In Better Hands

Upon breaking free from the cellar after my recent confinement, the coming day seemed dazzlingly bright, the sky a deep, glowing blue. A gentle breeze kept the red weed gently swaying. And oh! the sweetness of the air!

I could barely discern anything from the world I knew, for the red weed had covered every scrap of bare land and climbed up any sort of landmark. The roads were all obscured; trying to discern them while also navigating one's feet through the creeping vines proved to be a task in and of itself. At long last, I decided I was on a road that would lead to London, for all the good it would do me. Perhaps others had found refuge there, or had mounted some sort of defense against the invaders… though, from what I had seen thus far, I was left in doubt. Even so, where else was I to go? I would head for London, to survey what there was, or was not, and should there be nothing there for me, move on toward my father's home at Leatherhead, in hopes that he and Karai had made it there safely.

I cannot imagine I had made it more than a mile, given the constant struggle it was to walk through the vines, when a tripod crested the horizon, shooting its heat ray around it in three short bursts. It occurred to me that it had been quite some time since I had seen the devastating weapon used; perhaps the Martians had only a limited amount of fuel to power it, or only found it useful in combatting the Earthlings' weapons when they first posed a threat, and now that our most powerful guns and ships were defeated, the humans and anthro-creatures routed, there was no necessity for a bullet when a saber would do. Whatever the case, something was beleaguering the Martian enough for it to shoot multiple blasts, one firing up into the vast blueness of the sky as the fighting machine let out an eerie whoop and toppled over backward. It was miles from my position, yet I still felt the impact tremble through the ground. And astonishingly, none of its fellows came to its aid, either to assist it, or recover the wreckage.

I continued upon my course, keeping a wary eye on the place where the tripod had fallen, though all that came from that area was a stream of smoke, as though it had caught fire. Then I saw the other threat: bounding across the terrain in a wild, uncontrolled zigzag came the spider-like handling machine, the front of which was now marred with a great dent, as though it had crashed into something. Its erratic movements, though completely unpredictable, carried it across the landscape at a speed faster than that of a horse at full gallop. It was something to behold; for while the fighting machines crossed miles with a single step, the mechanical spider bounded swiftly over the ground—it just seemed to have trouble deciding in which direction it should be going, from one moment to the next. In that aspect, we were the same.

In my awe of the thing, I nearly forgot its danger. Hurriedly, I huddled down beside what was possibly a henhouse—so overrun with the red weed was it that I could not discern entirely—and lifted a number of vines over myself in a crude sort of camouflage. Yet, I believe it had seen me, for as confused as its direction seemed, it unerringly proceeded toward me. I tried to scuttle away, beneath the cover of the vines, and still, it followed. I feared its tentacles would snatch me up and fling me into its carrying basket at any moment, to carry me off to be stabbed and drained by the alien creatures (though good luck getting through my shell with their silly glass straws…). But death did not come for me that day. The handling machine stopped aside me, and a familiar voice called, "I can see you in there! The eye of the Lord sees all! 'No being created can escape God's sight, but all is bare and helpless before the eyes of Him with whom we must reckon.'"

"Parson Raphael?" I asked as I stood, shaking off the vines. "You're alive! And escaped the Martians! And…" I shook my head at the sight of the machine he had absconded with. "But… how? Surely they were about to drink your blood!"

He beamed down at me. "They set me aside for study!" he said. "The demons couldn't figure out why I had the rigors!" His face became stern. "A terrifying experience, unable to move, unable to fight! Utterly at the mercy of Satan and his devils! Well, Martians…" he conceded.

"I am sorry for that… I thought it better than knocking you out…" He held out a hand to help me up onto the machine.

"I've experienced no fear its like, even with the Lord's presence with me! Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death… But it did save me, you see! It made them stop and think, and it gave me time to remember what you said about breaking through your…" he made circles in the air with his hands, "…point… thingy sorcery, that it would be agony, but I could break thought it! And so I called upon the Lord to give me strength… He did! And so I knocked two of them together—I did try burning one with my cross, but it didn't work—and jumped up into this metal menace! It's complex, but the Lord guided my hand to mange the controls… see?" He pressed a knob, and the handling machine lurched a step backward, the both of us flailing about as neither of us expected it to move in that direction. He chuckled. "Well, almost. You touch the glass here, and the tenty-cles come out. Not really sure how to make them go where I want… At any rate, I managed it enough to slam it right into the ankle of one of the walking monsters, got its foot tangled in the legs of this one, and it broke!" he guffawed. "Fell right over, like a busted stool!"

" I saw! Well done!"

He continued to laugh, leaning on me. "A… a Martian divided cannot stand!" He slapped my shell, getting me to chuckle along with him, but the mirth suddenly drained from his face. "Why am I laughing? My wife is dead, and the last I said to her was calling her a devil!" He dissolved into sobs, collapsing to his knees on the floor of the machine. "Perhaps it was I; I am the one possessed…"

I was at a loss as to what to do for him, and could only keep a wary eye out for any Martians coming to retrieve their stolen property, should they even know such concepts. "Much as I hate to say, Parson, but that's not what we need to be worried about at the moment!" I encouraged him to his feet and into the control-seat. "As you're the only one of us who has some inkling of these controls, it's going to have to be on you to get us, and this thing, away from the Martians, before they come for it!"

"Right, yes," he said, still shaking his head in his distraught state. He punched a few buttons and the metal spider lurched forward, then sidestepped a few paces before resuming a course roughly toward London, but when a course correction was needed, a button-press or knob-turn often sent it wildly off-course, necessitating more corrections.

"Keep it straight!" I called as I was tossed to one side.

"I'm trying! But this demon machine won't hardly do the same thing twice!" he snapped back.

At the opening of one flange, the machine increased its pace immensely, now galloping across the weed-covered land. I lost my feet and was thrown back against the basket on the machine's rear. "Parson!" I cried, skidding about on my shell, "steer!" He ground his teeth, hitting all the buttons and swiping his hand across the glass panel. The delicate tentacles flailed about, some getting caught under the handling device's own feet and snapped off or tangled up within themselves. The spider made two sharp turns to the right in the course of Raphael's wild, random button mashing, and at once, we were pointed at and approaching one of the red weed 'trees' at speed. "Stop! Turn! Do something!" I yelped, getting enough footing to join Raphael at the control seat.

"I can't! It's locked up, won't respond!"

"Then, JUMP!" I grabbed him by the carapace and dragged him off the side of the spider. We landed in a bed of vines, spongy enough to break our fall. The handling machine continued on, unmanned (and un-turtled), crashing into the weed-tree a second later. The trunk burst with a watery blutch! and the full weight of its succulent bulk fell directly onto the metal spider. Three of the legs snapped off of the body, the basket, crushed to shards; the rest of the mechanism pummeled into the ground. One remaining intact leg kept trying to drag the rest forward, doing nothing but digging a trench in the soft ground.

The parson and I sat, staring at the destruction. If the Martians intended to come for their property, they would only be taking back scrap.

"The Lord giveth," Raphael sighed, "and he taketh away."

I patted his shell consolingly. "We could have made good time with it, if we could have controlled it." It was clear that that was a larger if than we could fathom. "Even so, it was still in better hands than the Martians'."