We couldn’t land back at Pope AFB. It was a shambles. A survivor said the saucers hit about midnight. A meteor had landed near Charlotte, and now the Martian fighting machines were drifting toward Washington, killing everything in their paths.
We roared back across country, looking for some place to land where we wouldn’t be gobbled up. Fuel got lower. We came in on a wing, a prayer, and fumes to Fitzee Field at Fort Ord. I had taken basic training at Ord.
A few hours later, I duffed.
• • • •
I heard about New York on the radio before the stations went off. A giant lizard had come up from the Hudson submarine canyon and destroyed Manhattan. A giant octopus was ravaging San Francisco, a hundred miles north of Ord. It had already destroyed the Golden Gate Bridge. Saucers were landing everywhere. One had crashed into a sandpit behind a house nearby. A basic training unit had been sent in. They wouldn’t be back. I knew. A glass-globed intelligence would see to that.
Navy ships were pulled under by the monsters that pillaged New York; by the giant octopus; by giant crabs in the South Pacific; by caterpillar-like molluscs in the Salton Sea.
The kinds of invaders seemed endless: Martian fighting machines, four or five types of aliens. The sandpit Martians, much different from the fighting machine kind. Bigheaded invaders with eyes on the backs of their hands.
A few scattered reports worldwide. No broadcasts from Japan after the first few minutes. Total annihilation, no doubt. Italy: A craft, which only existed on celluloid, brings back from Venus an egg of death. Mexico: A Tyrannosaurus rex comes from the swamps for cattle and children. A giant scorpion invades from the volcanoes. South America: giant wasps, fungus disease, terrors from the earth. Britain: A monster slithers wild in Westminster Abbey, another fungus from space, radioactive mud, giant lizards again. Tibet: The yeti are on the move.
It is all over for humanity.
• • • •
Meteor Crater at sunset. A hole punched in the earth while ice sheets still covered Wyoming and Pennsylvania.
I can see for miles, and I have the carbine ready. I stare into the crater, thinking. This crater saw the last mammoth and the first of the Indians.
The shadow deepens and the floor goes dark. Memories of man, crater. Your friend the Grand Canyon regards you as an upstart in time. It’s jealous because you came from space.
Speaking of mammoths, perhaps it’s our time to join old woolly in the great land of fossil dreams. Whatever plows farms in a million years can turn up our teeth and wonder at them.
Nobody knows why the mammoth disappeared, or the dinosaur, or our salamander friend the Diplovertebron, for that matter. Racial old age. No plausible reason. So now it’s our turn. Done in by our dreams from the silver screen. Maybe we’ve created our own Id monsters, come to snuffle us out in nightmares.
• • • •
The reason I deserted: The Air Force was going to drop an A-bomb on the Martian fighting machines. They were heading for Ord after they finished LA. I was at the command post when one of the last B-52s went over, heading for the faraway carnage on the horizon.
“If the A-bomb doesn’t stop it, Colonel,” said a major to the commander, “nothing will.”
How soon they forget, I thought, and headed for the perimeter.
The Great Southwest saw more scenes of monster destruction than anywhere in the world except Japan. Film producers loved it for the sterility of the desert, the hot sun, the contrasts with no gradations for their black-and-white cameras. In them, saucers landed, meteors hurtled down, townspeople disappeared, tracks and bones were found.
Here is where it started, was the reasoning. In the desert thirty-three years ago when the first atomic bomb was detonated, when sand was turned to glass.
So the monsters shambled, plodded, pillaged, and shook the Southwest. This desert where once there was only a shallow sea. You can find clamshells atop the Sierras, if you look.
I have an appointment here, near Alamogordo. Where it started. The racial old age is on us now. Unexplained, and we’ll die not knowing why, or why we lived the least time of all the dominant species on this planet.
• • • •
One question keeps coming to me. Why only films of the 1950s?
Am I the only one who remembers? Have I been left alone because I’m the only one who remembers and knows what I’m doing? Am I the only one with a purpose, not just running around like a chicken with its head cut off?
