He had been driving his broadcasting truck along Highwood Avenue when the saucers attacked. He had been reciting the pap about not panicking, and hoping that he could personally see one of the single-eyed aliens sometime. He put no faith in the friendly-explorer crud. He wanted to look into that lone eye and decide for himself what the critters intended, because Trace Roscoe fancied himself a pretty good judge of character, even the character of ostrich-hoofed schmoes from outer space.
Well, the earth rose up around him and his truck before he rightly knew what was going on; and after a period of blackness he woke up to pain and a stench like one of Poe's charnel houses in his nostrils. He found that he was lying with his left arm draped over a jagged hunk of truck, clutching the mike with stiff fingers. Not being one to act without thinking in an emergency, he lay perfectly quiet and listened for a while to the rumble and crump of bombs—which he later found out had been the rays from the saucers instead—and the buzzing of his own skull. He could taste blood and feel it drying on his skin. He didn't believe he was at all badly hurt.
A little way from his face there was a busted headlight. He gazed at it a while, collecting his thoughts and opinions, and noticing that an arrangement of the shattered glass and chrome made a quite respectable mirror in which he could see a good deal of what went on behind him. Before he had decided what to do, he saw the saucer come to ground on the blasted field. He played possum and after a bit he saw the greenie come up the rise and stand there glaring around, holding the queer pennon and tipping back the pronged helmet from his eye.
Trace concentrated on holding still until the critter stepped over to him, and then Trace exploded all over the poor bastard, and took away his gun, which he wouldn't be needing any longer, and ran.
He half expected to be popped off by a bullet or a ray or a lord-knew-what from the saucer, but he reached the first edge of ruins safely and went to ground like a rabbit. Sitting in an angle of broken wall, he scanned the city. The saucers were engaged in a final mop-up. Trace felt sick. He looked at his town from end to end and he knew there couldn't be a dozen people alive in it. He had no way of knowing what was happening to the rest of the world, but he made some shrewd guesses. He was aware of the incredible number of blips that had been showing up on the radar screens lately. He knew that this city wasn't important enough in the scheme of things to warrant more than a small section of the attacking forces. This must be what Revelations called "the great day of God" when good and evil fought it out at Armageddon. Except that evil seemed to be winning, hands down.
Trace Roscoe peeked over his wall at the grounded saucer, and saw that a lot of greenies were coming out of it, advancing cautiously toward their dead comrade who lay with ten feet of flag-pole sticking up from his throat. Trace counted them as an automatic action (there were seventeen), in case he would need to know how many made up a saucer's crew in the future. Then he bent low and ran from hillock to hillock through what had that morning been the south-western suburbs of his city. As he ran he discarded the holster of the alien's gun, and thrust the weapon itself into his belt. If he had had a few minutes to examine it, and had he discovered how many loads it carried, he would have remained and started a fight with the one-eyers. Running was strategically correct in view of his ignorance of his only weapon.
When he had covered a mile he got up on a one-story-high mound of rubble and looked back. The green men had planted their flag and returned to their craft; even as Trace watched, it rose like a round green bullet and disappeared above the yellow haze. None of the other saucers landed, so far as he could see. The landing, then, had been for the vainglorious purpose of leaving their banner in token of victory. Trace spat and jumped down and went on into the city.
The reek made him gag now and then, but he had smelled some god-awful things in his time and was able to control his uneasy stomach. He considered the possibility of poison gas and judged it too slight to worry over; the destroying rays had certainly no need of accompanying gases, for they were as all-destructive as a thousand hurricanes rolled up in one package.
By three o'clock—his watch, miraculously, was still going—Trace had entered the city itself. He trotted down a broken, heaped-up thoroughfare, his glance roving constantly from side to side in search of movement. A sergeant whose army was gone had to find himself another in a hurry; and if so be it he was the general in that one, well, Trace Roscoe was ready to take on the job.