The first Martian patrol moved past my makeshift hideout two days after my first contact with Jeff and Mutt. Their warning about what had happened to the last sap who tried to make friendly contact with the aliens were still fresh in my mind, and I stayed quiet and hidden.
Up close, the Martians were remarkable to see. Their patrol vehicle was a six-legged walker, designed, it appeared to me, to travel over extremely rough terrain without issue. Two Martians rode on top, in the open, and I got for the first time a clear view of our invaders.
They were tall, about eight feet by my best guess, and, I guess in a validation of humanity's deepest fears, green, a dark forest green. They were covered head-to-foot in short fuzz, and both of them carried what could unmistakably be weapons cradled in two of their three arms. The arms themselves were placed at equal intervals around their cylindrical bodies, as were their three legs. I wondered briefly if their counting system worked on powers of three or two, since they appeared to have four fingers on each limb, two of them opposable, one thumb-like digit on each side of the hand.
I watched from the fourth story as they came up the hill, their walker crushing the car I had been hiding in the night that they first landed.
"Go home!" A shout rang out from a house just down the street from mine, just as the walker was in front of it. It stopped and swiveled on its legs, the top half of their organic-looking machine moving independently of the bottom. The aliens appeared to consider the building for a moment. I didn't even want to speculate what was going through their minds.
There was movement again in the house, and something small flew out. I guessed that it was a coffee mug or something, and it beaned the slightly shorter alien right in the head.
Chaos broke out. The taller alien made a horrendous noise like a fire alarm and pointed its weapon at the building, letting off a stream of plasma, just like I'd seen the first night. The building caught fire immediately, and it rushed over to the other alien, which was lying on the floor, writhing in what I assumed was extreme pain. Dark green blood was gushing out of it, pooling on the deck of the walker.
The walker had transformed slightly at this point; a cannon had come out of the front "snout" of the machine, which was aimed right at the house. I ducked as I heard it powering up, remembering the terrible affect that a plasma blast had had on my vision before. Not a moment too soon, either, as just seconds later there was a noise like a thunderburst and a terrible flash of light that, even though I wasn't even in the line of sight, still left me seeing spots.
I peeked back outside to see that the entire building's upper half was gone, nothing left but the burning bottom portion. The person who had thrown that mug was obviously completely vaporized. The walker turned around and, with the taller alien still wailing, began to walk back the way it came.
As it fled with its injured passenger, there was movement at the bottom floor of the building. I saw a small child rush out, wailing. She looked no older than three or four, and unhurt.
With paternal instinct kicking in, I bolted down the stairs to try and grab her before she hurt herself. I stopped short just before the door, though. A Martian on foot had arrived as cleanup, and was just a few feet away from the exit.
At its feet was the crumpled body of the child. I cursed silently and started backing away from the street, as quietly as I could. My cowardice surprised me. I had always thought I'd be more outraged if I saw a child killed before my eyes, but fear -- and the explicit knowledge that there was nothing I could do against the alien -- kept me from leaping out in what was an obvious suicide attack.
I watched as the alien turned its swiveling head back to the east and loped off, presumably in response to some signal from its overlords. They had an amazingly graceful gait, with one foot planted and the other two in motion in a hypnotic cycle.
I went upstairs and crawled back into the bed I'd found and cried myself to sleep.