Her relentless complaining was at the heart of it. Once, he fantasized about tape-recording her morning monologues and playing them back to her: “Shit! I broke a nail…. This toothpaste tastes awful…. David, can’t you ever hang the toilet paper right?… Oh God, I don’t want to go to work today…. There’s nothing to wear. I hate my wardrobe…. Shit! I’ve got a run in my stockings…. Where the hell are those keys?… Your beard looks all scraggly, David; you need to trim that…. You’re not really going to wear that awful tie again, are you?… Oh, I hate this weather…. David, can you for once remember to pick up those prints from the frame shop?”
How he’d wanted to scream at her when she was alive: “It’s no wonder you’re so miserable! You focus every ounce of your attention on every little thing that’s wrong and never notice any of the good things!” He wanted to tell her to grow up, to stop being a whining cry-baby, to count her blessings rather than giving voice to every little irritant. But he never had the guts. He started thinking of her as an emotional black hole that could suck all good cheer out of any room she entered.
And then through work he’d meet some vibrant, laughing saleswoman who knew that closing a deal called for a habit of yeses, that every no demanded a redirect or rebuttal, that life was about seizing the prize…and even though she was less beautiful, less brilliant than his wife, a few drinks in the hotel bar were enough to turn the swimming euphoria of affirmations into something else: a groping search for meaning in a few minutes of undomesticated sex.
And now his wife was dead, and he remembered the delicacy of her features, and the way she’d looked at their wedding with the head-dress sitting slightly askew and an eyelash on her cheek. He recalled the time she’d read him German poetry while he languished with the swine flu; and the time he tried to cross-country ski at the golf course while she laughed at his clumsiness. And there was nothing he could do now to fix things, no way to take back his infidelities or even apologize for them. He paced through the new place, the one he’d moved into to escape the memories, and he ached to have her back. Just to tell her, one last time, that he loved her. Another damned cliché.
At some point he began to pay attention to the stories of the aliens, and he began to care. Steeped in an atmosphere of grief and global paranoia, the wild theory that they’d killed her, that her death was part of their infiltration of the human world, became irresistible. It was such a pleasure to loathe them, to wish them dead the way he’d once wished his wife were dead. He listened with growing fervor to the conspiracy stories and the speculations: they were taking over the planet by slowly replacing people with duplicates; they were breeding with humans to create some kind of hybrid species; they were stealing the water, or the air; they were turning human beings into livestock. All the clichéd stories, gleefully retold in the tabloids and just as gleefully consumed by David – lost in his empty apartment, lost in grief and guilt and flailing loneliness.
He read it all, and when his new neighbor sensed a kindred hate and told him about the Hunters, David went to a meeting.
At first it was just talk. The government was doing nothing. The threat was real and nobody in a position of authority seemed to care. Maybe they’d been compromised. The shapeshifters could be anywhere, anyone. It was up to the Hunters to be vigilant, to find them if they could, to protect the world from this new and unprecedented threat.
The Hunters gave him purpose. He was energized again, focused again. He found that he could sleep at night, and in the mornings he had reason to rise from bed. By the time the aliens made their announcement, he was too deeply entrenched in the Hunter ideology to take it seriously.
“We are no longer alien,” the message said, resounding from each of the crystalline ships at once, clear and unmistakable and heard around the world in every language. “Our world was destroyed. We are refugees, but we do not desire to disrupt your lives or your ways of life in any way. To that end, we have made ourselves one with you. We have become human. We learned your ways – your languages and cultures and beliefs – long before we came. We needed only to touch you to take the final step. Now we are human. You need do nothing to accommodate us. We will make all the changes. We have changed our very being to suit you, and we will live by your laws and your values. Our children will be human children. There is nothing to fear from us. Nothing at all.”
The announcement went on, but for the Hunters the only message that mattered was the confirmation of their fears: the aliens were still alive; they’d taken on human form. And the worst part, the most intolerable part, the part that negated all their assurances: Our children will be human children.
They were plotting to mate with humanity, to infect the human bloodline with their sick, alien substance.
Eventually, talk gave way to action. There were demonstrations in the streets, public demands for new policies to identify and quarantine the Intruders. And when the government was slow to respond, the Hunters went to work themselves. Targets were identified. Those who were new to town and couldn’t account for their histories. Those who were strange, who seemed a little off. The Hunters became what their names proclaimed them to be. They researched their targets and studied them for signs of inhumanity. And when they were sure, they did what needed to be done.
* * *
“I’m a Hunter,” he says.
She gapes, taking a horrified step back. She tries to say something. She swallows. “My God,” she breathes.
“Your people have a god?”
She glowers at him, but her body language is that of a trembling fawn. “When?” she croaks.
“Since before I met you. It’s where I go on Thursday nights. We meet at Michael Jameson’s house. There are seven of us in my chapter.”
She shakes her head. “Why? You…do you wear one of those hoods? Do you…have you been on a raid?”
He shrugs and looks away.
