Just as Steve reached the SUV, a Highway Patrol car came slewing around the corner, and ran up the short stretch of Highway 74 to the barricade.
“You men there, what are you doing?” echoed the voice from the official vehicle’s loudspeaker.
The “tax collectors” dodged behind their trucks, and abruptly and without warning opened fire. Multiple shots hit the police car, killing the officer inside, stray bullets whizzing by Steve’s head. He jumped into the SUV, slammed the door, and yelled “Floor it!”
They continued down the perimeter road along the lake. A few miles away, another traffic jam slowed them down.
“We’ve got to find shelter for the night,” Steve said.
“Where?” Cassie asked.
He pointed to an unlit house set back from the street.
“Try there.”
When he pounded on the front door, no one answered, so they drove around the place, and hid the SUV from the sight of the road. Then they prepared to camp.
“I’ve just got the two sleeping bags,” Cassie said.
“Keep ’em for yourselves. I have a pillow and a blanket in my pack. That’s enough.”
“We could break into the place,” she said.
He shook his head. “That wouldn’t be right.”
And that was Monday night.
They awoke the next morning to the sound of repeated gunfire off to the north.
“The ‘tax collectors’,” Steve said, groaning as he tried to sit up. He was stiff from sleeping on the ground.
“You think they finally caught up with them?” Cassie asked.
“Had to. The authorities wouldn’t allow something like that to continue.”
They started loading their things back into the SUV.
“Crap!” Steve said, pointing to a hole in the side of the vehicle.
He started going through everything, closely examining the contents, and then shook his head.
“What’s the matter?” Cassie wanted to know.
He grunted and frowned: “Bike’s ruined.”
He hauled it out and showed her the damage to the engine.
“Can’t do anything about it,” he said, tossing the cycle to one side.
Then he indicated a nearby faucet.
“Best fill up every container you’ve got,” he said.
Afterwards they drove into the little town of Lake Elsinore, and found a small, family-run restaurant that was still open.
“Don’t know how long the eggs will last,” the proprietress said, “but you’re welcome to them while we’ve got ’em. Coffee, honey?”
“Please,” Steve said, and they had a quiet breakfast together.
“Any papers?” he asked.
“The Valley Chronicle published a one-sheeter this morning, but most of the news is on TV.” She used her remote to turn up the sound.
“Fighting is reported throughout the San Bernardino area, in Palm Springs, and near Palmdale and Victorville,” the Channel 14 newscaster said. “We’ve got reliable reports that the Martians are on the move again, and that the military is deploying its forces to meet the threat. People are being encouraged to evacuate to the coast, where a massive operation is underway to transport the population to safer areas, particularly San Diego and Mexico.
“The southern freeways remain open, but are heavily crowded with bumper-to-bumper traffic; the same is true of the Pacific Coast Highway. Average speed on these roads is less than ten miles per hour. Several of our newscopters have been shot down, and the rest of the fleet has been confiscated by the Air Force, so we can’t give you our usual live coverage. Power has been lost in most of the outlying communities of the L.A. Basin. The Mayor continues to urge calm, and the Governor has issued a statement from his hotel in Austria, telling everyone to be brave and ‘kick some Martian butt’. That’s a direct quote.”
“Calm and brave, right,” Steve said, “just like him. Say, any service stations still open?” he asked the owner.
“Try Ben’s Den over on Water Street,” she said. “If anyone’s got gas, he does. Tell him JoAnn sent you.”
After finishing their meal, they topped off their tank, and then headed back to the Ortega Highway, which was finally open, but completely filled with traffic.
“You really want to do this?” Steve asked.
He was driving now.
“My sister’s in Laguna,” she said.
“But is she even there?”
Cassie tried calling on her cell phone.
“Nothing,” she said.
“Here’re our choices: we can go north to Orange County, where the roads will be terribly impacted; we can take I-15 south, with the same result; or we can chance the Ortega Highway over the hump. It’s about thirty miles through the Elsinore Mountains to San Juan Capistrano, but once we start, there’s no way out: we either come or we go. If we run into some guys like the ones we met last night, we’ll be completely at their mercy.”
She sighed. “I don’t know what to do,” she said. “Let’s try it, Steve. I don’t know why, but I trust you.”
“I trust you too,” Erie’s voice said from the back seat.
“OK, then,” he said, and turned onto the highway, forcing his way into the line of vehicles.
The Ortega Highway swings back and forth across the flank of the mountains just north of Elsinore Peak, a 3,500-foot expanse of dry scrub and bushes and trees. Spread along the top of the plateau is the Cleveland National Forest, which includes live-oaks and pine trees as well as scrub and chaparral. As the automobile crawled up the side of the mountain, they had a splendid view of the entire Moreno and Temescal Valleys.
Suddenly they could hear the rumble of heavy firing somewhere in the east.
“Look,” Erie yelled, “over there!”
She pointed out the window.
Far off in the distance they could make out the spindly skeletons of three of the Martian fighting-machines, slowly but inevitably working their way down the Moreno Valley.
“They must have destroyed March Air Reserve Base,” Steve said, pointing to the huge clouds of smoke reaching into the heavens above 2,500-foot-high Steele Peak, which blocked their direct view of the old military facility.
