An Incident on Route 12 | Page 3

him.
* * * * *
What had it been? Something that wore what seemed to be a man's body like a suit of clothes, moving the body as a man moves, driving a man's car ... roach-armed, roach-legged itself!
Garfield drew a long, shuddering breath. Then, as he slowed for a curve, there was a spark of reddish light in the rear-view mirror.
He stared at the spark for an instant, braked the car to a stop, rolled down the window and looked back.
Far behind him along Route Twelve, a fire burned. Approximately at the point where the Packard had stalled out, where something had gone rolling off the road into the bushes....
Something, Garfield added mentally, that found fiery automatic destruction when death came to it, so that its secrets would remain unrevealed.
But for him the fire meant the end of a nightmare. He rolled the window up, took out a cigarette, lit it, and pressed the accelerator....
In incredulous fright, he felt the nose of the car tilt upwards, headlights sweeping up from the road into the trees.
Then the headlights winked out. Beyond the windshield, dark tree branches floated down towards him, the night sky beyond. He reached frantically for the door handle.
A steel wrench clamped silently about each of his arms, drawing them in against his sides, immobilizing them there. Garfield gasped, looked up at the mirror and saw a pair of faintly gleaming red eyes watching him from the rear of the car. Two of the things ... the second one stood behind him out of sight, holding him. They'd been in what had seemed to be the trunk compartment. And they had come out.
The eyes in the mirror vanished. A moist, black roach-arm reached over the back of the seat beside Garfield, picked up the cigarette he had dropped, extinguished it with rather horribly human motions, then took up Garfield's gun and drew back out of sight.
He expected a shot, but none came.
One doesn't fire a bullet through the suit one intends to wear....
It wasn't until that thought occurred to him that tough Phil Garfield began to scream. He was still screaming minutes later when, beyond the windshield, the spaceship floated into view among the stars.
END

Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from Worlds of If January 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.

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