myself.”
“We have no choice. Who knows—” Wes tried to joke the scowl off Linc’s face—“maybe we can get rich by selling our observations to the Sunday magazines.”
A moment later, the quiet was broken by the sharp shuffling of eighty feet. The men were moving out. Linc reached for his gun, but Wes’ hand closed over his arm, and he laid it back down. “Okay,” Linc grunted, “so I’m out—put to pasture—an observer. Let’s go. I guess our battle group is forming over there.”
He indicated Iverson and the knot of lab men who had formed around him. None of them had guns, and their empty hands were nervously clenching and unclenching. The morning was warm, the Indian summer sun lying on Linc’s shoulders like a sweater. He stayed beside Wes, walking along the concrete of the parking lot, then across trimmed grass, through the crackle of fallen leaves. The students and police were well in advance, already off the lab grounds, onto the brushy weed growth of the open meadow.
A woods loomed one thousand feet ahead of them, and a pheasant took flight at their approach, its bright head glinting metallic green in the sunshine. Everything was strangely quiet. Somewhere in the forest, a flicker sounded its jungle cry, warming up for its journey south to tropical forests.
Fifteen minutes had passed, and the guns in the hands of the men had dropped from the ready position. Conversations had sprung up, carried to Linc’s hearing by the breeze that rustled the leaves and parachuted others to the ground.
“I guess the Eyes are late sleepers,” chuckled Myers, “and just can’t get themselves open this early.”
Linc winced at the levity; yet he felt an answering laugh within himself. Relief? He didn’t know. There was as yet nothing to be relieved about. Maybe the battle wouldn’t be fought and no men would die this morning; but there would be another morning.
With a whir of wings that shattered the morning stillness, the forest suddenly erupted, spewing forth birds of all sizes. They soared up from the trees, a cloud of them, noisy flaps that were crows, and whirring flutters that were warblers. Joining in a crowded sky, they drove straight over the approaching men and off toward the lab. Their calls were loud, and the men stopped still, startled by the sudden activity.
Squirrels which had been nibbling along the edge of the woods suddenly were dashing headlong into the dimness, making for cover, and rabbits leaped after them.
Then, up and over the highest elm came the skin and ball of a giant Eye. It sailed up in a great swoop, clearing the forest, and arcing down for the field.
“There’s another one.” Wes grabbed his arm. “To the west.”
They came in a steady dive, now, eight of them—oval obscenities, wide-open, staring in a challenge that sent quivers of gooseflesh down Linc’s back. They banked and rolled and settled groundward with a swaying motion from side to side.
“When are the fools going to open fire?” Hendricks cursed. “They’ll come right through to us, if they’re not stopped!”
The Eyes were nearly over the heads of the fighting force, and just as Linc opened his mouth to scream orders, the guns jerked up and spat orange fire into the morning. The simultaneous explosion of forty guns was a thunder in his ears.
The Eye Linc was watching shot upward twenty feet in a convulsive jerk, hung there for an instant, then started a wobbling descent. There were two holes in it. It skimmed the heads of the men, coming for Linc’s group. Tears streamed out of the corners of it, dripping to the ground like a trail of rain. And as it neared Linc, blood started to come, seeping from the holes, mixed with fluid.
Wes was pulling him down, trying to make him crouch with the rest of them, but the sight of the Eye bearing down, bleeding and dying, held him frozen. It halted fifty feet away, ten feet above the ground, soaking the land and the leaves beneath it with red. A glaze came over it as though it had drawn into itself, and as its life ebbed before him, he cursed it, eager to watch it die.
But the glaze that spread across it reached the bullet holes and the blood congealed on the edges of them. The glaze continued to spread, and before his horrified sight, the sides of the holes firmed up, drew themselves together from a gaping hole to a red line, and then the line changed color, the fresh purple of a scar fading to a gray that softened out until it was gone from sight.
The Eye was whole again—healed and whole—and it gazed at him with the same empty, alien expression he had seen before. He stared back, into the iris that was bigger than his head, accepting its challenge. There was a pull upon him, a bodily pull, drawing him closer to it, compelling him to walk into it. He wanted to rip it apart with his hands; he wanted to rid the world of the sight of it. He stepped forward.
“You idiot!” Wes was upon him, knocking him down. “Get away from here. You haven’t got a gun!”
Linc regained his feet and ran with Wes, sidetracking to go around the Eye. As he passed Hendricks, he heard the man muttering to himself, “They heal themselves. They congeal and heal, repeal the hole and make it whole.”
Linc paused in his flight to grab Hendricks and pull him along. The reactor technician was out of his mind, his own eyes glazed, not with the healing power of the Eyes, but with madness.
The three of them ran from the stare of the Eye, and found themselves in the middle of the melee. Around them the Eyes bobbed and swooped, and the ground was slippery with their blood. But they were healed over. The men were no longer a fighting unit, but a panicked horde of individuals. Bullets rained upward, piercing their targets, and the targets shot skyward, wounded and bleeding, only to return to the fight healed. And always, there was that pull, that constant pull upon Linc that impelled him to approach.
Students bumped into him, their guns discharging uselessly. Others fired volleys at the empty air. The field had changed from order to chaos, with the cries and screams of maddened minds.
Streaming blood from one of the Eyes fell on Linc and soaked into his shirt. Close by, a student jerked straight. His body stiffened, then went limp, and his gun fell from his open hands. He walked through the mob of running, whirling men, oblivious to the noise and jumble. An Eye sailed backward before him, the sun glinting on its healing surface. As Linc watched it the pull caressed him again, and grew from a caress to a tug. Another man, a policeman, joined the zombie student, and the Eye took him, too.
Linc broke from the tug of the thing. Sweat from his own body was mingling with the now cold blood of the Eye on his shirt.
“To hell with Iverson’s orders!” he yelled to Wes. “We’ve got to fight them off!”
He dashed for the student’s abandoned gun and raised it to his shoulder, blasting away at the Eye that had now gathered four men and was leading them out of the battle toward the field beside the woods. He saw the searing tear as his shot hit home, smack in the middle of the Eye.
“Bull’s-eye!” he shouted in triumph, and let go another blast. But the Eye bobbed upward, evading, and even as it did, he saw the wound he had made in it glazing over, the flow of blood halting, the sides of the hole growing together and scarring over.
“Wes!” He swiveled to find his friend. “What are we going to do?”
But Wes didn’t hear. He was yards away, a gun raised, shooting at another of the giants.
The sound of gunfire grew less and less. The circle around Linc broke, cascading outward as
