Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

In the returning silence I heard people call, distantly, ‘Quake! Earthquake! Get out, get out!’ I had met survivors of the San Francisco event of 1906, and I could sympathise with the anxiety in that voice – though I strongly suspected this was no earthquake.

And then the hotel’s fire alarm bell was rung with vigour. I heard footsteps running in the corridors, voices calling for the building to be evacuated – and we were to take the stairs, not the elevators. Again I suspected this was unnecessary, but I was ready to go. I grabbed my rucksack, packed up as ever, and left my room, pocketing the key, and joined the swarms for the stairs.

Out on the street there was a surprisingly large amount of traffic, mostly motor-cars but a few horse-drawn chaises, most of it heading east towards Aldwych, away from the ‘storm’, and disregarding the traffic lanes despite the efforts of a couple of special constables near the hotel to impose discipline. I was one of a flood of guests spilling onto the pavement from the hotel, most of them in night-gear and overcoats, for the March night was chill. But people looked bewildered and a little shamefaced, for that tremendous light show, the terrifying noise, the shaking of the ground had already ceased. Aside from a suspicious redness to the sky off to the west, there was nothing to be seen. People speculated aloud about what had happened – had the Martians been shot down even before they landed? There were wild rumours of super-guns carried aboard German Zeppelins, and so forth.

But one old fellow with a Kitchener moustache held forth: ‘I tell you what we don’t hear, and that’s artillery fire. I was in Rye during the Battle of Paris in ’14, and even from that distance we could hear the bark of the Germans’ howitzers as they advanced to the centre. Middlesex is a lot closer than that. Now, whatever that herculean storm was, we don’t hear our boys’ guns firing in response, do we? So what’s going on? Every one of ’em spiked already, eh?’

It is telling of the temper of the cowed Londoners of the day that his wife plucked his sleeve to hush him, and others looked away uneasily, or glanced for special constables and the like who might put a stop to his demoralising words.

Well, with the show apparently over – and the hotel not shaking to pieces or bursting into flames – we guests were encouraged to return inside. A fair fraction seemed over-excited and unwilling to retire to their rooms. In an imaginative move the manager opened up the restaurants and bars; there were drinks to be had, and soon a cold buffet was laid on, with coffee and tea. I heard grumblings from the staff, roused from their own beds: ‘Wish them blessed Mar-shins would come in the middle o’ my shift and not at the end of it.’

I stayed a while, drinking strong coffee and trying to find any news. Every room private or public had a Marvin Megaphone, of course, but they brought nothing but bland assurances that the enemy had landed just where the astronomers had predicted and our forces were vigorously engaging them – just that, no specifics, amid lashings of uplifting patriotic music. I tried making a few calls to contacts in Middlesex, but all the lines that way seemed to be down. I even called the Observer , for that paper has run a few of my cultural pieces from New York, but the duty editor said the telegraph lines were down too, and there was no news by wireless.

Eventually I filled my pockets with sandwiches, attracting odd looks from the hotel staff, and retreated to my room. I thought I should stay until the dawn, even try to sleep. I lay in my bed, clothed save for topcoat and shoes; at least I got warm. I heard nothing more from the war front, if such it was – no more thunderous detonations, and no clatter of gun-fire, as the old soldier had pointed out. It all seemed alarming and mysterious and not at all what we had expected. It was as if not a Martian but some tremendous unpredictable god had stamped on the earth.

The sky was lightening, as seen through my open window, when I was woken by the smell of smoke.

That was the end of the night for me. I washed hurriedly, grabbed my coat and bag – slurped a last mouthful of cold coffee from the cup I had brought with me from the restaurant – and hurried out of my room and once more to the stairs.

In the street, there was a faint light to the east; looking along the Strand I could glimpse Nelson silhouetted on his column. But the dawn was matched by a lingering red glow in the darker sky to the west. The wind, though gentle, blew from that direction, and that was the breeze that brought the stink of smoke to my nostrils. I imagined the whole of Middlesex was ablaze, and as it turned out I wasn’t far wrong.

The street had been transformed since I had come out at midnight. There were roadblocks and temporary gates all along the Strand now, manned by special constables, most of them identifiable only by the arm-bands and tin hats they wore over their civilian clothes. No vehicles moved, and those few parked in the street had been slapped with military requisition notices, if they didn’t have them already: some new set of regulations had been hurriedly brought into play, evidently, a new phase of a well-rehearsed plan.

Yet amid all the restrictions people were up and about. Some had the look of office workers to me, early birds perhaps even now expecting a normal day in the office, while Middlesex burned. Others were evidently on the move; they brought children and old folk with them, some in prams or walkers or in bath chairs, and they could be laden with goods, with suitcases and packs on their backs. These were sights that brought back to my mind once more the ghastly days of ’07, those hot summer hours when Frank and myself and my sister-in-law had been caught up in a panicky, uncoordinated evacuation.

But this was different, it seemed, so far. The government had not yet given up. The special constables and fire wardens and others were standing their ground, and even exhorted people to go back to their homes, to do their duty. Individuals could be singled out. ‘You, man – that’s the arm-band of a firewatcher. St. Martin’s, that’s where you should be, with your whistle and your bucket of sand, not running like rabbits.’

A few argued back, in that dawn – the absconding firewatcher, for one. ‘Come off the high horse, Ted, you’re a doorman at the Rialto, not Winston bloody Churchill. The guv’mnt ’ave took my motor-car, they’ve took my dog cart, and if it had occurred to ’em they’d have took my mother-in-law’s wheelchair too – no, no, Ma, don’t try to get up, you keep it – but they can’t yet reck-wee-zish-un my two poor feet, and if you’ve got any sense left you’ll join me.’

Even I was picked on for not carrying my gas-mask – in fact I had it but not on show, it was in my rucksack. ‘You’ll regret not having it to hand when the Black Smoke comes, missus.’

If this was going on in the West End, I imagined the same scene played out across the city and the residential suburbs: the authorities struggling to keep the city’s shape with their rules and regulations and an appeal to duty, and no traffic moving on the streets save for military and other official vehicles. And yet a trickle of dark, struggling dots must already have been filtering through the streets and alleys, laden, on foot, yet making their clumsy way, a trickle that was the people of London swarming and converging and massing, I guessed, in the great trunk roads leading south and east – opposite to the direction from which the Martians, this time, would surely come.

And, even in the Strand, even at this very early hour, in amongst the gathering crowd of evacuating residents I saw already folk who had evidently come much further, and were travelling into London. Some walked only with difficulty; they had scorched clothes, blackened faces. These were families, with old folk and little ones, all on foot – and all much less heavily burdened than the Londoners who were only now beginning their journeys, and I imagined a litter of abandoned suitcases and trunks and valuables lining the roads out of Middlesex, just as in Surrey thirteen years before. There was a first aid post in the hotel, and VADs came fluttering out to offer assistance to the worse-off of these poor wretches; waiters and bell-boys came out too with cups of water. These first refugees, it would turn out, were survivors from residences on the fringe of the Martian landfall, driven out by the fires, or the collapse of their properties, or just sheer terror – those much further in had not survived at all. I guessed as much but could not confirm it at the time. I longed to talk to these refugees, to learn a story or two from individuals, but the special constables, ever vigilant over morale, kept us apart.