CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

FIFTEEN GLORIOUS DAYS, FIFTEEN FUN-FILLED NIGHTS

I am weary of days and hours,

Blown buds of barren flowers.

—Algernon Charles Swinburne

Alex Smith, 17 Bi-January, Mars Year i

Marin County, California, Planet Earth

For the longest time I just stood there, heedless of my own safety. A Martian could have walked by at any time and harvested me. While imprisoned I’d only been aware of my immediate surroundings. I hadn’t had any notion of what’d been happening in the world outside. I’d expected to see some ruins, of course—but I suddenly found myself occupying a place that was literally “not of this Earth!” This wasn’t the world I’d abandoned two weeks earlier.

It was the first time that I felt that we were no longer masters of our world, just mere animals among many others, all now crushed under the Martian heel. Our lot, it seemed to me, was to lurk and to watch, to run and to hide, whenever our masters walked among us. The rule of man had passed.

But soon this feeling also passed, and I became aware of a terrible hunger gnawing at my insides. In the distance I could see a house that was relatively undamaged. I went creeping towards it knee-deep (sometimes neck-deep) in the red weed, hardly able to stand upright at times, seeking that little piece of paradise. There was a fence around the place, but when I tried to climb over it, I was just too weak. I finally found a gate where I could tumble into the yard. I broke a window. Inside I discovered a few odds and ends stashed away undiscovered in a bottom pantry (everything else had already been looted), mostly canned goods and some pop. I grabbed a can of salsa and popped the top.

It was hot!

It was really hot! I was crying as I shoved spoonful after spoonful into my gullet.

But hellfire and damnation, it tasted like manna from heaven!

I don’t think I’ve ever had anything better.

And the warm soda?—hey, I chugged half of it in one swallow to wash away the burning sensation of the Mexican food.

I found a few cans of fruit, vegetables, soup, and beans, all of it still good.

But I also found I couldn’t eat very much of anything. My stomach had shriveled during my captivity, and I feared overtaxing it with something that it couldn’t digest.

I fell asleep propped up against the cabinet right there on the kitchen floor.

When I awoke, it was dark, and suddenly I really had to poop! I ran outside without even checking for aliens, and did my American duty all over the red weed, yes, sir, I did!

Then I went back and ate some more. And slept some more. And pooped some more! And ate some more again!

I spent several days there rebuilding my strength, and throughout that sojourn, so unlike my recent confinement in Hell, I gradually regained my strength and natural good spirits.

I had no idea at this point what day it was. I’d lost track of time during my captivity. I think I spent fifteen days there, but I’m not really sure. The last few episodes tended to blur together in my memory. I was trying to forget everything about Reverend Lesley.

On the third day of my release, I put together a makeshift pack, adding the lightest cans I could find for my trip. I exchanged my clothes with some that I’d found in one of the bedrooms—they didn’t fit well, but then neither did my own duds anymore. I still wanted to see the big city—and what had happened to it. I hadn’t been cured, dear friends, of my deadly itch of curiosity, oh no!

A block or two down the road I splashed through a brown sheet of shallow water covering a place where a park used to be. I was surprised at this variation from the dry California landscape, but I soon discovered that the red weed tended to create standing pools of water wherever it grew. Liquid, almost any liquid, made the weed grow at an extraordinary rate, until it became huge in size. The resulting mass would quickly choke any waterway or drainage area, thereby creating mini-swamplands which allowed it to flourish even more. The weed was transforming the landscape in more ways than one.

In the end, though, the red weed succumbed to disease almost as quickly as it’d spread initially. Some kind of canker, the botanists said, something that devastated its vascular system, choked the weed back on itself. The red growth rotted like a thing already dead, its fronds becoming bleached, then shriveling and turning brittle. In the final stage they’d break at the least little touch. The water that had stimulated its early growth then carried its vestiges out to sea. Or so we believed then. But as always with the Martians, we never investigated far enough, we never probed beneath the surface, we never asked or answered the real questions.

And the chief of these was “why?”

On my journey I had to drink some of the muddy water. When I exhausted my cans, I also tried gnawing on the roots of the red weed; they were pulpish and watery in nature, and tasted like a cross between turnips and jícamas that have gone a little past their prime, leaving a slightly bitter flavor in one’s mouth. Still, they stayed down and provided nourishment, and once I got past the slightly unusual taste, I didn’t hesitate to use them to supplement my diet.

