by KW Jeter
I felt one of the woman's hands reach back and push against my chest. "Hold up a second," she whispered, then stepped away from me. The stream of sewage water splashed against my boots as I waited. "All right," she said after a few seconds. "Climb up here."
The beam of her odd lamp illuminated the mouth of another tunnel a few feet above the floor of the one in which I stood. She reached a hand down from her perch and helped me clamber up beside her. "I think this will take us somewhere along the Thames," she said. "We'd better rest for a few minutes before we go up there."
I sat down and leaned my back against the tunnel's curved wall. The long march through the sewer's heavy, oxygen-depleted air had in fact nearly exhausted me. A cool draft of fresh air came from somewhere beyond, though, and we sat in our clammy niche, refreshing our lungs.
"Whose squad you with?" asked my companion at last. I couldn't place the accent in which she formed her terse words.
"Ah… no squad," I said. "Don't have one, you see." I had resolved to conceal my ignorance from her concerning the circumstances into which I had been thrust. To ask point-blank the questions pressing in my brain would most likely convince the woman that I was insane. But if I hid my lack of knowledge about the war raging over our heads, I could perhaps add to my store of facts without exposing myself.
"Freebooting it, huh?" she said. "That's a hard way to go. Though I suppose that's what I've got coming now. Those damned lockers came down on my squad like a ton of bricks. I doubt anyone besides myself got away with his skin on." She lapsed into silence, staring into the lightless depths of the sewer.
"Where are you headed now?" I asked.
"Squeezer's company was pretty well dug into the East End. If we can get past the locker lines and link up with them we'll be doing all right. We can probably get what we need – some food, water and ammo – from Squeezer and his bunch. He owes me a favour."
I mulled over these scraps of information, trying to glean as many inferences as possible from them. Was the word lockers somehow derived from Morlocks? I decided to fish for more information. "Ahh… where will this Squeezer and his men pull back to if the, uh, lockers take the East End?" I assumed the person in question to be some sort of military leader.
"Pull back?" Her face turned toward me. "There isn't any place to pull back to. The East End is it. When that goes, it's all, over."
"Surely," I protested, "there must be somewhere else–"
"There was a radio transmission from Birmingham yesterday. But none today. And the locker bombers were spotted flying that way this morning. The whole city's probably smoking rubble by now." Her voice droned out the chilling statements, the rage and horror suppressed by the need to keep control of one's self.
I didn't ask her what radio transmissions or locker-bombers were.
"But Europe," I said. "Or America. Surely there must be some place that can, help us–"
"What help could a bunch of corpses give us? They were all wiped out months ago." She leaped closer to me. "Are you all right? You didn't get hit in the head or anything, did you?"
"No… no, I'm all right. I just… got confused. That's all. Fatigue, you know." My mind raced giddily at these revelations. This is the end of it all? I wondered sickly. Surely the force that had overwhelmed all the rest of the world would have little trouble snuffing out a last ragged band of holdouts in London's East End. And after that?
The dead Morlock's pallid visage and staring red eyes swam before my mind's eye. So inheriting the Earth millions of years hence wasn't enough for the filthy breed! They must swarm all over Time itself until every second of Creation was under their brute heel! And what of Man – the progenitor of these obscene parodies of himself? Subjugated, perhaps, if any survived. Kept as cattle like the far future's Eloi to feed the Morlocks' hideous appetites.
Not my flesh, I vowed silently. A shudder of revulsion and anger swept over me. When London fell I'd take to the countryside, cutting a red path through the Morlocks – with my bare hands when my bullets ran out – until my back was to the edge of the Dover cliffs. The Channel would receive my dying body and wash my ungnawed bones to sea.
I had always thought myself to be a man of moderate passions, indistinguishable in that respect from most Englishmen born to our logical and mannered times. But now my blood was aboil with fierce and dramatic thoughts, inviolate vows and burning vengeances. And I do not think myself uncommon in reacting so. I can imagine but few of my contemporaries reacting with anything but the same emotions of repugnance and defiance as I experienced upon the thought of the Morlocks' invasion. Thus do times of crisis arouse the most vivid, if not always the best, instincts.
"Come on," said my companion, rising to her feet. She started up the tunnel's gentle slope and I followed after, stooping slightly because of the tunnel's smaller diameter. "By the way," she called over her shoulder. "I'm known as Tafe."
"I'm pleased to make your acquaintance," said I. "Edwin Hocker's my name." Thus introduced, we proceeded upwards, away from the sanctuary of the sewer's quiet and dark.
Nothing that had happened so far had prepared me for the sight I witnessed upon reaching the surface of London again. I crawled out of the sewer opening, following Tafe, my new found Amazonian – in temperament if not stature – comrade, and entered a universe whose last vestiges of Order had fallen to brute Chaos.
Through a grate of twisted iron bars we hoisted ourselves out onto the Albert Embankment. All around us the marks of recent combat were visible – the rubble of shattered buildings, the cratered streets, the thick pall of smoke stinging our eyes. The Embankment's lamp-posts knocked on their sides like tenpins, with their iron dolphins in the street's dirt and muck like so many beached fish gasping for air.
