The Pink Smoke

"Aren't we taking you a bit out of your way?" Ms. Elphistone asked them.

Don and Casey exchanged a look, and Don answered, "We aren't really bound anywhere in particular."

"Just running," the woman summed up.

"Anywhere away from the Martians, yes."

"Aye, that's why we're off to my husband's farmhouse. Oh, Augie, where are you?" she said plaintively to no one present.

The turtle looked askance, whispering toward April's ear, "Is she going to be all right?"

April turned a smile on him so wide and strained beneath her yellow bonnet that it belied no small measure of doubt when she said, "She'll be fine."

Don let the matter fall, but resolved to himself to keep an eye on the woman, who was not handling the situation presented her in the best of manners, though Donatello could hardly fault her the distraught manner, given what they were all faced with.

At midday, they were waylaid, having to hide from the fighting machines in a copse of trees barely large enough to squeeze the horse and cart into with any sort of cover, too far from the larger wood along the edges of the meadows. April held Penny-Farthing's rein tightly, stroking her nose with reassuring whispers as the tripods passed, one after another, three in all, their destination undeterminable. With no reassurance that another machine would not come, the foursome eventually, cautiously, emerged. They proceeded slowly, saving the horse in the event they would later need her to bolt to safety, creeping across the fields like a mouse emerging in a house where it knows there to be a cat.

As the buildings of a small village came to view, Casey hopped down from the cart, checking his pistol. "Ga ahn ahid. O'll kitch as some suppah!"

"Do you think that's wise?" Ms. Elphistone queried, voicing Donatello's own doubt if not worry for their ally.

"Oll'll be will," the young soldier chirped. "Oy'm bettah on me own, ye know! Kape 'em sayfe," he nodded to Don, who firmly returned the gesture, and the little cart trundled on.

Holding their slow-going pace, it took another hour to pass the town, during which the report of a single gunshot carried to them from the direction of the wood their young soldier had struck out toward. Mrs. Elphistone relaxed slightly, heading into familiar territory. "Look, this is Doctor Whitmore's house… There's the church! And April had a little friend who lived here, they were playmates when April would come to stay, d'you remember, April?"

"Willard," the girl nodded, not as fondly. "He pulled my pigtails so much, it's amazing my hair's still attached!" The women laughed together, more at ease than they had been for the duration of their distressing journey, glad to be near its end.

"Just another hour from here," Mrs. Elphistone assured, settling back against the bench. But April looked worried.

"Shouldn't we wait for Casey? How will he know what direction we've gone?"

Donatello glanced behind them. "Well, the cart is leaving fresh tracks in the ground here, and we've still got a couple of hours of daylight left. He's clever enough to be able to find them and come after." April sighed, conceding their need to progress, but kept turning to glance behind them. Don made a conscious effort not to roll his eyes or otherwise show just how much he preferred not having their loudmouthed, arrogant companion along for the moment, but it was clear to him that it put April ill at ease. "Would you like to stop and wait?" he suggested.

She looked all around them once more. "It's not that," she stated. "It's something else… As if… I keep hearing something, like a whisper in my ear…"

"Merely the strain, dear. We'll be safe at the farmhouse soon enough," her aunt encouraged, but April sat bolt-upright.

"It's coming!" she yelped, brushing her bonnet back to put her fingers against one temple. She closed her eyes, concentrating on something only she could detect. Her jaw dropped in dread. "And it's carrying something meant to get rid of us!"

Indeed, as she spoke, the axles of the cart creaked as the ground tremored from the impact of giant tripod feet.

"We're out in the open! Oh!" Mrs. Elphistone declared, seizing the rein from Don and hauling Penny-Farthing's head back toward the town and whipping her into a gallop, just as one of the fighting machines crested the horizon, towering over the world below it.

The Martian, rather than unleashing the devastating heat ray, extended a tube ten feet long from below its hood, similar to the cannon Casey Jones had manned. From the end, it fired a black cylinder, which, when it hit the ground in the midst of the road and its surrounding meadows, began emitting a bizarre pink smoke that, rather that rising, pooled and flowed along the ground, heaping up and cascading over itself as it spread to fill the area.

Penny-Farthing must have caught the scent of the peril that was coming, for she reared and bucked, breaking free of her traces and nearly pulling June from the cart before she could let loose of the reins, leaving them calling uselessly after her. They all hopped down from the cart, just as the pinkish-violet smoke rolled across the edge of the town. A man ran out of one of the houses ahead of it, falling to the ground, writhing and clawing at his throat once he had taken in so much as a breath of the foul, pink poison. All three of them looked on in horror for a moment as the man continued in his agonized death throes, before Don grabbed hold of both of the women by the arm and ushered them into a run away from the rolling banks of flowing gas. "Don't look!" he told them, April hazarding a backward glance regardless of his warning, but kept her feet moving.

