The Shadow Girl by Ray Cummings

History will record that the battle of Great New York began on the morning of June 12, 2445 A. D. For three days it raged. I can give but fragmentary pictures. It whirled Alan and me into a maelstrom. I recall the morning of June 13. A day of the battle was passed. Inconceivable events of horror! Inconceivable ramifications of gruesome tragedy!

I recall that that morning Alan and I sat before a mirror-grid in the Westchester section of this monstrous beehive city. The fighting was farther south. We could see its ghastly details mirrored on a score of grids around us. We had been in it at times. And snatched food and sleep. But we were worn now to the verge of exhaustion. And worn with fear. The Turberites could not be stopped.

And Nanette? How could we dare hope that we would ever see Nanette again amid this torrent of killing?

The Hoboken area across the lower river had been the scene of bloody fighting all afternoon of June 12, the evening, and through the night. The Manhattan-Hudson terraces and most of the network of Hudson bridges down near the lower end were held now by the Turberites. They had penetrated through all the corridors of the Hoboken area south of the power rooms. Factory rooms and offices were here, shops and storage warehouses of local food supplies. The Turberites now swarmed them. The terminus of the north-south traffic artery on the Manhattan side of the river tunnel was taken from us.

The city traffic system of internal railways was long since paralyzed. It added to the panic of the people who were caught in the city the morning before, when the fighting so abruptly started, and who had not yet been able to get away. A resident population of thirty million now in this monstrous city! Ten million more as a daily average of visitors. They, too, were caught in the maelstrom of the panic. And another thirty million who commuted in to work.

Millions had escaped now. Every moment black streams of them came pouring out. But transportation was hourly becoming more difficult.

Inconceivable ramifications of tragedy! The mirrors before us pictured it in a myriad horrible details. My gaze caught one of them and clung, fascinated.

It was a vaulted corridor, with tiers of levels from the ground up to the thousand-foot roof. The loading platforms of the shuttles which normally whirled local travelers away to the main departing stages of the Northbound Local Coast Flyers were on these levels; forty of them, one above the other, on each side of the corridor. The shuttle cars stood ready on their tracks; the escalators still were in movement.

A tremendous throng of people was struggling here, trying to get onto the shuttles which occasionally were departing. The Hudson River -- nearly closed over here by the ground tracks, surface viaducts and the network of bridges to the Hoboken terraces -- showed occasionally in patches of sullen, yellow-stained water.

The crowd milled and fought for place in the inadequate cars. Every level, every smallest bridge, was thronged. From a line of doorways and trans-corridors up near the roof a horde of advancing Turberites appeared -- a mob of bloodstained villains with the blood-lust upon them. They came clambering and leaping through a hundred doors and windows; they spread down the inclines, the stairways, running over the spider-bridges. Within a moment they seemed everywhere.

I saw a low, unroofed kiosk upon the edge of a sidewalk level. Tables and chairs were there, as though this were a street cafe. It was black with men and women, thrust in there by the press of others outside. The furniture was overturned.

From twenty feet overhead a dozen figures of Turberites leaped a rail and plunged down. Men in torn and blood-soaked uniforms of red cloth, grotesque with epaulets and golden braid. Their swords flashed. The little cafe was in a moment strewn with the mutilated dead and dying. Some of the bodies went like plummets over the low rails. I could see the white splashes as they struck the sullen river.

There was a mirror giving a close detail in another section -- a room in the honeycomb of cells that occupied an area of southeast Manhattan. The Turberites had reached there now in a drive for the great air-stage where the transcontinental liners were departing.

Our police forces still held the roof-tracks and all the arteries of official travel up there; and the subterranean arteries were still ours all over Manhattan. But in the metal honeycomb of squalid living quarters which in my day was called the lower East Side the Turberites had forced us back.

There was, on my mirror, this chance close detail of a single room. A woman in it, thin and pallid and frail; wasted frame -- a woman old and haggard at thirty, with wisps of yellow hair turning white. In metal bunks her brood of children were huddled. Cut off here in their home, lost and forgotten in the turmoil. The woman had barred her door -- there were no windows; it seemed that perhaps her ventilator had ceased to operate; she huddled, gasping, with a baby against her breast.

The door burst inward. A savage who in a different age had stalked the forests of this same space stood expectantly upon the threshold. His painted face was grinning. Other faces behind him peered to watch. He bounded in; his tomahawk whirled. The woman mercifully went down at once; the children lay where he had thrown them in a gruesome little heap. He seized the baby, which still seemed alive. He held it aloft and gestured to his grinning, feathered companions. He tossed its white body toward the ceiling and flung the dripping tomahawk at the falling mark. The weapon cleaved the baby's head as it fell to the floor.