The man groaned, although it was more of a throat-singed croak. He seemed to shrivel before them.
Overcoming his revulsion, Culver caught the collapsing figure, and gently lowered him to the floor. The man’s clothes were torn and bedraggled; they smelled of excrement.
‘Please . . .’ The voice was weaker this time, as though the effort of seizing Culver’s wrist had taken most of his remaining strength. ‘. . . help . . . us.’
‘How many are left alive here?’ Culver said, his mouth close to the dying man’s ear.
‘I . . . don’t . . .’ His head lolled to one side. ‘Don’t . . .’
Culver looked up at his two companions. ‘Radiation sickness,’ he said unnecessarily. ‘He won’t last much longer. Try the geiger, see how bad it is in here.’
McEwen switched on the machine and they jumped when its amplifier discharged urgent, burring clicks. The needle jumped wildly before settling just beneath the quarter-way mark.
‘Too many rems,’ McEwen told them hastily. ‘It’s dangerous, we’ve got to leave immediately.’
‘I’m on my way,’ Fairbank said, beginning to turn.
‘Wait!’ Culver snapped. ‘Take a look at the others. See if we can save any of them.’
‘You gotta be kidding – oh shit, look . . .’
They followed Fairbank’s gaze and saw the shuffling shapes emerging from the shadows, most of them crawling, some stooped and bent, stumbling as if with age, a whining coming from them that was more frightening than piteous. In that moment of abject fear, it was hard to think of these unsteady, shambling figures as fellow humans, wretches who had had no time to shelter properly from the disaster and its disease-carrying aftermath, for they came at the three survivors like lepers escaping their colony, like hunched demons rising from unhallowed earth, like the undead reaching out to embrace and initiate the living . . .
It was too much for Fairbank and McEwen, one trauma too many in that day of traumas. They backed away.
The ravaged faces, fully revealed in the torches’ combined glare, pleaded for pity, for compassion, for relief from their suffering.
‘Culver, there’s too many of them. We can’t help them all!’ Fairbank’s voice was shaky with its own special pleading.
‘We can’t stay here,’ McEwen added from further away. ‘The radiation count is too high! If we don’t leave now we’ll end up like these people!’
One figure, a woman, finding some last vestige of strength, lurched forward and clung to Fairbank.
‘ . . . nnleasennnnnn . . ’ she implored.
He reflexively pushed her away and she fell to the floor, a weak cry escaping her. Fairbank took a step towards her as if instantly regretting his action, a hand reaching out. The moans of others changed his mind.
‘It’s no good, Culver,’ he said wearily. ‘We can’t help them. There’s too many.’ He turned and broke into a stumbling run towards the front of the store, chocolate bars and sweets tumbling from his overloaded pockets.
A hand scraped against Culver’s cheek. He flinched, but did not pull away from the feverish man he knelt beside.
‘Don’t . . . leave us . . .’ the man whispered.
Culver took the hot trembling fingers from his face and held them. ‘There’s nothing we can do for you right now,’ he told him, and added lamely: ‘We’ve got a doctor among us. If she’s agreeable, we’ll bring her back; she may be able to do something for you.’
The man’s grip suddenly strengthened. ‘No . . . no . . . you can’t . . .’ His other hand, wavering but determined, clutched at Culver’s collar.
Another weight fell across the pilot’s shoulders.
Culver toppled onto his side, the other person bearing down on him, the man beneath pulling, refusing to let go. Culver groaned, a sharp, harsh sound, almost one of pain, and he struggled against them, quickly shrugging the weight from his shoulders, grabbing the other man’s wrists and slowly prising the hand away from his jacket. The man’s other hand, still gripping his, was less easy to dislodge and for one insane moment Culver considered using the gun. It would have meant instant release for him and instant relief for the radiation victim. But whatever it took for such an act, it was not in him. Not yet.
He squeezed the man’s wrist unmercifully, and the clawlike fingers gradually opened. Culver broke free, rising to his feet, almost stumbling over a figure that had crawled up from behind. He avoided the grasping hand.