Their SUV continued to inch its way up the flank of the mountain at a stately five miles per hour.
“They’re coming!” Erie suddenly screamed.
“They’re still a long way off,” Steve said. “It’s OK, really.”
But they could see that the striders were moving visibly closer, even as they watched. Cassie and her daughter both had their heads hanging out of the windows on the right-hand side of the car.
“What’s that?” Cassie asked.
Steve glanced over. The Martian machines were coming down the slope from Perris, spraying some kind of black cloud towards the town of Lake Elsinore.
“What are they doing, Steve?”
“I have absolutely no idea,” he said, “but it doesn’t look good. This isn’t their usual weapon.”
“Please go faster,” Erie said.
“I’m going as fast as I can, Little One,” he said.
“Mommy, I’m scared.”
“Me too, Erin,” her mother said, “but we need to be brave now. Steve will get us through.”
But that journey, my brother later told me, was the longest of his life, and he prayed to God all through that interminable trip, not for his own salvation, but to spare the lives of Cassie and her daughter. It took them two hours to reach the top, while the Temescal Valley and Lake Elsinore and surrounding communities all became completely enshrouded in the oily fog. He had no idea what was going on down there, but he knew it couldn’t be good.
He felt an exultation of spirit when they reached the plateau of the Elsinore Mountains. It was around noon, so they broke out some simple fare for lunch, passing it around in the car, even as they continued to inch forward towards Orange County.
No one said anything, not even Erie. It wasn’t necessar
y. Just their companionship was enough.
If I get no more than this, Steve remembered thinking to himself, I’ll be well satisfied. He looked at his fellow travelers and smiled.
“I think we made it,” he said. “I really do.”
Cassie smiled back at him.
“I know I have,” she said.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
MY DARLING BECKY
There is in every true woman’s heart a spark of heavenly fire, which lies dormant in the broad daylight of prosperity; but which kindles up, and beams and blazes in the dark hour of adversity.
—Washington Irving
Alex Smith, 26 December, Mars Year i
Sonoma County, California, Planet Earth
The more time I had to think about it, the more I feared for the life and safety of my dear wife, Rebecca. I’d left with her Aunt Anita and Anita’s beau, Dave Kwon, in Sonoma, on the day after Christmas. It now seemed forever to me, but only a few days had actually passed.
I’d thought that she’d be safe there, but one of the Martian machines from Richmond had veered north to Vallejo at the top of San Pablo Bay, and was preparing to move northwest into Napa and Sonoma and ultimately to Santa Rosa, destroying the railroads there as well as the communication centers. Sonoma was on a straight line from Vallejo to Santa Rosa and was bound to be affected. Thankfully, I didn’t know about any of this at the time.
About three in the morning the police cars went blaring up and down the city streets, telling the people of Sonoma to evacuate, that the Martians were coming, and that they had fifteen minutes to leave. Becky got Anita and Dave into their old pickup, and crammed into the front seat as a third, with the dog tied in back in the open bed. My wife drove.
They headed up State Route 12, passing through Boyes Hot Springs and Glen Ellen. The police had routed the fugitives onto both lanes of the highway; in a few places they were able to crowd the cars three across by using the shoulders. They averaged about fifteen miles an hour.
As they were leaving, they could hear a series of huge blasts, punctuated with gunfire and the zapping sounds made by the alien weapons; and could see occasional flashes of green light in the direction of Sonoma. Anita was whimpering, she was so scared, and so was the little schnauzer in back, whose name was Fritzie; he was a sweet little thing, very bright and affectionate.
They’d just passed Glen Ellen when they were forced to stop. They tried to see what was happening up front, but the lights of the Highway Patrol vehicles obscured everything, together with clouds of gray smoke.
Then they heard something that absolutely terrified them: a deep boom-boom-boom noise. The ground began to vibrate, and they suddenly realized that one of the Martian striders was almost upon them. Anita screamed for help; Becky reached over and grabbed her aunt, telling her to be absolutely quiet. Then she turned off the lights.
Boom-boom-boom it went, pounding ever closer. Suddenly the car in front of them was smashed out of existence, as an enormous pad came out of the sky to crunch the vehicle into a flat metal flan, like something done by an auto wrecker. They could see the shaft of the leg extending up into the heavens, God knows how high; and then it lifted again, carrying pieces of the SUV and its inhabitants with it—and boom-boom-boom, continued on towards Santa Rosa.
“We can’t go forward,” my wife said.
“We can’t go back either,” Dave said. “We’re stuck!”
And it was true: the wrecks that now littered the road made it impossible to travel any further on Highway 12.
“You know, there’s a cutoff that runs from Glen Ellen to Oakville,” Dave said. “We could walk the mile or so back to Glen Ellen, and then head into the woods.”
“I don’t know how far I can manage on foot,” Aunt Anita said.
Her knees were bad, Becky knew, and her weight would make it difficult for her to walk any great distance.
“We’ll do the best we can,” my wife said.
