grew out of them—or out of the machine; it was hard to tell which—and not only anchored them to their computers but to their chairs and, finally, to the floor, into which the cables disappeared. Their faces were still vaguely recognizable, though wildly altered, half pale flesh and half metal, with a slightly melted look.
    Randy could not breathe.
    But abruptly he could move, and he scrambled backward.
    The door slammed behind him.
    He whirled.
    Tentacles—half organic, half metallic—erupted from the wall. The entire room seemed weirdly, malevolently alive, or maybe the walls were filled with alien machinery. The tentacles were quick. They lashed around him, pinned his arms, thoroughly him, and turned him toward his parents.
    They were still in their chairs but were no longer facing their computers. They stared at him with radiant green eyes that appeared to be boiling in their sockets, bubbling and churning.
    Randy