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 chums. 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.