War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells (Chapters 12-16)

The narrative of these chapters mainly deals with the tale of the narrator's brother, who has fled London for the country, where he meets up with two ladies also fleeing the city. This would be a short, unimportant vignette, but for Wells's masterful description of a fleeing townspeople. The three companions happen upon a town which has gotten wind of the Martian invasion and collectively decided to flee for greener pastures. Their horse and buggy was forced to stop, "for the main road was a boiling stream of people, a torrent of human beings pressing northward, one pressing on another" (151). The mass exodus of an entire village--unplanned--is no easy logistical feat, and the sheer amount of people on one road may pose more danger than the Martians themselves. The story can be read as an allegory of the damage that humans pose to ourselves in panics. Overreactions and mass hysteria rarely have a positive result, such as in the swine flu scare of 1976. The story is a potent one, warning of the dangers of group-think and forecasting what could possibly happen in a modern-day scenario.