“Ool-lah, ool-lah, ool-lah, ool-lah.”
I stared southwest towards Twin Peaks, wondering at the strange, remote wailing of the aliens, the expression of a million, million dead voices coming back to life again, the vocalization of thousands of vacant, staring window-holes moaning their collective distress at the overturning of the status quo. This seemed right to me somehow, this memorial dirge; it seemed a proper ending to it all.
“Ool-lah, ool-lah, ool-lah, ool-lah.”
The wailing of that superhuman double-aught note rose in great waves of sound that swept down and around the broad, sunlit streets of the city, echoing strangely between the tall buildings on each side, reverberating back and forth in unusual patterns. I turned north again, marveling at man’s grand funeral service, striding towards the iron gates of the university. I had half a mind to break into the library there and find my way to the summit of the tower, in order to peer across Golden Gate Park.
But I decided to remain on ground level, where I could hide myself quickly if necessary, and so continued gradually easing west. All of the large buildings to either side were empty and still; the sound of my footsteps provided an eerie point-counterpoint to the mournful moaning emanating from the distance.
Near the Park I saw a strange sight: a bus had overturned, and the skeleton of a man was hanging halfway out its door, his bones picked clean. I puzzled over this weird, surrealistic architecture, and then crossed to the other side of the street. The noise waxed louder and louder as I gradually moved west, although I could see nothing above the housetops save for a haze of smoke drifting slowly in the breeze.
“Ool-lah, ool-lah, ool-lah, ool-lah.”
The voice cried out once again, blasting out its lazy lament from the area surrounding the Park. The desolate cry worked its way deep into my soul, impressing it with melancholy. The mood that had sustained me to this point had now passed. The incessant wailing took possession of my soul. I found that I was becoming intensely weary of everything, of the struggle and the battle and the clash of civilizations. I was hungry and thirsty again. My long procession seemed a futile gesture of defiance.
It was already past noon. Why was I wandering alone in this city of the dead? Why was I walking by myself when all of Dead-Francisco was lying in state in its black shroud, while the mourners were conducting the service for the dearly departed? I felt completely isolated. I remembered old friends whom I’d forgotten for years. I thought of little things, of food in the supermarkets, of fine wines in liquor stores. I only knew of two humans who shared this immense city of the dead. I suddenly wished they were there beside me.
Further down the road I spied more dead bodies. An evil smell percolated from the sewers and the homes. I’d grown very thirsty from my long walk. I managed to break a restaurant window and find something to eat and drink. The latter was better than the former. I was so very weary after lunch, just tired to death in body and soul, that I located a couch in a back room somewhere, where I laid down and slept the sleep of the dead. Even the sofa was black.
I awoke to that distant, dismal howling ringing in my ears again.
“Ool-lah, ool-lah, ool-lah, ool-lah.”
’Twas now brillig, and after I’d rousted out some cookies and cheese in the bar—the meat in the fridge was covered with green slime—I wandered through the silent residential districts. Far away I saw the hood of the Martian machine from which this howling apparently emanated; it was poking just over the trees, outlined against the sunset. I wasn’t at all afraid. Indeed, I was long past the point of fearing anything. Encountering the aliens now just seemed to me the “right” thing to do, as if I were destined for one final meeting with the invaders before finding my own end and my own peace. I watched the silent sentinel for quite some time, but it didn’t move. It just stood there and cried its cry of despair, for no reason that I could discern.
I tried to formulate a plan of action, but that perpetual refrain of “Ool-lah, ool-lah, ool-lah, ool-lah” was getting on my nerves. Perhaps I was just too tired to think clearly anymore. Certainly I was curious about the monotonous wailing. I turned into the park, creeping alongside the shelter of a nearby terrace. Again I could see the stationary, howling Martian in the distance, growing ever closer as I worked my way towards it.
Suddenly I spied a pack of dogs, the leader dangling a piece of raw, reddish meat from his jaws, followed madly by a dozen starving mongrels hot in pursuit. It bolted away from me, as if fearing some competitor for this luscious tidbit. As the yelping died away, the wailing sound reasserted itself.
