The Flying Eyes. J. Hunter Holly
called them first thing, of course,” Iverson sighed. “This thing is local from all appearances. At least it’s local so far. They’re sending someone out—they wanted to know if we’re going to need the National Guard. I suppose we should expect trouble, but it’s up to the governor to declare martial law.”
There was a hopelessness in Iverson’s voice, and in the faces of the rest of them, that jarred Linc. To look at them, anyone would think a battle had already been lost, when, actually, no counter offensive had been started. “And everybody around here is just going to sit down and give up, is that it?” he snapped.
“I suppose you’ve got it figured out already,” Collins sneered.
“No.” Linc challenged Collins’ thrust with honesty. “But once I get my hands on enough facts, I will. Reports of where the Eyes are and what they are doing aren’t enough. Where did they come from? Where are they taking the people they capture?”
“We have some knowledge of that,” Iverson told him. “One of the boys went out in a helicopter and followed a Linc of people going north, out of town. They disappeared into the woods out there—on the game preserve—and from what he could see, there was something big and dark down among the trees. Something like a pit. He didn’t get a good look, and we had no chance to question him because he didn’t make it back. He was talking, reporting, and then he said an Eye had spotted him and was coming up fast, and—that was all. He must have gone down.”
Linc absorbed the information and it was somehow more menacing knowing that it had been not knowing. Something huge and black down inside the woods—something like a pit. It made his skin crawl. They should have discovered more, because with this fractional description the imagination was free to run wild and create atrocities and horrors that he prayed wouldn’t prove to be true. Lines of people—zombie-like people—following the naked, flying Eyes down the road, into the trees; and something big and black, and perhaps pitlike, waiting there for them. To do what?
“What’s being done?” he asked, steering himself back to the solid ground of action.
“This isn’t our worry,” Collins said. “It belongs to the local officials, to the government.”
“The Eyes are over our buildings, so it belongs to us,” Linc slammed back. “We can’t sit around and wait for the major to move. This is a government lab. We’ve got a high concentration of intelligence here, and we’re under a firm obligation to use it.”
“Linc’s right,” Wes backed him up. “We have the best chance of anybody, locally.”
The others rallied at Linc’s show of firmness. He had seen that reaction before. If he spoke calmly and surely, they all thought he had a plan and waited for him to explain it. But this time they were wrong. This time he had no plan and could only sit mute before them.
CHAPTER THREE
It grew dark, and Bennet and Myers left the office. Wes went into the empty cafeteria and spread some sandwiches for the remaining four of them. Linc paced the room, listened to Iverson’s end of phone calls, and ate sandwiches without tasting them. Collins watched him jealously. Linc could see the wiry man’s brain working, trying to come up with a plan before another was offered.
Outside, on the brightly lit grounds, there was only quiet. Linc felt cut off—away from the important events, away from the action, the experience of the people. Iverson was waiting for him to voice an idea, but he was too remote from the problem to touch on one; the telephone reports were half-truth only, the rest distorted by terror.
He came back from the window, decided. “I’ve got to go out. Maybe seeing for myself, I can get a clearer picture. I don’t like these hysterical reports. I need facts.”
“I should think you could apply your rule without ever seeing the real thing,” Collins said. “You’re always pushing down my suggestions with, ‘The simplest solution is the best solution.’ I shouldn’t think you’d need firsthand experience to come up with one.”
“Did I ever tell you that you should jump in feet first without facts?”
“Please, gentlemen,” Iverson interrupted them. “I won’t have dissension in my own house when we’re trying to save that house. I’d rather you didn’t go out, Linc, but if you feel you must, I won’t argue with you.”
“Thanks, Doc. I’ll try to make it only an hour or two.”
“Do you want company?” Wes asked. “I’d like the ride.”
“I’ll bet you’re just crazy for it,” Linc grinned, then nodded. “I’ll be glad to have you along.” He headed for the door.
The side streets they traveled were deserted. The lamps lit the cement in little pools and thrust their radiance upward into the trees, making splotches of orange and yellow and red out of the fall-turned leaves. It was a beautiful time of year, the time Linc liked best; the time of crispness and new energy, wind, and wild leaves swirling; the time when a man could hear himself make a sound upon the earth as he walked through the crackle of leaves. But it was robbed of that feeling tonight. Because this was the time of something else—of monstrous things with unholy stares, sailing against the sky, hovering with the falling leaves.
This journey was incredible, too. People should all have been home, cowering, perhaps peering from their windows. Yet the reports said they were downtown—having come out of curiosity, out of fear and the need for the strength of numbers, and then finding too late that they were caught in traffic jams.
Linc pulled to the curb two blocks from the main street. As he got out of the car, he caught the sound of shouting and the blare of horns. Grand Street made a brightness ahead of them, and they strode toward it, shoulder to shoulder. All Linc could see of the thoroughfare was a tight-packed line of cars. Occasionally the figure of a man or woman hurried across the intersection. But there were no Eyes.
They took the last block at a slow lope. As they rounded the corner onto Grand, Linc thought, “Now we’ll see,” and drew in his breath to face the unexpected.
But it was too unexpected. He stopped in mid-stride and groped for the glass show window of the store nearest him, bumping into Wes, dragging the other man back with him. Ten feet away—ten feet away and two feet above the ground—hovered the hideous oval of an Eye. It had widened in startled surprise as he came into view, and now, as he skittered sideways, the blue iris followed him, rolling sideways between the lids until red appeared at the corners.
They stood, backs to the wall, huddled together. Linc couldn’t force his legs to move. His knees were limp and he feared he would fall. Something pulled at him that he didn’t understand. But it was compelling and powerful, and the urge of it revolted him until fear was a taste in his mouth, and the acid of it jolted him back to sense.
“Cross the street!” he hissed at Wes, and took off at a dead run. As he edged between the cars and climbed over the hoods of others, he cursed himself for a fool. He should have gone back around the corner, back to safety. Why had he chosen to stay?
He stopped in the shelter of a doorway and Wes panted up beside him. Wes was no longer a tanned, gentle giant of a man. His face was dead white and his lips gray. He pointed toward the center of town, and Linc stepped out of the shelter to see.
The street, itself, was a tangle of stalled cars, some climbing the backs of others, wrecked and abandoned. Glass gleamed broken on the cement, and water ran in streams into the gutters.
People sat in some of the cars, their heads visible in the street lights and the flash of neon signs. More people ran among them, or clamored up and down the sidewalks, or peered frozen from the shops.
And over the street, caught here and there in the light, were six Eyes. They glided back and forth with an even beat as though they were breathing. They sailed up and down the street, turning their whole enormous bulk, tilting downward to gaze into the cars and the stores. Their blinking was a vast closing and opening, their bodiless rolling was a horror against nature. They moved quickly, tipping, and