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.