‘There’s nothing we can do,’ Dealey told her. His throat was dry, he could barely speak; the hand gripping the Browning would not keep still. ‘Keep . . . keep the light . . . on the doorway as a . . . as a . . . guide for them,’ he stammered.
Ellison remained on the other side of the broken boards, inside the darkened room, listening to the dreadful sounds, the trembling in his legs making it difficult for them to support his body. His hands were clawed against his face, his eyes staring and seeing nothing but blackness. They were crazy, crazy to stay here, crazy not to run, to get out while they had the chance, crazy to think they could defend themselves against so many. Culver and Fairbank were finished. Nothing could save them! The rats would rip them to pieces and then come searching for the girl, Dealey and himself! Why hadn’t they listened to him? The stupid, bloody fools!
He looked towards the source of light, seeing Dealey’s silhouette, the man leaning forward into the opening, clutching the gun. The gun! He had to take the gun! And the flashlight – he would need the flashlight!
Ellison moved quickly.
Dealey turned as the Browning was snatched away, tried to protest, but was pushed back against the doorway, shards of splintered wood digging into his back.
Gun held forward, Ellison made a grab for the flashlight. ‘Give it to me!’ he screamed as Kate tried to pull away.
He caught her arm, yanking her inwards. She fell, tried to kick out at him, but a hand smacked her viciously across the face. She cried out, falling backwards. The flashlight was taken from her.
Dealey tried to intervene and Ellison pushed him away once more. He levelled the gun at him. ‘I’m leaving!’ The engineer’s words were spat out. ‘You can come with me, or you can stay. But I’m getting out now!’
‘The others . . .’ Dealey began to say.
‘We can’t help them! They’ve had it!’
Ellison began to back away, keeping the weapon pointed at the two figures, who were blinded by the flashlight. Then he turned and began to run, heading for the door at the other end of the room, away from the mayhem below, away from his companions. And, he foolishly thought, away from the vermin.
31
Fairbank shouted his abhorrence, screamed his fear, as he fired at the huge swollen mass before them. The creature screeched, the sound of a hurt, terrified child, and attempted to lift her obese body, tried to protect herself, her two jaws snapping ineffectively, her useless limbs thrashing the ground, trampling and scattering the tiny offspring that had suckled at her breasts.
Bullets ripped into her, explosions of blood spurting out in dark jets, drenching the two men, soaking the earth around her, covering the blind, squealing things beneath her with its sticky fluid. In a paroxysm of agony, she rose up, exposing her sickening, fleshy underbelly, several of her brood still clinging to the many breasts that dangled there. A frenzied hail of bullets tore her open, a waterfall of blood gushing out, carrying with it internal organs that steamed in the dank atmosphere. Still she moved, still she writhed, falling again, but incredibly shuffling her way towards the two men.
Fairbank’s howling cry mingled with the muted crackling of the weapon, his face lit up with the bright flashes, his eyes demented with loathing, with revulsion for the monstrosity coming towards them. The massive, throbbing body began to come apart, the rising curved spine shattering into splinters, bursting outwards like shrapnel; flesh ruptured and parts pulverized as bullets tore through; one barely raised claw was shredded to pulp. Yet still it advanced.
The pointed head, its incisors like curled tusks, the eyes white, sightless, weaved in front of them; a strange stump protruded from her shoulder next to the head, an opening within it which could only have been another mouth, spitting blood-specked drool.
Culver sank to his knees, strength draining from his legs. He stared at the heinous deformity, the misbegotten grotesque, horrified, his muscles numbed. But as her foul breath and her spittle touched his cheek, the shock was punctured.
The flashlight at his knees, he raised the short axe with both hands and, with a screaming roar, brought it down with all his force.
The pointed skull before him split cleanly in two, grey-pink substance inside falling loose, liquid from the opened throat jetting out.
The piercing screech came from the stump next to the cloven head, the toothless jaws wide with the creature’s pain, her scaly purple tongue stabbing frenziedly at the air.
