The Massacre of Mankind

by Stephen Baxter

  But the soldiers were not done yet. Gray grabbed the NCO by the shoulder, and I saw him show the man something he held in his left hand, a pellet small and dark. It was a grenade, I guessed. The NCO hesitated for a second. Then he moved back, yelling at his men until they followed him away from the rest area.

  Gray waited until the beast had clambered fully into the tunnel. It was a big machine which barely passed the walls . . .

  Gray stood his ground and faced the thing from Mars . . .

  He detonated his grenade . . .

  In that confined space the shockwave knocked us like nine pins, back along the tunnel. Whether the explosion damaged the handling-machine fatally I cannot say, but I saw the roof collapse, and a rush of earth and rock like a dark waterfall smashed down on machine, Martian and all. As far as I could tell Ben Gray made no effort to get away. He must have been almost under the handling-machine when the explosion came.

  And I saw the roof over my own head cracking.

  ‘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?’

  17

  INSIDE THE CORDON

  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.’

  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.’

  18

  THE POTATO 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 wit
h 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.

  ‘Unearthly,’ I said aloud.

  ‘Indeed,’ Frank replied. He reached down a hand. ‘You’d better come out of there.’

  When I stood up, I felt oddly giddy, I gasped for breath, and was grateful for his hand as I stepped back up onto the bridge.

  Frank said, ‘It’s different when you see it on the ground, isn’t it? The Vicar I mentioned fancies himself as something of a naturalist. Once he collected beetles, he told me.’

  I smiled, though I still felt queasy. ‘A follower of Darwin, then.’

  ‘Now he has widened his field of study. Where the Martian plants grow, he says, the red creepers and the weed, our native flora and fauna cannot compete. The green plants that once colonised this river bed, and on land the earthworms and the ladybirds and the flies and the spiders, and the birds who used to feed on them – all dying back. We are seeing extinction in action, he says. He references a French fellow named Cuvier, which means little to me. For all the strutting of the fightingmachines and the sinister shadows of their flyers, this is the real stranglehold that Mars is imposing on the earth.’

  I took deep breaths. ‘And the air? Why is it I feel as if I’ve run an Olympic steeplechase?’

  ‘I’ve done some study on that myself, after my surgery was plagued by patients who complained of breathlessness after working the river-bed fields.’

  ‘What river-bed fields?’

  Ted Lane looked down the shallow valley of this stream. ‘Perhaps like those.’

  Glancing that way, I made out a number of figures toiling in the mud or the shallow water, perhaps a quarter-mile away. I thought some were soldiers, from the baggy clothes they wore and a faint sense of discipline about them – and the fact that one or two of their number did not work but strolled about watching the work of others, as NCOs and officers will. But there were other, more enigmatic forms among them – different sorts of people, I thought, a taller, slender sort, and a squat, hunched-over variety whose bent backs appeared to bristle with hair. The oddest thing about those fellows, dimly glimpsed from a distance, was that they didn’t seem to be wearing clothes at all . . . Curiosity sparked in me, even as a lingering sense of unreality deepened. After the tunnel, the whole day was like a dream.