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CHAPTER FIVE

IT STARTED LIKE A GUILTY THING

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

—William Shakespeare

Stephen Smith, 17 Bi-October, Mars Year viii

Inland Empire, California, Planet Earth

My brother Alex has asked me to jot down my memories of what happened here during the recent unrest, and although I’m not much of a writer, he can be persuasive when he wants to be.

If you’ve read his book about the War of Two Worlds, you’ll have seen me mentioned there. I think he overdramatized my role then, but that’s Alex for you. After the war, I married Cassie and adopted Erie, and we had two more daughters, Anna and Sarah. I finished my residency and became a cardiologist at a major hospital in Southern California. Erie grew up, found someone of her own, and we now have a grandchild, with another on the way.

During the Second Martian War, when the aliens were bombarding Earth with their meteors, we were fortunate to escape any trauma ourselves, other than what we saw reflected on the tube. I did spend six months after the war as a volunteer medic in South America a decade ago, helping to rebuild the devastated regions. But we were really fortunate not to have been directly affected by that second clash between the races.

When my older sibling volunteered for Expedition III, I flew up to Grass Valley, where he was living at the time, and spent a week saying goodbye—because I knew we’d never meet again in this lifetime.

And then when the Third War began, two years after the end of the second, well, we watched and waited from afar—but we received no communication from Alex for months. It wasn’t until later that I learned the reasons for this.

The news of the U.S.S. Indefatigable’s destruction hit everyone here hard. Things had started out well enough with the bombardment of the Martian home pits, and then we got the news of one disaster after another, seemingly caused by the insane actions of our own troops. Soon, though, it became evident that the aliens were manipulating our guys into attacking each other.

Every day, it seemed, there was something new, something really awful. The world appeared to turn upside down. And yet—all of this was still a distant shadow to us, something that had happened and continued to happen over there, not here. That made it all bearable somehow. There was nothing any of us could do about the situation, except support Madame President and buy more bonds, as our ex-Governor said.

Of more immediate concern was the potential loss of the U.S.S. Warren G. Harding, a missile submarine that was missing in the Pacific somewhere—they wouldn’t say exactly where. And then the Russian nuclear sub Boris Yeltsin vanished two days later off Vladivostok—again, no debris, no distress calls, no nothing. The freighter Fukuoka Maru broadcast an SOS shortly thereafter, saying it was…but the message was cut off in midstream. Rescue vessels sent to an area near Midway Island where the boat was located found nothing to indicate what’d happened to the ship—not even an oil slick.

BERMUDA TRIANGLE—WEST?

one of the headlines blared. The losses continued to mount day by day, just as they were simultaneously increasing on Mars. Gradually we all came to believe—without any hard evidence—that the two events were somehow connected.

One of the televangelists, Romey Carnick, reported a vision in which he saw the Rapture approaching, and urged his listeners to send him all their money, because they wouldn’t need it much longer. Several of the UFO people went to the mountain in western Nevada where Kirk’s “death” had been filmed, and began a vigil to await the arrival of the critters from the deeps—ours or theirs, they weren’t too specific. PBS reran Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series decades after the fact. His rumbling mantra, “billions and billions,” wasn’t exactly reassuring in our present context.

I didn’t like the way the tea leaves were reading, so I quietly began gathering together some survival gear and stowing it in our SUV. Like I told Cassie, “better safe than dead.” She agreed with me, remembering all too well our experiences in the War of Two Worlds. The two girls just thought it was a lark. Anna, the ten-year-old thoughtful one, was at that stage where she was always asking questions, and I’d had to scramble to find some reasonable answers. Her younger sister was more practical about such things.

Then Tijuana was attacked in the middle of the night by something or some things coming up out of the ocean. The few survivors described them as tentacled creatures of enormous size that rambled into the downtown section (“giant behemoths”), destroying buildings, cars, and people. At least two thousand individuals were missing, and the known dead numbered over ten thousand. The creatures—whatever they were—returned to the beach before dawn and vanished back into the deeps.

Both México and the United States declared states of emergency, and ordered all members of the Armed Services to report for duty. Baja California del Norte and San Diego County were put under martial law.

“Where do we go, Steve?” Cassie asked as we watched the terrible images on TV the next day. It looked as if most of Tijuana was still burning.

“I don’t know,” I said, but I’d actually been thinking about this very problem for the last several days. I’d been half-expecting something like this to occur.

Alex and I had a third sibling, Scottie, a sister who lived in Medford, Oregon together with her daughter Kari and our octogenarian mother, Betty. They had a house on the west side of town, and there were several spare bedrooms. Medford was far enough inland that it didn’t seem a likely target to me, particularly since access was limited by the lack of highways and the coastal mountain range.

