Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

The Martians had begun moving in earnest from their huge pit in the ruins of Stony Brook at six in the morning, New York time. They headed relentlessly west, sweeping along the Island towards Manhattan. People had already been moving out, but that moment, when the fighting-machines and the handlingmachines erupted from the pit, was when the flight had begun in earnest, with the Martians driving before them a great wave of people in cars and trucks and on motorcycles and bicycles, and many, many on foot, heading west towards the bridges to the mainland.

And Harry Kane, stoutly waiting for Marigold Rafferty, had made a late start.

Driving Bill Woodward’s Dodge, and with Marigold tucked in the back, Harry joined the main drag heading west, but found himself slowed to a crawl from the gitgo, not so much by the traffic as by pedestrians, dusty people limping along by the dusty tracks, adults burdened with luggage and infants, miserable children tottering along on skinny legs, old folks and the disabled in bath chairs. Every time he had come to Long Island Harry had been struck by the extremes of wealth and poverty to be encountered there. Only a few hundred yards from an emblem of supreme wealth like the glowing Bigelow mansion you would come to some dirt-poor post-industrial community of broken-down factories, warehouses and jetties, maybe a dismal hotel or boarding-house and a bar – always a bar, Prohibition or not – and shack-like dwellings strung out along the road. This morning it seemed fitting that rich and poor should be fleeing together along this dirt highway, where, Harry mused, if he squinted hard he thought he could make out the tracks of the Conestogas that had first opened up the Island.

Meanwhile, most of the stores were closed that Friday morning; those that were open were mobbed, and a couple looked to have been looted. The worst hold-ups were at the few gas stations that still had stocks. They spent a half-hour stuck in a jam outside one station that was still serving, and a couple of burly guys stood by with shotguns as ragged assistants laboured to fill up one car after another from dusty red-painted pumps.

‘Wow,’ Marigold Rafferty said, peering out. ‘The free market in action, right? I wonder what prices they’re charging.’

Woodward murmured, ‘We have more than half a tank. Also there’s a spare can in back. As long as we shut the engine down when we’re stuck, we’ll have the gas to get us to Manhattan – it’s not so far after all. No, running out of gas isn’t going to be our problem.’

Harry stared glumly out of the window. At times the flow was such that the car was entirely surrounded by bodies, shuffling by. ‘This happened in England in 1907, and again in 1920.’

‘And in the European wars,’ Woodward said sternly. ‘Whether you’re a Russian peasant or some deadbeat garage hand on Long Island, I guess it doesn’t matter if it’s a German armoured truck or a Martian fighting-machine that’s coming after you, guns blazing.’

‘No sign of the police, by the way,’ Marigold said. ‘Or the Guard.’

Woodward grunted. ‘Can you blame them? If you weren’t killed in an instant with your colleagues at Stony Brook, you’d get yourself and your families out of there, and to hell with the rest.’

‘Damn. And it’s my fault. You two could have got away hours earlier. You shouldn’t have stayed for me. We didn’t even know each other twenty-four hours ago.’

Woodward laughed. ‘It’s this way on the front line. When the action cuts in and the units get mixed up, you find yourself fighting for your life alongside some guy you met twenty-four seconds ago, never mind hours.’

Marigold said, ‘I’ve never been to the front line.’

‘You have now,’ Woodward replied softly. ‘Gap in traffic; we can move.’

The sun rose steadily in the sky. And Harry, looking north towards the Sound, thought he saw the light glint from the carapaces of fighting-machines on the move. They could be striding out in the shallow water, close to the shore.

‘They’re beating the traffic,’ Woodward said sourly, when Harry pointed this out.

They approached the city around noon.

Woodward’s tactic was to cut through Queens, and then cross to the island of Manhattan across the Queensboro Bridge.

But long before they got to the bridge it was apparent that driving all the way wasn’t going to be possible. For one thing everybody else had the same idea; all the traffic, wheeled and foot, was funnelling towards the few crossing-points across the East River, including Queensboro, and there was a solid, unmoving jam everywhere, long before they reached the waterfront.

And for another, Queens was in flames. Even before they got out of the car the stink of smoke was obvious, and there were ominous glows on the horizon, bright even on an early summer day.

Before they abandoned the car, Woodward put together light packs of their remaining water, beer and food, and handed out heavy driving gloves and scarves from a small trunk in the back. ‘To save your hands from the fires. Pull the scarf over your mouth to keep out the smoke… And here, take these.’ He handed out revolvers, one to each of them.

Harry inspected his. ‘A Colt Automatic.’

‘Ten years old. Kicks like a mule. Some day I’ll give ’em back to the Army. Here’s a couple of clips each.’ He eyed them. ‘I’m going to assume you both know how to handle a gun.’ He showed them the basics, reloading, the safety. ‘I got no plans to kill any Americans today. Think of it as a magic wand that you can wave when you need to get people out of the way.’

Marigold said, ‘You seem prepared.’

‘Hell, no. Making it up as I go along.’ Before he left the car he carefully locked it, and left a US Army parking permit in the window. He winked at Harry. ‘Won’t save it from a Martian Heat-Ray, but you never know, I might yet be back to collect it.’ Harry noticed that as a final preparation Woodward tucked a tyre-iron into his jacket. ‘OK, come on, we’re going to get over that damn bridge or die trying.’

So they pressed into the urban landscape of Queens, which struck Harry as a tangle of warehouses and factories and blocks of rough housing, fronting onto the river. And, today, the refugee flow from at least half the length of Long Island, all the way back to Stony Brook where the cylinders had landed, had poured into a suburb where the local population was already looking to flee. There was chaos, panic, crushing, the streets blocked by abandoned or burning vehicles, or by shoving masses of people.

They steadily made their way west towards the bank of the East River. Woodward tried to keep them away from the worst of the big blazes. You could see where the fires where, from the plumes of smoke that rose up into the sky. Both Woodward and Marigold proved smart in finding ways through, by ducking down alleys, even climbing over walls and hurrying through empty yards – once they even cut all the way through a house, through an open front door and out the back. To Harry’s relief, they avoided confrontations; better to evade than to pick a fight.

And Harry’s journalistic eye picked out details: the old woman fumbling to lock a door as smoke billowed around her; the little boy sitting with a toy wooden battleship on a stoop, crying his eyes out; a woman who seemed to be going into labour, right there in the middle of the street, with a few folk gathered around her, trying to help, and others pushing impatiently past. There was an old man who just died , clutching his chest, right in front of Harry, almost without warning, fell down and died. Harry wondered who he was. Maybe he was old enough to remember when Manhattan still had farmland, so young was New York. And now he had died on the day the city itself, it seemed, was going up in smoke. Harry was sore tempted to dig out the notebook and pencil that sat in the breast pocket of his jacket, but every time he stopped to stare Woodward or Marigold shoved him in the back. ‘Keep moving, you ass!’