Alien Invasion Short Stories by Laura Bulbeck

Author:Laura Bulbeck [Bulbeck, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781787552494
Publisher: Flame Tree Publishing
Published: 2018-12-15T16:53:06+00:00

The Hunted

Angus McIntyre

The War Office had sent an escort for Rachel, a young army officer who met her at the Glasgow landing field and summoned a hansom cab to carry her and her trunk to the railway station. After the smoothness and silence of her flight from London, the lurching and jolting of the cab and the din of its wheels on the cobbles left her feeling battered.

“I don’t suppose you can tell us where we’re going,” she said.

Her escort, whose name and rank she had already forgotten, shook his head.

“No, miss,” he said. “Orders.”

He looked very young, his khaki battledress crisp and neat. She thought he might be a lieutenant, or perhaps a sergeant. She tried to remember whether either of those ranks was higher than captain, the only other military rank she could remember.

She saw almost nothing of Glasgow, her eyes still dazzled by the miraculous visions she had seen from the window of the flying machine: houses and fields shrunk to the size of toys, ragged streamers of white cloud over the Midlands, sunlight glinting on the silver ribbon of a river. Amidst the beauty were uglier reminders of the recent fighting: the ragged black wasteland that had been Birmingham before the Martians burned it, clusters of shell craters marking the site of some futile battle, patches of lingering red weed like open wounds in the green landscape.

At the station, the soldier led her directly to the platform and the waiting train. She had hoped he might let slip the name of their destination when he bought tickets, but evidently he had the tickets or something like them already in his pocket. A board at the platform entrance had a list of stops written on it in precise chalked capitals, but she could only make out a handful of names – Dumbarton, Bridge of Orchy, Fort William – before he hurried her past. None of them meant anything to her.

The carriage was shabby and the seats bore a patina of grime. Too few people left to clean, she supposed. Even eight months on, Britain still seemed a land populated mostly by ghosts, the survivors too few to fill the nation’s once-bustling cities. Each face she saw still bore the mark of those weeks of terror and the long months of privation that followed.

The train whistle sounded and she felt again that residual frisson of fear, hearing in the familiar sound an evil echo of the hooting of the Martian hunting machines. She saw her companion start in his seat and guessed that he heard it the same way. The train jolted into motion.

She had some papers with her, drafts of a monograph on ancient Akkadian that she had been writing before the invasion. It seemed absurd to be still working on it when so many of her colleagues had died, when the university itself was a blackened shell. It might be decades before anyone cared about logosyllabic cuneiform again. Yet she found that immersing herself in her studies calmed her.

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