CHAPTER TWELVE

THE METEOR FLAG

The meteor flag of England shall yet terrific burn.

—Thomas Campbell

Alex Smith, 27 December, Mars Year i

Novato, California, Planet Earth

As the rosy-fingered dawn began to brighten our small world, we withdrew from my office window and pattered very quietly downstairs.

Mayer agreed with me that the house wasn’t safe anymore. He wanted to go to San Francisco to find any military units that remained. I wanted to find my wife in Sonoma, and then evacuate with her and her cousin to somewhere in the north or east, if those areas were more secure. I already knew that the Bay Area in general must inevitably be the scene of some final battle between the Martians and our military for the control of Northern California, and that San Francisco would ultimately be the focal point of that encounter.

Between Novato and Sonoma to the north, however, one or more new Martian landing sites had now been established, and were guarded by their companions, the death-machines. I wasn’t sure where any of these were located specifically, other than the one just north of town. If I’d been unmarried, I think I’d have taken my chances and headed cross-country on foot; but Mayer said something at that juncture that I later thought very wise: “It’s no kindness to make someone a widow. My wife died a year ago, and there hasn’t been a day since that I haven’t missed her.”

Thus far there was no indication that the invaders had occupied any territory to the south of us, so in the end I agreed to accompany the Guardsman on at least part of the journey, until we’d passed through the danger zone. Then I’d try to find some way to slip by the striders to the east or west.

I’d have started immediately, but my companion had a bit more sense.

“Look,” he said, “an army marches on its stomach. We need to carry some rations with us. There aren’t going to be any fast-food joints open along the way, and we can’t count on the water somewhere else being drinkable.”

He still had part of his kit left, including his canteen. I found several backpacks that Becky and I had used in our younger days, and a couple of large plastic bottles. The water was still running, amazingly, although the pressure was low. I packed some protein bars, crackers, soup, canned fruit, apples, half a loaf of bread, and some meat, which wouldn’t last long, but could be kept cool for a day with a few blue ice packs that I retrieved from the freezer.

“What about transportation?” I asked.

“We don’t want anything that makes noise,” he said. “They’ll attract too much attention from the buggers. No, bicycles would be much better.”

I knew of a shop down on Citrus, if it was still there.

We crept out of the house, and ran as quickly as we could along Olivet Avenue. The dwellings on our street seemed deserted. Two blocks on I saw three charred bodies sprawled close together, struck dead by the sting-ray; and here and there were things that the evacuees had dropped in their flight—a Rolex, a slipper, a wallet, a torn doll, a skateboard, and other detritus. At the corner in front of the post office I saw a child’s cart filled with toys and cookie boxes; it’d overturned near the body of the woman who’d been pulling it. Someone had left a small stack of rubber-banded one-dollar bills in the ditch. All junk now!

None of the structures here had suffered much damage. The fires obviously hadn’t spread to this neighborhood. I didn’t see a living soul anywhere. The inhabitants who survived must have escaped, I supposed, along the highways exiting the east or south parts of town.

“Kinda quiet,” Mayer whispered in my ear.

“Too damned quiet,” I said.

Other than the distant booming and hooting of the Martians, I could hear nothing. Even the birds seem to have forsaken the sky.

Then we both turned at the same moment, as a jet came roaring out of the southeast, flying just above the treetops. As it passed over us, it unleashed a missile from under one wing, obviously aimed at the new Martian pit north of town. But the weapon had hardly cleared the aircraft before the green finger of a sting-ray blasted both it and the fighter right out of the sky. We heard the fragments of the plane crashing into a field on the other side of Kendall Street.

“Jeez!” The Guardsman ducked his head.

“I guess we know what happened to the Air Force,” I said.

“If the Army’s no good and the Air Force’s no good, how do we survive?” Mayer asked.

“Right now,” I said, “we’ll do exactly what we’d planned to do.”

I led the way to Briskette’s Bicycle Shop on Citrus, which was still intact. We pried open the back door without making too much racket, and picked out a couple of sturdy mountain bikes. We strapped our packs on the back, and then made our way through the city streets, generally heading southeast towards San Rafael. The damage to the structures and houses became progressively less the further we traveled, although we did encounter the body of a man in black slumped by the side of the road in Hillside Park; it looked as if he’d been shot in the back by a small-caliber gun. We stopped frequently to listen for the alien machines, but heard and saw nothing. South of Hillside we headed east to the Redwood Highway, also called the 101 Freeway. It was the easiest route to get through, even though we felt very nervous about being so much in the open.

