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The Martians Strike Back!. Robert Reginald
Читать онлайн.Название The Martians Strike Back!
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781434443557
Автор произведения Robert Reginald
Жанр Научная фантастика
Издательство Ingram
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