Pettis was down on the ground before the echo of my shot had faded. He got up cautiously, then studied the door, swinging untouched in the breeze. My shotgun blast formed a neat scatter of pellet holes in the stucco a foot above it.
“You’re a lousy shot,” he grinned. “Sure you’re not an engineer?”
“What have you got against engineers?”
He continued to smile. “You know what they say: It takes an engineer to build the Brooklyn Bridge, and he’s the first guy you can sell it to.”
His smile disappeared when we reached the end of the alley. The small structure there looked nothing like the garage it was. Its brown stucco exterior was fronted with neat flower boxes under curtained windows, its red-tiled roof ledged in white gingerbread trim. Only the double doors at one end gave it away.
There were holes in the double doors, some of the tiles had been broken and knocked from the roof, and most of the windowpanes had been broken. Glass shards were scattered over a once neatly trimmed lawn.
“Hell,” Pettis muttered. He produced a key for the garage doors, pulled them open, and disappeared inside.
“Goddamn.”
He bent over the dented open hood of a small van. It had at one time been meticulously cared for; the chrome on the bumpers shone like new, the cherry red finish bright with wax where it wasn’t dented or scratched.
On the floor were tools—screwdrivers, the scattered remains of a wrench set, a meter with its face cracked. Pettis kicked at a nearby hex driver, cursing again.
“I hoped they wouldn’t get at it,” he said. “I thought it was well enough hidden. I really thought—” He kicked at the van, anger flaring.
He picked up a rag, then threw it down on top of the air filter cover. “Let’s see what I can do,” he said, resignedly. His head disappeared under the hood.
I went to the doorway and watched the alley. My gaze kept drifting back to the second-story porch with its swinging door. But only the slight breeze moved it as I watched.
Pettis banged around in the garage for a half hour before he called me.
“Don’t ask me why, but we’re in luck,” he smiled. “Every car I’ve looked at had hoses and tires slashed, distributor caps cracked, carburetors mangled. The only thing wrong with this was that the spark plug wires were pulled. Everything else is fine.”
“You mean it’ll work?”
“Get in back and I’ll start it up.”
I went to the rear and turned the latch on the door. Hair rose on the back of my neck. The door flew open to reveal a snarling wolf.
I heard the rapping tattoo of Pettis’s Uzi, and the wolf cried out once and fell beside me.
Pettis looked at me. “Now we know why the car wasn’t trashed. We caught him in the middle of it.”
“Guess that still makes us lucky.”
“Or stupid. Get in.”
I climbed into the back of the van, and Pettis turned over the ignition.
The engine roared into life. Pettis whooped and edged the van slowly out of the garage and down the alley. Suddenly he stopped the car and jumped out, holding the Uzi up.
“Forgot something,” he said.
He returned to the garage, emerging with something under his arm. He climbed into the driver’s seat and turned around, handing a book to me.
“When this is all over,” he said, “I want you to sign it.”
It was a copy of my first volume of poetry, Solitude.
For the first time since I had met him the day before, he was not completely sure of himself. “I read that when it came out,” he said. “It meant a lot to me.”
Seeing Pettis’s self-consciousness made me uneasy. It always embarrassed me to find people treating me this way. I’m a man who writes poetry, but I’m also a man who shops at supermarkets and pays bills and hates broccoli. I don’t know the secrets of God. I don’t know more than the next man. I have the same fears and epiphanies as anyone else. I just know how to write about it, and that seems, perversely, to make me special to other people. I hate that. Whatever success I’ve had merely means that I’m a lot like everyone else, since many of them seem to understand what I’m saying.
“It meant a lot to me when I wrote it,” I said. “When all this is over, I’ll sign it for you.”
We left the alley. The windows in the back of the van were covered by curtains. I drew them back to see something with yellow eyes glaring down at us from the porch of the house we had passed coming in. The eyes retreated, and this time when the porch door swung, it closed.
