Stephen King - The Tommyknockers

The two of them wavered back toward the cruiser, arms about each other's waists.

“The body,” Weems said.

“Leave it for now. He's dead. We're not. Yet.”

“Look,” Weems said as they passed Leandro's remains. “The bubs! They're out!”

The blue flashers, called bubbles or bubs by the troopers, on top of the cruiser were dead and dark. That wasn't supposed to be-leaving the flashers on at the scene of the accident was ingrained behavior.

“Did you-” Torgeson began, and then stopped.

Something in the landscape had changed. The day had darkened, as it does when a large cloud floats over the sun or when an eclipse begins. They looked at each other, then turned. Torgeson saw it first, a great silvery shape emerging from the boil of smoke. Its huge leading edge gleamed.

“Holy Christ!” Weems almost squealed. His large brown hand found Torgeson's arm and bore down upon it.

Torgeson barely felt it, although there would be bruises in the shape of Weems's hand the next day.

Up it came… and up… and up. Smoke-hazed sunlight glinted on its silvery-metallic surface. It rose on an angle of roughly forty degrees. It seemed to be wavering slightly, although that could have been an illusion or heat-haze.

Of course the whole thing was an illusion-had to be. No way it could be real, Torgeson thought; it was oxygen rapture.

But how can we both be having the same hallucination?

“Oh my dear God,” Weems groaned, “it's a flyin” saucer, Andy, it's a fuckin” flyin” saucer!”

But to Torgeson it did not look like a saucer. It looked like the underside of an Army mess-plate-the biggest damn plate in creation. Up it came and up it came; you thought it must end, that a hazy margin of sky must appear between it and the rafters of smoke, but still it came, dwarfing the trees, dwarfing all the landscape. It made the smoke of the forest fire look like a couple of cigarette butts smoldering in an ashtray. It filled more and more of the sky, blotting out the horizon, rising, oh, something was rising out of Big Injun woods, and it was deathly silent-there was no sound, no sound at all.

They stared at it, and then Weems clutched Torgeson and Torgeson clutched Weems, they hugged each other like children and Torgeson thought: Oh, if it falls on us

And still it came up from the smoke and fire, and up, as if it would never end.

By nightfall, Haven had been cut off from the outside world by the National Guard. The Guardsmen surrounded it, those downwind wearing oxygen equipment.

Torgeson and Weems made it out-but not in their cruiser. That was as dead as John Wilkes Booth. They hoofed it. By the time they had used up the oxygen in the last flat-pack, swapping it back and forth, they were well into Troy and found themselves able to deal with the outside air-the wind left them lucky, Claudell Weems said later. They walked out of what would soon be referred to as “the zone of pollution” in top-secret government reports, and theirs was the first official word of what was going on in Haven, but by then there had been hundreds of unofficial reports on the lethal quality of the air in the area and thousands of reports of a gigantic UFO seen rising from the smoke in Big Injun Woods.

Weems made it out with a bloody nose. Torgeson lost half a dozen teeth. Both counted themselves lucky.

The initial perimeter, staffed with National Guardsmen from Bangor and Augusta, was thin. By 9:00 P. M. it had been augmented by Guardsmen from Limestone and Presque Isle and Brunswick and Portland. By dawn, a thousand more battle-equipped Guardsmen had been flown in from Eastern Corridor cities.

Between the hours of 7:00 P. M. and 1:00 AM- NORAD stood at DEFCON-2. The President was circling the Midwest at sixty thousand feet in Looking Glass and chewing Tums five and six at a time.

The FBI was on the scene at 6:00 P. M. the CIA at 7:15 P. M. By 8:00, they were yelling about jurisdiction. At 9:15 P. M. a frightened, infuriated CIA agent named Spacklin shot an FBI agent named Richardson. The incident was hushed up, but both Gardener and Bobbi Anderson would have understood perfectly-the Dallas Police were on the scene and in complete control of the situation.

There was a moment of paralyzed silence in Bobbi's kitchen following the misfire of Ev Hillman's old. 45, a silence that was as much mental as it was physical. Gard's wide blue eyes stared into Bobbi's green ones.

“You tried-” Bobbi began, and her mind

(! tried to!)

produced an echo in Gardener's head. That moment seemed very long. And when it broke, it broke like glass.

Bobbi had dropped the photon pistol to her side in her surprise. Now she brought it up again. There was to be no second chance. In her agitation, her mind was completely open to Gardener, and he felt her shock at the chance she had given him. She intended that there should be no second chance.

There was nothing he could do with his right hand; it was under the table. Before she could aim the muzzle of the photon pistol at him, he put his left hand on the edge of the kitchen table and, without thinking, shoved as hard as he could. The table legs squealed harshly on the floor as the table moved. It struck Bobbi's lumped and misshapen chest. At the same instant, a beam of brilliant green light shot from the barrel of the toy gun hooked into Hank Buck's big radio/tape-player. Instead of hitting Gard's own chest, it jerked upward and passed over his shoulder -more than a foot above it, actually, but he could still feel the skin there tingle unpleasantly under the shirt, as if the surface molecules were dancing like drops of water on a hot skillet.

Gard twisted to the right and dropped down to get away from that beam of what looked like light. His ribs struck the table, struck it hard, and the table rammed Bobbi again, this time even harder. Bobbi's chair rocked backward on its rear legs, teetered, and then both it and she toppled over with a crash. The beam of green light swung upward, and Gardener was momentarily reminded of those guys who stand on airport tarmacs at night, using powerful flashlights to guide planes into their berths.

He heard a low crunching, crackling sound like splintering plywood coming from overhead, looked up, and saw the photon pistol had drawn a long slit in the kitchen ceiling. Gardener staggered to his feet. Incredibly, his jaws cracked and wavered in another large yawn. His head clanged and echoed with the grassfire alarm of Bobbi's thoughts

(gun he's got a gun tried to shoot me bastard bastard tried to shoot me gun gun he's got)

and he tried to shield himself before he went mad. He couldn't. Bobbi was screaming inside his head and as she lay on the floor, pinned for the moment between the table and the overturned chair, she was trying to bring the gun to bear on him for another shot.

Gardener lifted his foot and shoved the table again, grimacing. It overturned, beers, pills, and boom-box radio all sliding off. Most of the stuff fell on Bobbi. Beer splashed in her face and ran, fizzing and foaming, over her New and Improved transparent skin. The radio hit her neck, then the floor, landing in a shallow puddle of beer.

Flash, you fucker! Gardener screamed at it. Explode! Self-destruct! Explode, goddammit, ex

The radio did more than that. It seemed to bulge, and then with a sound like rotten cloth ripping along a seam, it shattered outward in all directions, belching small streaks of green fire like bottled lightning. Bobbi screamed. What he heard with his ears was bad; the sound inside his head was infinitely worse.

Gardener screamed with her, not hearing himself. He saw that Bobbi's shirt was burning.

He started for her, not thinking about what he was up to. He dropped the. 45 as he did so, without even thinking. This time it did go off, sending a slug into Jim Gardener's ankle, shattering it. Pain blew through his mind like a hot wind. He screamed again. He took a shambling step forward, his head ringing with her horrid mental cries. They would send him mad in a moment. This thought was actually a relief. When he finally went mad, none of this shit would matter anymore.