They packed up whatever they could carry, got Fritzie out of the truck bed, and then started trudging their way down the edge of the highway in the dark. They proceeded very slowly, both because of occasional motorcyclists, private and official, that were scooting by, and because of other pedestrians, some of whom were moving in the opposite direction.
When they reached Glen Ellen, it was obvious that Anita wouldn’t be able to continue much further, and that they all had to rest in any case. By this time it was starting to get light.
Glen Ellen is actually located a little to the west of Highway 12. Several secondary roads connect there, one leading off to the east, and several to the west. They stopped and found a motel where the proprietor took pity on them, giving them bagels and orange juice.
“You really need to get out of here,” the man said. “The Martians are all over Sonoma, I hear, and they’ve passed this way several times already, heading towards Santa Rosa.”
“Where can we go?” Becky asked.
“Don’t know,” the man said. “Maybe west would be best, but I couldn’t swear to it.”
“No,” Anita said. “I absolutely can’t go any further.”
So they stayed in Glen Ellen for the rest of that day, and saw no more Martians, ironically enough, although they heard periodically from different law enforcement officers that the aliens were still roaming around somewhere. They were all so tired by then that they didn’t really care that much. The power had failed, so there was no hard news of any kind; indeed, nothing was working except the tap water. Occasionally a police car would check on them.
Finally the authorities got a convoy of trucks through, and evacuated all the people they could find to Rohnert Park in the west. Fritzie sat up on Anita’s lap, looking thoroughly disgruntled by the proceedings.
I heard all of this many weeks later from the proprietor of the motel, Berke Fernández; but he knew nothing of what’d become of Becky and her aunt thereafter. He chose to remain with his property throughout the crisis, and somehow survived everything that followed.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE BLACK DEATH
I counted two and seventy stenches,
All well defined, and several stinks.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Alex Smith, 27 December, Mars Year i
Marin County, California, Planet Earth
About the time that the minister and I had our first tête-à-tête, the Martians were moving again. As far as I can tell from the conflicting accounts that were published later, most of the enemy remained busy with the great construction projects in their respective pits until about nine in the evening, generating huge volumes of dark green smoke. I think they must have been assembling their weapons of mass destruction.
The aliens must have been dissatisfied with the progress of the war thus far. They’d lost several machines to our attacks, and while they’d greatly and quickly overpowered our forces in each case, they couldn’t really afford a war of attrition. The supply lines to the home world were just too long and uncertain.
That night they began advancing again, slowly and cautiously, making their way south towards San Francisco in the west and to San José in the east. The two machines that had been assembled in Mountain View remained standing there, silent and alert, apparently serving as anchors for their companions’ great sweep southward.
The striders didn’t usually advance as a single grouped body, but often in a formation that resembled a loose, looping triangle, each separated from its fellows by a mile or two. Sometimes the point of one triangle was joined to another. The apex of each triangle could then wander left or right as needed for mop-up operations. They communicated with each other through siren-like howls, running up and down the scale from one note to another, if that’s what it was. No one has ever deciphered this language. I eventually concluded that the whoops and hollers were more like signals than anything else.
Of course, we’d heard the long wailing during the Battle of San Rafael, before the Martians retreated to Richmond. They
didn’t stay there for long, though, crossing San Pablo Bay again later that night. The National Guardsmen, consisting mostly of unseasoned volunteers, were now holding our front lines; most of our regular forces had been decimated during those first few days.
A typical engagement usually ran something like this: the Guardsmen would fire one wild, premature, and wholly ineffectual volley, just enough to identify where they were, and then the Martians would either destroy them with their sting-rays, or bypass them altogether to attack our HQ and C&C facilities. Afterwards, they’d often return to the front lines to finish the job. In this way our forces were quite literally picked apart, unit by unit, and destroyed as an effective “fighting machine.”
One group of tanks rallied at Hayward and ambushed a Martian strider moving south towards them, laying down very accurate fire, as deliberately as if they had been performing an exercise on a range somewhere.
The Martian machine advanced a few paces, staggered, and went down with a great whump of dust. Everyone cheered. The toppled alien, however, set up a prolonged ululation, an unholy racket indeed, and immediately a second glittering giant answered him, appearing over the trees just to the north. One leg of the damaged strider had been smashed by our shells. The second and third volleys flew wide of the Martian on the ground, and simultaneously its companion brought its ray-gun to bear on our tanks. The vehicles blew up, ammunition and all, and only one or two of our boys escaped.
The downed machine was eventually repaired and put back into service.
We could hear a continuous booming to the north and east on the other side of the Bay.
A few minutes past ten that night, the minister and I were still hiding in the shrubs along the road; I think we were somewhere in Mill Valley. Then three great machines loomed out of the darkness to the north. We could just make them out by the pale light of the moon, glittering as they twisted and turned in their wobbling style of walk.
A dozen rockets suddenly shot from the hills behind them, but eleven were immediately knocked from the sky by the green rays, and the twelfth impacted a tree short of its target. The Martians sometimes seemed to have difficulty locating our men, who must have broken into small guerrilla groups to attack the striders from cover. Four more of the fighting-machines soon joined the group, sweeping up and down the countryside to our left, looking for the soldiers who’d dared attack them.
Invasion! Earth vs. The Aliens Page 10