There wasn’t a breath of wind that morning, and everything was strangely hushed. As we hurried along between the wrecked and abandoned vehicles, the Guardsman and I talked back and forth in whispers and looked over our shoulders constantly. We stopped every mile or so to rest and watch.

We exited at Marinwood, just north of San Rafael, and there we encountered a Humvee with an Army lieutenant and several privates. They were the first living souls we’d seen all morning. We hailed the vehicle, and they halted while we peddled towards them.

“Identify yourselves!” the officer ordered, while one of his men manned a machine gun mounted on the rear.

“Private First Class Oliver W. Mayer, sir!” the Guardsman said, saluting his superior; he then recited the name and number of his devastated unit, neither of which I now recall.

I added my own name, and would have included my rank and serial number, except that I didn’t have any. The officer wasn’t interested in me, though.

“What happened to you, soldier?”

“Sir, we engaged the enemy, sir, but were driven back.”

“And the rest of your men?”

“All dead or dispersed, sir.”

Then he told his story in more detail, and I corroborated what I’d seen myself.

“Where’s the enemy now?”

“You’ll see the Martians five or ten miles up this road, sir, or maybe sooner. But you don’t really want to see them,” Mayer said.

“Why not? We’re supposed to be scouting this area.”

“Well, sir, with all respect, sir, if they see you, you’re dead!”

The officer wanted a description.

“Giants in armor, sir, a hundred feet high at least, with three legs and a body like steel and aluminum, and a great head in a hood, sir.”

“Oh, come on, Private!”

“Really, sir! They carry a kind of weapon, sir, that shoots fire and strikes you dead.”

“You mean a laser?”

“Not exactly, sir,” and the artilleryman began a vivid account of his encounters with the sting-ray. Halfway through, the lieutenant interrupted the soldier and looked at me.

“It’s all perfectly true,” I said, nodding my head.

“Well,” said the officer, “I suppose I’ll have to see for myself. We’ve had very few accounts from the front. Private, you’ll report immediately to General Harroll at HQ near San Rafael, and tell him everything you know. He’s somewhere near the freeway a few miles south, around Los Ranchitos. Just ask the men you meet.”

“Yes, sir,” Mayer said.

Then the officer drove on, and we never saw any of them again.

Later we encountered a group of three women and two children, trying to clear a path through the wreckage. They had a little pick-up with a few belongings piled in the back. We stopped and gave them a hand.

“Where are you ladies heading?” I asked.

“North,” one of them said. “We walked across the Richmond Bridge yesterday, and found this truck. The Martians are all over the East Bay now.”

I told them that they really didn’t want to go north, since the aliens were already there, and that it was impassible anyway; they might be better off heading west to someplace like Woodacre.

We finally reached San Rafael, but the place seemed deserted, although relatively intact save for occasional looting. We were far beyond the range of the sting-ray here, and if it hadn’t been for the complete absence of traffic and people, the day would have seemed much like any other.

When we couldn’t find the Army HQ at Los Ranchitos, Mayer suggested that we move further southwest towards San Anselmo. At the edge of town we came upon another emplacement of half-tracks and artillery pieces. They looked like regular Army to the Guardsman. We checked with the soldiers, and they said that General Headquarters were now located further west. So we moved on.

As we neared the small town of Fairfax, California, we saw increasing signs of a military buildup, including a group of MP’s blocking the road.

We told them our business, and were conveyed to a vacant house that was being used as temporary HQ. There we repeated our story to General Harroll.

“Well,” he finally said, “the Martians haven’t faced the real army yet, or any real weapons either. We’ve got some really big guns here.”

“Yes, sir,” Mayer said. “With respect, sir, you haven’t seen the Martians yet.”

“No, son, I haven’t, but I certainly will, and very soon, from what I hear. There’re supposed to be one or more of the fighting-machines heading towards us. I don’t know when they’ll get here, but we’ll have to stop them when they do.”

The Guardsman was ordered to refresh himself and report later in the day to a recon unit.

“Smith, I’m sorry, but you’ll have to stick around for awhile,” Harroll said. “I’d suggest staying close to Private Mayer.”

We headed for the temporary mess hall in a local school, where we finally got a hot lunch and some cold drinks; and then tried to find the company where Mayer was supposed to report.

We noticed a number of officers periodically staring over the treetops towards the northwest (and not towards Novato); many of the soldiers were engaged in the age-old military tradition of digging ditches.