* * *
David met her in the park. The first thing he noticed was how closely she resembled his wife: dark hair laced with copper, fragile features. But she also had a brightness to her, a cheerfulness that his wife never had: the quirky smile, the flash of humor in the eyes. She was throwing seeds to the ducks, who were largely ignoring her in favor of a boy throwing bits of bread.
“It’s terrible,” she said as he came up beside her. “Bread is terrible for them. Swells in their bellies.” She looked up at him and smiled. “Could even kill them. But everybody keeps throwing them bread, and when I give them a healthy alternative, they don’t want it.”
“Like people and fried food,” David said.
“Yeah. You like French fries?”
David laughed. “Love ’em. With vinegar.”
“I’ve never had them with vinegar.”
“Tell you what,” he said, his salesman’s instincts coming alive. “I’ll go to the supermarket and get some vinegar, you go to McDonald’s and get the fries. We’ll meet back here in half an hour.”
Her eyes gleamed. “It’s a deal.”
They became lovers that night. She moved in with him two weeks later. Their lovemaking was fierce, feral. For David it was laced through with the urgency to reclaim his humanity from the ruins of his past. She seemed happy to lose herself in his mad desire, and for a month they lived half-drunk on wine and fully drunk on each other. A sweat-soaked surrogate for happiness.
* * *
She sits in silence next to him on the bed, trembling. She’s fragile; he can probably kill her with his hands.
Her. An Intruder. A horror. A violation. Her existence defiles him and all humanity. The words of the Hunters ring in his head, and he remembers the one time his local chapter was part of a raid. Two women living together, both in their middle years. They were black, probably lesbians. They’d moved to town only a month after the Intrusion. One worked as a short-order cook at a diner, the other cleaned houses – the kinds of menial jobs
that didn’t require any history. There was no indication that either one had a family.
The Hunters spent a month watching them, digging through their trash, quietly learning what they could from neighbors and co-workers. They debated their options.
“What if we’re wrong?” someone said.
“We’re not wrong,” said the leader.
“We need to,” David said. He was usually silent, but he felt a flare of urgency, as if this were the moment that decided whether his lifeline out of despair was just a rope leading nowhere. “We need to do this.”
“Exactly,” said the leader, clenching his fists. “Humanity’s at stake!”
No, thought David. That’s not it at all.
The Hunters broke into the house wearing black masks and carrying ropes. The women were in bed together. The Hunters dragged them naked into the yard and hung them from an old oak. David stood watch near the street. He had no part in the killing. When it was over they dangled from the tree like sacks.
What if we’re wrong?
We’re not wrong.
A week later he met her in the park.
And now.
He looks at her tapering thigh and remembers touching it. The sun is shining on her goose-bumped arms, her breasts, her hair, blazing in the wetness of her eyes.
A violation, and her hands are soft.
“Will you kill me?” she asks.
His hand goes to her neck. It is downy at the nape. He runs a thumb along the rippling hardness of her trachea. His other hand goes to her hip by habit.
She looks into his eyes. “I love you,” she whispers.
His thumb slips down to the hollow of her throat. He remembers the women hanging from the tree. “My wife,” he begins, but falls silent because he can’t remember what he meant to say. He shakes his head. He doesn’t want to kill her. He wants to kiss her and touch her and lose himself inside her, like he has a hundred times before.
“How can you be human?”
She reaches up to touch the hand against her throat. She strokes the fingers, then lifts the hand and brings it to her lips.
“I’m so human,” she says.
Edison’s Conquest of Mars
Chapters I–IV
Garrett P. Serviss
[Publisher’s Note: This story was written as a sequel to Fighters on Mars, an unauthorized, altered version of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds.]
Chapter I
It is impossible that the stupendous events which followed the disastrous invasion of the earth by the Martians should go without record, and circumstances having placed the facts at my disposal, I deem it a duty, both to posterity and to those who were witnesses of and participants in the avenging counterstroke that the earth dealt back at its ruthless enemy in the heavens, to write down the story in a connected form.
The Martians had nearly all perished, not through our puny efforts, but in consequence of disease, and the few survivors fled in one of their projectile cars, inflicting their cruellest blow in the act of departure.
They possessed a mysterious explosive, of unimaginable puissance, with whose aid they set their car in motion for Mars from a point in Bergen County, N.J., just back of the Palisades.
The force of the explosion may be imagined when it is recollected that they had to give the car a velocity of more than seven miles per second in order to overcome the attraction of the earth and the resistance of the atmosphere.
The shock destroyed all of New York that had not already fallen a prey, and all the buildings yet standing in the surrounding towns and cities fell in one far-circling ruin.
The Palisades tumbled in vast sheets, starting a tidal wave in the Hudson that drowned the opposite shore.
The victims of this ferocious explosion were numbered by tens of thousands, and the shock, transmitted through the rocky frame of the globe, was recorded by seismographic pendulums in England and on the Continent of Europe.
