‘Morphia,’ he explained. ‘She’s lucky we got to her before she came out of shock. Don’t worry, she’s going to be okay – it looks like a clean severance. I’ll dress it and release the tourniquet for a while. Does she have any other wounds?’
Culver shook his head, tiredness beginning to overtake him. ‘Cuts, scrapes, that’s all. Oh yeah . . .’ he remembered, ‘. . . we’ve been exposed to pneumonic plague.’
The medic raised his eyebrows in surprise. ‘Okay, I’ll give her a quick once-over. How about you? Need some sedation?’
Again Culver shook his head. He gazed at Kate’s wan face, its lines softened already as the drug began to take effect; he wanted to go to her, comfort her, beg her forgiveness for what he had had to do, but she would not hear. There would be time later. He knew there would be much more time for both of them. He turned away, looking at the tiny windows in the door, the hazy blue beyond. Another face appeared before him: the winchman.
‘Flight Sergeant MacAdam,’ he introduced himself.
Culver found it difficult to speak. ‘Thanks,’ he finally said.
‘Pleasure,’ came the reply.
‘How . . .?’
‘You were spotted early this morning.’
‘The plane?’
The winchman nodded. ‘We thought you might have been from government HQ. Were you?’
‘No . . . no, we were trying to get into . . . into it.’
The man looked keenly interested. ‘Did you manage to? Christ, we’ve had no word from headquarters since this whole bloody mess started. What the hell happened down there?’
‘Didn’t . . . didn’t anyone get out?’
‘Not a bloody soul. And nobody could get to the HQ from the outside – all the main tunnels are down. Those bastards hit us harder than anyone expected. Some of the survivors may have got out into the city, who knows? We haven’t been able to search, first because of fallout, and then the freak rainstorms. We’ve been patrolling this stretch of the river ever since word got back that your party had been seen. But there was supposed to be more of you. Where’re the others?’
‘Dead,’ Culver said flatly, thinking of those who had escaped the Kingsway shelter as well. He suddenly remembered Ellison. Torchless, weaponless. Inside the shelter. ‘All dead,’ he reaffirmed.
‘But what did you find down there? What was inside?’
The medical officer intervened. ‘Let him rest, Sergeant. He can be questioned when we get back to Cheltenham.’
The winchman still looked questioningly at him.
‘Rats,’ Culver said. ‘Nothing but big bloody rats.’
MacAdam’s face was grim. ‘We’ve heard stories . . .’
‘People managed to get out of London?’
‘Oh yeah, plenty got out.’
Culver sank further back into the seat. ‘But where to? What to?’
The winchman’s face was still grim, but it held a humourless smile. ‘It isn’t quite as bad as you obviously think. The lunacy was stopped, you see, stopped before everything was destroyed. Sure, the main capitals are gone, the industrial cities, many of the military bases; but total destruction was brought to an abrupt halt when the separate powers realized the mistake . . .’
‘Sergeant,’ the medic warned.
‘What mistake?’ Culver asked.
‘You rest now; you need it. We’ll soon have you back at base where you’ll be taken care of. You’ll find it’s still chaotic, but some order is beginning to return under military rule. And they say a new coalition government’s about to be formed any time . . .’
The sergeant stood, patting Culver’s shoulder. ‘You take it easy.’ He turned to go.
‘Who started it?’ Culver shouted after him. ‘Who started the fucking war? America or Russia?’
He wasn’t sure if he heard right, the noise of the rotor blades almost drowning the reply. It sounded like ‘China’.
The winchman was standing at the cockpit opening, the same humourless smile on his face. Culver thought he heard him say, ‘Of course, there isn’t much left of it any more.’
Culver returned his gaze to the small windows, eager for their light, surprised, but too weary to be further shocked. The gloom of the Puma’s interior depressed him; there had been too many sunless days. His mind roamed back, seeing images, scenes he would never be free of.
And he thought of the final irony. The slaying of those who had long before plotted out their own survival while others would perish, choiceless and without influence. The slaying of a weakened master-species by a centuries-repressed creature that could only inhabit the dark underworld; mankind’s natural sneaking enemy, who had always possessed cunning, but now that cunning – and their power – enhanced by an unnatural cause. He thought of the giant, black-furred rats with their deadly weapons, their teeth, their claws, their strength. And again, their cunning. He thought of the even-more-loathsome, bloated, slug-like creatures, brethren to and leaders of the Black monsters of the same hideous spawn. And he thought of the Mother Creature.
