The Broken Hand Mirror of Venus
by Mark Onspaugh
T |
he tripod at City Hall was the largest Dillon had ever seen.
Easily two hundred feet in height, it leaned against the Los Angeles landmark like a drunk being escorted home by a slightly taller friend.
Like every other Martian device he had ever seen, it showed no sign of rust or corrosion. It gleamed in the afternoon sun as if its operators would return at any moment to finish razing downtown.
Dillon knew what he would find if he went up there. Martians a good three years dead, still managing to produce an ungodly stink, their loathsome triple eyes displaying the same amount of humanity and compassion that they had in life.
Zero. Zilch. Nada.
Dillon took some small satisfaction in the English ivy that was making its way up the legs of the machine. Within a couple of decades those gleaming death machines would be hidden under thick vegetation, serving as housing for various birds and rodents.
His stomach rumbled, and he wondered if there were any food stores in the old government building. Looters had cleaned out a lot of warehouses and markets, but sometimes the vending machines held enough stale or rancid treats to get him through another day.
As Dillon drew nearer, he saw that the top of City Hall was a charred and crumbling ruin on one side. The squids had gotten off a shot or two before the AV-19 had claimed them.
AV-19 had been the savior of the human race; the super-virus that would wipe out the goddamn squids once and for all.
It worked, worked fast.
Too bad AV-19 had mutated a few times after its encounter with the Martians, until it found it also liked killing humans just as quickly, albeit more painfully.
Science freaking marches on.
The first invasion of the Martians would have been a success but for their vulnerability to Earth’s bacteria. They died within weeks of landing and humans thought they had seen the last of them. The early tripods were also susceptible to the elements, and had quickly rusted and fallen apart without their Martian caretakers to maintain them.
Almost a hundred years passed, and the human race had nearly forgotten the invasion, regarding it with the same nostalgic distance as World War I.
Probes sent to Mars showed no signs of life, and economics and politics prevented manned missions.
A fatal error.
In 1992 the first of the new Martian ships landed, and now the Martians were immune to all the natural pestilence Earth might have to offer. Newer, more resilient tripods and smaller bipods began razing cities.
Dillon was only five when the attacks began, but his family lived in Jasmine, Florida, far from the conflict. By the time he was twelve, everyone was fighting with whatever weapons they had.
The Martian war machines were quicker and far more deadly than ground and air forces, so the scientists of Earth turned to biological warfare. The team consisted of scientists from every country, and was housed in an underground bunker far out in the Australian Outback. Named Project Dreamtime, they worked tirelessly to find a viral or bacteria strain that would kill the Martians.
Thanks to captured specimens, Project Dreamtime perfected the Ares Virus. Strain 19 proved to be the most lethal, and the spin doctors dubbed it “The Fourth Horseman”. A quorum of nations elected to release it where wind and water currents would carry it worldwide.
A small minority of scientists pleaded for more testing, but New York, Chicago, Moscow, Tokyo, Paris and London were all in ruins, and the Martians were moving in on every landmass that supported life.
AV-19 was released on Christmas Day, 2003.
And what the Martians had begun, the Fourth Horseman was now finishing.
Dillon found a candy machine near the cafeteria, but it was full of mice nests. He had managed to get along without eating anything living.
It wasn’t that he was opposed to eating vermin, hell, the idea of mouse stew made his stomach rumble. He just couldn’t take the chance that the creatures were safe to eat.
Like Marie had.
Shaking off such dark thoughts, he found the cafeteria ransacked. It always made him sneer when he saw a cash register emptied. What had those idiots thought that cash could buy? Life was strictly back to bartering. Spam for guns, soup for bullets.
No Good Money. Good Cans = Cash.
It was a bit of graffiti he had seen often since working his way from Tallahassee to Los Angeles. Trouble was, most of the proprietors of those make-shift trading posts were often dead, their bodies swollen like purple sausages, their mottled skin splitting under the ravages of AV-25. Either that, or their corpses lay rotting in the rubble of their enterprise, bodies partially reduced to ash by carelessly aimed death rays, the Martians who had employed them either too sick or too demoralized to aim properly.
Or, maybe the squids had just wanted to hear more screaming. Humans who got lased accurately never had time to do more than sizzle for a second before disintegrating into ash.
