Our Allies

I extended my hand to shake Miss O'Neil's. "Leonardo Hamato. These are my friends… ah…" I swiveled about, finding my companions no longer at my side. "Fellows?" Slight motion drew my attention to Raphael and Michelangelo, crouched behind the hill. "Oh, come now…" I chided.

They stood, trying to not look embarrassed at their action. "You may well be fearless, Leonardo, but the rest of us still have our sense of self-preservation in tact!" the parson harrumphed, crossing his arms over his chest.

"Sorry," Michelangelo grinned apologetically, also offering his name and hand to shake. "But we couldn't make out what it was, coming at us!"

"Yes," I agreed, motioning to the young woman's strange accoutrements, the antennae-ed helmet that seemed to be made from a kitchen colander, and a metal frame looking to have been made over the top of a dressmaker's dummy, "What is all this?"

"Oh! Things to help fight against the Martians!" She indicated the metal frame, which, supported by padding at the shoulders and waist, never came into contact with April's body. "This is called, if I've got it right, a Far-Away Cage. It's meant to deflect the Martian heat-ray into the ground instead of hitting me. And this," she said, replacing the helmet upon her head, "is supposed to increase some sort of latent mental ability I seem to have."

"Madness!" Raphael muttered, and Michelangelo bumped him in the side with his elbow.

"Not any more mad than all we've gone through!"

I chuckled at their interaction, looking again at the strange, scrappy, cobbled-together devices. "These look like something my friend Ogilvy would have made…"

Miss O'Neil's bright eyes widened. "Donatello Ogilvy?"

I was at once taken aback. "Why, yes! Do you know of him?"

In response, she grinned widely and seized my wrist, tugging me down the hill. "Donnie!" she cried gleefully as we approached. "Look who I've found!"

I gaped. After all this, I could scarcely believe our good fortune. "Donatello?"

The scientist, whom I never would have recognized in his patchwork rubberized coat and thick, smoked-glass-lensed goggles, turned to me, a wide smile spreading across his beak. "Leonardo, my friend! As I live and breathe! How marvelous to see you alive and well!"

"And you!" I shared the sentiment as we clasped hands and embraced one another several times, celebrating our chanced survival. "I happened to be passing through London… I came to see what that great explosion was about. The Martian?"

Don snorted. "That would be Casey Jones's insistence on setting a mine off beneath its foot, despite the fact that it was already nearly dead!"

"Cam on, Donnie! Win ilse woz Oi evah ganna git the chince?" the supposed Casey Jones whined, wheeling around Donatello, on what looked to be miniature bicycles on each foot, with apparent ease.

"We only have five more now!" Donatello sniped back at him. "I'd hate to have wasted one if we happen to need them later!"

"Hang on a sec," Michelangelo interrupted, coming up for a closer look at the young man. "Casey! From the gunners! Birthday: twenty-seventh of September, right?"

Casey looked taken aback and unsure how to respond to this. "Erm, yis? D' Oi knaow you?"

"Maybe! I'm Michelangelo, from the fourteenth hussars! We were stationed just down the line from you all at Horsell!"

"Oh, yeh!" Jones seemed to remember. "Any more 'a yours mike it aout?"

The artilleryman shook his head sadly. "Only me. Not even any of the horses. Yours?"

"Six 'a us, thenks ta Donatello, but Don an' me split 'woay fram 'em at Landon, 'foh the etteck…"

As the two soliders spoke about their brigades and the paltry few survivors, if they managed to survive still, another figure, who rather resembled an insect, slid from the seat of one of the mobile devices. It looked like a cart modified with a metal canister, emitting steam from a small chimney and fed by a bellows clearly made of an accordion (still making its two-note song), canvas fins on its sides, wheels canted sideways for stability. The device chugged and gave a final toot! as it came to rest. "Oh… Donatello, I cannot for the life of me see through this bloody clouded glass in this light!"

Don hustled over to her to assist. "They flip up out of the way, June… Here!" The scientist flipped a simple lever on each eye to pull the dark glass upward.

"That's much better now," the woman sighed. "Oh! And we have visitors! Shall I put the kettle on?" She returned to the vehicle and proudly yanked a cord, which produced another train-like whistle. She gave the device a befuddled look. "Now, that wasn't right…"

"Don't worry about it, June," Don reassured her, and turned back to Leonardo's group. "This is Mrs. June Elphistone, April's aunt, or as you might now call her…"

"June Buggy!" the woman declared, propping her fists on her hips and looking supremely chuffed about her modified appearance. "Look at me, I'm wearing men's trousers!" she said, holding out a leg. "Scandalous, I tell you, scandalous! Ahaha!"

Don chuckled and told me in more confidential tones, "She's gained a lot of confidence since we picked her up… I daresay more than even April, who already has it in spades. I don't dare dampen her enthusiasm… she's quite gung-ho about whopping some aliens!"

"They's oll dyin' aout, thaough, roight? Loike ye sed," Casey interjected, butting his way between us as if he'd been party to the conversation all along.

Michelangelo was overjoyed at hearing this. "Truly? Yes!" he shouted with a leap in the air.

Donatello looked less certain. "Yes, but I haven't yet ascertained why…"

"Dying?" I interjected. "The Martians are dying? Not conquered?"

"No… Here, come see for yourself!"

He led me to a park bench, with the others following, where I was drawn into a grisly alien autopsy. "Near as I can tell, this one perished from a number of infections. Note here, all the deposits in the lungs, the extremely inflamed tissue, and all the fluid exiting the sinus. No digestive track to speak of. With the sheer altitude of their machines, I can't imagine they would have come into contact with any sort of terrestrial disease…"

It was Raphael who spoke up. "The demons were feasting on the blood of Men. Thus, the God of the Heavens has sent His punishment upon them! A plague, to cleanse them from this earth!"

Don snapped his fingers in realization. "Bacteria!" He turned to explain to the mystified rest of us. "Germs… the miniscule creatures that live in our environment, in our very blood… While we've lived with them for eons, having fought off one and then the next, we've become immune to them—this is the first the Martians have encountered of them, and in injecting our blood into their own veins, exposed themselves to multiple—hundreds, even, of bacteria, viruses… All of which began their assault on the aliens, who could not withstand one at a time, much less all at one go!

Mr. Jones stated that he did not believe such things could exist, but Donatello had shown me, under a micro-scope, which magnified the single-celled organisms to visible size, strange squiggles and blobs that swam about, even attacking and consuming one another, splitting apart, procreating from themselves. The Martians, in their overturned machines, lay slain, not by any of Man's devices, but by the humblest creatures on the earth: minute, invisible bacteria. Directly, the invaders drank and fed; our microscopic allies attacked them. From that moment, they were doomed.

And yet…

Something did not feel quite right. I could not allow myself to feel at ease. Miss O'Neil, too, carried a look of uncertain dread upon her countenance. In a moment, Michelangerlo also ceased his frolicking exultations and took up a look of alarm. The rest of the group stilled upon seeing our reactions to we knew not what. A few seconds more, and we began to clearly feel vibrations from the ground, one following another with steadily increasing impact.

"Something is coming," April warned.

"Another fighting machine?" Don asked of her as he pulled a disc that looked like it was made from a pair of tea-saucers from his pack. "Now that we know they've signed their own death warrants, we can simply ride it out, so long as it doesn't get too near."

April put her helmet back on, and put a hand to her forehead. Then she gasped. "No! It means to end us all! It wants to burn everything to the ground!"