Fairfax proper was being evacuated. It had apparently served as a processing center for refugees, and the military was determined to get the civilians out of the area, ferrying them south to the coast. I saw a makeshift ambulance rush by, large red crosses painted on its sides. The roads were being kept open by the MP’s. Heavy equipment was pushing stalled or wrecked vehicles off the roads, and at least one bulldozer was clearing away the brush.

Of course, some of the locals didn’t want to leave, but they were picked up and forcibly loaded onto trucks when they refused. After asking around, we finally located the recon company to which Mayer had been detached, and received orders to take our bikes and peddle four or fives miles out along San Pedro Road to where it overlooks San Pablo Bay. Apparently, they were afraid that there might be an enemy attack from El Cerrito and Richmond, which were now overrun with the great striders.

We reached San Rafael again in ten minutes. This section of the town showed more life than the northern part had, although the place was in such turmoil that no one seemed to know anything about anything. I saw refugees from other cities trying to find somewhere to go with their families, plus long convoys of military trucks and transports and half-tracks and Humvees—and even a few tanks. Everywhere I encountered chaos and disorder. Mayer had to threaten several people to get us through.

We finally found the camp where the recon squad was located, and Mayer reported to the noncom there. I could see a fair distance in every direction, so I decided to remain awhile.

The Bay was filled with small boats as people tried to flee variously perceived perils to the east and west. Some of them were so packed with refugees that they sank under their own weight, but there was nothing we could do for them. Around us an excited and noisy crowd of fugitives was trying to escape inland. Several times the squad leader, Sergeant Antonio Vásquez Caballero, had to warn people away with his rifle.

I talked with one old couple who’d rowed from San Pablo to Barbier Memorial Park that morning. They lived on San Carlito Avenue in El Cerrito. Apparently, a Martian machine had come west from Walnut Creek, and another had followed the coast down from Vallejo. Together they’d destroyed the big refinery at Richmond. We could easily see the flames still burning there.

I don’t know where these people eventually went. I suspect a great many of them just died over the next few days. There wasn’t any place left that was safe from alien incursion. Some folks had the idea that the Martians were simply human beings from some other country. They couldn’t accept the idea of an attack from outer space.

Except where the boats were landing and the people were milling, everything else seemed pretty quiet. The folks who were decamping on the beach headed away from the shore fairly quickly, particularly once they understood that we couldn’t share our provisions. One tried to pull a pistol on us, and Vásquez Caballero shot him in the face. I could see a large ferryboat beached a few miles south of us, but it had long since emptied out. Three or four soldiers were standing around doing nothing.

“What’s that?” one of the refugees said when a big boom echoed in the distance.

Then the sound came again, this time from the direction of Fairfax, a deep, muffled thud, the throaty exhalation of a very large gun.

The fighting was beginning again. God, I’d already seen enough of the war to last me all my days. Almost immediately, the unseen batteries across the Bay took up the chorus, firing one after the other. A woman screamed down on the beach. Everyone stood around, not knowing what to do or where to go. We could see nothing of the Martians.

“The Army’ll stop ’em,” one woman said, but she didn’t sound too sure of herself.

Then explosions came seemingly from everywhere, left and right and all around, and the air began filling with clouds of smoke and dust and signs of fires burning in some of the houses in San Rafael. I could now hear the unique zzzttt of the weapons used by the great metal striders.

“HQ, HQ!” Vásquez Caballero shouted into his radio, “Cease fire! You’re firing on us!”

“Here they come!” one of the soldiers said.

Across the Bay near the Richmond Bridge they appeared, one tripod striding after the other. One, two, three, four of the armored machines advanced through the city of Richmond, looking like miniature Eiffel Towers in the distance. I could see the squirts of green fire emanating from under their hoods.

A fifth strider materialized further north in San Pablo, its glittering body shimmering in the afternoon sun as it swept forward, destroying the gun emplacements there. One of the aliens in Richmond aimed a shot at the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, damaging it. A second bolt accidentally breached the walls of San Quentin Prison; God knows what happened to the men sequestered there.

At the sight of these terrible machines the crowd of refugees near the water’s edge seemed struck mute by horror and dismay. They could only stand there, mouths agape and faces stricken, shocked silent by the approaching danger. There was no screaming or shouting—not yet anyway!

Two of the Martian tripods entered the water, and began heading across the Bay towards San Rafael.

“Get out of here!” I shouted to the masses, but they needed no urging from me. They rushed west into the park and then into the streets of the city. But where could they go?

