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.

“We need to find cover,” I said.

The minister cried faintly in her throat and began dashing down the road, but I knew it was no good running from a Martian, so I turned aside and crawled through some nettles and underbrush into the broad drainage ditch that ran by the side of the street. She looked back, saw what I was doing, and returned to join me.

Two of the great tripods halted near us, perhaps having seen our movement; the nearer of the machines was facing Tamalpais Valley, while the other strider was outlined indistinctly against the sky. I couldn’t be sure of its exact location.

The unworldly howling had ceased; the machines then took positions equally spaced from each other, working in absolute silence. They actually formed a half-circle, I later learned, with about twelve miles between the horns at its furthest extent.

We still had soldiers out there somewhere, targeting at least part of the crescent formation—at San Rafael and Novato and San Anselmo and Fairfax and Woodacre, and even at Point Reyes on the coast. Behind hills and woods, in ravines and gullies, across the flat meadows, wherever a group of trees or houses provided sufficient cover, our men patiently waited for the enemy’s next move. I don’t know if General Harroll was directing the activity, or if some other officer was in charge. Everyone knew, though, that this represented our final throw of the dice. The Martians just had to advance a little further into our line of fire, and instantly those motionless black forms, those guns and tanks glittering so darkly in the night, would explode into thunderous fury, would light up the sky with their weapons, and then water the soil with their valiant blood.

How much did the aliens actually understand? No one has ever answered that question to my satisfaction. Did the Martians appreciate the bravery of our boys? Or did they interpret our occasional spurts of activity, the sudden stinging of our shells, as the onslaught of a hive of bees, something to be brushed aside? Did they dream of killing us? What did they want? I had no idea, and neither did anyone else.

I’ve asked myself these questions a hundred times or more, and still I have no answer that makes much sense, although I know more now than I did then. As I watched those vast, impersonal sentinels standing so very close to us that night, I realized how utterly alien they were, and how strange we must seem to them. Was some understanding between the two species even possible?

Then came a sound like the distant concussion of a gun, followed by a long whoosh, and then another, and yet another. The Martian near us raised a tube on high and discharged it with a heavy boom that made the ground heave. The one further north answered it. There wasn’t any flash or smoke, just this ominous series of dull detonations, followed by the whooshing sound I’d heard previously.

This was obviously something new! I was so curious that I completely forgot my fear and climbed onto an adjoining wall. I stood there staring southeast towards Almonte. Just then I heard another loud report, and could feel rather than see a large projectile hurtling overhead down the valley towards the Bay. I expected to observe some flash of its detonation where it landed, but instead all I could see was the dark sky above, dimly lit by the moon, and a kind of mist spreading wide and low below me near the coast. The silence returned.

“What’s happening?” the minister hissed, crouching beside me.

“I have no idea,” I said.

A bat flickered by and vanished from sight. A distant shouting began—and then abruptly ceased. I looked up again at the Martian machine, and saw that it was now moving southeast along the creek bed, with a swift, rolling motion generated by the working of its three legs.

Every moment I expected some hidden emplacement of ours to attack the striders, but the evening remained calm and silent. This was very strange indeed. The figure of the Martian grew smaller as it receded, and presently the mist and night swallowed it up completely. We climbed higher along the wall as it paralleled the road, trying to see something, anything, that might tell us what was going on. Towards Almonte I could perceive a darkened hollow with a hill poking out of it; and then, on the other side of the stream, another. I couldn’t make any sense of it. What the hell was happening here?

I looked to the north, and there I saw a third of the black clouds hugging the ground.

Everything had become very still. Far away to the southeast, I heard the Martians hooting to one another, and then the air quivered again with the distant thud of their guns. But our own weapons made no reply.

“We need to get to higher ground,” I said, suddenly seized with apprehension.

I don’t know why I was so worried, but there was something very wrong about what I’d observed. So we headed immediately up the road leading out of Mill Valley to a hilly area between the two gullies. I just didn’t like the look of that black vapor.

Later I learned much more about the Black Death, as it came to be called, but everything then was still a mystery to us. It was just my gut instinct that drove us up that hill and saved our sorry lives.

The poisonous gas was dispensed in several ways. It could be shot some distance in canisters that would crack open on impact, thereby dispersing their noxious load, or by directly spraying the vapor over the areas that the aliens wanted cleansed of life. The fog killed everything that breathed it.

It was heavy, this gas, heavier than the densest smoke. It would sink through the air and pour over the ground in a manner that was almost liquid, abandoning the hills and streaming into the valleys and ditches and waterways. Wherever it encountered water a chemical reaction occurred, neutralizing the stuff and covering the stream or pond or ocean with a powdery dark scum that sank slowly to the bottom. The vapor didn’t diffuse in air as a gas might, but hung together in oily banks, flowing sluggishly down the slope of the land and driving reluctantly before the wind, very slowly combining with the moisture of the atmosphere, and sinking to earth in the form of an inert black dust. Our scientists have never been able to recreate the stuff in their labs.

Anyone who reached high ground could easily escape its effects, if they understood what was happening. In San Francisco, for example, a number of people on the upper floors of high-rise hotels survived the initial onslaught of the Martians, and eventually lived to tell about their experiences.

As a rule, though, the Martians didn’t wait for the vapor to disperse naturally, but cleared the air by wading into the stuff and neutralizing it with some kind of gaseous counteragent.

Late that night we heard some of our own guns again, firing in the distance at a Martian machine. We also saw another Martian ship land, I’m not sure where, somewhere to the south of us. It was a brilliant emerald meteor high in the sky, a beautiful sight really, if it hadn’t been so ominous.

The Martians had methodically cleared the countryside of most of the pesky “bugs” that were irritating them, much as we might smoke out a bees’ nest. From Novato to San Francisco millions of human beings died during that long, dark night, quickly and horribly and completely. Each discharge of an alien weapon resulted in the wholesale slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent men, women, and children.

We didn’t realize this, of course, for some days, but were lucky enough to save ourselves accidentally.

The great striders had almost ceased using their sting-rays, either because they had a limited supply of the energy needed to produce them, or because they wanted to preserve rather than destroy our countryside and cities. After that terrible night everyone knew that no earthly army could stand against them.

Thus, most resistance against the invaders had ceased by dawn of the next day. The military command withdrew its forces—there weren’t all that many soldiers remaining—to safer locations, leaving just a few bands of sappers and guerrillas. The local governments abandoned their efforts to maintain order, and evacuated their personnel to other locales, along with anyone else who could be persuaded to go. The cities in the San Francisco Bay Area were abandoned to the enemy. The Martians lost no time in occupying San Francisco proper, establishing their major base there.

Reverend Lesley, for once, had nothing to say. I think that even she was appalled by the wholesale slaughter of human life—although I’m not certain to this day whether the Martians actually intended to wipe us out completely, or were merely trying to control the surviving members of our population for their own purposes, whatever those might be.

Perhaps the future would provide answers to these questions. Perhaps the Martians themselves would someday enlighten us.

Hell, I was just glad to be alive.