The Massacre of Mankind

by Stephen Baxter

  And while we lumbered through the mud, I would learn later, the Martians were devastating Los Angeles, and had landed in Melbourne, Australia.

  It was with some relief that I realised we were approaching the Cordon at last. It had taken us hours to get to the perimeter – we reached it after two in the afternoon, I think.

  The support vehicles fell away now, leaving only the landships, the vehicles of serious intent. I could hear a dull booming, like thunder, coming from directly ahead of us. This, I learned, was an artillery barrage; guns many miles away were targeting Martian emplacements close to the site where we were aiming to breach the Cordon perimeter, softening up the invaders before we fell on them. We were rolling into gunfire, then, and the battle had already begun, with ourselves still far from the front.

  And the landscape changed. Where before we had rolled through a leafy countryside which, if untended, if lacking the sheep and cattle in the fields, was pretty much indistinguishable from how it might have been on any day in mid-May in any of the last dozen years, now the land was bare, the buildings ruined, fences knocked down, even trees smashed or burned. The ground itself was churned up by the passing of wheels, and pocked by shell craters. Here and there, too, I saw other signs of combat – a smashed gun emplacement, the metal of the guns melted like toffee - and, a gruesome sight, the white of bone, a skeletal hand protruding from the dried ground. I had not seen this hinterland of war before, as I had travelled to the Cordon through the underground passages. But in truth the Heat-Ray left few relics.

  Still that shouting of shells ahead continued, a barrage that seemed to shake the earth. And through the telephone in my sponson I listened to the calm voices of Eden and his crew. Now there was none of the joshing that had characterised the camp at Thornborough; there was only the calm reading of instruments, and routine reports from the engine room, and Eden’s quiet voice counting off the distance remaining: ‘Half a mile to the wire, boys, not long now . . .’ I knew that men going to war would pull back into themselves, and think of their homes, of their wives and children or their own mothers. They had to be dragged back to the reality by their officers, like Eden. ‘A quarter-mile more – keep it steady – two hundred yards – I can see the sappers pulling back the barbed wire for us, and I’m tempted to chuck out a bottle of whisky for their pains, but I won’t . . . Here comes the trench. Now, Mr Stern, if you please, give me all she’s got!’

  The engine roared, and we lurched forward – and the prow of the landship dipped as if we had fallen into an immense well!

  I would have seen it better if I had been an observer outside the hull of the great ship. Of course, such an observer could not have lasted long.

  To penetrate the Martian Cordon, we had first to get through the Trench, a triple ditch system deep enough to trip a fighting-machine. It was into the first such ditch that our ironclad of the land now flung herself. The trench was perhaps fifty feet deep and as many wide – but the Boadicea was a hundred feet long, and had been designed for just such purposes. She simply hurled herself over that great gash, and before she could tip into the depths her huge forward wheels engaged the far side wall. With engines screaming, with huge clods of earth being dug out by the treads – and with everybody aboard yelling encouragement – the wheels did their job, the prow rose, and she scrambled across the trench and smashed through the last barricades.

  We were the spearpoint. Behind us the sappers made the breach permanent, with pontoons and bridge sections hastily flung across the trench. The lesser vehicles behind us poured across and up the ramp we had created, and closed up behind us as we advanced.

  And the Martians came to meet us.

  I only glimpsed them as I peered timidly through my periscope: the great tall legs, the bronze cowls, the projectors of the Heat-Ray being brought to bear. We drove straight at them, into that forest of legs, and even over the engine’s roar I heard exultant yells from the crew. But the Heat-Ray splashed on us from all angles. I seemed to feel it like a physical blow, each great jolt of heat, and men screamed with each punch. The great Martian hull-plates would resist the heat, but they had been fitted into the landship’s frame by imperfect human engineering and there were gaps and seams, so that where the beam hit, sprays of molten aluminium showered the interior of the craft, slicing into the clothing and the flesh of the crew. Verity was kept busy.

  But despite the casualties, despite deep scoring wounds to the structure of our craft itself, still we advanced, into the teeth of the fire. Now we approached that barrier of supple, metallic legs. I abandoned my periscope and huddled over on myself – We hit with a tremendous clang. There was a scraping over our roof, and a crash and smash and a kind of explosion behind us.

  A glance through my periscope, when I dared uncurl, showed me what had happened. We had scythed through the legs of not one but two fighting-machines; both had tumbled over, and the cowl of one, it seemed, had detonated on impact with the ground. Other machines quickly clustered around the fallen, as was the way of the Martians. And now I saw that armada of lesser vehicles coming up behind to engage the Martian group. Many of their crews would die today, I knew – die in the next few minutes, in fact – but they would take Martians with them.

