But I was excited at the prospect of experiencing war up close again. I forgot my fear. I could see myself writing a book, being interviewed by Carson “Nuts” Davis or one of the other “regulars” on CNN. Oh yes!
By the time I returned to Novato late that evening—and it was a lot easier coming than going, let me tell you—I was even afraid that the silence that greeted me meant that I had missed the main event between Earth and Mars. I wanted to be in at the death! I wanted to see blood!
It was eleven o’clock when I reached town. The night was pockmarked with occasional streetlights, but many of them had been knocked out. I knew nothing of what’d happened in the ensuing hours. The radio was full of wild reports, as usual, but they didn’t convey all that much hard information. I suspected that the authorities were already censoring the news, trying to keep it both from us and from the enemy. What a dumb idea that seems in retrospect.
I didn’t even know what’d precipitated the initial conflict between our forces and theirs. It was just boom, boom, boom, rattle, rattle, rattle, zzzttt, zzzttt, zzzttt, and that was that. Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am. As I entered the outskirts of Novato, I could see along the western horizon a blood-red glow. As I drove ever nearer, it crept slowly upward in the sky. The clouds of the gathering storm mingled there with masses of black and red smoke.
Quartermass Street was deserted, and except for a lighted window or two, showed no signs of life whatever. I narrowly escaped hitting a multi-car pileup at the corner of Glass Road and Niswander Lane, where a small group had collected on one of the corners. They eyed me suspiciously as I edged past the tangled wreckage. From Niswander I partially followed Novato Creek into the small downtown area. As I ascended the little hill beyond St. Katherine’s Church, I could see signs of fire again. The nearby trees shivered in the fresh breeze. The rooftops were silhouetted black and sharp against the red-tinged clouds.
Suddenly a bright green flash illuminated the road around me, and I heard a very loud roaring noise pass over my head. It was a falling star—and a close one too. Another Martian ship was landing. I almost laughed out loud. When would it end? How many more were coming?
As I drove up Novato Boulevard, I could see the wreck of an Army transport hanging over a ditch off one side of the road, somewhere near Schweitzer Street. I passed Sargent’s Pepper Pot and Zee’s Zippy Zone, both closed and locked up tight. Even the KFC outlet had been abandoned, and the twenty-four-hour sign at McDonald’s, with its echo of Carl Sagan’s “billions and billions,” was turned off for the very first time that I could recall. I guess they didn’t serve Martians.
Because of the abandoned vehicles littering the street and the garbage strewn everywhere, I had to keep my eyes on the road. Then my attention suddenly wavered. Something was moving rapidly down one of the side streets. I couldn’t make it out at first. The light reflected off its dome in a flickering fashion unlike anything I’d ever seen. For a moment, I thought it was one of ours, some bizarre Army vehicle sent by the National Guard to defend the town. And then the thing shot forth its searchlight of destruction, illuminating the surrounding territory and its own immense body in pale emerald light.
How can I describe something so bizarre, so inhuman? It took the shape of a great tripod, twice as high as the houses around it, towering over most of the trees; and it strode down the street swaggering from side to side with imperial potency, smashing anything that got in its way, a walking, wobbling, withering engine of glossy, glittering metal, with long, articulate, almost animate ropes of some whitish alloy writhing beneath it. The clattering tumult of its passage intermingled with the riot of the flames and the revving of its weapon of mass destruction. Another immense flash, and then it abruptly heeled over on one foot, two of its supports waving in the air, and changed direction in mid-stride, moving down towards me on Kurtzoff Avenue, vanishing and reappearing almost instantaneously with each flash of its lightning-like weapon.
I’ve heard young people use the word “awesome” to describe just about everything that amazes them (which is just about everything in the world!); but I’d never been so surprised by anything in all my life. “Awesome” indeed!