‘I’m sorry!’ he shouted, and then he was running, staggering after the others, his only thought to be away from this dark limbo between life and death and away from these poor wretches whose best hope was to die sooner rather than later.
He heard their wailing cries, and he thought he heard footsteps coming after him, but he did not stop to look around until he was at the foot of the slope. His two companions were already through the narrow opening at the top, Fairbank reaching back to help him, his face a confused mask of fear and shame.
This is crazy, Culver told himself. They’re just people, our own kind, injured and disease-ravaged; not lepers, not unclean, and not dangerous. Why then were he, Fairbank and McEwen so afraid? He looked back and the answer was there. The shuffling, imploring figures were the incarnation of extreme human distress, the material results of the long-awaited, feared and fearful holocaust. The nightmare come true.
And who could face their own nightmare?
Culver leapt at the slope, Fairbank grabbing his hand and yanking him upwards. He was through the opening, warm rain and grey light enveloping him as he rolled down the other side, not stopping until he had reached the bottom, and even then rolling to a crouched position, facing the store as if expecting the dream to follow. Only Fairbank came sliding down to join him. McEwen stood a few yards away, poised to run.
‘I guess there were just too many, right?’ Fairbank said, clapping him on the shoulder.
Culver shuddered. ‘Yeah, too many.’ He straightened. ‘We’ll get back to them. Dr Reynolds can give them drugs, medicines, anything to ease it for them.’
‘Sure,’ Fairbank replied.
‘Maybe one or two will pull through.’
Fairbank wiped rain from his forehead and nose. He spat into the muddied dirt at his feet. ‘We’d better get to the shelter.’
He walked away leaving Culver staring up at the few visible letters of the store name and the narrow gap beneath. The mausoleum’s name was WORT.
Culver caught up with the others as they squeezed between a bus, all its windows smashed, red paint in the front blistered and flaky, and a sky-blue van, the bottom of its side panels already showing rust. He tried to avert his eyes from the rotted corpse of the bus driver, thrown back in his cab, hands still on the driving wheel as though he had insisted upon carrying his passengers right up to the very doors of eternity. Culver tried not to look, but eyes can be skittishly curious. Glass shards impaled the figure, gleaming from the body like diamonds in an underground rock face, the largest segment neatly dividing the man’s face in half. Something low in Culver’s stomach did a mushy backflip and he forced himself to concentrate on the two men in front. McEwen was walking unsteadily, using the bonnets and tops of cars for support, geiger counter slapping against one hip, rain-soaked shoulders hunched forward. Fairbank, who had turned to see if Culver was following, was white-faced, deep creases stretching from cheekbones to jawline making his normally broad countenance seem suddenly thin, almost gaunt. He opened his mouth to speak, but a distant muffled krumpf had them all staring towards the west.
Less than half a mile away, the remains of a partly-demolished building were collapsing completely, the exposed floors tumbling in on one another like a card-player’s thumb-shuffle. Clouds of dust billowed into the air, the rain only slowly beating them back to earth, the building becoming a pile of concrete and rubble amid a landscape of similar piles. Anything could have caused its surrender – an explosion of gas, the last rending of twisted and overloaded metal, the exhaustion of its ow
n concrete structure. The building’s final acceptance of the inevitable was like a death-knell.
The urge to return as quickly as possible to their sanctuary was strong within them, for more than ever it represented a form of survival. They hoped.
Skirting a five-car collision that resembled an artist’s metal sculpture, they climbed another hill of debris and were relieved to see the Chancery Lane UNDERGROUND sign once more, a section of its blue and red symbol missing.
‘It ain’t much, but it’s home,’ Fairbank said weakly, in an effort to shake off his own despondency.
‘Can you see Bryce?’ Culver peered at the cars below, rain bouncing off their roofs forming misty haloes.
Fairbank shook his head. ‘He can’t be far – he looked pretty done-in when we left him.’
Culver noticed that McEwen was visibly trembling. ‘You going to make it?’ he asked.
‘I just want to get away from here, that’s all. It’s like . . . like one massive graveyard.’
