Morlock Night

2

Damnable fool, I thought as I strode on. Did I mean my odd companion of late or myself? No matter. Anger, as it will, had replaced fear. A whole evening behind me wasted on such nonsense, and now I had a few more hours to look forward to of floundering about in the clammy fog before I found myself in my own warm home. Without bearings I pressed on, cursing myself and all the other doltards the English race produces.

Mercifully the fog began to thin and lift. Soon I could see the stars' pinpoints of light through rifts in the scudding clouds overhead. A three-quarters moon broke through and further illuminated the scene. My relief at being able to see around me, though, was soon chased away by a growing dismay.

The section of London in which I found myself was completely unrecognisable to me. Indeed, I was appalled to discover that such an area even existed. Were our municipal authorities really so lax as to allow it? I saw now that the buildings beside which I had been walking were actually nothing but ruined shells, great walls of brick and stone shattered into jag-topped pieces surrounded by mounds of rubble. Twisted pipes and charred, broken timbers poked out of the debris like skeletal fingers. What horrendous disaster could have struck this quarter and left me so unaware of its having happened?

And when could it have happened? Even now I could see that tangled clumps of weeds had burst forth in the crevices of the rubble. The whole area, as far as my eye could detect in any direction, gave the impression of violent destruction, overlaid with years of abandonment and neglect. For thirty years, as child and man, I had lived in London and never been aware that its boundaries contained such a monumental landscape of collapse.

Had I wandered so far in the fog as to have entered an area somehow forgotten by nearly everyone in the city? For a moment I feared that the images of ruin were all disordered hallucinations brought upon me by the sinister tobacco – if that's what it really was – of Dr. Ambrose – if that was his true name. But then I was confronted with a shoulder-high isthmus of broken stone that spilled across the road. No other route lay before me; I was forced to scramble and pick my way over it. The sharp edges of the stones against my palms convinced me of the reality of my surroundings. Wherever this was I had strayed to, it was as undeniable as the tear in the knee of my trousers inflicted by one of the shards.

On the other side of the rubble's barricade I could discern more clearly the distant fires I had first glimpsed through the fog. I had mistakenly thought them to be small and nearby – the contained, productive furnaces of factory work. Instead, I saw now that the nearest was some miles away and engulfed. a large, multi-storied building. Even as I watched, one of the outer walls cracked from the heat and fell away, revealing the pulsing white heart of the conflagration. Columns of turgid smoke billowed upwards, uniting in the sky with the dark outpourings from the further blazes.

My God, I thought, appalled. Some calamity had broken loose upon one of the inner sections – of the city as I had wandered about. For a moment my legs nearly trembled out from under me and I fell back against the sloping rubble I had just crossed. In fear and awe I gaped at the scene ahead of me. It seemed as though I was gazing into one of the fiery circles of Hell itself. In my breast bloomed the desire to creep into some dust-lined pit of broken masonry and hide myself from the sight of the flames. I suppressed the shameful fear as well as I could and regained my feet. Hampered by darkness and the street's mounded litter, I hurried toward the burning buildings – both to render what assistance I could and to regain my bearings in the city.

Before I had gone more than a few hundred yards I found the ruined nature of the district I was in assuming the aspect of some forgotten battlefield. Raw-edged craters pocked the street's surface, with curved segments of ruptured water and sewer conduits glinting dully from pools of stagnant water. I threaded my way cautiously among the pits, fearing the misstep that the dim moonlight made likely.

The shattered walls of the buildings along the sides of the road had become more grotesque in their appearance, reduced even closer to their elementary fragments. With my brain reeling and my heart oppressed by the sights that surrounded me, I pressed on and caught at last in my nostrils the smell of burning that was spreading through the night air like a disease.

Soon I could taste the ashes in my mouth. A subtler, more noisome odour was intermixed with the burning wood and singed brick. A smell such as burning pork might give. Noises – dull, muffled explosions and a sharper, rattling sound like rapid drumbeats – came to my ears from the direction of the flames. These grew louder as I hurried through the devastated landscape.

My mind was so filled with dire conjectures of what calamity had struck this section of London – earthquake, insurrection, God only knew – that I failed to see the rim of the largest crater until my boot crumbled its edge. I fell and slid partway down its rough slope. At the same time I saw three bright scarlet lines cut the darkness over my head, and from behind heard a stuttering crack of rapid gunfire.

