CHAPTER TWENTY

UNDER FOOT, UNDER WOOD

Better make a weak man your enemy than your friend.

—Josh Billings

Alex Smith, 28 December, Mars Year i

Marin County, California, Planet Earth

Had the Martians just wanted to destroy our cities, they could easily have done so on the evening of the Twenty-Eighth, when they began their move into the San Francisco Peninsula and the outlying areas of the Los Angeles Metropolitan Region. Refugees by the hundreds of thousands flooded the roads up and down the California coast and in the inland valleys. Some traveled by car, some by bicycles or motorcycles, and some on foot, but all fled the advance of the alien machines. Where the freeways became clogged, motorists just abandoned their vehicles and walked away. The worst traffic jams ever recorded in California history, maybe in the history of the United States or of the world, had suddenly become a stark reality.

It was the beginning of the end of all we held dear.

It was the beginning of the rout of our civilization.

It was the eclipse of man’s rule on Earth.

Beyond the brown hills that rise north and east of San Francisco, the glittering Martians went to and fro, calmly and methodically spreading their poisonous gas over each patch of countryside and town, spraying it again whenever it served their purpose, and taking possession of the conquered land. I don’t think they wanted to exterminate us as much as demoralize any organized resistance—or so I would judge from later events. They systematically destroyed our weapons, cut every phone line and power relay and cell or transmission tower, and wrecked some of the major freeway intersections. They were purposely and deliberately and methodically hamstringing mankind. They seemed in no particular hurry to extend their field of operations, and didn’t even reach beyond the central core of San Francisco until the next morning. Many individuals had remained in their homes during the Martians’ initial incursion the previous night, and no doubt many perished there, suffocated by the Black Death.

San Francisco Bay remained a jumble of interlocked shipping. Some captains were tempted by the enormous sums offered them by wealthy fugitives; less prosperous refugees who found their way to these vessels were often tossed overboard and drowned, unless they could pay the going price. About six on the evening of the Twenty-Eighth the aliens unleashed a cloud of black fog between and around the arches of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, but it quickly dissipated itself in the salt water.

The Bay itself became a jigsaw puzzle of confusion and chaos, with collisions between vessels almost epidemic—and for awhile the single exit point beneath the Golden Gate Bridge was so jammed with boats and barges that they threatened to block the passage completely. Fortunately, enough level heads prevailed that the wrecks were cleared away and the passage reopened. No one was allowed to board the ships from either the Presidio or the Bridge itself.

Early on, the Martians ignored the refugees, but that night they decided to seal the strait for good, thereby removing a major evacuation route. About seven, a strider appeared on Angel Island and started wading out towards Alcatraz Island, crushing the boats as it went, until nothing but wreckage remained. I don’t know why Alcatraz was deemed important, except that a strider poised there had an unencumbered view of the Golden Gate and the piers on the waterfront all the way down to the Embarcadero. A number of these structures were destroyed over the next day, although the Bridge itself remained largely intact, a testimony to its sound construction. The traffic lanes on the Bridge were blocked with wrecks and abandoned vehicles, so much so that the Martians apparently didn’t consider it a threat—fortunately for me.

At dawn on the third day after Christmas I realized that the wall we’d been climbing during the night actually fronted on an old house, one of a long line of such structures at the upper reaches of the town of Mill Valley. We decided to take refuge there until the Black Death had passed.

I broke a window to enter a house over Reverend Lesley’s objections—“We will be judged by the Living God for all our sins,” she said—and found it well provisioned. We stayed there all that night—that Dies Iræ (“day of wrath”) of panic and pandemonium—safe in a little island of daylight cut off by the Black Death from the rest of the world, while the Martians began their occupation of San Francisco. We could do nothing but wait and hope.

My mind kept returning to Becky. I figured she was safe in Sonoma, was possibly even mourning me as dead or injured. But what if she wasn’t? What if the Martians had suddenly moved north from Novato? This seemed unlikely to me, but the enemy had proved so unpredictable thus far that anything was possible—and I now had enough time on my hands to consider the very worst.