Culver struck again, cutting through this other skull, the axe head sinking into the shoulder, into the body itself.
The squirming abomination suddenly went rigid, became frozen just for a few moments. Then slowly, agonizingly slowly, it began to slump, nerve ends twitching, torn, bloated body quivering.
But Culver was not finished. His eyes were blurred and his face dampened by tears as he attacked the litter, the smaller more obscene – much more obscene – creatures that the monster had given birth to. He hacked their pink bodies, ignoring their faint cries, striking, pummelling, crushing their tiny bones, making sure each one was dead, beating any small movement from them, shredding them from existence, sundering them of all form, of any shape.
A hand tugged at his shoulder, the grip hard, violent.
He looked up to see Fairbank grimacing down at him.
‘The other rats are down here,’ the engineer said through tight-clenched teeth.
Culver was hauled to his feet, his mind still confused, still dazed by the slaughter. And by what he had slaughtered. He quickly became aware of the darting black shapes in the rubble of the damp underground chamber.
The rats were in turmoil, leaping from an opening in the brick wall, scampering down the slope of debris, squealing and hissing, looking wildly around, lashing out at each other, gnashing their teeth and drawing blood. They poured through, more and more, filling the room, and somehow oblivious to the two men. The mutant Black rats fought each other, groups turning on an individual for no apparent reason, tearing it apart and gnawing at the body.
Culver and Fairbank could not understand why they were ignored as the animals swilled around the chamber, biting at the other gross forms that lay dying or dead on the floor, high-pitched squeals filling the air, the sound resembling hundreds of excited birds inside an aviary; the noise, the movement, intensifying, rising to a climax, climbing to a thunderous pitch.
Then they stopped.
They lay in the darkness, black-furred bodies quivering, a trembling, silent mass. Occasionally one would hiss, snarl, rear up, but would become passive almost immediately, sinking back among its brethren. The shaking motion seemed to reverberate in the atmosphere itself.
Bathed in blood, grimed with filth and barely recognizable, the two men held their breath.
Nothing stirred.
Slowly, wordlessly, Fairbank touched Culver’s sleeve. With a slight jerk of his head he indicated the doorway they had entered by. Keeping the light beam on the floor before them, the two men began gently, quietly, to make their way through the gathered vermin, careful not to disturb any, skirting round when a pack was too thick to step over.
A rodent lashed out with its incisors, hissing at them when they trod too close. The teeth grazed Culver’s ankle through his jeans, but the animal did not attack.
At one point, Fairbank tripped and stumbled into a tight group, going down on his knees among them. Inexplicably, they merely scattered, snarling at the air as they did so.
They were just thirty yards from the doorway, both men wondering why they could not see Kate’s flashlight shining into the collapsed room behind, when an eerie keening began.
It started as a single, faint, low whine; then other rats joined in, the keening growing, swelling. The sound ended in a startling unified screech and the vermin broke loose again. But they darted towards the bloody, shapeless carcase of the gross monster that the two men had destroyed, the miscreated beast who had nurtured the even more hideous newborn, pouncing on the remains, fighting each other over the
scraps, covering the nest completely with their own frantic bodies.
And when there was nothing left of the malformity and her brood, they turned on their kindred, the bloated beasts who were of the same breed but perversely different, savaging them until they, too, were nothing but bloody shreds.
The two men ran, heading for the doorway, kicking aside those vermin still standing in their path. Culver swung the axe as a rat sprang at him, catching it beneath the throat. It squealed and dropped in a limp bundle to the floor. Another leapt and caught his arm, but the leather jacket ripped and the animal fell away, Culver cracking down with the blunt end of the axe, breaking bone. Fairbank scattered four or five others that had grouped in the doorway itself.
They were through and there was still no light from above, but they heard Kate cry out Culver’s name.
Fairbank whirled in the doorway, pressing a shoulder hard against the frame, the Ingram pointed back into the chamber they had just left.
‘Culver, give me light!’ he shouted.
