Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

I murmured to Gray, ‘What is this vessel?’

He shrugged. ‘Scarcely matters, does it? Might even have been a lifeboat from one of the warships the Martians smashed up in the Pool…’ He fell silent, watchful, as the boat inched its way down the flooded street, and over what I supposed to be a drowned embankment. ‘Always the trickiest part, over the streets, there’s all sorts of hazards – was on a boat once that got spiked by a smashed lamppost, sharp as a bit of broken bone, and that was no fun.’

We joined a line of such boats. The oars lapped, and gulls wheeled overhead, cawing, perhaps seeking food. The old route of the river was easy to make out as we progressed, for I could see the spans of bridges, every one of them broken as if snipped with scissors: Battersea Bridge, Albert Bridge, Chelsea Bridge. But the far bank was as drowned as the Clapham side, or more so; the river, vast and extensive, seemed to spread far inland to the north and east, over Chelsea and Westminster. The river itself was scummy, dirty, and scattered with debris – bits of wood, the remnants of clothing, dead birds and animals. And it was littered with wrecks; the heat-twisted hulks of battleships protruded, rusted and pathetic, above the lapping water. And it smelled foul, even in the middle of the river. It was hard to believe this was the river of empire.

Gray was watching me, as if interested in my reaction. ‘More marvels for your newspaper stories, Miss Elphinstone?’

‘Hardly marvels… The flooding. Is that the work of the Martians?’

‘Not directly. Indeed I doubt the Martians, from their arid world, know enough about hydrology to have managed this deliberately. No, this is all accident and neglect; nobody is in a position to maintain the drains and the flood gates and the pumping stations. So the Thames is regaining its old banks: flooding lost lagoons at Hammersmith, Westminster, Bermondsey, the Isle of Dogs, Greenwich.’ He smiled. ‘The old rivers are coming back too, bursting out of the culverts under which we buried them. I have a friend who swam down the course of the Fleet, for a dare, from St Pancras to Blackfriars… Of course as much damage is being done underground as over.’

‘The flooded Underground tunnels.’

‘An awful lot of people sought shelter from the Martians down there, for an awful long time.’

So much damage had been done – so much suffering! I felt ashamed of my own self-absorption.

Now followed perhaps the most extraordinary part of that strange urban journey. We cut in from the river’s true bank, and rowed our way cautiously north-east – I think we followed the line of the drowned King’s Road, through Chelsea towards Belgravia. Our pilot navigated cautiously, peering to left and right and every so often calling a halt if he suspected we were to encounter some submerged obstacle. To my right the broad, placid river; to my left I thought I glimpsed the great museums of South Kensington rising pale. And ahead, the jagged ruins of General Marvin’s new Palace of Westminster protruded from the water like the skeleton of some vast aquatic mammal.

Still on the river, we passed Buckingham Palace – its roof was melted and skirted the Victoria Memorial, and our pilot seemed to make his way more confidently over the drowned St James’s Park. At last we came to Trafalgar Square, which rose up out of the water, and along with the boats that had preceded us we berthed on the Gallery steps; iron posts had been driven into the stone for the purpose. Once I had climbed out onto the steps, looking away from the water, I had a brief, odd feeling of normality, of routine, despite the khaki-clad men all around me. But a glance down Northumberland Avenue showed the waters of the swollen river, glinting in the sun between the buildings, its surface littered with unidentifiable debris.

Gray came to me. ‘Now we have lunch.’

‘A little late for that.’

‘You’re in the Army now, Miss Elphinstone; you eat when you’re fed. And then it’s a walk for us, I’m afraid.’

‘Which way?’ I knew my destination was to the west and the Cordon, eventually.

But he pointed east, along the Strand. ‘That way, along the new shore. Dry enough, if we cut up a couple of streets. The Strand, you know – a Saxon word for “beach”, and that’s no accident, for this was once the bank of the ancient river.’

‘How far?’

‘All the way to Stratford.’

‘Stratford? East, then, not west, to where the Martians are – I imagine there’s a plan.’

‘As much as the Army ever has.’

So that extraordinary day continued. We walked, but I am used to that, and was glad of the exercise after days of travel on boat and train. We headed along the Strand – where, as I have previously remarked, I had the opportunity to inspected the war wreckage of landmarks familiar to me – and then through Aldwych and around the London Wall to Aldgate, and then on up the Whitechapel Road to Stepney and Bow. As we progressed the scouts would peel off to the locations of telephone equipment, left by those who had come this way before; they checked the gear and made hasty reports. The engineers suspected that the Martians could detect our wireless transmissions, and could track us that way – but they could not detect our telephone calls.

As we walked, though we saw little evidence of fire, we passed tremendous craters in the ground – as if great bombs had fallen. The Heat-Ray will incinerate a human in a flash, and demolish a building – but such is the density of energy it delivers that the fires it sets, in urban situations anyhow, tend to blow themselves out. So London had been spared the great firestorm that many had predicted when the Martians brought the Heat-Ray back to the city.

But what the Martian assaults had done, by breaking the skin of modern London, had been to reveal the medieval bones and guts lying beneath. I was fascinated to learn that the Martians’ destruction of the Guildhall had revealed the remains of a Roman amphitheatre beneath, a structure long hypothesised but its existence never confirmed. Gray told me that even as the Martians still strutted over London in the present, archaeologists came to study what was exposed of the past. ‘Makes you proud, doesn’t it? That we still have such a perspective, even in this … Do the Martians seek abstract knowledge? If not, then that separates us from them.’

Now I saw that the men around me, on a murmur from their officers, were raising handkerchiefs and scarves to their faces, and Gray quietly advised me to do the same. He pointed to a churchyard, not far off the road. The church itself had been smashed, and the ground around churned up too.

‘The graveyards?’

‘In some of the older churches there are plague pits. Best to be cautious.’

We walked on.

You might ask where were the Londoners in this, those millions who still remained. Hiding – that’s the short answer. I learned that the surviving population had learned to stay back from the main thoroughfares, and inhabited the great warrens of back streets, especially in the East End rookeries – that was if they hadn’t found shelter underground, in the sewers or railway tunnels that were not yet flooded. Thus they avoided the Martians, with their Heat-Ray, and their harvesting.

And they did what they could to keep themselves alive, and not just on the rations the emergency government managed to provide; they foraged in the wrecks of stores, where tinned goods and so forth could still be found, and they grew vegetables, even kept chickens and a few pigs, in gardens and allotments and the smaller parks.

The government kept an eye on the population. A system of ration cards was one way of ensuring every man, woman and child was logged in a great register somewhere. The police still functioned, after a fashion, augmented by Special Constables; crime levels were lower than you might have expected – because, it was said, the rations doled out were more nutritious than the diet of many East End Londoners before the Martians came. And people were put to work, on one project or another: on salvage work, or maintaining the surviving sewers, for example, as I was to discover for myself.