Eric S. Brown & H. G. Wells by The War of the Worlds Plus Blood Guts & Zombies

Author:The War of the Worlds Plus Blood, Guts & Zombies [The War of the Worlds Plus Blood, Guts & Zombies]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

After the girl had died and reanimated, they’d tied her up. Perhaps they were in denial, claiming she was “ill” and kept her with them rather than let the army deal with her by breaking her skull open and tossing her into a pyre. My brother’s heart went out to the children who were riding with her for she must have stunk greatly from the heat of the midday sun.

“This’ll tike us rahnd Edgware?” asked the driver of the cart with the dead girl in the back, wild-eyed, white-faced; and when my brother told him it would if he turned to the left, he whipped up at once without the formality of thanks.

My brother noticed a pale grey smoke or haze rising among the houses in front of them, and veiling the white facade of a terrace beyond the road that appeared between the backs of the villas. Mrs. Elphinstone suddenly cried out at a number of tongues of smoky red flame leaping up above the houses in front of them against the hot, blue sky. The tumultuous noise resolved itself now into the disorderly mingling of many voices, the gride of many wheels, the creaking of waggons, and the staccato of hoofs.

The lane came round sharply not fifty yards from the crossroads.

“Good heavens!” cried Mrs. Elphinstone. “What is this you are driving us into?”

My brother stopped.

For the main road was a boiling stream of people, a torrent of human beings rushing northward, one pressing on another. Among there were a few of the dead, raging through the crowd, attacking anyone and everyone they could reach. The air was for of screams. A great bank of dust, white and luminous in the blaze of the sun, made everything within twenty feet of the ground grey and indistinct and was perpetually renewed by the hurrying feet of a dense crowd of horses and of men and women on foot, and by the wheels of vehicles of every description.

“Way!” my brother heard voices crying. “Make way!”

It was like riding into the smoke of a fire to approach the meeting point of the lane and road; the crowd roared like a fire and cried out as the dead moved through them.

The dust was hot and pungent. And, indeed, a little way up the road a villa was burning and sending rolling masses of black smoke across the road to add to the confusion.

Two men came past them. They carried military issued rifles though they were not soldiers. My brother guessed they’d looted them from the dead. Then a dirty woman, carrying a heavy bundle and weeping. A lost retriever dog, with hanging tongue, circled dubiously round them, scared and wretched, and fled at my brother’s threat.

So much as they could see of the road Londonward between the houses to the right was a tumultuous stream of dirty, hurrying people, racing for their lives, pent in between the villas on either side; the black heads, the crowded forms, grew into distinctness as they rushed

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