The Red Hour

Ellis Wren

In the high desert of the inland Northwest, a science writer is ghostwriting a memoir for an aging astronomer when she shows him something impossible: lights on Mars that keep a schedule. Days later, a cylinder falls out of a clear sky onto the sagebrush flats outside his town. A delegation of sheriffs and mayors walks down to it under a white flag, and the first contact between Earth and its nearest neighbor ends in a line of burning earth and a weapon that erases everything it touches. More cylinders land. Machines stand up out of the pits on three long legs and begin to walk. Elias sends his wife east to her sister's and goes back for one more look, and spends the rest of the war trying to reach her. He escapes the fall of his town as a black smoke pours down the river valleys, survives the bridge at Milburn Siding, and crosses an occupied country emptied of everyone but the dead and the patient machines that farm it. In the fallen city downriver, his brother Frank, an emergency-room nurse, keeps his own account of the collapse and of the river gunboat that taught the invaders caution at the cost of her crew. Elias shelters with a pastor whose faith breaks against what the machines do with their harvest, meets a sergeant building an underground nation on half-rations and a whistle, and wakes one morning to find the invaders dead, undone not by armies but by the oldest, smallest life of the earth. Walking east through the ruins, past gulls at their work, Elias registers at a camp on the mountain pass, where a pencil line on a plywood board leads him back to his wife, and to the work of writing it all down.

Adapted from H. G. Wells's novel The War of the Worlds (1898). Published by TalesReborn.