Invasion of the Body Snatchers (23 page)

I knew that men were already flinging themselves into cars, that starters were grinding, motors catching, cars lurching forward, carrying men after us and ahead of us; more and more with every blast of that deep, ominous, and terrible sound. Far ahead, men were leaving homes and farmhouses to spread through these hills, hunting or waiting for us. The next few minutes - no more than five, perhaps - were the last moments left in which we could even hope to stay unobserved.

Higher on the two-hundred-foot hill sloping up to our right, the underbrush dwindled and gave place to an open, exposed, useless stretch of field, waist high with summer-browned weeds. Walking in that field, or any of the many others like it ahead, we'd be instantly visible to the first man or men to come over the hill's crest or step out from the underbrush below it. Yet to continue walking this path could only mean stepping into the arms of the men who would be prowling it, and every other, within minutes.

Holding Becky by the arm, I stopped and just stood in a panic of confused indecision, trying to make one of two hopeless choices. If it were only dark, we wouldn't be limited by the paths; the area of search would be expanded, and- But it was bright daylight, foggy still, but with wide patches of sunlight. Full darkness was several hours off. I turned suddenly, leading Becky off the path, climbing the hill to the beginning edge of the exposed, momentarily sunlit field of weeds that curved on up to the crest. Stooping, my arms moving fast, I began yanking great handfuls of weeds loose, snapping their brittle stems, gesturing violently at Becky to do the same. Then we had, each of us, a huge armload of weeds, like sheaves of wheat. "Walk ahead," I said to Becky, "out in the field," and without questioning me, she moved, her body pushing through the weeds, leaving a wide swath, a trail of bent weeds behind her. I followed, walking sideways, sidling along, and with my free arm moving in a steady, scythe-like sweep, I caught up the weeds we'd bent down, straightening them again as I walked. I moved fast, working with desperate carefulness, sweeping the bent weeds to an exactly upright position again. When we'd gone twenty yards, I could see no visible trail behind us.

In the centre of the field now, I had Becky lie down, then I lay down beside her. I scattered her armload of yellow weeds over us, covering us completely; then, as well as I could, I straightened the weeds around us, then set those I carried upright on top of us, spreading them apart till they stood - leaning, sagging in places - but held up by each other in more or less vertical position.

Exactly what it would look like to an observer on the edge of the field, I didn't know; but with no trail leading to it, I could only hope it wouldn't be particularly noticeable. Lying in the middle of a wide and exposed field, apparently searchable at a glance, was, I hoped, a hiding place that wouldn't occur to whoever passed it; a hunter, I told myself, expects the fugitive to run.

Several minutes passed; then - very close, it seemed - I heard a voice call out. I couldn't understand it, quite, but it seemed to be a name - Al, maybe - and another voice answered, "Yeah." I heard the crackling of underbrush; it continued for a time, then faded away, and I reached carefully for Becky's hand and held it tight.

twenty

We lay for a long time - motionless, terribly uncomfortable at first, then painfully uncomfortable, but never moving, never changing position. From time to time, we heard voices: on the path near us and from farther away. Once, for a long, long time it seemed, though it was probably no more than three to four minutes, we heard two men talking quietly, slowly climbing our hill, cutting through the field we lay in. The voices drew nearer, steadily louder in volume as they approached; then they passed us, no more than thirty yards away. We could have heard clearly, I suppose, what they were saying, but I was too frightened and intent on guessing their progress to pay attention to the sense of their talk. Several times, very distantly, we heard automobile horns, series of short and long blasts in some sort of signal.

Then, after a very long time, we were cold, the damp and chill rising from the ground underneath us, and I knew the sun was low, that time had passed, and that we weren't going to be found, at least not here where we lay.

I forced us, Becky not questioning me, to lie here till full dark, and for the last long spell of it we lay steadily shivering, bone cold, and I had to clench my teeth till my jaws ached painfully, to prevent my teeth from actually chattering.