“Maybe sis’s place up north,” I finally said. “But if we’re going to do anything, we need to move now, before any further attacks take place—and I think they will.”

“What about your job?”

“If they won’t give me leave, I’ll resign—but I think they will.” Cassie’s situation was somewhat easier, since she now worked as a freelance artist and designer, and did most of her efforts on-line. She’d once been a dental technician, but after a decade of peering into patients’ mouths, decided she’d had enough of bad breath and worse gums.

“Then, let’s do it!” she said. “I’ll call Erie and see if she wants to join us.”

But Erie’s husband didn’t want to risk losing his position, and didn’t think the danger as great as I did—and so they decided to stay in Yucaipa. It was just us. I arranged to take a month’s leave of absence from the hospital, citing a family emergency, and we decided to depart early the next morning.

That night San Diego was attacked by the enemy, and the old hotel that had served as the fictional setting for Richard Matheson’s classic fantasy of love separated by decades, Bid Time Return, burned to the ground, taking many of its guests along with it. The U.S. Naval Reservation and the Naval Air Station on adjoining North Island were crushed in the first hour. The devastation spread up the coast to the marine park, where all the sea animals were freed, and to exclusive La Jolla—exclusive no longer—and even reached the university campus, where the library, perched on end like a top, was knocked over like a bowling pin—and rolled three or four times—until the classifications were all thoroughly discombobulated. There, for whatever reason, the invaders stopped and withdrew back into the sea.

Our ships, our planes, the heart of the wealthiest parts of the city, were all gone, crushed as thoroughly as if some giant from the beanstalk had trampled over their ruins in the night. The few photos that survived of the onslaught showed vague images of rounded blobs with long arms that reached out and systematically—and very quickly—pulled things apart. Ordinary bullets seemed completely ineffectual in stopping the creatures.

And we didn’t know if these were the Martians or some other new enemy of Earth. Maybe the jihadists had developed some advanced weaponry.

We were still determined to leave, but found that many other people now shared our desire—the freeways going east out of California were all jammed with cars. We left at five a.m., and it took us almost three hours to get over the Cajon Pass.

“What are we going to do, Alex?” Cassie asked.

“Head across the desert,” I said, and veered onto U.S. Highway 395 towards Tehachapi and Bakersfield. We traveled all day just to get over the pass, and camped in the hills east of the latter city.

I’d long been preparing for this day, and had equipped my vehicle with everything we might need for a temporary stay just outside the reaches of civilization. The kids slept in the back of the car, and Cassie and I shared sleeping bags under the stars. Fortunately, the weather was clear and the conditions passable.

During the night, the enemy attacked Chula Vista, south of San Diego. Each venture seemed to penetrate a little farther inland, and to cause that much more damage. The freeways were also being destroyed, apparently according to some systematic design or plan. We were able to follow events on the radio.

I decided the next morning to stay off the major north-south arteries, and to travel up the long central valley of California only using back or side roads—at least until we passed Redding up north. My watchpad provided me with all the maps I needed. It wasn’t quick, but travel this way was still probably faster than the freeways would have been.

By this time President Bush had pronounced the attackers the “ungodly Martians,” although nobody had actually seen or captured one of the critters to verify this notion. Whoever or whatever they were, they were spreading rapidly. No ship dared venture out to sea anywhere along the Pacific Coast out to Hawaii and Midway. Some 154 ships, both military and civilian, had just “vanished” without a trace over the last three-week period. Occasionally, aircraft would spot debris or oil slicks floating in the water, but even those signs of devastation were rather uncommon.

On land, the region from Ensenada to Oceanside had been utterly pulverized to a depth of fifteen or twenty miles inland with insidious night attacks that always resulted in the invaders retreating back into the waves before the sun showed its ugly grin over the eastern horizon. Attempts by our Air Force to stop the creatures were futile, generally ending in the destruction of the craft, which seemed to be engulfed in ripples of severe air turbulence that shook them apart.

On the second day we stopped and had a late lunch in a quaint little town along the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Range. It reminded me of the café where Cassie and I had met fifteen years before. The lentil soup was just delicious, sprinkled with small pieces of onion, cilantro, and cheese, and the fresh-baked bread and real butter melted away some of our cares. I ate a tuna melt sandwich with havarti cheese on sourdough that just seemed fabulous after several days of canned goods and packaged junk.

“What’s the news?” I asked the waitress-cum-owner, Miss Paulina Cleland.

“Oh, it’s nothing very good, I do declare,” she said, shaking her gray locks. “It never is, you know. They’re all being punished for their sinful, citified ways. Can I get you some more herb tea?”