• • • •
The radio stations are going off one by one as I drive from the crater to Alamogordo. Emergency broadcast stations, something out of Arkansas, an Ohio station. Tonight, I’m not going to be stopped. I’ve got the thirty-round magazine in the carbine and the forty-five-round drum in the Thompson. I wish I had some grenades, or even tear gas, but I have no mask (I lost it in the battle against the grasshoppers.) Besides, I’m not sure tear gas will be effective for what I have in mind.
On the dying radio stations and in my mind’s eye, this is what I see and hear.
The locusts reach Chicago and feast till dawn, while metal robots roam the streets looking for men to kill.
The giant lizard goes past Coney Island with no resistance.
The huge mantis, after pillaging the Arctic, reduces Washington to shambles. It has to dodge flying saucers while it pulls apart monuments, looking for goodies. The statue of Abraham Lincoln looks toward Betelgeuse and realizes that the War Between the States was fought in vain.
The sky is filled with meteors, saucers, a giant flying bird. Two new points of light hang in the sky: a dead star and planet, which will crash into earth in a few days. The night is beginning to be bathed in a dim bloody light.
An amorphous thing sludges its way through a movie theater, alternately flattening, thickening, devouring anything left.
The Martian fighting machines have gone up and down both coasts, moving in a crescent pivotal motion.
The octopus has been driven underwater by heat from the burning San Francisco.
So much for the rest of the country.
Here in the Southwest: A million-eyed monster has taken over the cattle and dogs for hundreds of miles.
A giant spider eats cattle and people and grows. The last Air Force fighters have given up and are looking for a place to land. Maybe one or two pilots, like me, will get away. Maybe saucers will get them. It won’t be long now.
The Gila monsters roam, tongues moving, seeking the heat of people, cars, dogs.
Beings with a broken spaceship are repairing it, taking over the bodies of those not eaten by other monsters. Soon they will be back up in the sky. Benevolent monsters.
Giant columns of stone grow, break, fall, crushing all in their paths. Miles wide now, and moving toward the Colorado River, the Gulf, and infinite growing bliss. No doubt they have crushed giant Gila monsters and spiders along with people, towns, and mountains.
A stranded spaceman makes it to Palomar and spends his last seconds turning the telescope toward his home star. He has already killed nineteen people in his effort to communicate.
A monster grows, feeding on the atoms of the air.
A robot cuts its way through a government installation fence, off on its own path of rampage. The two MPs fire until their .45s click dry. Bullets ricochet off the metal being. Soon a saucer will fly over and hover. They will fire at the saucer with no effect; the saucer will fire and the MPs will drift away on the wind.
(There may be none of our bones to dig up in a million years.)
All this as I drive toward the dawn, racing at me and the Southwest like the avenging eye of god. No headlights. I saw a large meteor hit back in the direction of Flagstaff; there’ll be hell to pay there soon. Meanwhile, I haven’t slept in two days. The car sometimes swerves toward the road edge. No time for a crack-up, so close now.
The last radio station went off at 0417.
Nothing on the dial but mother ea
rth’s own radio music, and perhaps stellar noises which left somewhere 500 million years ago, about the time our friend the Diplovertebron slithered through the mud. The east is greying. I’m almost there.
• • • •
The car motor pops and groans as it cools. The wind blows steadily toward the deeper desert. Not far from here, the first A-bomb went off. Perhaps that was the challenge to the universe, and it waited thirty years to get back at us. This is when it started.
This is where it ends.
I’m drinking a hot Coke. It tastes better than any I’ve ever had. No uppers, downers, hash, horse, or grass for me. I’m on a natural high.
I’ve set my things in order. All the empty bottles are filled with gasoline and the blanket’s been torn up for fuses. My lighter and matches are laid out, with some cigarettes for punks. With the carbine slung over my shoulder, I wait with the Thompson in my right hand, round chambered, selector on rock and roll.
