‘There’s no time.’ Xander shook his head.
Aunt Brenda swayed on her feet, lurching towards the tent’s entrance. ‘Come on… children…’ she muttered, barely conscious, but surely hearing the now-piercing whistling sound.
‘Don’t be afraid,’ Xander whispered to Kia, squeezing her hand. ‘You have me. We’ll get through this.’
Xander smiled softly at his sister, who began to cough into her sleeve. When she pulled her head back up, the effort seeming to strain her, his smile fell from his face: there was a dark red patch on her sleeve. He barely had time to grimace before the strike began.
BOOM. CRASH.
They all staggered to the side as explosions rippled through the ground, erupting and causing an unholy symphony of screaming and shouting to echo through the cavern. Pulling himself together, Xander followed his Aunt Brenda, who was already pushing through the tent flap and out into the crowded street outside.
By this point, it was less a street and more a swarm of people, all similarly dressed in rags and injured or bandaged up, surging in one direction.
‘Stay close!’ Xander said to Kia, holding her hand even tighter as they joined the crowd.
As they were swept along in the mad rush, punctuated every so often by resounding crashes as weaponry rained down on them from above and hit the ceiling of their cavernous underground city, he looked up. His ‘sky’ was a sea of jagged stalactites which cracked and crumbled with every strike, raining pink-red dust down on the Martians. Before his eyes, one began to splinter from the rest and fought its way loose, crashing down onto some tents which exploded with rock and Martian debris – he looked away, barely able to consider that real people had just been crushed to death.
‘It never- it never used to be so- so bad,’ he heard Aunt Brenda faintly mumble, as she guided them forward through the crowd. Her face was paler than he’d ever seen it before – paler than bone – as she turned back to check on them, grinding her teeth and straining to keep her eyes open.
He knew what she meant. Their first underground haven had been close to Mars’ northern ice cap, which provided them with the water they needed to survive. They’d all lived together, with their parents, in a larger tent with plenty of supplies. Life was grim, and there was occasional
bombing, but they still had the supplies to survive. Rumor had it then that the Humans were also after the limited water supply for their own survival.
Vaguely, he remembered speaking to a girl who lived in one of the neighboring tents. She’d said something about being captured and taken hostage, but she could remember very little about the time she’d spent imprisoned, or even how long it was. Xander had chalked it down to more of the Humans’ atrocities in the name of colonizing, or trying to take ‘back’, Mars, despite the fact that it had never belonged to them in the first place. His father had made sure to drill this into him ever since he could talk, and now the name ‘Humans’ was forever branded into his brain next to ‘Evil’. They called themselves Martians but they all seemed to have forgotten that they were also descendants of human immigrants from Earth centuries ago, for it’s been too long they were disconnected from Earth until the war.
The Blue and White 