Dillon found a dented can of tomato soup in the pantry and a discarded can of beets under the deep fryer. Someone had actually been picky enough to toss it aside. Dillon hated beets, they actually made him gag, but they were loaded with minerals and vitamins. He found a pot and made a fire with some old newspaper and the slats of a fruit crate. He cut up the beets into the soup and used a liberal amount of pepper and garlic salt. The resultant soup tasted like shit, but at least it didn’t taste like beets.
He spent the better part of the day going through offices, scoring a couple of Payday candy bars in a baggie, two cans of minestrone soup and some packets of ramen noodles. The noodles never sat well with him, he’d trade them for something better if he could find someone to trade with.
“You’re fooling yourself,” he thought.
The truth was, he hadn’t seen many people left alive since his sister Marie had contracted AV-25. He had promised to stay with her, to be by her side until the end, then give her a decent burial.
While he had been out looking for fresh water, Marie had gone off by herself.
He never found her.
She had been so worried about infecting him that she had gone off to die alone. It was typical behavior for his older sister, and he both admired and hated her for it.
Like their parents, he had never had a chance to say goodbye.
He lost Marie in Texas. In the two years it had taken him to reach California, he had only seen a handful of living humans. One had been an old desert rat in New Mexico.
Dillon had been crossing the desert just after dark, and his only illumination came from starlight. He couldn’t risk using a flashlight, and batteries could often be traded for bullets. Besides, his night vision was pretty good.
A trading post loomed ahead like a specter, its chipped and weathered hand-painted signs promising soda, beef jerky and cactus candy. Dillon hadn’t eaten in two days, and was hoping to find food and a place to rest out of the sun for a bit.
He was within fifty feet of his goal the old man had popped up out of a hidden burrow like a trapdoor spider and had taken a shot at him, the bullet so close Dillon had heard the whine of it as it passed by his left ear. Fortunately, Dillon was younger and quicker and had put a bullet in the bastard’s forehead before he had gotten off a second shot.
It was too bad, because the old bastard showed no signs of infection, and Dillon thought the man might be immune to AV like he was. It would have been nice to have some company, even if just for a little while. He pushed the corpse back down into the rat’s hidey-hole and helped himself to the man’s supplies, which included a lot of jerky and, wonder of wonders, some stale chocolate cookies. It had been so long since Dillon had had anything like that that he had gorged himself, eating the whole bag at once. This had given him a bad case of the runs the next day, but it was worth it. He also found a paperback copy of The Count of Monte Cristo squirreled away behind some crude Kachina dolls. Paperbacks were a rarity, most of them had been used for fires in the early years. There were still hardcovers in libraries that were still standing, but these were too heavy to carry.
You had to pack light dealing with squids.
His second encounter had been in Las Vegas.
Much of the strip had been demolished by the Martian war machines, but a portion of the Excalibur still stood, its single charred turret looking like an actual remnant of some medieval castle rather than a casino. Dillon had tried to explore there, only to be pelted with silver dollars by a group of four or five laughing children. They were almost feral, hooting and howling at him like wolf children. Dillon wanted desperately to talk to them, to find out if there were other survivors, but they always attacked him with the heavy coins, which they could throw with unerring accuracy. He stayed for nearly a week, trying to coax them to come out, but they called him “Mars man” and “Squid shit” and told him to go away. Finally, he gave up and made his way to Los Angeles, their gibbon-like hooting fading in the distance.
He had quite a scare in Arizona, just a mile from the California border. He had found two toppled tripods that had blundered into deep holes and crashed to the ground. Though there was no one about, he could see the holes had been concealed with a lattice of wood covered with sheet rock and earth. Careful examination of the area showed a line of such holes, nearly fourteen in all.
“I hope you got the bastards,” he thought, admiring the work that had gone into so many traps. “I hope you got them before they got you.”
He investigated the first tripod and found it devoid of corpses, Martian or otherwise. As usual, it was filled with complex devices that seemed to defy human manipulation. One of the leaders of the human resistance had theorized that Martian machines were attuned to Martian brains, and that no amount of coaxing, fiddling or cursing would get them to respond to humans.
It was just as well. The thought of traveling the country in one of the hated machines made him nauseous. These things had nearly brought the human race to an end.