My musings became almost an obsession. I could think of nothing else for hours but what might be happening to her, turning over each new twist and turn until I was crazy with worry. My only consolation was the belief that the Martians were now moving en masse towards San Francisco—and thus away from Becky. I would not have been comforted knowing the reality of the situation.

However, I soon grew very tired of my ministerial companion’s constant complaints, of her continuing despair, and so I kept my distance, staying in a children’s bedroom filled with toys, dolls, and computers. I even tried connecting to the Internet, but everything was still down. None of the accouterments of modern civilization would do anything more than beep at me, and I was already getting plenty of that from Lesley. My cell phone was also dead. I felt completely cut off from the rest of the world.

When the minister barged in again to complain about the food, I told her where she could shove it. Such unexpectedly uncouth language seemed to take her aback. She walked away, leaving me in blessèd silence.

We were temporarily hemmed in by the Black Death. I saw signs of life in the adjoining structure late that night—a face showing at a window and some lights that flickered (perhaps candles); and later I heard the slam of a door. I don’t know who they were or what became of them, just that they were gone by morning, when we investigated the place. The Black Death drifted slowly down towards the sea, creeping away from us on little rats’ feet. I could easily measure its withdrawal from the attic window when the light returned on the Twenty-Ninth.

A Martian machine strode across the adjoining field about nine that morning, neutralizing the remaining gas with a stream of some chemical that hissed against the walls of our house, smashing all the glass that it touched, and singeing Lesley’s hand as she fled from the living room. It had the peculiar odor of chlorine or bromine or something like that (“borine,” I thought, chuckling at my own witticism, which would have been lost on the minister).

Late that morning I slowly crept downstairs across the sodden carpet to peer outside. The country to the southeast was completely dark, as though a black snowstorm had passed over it. Looking down the valley towards the Bay, I was astonished to see a kind of reddish tinge intermingling with the soot on the scorched slopes of the brown-green hills above Mill Valley.

Then I realized we were free again. I decided to depart at once, but Lesley wouldn’t hear of it.

“We’re safe here,” she kept repeating, “safe, safe, safe!”

Good riddance, I thought to myself, and decided to leave without her. I found some food and bottled water, even a first-aid kit in a bathroom cabinet, and a couple of clean shirts in one of the bedrooms. The weather was getting funky again, as it had a tendency to do at this time of the year, with mists and rains and rather cool nights.

When the minister realized that I was leaving her alone, she suddenly roused herself and demanded that we travel together. Shitty shit, shit! I didn’t have the gumption to refuse her. I actually felt sorry for the woman. I think it was leftover guilt from leaving my wife alone. Well, in retrospect I shouldn’t have tried!

Everything appeared quiet outside, so we started walking southeast around noon on the blackened road towards Almonte.

Dead bodies lay strewn by the way, contorted and twisted in their pain and wretchedness, dogs and cats and birds as well as men, plus the usual assortment of wrecked automobiles and trucks, all layered with a leavening of the inert black dust. That pall of powder, that thick coat of cinders, made me think of the destruction of the ancient cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and how they’d been immersed by a volcanic eruption that had left them buried for thousands of years.

We reached the village of Almonte without further difficulty. We were constantly besieged by the strange, even bizarre landscape around us, now almost surreal in its appearance; and we were relieved to find that one large patch of green on the side of a hill had somehow escaped the suffocating drift of the dust. It was covered with a peculiar kind of bush with long, narrow leaves. Lesley made the Sign of the Cross at it and mumbled something about “need” or “Swede” that I couldn’t quite make out.

I also noticed a reddish tinge to the soil, and when I bent down to examine this phenomenon more closely, I saw that the ground was covered with the minute ruby sprouts of a myriad of new plants.

“Look at this!” I said, but Lesley would have nothing to do with my philosophical observations, having no curiosity about such things whatsoever.

A mile or so to the east we came back to the 101 Freeway, and there we saw some men and women hurrying off in the distance towards the town of Tamalpais Valley. I didn’t even try to hail them, although these were the first living folks we’d encountered in the outside world in several days.

By this time we were both hungry and thirsty, so I raided a 7-11 Store near the highway. Lesley insisted on leaving a twenty-dollar bill on the counter, which I thought unnecessary. Nothing was cold, of course, but the packaged goods were still sound, and the pop and bottled water didn’t age. I supplemented my pack with as much as I could reasonably carry.