I came upon the wreckage of the handling-machine not far from the Martian pit. At first I thought one of the buildings had fallen across the road. It was only when I clambered over the ruins of the structure that I realized that it was intertwined with the workings of an alien handler, which was lying with its tentacles bent and smashed and twisted among the debris that it had made. The front section of the thing was completely smashed in. It looked to me as if it had driven itself right into the side of the structure, and then been crushed when the building tumbled down around it. The driver in the cab must have lost control, but I couldn’t get close enough to examine the damage personally. All I could see were the “earthly” remains of the creature itself: the tattered and gnawed gristle of the alien, and a seat smeared with blood or some other fluid.
What was going on here?
I pushed forward. Through a gap in the trees I spied a second Martian strider, standing as straight as the first somewhere over near the Zoo; it was as still and silent as a guardian of Hell. Patches of the red weed filled a nearby drainage ditch, making a spongy mass of dark-red vegetation splotched all over with sickly white flecks, as if it had been sprayed with acid. It looked like it was dying. Suddenly I glanced up: a giraffe was strolling by, red weed dangling from its lips. Someone must have released the animals from their cages.
As I crossed a small bridge, I again heard the wail—“Ool-lah, ool-lah, ool-lah, ool-…”—but it cut off suddenly in mid-syllable, as if someone had pulled the plug on a stadium sound system. The abrupt silence rolled over me like a thunderclap.
The nearby trees stood faint and tall and dim in the twilight, growing dark as the sun settled well below the horizon. All about me the red weed clambered among the ruins, writhing to reach the remains of that dim light. Night, the mother of fear and mystery, was rapidly approaching, just as it had drawn its cloak over all mankind.
But while that mournful voice had interrupted the solitude, the desolation had somehow seemed more endurable: Dead-Francisco had been alive to me again, even if that life was utterly alien; and the sense of life surging around me had bolstered my spirits. This abrupt change, this sudden absence of sound, this passing away of something ineffable—I didn’t know what—left me with a stillness in my soul that was almost palpable. There was nothing remaining but the eerie quiet, the gaunt, gray, ghoulish quiet that just wouldn’t go away.
I wanted to die.
Dead-Francisco gazed upon me with its empty, spectral eyes. The windows in the white houses of the city were like the sockets of bleached, barren skulls. Around me I imagined a thousand voiceless, noiseless enemies moving ever closer, surrounding my form. My paranoia seized me by the throat, exacerbating my horror of my own temerity. The Park became as pitch black as if it were tarred, and I saw a contorted shape lying prone across the pathway. I couldn’t bring myself to go on. I turned around and ran headlong from the unendurable stillness. I hid from the night and the silence until long after midnight, crouching down in a nearby taxi stand, I don’t know where.
Just before dawn my courage returned, and while the stars were still shining I crept back once again to Golden Gate Park. I missed my way somehow among the city’s crazy-quilt streets, but presently saw the place revealed again in the half-light of the early dawn, down at the end of a long, long avenue. I knew then just where I was. On the right, reaching towards the fading stars, was a third Martian fighting-machine,
erect and motionless and still, just like all the others.
An insane resolve suddenly possessed me. I would die here and now! I would just die and end it all. I would save myself the trouble even of killing myself. So I marched recklessly towards this giant behemoth, but as I drew nearer and nearer and the light became clearer, I saw that a flock of black birds was circling around the top of the machine, clustering on its hood. Suddenly my heart gave a little jump, and I began running down the road.
I hurried through the red weed, wading across a small stream of water that was oozing from a broken main towards the sea, and emerged into the open parkland just before sunrise. Great mounds of dirt had been heaped about the Martian pit, making a kind of fort. It was the last and greatest of the alien camps. A thin line of smoke rose into the sky. Against the skyline I could observe the outline of a dog, prancing and jumping and tugging at something. I felt no fear, only a wild, trembling exultation as I pelted up the hill towards the motionless monster. The cab was draped with dangling, stringy shreds of dull, red-brown flesh, which the hungry crows were fighting over.