The trees lining the street a block ahead of me parted like the Red Sea. The brittle reeds that were trunks snapped before Moses’s imperious command. A second tripod appeared, rushing headlong towards me. It must have been a hundred feet high, even larger than the first death-machine. And I was driving right at it down the middle of the main street in town! I slammed on my brakes, swung the car around, the tires protesting this unwanted exertion, and floored the gas pedal. The sting-ray touched the trunk of my vehicle, and I slewed sideways into a ditch filled with shallow water.
I unbuckled my belt and crawled out, almost immediately falling into the muck, just a second before another blast seared the top of the car, scorching me with its heat. Only the cool water saved me from being fried along with my vehicle. I scurried away as fast as I could, keeping my head down. The gas tank exploded behind me, showering me with metal debris. I looked back: one of the car’s burning wheels was still spinning slowly in the wind. Then I heard a clanking sound, and I pressed myself deep into the mud. The colossal mechanism went striding right by me, evidently satisfied that it had crushed the vermin menace. It ran up the avenue towards its brother.
Seen from behind, the thing was unbelievably large and strange. I had the distinct impression that it was somehow more than a gadget, more than just an odd collection of nuts and bolts, more than the classic robot warrior depicted in the old “B” films of the 1950s. There were plenty of mechanical parts, to be sure, and some kind of greenish alloy had been layered over the carapace and legs; but the long, flexible, glittering tentacles that dangled beneath the thing one of them gripping a tree trunk, swung and rattled against its shiny body. I spied an occasional glistening of gleaming flesh amidst the metal sheen.
The huge machine picked up its pace as it strode along, proud and arrogant and utterly without fear. The brazen hood that surmounted the thing moved to and fro, back and forth, like a giant mantis head looking for some new prey. Slung behind the main body was a basket of white metal that looked similar to a fisherman’s creel. Puffs of green smoke squirted randomly from the monster’s body as it swept by.
And then, in an instant, it was gone.
As it passed it began warbling a defiant, deafening howl that drowned out everything else:
“Ah-loo!” It screamed to the æther. “Ah-loo!”
In another minute it had joined its companion half a mile away, and then both of them moved on, stooping over something cached in the open field. I have no doubt that this was another of the alien ships dispatched from Mars.
“Ah-loo!” came the call once again. I thought of a pack of wolves baying to the stars.
I didn’t—and don’t—know what any of it meant, or if, indeed, the ululation meant anything at all. Maybe it was just the Martians’ cry of exultation.
I lay there in the mud for some time, wet and weary, watching the flashes of intermittent light and the monstrous metal gods bobbing in the distance under the skeletons of the few remaining trees. Their figures sometimes grew misty within the clouds of smoke, and then would suddenly flash again into sharp clarity. Occasionally the night swallowed them up altogether.
I was soaked through, but it was some time before my senses allowed me to struggle back up the bank to a dry spot on the asphalt. I’d been a fool, once again! I never seemed to learn.
I could see Min’s old observatory-cum-garage a few hundred yards distant. I made a run for it and hammered at the door, but no one answered (Mindon himself, of course, was long gone). I thought about breaking the glass, but decided that I really needed to get away from here altogether before the striders returned.
After awhile I succeeded in crawling home unobserved by the monstrous machines, heading back towards the residential area of Novato.
I pushed on, wet and shivering, towards my own house. It was
very dark indeed on the back roads. The streetlights were now out completely.
If I’d had any sense at all, I would have tried to rejoin my wife in Sonoma. But the shock of that night, and my physical weakness, prevented me from thinking clearly. I was bruised, I was weary, I was wet to the skin, and I was really, really dumb.
I blundered into a man in the darkness. He cried out in sheer terror, as did I, and then sprang sideways, rushing pell-mell down the street before I could gather my wits sufficiently to speak to him. I stayed close to the fence line, where I could keep my bearings, and worked my way down the street, yard by yard.
