by JAMES H. SCHMITZ
He was already a thief,
prepared to steal again. He didn’t know
that he himself was
only booty!
Phil Garfield was thirty miles south
of the little town of Redmon on Route Twelve when
he was startled by a series of sharp, clanking noises.
They came from under the Packard’s hood.
The car immediately began to lose
speed. Garfield jammed down the accelerator,
had a sense of sick helplessness at the complete lack
of response from the motor. The Packard rolled
on, getting rid of its momentum, and came to a stop.
Phil Garfield swore shakily.
He checked his watch, switched off the headlights
and climbed out into the dark road. A delay of
even half an hour here might be disastrous. It
was past midnight, and he had another hundred and
ten miles to cover to reach the small private airfield
where Madge waited for him and the thirty thousand
dollars in the suitcase on the Packard’s front
seat.
If he didn’t make it before daylight....
He thought of the bank guard.
The man had made a clumsy play at being a hero, and
that had set off the fool woman who’d run screaming
into their line of fire. One dead. Perhaps
two. Garfield hadn’t stopped to look at
an evening paper.
But he knew they were hunting for him.
He glanced up and down the road.
No other headlights in sight at the moment, no light
from a building showing on the forested hills.
He reached back into the car and brought out the suitcase,
his gun, a big flashlight and the box of shells which
had been standing beside the suitcase. He broke
the box open, shoved a handful of shells and the .38
into his coat pocket, then took suitcase and flashlight
over to the shoulder of the road and set them down.
There was no point in groping about
under the Packard’s hood. When it came
to mechanics, Phil Garfield was a moron and well aware
of it. The car was useless to him now ... except
as bait.
But as bait it might be very useful.
Should he leave it standing where
it was? No, Garfield decided. To anybody
driving past it would merely suggest a necking party,
or a drunk sleeping off his load before continuing
home. He might have to wait an hour or more before
someone decided to stop. He didn’t have
the time. He reached in through the window, hauled
the top of the steering wheel towards him and put
his weight against the rear window frame.
The Packard began to move slowly backwards
at a slant across the road. In a minute or two
he had it in position. Not blocking the road
entirely, which would arouse immediate suspicion, but
angled across it, lights out, empty, both front doors
open and inviting a passerby’s investigation.
Garfield carried the suitcase and
flashlight across the right-hand shoulder of the road
and moved up among the trees and undergrowth of the
slope above the shoulder. Placing the suitcase
between the bushes, he brought out the .38, clicked
the safety off and stood waiting.
Some ten minutes later, a set of headlights
appeared speeding up Route Twelve from the direction
of Redmon. Phil Garfield went down on one knee
before he came within range of the lights. Now
he was completely concealed by the vegetation.
The car slowed as it approached, braking
nearly to a stop sixty feet from the stalled Packard.
There were several people inside it; Garfield heard
voices, then a woman’s loud laugh. The driver
tapped his horn inquiringly twice, moved the car slowly
forward. As the headlights went past him, Garfield
got to his feet among the bushes, took a step down
towards the road, raising the gun.
Then he caught the distant gleam of
a second set of headlights approaching from Redmon.
He swore under his breath and dropped back out of
sight. The car below him reached the Packard,
edged cautiously around it, rolled on with a sudden
roar of acceleration.
The second car stopped when still
a hundred yards away, the Packard caught in the motionless
glare of its lights. Garfield heard the steady
purring of a powerful motor.
For almost a minute, nothing else
happened. Then the car came gliding smoothly
on, stopped again no more than thirty feet to Garfield’s
left. He could see it now through the screening
bushes a big job, a long, low four-door
sedan. The motor continued to purr. After
a moment, a door on the far side of the car opened
and slammed shut.
A man walked quickly out into the
beam of the headlights and started towards the Packard.
Phil Garfield rose from his crouching
position, the .38 in his right hand, flashlight in
his left. If the driver was alone, the thing was
now cinched! But if there was somebody else in
the car, somebody capable of fast, decisive action,
a slip in the next ten seconds might cost him the
sedan, and quite probably his freedom and life.
Garfield lined up the .38’s sights steadily
on the center of the approaching man’s head.
He let his breath out slowly as the fellow came level
with him in the road and squeezed off one shot.
Instantly he went bounding down the
slope to the road. The bullet had flung the man
sideways to the pavement. Garfield darted past
him to the left, crossed the beam of the headlights,
and was in darkness again on the far side of the road,
snapping on his flashlight as he sprinted up to the
car.
The motor hummed quietly on.
The flashlight showed the seats empty. Garfield
dropped the light, jerked both doors open in turn,
gun pointing into the car’s interior. Then
he stood still for a moment, weak and almost dizzy
with relief.
There was no one inside. The sedan was his.
The man he had shot through the head
lay face down on the road, his hat flung a dozen feet
away from him. Route Twelve still stretched out
in dark silence to east and west. There should
be time enough to clean up the job before anyone else
came along. Garfield brought the suitcase down
and put it on the front seat of the sedan, then started
back to get his victim off the road and out of sight.
He scaled the man’s hat into the bushes, bent
down, grasped the ankles and started to haul him towards
the left side of the road where the ground dropped
off sharply beyond the shoulder.
The body made a high, squealing sound
and began to writhe violently.
Shocked, Garfield dropped the legs
and hurriedly took the gun from his pocket, moving
back a step. The squealing noise rose in intensity
as the wounded man quickly flopped over twice like
a struggling fish, arms and legs sawing about with
startling energy. Garfield clicked off the safety,
pumped three shots into his victim’s back.
The grisly squeals ended abruptly.
The body continued to jerk for another second or two,
then lay still.
Garfield shoved the gun back into
his pocket. The unexpected interruption had unnerved
him; his hands shook as he reached down again for
the stranger’s ankles. Then he jerked his
hands back, and straightened up, staring.
From the side of the man’s chest,
a few inches below the right arm, something like a
thick black stick, three feet long, protruded now
through the material of the coat.
It shone, gleaming wetly, in the light
from the car. Even in that first uncomprehending
instant, something in its appearance brought a surge
of sick disgust to Garfield’s throat. Then
the stick bent slowly halfway down its length, forming
a sharp angle, and its tip opened into what could
have been three blunt, black claws which scrabbled
clumsily against the pavement. Very faintly,
the squealing began again, and the body’s back
arched up as if another sticklike arm were pushing
desperately against the ground beneath it.
Garfield acted in a blur of horror.
He emptied the .38 into the thing at his feet almost
without realizing he was doing it. Then, dropping
the gun, he seized one of the ankles, ran backwards
to the shoulder of the road, dragging the body behind
him.
In the darkness at the edge of the
shoulder, he let go of it, stepped around to the other
side and with two frantically savage kicks sent the
body plunging over the shoulder and down the steep
slope beyond. He heard it crash through the bushes
for some seconds, then stop. He turned, and ran
back to the sedan, scooping up his gun as he went past.
He scrambled into the driver’s seat and slammed
the door shut behind him.
His hands shook violently on the steering
wheel as he pressed down the accelerator. The
motor roared into life and the big car surged forward.
He edged it past the Packard, cursing aloud in horrified
shock, jammed down the accelerator and went flashing
up Route Twelve, darkness racing beside and behind
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.