They won’t die easy, but I envision a stack of them ringing my body, my bones, the car; some scorched and blackened, some shot all away, some with mandibles still working long after I’m dead.
I open the twenty-kilo bag of sugar and shake it onto the wind. It sifts into a pile a few feet away. The scent should carry right to them.
I took basic at Fort Ord. There was a tunnel we had to double-time through to get to the range. In cadence. Weird shadows on the wall as we ran. No matter how tired I was, I thought of the soldiers going into the storm drains after the giant ants in a movie I’d seen when I was six. They started here near the first A-blast. They had to be here. The sugar would bring them.
A sound floats back up the wind like the keening of an off-angle buzz saw. Ah. They’re coming. They’ll be here soon, first one, then many. Maybe the whole nest will turn out. They’ll rise from behind that dune, or maybe that one.
• • • •
Closer now, still not in sight.
It’s all over for man, but there are still some things left. Like choices, there’s still that. A choice of personal monsters.
Closer now, and more sounds. Maybe ten or twenty of them, maybe more.
End of movie soon. No chance to be James Arness and get the girl. But plenty of time to be the best James Whitmore ever. No kids to throw to safety. But a Thompson and a carbine. And Molotov cocktails.
Aha. An antenna waves in the middle distance. And—bigger than I thought. Take your head right off.
Eat leaden death, Hymenopterae! The Thompson blasts to life.
Screams of confusion. A flash of 100 octane and glass. High keening, like an off-angle buzz saw.
I laugh. Formic acid. Cordite.
Hell of a life.
© 1980 by Howard Waldrop.
Originally published in Shayol.
Reprinted by permission of the author.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Howard Waldrop, American iconoclast, was born in Mississippi and now lives in Austin, Texas. His first sale to a professional magazine was the story “Lunchbox” which appeared in the May 1972 Analog. His unique fiction has received many nominations for the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, and in 1980 “The Ugly Chickens” won both the Nebula and the World Fantasy Award. Small Beer Press recently released two collections of his fiction, Other Worlds, Better Lives: Selected Long Fiction, 1989-2003 and Things Will Never Be the Same: A Howard Waldrop Reader: Selected Short Fiction 1980-2005. Although Howard does not own a computer, SFF.net hosts a website for him at sff.net/people/Waldrop.
To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight.
HARRY AND MARLOWE VERSUS THE HAUNTED LOCOMOTIVE OF THE ROCKIES
Carrie Vaughn
As they crossed the Great Plains of America, Harry was certain she’d never seen anything so astonishing in all her life.
The Kestrel hadn’t had such a long stretch airborne since she crossed the Atlantic. Even on the third day of it, Harry leaned out a window to watch the land passing beneath them, and what seemed to be all of heaven passing above. “Have you ever seen the sky look so very large, Marlowe?”
“Only at twenty thousand feet of altitude.”
Twenty thousand was nearly the upper limit of military-grade airship capabilities. Any higher, the air ran out. The sky was huge at altitude, but very lonely. According to the barometric altimeter, they were at some five thousand feet altitude now—only two thousand, vertical: Details of the ground spread out as on a map. Wind buffeted them, the sun blazed down. They might have been flying over an ocean, but this was grass, hundreds of miles of it, rippling with shadows and light. The yellowing plain seemed barren, featureless and undisturbed. Easy to become disoriented, when all directions looked the same.
The plains weren’t really so desolate—at regular intervals, small towns grew up like weeds along the rail line. About a day’s wagon trip apart, each of them. The Kestrel wouldn’t be lost, if something happened out here. Harry was almost sad about it—she didn’t really mind the loneliness of being in an airship over an endless plain.
She had to search for it, but she picked out the double lines of the railroad tracks, along with accompanying telegraph wires on posts, that guided them on. Best way to navigate in such a place. Someone might have taken a pencil to a map. She followed the line west, where something like a mirage disturbed the sameness of the planes, a rough gray splotch, rising like some distant wall.
