Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

We were coming into a small village, unprepossessing, a row of shut-up shops and workers’ cottages surrounded by fields. But it had a rail station, surrounded by rather boxy villas. The rail line itself was lost in green weeds.

‘The widow kept the cars under wraps, so to speak, for some months. The Martians smashed up just about every vehicle they could see in the first hours or days, but these beauties were kept out of sight. Now, of course, they’re proving remarkably useful – although one always has to be discreet.’ We pulled up before a rather dilapidated station-house. ‘Give me a hand.’ He bundled out of the car, glancing again at the sky.

I followed him, as did Ted, sweating, blood smeared on his face and dust staining his crumpled uniform, staying steadfastly at my side.

I saw that the rear wall of the station house had been cut away, to be replaced by a hanging tarpaulin. Frank pulled on a rope, and the tarpaulin lifted, like a stage curtain. ‘Help me, man.’ Ted hurried over to take another length of rope, and I helped too, and we all pulled away.

The tarpaulin lifted to reveal a gutted interior. The window for ticket sales was still there, and a door to a lavatory gaped open, but otherwise the station house had become an impromptu garage. Half of it was occupied by one more vehicle, a small tractor, and there were tool sets, oily rags, and cans of oil and petrol lying around.

Frank waved us out of the way, briskly drove in the Rolls, and hustled out, dragging the tarpaulin down after him.

‘Abracadabra,’ he said dryly. ‘As if it had never been. Looks rather strange, I know, but I think we can rely on the Martians not being au fait just yet with the fine particulars of latenineteenth-century English railway architecture. It’s footslogging it from here to Abbotsdale, I’m afraid, but it’s not very far. Well – nowhere is very far from anywhere else in the Cordon, it’s only twenty miles across, as you’ll know…’

We walked on along the road, heading roughly north, and up a slight incline. I soon wearied. We were in the Chilterns, a landscape of chalk, of steep rises and hidden valleys: a country where a hill to climb is never far away, as I and my leg muscles were to discover in the days to come. But the peaceful quiet did us both good, I think, Ted and I, after our extreme experiences. Indeed, after the shock, the sudden violence, this ordinarylooking country didn’t seem real, not to me.

Ordinary-looking country . Not really, as seen from the car, and less so now as we walked through it and saw the detail. The roadside hedges were untrimmed, bramble and holly both growing wild everywhere. A number of cottages we passed were evidently abandoned, some broken open or burned out. In places phone wires were down and lay where they had fallen. One poignant relic, for me, was a poster affixed to a tilted telephone pole for an agricultural show that would have been held in the autumn of 1920 – that season had come and gone, the show had never been held, but the poster, weather-faded, clung on.

Frank had brought his pack from the car, and he dug out water flasks. As we walked, Ted and I both drank thirstily.

Ted, coming to himself, was growing more observant, more curious in his practical way. ‘Where do you get your petrol?’

‘Stores from before the invasion.’ He pointed to the sky where an aeroplane whined, a distant wasp. ‘And we get drops. But the Martians have a good kill rate of the aircraft, unfortunately; we can’t rely on that. There’s a strict rationing system, for everything – you’ll see. Eventually we’ll run out.’ He glanced at me. ‘But maybe something will turn up before we get to that crisis, eh? They told me you were coming, but not what you’re up to…’

I had known that some communication was possible with the interior of the Cordon; it was no great surprise to find Frank expecting me. I had always had a vague idea that as soon as I found Frank I would blurt it all out to him – even the deeper truth of my mission, the blood and the lie – and rely on his judgement and strength of character, rely on his help.

But now that I was here, walking through this Cordon of his, with its patrolling Martians and stashed cars and so forth, I found myself peculiarly uneasy. In France I had lived in a country under occupation, and I had seen how individual lives and choices were distorted by that brute fact, how society itself was pulled out of shape. These were uneasy, nebulous thoughts – they made me uncomfortable even with Frank – but the upshot was that I decided to keep the secret of my true mission a little longer, until I understood what I had walked into.

We turned a corner, and came upon a tumbled cart with broken wheel, and the skeleton of a horse, the mighty bones jumbled in the traces. The bones had been picked clean; there was no smell, and it was a rather abstract sight.

Frank pointed. ‘You can see the leg that got broken, and the bullet-hole in the skull where the driver put the animal out of its misery.’

Ted looked at him. ‘What of human remains?’

‘You come across some,’ Frank said. ‘In the ditches, in abandoned houses we break into for supplies – all under the mandate of the Vigilance Committee, you understand. We bury them decently. The Vicar at Abbotsdale comes out to say the words, and he keeps a note of names and dates, if they’re known. Usually it’s starvation and sickness that takes them… If it’s the Martians, you see, there’s no trace left. Come along – not far now – soon we’ll be seeing our farmed fields.’

We came to a stream. The road crossed this by a small stone bridge, and here we stood and stared, curiously. The water was a mere trickle, and it ran over a bed that was choked with dense crimson vegetation.

‘I remember this red stuff from ’07,’ I said.

‘I think we all do,’ Ted Lane said. ‘The red weed… But I thought that got killed off with the Martians.’

‘So it did, last time,’ Frank said. ‘The Martians seem to have found a way to make the stuff immune to whatever earthly cankers did for it before, just as they evidently toughened up their own blood. Now here it is, surging into life wherever there’s open water, or even heavy ground if the water table is high…’

Curious, I clambered down from the bridge for a closer look. I stood in mud that gave under my boots, and the weed sprawled and flourished around me. In that English stream bed I saw fronds and vesicles and stems and what seemed to be seed pods, all in that rich crimson, a deeper red than blood. In form it was reminiscent of cactus plants, with bulbous, prickly lobes sprouting from deep root systems.

Much speculation had been vented on this biological novelty since the fall of the Martians in ’07. Lankester of the Natural History Museum, for example, opined that a cactus-like morphology was what one might expect to be characteristic of an arid world like Mars, where plants must extract and conserve what little water is available: digging deep with long roots, storing the treasure in vessels with leathery skins defiant of evaporation, and with prickles to drive off thirsty Martian animals – or humanoids. Now, not for the first time in my life, I discovered that comforting theories are one thing, but the reality of the alien, close to, is quite another, for the strangeness seems to drive out the analysis.

And certainly the weed seemed to have more about it than merely being niggardly of water. It was vigorous stuff. When I crouched for a closer look, I could see it growing. I mean that literally, I could see the leaves stretch and spread, the air blisters grow. How to describe that eerie development? It was like watching an accelerated film, perhaps. It did not fit with my experiences of earthly life; it was faster than the imperceptible growth and movement of the vegetable world, slower than the fast oxygen-fuelled motions of the animal. Something in between.