It took just a moment to scramble up the rampart and stand on its crest. The interior of the structure was suddenly revealed to me. Gigantic machines, larger than any I’d ever seen before, were arrayed here in row after row amidst huge mounds of raw materials and strange, almost nest-like shelters. And scattered about them, some hanging from their war-machines, some in the now rigid handling-robots, some stark and silent and laid out in a formal line, I saw the Martians—all of them!—dead and damned and decaying.
They’d been murdered, I was later told, by a hidden killer for which they’d been completely unprepared: the earthly bacteria that had overwhelmed their defenseless internal systems. In essence, they were destroyed by their own feedings, slain as the red weed was being slain—killed, after man’s efforts had failed to have any effect at all, by the humblest of things on this Earth.
We should have known. If our terror hadn’t so blinded us, we would have known. Disease has taken its toll on mankind since the very beginning of our race, indeed, has taken its toll of all of our animal ancestors since life itself first began. But disease had apparently long since been eradicated on Mars, so long ago, in fact, that the invaders had completely forgotten the lessons of the past. As soon as the Martians began drinking our earthly water and feeding on earthly blood, our microscopic allies began their work of undermining the alien bodies. The invaders were irrevocably doomed, dying and rotting from within even as they went busily about destroying civilization.
It was inevitable. Man had bought his birthright upon this Earth through billions of deaths, and those who’d survived the onslaught of the unseen were fortified against future attacks. Even if the Martians had been ten times greater than they were, they would have perished anyway.
I saw the scattered bodies of at least fifty of the aliens, abruptly overtaken by a death that must have seemed as incomprehensible to them as any to us. Even I failed to understand the why and where of it. All I knew was that these “things” that had been so horribly alive a few days ago, so terribly destructive to mankind, were now all dead. For a moment I almost believed that the destruction of Sennacherib had been repeated, that God Himself had sent the Angel of Death to slay our enemies in the night.
I stood staring down upon that pestilent pit, and my heart suddenly brightened, even as the rising sun reignited the new world with bright, burning fire. The excavation was still layered within its darknesses; the mighty engines, so great and wonderful in their power and potency, so unearthly in their tortuous forms. They rose weirdly and vaguely and strangely out of the shadows towards the light—but ultimately had been overthrown by it. A pack of dogs was already fighting for the right to the bodies laid out in the depths of that awful camp.
Across the structure on its farther side, flat and vast and strange, was propped the great flying-machine with which the Martians had been experimenting when Death had suddenly announced his unmistakable presence. The sound of cawing caused me to look upwards at the huge strider that would fight no more, one of the tallest of the Martian fighting-machines that I had yet encountered. The tattered red shreds of flesh now dripped down to enrich the soil of Golden Gate Park.
Death creates life; life creates death.
The two other Martian machines that I’d observed earlier stood a little further off, just where doom had overtaken them. The one whose howl had been stopped in mid-blast might have been the final alien to perish upon the Earth; its voice had rung out until its energy was exhausted, pleading with its companions for an assistance that never came, in an awful parody of my own experiences of this past month. The machines just glittered now in the bright sunlight, harmless tripod towers of shining metal, seared and cleansed by the rays of the rising sun.
I turned around. The great Mother of Cities, the glorious metropolis of San Francisco, was like a phoenix destined to rise again from its ashes. Those who’ve only seen the town veiled in its somber robes of smoke can scarcely imagine the naked clarity and beauty of that silent wilderness of houses and offices and places of worship. My heart was suddenly caught up in its beauty.
Eastward, the sun blazed dazzlingly in the clear azure sky, and here and there some facet in the great wilderness of roofs caught the light and reflected it back at me with a white, pure, clean intensity.