  In the midst of such a battle it may seem odd that Eric Eden yanking open the door of my compartment should make me jump, but it did. His face was blackened by smoke and soot, save for his eyes, where he had removed his goggles. And he was grinning, his teeth white. ‘That was quite a stunt, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Two fighting-machines at once – I’ll say.’

  ‘If you tried that on a soccer field you’d be penalised for taking out your man. Well. The battle is closing behind us, but we, and a few more vehicles, are pushing on. The primary purpose of the expedition is to try to disrupt the Martians’ command and control, and so we’re making straight for the central Redoubt at Amersham. But you, madam, get out here.’

  I clambered out of my cell, stiffer than ever. Verity, I saw, was working frantically, treating four wounded men, all of them horribly burned, on face, neck, back, legs; all seemed groggy with morphine. A fifth man, himself limping from a burn to his leg, was helping Verity as best he could. The air was murky with smoke, and rich with the stink of cordite; the engine roared, the gears screamed.

  Eden said to me, ‘I’ll give you a young officer. Lieutenant Hopson – the chap I sent to bring you in, if you remember. Smarter than he looks and he knows the Cordon, been on a number of infiltration operations before. He’ll get you to Marriott.’

  ‘And Verity?’

  At the sound of her name, she looked up from her work, distracted. ‘Leave me here.’ And she turned away, before I could acknowledge her.

  I would not see her again. In the end she gave her life on the front line. I knew few soldiers braver.

  Eden tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Come, then. The sooner I can get rid of you the sooner I can regain control of my ship; Tommy Hetherington’s a marvellous chap but a touch on the reckless side . . .’

  The great landship did not even come to a full halt before depositing myself and Hopson; it had too much momentum to be wasted on the likes of us, and we had to jump down and roll in the broken dirt. But we made it in one piece. Hopson was the first to his feet, and he dragged me to cover behind a fragment of scorched, broken wall.

  Already the Boadicea was moving on, and that huge flank slid past us as if she were a great liner leaving a Liverpool dock: an extraordinary sight. As it turned out she would reach Amersham that day, leading the remnants of her land-borne flotilla, and engage the Martians. The question of whether that great incursion made any difference to the Martians’ execution of their global Second War remains controversial in the eyes of many historians. To my eyes it was worth the try, at least. But the Boadicea herself would not survive; her monumental wreck is, today, the centrepiece of a museum.

  Hopson gave me a minute to breathe. Then he said, ‘Now to find this scallywag Marriott and his chum
s. Are you ready?’

  ‘Always.’

  He sat up, glanced around to see if the coast was clear, and led me out into the open.

  And in the hours that followed, even as we progressed across the Cordon, and the line of midnight swept across continents and oceans, more Martian fleets landed, and around the world the fighting intensified.

  9

  ESCAPE FROM LONG ISLAND

  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.

  10

  THE BRIDGES OF NEW YORK

  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 pe
ncil 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!’

  And then Harry saw a glint of bronze, high in the air. It was the hood of a fighting-machine, high above Queens. Already, the Martians were here. He would tell me that the sight gave him an extraordinary thrill, as if of exhilaration; none of it seemed real, as if it were all a huge movie set. That’s youth for you.

  At last they broke through to the river front, and by a miracle of Woodward’s navigation right at the entrance to the Queensboro Bridge.

  Harry, coughing from the smoke, was dazzled by the sudden brilliance of the open panorama. There was the bridge, below it the river on which lay the low grey profiles of warships, and smaller specks that looked like ferries, bravely hauling off handfuls of refugees from the Island. And there ahead of him was Manhattan, a great reef of buildings that poked like broken bones at the sky. As far as he could see the air above the city was clear – no sign of smoke, not yet. Looking back, though, he could see that over in Brooklyn an immense, smoky fire burned, and Harry heard the crump of a distant explosion; he knew that Brooklyn was dense with heavy industries, refineries and shipyards, which would no doubt be targets for the Martians.

  And the Queensboro Bridge itself was a solid, unmoving mass of vehicles and people.

  ‘The Martians haven’t crossed yet,’ Marigold said. ‘So we’re still ahead of the game . . . All we need to do now is get across that bridge. Shit.’

  Harry grinned. ‘Hey, language! You’re not in Menlo Park now, you know.’

  Woodward pressed forward. ‘Come on. And now’s the time to use your magic wands.’

  He led the way, pushing through the crowd by main force, and Harry and Marigold did their best to follow. Woodward’s revolver was indeed only a back-up, a symbol; he made most of his progress through firm shoving, and snapping out orders that people obeyed without thinking – he got through, Harry thought, mostly by showing a kind of unswerving belief in his own right of way. And, inch by inch, yard by yard, they crossed that bridge.