The medic, intent on treating the girl’s wound, glanced around in surprise when he heard the man laughing. He quickly began to prepare a sedative when he noticed tears flowing down Culver’s face.
Culver thought of the Mother Creature and her offspring, her tiny, suckling litter. The government headquarters had been attacked so ferociously because the Black rats had believed their queen to be under threat. The poor fools had been wiped out as soon as the shelter became occupied, the mutant vermin disturbed by the terrible sounds of bombs, alarmed at the sudden invasion. The onslaught had been instant and merciless.
Culver tried to stop laughing, but he couldn’t. It was all too ironic. And the greatest irony of all was the Mother Creature’s children. The little creatures who fed at her breasts.
He wiped a shivering hand across his eyes as if to wipe out the vision. He and Fairbank had been distraught with the discovery. Through their shock, the possibilities had assailed them, the implications had terrified them.
For the small, newborn creatures had resembled human . . . human! . . . embryos. They had claws, the beginnings of scaly tails, the same wicked, slanting eyes and the humped backs. But their skulls were more like the skulls of man, their features were those of grotesque, freakish humans. Their arms, their legs, were not those of animals. And their brains, seen clearly through their tissue-thin craniums and transparent skin, were too large to belong to a rat.
His shoulders shuddered with the laughing. Had mankind been created in the same way, through an explosion of radiation, genes changed in a way that caused them to evolve into walking, thinking, upright creatures? Another dreadfully funny notion: had mankind evolved not from the ape, as the theorists, those wretched interpreters of it all, thought? Had mankind . . . had mankind evolved from these other foul creatures? And had that same course of evolution been unleashed once again?
He wanted to stop laughing, but he could not. And neither could he control the tears. It drained him, it nauseated him. And presently someone was leaning over him, aiming a needle, anxious to release him from the hysteria.
The rats went back.
They swam to the Embankment and leapt from the water, black skins glistening in the bright sunlight. Others, those on the bridge, ran squealing from the thunderous, death-dealing creature in the sky. They gathered in the open, trembling, confused by the violence against them and by the loss of the beasts below who had ruled them. And something else was gone. The Mother Creature and her strange litter, the new alien breed that the Black rats had yearned to destroy, for they were not of their kind, no longer existed. The difference of these newborn was beyond understanding and had sent fear coursing through the black mutants.
But they had not been allowed to kill them. The Mother Creature was all-powerful, controlling their will, ruling them and allowing no dissent. Her own special guard had dealt with those who rebelled. And the guard had been felled by the sickness.
Still the
rats had protected their matriarch, governed and conditioned by her thoughts. Now those thoughts were no longer in their heads. And their numbers had grown small.
They returned to the gloomy underworld, safe there below the ground, away from the sun. They soon found the human who hid among them in the darkness, his burbling anguish – his smell of pungent fear – drawing them to him. They scratched on the door he hid behind. Then began to gnaw at the wood. They took pleasure in his screams.
When there was nothing left of him, they roamed the dark tunnels, content to stay, to rest, to procreate.
When they were hungry, they left the dark, ever-nocturnal underworld, silently creeping into the open where the night sky and fresh breezes soothed them. They slithered among the rubble of the old city, seeking sustenance and easily finding it.
And only when the first haze of dawn broke did they slink back into the holes, back into the tunnels below, reluctant to leave this new, free territory. This new world that was to become their domain.
Domain
James Herbert is not just Britain’s number one bestselling writer of chiller fiction, a position he has held ever since publication of his first novel, but is also one of our greatest popular novelists, whose books are sold in thirty-three foreign languages, including Russian and Chinese. Widely imitated and hugely influential, his twenty-three novels have sold more than forty-eight million copies worldwide.
Also by James Herbert
The Rats
The Fog
The Survivor
Fluke
The Spear
The Dark
Lair
The Jonah
Shrine
Moon
The Magic Cottage
Haunted
Sepulchre
Creed
Portent
The Ghosts of Sleath
’48
Others
Once
Nobody True
The Secret of Crickley Hall
Graphic Novels
The City
(Illustrated by Ian Miller)
Non-fiction
By Horror Haunted
(Edited by Stephen Jones)
James Herbert’s Dark Places
(Photographs by Paul Barkshire)
Devil in the Dark
(Biography Craig Cabell)
First published 1984 by New English Library
This edition published 2000 by Pan Books
This electronic edition published 2011 by Pan Books
an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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www.panmacmillan.com
ISBN 978-1-447-20338-4 EPUB
Copyright © James Herbert 1984
The right of James Herbert to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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James Herbert, Domain
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