An irrational wave of temper swept over me and I raised my head over the rim of the crater. "I say," I shouted at my unseen marksman. "Are you aware you're shooting at a British citizen?" The half-destroyed walls echoed with my words, but gave no answer. "I demand to know-"

I suddenly felt myself grasped about the legs and pulled down farther into the crater, tearing my waistcoat against the rough stones. "What the hell are you doing?" demanded a hoarse woman's voice. At the same time the air above the crater was suddenly crossed and re-crossed with scores of the glaring red trails, while a clattering volley of gunfire sounded from all sides and chips of masonry danced off the walls along the street.

Safe below the hail of shots, I twisted around on the pit's slope and confronted this new personage. I saw a young woman of slight build with closecropped dark hair. Her fine-boned features were obscured beneath streaks of black grease on her forehead and cheeks. Dressed in a man's rough trousers and jacket, with a belted leather harness crossing her shoulders and waist, she crouched in front of me, cradling some odd type of rifle across her knees.

What this woman and her strange garb signified, I had no idea. By this time so many disorienting events had battered my mind that I felt nothing further could surprise me. "My dear woman," I said, raising my voice. "I find this incredible. We're surrounded by maniacs with some type of Maxim gun up there. What in God's name is going on?"

She stared at me, her eyes drawing into slits. "Something wrong with you, buddy?" she demanded. "And where'd you scavenge those funny clothes?"

"I- I don't know what's wrong." I said weakly, taken aback by a voice so belligerent in a woman – the most shocking thing so far. "I feel a little dizzy. And these were good tweeds before all this madness started."

The gunfire ceased and the crater's interior lapsed into darkness. She turned toward the sky. "We'd better move out," she said. "Before they start flinging in grenades."

"Grenades?" My God, I thought. A war has broken outright in the heart of London. I fancied myself well up in the news of the day, but I had heard of no diplomatic crisis that could have precipitated this. Had the Kaiser or Czar gone mad and ordered their secret agents – of which London was full, everyone knew – to instigate some wave of assassination and bombing? Filthy brutes, I seethed to myself. Whoever they are. Bringing their infernal devices into the heart of a civilised nation's capital instead of out among some peas ants and savages where they belonged.

"Come on," said the woman. "Lost your gun? Here, take this." She unsnapped a leather holster on her belt and extended a dully gleaming shape of metal to me. I took it and felt the grip of some unfamiliar make of pistol fill my hand. Automatically, my fingers curled around it.

I am no soldier and must confess that, up to this point, my acquaintance with a battlefield had been limited to reading war correspondents' dispatches. But here, in London, to see the ugly face of destruction… I felt as outraged at this violation of the proper order as an astronomer would upon seeing the planets break from their orbits and dance into the sun. I confess that my blood pulsed with a giddy excitement at the chance of placing a bullet into the hearts of whatever scoundrels had invaded – without even proper notification of intent – my homeland's green and sacred soil. God and queen must love a patriot, and there's no patriot like a man with a gun in his hand. I put away whatever qualms I had about the situation in which I had found myself. Whoever this indelicately garbed woman was, I had no choice but to follow her crouching figure to the bottom of the crater.

My tweeds were even worse soiled by the time I had half slid, half-stumbled down. My boots splashed into several inches of muddy, scum-topped water. "Over here," whispered the woman. The dark outline of her hand motioned me to follow. I glanced nervously up at the rim of the crater, saw nothing but the stars and moon overhead, then went along behind her.

I watched as she knelt down and pried up a large broken section of cement, then assisted her in sliding it a few feet away. A jagged hole, slightly wider than a man's shoulders, was revealed now, broken through into some form of tunnel beneath. I surmised it to be a sewer conduit, as a dampish, corrupted smell wafted from the aperture. I looked at it dubiously as the woman slung her rifle behind her by its strap. "Come on, jack," she said. "In you go."

The hole's repugnant aspect held me at its rim, but then we both whirled around at hearing slight scuttling noises behind and above us. My first flush of courage had been tempered by caution. I stowed the strange pistol in my coat pocket and lowered myself feet first into the hole.

A drop of a few feet landed me in a shallow rivulet of water. I stepped back and looked up through the hole, waiting for my female comrade to drop through. Her heavy booted feet and rough-clothed lower limbs appeared, then she descended no farther. Her body twisted violently around. At the hole's perimeter I could see another figure, obscured by darkness, lunge at her from somewhere above.