As I gazed upon this wide expanse of buildings, silent and abandoned, I thought of the hopes and efforts, the hosts of lives that had gone into building this human reef, and the swift and terrible destruction that had been visited upon it. I realized then that the shadows had finally been rolled back, that man might again live in these streets. This dear, vast, dead city of mine was once more a living and powerful thing. I felt inside me a wave of emotion that nearly overwhelmed my soul. A tear rolled down one cheek.
Our long torment was over. The healing could now begin. The survivors of the people scattered over the countryside—leaderless, lawless, foodless, like sheep without a shepherd—the thousands who’d fled by sea, would soon begin to return. The pulse of life, growing stronger and stronger, would beat again in the empty streets and pour across the vacant squares. The hand of the destroyer was finally stayed. The gaunt wrecks, the blackened skeletons of the houses that stared so dismally at the sunlit grass of the Park, would presently be echoing with the jackhammers of contractors and the tapping of carpenters. I extended my right hand towards the sky and thanked God for our deliverance. In a year, I thought, in just a year, it would all be remade anew.
Suddenly I was overwhelmed with the prospect of my old life restored again, something that I’d once thought was lost forever.
Was it really possible?
Could Becky still be alive?
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
THE WRECK OF MANKIND
In this wild, solitary girl I had at length discovered the mysterious warbler that so often followed me in the wood.
—W. H. Hudson
Alex Smith, 24 Bi-January-11 Bi-February, Mars Year i
San Francisco, California, Planet Earth
I come now to the strangest part of my story. I remember, clearly and coldly and vividly, all that I did on that day until the time that I stood weeping upon the summit of the Martian pit in Golden Gate Park. After that, though, I blanked out.
Of the next few days I can recall nothing. I’ve since learned that I was not the first person to stumble upon the Martians’ destruction; several other wanderers had already discovered the deaths the previous night. One man—the very first—had gone back downtown at about the same time I’d been sheltering in the taxi stand, and had managed to signal someone through a satellite link. The news had flashed around the world on CNN and the other media. San Francisco and Los Angeles and their suburbs had been the most severely affected areas; the rest of the country, the rest of world, had gone on pretty much as usual—well, except for the knowledge that we were no longer alone in the universe.
When I re
gained my senses, refugees were already beginning to return to San Francisco by bus and train and automobile. Supplies were being brought from Sacramento by the National Guard. Within days life began flourishing once again in the silent streets of the city. The people found themselves overjoyed, even elated, at the sudden end of the war, despite the destruction that was everywhere visible. Men would suddenly embrace complete strangers, hugging them on public streets, just grateful to be alive.
The European Community sent ships to the major eastern and Gulf ports of the United States, while China and Japan and Australia dispatched supplies to Portland and Seattle and San Diego on the West Coast, which were serving as the major distribution centers until services could be restored to San Francisco Bay in the north and San Pedro in the south.
But I knew nothing of this until long after the fact. I drifted in and out of a world of my own. When I finally awoke, dazed and disoriented, I found myself surrounded by kindly people, a couple who’d found me wandering and raving in the streets of the city, somewhere near the upper reaches of Market. They said that I was singing some demented doggerel about “The Last Man Alive Can Scarcely Survive!” These people sheltered and bathed and fed me—and protected me from myself. They learned something of my story during the days of my recovery, when I was still rambling in my mind and uttering utter nonsense.
When I was restored again to some semblance of normalcy, they gently broke the news that the town of Sonoma had been destroyed during the invasion, together with most of its population. A strider had swept the place out of existence without any apparent provocation, as a boy might step on an anthill.
I was still a very lonely man, but they were gentle to me in my extremity. I was also sad, tremendously sad and morose, and still they nurtured me. I remained with them for four days after my recovery. During that time I felt a vague, growing need to revisit whatever remained of my previous life, an existence that now seemed so happy and untroubled in the warmth of my memories. They tried to keep me from leaving. They did all that they could to divert me. But at last I could resist the temptation no longer, and, promising faithfully to return, I left my new-found friends with tears and gratitude and thanks, and went out again into the streets that had lately been so dark and strange and empty to me.
Invasion! Earth vs. The Aliens Page 21