Near the intersection with Brea, I stumbled onto something soft and large, and was able to feel around enough with my feet to realize that I was touching the broken, bloody body of a man. A flash of light in the distance gave me just enough illumination to see that it was Brice Boston, his head bent down at an awkward angle, the rest of his body crumpled up on the sidewalk, as if he’d been flung there from on high. There was no sign of his weapon.
I felt for a pulse, but he was quite, quite dead. He’d owned a bar in town, the Shawnee Shack on Joseph McCarthy Boulevard; its walls had been littered with short snippets of really weird verse and prose poems, so his death was a kind of poetic justice, in a way. I had to stop myself from breaking out in hysterical laughter at the thought.
I stepped around the body and pushed on. The police station was abandoned and burned out. My own home, though, was still intact, save for the cracked chimney, and most of my neighbors’ dwellings seemed to have come through the conflagration relatively undamaged.
Down the road towards the bridge I could hear distant voices and the occasional sound of rushing feet, but I didn’t have the courage or energy to investigate. I just wanted to be left alone.
I let myself in, closed and locked and bolted the door, staggered to the foot of the staircase, and sat down, appalled by what had happened to me. All I could think of was the striding metal monsters, like something out of A. Merritt, and the dead body of my neighbor smashed against the walkway, unloved and unmourned and unparsed.
I crouched there on the stairs with my back pressed against the railing, shivering violently, sick and empty and filled with dread. I had no idea what to do or where to go. I knew nothing. That terrible night seemed to last forever, and I knew what my fellow citizens were feeling, each and every one—in Novato, in California, in the grand old U.S. of A., even in the world.
The age of man had ended.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I WILL FIGHT NO MORE FOREVER
Our chiefs are killed, the old men are all dead.
The little children are freezing to death.
My people have run away to the hills.
I will fight no more forever.
—Chief Joseph
Alex Smith, 26 December, Mars Year i
Novato, California, Planet Earth
After awhile I came to my senses. I was cold and wet. Little pools of water were dripping from my clothes onto the stairs. I got up and went into the living room. By feeling my way along the side of the room, I found a bottle of whiskey and fixed myself a sloppy drink. Then I crept upstairs to change my clothes.
I felt better afterwards, and went into my office, the window of which looks west towards the original Martian landing site. St. Katherine’s Tower and the trees surrounding it were gone. This opened up the view so much that I could see, very far away and backlit by a vivid red glare, the field surrounding the sand pit. Etched against the light were the huge black shapes of the Martian machines, grotesque and cartoonish, busily moving back and forth, up and down, and doing…something.
It seemed as if the whole countryside was on fire. The hills were crawling with tongues of flame, the brush in the open fields were burning fiercely, trees were going up one by one like Roman candles, swaying and writhing with the gusts of the night wind, and throwing a ruby reflection upon the clouds of smoke scudding overhead. I couldn’t see what the machines were doing or clearly identify the large black objects that they were manipulating. Neither could I determine exactly where the fires were burning, except that the nearest was located in one of the residential areas on the west side of town. The reflections of the flames danced up the walls and ceilings of my home. I could smell the sharp, biting tang of the smoke.
I crept closer to the open window. I could now see a charred and blackened zone of mixed pines and expensive homes in the Santana District, a relatively new development southwest of Novato. Many of the houses along the far end of Novato Boulevard had been reduced to glowing ruins. The light reflecting from the area surrounding the high school puzzled me at first, with its row of yellow oblong objects, but then I realized that these were the wrecked and abandoned carcasses of school buses. Some of them appeared to have burned.
Here and there I could see irregular patches of darkness scattered amidst the dimly glowing ground. There was no sign whatever of any attempt by “Official Novato” to contain the damage. The electricity was completely out by this point. I’d tried earlier to use my computer, but it was dead, along with everything else. I still had my laptop and cell phone, of course, for however long their batteries held out; but when I tried calling my wife a few minutes later, I couldn’t get a signal. Nothing else would connect, either.