The terrible results achieved by the invaders had produced everywhere a mingled feeling of consternation and hopelessness. The devastation was widespread. The death-dealing engines which the Martians had brought with them had proved irresistible and the inhabitants of the earth possessed nothing capable of contending against them. There had been no protection for the great cities; no protection even for the open country. Everything had gone down before the savage onslaught of those merciless invaders from space. Savage ruins covered the sites of many formerly flourishing towns and villages, and the broken walls of great cities stared at the heavens like the exhumed skeletons of Pompeii. The awful agencies had extirpated pastures and meadows and dried up the very springs of fertility in the earth where they had touched it. In some parts of the devastated lands pestilence broke out; elsewhere there was famine. Despondency black as night brooded over some of the fairest portions of the globe.
Yet all had not been destroyed, because all had not been reached by the withering hand of the destroyer. The Martians had not had time to complete their work before they themselves fell a prey to the diseases that carried them off at the very culmination of their triumph.
From those lands which had, fortunately, escaped invasion, relief was sent to the sufferers. The outburst of pity and of charity exceeded anything that the world had known. Differences of race and religion were swallowed up in the universal sympathy which was felt for those who had suffered so terribly from an evil that was as unexpected as it was unimaginable in its enormity.
But the worst was not yet. More dreadful than the actual suffering and the scenes of death and devastation which overspread the afflicted lands was the profound mental and moral depression that followed. This was shared even by those who had not seen the Martians and had not witnessed the destructive effects of the frightful engines of war that they had imported for the conquest of the earth. All mankind was sunk deep in this universal despair, and it became tenfold blacker when the astronomers announced from their observatories that strange lights were visible, moving and flashing upon the red surface of the Planet of War. These mysterious appearances could only be interpreted in the light of past experience to mean that the Martians were preparing for another invasion of the earth, and who could doubt that with the invincible powers of destruction at their command they would this time make their work complete and final?
This startling announcement was the more pitiable in its effects because it served to unnerve and discourage those few of stouter hearts and more hopeful temperaments who had already begun the labor of restoration and reconstruction amid the embers of their desolated homes. In New York this feeling of hope and confidence, this determination to rise against disaster and to wipe out the evidences of its dreadful presence as quickly as possible, had especially manifested itself. Already a company had been formed and a large amount of capital subscribed for the reconstruction of the destroyed bridges over the East River. Already architects were busily at work planning new twenty-story hotels and apartment houses; new churches and new cathedrals on a grander scale than before.
Amid this stir of renewed life came the fatal news that Mars was undoubtedly preparing to deal us a death blow. The sudden revulsion of feeling flitted like the shadow of an eclipse over the earth. The scenes that followed were indescribable. Men lost their reason. The faint-hearted ended the suspense with self-destruction, the stout-hearted remained steadfast, but without hope and knowing not what to do.
But there was a gleam of hope of which the general public as yet knew nothing. It was due to a few dauntless men of science, conspicuous among whom were Lord Kelvin, the great English savant; Herr Roentgen, the discoverer of the famous X ray, and especially Thomas A. Edison, the American genius of science. These men and a few others had examined with the utmost care the engines of war, the flying machines, the generators of mysterious destructive forces that the Martians had produced, with the object of discovering, if possible,
the sources of their power.
Suddenly from Mr. Edison’s laboratory at Orange flashed the startling intelligence that he had not only discovered the manner in which the invaders had been able to produce the mighty energies which they employed with such terrible effect, but that, going further, he had found a way to overcome them.
The glad news was quickly circulated throughout the civilized world. Luckily the Atlantic cables had not been destroyed by the Martians, so that communication between the Eastern and Western continents was uninterrupted. It was a proud day for America. Even while the Martians had been upon the earth, carrying everything before them, demonstrating to the confusion of the most optimistic that there was no possibility of standing against them, a feeling – a confidence had manifested itself in France, to a minor extent in England, and particularly in Russia, that the Americans might discover means to meet and master the invaders.
Now, it seemed, this hope and expectation were to be realized. Too late, it is true, in a certain sense, but not too late to meet the new invasion which the astronomers had announced was impending. The effect was as wonderful and indescribable as that of the despondency which but a little while before had overspread the world. One could almost hear the universal sigh of relief which went up from humanity. To relief succeeded confidence – so quickly does the human spirit recover like an elastic spring, when pressure is released.
“Let them come,” was the almost joyous cry. “We shall be ready for them now. The Americans have solved the problem. Edison has placed the means of victory within our power.”
Looking back upon that time now, I recall, with a thrill, the pride that stirred me at the thought that, after all, the inhabitants of the Earth were a match for those terrible men from Mars, despite all the advantage which they had gained from their millions of years of prior civilization and science.
As good fortunes, like bad, never come singly, the news of Mr. Edison’s discovery was quickly followed by additional glad tidings from that laboratory of marvels in the lap of the Orange mountains. During their career of conquest the Martians had astonished the inhabitants of the earth no less with their flying machines – which navigated our atmosphere as easily as they had that of their native planet – than with their more destructive inventions. These flying machines in themselves had given them an enormous advantage in the contest. High above the desolation that they had caused to reign on the surface of the earth, and, out of the range of our guns, they had hung safe in the upper air. From the clouds they had dropped death upon the earth.
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