Culver did so, shining the beam into the next room. The rats were swarming after them.
Fairbank fired, the weapon hot in his hands, his trigger finger stiff with the pressure. The advancing rats danced and jerked as though on marionette strings. ‘Start climbing,’ he called out over his shoulder. ‘I can hold them without the light for a couple of seconds!’
Culver quickly climbed the heap of rubble leading to the fallen joist. His torch lit up Kate standing on the ledge above.
With no time to even wonder what had happened to her flashlight he yelled, ‘Catch!’ and lobbed the light towards her. She only just managed to hold it; she turned the beam back down into the pit.
The thing they had dreaded most of all happened. The Ingram clicked empty. With an alarmed shout, Fairbank turned to follow Culver, dropping the useless weapon into the dust.
Culver ran two steps up the angled joist, throwing the axe onto the ledge above him and grabbing at the edge just before his boots began to slip down again. Pieces of masonry fell away, but he quickly had both elbows on the overhang. His feet scrabbled for purchase.
He heard screaming from behind.
Kate was kneeling on the ledge, pulling at his clothes, trying to lift him. Dealey, too, had ventured out and had a hand beneath Culver’s shoulder. The pilot’s boots found a grip, enough to push upwards. He scrambled over the edge, instantly rising to his knees, grasping the flashlight from the girl.
Fairbank was halfway up the slope, his lower body engulfed by biting, scratching vermin. One darted up his back, sinking its teeth into the back of his neck. The engineer rolled over in an effort to dislodge the animal; his mouth was open in a scream, his eyes tightly closed against the pain. The rat fell away and Fairbank started to crawl again, his hands clawing into the rubble, the weight of the vermin chewing into his legs holding him back. He rose to a kneeling position, the rats clinging to his lower body. He tried to push them away and his hands came away bloody, fingers missing.
‘Help me!’ he screamed.
Culver tensed and Kate threw herself at him, knocking him back against the wall.
‘You can’t, you can’t,’ she kept saying over and over again.
He tried to free himself, but she held him there, Dealey using his weight to assist her. And in reality, he knew that the little engineer was beyond help.
‘Give me the other gun!’ he shouted and could not understand why they did not comply, why they merely held him tight.
Fairbank was dragging the giant rats upwards with him. They covered him now, making him a creature of black, stiffened fur, a monster of their own kind. His screaming had turned into a raspy choking as they tore into his neck. One side of his face had completely gone, the skin ripped down, taking an eye and most of his lips with it. His nose was nothing more than a mushy protuberance. He tried to raise his arms as if still reaching for the ledge, but they could hardly move with the weight of the rats clinging to them.
Fairbank fell stiffly backwards, crashing down into the rubble, the black pools of water. His blood spread outwards, joining those pools as the vermin pushed and snapped at each other in their struggle to devour the most succulent parts.
Others were aware of the three people on the overhang above and darted up the slope, springing onto the metal beam, attempting to scramble onto the ledge.
32
The thing that would eventually kill Ellison was lying in the darkness. It did not move, nor even breathe. It made no sounds, nor could it. It had been dead for some time. But still it would kill Ellison.
The corpse was that of a sewer worker, a senior repairs foreman, and as a living being the foreman had chosen this shadowy place to die. Others in his small work crew, on the day of the bombs, had elected to return to the surface, to find their families, to put their faith in the authorities. This man had had no such faith. He was old, ready – more than ready – for retirement, not just from the job he had worked at for forty-two years (some said a hundred, others said he was born in the sewers, while still others who did not appreciate his dour, often rancid, humour maintained he belonged there), but from existence itself. He may have been considered perverse in his belief that life was somehow cleaner beneath the streets than above. What he meant, but what he never told anybody, was that there was a wonderful absence of people in this permanently nocturnal underworld. And everything was more distinct down there, more defined, unlike the murky upperworld where there were shades for everything, colour, opinions and race. In the depths, everything was black unless illuminated by man-made light; and such illumination made the blackness beyond mere black, deeper in intensity. He had considered himself a simple man (although he was not) with a penchant for absolutes. The tunnels gave him absolutes.