The swampy areas were sufficiently shallow for me to wade across them without difficulty, although the weed itself tended to impede my progress. There were wet patches everywhere, even on some of the roads, and I had to be careful that I didn’t slip. I was still very weak from my long ordeal. I managed to find the state highway again by noticing occasional houses and the lines of power pools and lights, and so made my way down towards Sausalito.

Here the scenery changed once more, from the strange and unfamiliar to the standard urban wreckage I’d seen everywhere else that the aliens had visited: patches that exhibited the devastation of a tornado, interspersed with houses whose blinds were neatly drawn and doors primly closed, as if their inhabitants were still sleeping within (maybe they were). Ironically, this landscape seemed almost stranger to me now than the places that had been terraformed—or, more correctly, Marsaformed! The weed was less abundant here, for reasons I didn’t understand, and the tall trees along the lane were completely free of the alien creeper. I hunted assiduously for food in these places, but they’d already been ransacked thoroughly of anything worthwhile. I rested for the remainder of the day in a real bed, being too fatigued to press on.

All this time I saw no living humans and no sign whatever of the Martians. I did encounter a couple of hungry-looking dogs, but both bolted on sight. It doesn’t take long for the veneer of civilization to vanish, even among our beloved pets. Later that day I saw two human skeletons—not bodies, but skeletons picked quite clean—and in the woods nearby I found the crushed and scattered remains of several cats and rabbits and even the skull of a sheep or goat. But although I gnawed the bones in my mouth, there was no nourishment left in them. I was growing hungry again: the Martian vegetation didn’t provide much nourishment to the human soul.

In the hours before sunset I struggled along the road towards Fort Baker, where I saw further signs of the sting-rays at work. In a nearby house I found—oh glorious day!—a sack of sprouting potatoes that helped assuage my hunger. I ate them raw with a little salt. From Fort Baker one could look down upon the Golden Gate Bridge. What I spied were blackened trees, darkened ruins, and the remnants of a flooded ditch, red-tinged with the weed. I heard nothing but silence. How swiftly the world had fallen beneath the sway of the invaders!

For a time I wondered whether mankind itself had been wiped from the Earth. I stood there alone, potentially the last man left alive.

I stayed in Fort Baker overnight. The next morning I slowly trudged across the great bridge that spanned the Golden Gate, avoiding the wrecked and tangled cars, trucks, and vans. The only men I encountered were long dead. I stopped at mid-span, and gazed back into San Francisco Bay, filled now with the wreckage of great and small ships, blotted with dark oil stains and patches of the crimson kelp.

The air was crystal clear. I thought I saw a strider perched on Treasure Island, but it might have been the wavering of the light. Then I turned widdershins and gazed out to sea, drowning my eyes in the great ocean expanse laid there before me, wanting to lose myself in the endless waves of blue. I almost ended it there. I even stood on the railing, holding onto a guy wire as I swayed in the breeze.

Then I sighed and stepped back down onto the roadway. I looked back into the harbor. The central span of the Oakland Bridge was gone. I saw no smoke, no smog, no nothing. Man had been vanquished in little less than a month. But suddenly I laughed out loud, almost hysterically, because I realized that, in spite of everything, the Golden Gate Bridge was still standing! I was still standing. Surely that meant something. It had to. I would see what I could see, and hang the bloody consequences!

So I entered upon the great city of San Francisco, Babylon-by-the-Bay. And the first thing that I saw there was the skeleton of a man, his arms separated several yards from the rest of his body.

“And a very fine morning to you too,” I said.

I didn’t care now who heard me—or what.

As I plodded on into the city, I became more and more convinced that the extermination of mankind had already been accomplished in this part of the world, save for a few stragglers such as myself—and we wouldn’t be far behind. The Martians, I thought, had moved elsewhere, had left this country desolate, were now seeking their prey in some more distant community. Perhaps they were destroying Berlin or Paris or Washington, D.C., or maybe they’d moved east over the mountains into Nevada.

I again laughed out loud at the thought of the aliens encountering the gamblers of Reno or Las Vegas, of being confronted at the city gates by a crowd of feckless, useless individuals calling themselves men and women.

“Double or nothing?” one of them might say.

“Double or nothing?” I screamed to the wind.

“Double or nothing!” one of the Martians might have said.

Who the hell knows?

Who the hell cares?