River of Blue Fire (31 page)

Paul lay across the rowing bench, stunned. The mists were thinning as the day grew brighter. He could see Big Ben clearly for the first time, just beyond the bridge. He had thought its top was shrouded in fog, but it was gone. Only a scorched stump protruded above the shattered rooftops of Parliament.

The waves subsided. He clung to the railing and watched the metal monstrosity stalk away down the river. It stopped briefly to uproot some wreckage where the stanchions of Waterloo Bridge had once stood, pulling the great muddy mass of cement and iron from the depths with its steel tentacles, then dropped it again like a bored child and disappeared into the fog, heading toward Greenwich and the sea.

T
HERE were other mechanical monsters, as Paul learned in the days ahead, but he also learned he did not have to work much to avoid them. They did not bother with individual humans, any more than an exterminator who had finished his job would waste time crushing a lone ant on the walkway. But in the immediate hours afterward, he expected to be seized and smashed by one of the gigantic machines at any moment.

Certainly, they had already proved their capacity for destruction. London, or what he could see of it from the river, was a wasteland, the damage far worse than anything it had suffered since the days of Boudicca. The giant machines had smashed and burned whole blocks of streets, even leveled entire boroughs, in what seemed purely wanton destruction. And he knew that the worst was hidden from him. He could see a few bodies scattered in open spaces on the riverbanks, and many more bobbed past him on the river current in the days that followed, but when the wind suddenly turned toward him the smell of death became truly dreadful, and he knew that there must be thousands and thousands more corpses than he could see, trapped in underground stations that had become vast tombs or crushed in the rubble of fallen buildings.

Other incursions had been more subtle. What he had thought in the first hour were red flowers on the Victoria Embankment instead proved to be an alien vegetation. It was everywhere, waving scarlet stems filling up the verges and the traffic islands, swarming over deserted gardens, festooning the remaining bridges and lampposts; for miles at a stretch, the only things moving other than Paul and the river were fronds of the red weed swaying in the rotten wind.

But as shocking as it was to see London in its death throes, other and even stranger surprises awaited him.

Within hours of his encounter with the first metal giant, Paul began to understand that this was not
his
London, but the city as it might have been generations before his birth. The shop signs he could see from his boat were written in funny, curling script, and advertised services that seemed hopelessly quaint: “millinery,” “dry goods,” “hosiery.”

The few cars still recognizable as such were ridiculously old-fashioned, and even the human corpses putrefying in the street seemed oddly antique—most noticeably those of the women, who were dressed in shawls and ankle-length skirts. Some of these nameless dead even wore hats and gloves, as though death itself were an occasion that must be met in formal dress.

Hours passed after the shock of seeing the first invader before Paul realized what place he had actually found.

He had steered the boat to a deserted jetty across from Battersea in order to rest his aching arms. In another London—in
his
London—the famous power station that had dominated this part of the riverfront was long gone, and the municipal authorities were building cloud-piercing fibramic office towers on the spot, but in this London the station itself apparently would not be built for decades yet. But since some terrible conflict seemed to have slaughtered almost everyone, the power station would probably
never
be built. It was all so confusing!

The sun was dipping low in the west, which softened the ragged skyline and made the destruction a tiny bit more tolerable, and for a long moment Paul just sat in as much personal stillness as he could muster, trying not to think about what lay all around him. He shut his eyes to further the process, but the feeling of imminent doom was so strong he could not keep them closed. At any moment, one of those grotesque, skyscraping machines might appear on the horizon, a tripod remorseless as a hunting beast, hood swiveling until it caught sight of him. . . .

Tripods
. Paul stared at the brown water of the Thames swirling around the jetty, but he was no longer seeing it. Tripods, giant war machines, red weeds growing everywhere. There was a story like that, wasn't there. . . ?

It came to him like a blast of cold air, not as the satisfying answer to a question, but as the unwelcome beginning of an even more frightening problem.

Oh, God. H. G. Wells, isn't it?
War of the Worlds,
whatever that thing is called
. . . .

It was one of those works he felt he knew quite well, even though he hadn't actually read the book or seen any of the numerous adaptations (several versions of which, both interactive and straight, were available on the net.) But there was, he felt quite sure, no version like this. Because this was not a version. This was horribly real.

But how can I be somewhere that's also a made-up story
?

Even a moment's contemplation of this made his head hurt. There were far too many possibilities, all of them utterly mad. Was it a make-believe place, based on a famous story, but constructed just for him? But that was impossible—he had already decided it was ridiculous to imagine someone building an entire Ice Age set, and how much more mind-numbingly expensive would this London be? And when he considered how many different places he had seen already . . . no. It was impossible. But what other answers were there? Could this be some real place, some London in another dimension that had been invaded by space aliens, and which Wells had somehow tapped into? Was that old author's device, the alternate universe, really true?

Or was it something even stranger—one of those quantum things that Muckler at the gallery was always raving about? Had the fact of Wells' invention caused this place to come into being, a branching of reality that did not exist until the man from Bromley first set pen to paper?

That only led to more questions, each more boggling than the last. Did every made-up story have its own universe? Or just the good ones? And who got to decide?

And was he himself, already missing part of his past, now caught in some ever-ramifying journey, into dimensions farther and farther from his own?

At another time he might have laughed at the idea of a multiple universe run on the basis of editing decisions, but nothing about his situation was in the least bit funny. He was lost in a mad universe, he was impossibly far from home, and he was alone.