And the falling bombs had provided the ultimate one. There was no more living, only dying.
He had let his workers go, not even offering advice. In fact, he was pleased to be released from them. Then he had found his place in the dark.
The old air-raid shelter was not unknown to him, although strictly speaking it was off-limits to the sewer workers. He hadn’t visited it for many years, for past curiosity had soon been diminished by the bunker’s very emptiness; but once he was alone, he had sought out the refuge simply because he had preferred death without wetness. True, the old complex was damp and puddled, but there were places where the moisture at least did not run.
So he had settled down in the dark corridor, not minding when the batteries of his helmet lamp had run down, the light slowly eaten by shadows, swallowed by blackness in one quick gulp. He waited and ruminated, having no one to shed tears for (his family were not close) and little regret that it had all come to this. In a way, he was even pleased that his manner of death was of his own choosing, and not specifically laid out by the corporate authority who had ruled his destiny for as long as he could remember. He had heard that the final stages of starvation were not that unpleasant, that the mind, unrestricted, not diverted by physical needs, found a new, freer plane. If only the boring hunger pains and the agony that came from organ deterioration did not have to be endured first.
The days had passed and the old man had tried to remain still, not to maintain strength, but because stillness was close to lifelessness. He lost track of time, so had no idea of when the hallucinations began (or even of when they ended). He enjoyed most (who wouldn’t mind swapping anecdotes with God, or floating through space and seeing the Earth as a tiny pinpoint of blue light?), but there were others that terrified, that made him huddle up in a tight ball and hide his face away from sights and sounds that had no place in his dimension. The scurrying noise had provoked the worst visions for, inexplicably, they seemed to draw him back to a dreamy reality. The padding, scuffling of small bodies was very close, coming from a grating that ran the length of the corridor in which he lay. He never dared look, for that would mean testing the truthfulness of the dream, and that truth might bind him longer to the existence he was trying
to escape. He had lain still, not breathing, lest those underworld creatures that made such sounds impose their truth upon him.
The old man’s delirium was timeless, the slide – once the worst was over – into peace, not oblivion, easy and gliding, with almost no line drawn between the two opposites, life and death. The body had straightened before the final but slurred moments, legs sprawling outwards, arms at his sides, and head slumped onto his chest. It was the way he had chosen and it had not been too unkind to him.
He had thought, mistakenly, that at least his way out was of no consequence and no bother to anyone else; but in that, he was wrong.
Had not the sewer worker chosen that particular spot in which to wither away, and had his legs not sprawled outwards, feet pointing east–west, then Ellison would not have stumbled over him, tripped and lost his flashlight, gun, and a little later on, his life.
Ellison burst through the door, his only desire to be as far away as possible from the commotion back there. He knew the others had no chance: there would be nothing left of Culver and Fairbank by now, and Dealey and the girl would not last long on their own. He did not consider that the latter two had even less of a chance without the flashlight and gun he had taken from them. They were fools and the world was no longer fit for such; only the clear-headed and ruthless would survive. He meant to survive; he had already gone through too much not to.
Beyond the room where Kate and Dealey lay stunned was yet another room, this one smaller and square-shaped. The flashlight soon picked out a door directly opposite. He prayed it would not be locked as he hurried over, and his prayer was answered. Thankfully, he pushed it open wide and saw the short corridor beyond, another door at the end. Whoever had originally designed the crazy house must have had a mania for doors and corridors, unless (and more likely) these were added over the decades as the complex was extended. So unnerved at what lay behind and so intent on what lay ahead, Ellison failed to notice the sprawled legs, the opposite-angled feet, just inside the door. Both flashlight and gun were thrown from his outstretched hands and he landed heavily, the concrete floor rushing up to meet him and skinning his hands and knees. His surprised cry changed instantly to one of pain, then anguish when something shattered and there was no more light.