“Marlowe, you’ll want to look at this,” she said, nodding ahead.
A smile flickered on his lips as he made another small course correction, heading directly toward that gray shadow.
The Rocky Mountains.
• • • •
They stopped briefly in Colorado Springs, an oasis on the plains that was very nearly cosmopolitan. Pikes Peak rose like a tower to the west of the town, some fourteen thousand feet in altitude. The mountains were a wall marking the end of the plains, and they kept going, peak after peak. Traversing them in the airship would be a challenge.
They’d had a bit of a scare approaching the town. Marlowe squinted some distance south, and Harry took up the spyglass. Another airship, even smaller than the Kestrel, with an open gondola, traveled at an easy pace. Three men were on board.
“They’re flying a U.S. Cavalry flag, I think,” she said. “A local patrol, perhaps? That ship certainly isn’t built for distance.”
“I’d wondered if the cavalry would use airships out here. Best way to keep track of all this territory, I should think.”
Sun glinted off the other gondola, a reflective flash. A man looking back at her through his own spyglass. “They’re watching us,” she said.
“Run up flags. I don’t want to waste time explaining ourselves to them.”
Naval semaphore flags worked just as well inland, and Harry raised the flags along their gondola that identified them as a private ship registered in Chicago. A lie, of course, but nothing would draw the attention of the U.S. Cavalry faster than if she raised the correct British Navy flags. Fortunately, the patrol vessel believed them and maintained its course north and east.
The Kestrel had drawn attention wherever she flew in America. Harry found herself avoiding the crowds as much as she could—a stray photograph of her placed in front of knowing eyes might reveal her true identity, and that wouldn’t do at all. Her and Marlowe’s roles here were part tourists, part spies, and part archeologists. Marlowe put himself forward as a research assistant to a member of the Royal Academy, gathering notes for a treatise on Aetherian technology outside of Britain. To preclude awkward questions, Harry was usually introduced as a relative of his along for the education. No one knew that she was also Princess Maud of Wales, and she hoped that if by some strange chance they met someone who recognized her, such a person would have the good sense to keep quiet about it.
They were searching for innovation. For something new. As was their wont, the Americans had taken Aetherian technology like locomotive
engines and made them faster, cheaper, and more efficient. They had adapted the Aetherian engines to the paddlewheel ships that plied the Mississippi. They had also done things like build an entirely mechanical elephant, billed as Jumbo from the Stars, which currently performed in a specially built arena at a place called Coney Island.
So far, though, she and Marlowe had found nothing new, and no evidence that anyone had stumbled upon lost artifacts not part of the original Aetherian wreckage at Surrey.
In Colorado Springs, they obtained a set of local maps and identified their next destination: a small crossroads town in the mountains called Alamosa.
“Remind me: How did you discover this place?” Marlowe asked. He had the new maps spread out on the collapsible table set up in the middle of the cabin. Colorado Springs had a number of hotels that were meant to be very fine, and Harry thought longingly of a hot bath and a dinner on fine china. But they hadn’t indulged in New York, Baltimore, or even St. Louis, and they most certainly wouldn’t indulge here. They were on campaign, as she thought of it. Better to maintain their cover as academics of only moderate means. When needed, a curtain divided the cabin into two makeshift rooms, and Marlowe was a model of propriety. On the other hand, she was an only partially successful aspirant toward propriety.
“A dime novel, would you believe?” she said. “‘The True Story of the Haunted Locomotive of the Rockies.’ I’ve got a copy stashed in my trunk if you’d like to see it.”
“Are the illustrations very lurid? Then I might.”
She dug in her trunk, stowed under one of the benches, and found the book, which indeed had an astonishing engraving on the cover: a locomotive with flames streaming from its coupling rods and a cattle guard in front stretching open like a fang-filled mouth.
Marlowe regarded the picture skeptically. “Are you telling me you’ve planned the next stage of this expedition based entirely on a story in a penny dreadful?”
Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 50 Page 4
