An incident on Route twelve by James H.

Schmitz.

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 packer'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 one hundred and ten miles to cover to reach the small private airfield where Madge waited for him in the thirty thousand dollars in the suit case 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 the fool woman who had run screaming into their line of fire.

One day 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 a suit case, his gun, a big flashlight, and the box of shells, which had been standing beside the suit case.

He broke the box open, shoved a handful of shells and the thirty eight 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 his 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 somebody decided to stop.

He didn't have the time he reached in through the window, hauled the top of the steering wheel toward 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 passer.

By his investigation, Garfield carried the suit case in 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 suit case between the bushes.

He brought out the thirty eight, clicked the safety off, and stood waiting.

Some ten minutes later, a set of head lights appeared speeding up Route twelve from the direction of Redman 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, breaking 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 Redman.

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 one 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 slam shut.

A man walked quickly out into the beam of the headlights and started towards the packard philled gar Garfield rose from his crouching position, the thirty eight 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 in life.

Garfield lined up the thirty eight sights steadily on the center of the approaching man's head.

He led 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's 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 hum quietly on the flashlight showed the seats empty.

Garfield dropped the light, jerked both doors open, and 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 right 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 a wounded man quickly flopped over twice like a struggling fish, barns and legs sawing about with startling energy.

Garfield clicked off the safety, pumped three shots into his victim's back.

The grizzly 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 hand 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 black, thick stick three feet long protruded now from 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.

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 stick like arm were pushing desperately against the ground beneath it.

Garfield acted in a blur of horror.

He emptied the thirty eight into the thing at his feet, almost without realizing he was doing it.

Then dropping the gun, he seized one of the ankles, ran backward into 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 hand 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 packer, 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 break 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 into 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 the men against his sides, immobilizing him.

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 wood, stood behind him, out of sight, holding him.

They had been in what had seemed to be a 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 it 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 Touf Phil Garfield began to scream.

He was still screaming minutes later, when beyond the windshield the spaceship floated into view among the stars.

End of an incident on Route twelve by James H.

Schmitt's