Finally we stood - stiffly, hardly able to stumble to our feet - and I saw that with darkness there had come advantages. We couldn't be seen now - it was very dark - from even eight or ten yards away, and broken stretches of fog, a real help, drifted low in the sky and across the ground. But there was that crescent moon overhead, and I knew that long before we could walk two miles, there would be times when we could be seen clearly. And long since, I knew, in the time we'd lain silent and motionless in this field, the search would have been organized, the hunting party completed; every able-bodied man, woman, and half-grown child in Santa Mira, for all I knew. And there was only one way we could come, the way we now began walking: toward Highway 101. And they knew that, all of them, as well as we.

We weren't going to get out; that was certain, and I understood it. We could only take every least chance we could give ourselves, not giving up, yielding nothing, fighting to the very last instant of time we had left.

We each wore one of my shoes; Becky couldn't keep both of them on, they were far too large. But with a handkerchief stuffed in the heel of the one she wore, she could keep from losing it, dragging it shuffling through the weeds or underbrush, lifting it carefully. Favouring our stockinged feet, we walked on through the dark as quietly as we could, Becky holding my arm, while I guided us by the shapes of hill crests, an occasional small landmark, and simple dead reckoning.

An hour passed and we'd come over a mile, encountering no one, hearing no one. An illusion of hope began to grow in me, and I pictured in my mind, like a map, what lay ahead of us. And - I couldn't help this - I began visualizing a picture of ourselves reaching the highway and running across it, stopping traffic suddenly, bunching it up, brakes squealing, twenty or a hundred cars deep, bumper to bumper, and filled with real and living people.

We kept on, covering another half mile in another half hour. Then we were moving down the gentle slope of the final hill, toward the wide strip of farmland that paralleled the highway along the shallow little valley through which the road ran. A dozen steps more, and now, as it had been doing intermittently for an hour, the moon broke through a gap in the low layers of moving fog. In the little valley at our feet we could see the fences and farmlands and, a little to the left, Art Gessner's farmhouse, dark and unlighted and his fields, neatly ruled off by the thin hues of his irrigation ditches. At the far edge of the tilled land below us grew wheat, I knew, bordering the highway, in a strip several acres wide. In a field nearer us I could see something I'd never seen grow there before. Paralleling the tiled ditches lay row after row of… cabbages, perhaps, or pumpkins, though neither were grown here, not in this area. Fairly round spheres, dark circular blobs in the faint moonlight, growing in long, evenly spaced rows. I knew what they were then, and Becky, beside me, drew in a sudden sharp breath. There lay the new pods, as large already as bushel baskets, and still growing; hundreds of them, in the dim, even light of the moon.

The sight scared me, terrified me, and I hated to go on, to walk down there and through them, hated the thought of even brushing against one. But we had to, and we sat down, waiting till the fog once more drifted over the face of the moon.

Presently it did; the light dimmed and diminished, but not enough. I wanted to cross this open field in as near to pitch darkness as this night would give us, and we sat there on the dark hillside waiting.

I was very, very tired, and sat slumped, staring dully down at the ground, waiting till it should darken completely. The field below, in which the pods lay, was narrow; perhaps a hundred feet across, no more. Then the acres-wide belt of wheat began, sheltering the pods from the view of the highway beyond the wheat fields.

I realized, suddenly, what would happen; now I understood why we'd gotten as far as we had, encountering no one. There had been no point in scattering their strength through the square miles of territory we had crossed, trying to find us in the darkness. Instead, they were simply waiting for us; hundreds of silent figures strung along together in a solid line hidden in the wheatland between us and the highway we had to approach, until presently we walked into their waiting arms and hands.

But I told myself this: there is always a chance. Men have escaped from the most tightly guarded prisons other men could contrive. War prisoners have walked hundreds of miles through a population of millions, every one of them his enemy. Sheer luck, a momentary gap in the line at just the right instant, a mistake in identity made in the darkness - until the very moment you are caught, there is always a chance.

And then I saw that we didn't dare take even what little chance we might have had. A low swirl of fog edged off the face of the moon, and again I saw the pods, row after row of them, lying evil and motionless at our feet. If we were caught, what about these pods? We had no right to waste ourselves! We were here - with the pods - and even though it was hopeless, even though it made capture an absolute certainty, we had to use ourselves against these pods. If there was any luck to be had, this was how it had to be used.