“Please.” I held out my mug. It had a message stenciled on the side: “The Lord Loves You.”

“This has a unique flavor. What is it?” Cassie asked.

“Oh, that’s just a bit of sassafras and bay leaf and ginger and some other odds and ends. My Granny taught me how to brew it when I was a little thing no older than your girls.”

Anna wanted the recipe, and so Miss Paulina wrote it down on the back of a takeaway menu.

We stayed that night at a motel on State Route 49 in Butterfly, east of Merced. Cassie called her older daughter, and discovered that they’d decamped the day after we left, and were now in New Mexico. I talked with them briefly and wished them well.

Then I looked at the map. I figured we could follow the same route up to Grass Valley and Nevada City, and then just above that town, take a local road up to Oroville and Highway 99. That would bypass Modesto, Stockton, and Sacramento to the east, and ultimately take us through Chico on our way to Red Bluff and Interstate-5. If the latter was impacted, we could try one of the other ways through the mountains to the east. It seemed like a possible plan.

But fate had something else in mind for us.

The next morning, we learned that the aliens had made a massive attack on the Bay Area, flattening San Francisco and the other communities surrounding it, and penetrating all the way to Sacramento, almost to Grass Valley. This time they had not withdrawn, and were continuing to spread their death and destruction throughout the central part of the state. Our armed services seemingly could do nothing to stop them.

We had a family council then and there. We either had to go back, try to cross the mountains into Nevada on winding, two-lane roads, or chance that Highway 49 was still passable. The closer we got to Sacramento, the worse the congestion would be. We were already starting to see lines of cars coming south towards us. And we were late enough in the season that there was always the possibility of snow.

“There just aren’t a lot of roads that go all the way through,” Cassie said, after examining her pad. “The one over Yosemite is particularly bad. If we go to Sonora, we could take 108 over the Sierras south of Tahoe, which is apt to be bumper-to-bumper now.”

“All right,” I said, “let’s try that.”

We started an hour later, and had no trouble until we reached the village itself. We’d gassed up before we’d left Butterfly, figuring that supplies would be hard to get as the roads became more crowded. Then everything slowed to a crawl as we headed northeast on State Route 108. At Twain a local highway merged from the north, and then we did come to a complete stop.

I finally got out of the car.

“Anyone have any news?” I asked several of the other refugees.

“Stockton’s been hit,” said one.

“Modesto too,” said another.

I could see smoke clouds on the western and northern horizons.

“Oh, looks like we’re moving again,” another man said, and got back in his car. I did the same.

For the rest of the afternoon, it was start and stop, stop and start, and we barely went five miles. During one of our many breaks, we grabbed a quick bite to eat out of our stores, and then wrapped blankets around the girls as the sun set. Slowly, very slowly, we continued to inch our way into the mountains.

Suddenly there was a flash of green fire to the west of us.

“Martians!” I heard someone shout through the open driver’s window.

“How far?” someone else asked.

“Maybe, oh, twenty-thirty miles.”

“That would make it about Angels Camp.”

“Yep.”

“Got any weapons?”

“Shotgun and six-shooter.”

“Won’t do much good.”

“Nope.”

I figured we were making less than five miles an hour—but still, we were progressing; and although the flashes continued, and even seemed brighter on occasion, we managed to keep ahead of them.

About midnight we were nearing the Indian reservation when I heard some audible thumps behind us, and then an explosion.

“They’re coming!” somebody screamed.

“We’ve got to get away from the road,” I said.

We pulled into a camping area, grabbed as much as we could, particularly blankets, and headed west on a trail towards a large lake, using our flashlights to get us a few hundred yards distant.

“I figure they won’t search beyond the roads between the cities,” I said. “All we have to do is wait for them to pass.”

We found shelter under a grove of pines, and turned off our lights. Huddling together in the freezing pitch dark waiting for the aliens to come is one of the scariest things I’ve ever done in my life. I wouldn’t have had the courage to face the situation alone, but the knowledge that I had to save the lives of my dear family also saved me.

We heard the cars exploding and being crushed by the Martian machines less than a half-mile from us. The girls were shaking from the cold and their fear. Any real animals had since fled the scene. The aliens were very methodical in their destruction, and they continued to pursue the metal ribbon all the way up to the pass, pausing just for a few moments to destroy some housing before continuing on their way. I don’t what they were doing—I didn’t want to know.

I decided that discretion was, well, you know, and we stayed where we were—safe if a bit chilled—until the sky began to lighten again over the peaks. At that point, our spirits had nowhere to go but up.