As I turned around again to face the Bay, I realized that the fifth machine was coming right across the water to Peacock Gap, where we were standing. Then I broke and ran, not waiting for Mayer or anyone else. The approaching fighting-machine rushed right up the gravel beach towards us. The recon site was blasted out of existence with one shot. One of the boatloads of fugitives was swamped by a huge wave when the tripod’s foot splashed into the water nearby. The stones under my feet were muddy and slick. Then, as the Martian machine towered overhead just a couple of hundred yards away, zapping some target off in the distance, I flung myself forward into a depression in the ground, and put my hands over my head.

But the strider took no more notice of the people running from it than a man would of a bunch of ants in a nest that his foot had disturbed. The machine’s hood pointed at the batteries that were still firing near Fairfax and let loose a mighty blast. Most of the guns went silent.

However, the Army had hidden a couple of camouflaged tanks in a nearby residential section. Two or three of these weapons now opened fire at close range. The sudden near concussion, the last one close upon the first, made my heart jump. The monster was already raising its sting-ray when the first shell burst just six yards from its cowl. Simultaneously, two other shells exploded in the air near its body, slewing it around—and then a fourth shell impacted directly on the hood. The strider’s carapace bulged, flashed green and red, and disintegrated into a thousand tattered fragments of ruby flesh and glittering metal.

The refugees uttered a collective cry somewhere between a scream and a cheer.

Amazingly, the decapitated colossus didn’t topple. It must have had some automatic stabilizer that restored its balance, because it started walking forward in a straight line into the city, obviously without direction, crushing cars, people, and even houses beneath its huge pads. It smashed forward until it hit the brick façade of St. Gandalf’s Church, which it demolished in the act of destroying itself. There was a muffled explosion that sent pieces of the machine in all directions, but the greater part of it was still intact, although crumpled on its side.

I ran the several city blocks to the wreck.

Thick clouds of smoke were pouring from the downed strider, and through the whirling wisps I could see its giant limbs churning the soil and flinging a spray of dirt into the air. The tentacles swayed and struck out like living arms, maiming anything they encountered. It was as if some great wounded thing was struggling for its life. Enormous quantities of a reddish-brown fluid were spurting in noisy jets out of the machine in all directions. I didn’t know whether it was blood or oil or some combination thereof.

Two other machines responded immediately to the plight of their brother, heading in our direction, advancing with gigantic strides from the beach. As soon as they were in range, the tanks opened up again.

I ran a half block and hit the ground once more. I could hear the shells whistling over my head and impacting on the Point, and the returning zaps of the Martian weapons. The noise was deafening. Then I saw them again, those twin towers of gray, as they attacked and destroyed the tanks. They’d passed me by somehow, and were now stooping over the still-spurting remains of their comrade.

A third and fourth machine now appeared, zapping their sting-rays in every direction. I heard rather than saw a flight of jets high above me, but they either quickly passed by or were blasted out of the sky, because they were only evident for a short period of time. The whine of shells, the crackling hiss of the Martian beams, the crashing of the houses, the screaming of the people, the burning of the fires, all mingled together to form the cacophony of battle.

I wanted to hide.

I wanted to run away.

I had no idea where to go.

Clouds of dense black smoke obscured the city and San Pablo Bay, limiting my vision on those occasions when I was able to raise my head. I knew that the tanks were out of action, because the distinctive whoof-swish sound of their shells had vanished.

I stood up, finally, to see what was going on. Through the fog of war I could spy some of the refugees, still trying to find some hole in which to hide. In the distance they looked like little frogs leap-hopping through the grass, running back and forth in dismay.

Then the sting-ray was back again, its emerald lance poking ever closer to me. The nearest row of houses caved in as it dissolved with the touch, sending flames of despair into the sky; the trees in the park caught fire with a roar of protest. And still the green light flickered up and down, here and there, licking up the people, and coming within fifty yards of where I stood.

I screamed out loud, and staggered through the leaping, hissing earth back towards the beach. Had my foot stumbled, that would have been the end of me. I ran helplessly away in full sight of the Martians.

I expected to die.

I have this dim memory of a great Martian foot coming down within yards of my body, driving straight into the loose gravel, whirling its way forward and lifting again. Then the four remaining machines strode away from me and gathered around their fallen brother. They picked up the shattered remains, and gently carried the debris of their comrade between them back across the Bay to Richmond. I thought of a baby rocking in its cradle.

Slowly, then, so very slowly, I realized that by some miracle I had once again escaped the touch of death.