A minute passed before the first edge of the next wide bank of fog bit into the face of the moon. It covered it slowly, the light dimming, and then, once again, it was full dark, and we stood, and walked silently down the hill, into the monstrous field below us. The nearest building was the barn, and we hurried to it, occasionally brushing the dry, brittle surfaces of the great pods, stepping over the loose tile of the ditches between the rows.

I found the tractor gas just inside the open door, six great metal drums of it lined up along the wall on the dirt-packed floor, and the excitement flared up in me, and strength pulsed with my blood through my veins. This was futile, of course; there were hundreds of pods. But the chance to make a stand had to be taken. I shook two benzedrine tablets into Becky's hand, took a couple myself, and we choked them down. Then Becky helped me heave the first drum onto its side. It took me ten minutes, prowling that barn, lighting one match after another, to find the rusted wrench up on one of the low rafters. Then we rocked the big metal drum, got it rolling, and trundled it out through the door and down to the nearest of the tiled irrigation ditches. The drum in position, the hexagonal metal plug over the lip of the tile, I started the plug with the wrench, then turned it loose with my hand, the gasoline spurting through my fingers. Then the plug dropped out, and in a steady, rhythmic gurgle the gasoline poured into the ditch and began to flow sluggishly down the slant of the tiles. I wedged the drum in place with a clod of dirt, and left it.

Presently six drums of low-test farm gasoline lay side by side at the head of the irrigation ditches, and the first one was already empty. Ten minutes passed; we simply sat there, silently. Then the flow from the last of the drums ceased, except for a slow dripping sound, and I knelt beside the open ditch, the sharp reek of gasoline stinging at my eyes. I lit a match, dropped it into the still slow-flowing pool, and it promptly went out. I lit another, and this time brought it slowly down, till the bottom edge of flame touched the shiny surface; I could see my face reflected in the pool. The flame caught, a little flicker of blue that grew into a circle, half-dollar size for a moment, then swelling to the shape and diameter of a saucer. And then it flared, puffed up smokily so that I jerked my head back, and the flame - red spikes mixing with the blue now - moved down the tiled ditch, widening to its edges, and then in another instant it began to race.

The heat grew and multiplied on itself, the flames began to sound - a liquid crackle - and they reddened and shot suddenly high, and the black smoke began to roll. Standing now, we followed the line of flame with our eyes, watched it climbing in height, running down that field in parallel lines, shooting down connecting ditches with a subdued roaring sound, and the black silhouettes of the pods were suddenly sharp against the smoky red flame. The first pod burst into a round torch of pale, almost incandescent flame, the smoke white; then the second, then the fourth and fifth together, then the third. And now the soft, explosive puffs of pods bursting into flame came steady as a clock tick, one after another down the rows, flaring into mushrooming incandescence, and the sudden sound of hundreds of voices moving toward us through the wheat washed at our ears like surf.

For perhaps a minute I thought we had won, and then of course the gasoline - only six drums of it flowing into that great field - burned out. One after another, the racing red hues of flame slowed and stopped, dwindling, at all the points where the last trickles of gasoline had flowed into the ground. The rows of burning torches still glowed, but the flames were redder, the white smoke increasing, and no new ones were catching. The flames - higher than a man at their peak - were suddenly only waist-high, sinking rapidly, and the red lines of fire, once solid and bright, were broken. At almost the same moment, the flames, covering perhaps half an acre of field, subsided to flickering inch-high tongues - and the hundreds of advancing figures were upon us.

They hardly touched us; there was no anger, no emotion in them. Stan Morley, the jeweller, simply laid a hand loosely on my arm, and Ben Ketchel stood beside Becky, in case she should try to run, while the others, gathering around us, looked at us without curiosity.

The two of us, then, in the midst of a straggling mob of hundreds of people, began slowly climbing the hill we'd come down. No one held us, there was very little talk, no excitement; we simply plodded, all of us, on up that hill. One arm around Becky's waist, my other hand on her elbow, I helped her as well as I could, my eyes on the ground, thinking of nothing, feeling nothing, except how tired I was.