‘Pity some of the dead won’t lie down,’ added Fairbank in unappreciated black humour.
Culver ignored the remark. They all had different ways of coping; Fairbank needed to make jokes, no matter how lame, nor how tasteless.
‘There he is.’ Fairbank pointed, then frowned. ‘At least I think it’s Bryce.’
They descended warily, not risking a fall on the unstable slope.
‘Over here,’ the engineer said, leading the way through the tangle of machinery. Culver spotted the Civil Defence officer on the entrance platform of an empty double-decker bus. His feet were in the road, his body hunched forward over his lap, oblivious to the pounding rain. He appeared to have stomach cramps, but as they drew nearer, they realized he was clutching something.
McEwen caught sight of a familiar form sheltering in a doorway not far from the Underground entrance. For the first time that day he managed to smile. There wasn’t much left of the building above the doorway, for the blast had sheered off the roof and upper floor but, although wrecked, the shops below remained, and it was here, in an open doorway, that the dog shivered over a scrap of food lying at its feet.
The mongrel – McEwen was no expert, but it resembled a German Shepherd mostly – looked forlorn and weak, its fur bedraggled, almost colourless with grime, ribs showing like struts through stretched canvas. Saliva streamed from its mouth, soaking the meagre rations it had managed to salvage from somewhere, and McEwen’s heart went out to the dishevelled animal. After witnessing so much human suffering, the dog’s plight stirred deep emotions in him for, unlike its masters, this creature was blameless, having no say in its own destiny, innocent of all guilt for the destructively sick world it inhabited. McEwen squeezed between two cars and made towards the animal.
The dog’s head was bent low, too concerned for the raw meat at its feet to notice the man’s approach.
Poor little bastard, the ROC officer thought. Half starved and probably still bewildered by everything that had happened.
He watched it wolf down one of the sausage-like scraps between its front paws. The food was red, bloodied, and McEwen wondered where it had found such fresh meat.
‘Good boy,’ he said, moving forward cautiously, not wishing to frighten the animal. ‘Good old boy,’ he repeated soothingly.
The dog looked up.
14
Bryce was in pain. He moaned and his body rocked quickly backwards and forwards in swift rhythm that sought to ease the hurt.
Culver and Fairbank saw there were scratch marks on his neck, blood flowing from the wounds with the rain. They rushed to him, Culver kneeling and grasping the CDO’s shoulder.
‘What’s happened to you?’ he said, using pressure to get the man to straighten. ‘Did you fall?’
Fairbank looked around uneasily, then bent closer, hands resting on his knees.
Bryce looked at them as if they were strangers, a terrified, glazed expression in his eyes. Recognition slowly filtered through.
‘Thank God, thank God,’ he moaned.
They were shocked when they saw his face. The neck wounds stretched round to his cheek, where they became large gashes from which blood flowed freely. The thin line of blood, dotted with small bubbles of drying blood, stretched across the bridge of his nose as if he had been slashed with wire. One eyelid was torn, blood clouding the eyeball beneath red. ‘Get me back to the shelter. Get me back as quickly as possible!’
‘What in hell did this?’ Culver asked, reaching for a handkerchief to stem the seeping tide from the man’s neck.
‘Back, just get me back! I need help.’
‘Culver, there’s something wrong with his hand.’ Fairbank had moved closer and was reaching for Bryce’s arm. He tried to ease the injured man’s hands from his lap, but met with surprising resistance.
‘Bryce, were you attacked by rats?’ Culver asked. ‘Jesus, we thought you’d be safe out here.’
‘No, no!’ It was a shout born out of acute pain. ‘Please take me back to the shelter.’
‘Show me your hands. Let me see them.’
Culver and Fairbank pulled at the arms together.
Bryce had been clutching one hand with the other and, when they were withdrawn from between his blood-drenched lap, they came apart. The other two men flinched when they saw the fingerless right hand.
Fairbank turned away from the bloodied stumps, pushing his forehead against the coolness of the bus. Culver held the wrist of Bryce’s injured hand. He folded the handkerchief, now rain-sodden, over the finger stumps, pressing them against the protruding bones.