From this point, upriver on the Surrey side, we could see the fires at London's heart, billowing out their columns of smoke that all but obscured the moon and stars. Massive rumbling noises, like the Earth in upheaval, together with explosions muffled by distance, battered our ears from all points of the compass.
"Let's go," said Tafe. She unslung her rifle from her back and held it poised before her.
Mute with dismay at the sight of London in flames, I followed after. The next few hours melted free of Time and its passing, merging into an endless nightmare of flight and the pitiable aspects of a ruined city.
We picked our way across the Thames on toe twisted remains of some massive bridge that lay collapsed in the dark water. We scrambled from crater to crater, from mound of rubble to broken wall, tacking a devious course to the East End. Where the passage was impossible due to fire or the presence of the "lockers" as Tafe called them, we back-tracked and went around, or waited until it was clear. Once we crouched in a trench filled with freezing mud while a yard away from us a company of the enemy sauntered past, laughing and gabbling to each other in their barbaric tongue. I lifted my head and caught sight of their pallid, large-eyed faces, filled with a cruel triumph. Then Tafe hissed and pulled me back out of sight.
Visions of death and destruction. Christopher Wren's great church dome shattered. A wide boulevard littered with human corpses plundered of their weapons. Massive metal constructs, bristling with cannon and apparently at one time propelled by wheels inside belts of iron, now butted against each other in frozen combat and leaking greasy smoke from their hatches. Traces of a yellowish gas clinging to the lowest points of a street, at the first sicklysweet scent of which Tafe turned and ran while I coughed and stumbled after.
Thus we made our way across the city – scrambling, hiding, running – with Tafe leading in her cautious semi-crouch, rifle poised, and I following, dazed by the wreckage.
I came out of my sinking stupor once while we were taking momentary refuge in a gutted cathedral. The great bells had fallen when the supporting timbers had burned away, and now lay on the sides in the charred pews and altar. One side of the chapel, I discovered, had been converted by the Morlocks into a temporary butcher shop for their ravaging troops. I
n the dark the vague outlines could be seen of the half-stripped carcasses hanging from hooks in this grisly abattoir, swaying and turning over scattered ribcages and spines. I found myself staring at a kettle of rendered fat and suppressing a scream. Suddenly the church itself began to scream, then tilted and went darker than the dark that had filled it before…
Tafe slapped me back into consciousness. The nightmare wasn't over yet. She pulled me to my feet, then led me into the now-empty street outside.
The East End was silent when we at last sneaked into that section of the city, but the pall of smoke and signs of recent battle were clearly evident. We saw none of the Morlocks. They had apparently finished their business and moved on to some other area to celebrate their victory.
We found the remains of Squeezer's company still crouched in the trenches they had dug in the centre of one narrow crossroads. Tafe searched among the still bodies, then stopped and turned over the corpse of an older male, his grey beard. stiff with the mud in which he had fallen. For a moment Tafe laid her ear against the old man's chest, then lowered the cold body back to the ground.
Cold, disheartened, my clothes torn and covered with filth, I stood next to her and shivered as I surveyed the desolate scene around us. The moon was lower now, sliding beneath the smoke that filled the sky. When dawn came, where would we be?
Tafe stood and pointed across the series of trenches. "See if the lockers left any ammo behind. We'll need all we can get our hands on."
We separated and began our unpleasant task, searching around and under the slaughtered forms of men and women, who had been the last flickering light of human society in the besieged city and the world beyond. How many other random sparks like Tafe and myself existed, seeking only to make our own deaths come hard as possible to the Morlocks?
Such was the upshot of one man's ambition to Travel through Time! A man in whose very parlour I had supped at the beginning of this long, dark night, and now whose very memory I cursed in my heart! A Time Machine that had become a bridge for these monsters, our children, to swarm across from millions of years into the future and overwhelm us. In the silenced, blood-spattered face of every brave man I examined was the same question that I read in my own heart. What evil design of Providence could have thus doubled Creation upon itself, like a snake devouring its own tail?
I reached the end of the trench without finding anything more than empty shell casings and a few broken knives. The Morlocks were evidently efficient scavengers of Man and his artefacts. I lowered the final corpse back down to the muddy floor of the trench, straightened my aching back, then leapt back in horror as the corpse in front of me jerked convulsively, flinging its limbs out like a ghastly marionette. A spatter of half-clotted blood struck my face. The corpse sagged back to the ground. Only then did my befogged brain perceive the ringing echo of a gunshot from somewhere close by.
Another shot rang out and the trench's rim exploded into pieces of mud and paving stone a few inches from my head. "Hocker!" I heard Tafe call out. "Get down!" A second of frozen bafflement passed; then I dove full-length to the bottom of the trench. A volley of shots splattered into the wall in front of which I had been standing.
I crawled a few yards away on my stomach, then turned on my side and pulled from my coat the pistol Tafe had given me. All was silent but for my heart's pounding. The shots must have come from one of the ruined buildings that flanked the street. Another lone Morlock? I counted my breaths for a minute, then cautiously raised my head over the trench's rim. The jagged brick walls on either side revealed nothing. At the other end of the trench I could see Tafe crouched with her rifle, scanning the dark, unmoving shapes that surrounded us.
