Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

A scout, goggles and gas-mask fixed, headlight bright, rode a motorcycle into the billowing smoke: immediately heading into the zone of destruction. Soon more prepared to follow.

‘That’s where we need to be,’ Frank said. ‘Where the wounded are – if any survive at all. Come on. Pick up your bag.’

‘But the hospitals—’

‘Plenty of muscle here to put all that back together. What we must do first is to find our patients.’

He led the way beyond the parapet, digging a torch from his pocket to light the way. They both donned their gas-masks, meant for protection against the Black Smoke, but now the goggles and filters served to protect eyes and lungs from the dust of the shattered landscape. Glancing around, Frank saw that more of the VADs were following their lead, carrying torches and lanterns.

‘We must go in,’ he said.

The staff around him, MOs and VADs, all terribly young, terribly scared, only looked at him. He had to take the lead, he saw. He turned into the dark, took one step, two. They followed.

The ground was broken, as if a great wave had passed through it, pocked as if a hail of meteorites had struck. And it was littered, he saw, littered with wrecked guns and vehicles, and with human remains. A limb here, an open hand there, a detached skull: some of the more complete bodies lay draped over the parapets of trenches. Disarticulated : a clinical word that floated to the top of Frank’s stunned mind. Not even burned, most of them, just torn apart. Yet he saw movement, obscured by dust, a little deeper into the zone.

Verity stood at his side, her gloved hand over her mouth. ‘Perhaps this all seems very small, if you’re looking at it from Mars.’

They came upon a couple of soldiers, one dragging the other, who appeared to have a broken leg and was badly burned on the face. Frank and Verity ran to the men, and helped lower the wounded fellow gently to the ground.

‘It’s nothing,’ the man said, his speech distorted by the damageto his face. ‘A cushy. Nothing…’

‘Don’t talk,’ Frank said.

The soldier who had been doing the carrying didn’t seem badly injured. He just stared, apparently unable to speak.

‘Shock,’ said Verity briskly. ‘Nothing to be done for him now. Just take him back.’ A couple of VADs took the shocked man in hand and led him away.

Verity briskly examined the wounded man. ‘He’s bleeding out. He needs a tourniquet on this leg. Cold water for the burns on his face. Get the leg set and splinted…’ She looked at Frank, her uncertainty evident despite the masked face. ‘If you agree, Doctor.’

‘Of course. Go ahead.’

As she worked, Frank stood and looked around once more. The dust was clearing a little now. Still a tremendous heat came from the direction of the cylinder’s fall – whatever was left of Uxbridge must be burning vigorously, he thought, and the fields and the forests around the town. From the camp, others were coming out, medical staff but also common soldiers, NCOs, even the officers, meeting the handful of men and women who came limping out of the disaster. Frank already had an intuition that the percentage of survivors would be small, that the wounded they encountered from the periphery of the infall.

One older man, an experienced MO, bent over and vomited helplessly. When he straightened up, wiping his mouth, he said, ‘What can we do here? It’s a butcher’s yard.’

‘Yet there is life.’ Frank pointed. ‘I saw movement, there.’

Verity walked that way. ‘It is a horse. I think its back is broken.’ She took her revolver, and, hesitantly, but murmuring words of comfort, she pressed it to the animal’s temple and pulled the trigger. The report seemed shockingly loud. ‘Never had to do that before; I’m no country girl.’

‘What can we do?’ the older man asked again. ‘What can we do?’

‘Medicine,’ Frank said, as determinedly as we could. ‘Whatever we can. Come, Follow me. Fan out…’

So they found their patients, among the dead. Most of the beds of the field hospital remained empty. But throughout the night Frank and his team went back into the broken landscape to seek survivors, or at least to tend the dying, over and over. All this was lit sporadically by torchlight and lanterns: human forms coming together, dimly glimpsed in air laden with soot and smoke.

Monday morning has never been my favourite time of the week. Especially if one is tied to the routine of an office and the commute, it is a grey dawn on the brightest of days, when a lazy Sunday evening at the end of which one somehow feels as if one is oneself again is revealed to have been a deception, and with a hurried breakfast heavy in the stomach, there’s nothing for it but to swarm ant-like to the great hives of the office districts. And bit by bit one’s own identity is shed for the duration. But there can scarcely have been a more dreadful Monday morning to wake to than that of the 29 thMarch – in London not since the days of the First Martian War itself, perhaps, or in Paris since 1914 when the Germans came to town. And many of us were already awake, I suspect – it had been a sleepless night for me ever since midnight, and the Martians’ first landfall.

I had reached central London from Stanmore, not without difficulty. I stayed in a hotel on the Strand. I had taken the room at an exorbitant cost – everything had been heroically marked up in those final days and hours – but, unexpectedly free of the burden of my sister-in-law and being a journalist, I had determined to be in the thick of things: the story of London in the Second War, whether the Martians got that far or not, would be a tale for the ages. Bluntly put, I expected a retrospective commission from the Saturday Evening Post to boost my savings.

Before Sunday was over the telescopic spotters had done their work, and the government and the military authorities had already alerted the people through the papers and the Megaphones and the loudspeaker vans that the Martians were on the way, that this time they were heading for Middlesex and Bucks, well away from the city – that the Army was on the move and ready to deal with them. They were coming back! It was terrifying; it was thrilling – thrilling if we really were ready for them, at least.

What did I expect, that Sunday night? Perhaps to see a falling star or two, as when, under a starry sky on a short June night, Frank had watched the sixth cylinder of the ’07 wave fall towards Wimbledon, while my sister-in-law and I dozed – a green flash, falling silent beyond the hills – a gentle landing by comparison, as we know now. And then there would be the clatter of distant artillery as our boys got their revenge for what had befallen their fellows the last time.

Not a bit of it. As Churchill would put it later, the dastardly Martians returned to the pitch, but refused to play the game by the rules.

So there I was at midnight, fully dressed, waiting for the show.

And – peering from my sixth floor window towards the north, for I had made sure I got a room with a view on that side – I saw what appeared to be a sudden storm: tremendous flashes of white light like bolts of lightning that reached from the ground high into the air, miles high it seemed to me, and not a bit of green about them, all in a kind of eerie silence.

Then, a full minute later, the sound broke, like tremendous claps of thunder falling on the city; I heard the smashing of windows. There was a deep shuddering of the very fabric of the hotel too, and I sensed tremendous energies pulsing through the earth beneath us as through the air. (I was some ten miles from the nearest landfall of the Martians’ dummy projectiles, as I learned later.) It was over in a moment, though the horizon continued to burn red.