‘You mean they can afford to be choosy?’ Fairbank’s voice was too weak to sound scornful.
‘I think we should go on. If the bastards are anywhere, they’ll be behind us in the tunnels.’
‘Oh, great. That’ll give us something to look forward to.’ The engineer shone his torch back in the direction they had come from.
Bryce, wiping his mouth with a handkerchief and still using the wall for support, said, ‘Culver is right: we should go on. These vermin have existed in the darkness for so long the world above will be alien to them. They’ll hide where they feel safe and attack only the weak and defenceless. These poor unfortunates may have already been dying before they were set upon.’
He managed to straighten and his face looked haunted in the torchlight. ‘Besides, two of you have guns; we can defend ourselves.’
Culver could have smiled at the thought of two handguns fighting off hordes of monster vermin, but the effort would have been too much. ‘We’ve come so far, almost to the point of no return, if you like. If we go back now, we’ll have achieved nothing. If we get to the top of those stairs, then at least we’ll have some idea of what the world has left to offer. Who knows, it may be teeming with human life again. Perhaps they’re even creating some order out of the mess.’
‘Yeah, I’d love to believe it but I’d have to be fucking mad.’ Fairbank slapped the palm of his hand against the smooth wall. ‘You’re right in one thing, though: we’ve come this far so let’s go on. I want to see daylight.’
‘But we’d have to climb through those dead bodies.’ McEwen looked at the other three as though they were insane.
‘Keep your eyes off them,’ Fairbank suggested.
‘How d’you stop smelling them?’ There was more than a hint of hysteria in the ROC officer’s plaintive cry.
Culver was already walking away. ‘You’ve got a choice: come with us or walk back on your own.’
Bryce and Fairbank pushed themselves away from the wall and followed. After a brief moment of hesitation, a moment when his face pinched tight and his bowels considerably loosened, McEwen went after them.
Culver could not keep his gaze from the first few bodies; they held a peculiarly morbid fascination for him, a compulsion to see how much damage could be inflicted upon the human frame. It was the things that crawled between the openings, the gashes, the empty eye sockets, that made revulsion the catharsis of his curiosity rather than the mutilated flesh. He tried not to breathe in too deeply.
They climbed the stairs, forcing themselves to step between the corpses, deliberately keeping their eyes unfocused, their torch beams never lingering too long on one particular spot. Culver wondered how long the generators operating the emergency lighting had continued to run: had these people died in total darkness, feeling only the slashing jaws and talons, or had they witnessed the full terror of their assailants? Which would have been worse: unseen demons gnawing away at your squirming body, or black carnivorous beasts, seen and thereby understood, tearing you apart? Culver slipped and his knee thudded against the chest of a man whose face was just a gaping hole.
Culver recoiled, almost backing into Bryce who was just below him on the stairs. Bryce grabbed the handrail for support, preventing them both from toppling back down the escalator. Recovering, Culver continued to climb, but an abhorrent question could not be pushed from his mind: why would the creatures burrow so deeply into a man’s head when softer flesh and organs were more accessible?
He stopped and surveyed the pile-up of bodies before him. They would have to be lifted clear and the idea of touching them did not appeal.
‘Help me,’ he said to Fairbank, who was next in line behind the Civil Defence officer. Bryce moved aside to let the engineer pass.
‘Christ, do we have to?’ Fairbank complained. ‘Can’t we climb over?’
‘And risk all of us tumbling down to the bottom in an avalanche of corpses?’
‘Since you put it that way . . .’
The first body they lifted was that of a woman and, with nothing much left inside her open abdomen, she was as light as a feather. They carefully avoided looking at the featureless face.
‘Put her onto the section between escalators – she’ll slide down.’
Fairbank did as instructed and watched the body swiftly descend into the darkness below. ‘There’s a ride she couldn’t enjoy,’ he said, and froze as Culver looked at him sharply. He cast his eyes downwards, avoiding Culver’s icy gaze. ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘It’s . . . it’s bravado, y’know? I’m shit-scared.’
