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.
3
"Come on, Hocker. Wake up. It's not as bad as all that."
The toe of a boot rudely prodded me in the ribs. I opened my eyes, which I thought had closed upon my last earthly vision, and saw Dr. Ambrose standing over me. A thin smile was upon his death-pale, handsome face.
"You!" I cried, raising myself upon my elbows. "Fiend! What ungodly tricks have you been playing upon me?" I would have stood up and taken the man's neck in my hands but for the silver point of his walking stick that he held against my chest.
"Control yourself, Hocker." The smile vanished. "Tricks, indeed! If a blindfolded man was walking upon the edge of a cliff and someone else tore the cloth from his eyes, no matter how much seeing his danger scared the fellow, would you call it a 'trick'? Good Lord, Hocker, you should be grateful to me, instead of spitting out your spleen at me as though you were someone with an actual grievance. Now come on, stand up and pull yourself together, man. All shall be explained. Here, take a swig of this. It'll help clear your head."
He put aside his walking stick, bent down and grasped me by the arm. As he drew me up my legs were a trifle unsteady from muscle fatigue; he pressed a small silver flask to my lips. I drank and found myself swallowing brandy, good but with an unfamiliar aftertaste to it. Its warmth spread across my chest and oddly up the back of my head. My dizziness and a ringing in my ears melted away and my tired legs stopped trembling.
Ambrose took away the nearly empty flask and stowed it in his coat. "Got your heart back again?" he asked.
I nodded, then looked at the scene around us. Another wave of dismay swept against me. "My God!" I cried. "This is the worst yet! What's happened here? What's happened to the city?"
Over the vista broke a cold gray light, such as seen in those false dawns that are neither night nor true morning, when the world and all its contents seem but shapes of mist, formed of vain hope and desire… If you awake from troubled sleep at such a time, you can only sit by the window and think of those that have been lost to you, those that followed your parents into those cold and heartless regions below the grass, silent and dark. Eventually morning comes and the world resumes its solidity, but another tiny thread of ice has been stitched into your heart forever.
Such was the illumination by which I saw the ruins of London. But now they did not seem just freshly battered by war, but weathered away by passing centuries. The heaps of rubble had lost their jagged edges, sinking under mould and decaying vegetation. The road was cracked and riven, as though the Earth beneath was shrinking with age. As I surveyed the appalling scene a small, shinyblack thing like a salamander darted to the crest of one low mound, glared at us with eyes like two pinpoints of light, then darted away. Another one, but with inky bat wings, flapped up from one of the street's cracks, then curved away on the chilling breeze that came from the west.
"Not a pretty sight, eh, Hocker." Ambrose lifted his walking stick and pointed with it to the horizon. "This is the way it is all the way to the ocean, and in all the lands beyond as well."
"My God," I said. "What have you brought me to? Is this some future time when Man and Morlock both have rotted away? What comes after this, for God's sake?"
"Nothing comes after this, actually," said Ambrose briskly. "And nothing before, either. Your good, comfortable year of 1892 and all the other years of Victoria's reign, and all the rest of the Earth's existence from its gaseous birth to its final fiery plunge back into the sun, are no more. What you see around you are the rocks and shoals of Eternity after the Sea of Time has been drained away. Such is the final upshot of all that mucking about with Time Travel."
"You don't mean-" I stammered. "Surely not- surely this isn't the end of it all." The scene's oppressive gloom weighed heavier and heavier upon me.
"My dear fellow," said Ambrose mildly, "this is no end to everything, this is everything. The Alpha and Omega of the Earth's existence. Nothing but this through all Time, Past and Present – if those words still meant anything."
"But how?" I seized his arm in desperation. "How could it, have happened?"
"You yourself ate dinner with the man who built the Time Machine, and heard his story. Even such a trifling little excursion as his was in fact so gross a violation of the Universe's natural order as to make distant galaxies warp from their courses! That such power ever fell, however unwittingly, into a mortal man's control was no license for him to actually go and use it. And then when the Morlocks gained control of the Time Machine, and sent whole armies trooping back and forth between your century and theirs – can't you imagine what happened? A temporal implosion! Our little pocket of the Universe was sucked out of the flow of Time and into this dark, unchanging abyss."