Pettis braked at the mouth of the alley, and we loaded the contents of the grocery cart into the van. I watched for the reappearance of our monitor. When I told Pettis about it he grunted.
“Guess you’re not an engineer after all. That’s the second time I’ve been stupid today. They’ll all know we’re trying to leave now.”
He left me at the van and climbed a trellis to the second-floor porch. I saw him open the door and enter the house, then heard nothing. When Pettis returned, by way of the front door, he was grim.
“We’d better get gas and get back to the hotel,” he said.
We got back in the van, and Pettis threw it into gear and roared off.
There was an Exxon station two blocks away, and Pettis pulled in and killed the engine. The silence was eerie. The pumps had been smashed, but they wouldn’t have worked without electricity anyway, so we siphoned gas directly out of the underground tanks with the plastic hose from the hardware store. Pettis got two covers off, one for the van and another for the two five-gallon containers in the back of the van.
As we were rolling up the siphons to leave, Pettis glanced up to check the sun, which had begun to lower toward the desert.
“I wanted to get out of here earlier,” he said, shaking his head.
We loaded up and pulled out.
While Pettis drove, I turned to the title poem in my book. I began:
In solitude born, we live and perish. In solitude, lone spirits encased In borrowed dust.
That seemed truer now than it had to the lonely young man who had written it twenty years before.
At the hotel they were as ready as they were going to be. Amy was pacing nervously outside the front door, her .45 weighting her right hand. Her eyes went wide when she saw the van.
“Doc, come here!” she called into the lobby excitedly.
Pettis got out, slamming the door. “Any trouble while we were gone?”
“One stopped at the end of the courtyard a little while ago. It ran away when I shot at it.”
Doc appeared at the swinging doors. His solemn face brightened when he spied the van. “Ah.”
“Don’t be too pleased,” Pettis said. “They know just what we’re doing.”
Doc said, “We’ve got two hours of daylight, and another half hour beyond that before the Moon comes up. With any luck—”
“Forget luck,” Pettis said. “After the full Moon last night, they’re pretty active today. I’d expect trouble no matter when we leave.”
As if in answer, a hulking shape appeared in the mouth of the alley across the street. It regarded us bale-fully, and when Pettis sent a volley of machine-gun fire at it, it merely retreated into the gloom.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Pettis said.
CHAPTER 16
Transplanting
The sun left us. It had grown old and dark and tired, and now, when we needed its strength and good heat, it died into the west.
A lazy bank of clouds crawled across the western horizon, sealing the coffin of the sun, turning the long twilight even darker.
Out of this twilight, between us and the dead sun, the wolves appeared.
Perhaps they smelled the Moon slowly climbing the ladder in the east. Perhaps their hatred for us, now only four of the seven hundred human beings who had once inhabited the town of Hopkinsville, was so intense, so all-consuming, that they were compelled to destroy us no matter what. All I know is that as we roa
red up Hopkinsville’s main street on our way out of town, an indistinct mass in front of us in the gloomy twilight focused, in the high beams of the van’s headlights, into a wall of wolves.
Doc remarked sedately, “Perhaps we should turn around.”
“I’m a mile ahead of you,” Pettis replied, completing a 180-degree curve.
As if in a nightmare, more wolves had melted out of the shadows into the weakening daylight to block our retreat. As we watched, more were lowering themselves deliberately from roofs, gliding from alleys and doorways. Every building around us was spilling wolves into the street.
A broken murmur of growls built into a deep angry wave of sound. In the leaving light, their yellow eyes glowed like ranks of fireflies.
Pettis braked the van. For a moment we hung suspended, caught in time. I feared that Cowboy had given up. The wolves angled in closer.
“Hold on,” Pettis ordered.