The other man turned away, reaching for the next corpse. It was another woman, but this one had some substance to her and was not as easy to lift, even though her breasts were gone, her stomach hollowed. Both men grunted with the effort and when an arm fell around Culver’s shoulder in a lover’s casual embrace, he had to bite into his lower lip to prevent himself from screaming. All her fingers were missing.
When her body had careered off into the blackness, twisting sideways as it sped down, they reached for the next. For a few seconds they could only look at the tiny child, her curled body untouched. The heavy woman had protected the little girl from scything teeth, but her weight and the weight of others had been suffocating.
Culver knelt and brushed a lock of pale yellow, almost white, hair from her cheek. The others watched, not knowing quite what to do. Fairbank looked at Bryce, who gave a slight shake of his head.
Finally, Culver laid the child on her side and arranged her unmarked limbs so that her body was at rest. Perhaps the others expected to see tears in his eyes when he rose, perhaps remorse, his face crushed with grief; they were not prepared for the tight-lipped grimness, the anger that exuded a frightening coldness. For the first time Bryce saw something more in this somewhat laconic stranger who had arrived in their midst so dramatically just a few weeks before, something he realized Dealey had appreciated from the beginning. Dealey had tried to use Culver during their time of self-enforced internment, had tried to gain his confidence, make him part of the ‘officials’ team, but Culver would have none of it. Neither would he side with the others, those whom Dealey secretly referred to as ‘the civilians’. He remained his own man and, as such, was trusted by both parties, if not accepted. Bryce thought that Culver could not have cared less, mistaking his attitude for apathy; now, for the first time, he saw that Culver’s impassivity paradoxically covered an intensity of feeling which only a moment such as this could unveil. Once seen, you were aware that it had always been there and was the quality that made you feel slightly uneasy in his presence. It was a subtle thing and Bryce guessed only extremes made it recognizable. He could not understand why this sudden revelation had assumed a special importance to him, but Bryce was somehow relieved to know the man was far more complex than he had been given credit for. Strangely, he felt safer in his company.
Culver was pulling at another body, this time a man whose eye socket was enlarged as though something had bored straight through. Fairbank moved forward and helped the pilot lift the body onto the makeshift slide. As he did so, he glanced upwards towards the top of the escalators, a movement catching his eye.
‘What’s that?’
The others followed the direction of his gaze. A black shape was moving towards them, sliding down in the same manner as the corpses they were disposing of. It gathered momentum as it drew nearer.
Fairbank backed away from the handrail, fearing the worst. McEwen drew his revolver.
Culver raised a hand as if to stop the ROC officer firing. ‘It’s okay, it’s a body.’
Fairbank gave a quick sigh of relief and stepped towards the handrail again, hands outstretched to catch the sliding figure.
‘Let it go,’ Culver said quietly but urgently.
The engineer raised his eyebrows in surprise and withdrew his hands. As the sliding figure went by he understood Culver’s command. The corpse was headless.
This time he staggered back from the handrail. They al
l followed the descending body with their torch beams.
‘What could have done that?’ Fairbank asked breathlessly.
‘The same that did all this,’ Culver said, waving his torch at the carnage above and below them. ‘Come on, there’s room to get through now.’ He stepped over two corpses, using a handrail for balance.
‘Wait a minute,’ said Bryce. ‘They could still be up there. Something caused that body to move.’
Culver went on, his pace quickening. ‘Maybe we disturbed it,’ he called back over his shoulder. ‘It could have been resting on the handrail and movement down here made it shift. Or maybe it just rotted itself free.’
The three men left behind glanced anxiously at each other, then moved as one after Culver. McEwen kept the .38 clear of its holster.
