Footfall

“Elephants?” Colonel Halverson demanded. “Elephants?”

“Yes, sir,” Harry said. “The invaders—”

“Why do you say elephants?”

“They look like baby elephants with two trunks.”

“You’ve seen them, then?”

“Yes, sir, I sure have.” Harry winced. This wasn’t going to be easy. Why tell it at all? “Shot one, too, but they wear armor, so I doubt if I hurt it.”

“Armor?”

“Yeah. Body armor, and they have rifles. They kill people. They kidnapped-they took some people prisoner from a farmhouse. Killed the farmer.”

“Just how close did you get to them?”

Harry shuddered, “Too damn close! Close as you and me!” One stood on my chest — He wouldn’t say that. It shamed him.

Halverson looked skeptical. “How’d you get away from them?”

“They let me go. Look, you guys do what you want, but Mrs. Dawson and me have to get out of here. They’re all around, it’s damned lucky they didn’t get here yet.”

“Tell me more,” Colonel Halverson said. “Tell me everything.”

“There’s just not that much,” Harry said. They wore elevator shoes and they came down on paper airplanes. If I say that — “They came down on hang gliders. Then bigger stuff landed”

“How big? Where?”

“Near Logan . They had flying things about as big as a jetliner only not so wide in the wings. And a floating thing about as big as a diesel semi. That’s what I saw. There may have been bigger.”

“Tanks? Field guns?”

“None I saw.”

“And they let you go?”

“Yeah, sort of.”

“They let others go?”

“Yes—”

“From Logan . Southwest of here.” Halverson pounded his right fist into his left hand. “But we know they’re east of us, and nobody’s come out of there. They would, too, if the-if those things would let them. Maybe there’s something they want to hide. Son, you better tell me everything you know.”

Gradually Halverson dragged the story out of Harry. Finally it was done. “So I found the gun,” Harry said. “I thought about going after Mrs. Wilson, but I came here, instead.”

Halverson looked thoughtful. “Hell, what else could you do? You’re no army. The next time they’d just shoot you. But I sure wish I knew what they’re hiding out to the east—”

“Colonel?” The sergeant seated on top of the armored car jumped off. He looked older than Halverson.

“Yeah, Luke?”

“Colonel, I heard a funny story last night. Over in Collinston.”

“Collinston? That’s fifty miles from here! What were you doing in Collinston?”

“Took some of the boys over for a drink. You didn’t need us. We weren’t going anywhere.”

“Next time you leave camp, you tell me,” He chuckled. “Okay, so you found a bar open in Collinston. Guess it takes more than war and a parachute invasion to close the bars in that town.”

“Sure does. Anyway, there was a guy in the bar. He’d been drinking a lot, so nobody paid much attention. He said he’d seen an elephant. A little one. In a willow patch outside of town. Thought it escaped from some circus, because it was a trained elephant.”

“Trained? Trained how?” Halverson demanded, “Don’t know.”

“Harry.” Carlotta’s voice was low and urgent. “Harry, that’s an invader. We have to go capture it. We have to get it alive. Maybe it knows about Wes. Harry, we have to!”

Harry gulped hard. “Sure, but I need gas—”

“I’ll get it out of David’s car,”

“Hey, hold on,” Colonel Halverson said. “I can’t let you do that—”

“Why not?” Carlotta demanded. “You’re going east. You’ll see lots of invaders, you don’t need this one.”

“But-look, those things are armed—”

“It didn’t hurt that man in the bar,” Carlotta said. “Why would he think it was trained? Maybe-maybe it lay down and rolled over!”

“Holy shit!” Harry said. “Hey, she might be right.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Colonel, my husband was a personal friend of the President. President Coffey himself sent Wes up to meet the aliens. It’s my right to find out what happened to him. You give Harry some gasoline, and then go fight your war. Harry and I will do the rest.”

Yeah, Harry thought, sure.

“I say we go in after them.” Evan Lewis sounded very sure. “Hell, Joe, we have to! We can’t let those-things run all over Kansas ,”

“Wasn’t me arguing with you. Captain,” Lieutenant Colonel Halverson said. He looked at the others seated at Juana Morgan’s dining room table. Evan Lewis, who ran a tractor sales and repair agency, and commanded the tanks. George Mason, lawyer, who commanded the six helicopter gunships. The fourth man at the table was David Morgan, retired professor of business administration, Halverson’s adjutant and chief of staff. Morgan was the smallest one at the table, and he spoke with a clipped eastern accent that irritated hell out of Joe Halverson, but he was certainly the smartest man in the battalion.

“And I still don’t like it,” George Mason said. “Colonel, we don’t know what we’re up against, and we don’t know what the Army has in mind.”

“So what do you suggest we do?” Halverson asked.

“Wait for orders.”

“How heroic,” Captain Lewis said.

“Enough.” David Morgan spoke quietly, but they all heard him. “We don’t need bickering.”