36
Chrissie rode in the back of the van with Harry and Moose, with Harry’s good arm around her and Moose’s head in her lap. Slowly she began to feel better. She was not herself, no, and maybe she never would feel like her old self again, but she was better.
They went to the park at the head of Ocean Avenue, at the east end of town. Tessa drove right up over the curb, bouncing them around, and parked on the grass.
Sam opened the rear doors of the van so Chrissie and Harry could sit side by side in their blankets and watch him and Tessa at work.
Braver than Chrissie would have been, Sam went into the nearby residential areas, stepping over and around the dead things, and jump-started cars that were parked along the streets. One by one, he and Tessa drove them into the park and arranged them in a huge ring, with the engines running and the headlights pointing in toward the middle of the circle.
Sam said that people would be coming in helicopters, even in the fog, and that the circle of light would mark a proper landing pad for them. With twenty cars, their headlights all blazing on high beam, the inside of that ring was as bright as noon.
Chrissie liked the brightness.
Even before the landing pad was fully outlined, a few people began to appear in the streets, live people, and not weird looking at all, without fangs and stingers and claws, standing fully erect—altogether normal, judging by appearances. Of course, Chrissie had learned that you could never confidently judge anyone by appearances because they could be anything inside; they could be something inside that would astonish even the editors of the National Enquirer. You couldn’t even be sure of your own parents.
But she couldn’t think about that.
She didn’t dare think about what had happened to her folks. She knew that what little hope she still held for their salvation was probably false hope, but she wanted to hold on to it for just a while longer, anyway.
The few people who appeared in the streets began to gravitate toward the park while Tessa and Sam finished pulling the last few cars into the ring. They all looked dazed. The closer they approached, the more uneasy Chrissie became.
“They’re all right,” Harry assured her, cuddling her with his one good arm.
“How can you be sure?”
“You can see they’re scared shitless. Oops. Maybe I shouldn’t say ‘shitless,’ teach you bad language.”
“‘Shitless’ is okay,” she said.
Moose made a mewling sound and shifted in her lap. He probably had the kind of headache that only karate experts usually got from smashing bricks with their heads.
“Well,” Harry said, “look at them—they’re scared plenty bad, which probably tags them as our kind. You never saw one of those others acting scared, did you?”
She thought about it a moment. “Yeah. I did. That cop who shot Mr. Shaddack at the school. He was scared. He had more fear in his eyes, a lot more, than I’ve ever seen in anybody else’s.”
“Well, these people are all right, anyway,” Harry told her as the dazed stragglers approached the van. “They’re some of the ones who were scheduled to be converted before midnight, but nobody got around to them. Must be others in their houses, barricaded in there, afraid to come out, think the whole world’s gone crazy, probably think aliens are on the loose, like you thought. Besides, if these people were more of those shape-changers, they wouldn’t be staggering up to us so hesitantly. They’d have loped right up the hill, leaped in here, and eaten our noses, plus whatever other parts of us they consider to be delicacies.”
That explanation appealed to her, even made her smile thinly, and she relaxed a little.
But just a second later, Moose jerked his burly head off her lap, yipped, and scrambled to his feet.
Outside, the people approaching the van cried out in surprise and fear, and Chrissie heard Sam say, “What the blazing hell?”
She threw aside her warm blankets and scrambled out of the back of the van to see what was happening.