War of the Worlds 2005

[Waelith]

This is my fan fic, based on the story By H G Wells, but it may also contain influences from the Speilberg film, which has just recently made it to DVD.

Here is chapter one...


My Experience


Chapter 1

I had woken up with a profound headache, and really did not want to go to work. Another day in that chemist filled me with a sense of dread. I would much rather have stayed home and lounged about, and gone on-line, played a few games, or maybe chat on Msn.
However, I got up, and looked at the time. I had another five minutes before the alarm was due to go off, so I lay back down again. I found my 4head stick on my bedside table, and applied some, hoping to relieve my headache, before I ventured out of bed.

Another five minutes on, I climbed out of bed, and opened the blind on my window. It was a freezing November morning, and the mist outside seemed to make it look darker than the actual 7:55am time suggested. The back of my flat was not very interesting to look at in the best of times. I had the view of other houses at the back of me, and their rear yards. Somebody’s washing still remained on the line, three days on.
I closed my bedroom window, and made my way to the bathroom, still rubbing my eyes. I suddenly found myself running back to the bedroom…to turn off my alarm, which was still going. Somehow I had overlooked it.

I later arrived at work, and within five minutes, my boss, Brian was pointing out the most recent of the dispensing errors which had been made by myself or Kirsty, who worked with me. After which I let out my usual un-impressed sigh and then went on with my work. I thought to myself “Why do we have to have this first thing? I am barely awake. I know that after my three month trial, I am not going to be working here, anymore, anyway.”

And so another day ensued, much the same as had the day before. I went home that night and as usual, stayed indoors, and watched some TV, and then had a bath, and then spent a few hours on line. I spoke to my mother on the phone, and she asked how I was, and I told her “I am ok”. She was discussing how I could come and visit her, in the Isle of Wight over Christmas. I explained to her that “I haven’t got enough time off work over Christmas to warrant travelling down there, and I haven’t any money anyway. I am pushing my credit card limit to the max as it is”. At this point I heard what sounded and felt like and electrical current go through the flat. My cat fled from her resting place on the end of my bed, to underneath it. Everything went dark. The line to my mother was cut off. My online status had remained the same though. I tried to ring my mother again, but the line was dead. I fiddled about with a torch, and the electrical point, but to no avail.

How come my internet connection remained? What the hell was going on?

I looked around for some candles, to see what I was doing, but I was somehow distracted by the fact that my PC, and my internet connection stayed live. I went back over to the PC, and found myself sat down and transfixed to the monitor.

A dark blue-ish screen welcomed me, and then the text began.

I sat and stared.

IT IS TIME…it began.

I continued to watch. Nothing happened for what felt like a few seconds, and then a  picture came up…like a camera was broadcasting the scene that I was watching. I was looking at a picture of a storm, a lightning storm. One like I had never seen before. I was entranced, Was this real? The lightning was more blue, than white, and the sky was becoming very dark red and smoke-like. I  was actually finding what I was viewing amazing, and thinking how cool it would be to watch a storm like that for real, when the screen went back to the previous blue colour with the text on.

The writer of the text then typed:

“ARE YOU STILL THERE?”

I found myself typing
“YES!”

“WHO ARE YOU?” I continued.

“INSIDE YOUR MIND, YOU KNOW WHO WE ARE…IN FACT YOU KNOW EXACTLY WHAT WE ARE…The author of the text continued.

I smiled, and thought “Just another one of my weird net buddies playing a prank…”

WHY ARE YOU SO PESSIMISTIC, WORLDOMINATION? Asked the text.

“WHAT…HOW THE HELL DO YOU KNOW MY SCREEN NAME?, HOW DO YOU KNOW WHAT IM THINKING?” I typed in frantically, now getting a little paranoid.

“IT WAS US WHO STOPPED THE ELECTRICITY RUNNING, AND TURNED OUT YOUR LIGHTS.” It continued.

OK…WHATS GOING ON? I asked.

Nothing…There was no sign of anymore contact. I sat waiting for ages, but there was no answer. The picture of the storm came back. It showed up various shots from all over the world, with the same storm, at the same time. I thought back to the Speilberg film Independence day, where the skies are flame red, and the cities are but black silhouettes against the fire. It looked awesome. I sat mesmerised by the scenes that flashed before me…London, Big Ben, Tower Bridge, The Tyne Bridge in Newcastle, and The Manhattan skyline in New York, and even the pyramids in Egypt all showed with the same stormy background. The same blue lightning was wreaking havoc across the skies.

