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 then 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.

“Like the grave!” he said.

After that the great striding machine had then walked away across the landscape, apparently seeking out another Martian landing site somewhere close by. It’d been gone an hour or two, and then had returned with a second fighting-machine even larger than the first.

“Why didn’t you run away?” I asked.

“Where would I’ve gone?” Mayer said. “I didn’t know what was happening or where my friends were. I’d been told to stay put at the camp until I received orders to the contrary, so I did.”

“What happened then?”

“Well, the buggers came back to the first pit, gathered up some equipment or supplies or something—I’m not sure what—and then left again. This time I had the feeling that they’d gone for good. Not that I was going to crawl over there to find out, mind! But finally I needed to take a dump, and so I headed off into the brush. And afterwards, I waited as long as I could, but when none of the other guys showed up, I decided to return to Novato.”

I questioned him about what he’d seen along the way.

“Man, there’s just nothing left,” he said, “nothing. The people are either gone or dead. Some of the houses were burned by the fires. The roads’re all jammed—I could see that the 101 was packed bumper-to-bumper north and south, but the cars are mostly empty. I only spotted a few folks still alive, and they hid whenever they saw me.”

And then he told me something that chilled my very soul.

“They were harvesting the people!” he said. “The machines, I mean. I saw them doin’ it out near the freeway. Some they killed, some they took prisoner, stashing ’em in a kind of webbed basket.

“I gotta get to Frisco, man. There’s gotta be someone left down there. I’ve gotta find an officer. I’ve gotta get my orders. See?”

Mayer had eaten nothing other than a few crackers, so I found some meat and bread in the fridge, which was still holding its temperature pretty well, and would for another day or so. I also had some candles, but we dared not light them for fear of attracting the Martians, so we did everything by touch. He rambled on for a bit before dozing off. I couldn’t sleep, so I waited in that godawful dungeon until things began to emerge again from the shadows, and the trampled bushes and broken roses beneath my second-story window grew more distinct. I could now see his face quite clearly, blackened and lined; mine probably wasn’t much different.

When we’d finished our early breakfast, we snuck softly upstairs to my office, and I looked out again over the western part of the valley. In one night, just one, everything had become a vale of ashes, everything but our street and a good part of Novato Boulevard. The fires had dwindled now, although I could still see occasional gusts of smoke. The ruins of the shattered, gutted houses and the blasted, blackened trees that the night had hidden now emerged gaunt and terrible in the pitiless light of dawn.

Here and there some object or building had escaped the devastation—a house, a business, a church standing out white and fresh amidst the wreckage. In the distance, sparkling brightly in the growing light of the sun, were three of the great metal giants, standing sentinel around one of the newest of the Martian landing sites, their cowls rotating constantly as though surveying all the desolation that they’d made.

It seemed to me that this new pit was larger than the original, and that the aliens were building something there. I could see puffs of green vapor streaming from the site towards the brightening dawn, jumping up and around in playful patterns until they vanished into the haze. Even at this distance, I could hear a low boom-boom-boom sound emanating from the pit. It reminded me of hip-hop music.

It was now the Twenty-Seventh.

I knew we had to leave Novato, but there was no place to go.