Footfall

Finally, though, she got in, and the blue Jimmy drove off. And now it’s just Carlotta and me. David Morgan stood very straight as he went to his tank and climbed in.

Colonel Halverson came over to stand below them. “Bout time, Jimmy,” he shouted up at them.

“Yes, sir.” Corporal Lewis waved to Harry and crawled back inside through the window.

“Thanks, Mr. Reddington,” Halverson shouted. “I need all my troopers. Good of you to fill in. I doubt you’ll be needed, but—”

“Yeah. No problem, Colonel.” Of course Carlotta’s goin’ nuts, wanting to go get that elephant. Maybe it’s safer up here!

“Thanks, then,” Halverson said. He walked briskly up the line to the lead tank and climbed in. He stood in the turret for a moment, then waved dramatically. “Wagons-hoooo!” he shouted.

The helicopters rose in a cloud of dust and swept forward and off to each side in groups of three The tanks fa

“Watcher, this is Jayhawk One. Do you read?”

Harry keyed the mike. “Roger, Jayhawk One, this is Watcher.”

“Course is 100 degrees, moving forward at 1220 hours,” the tanker’s voice said in Harry’s ear. Harry started guiltily and switched on the tape recorder.

When the Bradley began to move eastward, it was much harder to keep the radio aimed properly. Harry braced it against the chimney. The rooftop was steep and it wasn’t easy to keep his footing.

The helicopters wove in complex patterns ahead of the tanks. “Moving, ahead at twenty klicks,” the voice said.

About ten miles an hour, Harry thought. He could still remember kilometer signs on highways, although he hadn’t seen one in years.

A half-hour went by. The helicopters and lead tanks were nearly invisible. The others were strung out behind them. Harry’s radio contact was a good five miles ahead, and it took all his attention to keep the ante

“Light overhead,” the tanker’s voice shouted.

Harry could see it. A bright green flash, more visible high up than near the ground.

“It’s moving in a circle-Number Three Helicopter reports the beam is moving around them in a circle, it’s tightening in on them—” There was a pause. “No contact with the choppers. Colonel Halverson reports they’ve all been attacked by some kind of beam—”

Jesus.

“So far nothing’s shot at us—”

There was a roar and the sharp snap of multiple sonic booms. Harry looked up. Dozens of parallel white lines crossed the sky from the southwest; they dropped like the lines in Missile Command, downward toward where Colonel Halverson’s force was centered. There were bright flashes at the horizon and along the line where the co

“Jayhawks, this is Watcher,” Harry said. “Any Jayhawk, this is Watcher. Come in—”

Harry poured the last of the gas into the motorcycle.

“What was it?” Carlotta asked.

“I don’t know. It looked like a video game. It was unreal.” Harry went on checking the motorcycle. Making a motorcycle work was a good test of sanity, and one he could win. Death from the sky-we owned the sky once. Then the Soviets took it away. Now we’ve got to take it back from baby elephants.

“Motor’s in good shape. We’ll make it fine. You’ll have to hold the rifle.” He handed Carlotta the 30-06 Winchester that David Morgan had loaned him.

“Not an elephant gun, but it’ll give them pause to think,” Morgan had said.

Not a loan anymore. They were dead, all of them. He’d waited an hour. “Maybe I ought to go look?”

“No.” Carlotta was positive. “You’ll get yourself killed. It’s more important that we capture that stray—”

“Mrs. Dawson, you don’t know that’s a stray.”

“What else could it be?”

Harry shruigged. All I know is I’m gettin’ damned tired of ridin’ this motorcycle, and I wish I had another tube of Preparation H. But my back isn’t as bad as it was. “All aboard.”

He patted his pocket to be sure the tape was in it. Somebody would want that tape.

“I will never go metric—” Harry sang.

A clump of cars and people was clustered around a big semi ahead. “We’re just about to Collinston,” Harry shouted. “That looks like trouble.”

He slowed, and drove the motorcycle up to the semi. A highway patrol cruiser was parked nearby, and a lieutenant of the highway patrol stood facing a knot of angry farmers and truckers. Most of them held rifles or shotguns.

“Oh, shit,” Harry muttered.

The lieutenant eyed Harry and Carlotta. Red beard, dirty clothes; middle-aged woman in designer jeans. He watched Carlotta dismount. “Yes, madam?”

“I am Carlotta Dawson. Yes, Dawson. My husband was aboard the Soviet Kosmograd. Lieutenant, I gather there is an alien here?”

“Damn straight,” one of the truck drivers shouted. “Goddam snout blew George Mathers in half!” He brandished a military rifle. “Now it’s our turn!”

“We have to take it alive,” Carlotta stated.

“Bullshit! This one was a farmer. “I come out of Logan, lady. The goddam snouts killed my sister! They’re all over the fucking place.”

“How’d you get out? Foot on your chest?” Harry asked.

The driver looked sheepish.

“Thought so,” Harry said. “Look, give us a chance. The military wants to question that thing. We’ll go in after it.” He pointed to the willow trees a hundred yards from the highway. “Over there, right?”

“Over there and go to hell,” someone yelled.

“Let’s go,” Harry said. He gestured to Carlotta. She climbed on behind. “In there.”

“There” was a dirt path leading to the clump of willow trees. As Harry started the motorcycle, he heard one of the truck drivers. “We can blow it away when he gets out.”

There were mutters of approval.

When he stopped at the swamp’s edge, he could hear something big in the creek.

For Harpanet, things had become very odd. He had gone through terror and out the other side. He was bemused. Perhaps he was mad. Without his herd about him for comparison, how was a fi’ to tell?

Try to surrender: fling the gun to the dirt, roll over, belly in the air. The man gapes, turns and lurches away. Chase him down: he screams and gathers speed, falls and runs again, toward lights.

Harpanet will seem to be attacking. Cease! Hide and wait.

A human climbs from the cab of a vehicle. Try again? The man scampers into the cab, emerges with something that flames and roars. Harpanet rolls in time to take the cloud of tiny projectiles in his flank instead of his belly. The man fires again.

He has refused surrender. Harpanet trumpets: rage, woe, betrayal. He sweeps up his own weapon and fires back. The enemy’s forelimbs and head explode outward from a mist of blood.

In Harpanet’s mind his past fades, his future is unreal. His digits stroke his side, feeling for the death wound.

No death wound; no hole big enough for a digit to find. What did the human intend? Torture? Harpanet’s whole right side is a burning itch covered with a sheen of blood. An eight to the eighth of black dots form a buzzing storm around him. He lurches through the infinite land, away from roads, downhill where he can, within the buzzing storm and the maddening itch The jaws of his mind close fast on a memory, vivid in all his senses, more real than his surroundings, He moves through an infinite fantasy of planet, seeking the mudroom aboard Message Bearer.

Green… tall green plants with leaves like knife blades, but they brush away the hungry swarming dots… water? Mud?

He rolls through mud and greenery, over and over, freezing from time to time to look, smell, listen.

Harpanet’s past fades against the strange and terrible reality. If he has a future, it is beyond imagining, a mist-gray wall. There is only now, a moment of alien plants and fiery itch and cool mud, and here, mudroom and garden mushed together, nightmarishly changed. He rolls to wash the wounds; he plucks gobs of mud to spread across his tattered flank.