They neared the edge of the gully and instinctively kneeled in the brush, then they peered over the rough side of the cut.
Marie pushed closer to Ian; the camera shoved over his back to see what had caught the men's breath.
Bright light streamed from the gully, silhouetting the trees and brush, and casting deep shadows in their wake. Colors were vibrant in the light, the grass vivid amid brown weeds and red dirt.
At first Marie find nothing through the camera, but she played with the controls and muted the recording, until she could discern two silver objects sitting in a wide gap of the ditch.
Winter runoff had eaten away the ground, making a basin filled with sumac brush. The rust-colored sumac leaves seemed to support the crafts, one small and cylindrical, the other a huge disk of glowing metal. The smaller craft seemed like a cheap version of the second spaceship, its surface rippled with no attendant glow, almost like it was a fake.
She panned the camera down and gasped.
Standing at the foot of the gully, a small man dressed in silver clothes studied the ground, a small globe of light hanging in the air near his shoulder. His head seemed too large to be part of his body, a bulbous appendage that only seemed to be a head with a liberal use of imagination.
She could see one of his eyes from their angle, a dark oval glued to the head, glistening in the light from the craft. Arms hung at its side loosely with no apparent elbows, a black tube held in its long-fingered hand.
John grasped Ian's shoulder to pull the informal leader of the outing away from the edge of the gully. Though he could not explain it, his instincts told him they had stumbled on something best unseen.
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As John pulled, the rest of the observers watched the small man raise its hand and extend the tube towards a huge clump of weeds it had been studying.
A thin beam of blue light lanced out of the tube and struck the weeds, igniting a fire that seemed to rise from beneath and above the weeds.
A strangled scream ripped the night as the weeds flipped over and revealed a man dressed in a suit of netting and vegetation. Red flames were erupting from the man's chest as he curled into a ball and contracted around the wound. In seconds, the screams stopped.
They had no time to react. They could only watch in horrified amazement as a second weed draped man rolled down the side of the gully further to their left and firing a weapon at the small man.
John recognized the sound of a suppressed machine gun and knew the time to leave was now. He wrenched Ian away from the lip of the gully and pushed Marie backwards.
The small man's shoulder burst like a rotten fruit, spraying gray matter and fluid into the depths of the gully. He turned slowly to face the threat as bullets pummeled the ground at its feet, the tube still held low as if the man was moving in slow motion.
Light rained from the tube as the man raised his arm, each beam hitting closer to the man who had landed at the bottom of the gully.
As Marie fell to her back, she heard another scream from the gully and saw John pulling Ian into the depths of the woods with one hand and reaching for her father with the other hand. The camera slipped from her grasp and rolled over her head to land on the ground. She twisted onto her stomach and reached for the camera.
Bob felt someone grasp his shirt collar and pull, but it was too late. The small man in the gully was turning again, his arm raising, the tube still flinging bolts of light.
Light burned across his arm, digging a furrow as it passed, then Bob was on his back with John dragging him to safety.
Ian helped John get their father to his feet, then braced him on each side and dragged him away from the gully, their thoughts on the safety of the house.
Following the men, Marie paused once and turned the camera toward the gully. She thought it was her imagination, for a moment seeing a red tinge to the light coming from the gully.
She ran after the men.