‘Hold the handkerchief against them,’ he told Bryce. ‘It’ll stop the bleeding a little.’ He guided the hand towards the other man’s chest and placed the uninjured hand over it. ‘Keep it there. Keep your elbow bent and your hand pointed upwards. Try not to move it.’ He quickly ran his eyes over Bryce, checking for further wounds. He found them, but none was as bad. ‘Where were they, where did they attack you from?’
‘No, not rats.’ It was an effort for Bryce to speak. ‘It was a dog. A . . . mad . . . dog in the car. Rabid. It was rabid. That’s why you’ve got to get me back.’
Culver understood and it was almost a relief. Bryce had come across a wandering dog and it had attacked him. Not rats. Not bloody mutant rats, but a lost, probably starving, dog! But if it had rabies, then Bryce was in even more serious trouble. No wonder he wanted to get back to the shelter – Dr Reynolds would have an antiserum, something that might save his life. If she didn’t – Culver tried to push the thought away – then Bryce would be dead within four to ten days.
‘Can you stand?’ he asked.
‘I . . . I think so. Just help me up.’
Fairbank forgot his nausea and helped Culver lift the injured man to his feet.
‘Okay,’ Culver assured Bryce, ‘We’ll get you back. There’s bound to be an anti-rabies vaccine in the medical supplies, so don’t worry. The sooner we get you there the better.’
‘It’s essential . . . that I’m treated before the symptoms begin to show. Do you understand that?’
‘Sure, I understand. Try to keep calm.’
Through his pain, Bryce remembered the bitter irony of the newspaper headline he had read in the car just before the rabid dog had snapped its jaws into his neck. Keep calm, that was only annihilation knocking on the door. Keep calm, that was only Death tapping you on the shoulder. He began to weep and it was not just because of the throbbing pain.
They half carried him towards the Underground entrance, keeping a wary eye out for the animal that had caused the injury, avoiding open car doors where possible, kicking them shut first if there was no option but to pass by. The rain pounded ceaselessly, and even though it was warm, Culver felt a chill creeping into his bones. The outside world was as bad as they feared it would be; the city was not just crippled, it was crushed.
Culver and Fairbank both saw McEwen at the same time. He was leaning forward, one hand extended, reaching for something cro
uched in a doorway. Something that was partly obscured by his own body.
McEwen smiled at the dog as he tried to coax it from the doorway. ‘Come on, boy, no one’s gonna hurt you. You just finish your food and then we’ll see what to do about you. We could do with a rat-catcher.’
A low, warning growl came from the dog. Its head was still bent close to the food, and its eyes looked up at him with distrust. McEwen noticed there was a moroseness in those large brown eyes.
‘Yeah, I know you’re starving. I’m not going to take your food away from you. You just gobble it down, there’s a good boy.’
Before the final scraps disappeared into the dog’s jaws – snapped up and swallowed whole, as if it feared they would be taken away – the ROC officer noticed something odd. One of the two slivers of meat had what appeared to be a fingernail attached to it.
He hesitated, his hand poised in mid-air, suddenly not so sure that the animal should be patted. It looked a little wild-eyed now. And it was trembling, and its snarl was not encouraging.
There were red blood specks in the foamy white substance drooling from its mouth.
‘McEwen!’
His head whirled round and he saw Culver running towards him through the rain, reaching for the gun in his shoulder holster. Everything became slow motion, the running figure, the turning-back to the dog, the animal quivering, moving forward, its back legs stiff as though semi-paralysed, the hunching of its shoulders, the bristling of its damp fur, the wide gaping jaws and blood- and saliva-filled mouth . . .
Culver stopped and aimed the gun, praying he wouldn’t miss from that range. The dog was tensing itself to leap, but something was wrong with its haunches. Its own madness carried it through. It was in the air, yellow teeth exposed, ready to clamp down on the man’s outstretched hand only inches away.
Culver fired and the shock wave jerked his arm back.
The mad dog spun in the air and landed writhing at McEwen’s feet, jaws snapping, yelping, screeching.