Another minute passed. I began inching my way closer to Tafe, watching the ruins as I pulled myself along on my hands and knees. My ear caught the sound of something moving in the rubble behind a segment of wall several yards away. A few shards of brick were dislodged and pattered to the ground. My hand with the pistol flew up instinctively and I fired twice at the shape I thought I detected in the ruined building.
Nothing moved for several seconds. Was this the end of our lone antagonist or had he merely fled to fetch more of his vile brethren? I was about to raise my head to see when a small object flew in an arc from behind the wall. It bounced off the side of the trench behind me, then rolled a few feet away. A small, oval object, the size of two fists perhaps, with a cross-hatched metal casing, lying in the mud.
Tafe grabbed me roughly by the shoulder and threw me to one side of the trench. Stunned for the moment, I saw her leap upon the grenade, rise to her feet, and throw it into the air back at the ruin from where it had come. It only travelled a few yards from her hand when it exploded.
A glaring flash of light, and a dull percussive sound drove into my head and abdomen. Mud and dirt rained upon me, dislodged from the trench wall by the shrapnel, but where Tafe had thrown me I was safe from the metal shards' actual impact.
She, however, had still been standing with one arm raised when the grenade went off. Now she lay crumpled on the floor of the trench, blood streaming from wounds across her head and neck.
I crawled to her and examined her injuries as well as I could. She was unconscious but breathing. My head jerked up at the sound of movements in the buildings surrounding us. More than one – the other Morlocks had no doubt been attracted by the explosion. The rustling and scraping of their footsteps spread to either side as they fanned out.
Hastily, I tore out most of the lining from my coat, wadded it and pressed it to the largest of Tafe's wounds just below the jaw. With one hand holding the bandage tight, I managed to lift her with my other arm. The heels of her boots made two grooves in the trench's mud as I dragged her from the spot.
At the farthest end of the trench I stopped and listened for the Morlocks. The sound of cautious footsteps in mud led me to surmise that they had come out of the ruins and were starting to filter into the trenches to look for us. The buildings on this side of the crossroads were silent. I scrambled up out of the trench, pulling Tafe with me. As I started to carry her into the nearest battered shell of bricks, rifle fire burst behind us and the mud flew into a gritty spray a few inches from my feet. The next shots hit against the half-destroyed wall I dragged Tafe behind.
The slow, deliberate footsteps from the trenches edged closer toward the small cul-de-sac where I crouched with Tafe's unconscious form against me. Both her rifle and my pistol had been lost in the trench when the grenade had exploded. Her smaller wounds had crusted over with dried blood and dirt, but the rag I held to her neck still seeped red. My own blood felt hot and feverish, pulsing at my temples.
I looked at my own filthy hand, the blood upon it glistening wet in the fragment of moonlight that slid into the ruins, and waited for the Morlocks to fall upon us. Noise from beyond the shattered bricks. The blood and dirt.
3
Cigars and Good Beer
"Come on, Hocker. Wake up. It's not as bad as all that."
The toe of a boot rudely prodded me in the ribs. I opened my eyes, which I thought had closed upon my last earthly vision, and saw Dr. Ambrose standing over me. A thin smile was upon his death-pale, handsome face.
"You!" I cried, raising myself upon my elbows. "Fiend! What ungodly tricks have you been playing upon me?" I would have stood up and taken the man's neck in my hands but for the silver point of his walking stick that he held against my chest.
"Control yourself, Hocker." The smile vanished. "Tricks, indeed! If a blindfolded man was walking upon the edge of a cliff and someone else tore the cloth from his eyes, no matter how much seeing his danger scared the fellow, would you call it a 'trick'? Good Lord, Hocker, you should be grateful to me, instead of spitting out your spleen at me as though you were someone with an actual grievance. Now come on, stand up and pull yourself together, man. All shall be explained. Here, take a swig of this. It'll help clear your head."
He put aside his walking stick, bent down and grasped me by
the arm. As he drew me up my legs were a trifle unsteady from muscle fatigue; he pressed a small silver flask to my lips. I drank and found myself swallowing brandy, good but with an unfamiliar aftertaste to it. Its warmth spread across my chest and oddly up the back of my head. My dizziness and a ringing in my ears melted away and my tired legs stopped trembling.
Ambrose took away the nearly empty flask and stowed it in his coat. "Got your heart back again?" he asked.
I nodded, then looked at the scene around us. Another wave of dismay swept against me. "My God!" I cried. "This is the worst yet! What's happened here? What's happened to the city?"
Over the vista broke a cold gray light, such as seen in those false dawns that are neither night nor true morning, when the world and all its contents seem but shapes of mist, formed of vain hope and desire… If you awake from troubled sleep at such a time, you can only sit by the window and think of those that have been lost to you, those that followed your parents into those cold and heartless regions below the grass, silent and dark. Eventually morning comes and the world resumes its solidity, but another tiny thread of ice has been stitched into your heart forever.