It was as if my brief departure from town earlier in the evening had drawn a curtain over the city, shutting down all life and activity save that of the aliens. I had this weird sense of empowerment; it almost seemed to me as if I was somehow responsible for everything that had happened.
I didn’t see any signs of human life at first, but as I watched the tableaux unfold over the next hour, I was able to distinguish a number of small black figures scurrying from one side of the street to the other, keeping to the shadows, looking like bugs dodging for cover after a rock has been lifted from their hidey-holes.
This was my secure little world of the past five years. What had happened these last few days seemed unbelievable to me. Why had the Martians invaded Earth? What was their goal? I scarcely knew or understood, and even today many of their motivations are unclear. But as I continued to gaze out my window, I could see three gigantic black tripods striding to and fro in the glare from the landing site.
These machines never stopped except to “retool,” so to speak. I wondered if they were intelligent in themselves, or whether they were directed, personally or at a distance, by Martian controllers, using the artifacts as extensions of their own consciousnesses. I tried to imagine how an automobile or airplane might appear to dogs, if they’d been intelligent enough to understand such things.
Someone scrambled into my garden just below me with a slight scraping of the fence, and I roused myself from my lethargy. I could just make him out clambering over the stakes. I quietly leaned over the sill.
“Hssst!” I whispered.
He stopped, one leg poised over the barrier. Then he hopped into the yard and ran across the lawn to the corner of the house.
“Who’s there?” he asked, keeping his voice low. He stood under the window peering up at me.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Trying to survive.”
“I’ll let you into the house.”
I went down and opened the door and then relocked behind him, for all the good that would do. I couldn’t see his face, but he was wearing some kind of uniform.
A flash of green light revealed his features.
It was Private Mayer.
“What happened?” I asked.
“What hasn’t?” he said. “They wiped us out—just plain wiped us out.” He kept repeating the phrase over and over again.
“Here,” I said, handing him the bottle of whiskey. I didn’t bother with a glass.
He chugged down several swallows before gasping as the liquor hit the back of his throat. Then he sat down by the table, put his head on his arms, and began crying like a boy. It was a long time before he could answer my questions, and t
hen only very haltingly.
He’d been a transport driver for the National Guard. The Martians had emerged from their pit about the time I was driving Becky to Aunt Anita’s. When the engagement started, they’d fired several rounds into the enemy camp, but seemed to cause little if any damage. The aliens had begun crawling slowly towards them under the cover of some kind of metal shield.
Then this canopy had somehow risen up on three legs and become the first of the great fighting-machines. Mayer’d taken over one of the half-tracks when its driver had been killed, and had driven it around in circles for several minutes until it’d stalled in the sand. He’d just gone out to free the vehicle, when it’d taken a direct hit from one of the striders. He’d been thrown by the explosion into a hollow, which had saved his life, but the half-track had been destroyed. He’d been unconscious for a few minutes. When he awoke, he found dead bodies all around him.
“I used ’em as cover,” he said. “I was scared to death. Far as I could tell, my company’d been wiped out except for me. The smell was awful, like charred meat! Something had fallen across my back, probably a piece of the half-track, so I lay there until I felt better.
“They wiped us out!” he said again.
He’d remained there among the dead for some time, occasionally peering out to see what was happening. The Guardsmen from the northern camp had tried rushing the pit, keeping low, but the killing-machine had suddenly risen to its feet and begun striding back and forth across the field, its diamond-shaped hood methodically sweeping left and right like the head of a cowled monk. One of its many “arms” had carried a metallic case of some kind that had generated the sting-ray. Up close it looked very much like a green laser beam.
Within a few minutes there hadn’t been a living soul left on the field, and every remaining bush and tree (and there weren’t many by this time) had been reduced to blackened skeletons. There’d been other groups of soldiers somewhere beyond one of the hills—he had no idea what’d become of them. Our boys had exchanged fire with the enemy for at least another hour, and then everything had gone quiet again.
Invasion! Earth vs. The Aliens Page 6