Their combined weight crumbled away the rim of the hole, and the woman fell another few inches, dragging her assailant partway down with her. I grabbed her feet in order to help pull her through, but to no avail. She was held fast by the figure grappling with her. One arm freed itself and groped blindly behind her for her rifle, but it was wedged hopelessly between her and the edge of the hole. I could see her other hand pushing against one of the assailant's fists, in which a long, bayonet-like blade struck off the moon's light as it strained toward her neck.

Her boots broke from my grasp and kicked against my chest. "What the hell are you waiting for?" she shouted. "Get him!"

I brought the pistol out of my pocket, knelt, and with a hand and eye steady from many grouse shoots, aimed at the narrow section of her attacker that was open to me. Nothing happened when I pulled the gun's trigger. "Come on! Come on, dammit!" she gasped as I fumbled in the sewer's darkness for the pistol's safety release. A tiny lever on its side moved under my thumb and I brought the pistol back up to fire.

As my finger pulled back on the trigger, the woman, instead of keeping her head away from the attacker's blade, lowered it and pushed desperately with her brow against the other's fist. I could make out every tense ligament of her face now filling my line of fire. Too late to stop the shot, I jerked the pistol up as it fired.

The flash from the weapon's muzzle dazzled my eyes, and the sewer tunnel echoed deafeningly with its roar. I peered upward, dreading to see which of them had intercepted my shot.

The woman's body slumped lower, then fell to the tunnel's sloping floor. The other figure slid through as well, landing heavily in the shallow water and not moving as the woman raised herself to her hands and knees.

"Are you all right?" I asked.

She nodded as she slowly regained her breath. By the scrap of light from the hole in the sewer's arching roof, I watched as she stood and unfastened a short tubular object from her belt. A click, and a flaring beam of light shot from one end of it. A peculiar sort of lamp I thought it, but undeniably useful.

I stepped close behind her as she went up to the corpse of her assailant and played the beam of light over it. The skin of my arms and neck contracted in horror as the body's details were revealed by the bright circle travelling over it. My mind raced back to the memory of a fantastic story of a Time Machine and the adventures it produced, told in a warm, well-lit parlour only a few hours – it seemed ages! – ago. My eccentric host's very words leapt into my thoughts… this bleached, obscene, nocturnal thing… it was a dull white, and had strange, large grey ish-red eyes… flaxen hair on its head and down its back… I shivered involuntarily when I realised that the corpse on the sewer floor before me was the very image of my story-telling host's imaginary Morlocks! Indeed, as I stared at the dead thing, its large eyes still glaring at us, the word imaginary shrank from my thoughts. I stood aghast, bereft of sense as would be an Alpine traveller, who, upon the lifting of a snowstorm, finds himself poised on the very brink of a bottomless precipice.

As we examined the creature's vile carcass, I noted a few significant differences from those details that the Time Machine's inventor had described to his dinner party. Our host had given his audience the impression of a much smaller creature with a thin-shanked, spidery appearance. The one before us now was of the stature of a short man built wide across the shoulders, with corded muscles filling out its sinewy arms. The flaxen hair was clipped short, and the creature was garbed in a one-piece, utilitarian garment, crossed with leather straps like my companion's, but stained with blood from the fatal wound my shot had given him. A rifle similar to the woman's lay under the corpse, while the bayonet was only a few inches from the creature's outflung hand.

My study of this apparition was ended when the woman doused the light. The beam disappeared with only a slight click from the tube she held. "A scout," she said. "We'd better move on before the rest of his squad comes after."

I helped her drag the pallid corpse away from where it would have been visible from above. Then, into the complete darkness and stale must of the sewer tunnel, I followed after her. As I slogged through the shallow water, my mind flicked from thought to thought like the beam of light my companion produced to light our way.

The remembered words of the mysterious Dr. Ambrose taunted me. Clearly he had not been the babbling lunatic I had surmised him to be. A figure of knowledge and power I saw him now; but what knowledge? What power? By his agency, I was certain, I had been translated from my quiet London haunts into this dark vista of struggle and death. A fragment from Matthew Arnold… as on a darkling plain! Swept with confused alarms of 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 and altar. One side of the chapel, I discovered, had been converted by the Morlocks into a temporary butcher shop for their ravaging troops. In 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.