He rammed the engine into gear and tore straight for the file of wolves in front of us. Abruptly, he made a screeching left turn into an alley between two small buildings, one of them a barbeque restaurant named Raoul’s. The alley widened into a parking lot. At high speed, Pettis drove toward the back corner where a concrete curb formed a border with another parking lot behind. We mounted the curb with a jolt. Pettis negotiated a narrow alley that led into the adjoining street. Tires squealing, he turned sharply and accelerated.
“We’ve got the bastards,” he said.
Ahead of us, the street snaked left and right. Suddenly, there was a roadwork sign. Pettis pushed the engine, cutting close to the sign, knocking down a sawhorse next to it. The tarmac ended, throwing us onto a dirt road that melted to rough desert. Hopkinsville ended behind us; to the left was the paved highway.
Pettis angled us toward the highway. We took it with a jump and skid.
We topped a slight rise. This time Doc said, “I hope you’re still a mile ahead of me.”
Howling in anticipation, a phalanx of wolves waited for us, blocking the road and the desert to either side.
“Anything you want, Doc,” Pettis said, slamming the truck ahead.
We hit the line of wolves. I felt the thump of bodies against the van. One wolf hit the roof and rolled over it, keening in pain.
We were through the battle line, but we weren’t free of the wolves. Those at the outer edge of the phalanx began to run with us. They were frighteningly fast, their powerful hind legs moving like pistons. They glided on all fours like sleek greyhounds, their yellow eyes never leaving us. For a moment my eyes locked with one of them, slower than the rest, its loping strides hampered by a hitch as it favored one paw—
“Shit!”
We had slowed hitting the line, and Pettis fought to control the van and get it back up to speed. For a moment it looked as though he had failed, and we went into a sideways skid. I felt the van tilt, and then suddenly Cowboy had it righted and we straightened. He slipped into third gear and we began to pull away from the pack.
One wolf, however, kept pace. In his eyes I thought I detected some of the raw hate I had confronted in the original beast that had invaded my home. It was logical that the meteor-borne wolves would be faster than the human victims they had added to their ranks.
The speedometer read close to seventy. Still the wolf kept pace. He was shearing closer, eyes tight on the van as if magnetized, tongue lolling in exertion.
“Come on,” Pettis urged the van. He glanced at me. “Get your shotgun and try for him.”
I pushed the curtains completely aside, flipped the window latch, and slid it open. I steadied the gun against the window frame, feeling like a frontiersman aiming out of a stagecoach. I sighted along the barrel into the burning yellow eyes of the wolf.
I pulled off one shot, then another. Both went wide.
“I told you you were a lousy shot,” Pettis shouted.
Holding the steering wheel tightly with one hand, he thrust the Uzi at his daughter in the seat next to him. “Try this.”
She rolled down her window and sprayed the wolf with fire. It broke stride, then recovered. She fired again, putting a bullet into its throat. It screamed, stumbled, then with a burst of resolve closed the distance between us and leapt at the side of the van, hitting the front door. It howled piercingly.
Amy screamed, sliding away from the window as the thing held onto the open window frame with its claws.
It began to pull itself into the car. I fumbled with my shotgun, trying desperately to load it. Amy had dropped the Uzi and screamed, pushing herself against her father as he fought to control the vehicle.
Calmly, as if he was taking out a mechanical pencil, Doc removed a pistol from his pocket, pointed it at the monster’s head, and pulled the trigger. The body fell out and away, tumbling to the desert where it lay unmoving.
Amy was hysterical. Pettis held her against him for a minute, then pushed her gently back into her seat. She stared at the blood on the door, then rolled the window up, shivering.
“Why did you wait so long?” I asked Doc, who was serenely returning his gun to his pocket.
“I thought you’d prove yourself a good shot after all,” he quipped, smiling slightly at the spill of shotgun shells in my lap and the still empty shotgun.
Pettis brought the van up to seventy-five. I saw the green glow of his watch.
“Six thirty-five, Doc.”
Doc paused before saying, “We might just make it.”
