“What are you talking about?” Brad asks. He’s lying full-length on his stomach. Now he takes the figure, which is perhaps seven inches tall, from Johnny and looks at it. There is a cut on one of Brad’s plump cheeks. Falling glass from the light-fixture, Johnny assumes. Downstairs, the screaming woman falls silent. Brad looks at the alien, then stares at Johnny with eyes that are almost comically round. “You’re full of shit,” he says.
“No,” Johnny says. Tm not. With God as my witness I’m not. I never forget a face.”
What are you saying? That the people doing this are wearing masks so the survivors can’t identify them later?”
The idea hasn’t occurred to Johnny until this moment, but it’s a pretty good one. “I suppose that must be it. But-”
“But what?”
“It didn’t look like a mask. That’s all. It didn’t look like a mask.”
Brad stares at him a moment longer, then tosses the figure aside and begins wriggling toward the stairwell. Johnny picks it up, looks at it for a moment, then winces as another slug comes through the window at the end of the hall-the one facing the street-and drones directly over his head. He tucks the action figure into the pants pocket not holding the oversized slug and begins to wriggle after Brad.
On the lawn of Old Doc’s house, Peter Jackson stands with his wife in his arms, woundless at the center of the firestorm. He sees the vans with their dark glass and futuristic contours, he sees the shotgun barrels, their muzzles belching fire, and between the silvery one and the red one he can see Gary Soderson’s old shitbox Saab burning in the Soderson driveway. None of it makes much of an impression on him. He is thinking about how he just got home from work. That seems like a very big deal to him, for some reason. He thinks he will begin every account of this terrible afternoon (it has not occurred to him that he may not survive the terrible afternoon, at least not yet) by saying I just got home from work . This phrase already has become a kind of magical structure inside his head; a bridge back to the sane and orderly world which he assumed, only an hour ago, was his by right and would be for years and decades to come: I just got home from work .
He is also thinking of Mary’s father, a professor at the Meermont College of Dentistry in Brooklyn. He has always been rather terrified of Henry Kaepner, of Henry Kaepner’s somehow daunting integrity; in his heart Peter has always known that Henry Kaepner considers him unworthy of his daughter (and in his heart this is an opinion with which Peter Jackson has always concurred). And now Peter is standing in the firestorm with his feet in the wet grass, wondering how he’ll ever be able to tell Mr Kaepner that his father-in-law’s worst unspoken fear has become reality: his unworthy son-in-law has gotten his only child killed.
It’s not my fault, though, Peter thinks. Perhaps I can make him see that if I start by saying I just got home from w-
“Jackson.”
The voice wipes out his worries, makes him sway on his feet, makes him feel like screaming. It is as if an alien mouth has opened inside his mind, tearing a hole in it. Mary slips in his arms, trying to slither out of his grip, and Peter hugs her tight against him again, ignoring the ache in his arms. At the same time he comes back to some vague appreciation of reality. Most of the vans are on the move again, but very slowly, still firing. The pink one and the yellow one are now pouring fire into the Reed and Geller residences, shattering birdbaths, blasting away faucet bibs, breaking basement windows, shredding flowers and bushes, slicing through raingutters that drop, slanting, to the lawns below.
One of them, however, is not moving. The black one. It is parked on the other side of the street, blocking most of the Wyler house from view. The turret has slid back, and now a shining figure, all bright gray and dead black, issues from it like a spook from the window of a haunted house. Except, Peter sees, the figure is standing on something. It looks like a floating pillow and seems to be humming.
Is it a man? He can’t exactly tell. It appears to be wearing a Nazi uniform, all black, glossy fabric and silver rigging, but there is no human face above the wings of its collar; there is no face of any kind, in fact.
Just blackness.
“Jackson! Get over here, partner.”
He tries to resist, to stand his ground, and when the voice comes again it isn’t like a mouth but a fishhook, yanking inside his head, tearing his thoughts open. Now he knows what a hooked trout feels like.
“Get a move-on, pard!”
Peter walks across the rain-washed remains of a hopscotch grid on the sidewalk (Ellen Carver and her friend Mindy from a block over made it that very morning), then steps into the gutter. Rushing water fills one shoe, but he doesn’t even feel it. In his mind he is now hearing a very strange thing, a kind of soundtrack. It’s being played by a twanging guitar, sort of like an old Duane Eddy instrumental. A tune he knows but can’t identify. It is the final maddening touch.
The bright figure on the floating pillow descends to street-level. As Peter draws closer, he expects to see the black cloth (perhaps nylon, perhaps silk) covering the man’s face, giving him that spooky look of absence, but he doesn’t see it, and as the plate-glass window of the EZ Stop explodes down the street, he realizes an awful thing: he doesn’t see it because it isn’t there. The man from the black wagon really has no face.
“Oh God,” he moans in a voice so low he can barely hear it himself. “Oh my God, please.”
Two other figures are looking down from the turret of the black van. One is a bearded guy wearing the ruins of what looks like a Civil War uniform. The other is a woman with lank black hair and cruel, beautiful features. She’s as pale as a comic-book vampire. Her uniform, like that of the faceless man, is black and silver, Gestapo-ish. Some sort of trumpery gem-it’s as big as a pigeon’s egg-hangs from a chain around her neck, flashing like a remnant of the psychedelic sixties.
She’s a cartoon, Peter thinks. Some pubescent boy’s first hesitant try at a sex-fantasy.
As he draws closer to the man with no face, he realizes an even more awful thing: he’s not really there at all. Neither are the other two, and neither is the black van. He remembers a Saturday matinee-he couldn’t have been more than six or seven years old-when he walked all the way down to the movie screen and stared up at it, realizing for the first time how cheesy the trick was. From twenty inches away the images were just gauze; the only reality was the bright reflective foundation of the screen, which was itself utterly blank, as featureless as a snowbank. It had to be, for the illusion to succeed. This is the same, and Peter feels the same sort of stupid surprise now that he felt then. I can see Herbie Wyler’s house, he thinks. I can see it right through the van.
“JACKSON!”
But that is real, that voice, just as the bullet which took Mary’s life was real. He screams through a grin of pain, jerking her body closer to his chest for a moment and then dropping her to the street in a tumble without even being aware of it. It is as if someone pressed the end of an electric bullhorn to one of his ears, turned the volume up all the way, and then bellowed his name into it. Blood bursts from his nose and begins to seep from the corners of his eyes.
“THATAWAY, PARD!” The black-and-silver figure, now insubstantial but still threatening, points at the Wyler house. The voice is the only reality, but it is all the reality Peter needs; it’s like the blade of a chainsaw. He jerks his head back so hard his glasses fall askew on his face. “WE GOT US SOME HOORAWIN TO DO! BEST GIT STARTED!”
He doesn’t walk toward Herbie and Audrey’s house; he is pulled towards it, reeled in. As he walks through the black, faceless figure, a crazy image fills his mind for just a moment: spaghetti, the unnaturally red kind that comes in a can, and hamburger. All mixed together in a white bowl with Warner Bros cartoon figures-Bugs, Elmer, Daffy-dancing around the rim. Just thinking about that kind of food usually nauseates him, but for the moment the image holds in his mind, he is desperately hungry; he lusts for those pallid strands of pasta and that unnatural red sauce. For that moment even the pain in his head ceases to exist.