There were two more human blockages before they reached the top and these were cleared quickly and with little thought. Bryce wondered how soon the mind adapted itself to circumstances, how quickly it impersonalized itself from such enormous tragedy. The aching sickness was still there, but they were gradually becoming anaesthetized to the horror. Not completely, but enough not to be distracted by it.
At last they were at the barriers leading to the escalators. They shone the lights around the circular ticket hall and their spirits sank still further as the nightmare was reinforced.
The round chamber, sunk just below the city streets, was nothing more than a huge open grave. Culver rejected the idea: it was more like a slaughterhouse.
There were two entrances where a steady torrent of rain poured through, diffusing the greyish light of day. The tangled shapes before them could have been hewn from rock, so still, so colourless, were they.
Many of the blast survivors had obviously staggered or dragged themselves down into the station, seeking refuge from the killer dust they knew would soon fall. He remembered those whom he and Dealey had met fleeing from the tunnels; had they thought it safe to linger here in the ticket hall, that their very numbers would keep the vermin away? It would have been packed with the injured, the dying. The smell of fresh-flowing blood would have been overpowering, attracting the creatures below.
There were doors leading off from the hall – he and Dealey had entered one when they had first fled from the holocaust – and several were jammed open with the bodies of those who had tried to escape. He wondered how the station worker who had told him where to find the flashlight had fared, and turned the torch on that particular door. It was off its hinges.
Fairbank had walked over to the ticket office, a long isolated booth near the centre of the round hall, careful to step over husk-like corpses and brushing away flies that buzzed greedily over them. He detested these swarming parasites as much as the creatures who had wrought such slaughter. And almost as much as the men who had sent the missiles.
The office door was open, a man’s body sprawled half-out as though he had tried to flee from something inside. Fair-bank pushed at the door until it nudged against something solid on the other side. The gap allowed him to see all he wanted to.
Terrified survivors must have cowered inside when the vermin had attacked, assuming they would be safe, that the creatures would not be able to break through the booth’s toughened glass. But he saw that two panes were completely shattered while others had cracks from top to bottom. The explosions above had probably caused the cracks, weakened the glass, to break through must have been relatively easy for the rats.
He wrinkled his nose at the smell spilling from the confined space and saw something that momentarily stopped his breathing, if not his heart.
‘Jes – hey, over here!’
The others, preoccupied with their own disturbing observations, turned towards the booth. He waved them over.
They crowded into the doorway, their combined lights showing every detail of the carnage inside the ticket office. They soon spotted what had taken Fairbank’s breath away.
The black rat was huge, almost two feet in length. Its scaly curved tail offered at least another eighteen inches. Its fur was stiffened, dull and dry with death, its massive haunches still hunched as though the rodent was ready to leap. But there was no life in the evil yellow eyes, no dampness to the mouth and incisors. Yet still it emanated a deadliness, a lethal malevolence that made three of the men shudder and back away, even though its neck was twisted at an awkward angle, its skull indented unnaturally.
Only Culver moved forward.
He stooped and examined the dead beast closely. Someone had fought back, had battered the rat to death. That person was probably also dead, killed by the creature’s companions, but at least he or she had not given in easily. Possibly there were other dead vermin out there, lying among the bodies of the humans they had attacked, corpses of both species decaying together.
There seemed to be little weakness in the creature, even in its present state. Yet the skull was caved in. How hard had it been struck? He touched the outer rim of the dent, and the bone beneath his fingers moved inwards. It was brittle and thin. And there was no sign of blood. The blow had not even broken the skin, yet it had presumably caused the rodent’s death. Culver turned the body over and found no other wounds. So possibly the vermin had paper-thin skulls – at least, this one had. Where did it leave him? Nowhere. It might be feasible to win a battle with one or two of these creatures by crushing their heads, but they moved around in packs – large packs.
He straightened and coldly kicked the bristle-furred corpse before leaving the booth.