Human race? Hell, practically all life on Earth had fallen to the Martian war machines, which seemed to fire on anything moving or with a heat signature. It seemed the Martians were only interested in wiping out life on Earth. Whether it was something they considered pre-emptive or they just wanted the real estate, they had very nearly succeeded.
Dillon suspected that there were pockets of wildlife in some of the world’s more isolated areas, but it would be long after his lifetime before the Earth was fertile and green again. Something in the Martian arsenal had also rendered the oceans lifeless, or maybe it was another variant of AV-19. Whatever, he wasn’t taking a chance of swimming in open water or eating anything that didn’t come out of a can or pouch.
He was sure the second tripod would be just as barren, and his mind was elsewhere, wondering if he would find a survivor, perhaps a girl close to his own age.
There were two nude and desiccated human corpses in the second tripod, a middle-aged man and woman. Dillon had just registered that the corpses displayed unusual post-mortem wounds when a tentacle had wrapped around his left ankle. He saw with mind-numbing horror that a Martian had hidden underneath a control panel, and was now drawing him near. It was making that godawful sound they made, which registered on an aural and psychic level, making one’s skull vibrate while producing feelings of vertigo and nausea.
The thing’s grip was strong, and the natural corrosive in its suckers was eating through his jeans and starting to burn his leg. If he didn’t do something, part of his leg would be pre-digested before he crossed another ten feet of floor.
Dillon pulled a hunting knife from his belt, a good solid blade with one serrated edge. With a violence fueled by adrenaline and a life-long hatred he hacked at the tentacle, trying to saw through it before he was in reach of the creature’s smaller and more agile tentacles.
It shrieked, and the noise went through his skull like a dental drill, making him cry out in agony. For a moment he nearly lost his grip on the knife, but knew he’d die if he did.
With renewed vigor he stabbed and hacked at the thing, all the while cursing it, its lineage, its planet, its odor and its sexual proclivities.
The mollusc-like body of the Martian raised up a good eighteen inches, and Dillon was horrified to see it possessed a complement of eight crab-like legs on its underside. It began to scuttle closer to him, the better to dine on him and prolong its own hateful existence.
Dillon screamed like a mad man and hacked at the thing, forgetting in his blood rage the pistol in his belt and the rifle in his backpack. He was an atavistic creature, now, like a proto-human facing some terror that had not been dissuaded by his fire.
With a bloodcurdling war cry Dillon cut through the tentacle, taking off the tip of one thumb in the process. The creature shrieked and withdrew the injured stump, and Dillon rolled toward the door, now remembering his firearms.
The shots inside the tripod chamber were deafening, and he did not stop firing until the creature was still and all three eyes had been pulped.
Dillon collapsed just outside the tripod, remembering to crawl into the shade just before losing consciousness.
He awoke around midnight, alternating chills and fever. The burned part of his leg looked inflamed, as did his injured thumb, which was scabbed but swollen.
AV-25 he thought with mounting panic, but calmed himself. It was an infection from the corrosive on the Martian tentacles. If he could weather the fever and stay hydrated, he should be all right.
He had some aspirin in his backpack, and he took these with a generous amount of water. He was loathe to be so free with his meager supplies, but erring on the side of caution might mean his life.
He slipped in and out of consciousness, dreaming uneasy dreams heightened by fever to an almost psychedelic surrealism.
Dillon drifted for three days from his infection. He rallied on the fourth day and made himself a gray sort of stew with jerky and what little water he had left. It was enough to revitalize him and he replenished his supplies in one of the “tiger traps” the locals had dug. He also found a gallon of kerosene. The smart thing would have been to lug it along, hopefully trade it for ammo or a new pistol, but Dillon needed to further punish the Martian who had nearly killed him. He buried the humans he had found in the tripod, marking their graves with simple crosses snapped off from the lattice-work of the traps. He waited until dark, and then had doused the interior of the tripod and the dead Martian with the kerosene. Outside, he used flint and steel to light a piece of kindling, and tossed it inside.
There was a satisfying whumph, and a bright flame he was sure could be seen for miles. The stink of the burning squid was terrible, it made his eyes water and he vomited up his dinner. But he stayed where he was, hoping that stench would carry to any other of the goddamned things left alive.
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