Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

‘ Out! Out! ’ That was the cry on Lane’s lips, and on the sappers’ – I could not see their NCO. So we ran along that tunnel, away from the Trench and under the Cordon and on towards the lair of the Martians; we ran through pulses of dust as sections of the tunnel collapsed; we ran when the lights failed at last, ran through the dark by the flickering light of battery torches.

Perhaps I was struck by a falling slab. I do not remember the end of that terrible journey. I had Lane, I suppose, to thank for saving my life.

The next I remember I was lying in on green grass, a pale summer sky above.

England, I thought. This is England. With such horror buried in the ground.

Ted Lane sat with me, looking down, his face smeared with pale dust, and a darker, crimson stain on his chin. He smiled when he saw my eyes open, and helped me sit up. I was in a meadow. Daisies nodded, irreverent. Looking around, I saw I had not been the only casualty of our flight; men in khaki lay scattered around me, their companions tending them. They were grey, dusty masses dumped incongruously on the green sward.

To my left I saw broken ground, a kind of rampart, dirt and rock crudely piled up like a stalled wave. It was the Martian perimeter, I realised with a kind of wonder, or the inner edge of that smashed ground. Where we had emerged, where our tunnel mouth was, I could not tell. But I was inside now; that was clear.

But when I looked the other way, deeper into the Cordon, I saw Martians, fighting-machines, three of them, huge in the mist of distance. They picked their way to and fro across the ground like beachcombers collecting shells – their motions seemed peculiarly coordinated, even choreographed, and I thought of Walter’s speculations of Martian telepathy. There was no sign of any human reaction or resistance. It was an almost casual vision, as if this was quite normal.

And I heard a car horn.

When I turned I saw a Rolls, bright yellow, bouncing over the grass. It made a sharp turn and skidded to a halt. The driver leaned out, doffed a leather cap and goggles, and grinned at me. A new scar on his face was livid.

It was Frank, my former husband.

‘Parp, parp!’ he called. My ears were ringing; I could barely hear him. ‘But you never were one for Grahame, were you, Julie? Never mind. Welcome to Darkest England. Anyone need a lift?’

Frank told me that when word had got to him that I was on the way in, he had insisted on meeting me in person, ahead of a better equipped force, and here he was. And, if he was to drive me off to some shelter, Ted Lane insisted on accompanying me.

So Lane and I sat in the car side by side, covered in dust and mud, even splashed with blood. I felt extraordinary, grotesque, as if I did not belong. My ears rang too, adding to the sense of unreality. We left the surviving sappers with promises of transport as soon as it could be arranged. Still, I felt my heart would break as we drove away from those men, all so young, so many injured, who had seen their companions die in order that I should fulfil my own mission: a mission of whose nature they could have no clear idea.

Frank told us there was a medical bag in the back of the car. We found it, opened it, drank from a flask of water, wiped our faces and hands, and applied antiseptic to our cuts. Concrete dust scattered from my hair when I shook my head. ‘I must a look a sight.’

‘You look just fine, Miss,’ Ted Lane told me.

It was still very early morning; the countryside was bright and innocent. ‘Is this real, Ted? Was that real? The handlingmachine, the men who fell – Ben Gray—’

He took my hand. ‘It will pass. It always does. But we’re not out of the woods, Miss. This is Martian country. Put it aside for later. Like in a box, tucked deep inside.’

‘Is that how you —’

‘Keep thinking, Miss. Just keep thinking.’

I nodded.

Frank did not look around. I had been married to him; I knew he would understand, without needing details until I was ready. He, for one, was concentrating on the job, of driving.

And meanwhile the Rolls fair rattled along a potholed road, leading us away from the heaped-up war zone behind us – and into a scene that was astonishing for its mundanity, all things considered, given what I had gone through to get this far. This was the English countryside, and on that early May day it was clad in that thick moist sun-drenched green you see nowhere else in the world. I glimpsed dogwood hedges, and houses of ancient-looking stone, and poppies and pimpernels, and thought I saw a yellowhammer, sat on a low twig and lording it over the world. Compared to Berlin – compared to London – it all seemed so old , and unplanned too, with field boundaries that might go back to Celtic times or earlier, buildings that might once have been barns or woodsmen’s shelters now turned into garden stores or gazebos for a new generation of commuters. This was what you got when you had centuries of peace, so many slumbering generations. I had a sudden sense of age, of continuity, from Wat Tyler through Shelley to Darwin, to mention three of my own heroes – an England with a history that had nothing to do with these Martians – and I had a sudden determination that she had to be saved.

But if you looked closer things were far from ordinary. There was no other traffic to be seen on the road along which we sped, for a start. Here and there one would see wreckage – cars driven off the road and abandoned to rust. The most startling sight of that sort, which we saw from a level crossing, was a smashed train. It looked to me as if the locomotive’s boiler had been disrupted by the caress of a Heat-Ray, and then there had been a derailment. The train lay along the line that had carried it; passenger coaches were smashed to matchwood, and freight coaches lay on their backs, rusting wheels in the air, like tremendous cockroaches, upended. It was not the train’s destruction that affected me so much as the fact that it had never been cleared away.

A little later we passed at speed through an area that looked, from afar, as if it had been burned out, for a black dust, like soot, lay over everything, the road itself, the houses, the fields. I would learn from a grim-faced Frank that this was the aftermath of a Black Smoke attack. In the First War the Martians had rendered whole swathes of Surrey lifeless with the stuff. But that substance, evolved on an arid Mars, had been too easily laid by water and rendered into harmless dust. The Martians had tweaked the design – the stuff they had now was still more deadly – and the poison lingered, even in the English damp. The Martians had used that deadly substance sparingly in this war, Frank said, only as a ‘punishment measure’ when they encountered resistance. It was not their aim to exterminate us, after all.

And then, to add to the oddness of the day, there was the peculiar way in which Frank continually inspected the sky.

I noticed detail: the way his shirt collar was worn, the elbows of his jacket rather crudely patched with scraps of leather. That was not Frank’s style; he was a professional man who preferred smartness. And his manner had changed; those upward glances told of a furtiveness, an inner tension. It was only later that he told me in detail of his experiences with the Army during the Martian landings – experiences that inevitably left scars. Still, looking over his shoulder, I could see my exhusband was enjoying the way the car handled.

‘And since when did you own a Rolls Royce?’ I demanded of him. My voice felt muffled in my own shock-blown ears, but I ignored the effect.

‘Ah, if only I did,’ he replied. ‘Not mine; it belongs to the Dowager Lady Bonneville – the big cheese in this neck of the woods, you’ll meet her – or more strictly it passed to her after the death of her husband some years back. Part of a collection.’