CHAPTER 17
Night Journey
Twenty minutes later, we began a long climb into the mountains. There was something strangely familiar about the road we were on. I would have known it immediately had I been able to associate our van’s flight with the pleasant and frequent afternoons I had spent as a tourist on just this trip. A few minutes later my realization was confirmed when we made a sharp turnoff beside a small sign that read gift shop and information center ahead, and the looming white outlines of two telescope domes rose tantalizingly into view before dropping behind the curve of the steeply climbing road.
“Mount Locke Observatory?” I asked.
Doc looked at me. “Of course.”
When I continued to look dumbly at him he said, “This is where Proctor will be.”
Pettis added, “If he’s still alive.”
Doc merely looked quietly past me through the window as we drove by the parking area, past the administration building, and the headlights illuminated the damage that had been done to the dome of the 102-inch telescope.
“Goddamn,” Pettis spat.
The dome’s observation slit stood open, as on any night, but its beautiful white coat, trimmed in orange, was scored with claw marks. One of the tall antennas mounted beside it had been ripped out; it stood out from the side of the white structure like a spent arrow.
“Not very pretty,” Doc offered.
Pettis grunted in reply.
Far below us, at the base of Mount Locke, we heard a wolf cry. Before long, the enemy Moon would make that lonely sound epidemic.
Pettis drove the van around the dome to a small cove beneath the telescope set into the rock wall of the mountain. There was a garage, its door opened wide. Three of the four berths contained wrecked automobiles. The fourth was empty and Pettis parked in it.
We unloaded, and Pettis then scattered broken glass and metal parts from the other three cars over the van.
“Will it work?” I asked.
“Stay out and see if you want,” Pettis answered testily.
Brandishing his Uzi in one hand, a flashlight in the other, Cowboy began to walk toward the main building containing offices. Doc stopped him. “That’s not where he’ll be.”
“It’s the only secure—”
“Come with me,” Doc answered.
The glass doors to the 102-inch dome had been smashed, the steel frames twisted. The elevator inside was open, but the control buttons had been ripped out of the wall and one of the doors caved in. The stairs were littered with debris�
�broken frames exhibiting photographs of comets and galaxies, scattered pamphlets preaching the wonders of astronomy and of the telescope the visitor was about to see.
Pettis went up first, the short snout of his gun raised in front of him. The stairs ended in a short landing. There was a sign that said 2nd floor.
“Keep going,” Doc urged.
We went up. “I don’t like this,” Pettis said. A moment later he motioned us to stop. “There was a sound downstairs,” he said, but we heard nothing farther. We went on.
When we reached the third floor Doc told us to stop.
Pettis regarded the door, which was pitted with dents. “I still don’t like this. There’s no way—”
“You’re not the only one good at surviving, Cowboy,” Doc replied. He pushed past us and opened the door.
Flashlights beaming ahead of us, we entered a cavernous room dominated by the monstrous tan-colored tube mounted in the center. It resembled a wide artillery gun whose short barrel might propel Jules Verne’s capsule from the Earth to the Moon. Beneath it, cables snaked across the floor over the huge disk-shaped base that rotated the telescope.
It was deathly quiet in the room. Our steps echoed with the same sound one hears when walking in an empty church.
A flash of red lit the top of the telescope tube.
Pettis was faster than I was. His machine gun targeted the light.
“Wait,” Doc called out sternly.
At the top of the tube there was a metallic scrabbling sound. In the lighter contrast of the night sky filling the open dome slit I saw the outline of a head.
“Goddamn,” a voice called down angrily. ‘Turn those white lights off!”
“Wyatt?” Doc shouted up, cupping his hands around his mouth.
“That you, Baines?” the voice answered in a milder tone. It held a drawl that was not altogether Texan. The red light went out, and then a white light went on, illuminating what looked like a square cage with a man in it. “Come on up.”
Doc chuckled and led us to a corkscrew ladder that snaked once around the telescope mount. This left us on a short ledge, above which was a metal-runged ladder locked at chest height, which we mounted one by one.
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