Read Online Invasion by Dean Koontz - Free Book Online Page B

even as awkward as that sounded, it was still the only proper word-if the alien could come so close to seizing control of a human mind, how simple for it to mesmerize a dumb animal. Denied will power, the horse had gone off with the alien.
        When I looked closer and after I followed the trail for a few yards, I corrected myself and added an "s" to the noun: aliens. Clearly, there had been at least two of them, probably three.
        Numbed, I went back into the barn and turned off the heaters in order to keep the dead horse from decomposing. When I left I locked the door, although that was a pointless gesture now.
        I looked at the tracks for a long while. Nightmarish thoughts passed through my mind like a magician's swords passing through the lady in a magic cabinet: Blueberry hadn't been supper, but lunch. Kate was their supper. What would they want for breakfast?
        Me? Connie? Toby? All three of us?
        No.
        Ridiculous.
        Would the first encounter between man and alien be played out like some simple-minded movie, like a cheap melodrama, like a hack science fiction writer's inept plot: starman the gourmand, man the hapless meal?
        We had to make sure that it did not go like that. We had to establish a communications bridge between these creatures and ourselves, a bridge to understanding.
        Unless they didn't want to understand, didn't want to bother, didn't want anything from us except the protein that we carried in our flesh and blood… I went back to the house, wondering if I were, indeed, out of my mind.

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    9.
        
        Connie and I agreed to take turns standing guard duty during the night.
        She would sleep-or try to sleep-from ten o'clock until four the next morning, and then I would sleep-maybe-from around four until whatever time I woke up. We also agreed that we were basically a couple of real ninnies, that we were being overly cautious, that such an extreme safety measure as this was probably not necessary- yet neither of us suggested that we forget about the guard duty and just sleep together, unprotected, as we would have done any other night.
        I  helped her put Toby to bed shortly before ten, kissed her goodnight, and went to sit at the head of the stairs, in the precisely precribed circle of light from a tensor lamp. One table lamp was burning down in the living room, a warm yellow light that threw softly rounded shadows. The loaded pistol was at my side.
        I was ready.
        Outside, the storm wind fluted under the eaves and made the rafters creak.
        I picked up a paperback novel and tried to get interested in a sympathetic professional thief who was masterminding a bank robbery in New
        Orleans. It seemed to be an exciting, well told story; my eyes fled along the lines of print; the pages passed quickly; but I didn't retain more than five percent of what I read. Still, I stayed with it, for there was no better way to get through the next six hours.
        The trouble came sooner than I had expected.
        Twenty-three minutes past eleven o'clock. I knew the precise time because I had just looked at my wristwatch. I was no more than one-third of the way through the paperback novel, having absorbed little or nothing of it, and I was getting bored.
        Gentle, all but inaudible footsteps sounded in the second-floor hallway behind me, and when I turned around Toby was there in his bare feet and fire engine-red pajamas.
        "Can't you sleep?" I asked.
        He said something: an incoherent gurgle, as if someone were strangling him.
        "Toby?"
        He came down onto the first step, as if he were going to sit beside me-but instead of that he slipped quickly past me and kept right on going.
        "What's up?" I asked, thinking that he was headed for the refrigerator to get a late-night snack.
        He didn't answer.
        He didn't stop.
        "Hey!"
        He