"What is it?"

"G-g-gaseous iodine," the turtle reasoned from the strange gas's color, its motion almost fractal in nature. "…and probably much worse! Run!"

The fighting machine launched another canister on the other side of the township, the same hideous smoke pouring from it in a way that boxed them in. As it began swirling around their ankles, and rising quickly, Don said, "We've got to get up above this, fast!"

Mrs. Elphistone pointed ahead of them. "The church's bell-tower! There's a ladder inside that goes straight to the top!"

"Go!" Don shouted as they set off in its direction. "Whatever you do, don't breathe any of it!"

The gas had risen to their mid-torsos by the time they reached the church and flung its doors wide, then slammed them shut again in hopes of impeding the flow of the gas, but the effect was precious little. June pointed them through the narthex to the access ladder, which she helped lift April onto. As soon as April was well on her way, Donatello crossed his fingers for Mrs. Elphistone to step onto so he could boost her up to the first rung, five feet above the floor. By then, the smoke had seeped through the door and through every crack around the windows, and the scientist was up to his neck before April reached the top, not hazarding to jump up before Mrs. Elphistone had reached the platform, lest the rickety ladder not hold them both. With a final, deep breath of clear air, he disappeared into the pink fog entirely.

April's face appeared over the gap as soon as her aunt had cleared the way, concern etched on her features. "Donnie!" she called down desperately.

"Oh, dear… Oh, me…" Mrs. Elphistone gasped. "I'm so sorry, April, dear… Come away… He's sacrificed himself for us, the poor dear!"

"Be quiet!" April chastised her, looking down the ladder, with the poison pinkness having reached the church's high ceiling, but not gone any higher. "Donnie?"

A moment later, Donatello came climbing rapidly up to them and out of the bank of gaseous fog. As he reached them, stepping onto the now very crowded tower platform and bracing himself on the crossbeams, he let out the breath he had been holding. April, throwing all caution to the wind, threw her arms around the sides of his shell, clutching him tightly. "Watch your footing!" he warned.

"I'm so glad you're okay!" she breathed. "You didn't come up for such a long time! I can't believe you managed to hold your breath for that long!"

He chuckled lightly. "I love being a turtle. If there's one thing we're good for, it's our excellent lung capacity!"

"Well… Perhaps he hasn't sacrificed himself for you after all," June said with a wry grin. "He shall have to make up for it some other time."

"Aunt June!" April scolded.

"Kidding," June smirked. "Only kidding." Her smile then fell. "What about dear Master Jones, though?" She leaned to the side, trying to look around the bell and the tower's other two occupants to see anything outside of the pink cloud.

April let out a gasp, turning herself around as quickly as she could to look out from the cupola, spotting a single figure in soldier's accoutrements with a dead grouse dangling from his belt, and already knee-deep in the deadly gas and completely unaware of its danger, as another bank approached from out of the forest behind him.

"Oh no," Donatello murmured.

"Casey!" she shouted. "Get out of there! It'll kill you if you breathe it!"

"Huh?" was Casey Jones's reaction, lifting his arms as if getting them out of the fog would do him any good.

Don stuck his head out of the cupola. "Climb, Jones!" he yelled.

Casey looked all about him, in the largely meadowed area, finally locating a single, scrawny jack-pine that had somehow struck out on its own, in the relative middle of nowhere. He made a bee-line for it, shimmying upward until its top started bowing under his weight, with the gas rising after him, right up to his heels. And there he clung, unable to move a muscle without being dumped into the choking, cloying miasma, for the entire night and the better part of the following morning, with his three companions unable to do anything for him, much less themselves, on their tiny island above the violet-pink and deadly sea.

"It's almost pretty," Mrs. Elphistone commented, "the color, and the way it moves…"

April frowned. "I've always hated pink."

Mrs. Elphistone managed to hunker down in her corner of the belltower enough to be able to catch a bit of fitful sleep, while Don and April took turns at the side of the cupola facing Casey, keeping a nerve-wracked eye on him should he fall. Of course, if he did, there was absolutely nothing to be done about it, but neither of them wished that to happen unnoticed at the very least, keeping vigil for their friend. Donatello, at one point, insisted that April try to get some sleep, but she claimed she was too nervous for Casey, and upon her offer for him to rest, he said that he didn't trust the platform to hold him if he moved off the beams he was standing on, given the whole setup was meant to hold one scrawny young altar boy and not two women and an anthropomorphic turtle, so neither of them did more than lightly doze for the whole night.