I spent the whole night, just watching this storm develop on my monitor, amazed, and various strange thoughts went through my mind. “Is it the start of the end of the world? Is it a dream? All these questions. Had terrorists hacked into my computer? What the hell was happening here? It got to what felt like 3am, although I had no access to the time, as the time on my monitor said the same as it had just before the electrical surge. My mobile phone was as dead as a dodo, I could not turn it on, or charge it up, or anything.  I had even looked at the clock in the kitchen and bathroom, and at my watch. They all said 10:48pm, which was the time that this strange phenomenon had occurred.

I felt overcome with tiredness, and went to get ready for bed. The silence was eerie around me. I opened the window, and the silence outside was deafening. I couldn’t even hear the usual London to Dover bypass traffic on its early morning shift.
The next thing I noticed was the sky. It was cloudy, and it was red…the same dark red as on my PC monitor. This was not light pollution, since all the street lamps were out, and there wasn’t a light in sight. Nothing was on, and no-body was about.
I wondered if all those sleeping people knew what I was experiencing, Did they know that the flames in the sky were there, and that their alarm clocks were not going to get them up, come the morning? Apart from the glare from my monitor there was no other light for what seemed like miles.

I climbed into bed, and tried to pass it off as a weird dream, and tried to go to sleep.
Eventually I managed to go to sleep, and I had in fact a really good sleep, despite all the odd things that had just happened. I might have only been asleep for a couple of hours, but it felt like a good eight or ten hours, before I woke up again.

I woke up to find that most things were working normally, but sporadically. The clocks were still out of sync though. The kettle was playing up. I turned on the TV, as I eventually sat down to a cup of tea. I was quite relieved to know that it was the weekend, and remembered I hadn’t got work today. I began to wake up and realise each channel had “newsflash”. I came to, and realised that last night had really happened. The news was about the storms and the weird sky, just like I had seen the night before, I was beginning to think that I was not waking from a dream…

After having sat for ten minutes, I got up and dressed, and then I decided to open the blinds, and curtains round the flat. There were huge shafts of blue lightning streaking across the sky, and there was still this strange silence. There was no thunder.

I was looking out of the bedroom window, watching the storm, almost haunted by it. I felt a strange sense of foreboding…
Foreboding, that was much stronger than the night before.
A flash of lightning came that was so bright streaked through the room. I jumped back, wondering how the hell I had not been killed by it.
After which, my PC monitor whirred up again, completely by itself.

The dark blue screen came back, and the text began…

“WE ARE HERE”…

[Mojo Toner]

  looking foward to the nxt chapter.

[Gollum]

ooh, very good.

*sits back and eagerly awaits the next installment*

[EG]

OOoohhhh! Ominous!!!

very good

[Waelith]

Chapter 2

I stood facing the computer monitor, in amazement, and wondered what all this meant. It was still as dark, and gloomy as the night had been, and the lightning outside was starting to make weird buzzing noises. Electricity just kept shooting into the ground outside. I ran to my window, and saw the lightning enter the same spot of ground, over and over, some yards away from the flat. I could not understand how I was drawn to it, or how it was causing me no physical harm, whatsoever. The car didn’t escape from the heat. It was on fire, but I don’t remember thinking about how I am going to pay to repair the damage, or how I will get it on the road again. For some reason, those kind of thoughts didn’t enter my head at the time. It was as though I was completely possessed by the brilliance of this lightning.

At some point this lightning finished striking, and all I could see was the burning of the car, the trees, and the rubbish bin that were in the immediate area. The fire was the only thing that provided light.
There was still no thunder.

My monitor had more text on it.

“YOU ARE COMING WITH US…” It said.
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN? TO WHERE?” I replied.
“WHO ARE YOU” I continued.
“YOU HAVE TO PREPARE FOR YOUR MISSION” It conceded.
“WHAT?”…

With that, a huge rumble came from outside the front of the building, a mechanical noise. It was deafening. My cat remained under the bed. I ran into the living room, to see what the source of the noise was, and where it came from. I looked out of my window, and saw what I thought was this huge leg…it was difficult to describe. It was made of some kind of metal, dark in colour, yet it looked organic. Right then two more just like it swept past the window, and suddenly this thing was already half way down the street, in one stride. I looked again, and saw that it was three legged. It was over a hundred feet high, and at its top, a hood, with searchlights that were scanning the street, like a police helicopter would. I could make out the shape of the hood, it was unearthly. I had never seen anything like this before, yet somehow I knew exactly what it was. From it, metallic tentacles protruded, searching, feeling…

