struggle and flight,/Where ignorant armies clash by night – crossed my thoughts. But what did it signify? Was all this some covert invasion that had erupted in the midst of England of which Ambrose had some advance knowledge? Was there a connection between his pallor and the much ghastlier whiteness of the Morlock I had slain? Could this Ambrose perhaps be an agent of the Morlocks disguised as a man of this time, and drawing me into some devious plot? For what purpose?
Such was the anxious tenor of the musings that absorbed me as I tramped through the damp sewer tunnel. I longed to ply the woman ahead of me with questions – she certainly didn't seem to wonder at these proceedings – but refrained. Simple survival dictated my silence for the moment. Dreadful conjectures of war and disaster sweeping over English soil filled my breast.
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
