Mark Dunn - Under the Harrow

“I asked ,” said Mrs. Potterson, “when you think that we will be able to climb down from this place.”

“I think not for some time, madam. There is perhaps ten or twelve feet of water below, and I do not anticipate a rapid recession.”

Graham now turned his telescopic glass on the pitched roof of the church to continue his intermittent monitoring of the hundreds of people situated there. It was at that moment that a shot rang out. A man seated near the edge of the roof, fully within the librarian’s view, clutched at his crimsoning chest and then fell sideways like a toppled skittle, rolling himself right down the pitch and then completely off the roof.

Then came a second shot seemingly from out of the empty blue, and a woman near the peak of the roof was struck. More shots rang out in rapid succession, and more of those who had put themselves atop the All Souls church began to fall. Panic now broke out and there was a mad scramble toward the outside fire stairs that connected the roof with the choir loft inside. Matilda caught the hand of one of her two little girls as the other child slipped away, falling back into the arms of Mr. Chuffey, the baker. “I’ve got you, girlie!” he cried. “Onward! Hurry!”

A moment later other guns were turned on the occupants of the Bedlam roof. There was now a similar panicked scrabbling surge toward the door that communicated with the internal stairwell.

Vincent tried to shield his beloved Maggy from the gunfire, but a bullet found her, penetrating her neck. Too heavy to be held, she fell from my friend’s arms. Vincent dropt to his knees before her and raised up her limp and dying body, clutching her warm full bosom to his own breast, beholding her face as the light fled from her eyes. She gave him a glimmer of a smile before passing on. He held her there, not moving, as all around him others pushed past, stepped aside, entreated him to save himself.

I was too far away to add my voice to theirs. I took Hannah’s hand and moved us along in the throbbing, jostling, jolting throng. Preceding me were Gus and Charlotte and my nephew Newman. I watched as Newman was shoved to the ground by a wild-eyed man, as he tried to rise and was knocked down again by the knee of a different man thrust stumblingly forward by the hysterical crowd. I reached down and strained to pull Newman to his feet.

The crowd crushed closer now and tighter still, as those having reached the door to the stairs bunched and bottlenecked themselves within the straitened stairwell. There were even more guns firing away at us now and more Dinglians dropping all round me: people I knew, people I did business with, people I wrote about, people I’d had a pint with, thrown a quoit with, people I esteemed, people I loved: Gummidge the lamplighter; Mrs. Flintwitch, the doll’s dressmaker; Mrs. Chillip, my brother’s neighbour; the schoolmistress Miss Clickett; the distiller Cratchit; the dentist Copperfield; the pieshop owner Mrs. Nickleby, the veterinarian Micawber, and the unfortunate Mr. Howler who in the end had done the right thing and perhaps would be rewarded for it in the quiet, far less flustering afterlife.

From the campanile, Antonia and Estella watched in terror as their friends, their neighbours, their surviving countrymen and women were stricken down one, two, three at a time by the diabolically-exacting aim of the Project marksmen — expert Outland sharpshooters hired to finish the task that the floodwaters had started.

The sound of guns was joined by the cries of those who had been hit and by the horrific screams of those who watched as others were shot, by the grunts and moans, gasps and sobs and hasty injunctions and brisk exchanges and nearly monosyllabic good-byes swirling from within that brutal, bloody, cold-hearted assault upon the “ant colony,” upon that cage of subhuman guinea pigs, upon the “Victorian freak show” darkening behind its descending curtain.

We had tried valiantly to save ourselves. We had engaged our intellect and our muscle and our intrepidity, we had come together as the Dell had never before united itself to deliver our valley from a powerful mysterious force that had played us like chess pieces until we should lose all of our crenellation, until we should be wholly discarded, disposed, ultimately destroyed. The fear in me gave way to deep, burning anger. How could such a thing be? How could the universe be so indifferent? Where was God? Where was fairness and justice in this cosmological equation?

I returned my ranging thoughts to Newman who stood before me. “Are you all right, nephew?”

He nodded. “I’ve lost Mama and Papa.”

I pointed. “They’re there. Just ahead. Keep moving along.”

But Newman didn’t keep moving. He stopped, risking again being swept under the mob. He cocked his head. Listening. Listening to something quite different from the tumult of panic and peril and death. He was the first to hear the curious drone of the manmade birds as they approached — the sound of their spinning horizontal wings, turning in rapid oscillations like the wings of the oddest sort of hummingbirds. The drone quickly became a steady mechanical groan, as the flying machines began to descend over Dingley Dell, moving both vertically and horizontally. There were twenty of them, then thirty, then perhaps forty of these manmade mechanical birds, less like a flock now than like a gathering swarm of giant mechanical bees, hovering above, spinning their blades in the manner of Leonardo da Vinci’s famed aerial screw.

Some drew so close that I could feel a strong wind from the air they displaced, so close that we could see the faces of the men and women who rode inside. They were drest as soldiers. They were pointing guns — not at us, but out and away — aiming their arms at those who were aiming their guns at us . The spinning, flying machines buzzed over Milltown as if to announce their arrival, and then they pulled themselves apart and spread themselves out along the periphery of the valley, fluttering over the place where the shooters had been about their killing business.

Here and there could be heard an exchange of rapid gunfire between the flying soldiers and the Tiadaghton marksmen. But quite quickly did the shots die away. The Project shooters were outnumbered. The Project shooters were fleeing back into the woods, fleeing Dingley Dell. The Pennsylvania Air National Guard under orders of the governor of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania had come to Dingley Dell to save the aliens.

ewman Trimmers touched the sky.

The mechanical bird called the helicopter lifted him, along with his mother and his father, up into the air, flying him high above the flooded valley and on to a place called the “FiG.” Fort Indiantown Gap, as it was also known, was headquarters for the Pennsylvania National Guard. All of the surviving Dinglians were airlifted there. The rescue operation continued throughout the long night and then through all of the next day and even through several days thereafter. By late afternoon of the second day, most of those who had made it safely through the flood had been taken away and put into an encampment that was being set up for them on the grounds of the FiG. There were a few Dinglians who had made their way into the Eastern and Western Woods and who, not trusting the Pennsylvania guardsmen, hid there for a while. These men and women would later be found and placed into the camp as well.

The Senator and the Governor appealed to the United States Congress for special emergency funding to provide for all of the displaced and homeless Dinglians. There were many months of investigations to be held, many charges of criminality to be prosecuted. These are ongoing even as I write this eighteen months later. Hundreds of Tiadaghton employees were rounded up and taken to prison. There were suicides. An arsonist took a match to New York’s landmark Flatiron Building and destroyed two of the upper floors. The newspapers called the growing revelations about the Tiadaghton Project the “The Scandal of the Millenium.”