He slept that evening in a deserted restaurant near Cheyne Walk. It had been looted of everything remotely resembling food, but he was not feeling particularly hungry, especially when every change of wind brought the smell of putrefaction from some new quarter. In fact, he could not remember the last time he had felt truly hungry, and could but dimly remember the last time he had eaten, but the thought only raised more questions, and he was very tired of questions. He pulled drapes from the windows and wrapped himself in them against the cold from the river, then slid down into a heavy, dreamless sleep.

As he made his way up the Thames the next day, moving faster because of a pair of oars he had salvaged from another abandoned boat, he found that he was not the only human being in this ruined London. From the river, and during the course of a few cautious landings before the sun began to set again, he saw nearly a dozen other people, but they were as wary of contact as rats: all of them either ignored his cry of greeting or actually fled on seeing him. Thinking of how everything edible had been taken from the restaurant and the shops he had explored on either side of it, he wondered if these people did not have good reason to shun other survivors. And survivors they clearly were, all of them ragged and blackened with dust and soot, so that at a distance he could not have guessed the ethnicity of any of them.

He found an entire community at Kew the next day, several dozen people in tattered clothes, living in the royal gardens. Paul did not come ashore, but hailed them from the river and asked for news. A small deputation came down to the water's edge and told him that the aliens—the “machine creatures” as these survivors called them, had largely moved away from London, pursuing their inscrutable aims northward, but there were still enough left behind to make life in the city a very hazardous thing. They had themselves come to Kew Gardens only a week ago from Lambeth, which had been almost completely destroyed, and had already lost a few of their party who had been caught on the open green when a tripod had appeared and stepped on them, apparently by accident. When the Kew survivors had finished trapping and eating the last of the squirrels and birds, they told Paul, they planned to move on.

It was good to talk to other people, but there was something in the way they inspected him that made Paul uncomfortable. One of the men invited him to join them, but he only thanked them and rowed on.

The oddest thing, he thought as he made his way up the river toward Richmond, was that his memory of
War of the Worlds
was that the Martians had proved susceptible to Earth diseases, and had died within a few weeks of beginning their campaign of devastation. But the survivors at Kew had said the first Martian ships had arrived in Surrey over half a year ago. Paul was curious about this variance from the Wells story, and picked up scraps of newspaper dated in the last days before the Martian invasion when he came across them, but of course there was nothing available to tell him the current date. Civilization had come to a halt on the day the Martians came.

In fact, that was the strange thing about the whole situation. Unlike the other stops on his involuntary pilgrimage, this post-invasion England seemed to have reached a kind of stasis, as though someone had played an endgame, then left without removing the pieces from the board. If London was any example, the country, perhaps the world, was completely in the hands of the invaders. The creatures themselves had left only a token force. The tiny residue of human survivors were scrabbling just to survive. It all felt so . . . empty.

This spawned another thought, which began to grow as the day went on, as Paul passed and called out to a handful of other scavenging humans with no result. All of the places he had been since he had somehow lost his normal life were so . . . so
old
. They were situations and scenarios that suggested a different era entirely—the turn of the century H. G. Wells novel, the strange
Boy's Own Paper
version of Mars—another and quite different Mars than the one which had spawned these invaders, which was an interesting thought in itself—and the Looking Glass place where he had met Gally. Even his dimmest memories seemed to be of an antique and long-concluded war. And the Ice Age, that was just plain ancient. But there seemed another common element as well, something that troubled him but that he could not quite name.

It was the fourth day, and he was just east of Twickenham, when he met them.

He had just passed a small midstream island, and was working his way alongside an open green space on the north side of the river, a park of some kind, when he saw a man walking aimlessly back and forth on the bank. Paul thought he might be another of those whose minds had been permanently deranged by the invasion, because when he hailed him, the man looked up, then stared at him as though Paul were a ghost. A moment later the man began to leap up and down, waving his arms like a spastic flagman, shouting over and over again: “Thank goodness! Oh, heavens! Thank goodness!”

Paul steered closer to the riverbank as the stranger ran down toward him. Caution long since having gained the upper hand over his desire to commune with living humans, Paul stayed a little way out into the water while he made a hasty examination. The middle-aged man was thin and very short, perhaps not much more than five feet in height. He wore spectacles and a small mustache of the sort a later generation would identify with German dictators. But for the ragged state of his black suit, and the tears of apparent gratitude in his eyes, he might have just walked away from his desk in a small, stuffy assurance firm.

“Oh, thank the good Lord. Please come help me.” The man pulled a kerchief from his waistcoat pocket and used it to mop his face. It was impossible to tell what color the cloth had once been. “My sister. My poor sister has fallen down and she cannot get up. Please.”

Paul stared at him hard. If he was a robber, he was a very unlikely-looking one. If he was the front man for a gang of thieves and murderers, they must be very patient to set bait for the infrequent river travelers. Still, it did not pay to be hasty these days. “What happened to her?”

“She has fallen and hurt herself. Oh, please, sir, do a Christian good deed and help me. I would pay you if I could.” His smile was sickly. “If it meant anything. But we will share what we have with you.”

The man's sincerity was hard to doubt, and it would take a gun to equalize the difference in their sizes. He had not showed one yet, and Paul had been in range for quite some time. “All right. Let me just tie up my boat.”

“God bless you, sir.”

The small man bounced from foot to foot like a child waiting to use the toilet as Paul waded ashore, then made his rowboat fast. The man beckoned to him to follow, and set out up the bank toward the trees in a strange, awkward trot. Paul doubted that before the invasion the man had ever gone faster than a walk since he had been a child at school.

As if the memory of former dignity suddenly returned with the presence of a stranger, the man in the black suit abruptly slowed and turned around. “This is so very kind of you. My name is Sefton Pankie.” Walking backward now, and in imminent danger at any moment of tripping over a root, he extended a hand.