The Uninvited by William W. Johnstone

bad. I told you I hoped you brought a change of drawers, didn’t I?”
    Trooper Satler looked at Al and sniffed. “Phew, Al—damn! You stink!”
    â€œWell, stick your head in there, Smoky Bear!” Al challenged. Then he made his way carefully off the porch and out into the yard. Walking very peculiarly.
    The Louisiana State Trooper stuck his head in the house, pulling it out much quicker. He walked stiffly to the edge of the porch. There, he sat down and put his head between his legs, breathing deeply.
    Slick looked in, grunted, then backed away. “I never doubted you, Vic.”
    â€œI know, Slick, and I thank you for that.” He looked at the remaining doubters.Go on, Dr. Long, Parker,” he urged them. “Take a good long look and then I want to hear another one of your jokes.”
    The DA glanced in, gagged, and ran out to the cars. Dr. Long finally clicked off the lights, plunging the room into darkness. The bare bones of the couple glowed as if charged with fluorescence.
    Slick’s stomach rumbled. He ate another Tums. “Somebody shut the goddamn door,” he suggested.
    The door was closed.
    The men filed out in the yard, all of them looking around them, their heads never remaining still.
    â€œWell?” Sheriff Ransonet looked at the DA. Parker’s face was pale in the moonlight.
    â€œI think we all need to sit down and discuss this tragedy,” the DA suggested.
    â€œYeah,” Slick agreed. “And I’ll buy the first round!”

Chapter Four
    The mutants watched from their hiding places as the humans loaded the food source into ambulances and drove away, leaving the night silent, free of the incomprehensible engines and flashing lights. Still, the mutants waited, wanting to be certain all was safe, for they had learned over the past two days that to attack one or two was safe, but to attack a large group was not wise. For their numbers were still growing. But soon there would be enough to attack the larger population centers, where everyone could eat.
    They waited, until they heard the clicking, signaling that it was safe to move.
    With the rain and the mist gone, the storm now over Mississippi, charging toward Alabama to dump its rain and fury, the mutants began their march toward food, for they were voracious eaters, eating not only for subsistence, but also because it was their nature to destroy.
    They crawled into telephone boxes and relay stations, ate through wires, and knocked out communications in a few spots in Baronne and Lapeer Parishes. Not enough to cause any panic—yet—but enough to create mild annoyance among some of the rural subscribers to Ma Bell.
    The creatures crawled up telephone poles and chewed through the wires; the material was most palatable to their taste. A roach will eat almost anything. They’ve even been known to eat the eyelashes and eyelids from sleeping people.
    They crawled up high-tension poles and ate through the lines, electrocuting themselves in long chains, ground to top, shorting out multi-voltage, high-tension lines. For every five thousand that were fried into pieces of dark ash, ten thousand took their place. They covered transformers, fifty deep, creating a living bridge from pole to pole, shorting out power.
    They ate everything warm-blooded that got in their way during this first massive march: cats, dogs, pigs, chickens, horses, and people. In their original form, much smaller, and much less aggressive, and with only mouthparts, they had been known to eat leather, soap, glue, wood, cloth, paper, and any food that man ate.
    But these creatures were mutants, five inches longer and much heavier than even the largest of their species. And in a very primitive fashion, due to the change in their body chemistry from N-A-N-1-D , these mutants could reason and organize. And they had teeth.
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    Three radio stations served the two-Parish area from within their borders. One, in Barnwell, an