His companions were watching the booth warily as Culver carefully picked his way towards them. He slapped away flies and other insects, averting his eyes as they landed in the open wounds of the dead and laid their eggs. How fast would these insidious insects multiply now they had no opponents? And what epidemics would they carry and spread among those left to survive? Once the rain had stopped, this other, tiny-sized menace would take to the air to breed, develop and devour. Only winter would stem their tide, and then only temporarily.
Culver faced Bryce. ‘How many of these vermin have been living in the sewers and tunnels? And for how long?’
The Civil Defence officer had to look away; once again the glint in Culver’s eyes was intimidating. The voice was low, controlled, but the anger was barely suppressed.
‘I don’t know,’ he answered, frightened by everything around him and frightened by Culver’s tone. ‘There were no reports of them that I know of.’
‘You’re lying. They’re too big and too many to have stayed concealed for this long.’ His face was only inches away from Bryce’s. The other two men looked on, themselves interested in the answers.
‘I swear I know nothing of them. There were some rumours, of course . . .’
‘Rumours? I want to know, Bryce.’
‘Nothing more than that! Just hearsay. Stories of large animals, perhaps dogs, roaming the sewers. Nobody gave the stories any credence. In fact, the reports were that rats were becoming scarcer down there in recent years.’
‘Yeah, ordinary rats. Didn’t anybody stop to wonder why?’
‘You . . . you mean these creatures drove the others out?’
‘It’s possible. Come on, Bryce, you’re a government man – you must know more. Were there any disappearances, sewer workers and the like going missing?’
‘That’s always happened, Culver, you must understand that. There are hundreds of miles of tunnels beneath the city, and the sewers have always been dangerous through flooding, cave-ins. And animal life has always existed down there. God alone knows what has prowled the tunnels through the decades . . .’
‘Bryce . . .’
‘I’m telling you the truth! I work for Civil Defence, nothing more! If anyone knows something, it’ll be Dealey.’
Culver stared at the older man for a few more moments before the tenseness left his body. ‘Dealey,’ he said, almost as a sigh. He suddenly remembered again the flight into the tunnels just after the nuclear bombs had detonated, when he had told D
ealey, then blind, that there were huge rats around them. Dealey asked if they were black-furred, and had said something like, ‘No, not now,’ as if he knew of them. He might just have been referring to the previous times when the mutants had rampaged; or he might have known they were still in existence.
‘Maybe he’ll do some explaining when we get back,’ Culver said and turned away from Bryce. ‘Let’s see what’s left upstairs.’
Together they clambered over the dead, each man keeping a wary eye for any black moving shapes among them. They saw one or two rat carcases lying among their victims, but Culver noticed something more. He looked around at Bryce and their eyes locked. Something passed between them, a sensory acknowledgement, and neither one mentioned their observation to the other two who were more interested in the opening ahead.
The rain bounced hard off the metal-edged steps and fallen masonry, sending up a low splattering spray. The sound was intense, almost violent.
‘They’ve destroyed the skies, too.’
It was a strange and poignant thing for Fairbank to say, and it sent a shiver through each of them. They stood by the opening, becoming damp with reflected rain, even though not exposed to its full force.
Bryce spoke to the ROC man. ‘Check the geiger. In here first, then outside.’
McEwen switched on the machine hanging over one shoulder by a strap, realizing he should have checked the atmosphere for radiation at each stage of their exploratory journey. Too many shocks had overwhelmed such a precaution.
Brief, separate clicks came from the ionization instrument’s amplifier and McEwen quickly reassured Culver and Fairbank. ‘It’s normal. It’s just picking up very high-energy particles natural to the atmosphere. See – it’s irregular, weak, nothing to worry about.’
‘Care to take a shower?’ Fairbank pointed with his thumb at the pouring rain.
McEwen looked less sure of himself. He took the geiger counter from his shoulder and pushed it out into the downpour.
‘It’s warm, the rain’s warm!’ He quickly withdrew his arms and brushed off droplets as though they were acid.