My fears were confirmed. It was a tripod, from a different planet. It was massive, and ominous. Somewhere I am sure, in my dreams, I had seen this thing before. It was exactly the same as in the dreams I had. It looked around the street…up and down with its search lights. I saw its head turn, and face towards me, I sank back into my position on the window-ledge, hypnotised. This thing had what looked like three “eyes”, one large one in the middle of its frontal features, which was spinning around, and ejecting a really bright light. This I assumed was its main search beam. The other two lights on either side of it were much smaller, and searched this way and that, from under the hood, which was staring down towards me. I looked straight at it. Imminently it turned, and strode back this way, towards the building I was in. I wasn’t entirely sure what I should have done next, so I sat on the ledge, rooted to the spot, in total awe. How come this thing hadn’t noticed me, or killed me or… Or had it noticed me? I assumed it had…
In an instant, it had disappeared. There was a huge thud, it must have just stepped over the house. It was completely dark again, but for the red sky, and the lightning, which seemed quite infrequent now.
I ran back to the bedroom, and found it to be lit, from the window outside. I hadn’t pulled the blind down after watching the storms earlier. It was so bright in the room, I couldn’t focus. The window was smashed, I did not realise this straight away, through the din. But I realised that it was freezing cold in the room. The monitor on the computer now said
“WE ARE HERE TO SAVE YOU FROM THE FATE OF THE EARTH…YOU MUST COME WITH US…YOU ARE PART OF THE PLAN.”

I was standing there staring at the screen, in the middle of the tumultous noise that was occurring outside at my window. “What plan…” my mind was asking.
“THE SAME PLAN YOU DREW AGAINST THE EARTH, BEFORE YOUR ARRIVAL HERE THIRTY YEARS AGO” The monitor now replied. I hadn’t even typed anything, and the computer knew what I was thinking…I was beginning to feel more disturbed by the words on the monitor, than the tripod outside, which was directing its light in through my window.
Plan? What plan? When did I plan to destroy the earth? I have only dreamt of it, wrote songs about it for my band, and imagined how cool it would be to take out entire populations, because I was feeling angsty and pissed off with the bad things that had happened in my life… I stood there and thought seriously…how could I plan an attack on the very planet in which I lived? What means did I have, apart from my own imagination? I was no terrorist, or anything. What motive did I have? I couldn’t understand. I have no weapons, or anything like that. I have no army. What the hell…I continued to think.

The monitor replied, and said “YOU HAVE US”.

“You?...”
“YES. US…WE WERE CREATED BY YOU. YOU ARE THE ONE THAT MADE US. YOU MADE US FOR THE PURPOSE OF FINISHING THE EARTH. YOU CREATED US, AND OUR WEAPONS THIRTY YEARS AGO.”

“Weapons?”… I murmured to myself.
With that, the tripod outside moved. I turned round to see it launch a beam of light onto the houses that backed on to mine. There was a loud electrical buzzing noise, and immediately the houses were on fire, and the trees and bushes surrounding them caught light as well. I could feel the heat from my broken window. This was no ordinary beam of light. It was indeed a weapon. It was a ray of heat. Intense heat. How I survived the temperature from this thing I did not know. Those houses were only yards away. Everything outside my window was now just a mass of flames.
“YOU HAVE ONE OF THE MOST POWERFUL WEAPONS AT YOUR DISPOSAL…THE HEAT RAY”…
The monitor replied.
“Whoah…” I exclaimed, in astonishment. I was still utterly confused at the statements on the monitor, and even more confused with myself, and my lack of emotion, or lack of care for the burning homes across the way. People were clearly dead in those buildings, and I didn’t care. I wondered if I really was this heartless. I tried to fight these emotions, or lack of them thereof. Why did I find the burning houses satisfying to watch? Why did this tripod machine protect me from its burning heat ray?
The monitor seemed to answer me again.
“YOU WOULD NOT HAVE CREATED US, BEFORE YOU LEFT YOUR HOME PLANET IF YOU CARED ABOUT THE INHABITANTS OF THIS EARTH…”
It said.
“You are saying I don’t come from the earth? How come I don’t know this? Why have I been brought up as someone who has been born and raised here?” I found myself speaking. The monitor then said “ALL WILL BE EXPLAINED ONCE YOU COME WITH US”…
And with that, the tripod stirred outside, once more, and extended its tentacles in through the window, and gently wrapped themselves around me….

I remembered no more…

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