We decided then and there to follow the freeway south to San Francisco, starting the next day. It was only about five miles or so to the Golden Gate Bridge.

In the meantime, we needed to start looking for another safe house for the night. There were plenty of prospects in the immediate vicinity. First of all, though, I wanted to reconnoiter the local area, to see if any of the Martians yet lingered.

On the other side of the inlet the theological seminary was burning, much to Lesley’s consternation.

“God wouldn’t have allowed such a thing,” she said. “He just wouldn’t.”

“Maybe they were heretics,” I said.

She admitted that they belonged to some other denomination, but the idea still seemed to disturb her.

“A great many have died,” I said, “and thousands of buildings have been destroyed. What difference does one more make?”

She looked at me with utter contempt.

“You’re a tool of the Devil,” she said. “No one who believed in God would ever say such things. That’s a sacred place.”

“I’m a tool of no one, and I paint what I see. Look around you, Reverend. What do you see?”

Lesley uttered a cry halfway between a croak and a lament.

Down by the water’s edge, a grove of trees was still smoldering.

“I do regret the loss of the trees, though,” I said.

Then I continued down the road to Tamalpais Valley.

This town had been unaffected either by the sting-ray or the Black Death, and I saw a few people still wandering around, though no one had much news. Like us, they were taking advantage of the lull to shift their quarters to someplace safer. I think that many of the houses here were still occupied by their original inhabitants, too scared even for flight. And who knows, maybe staying put was as good an option as anything else. I know from stories published after the war that some people survived the entire invasion without ever having left their homes.

We could see evidence of the hurried evacuation all along the road. I remember particularly the three smashed motorcycles lying together in a surrealistic heap, pounded into the road by the wheels of the cars and trucks that had subsequently passed over them. We crossed the Overwood Creek Bridge about mid-afternoon; I noticed some reddish clumps of vegetation floating down the stream, some of them bigger than basketballs. I had no idea what they were, and there really wasn’t time for close scrutiny. I did wonder, though, if they were connected to the shoots that I’d seen earlier that day up the hill.

At Popcastle we again encountered a shroud of black dust that was the remnant of the neutralized poison gas, and heaps of dead bodies everywhere; but spied nothing of the Martians until we were almost at Marin City.

In the distance I could see three individuals running down a side street towards the Bay, but otherwise the place seemed deserted. Up in the hills the remnants of Fort Baker were still smoldering, but we saw no further signs of the Black Death.

As we approached Marin City, a group of people suddenly ran straight at us, and the upper section of a great Martian fighting-machine loomed over the nearby houses not more than a hundred yards away. I was scared half to death. Had the strider just glanced down at us then, I would have died for sure—but once again I was spared, for what reason I have no idea. We didn’t dare go on. We hid for a few moments in a backyard storage shed. There the minister curled herself into a ball, weeping silently and refusing to stir.

I was determined to reach Sausalito, though, and so an hour or two later I set out again by myself. I crept around some shrubs and stepped into a passageway beside a big house, emerging into the open on the road towards the Bay. The minister—I just couldn’t shake the bloody woman no matter what I did—suddenly came scurrying after me. I tried to outrun her.

That was the stupidest damned thing that I ever did in my life. I should have known that the aliens were still there. Lesley had just caught up with me when we saw the fighting-machine we’d seen before, striding over a field not far from Tamalpais Valley. Four or five little black figures scurried before it like mice, and it soon became evident that the machine was actually herding them. In three strides it was among the fugitives, but instead of using its sting-ray to blast them out of existence, it systematically picked them up one by one, tossing them into the great metal carrier on its back, like some vineyard worker harvesting clusters of grapes.

It was then, for the very first time, that I realized that the Martians might have some purpose in mind for us other than death. The two of us just stood there in the open, utterly appalled at the sight, and then turned and fled through the gate behind us into a walled garden, falling into, rather than deliberately finding, a ditch. We lay there, scarcely daring to whisper to each other, until the sun went down.

Lesley just whimpered constantly, like a puppy crying for its dam.

There were worse things than being alone.