On this particular night we’d scored some cans of tinned meat, a decent bottle of malt whisky, some coffee-beans and (the big prize, as far as I was concerned) a hand-cranked coffee grinder. I hadn’t had freshly ground coffee since before I’d come down with flu. By the time I’d recovered from that, there had been no power so there was no way to use an electric-coffee grinder. When I found the hand-cranked grinder, I couldn’t have been more excited if I’d found a treasure chest filled with Spanish doubloons.
I’d also found a good, high-power LED torch in a shed behind someone’s house. We were always on the lookout for torches; and batteries. Most of the torches we found were rechargeable, which made them useless in a world without electricity. The torch I’d pilfered that night was about as good as it got: German made, a high-intensity beam and battery-powered. It must have cost a small fortune. The man who had bought it wouldn’t be needing it any more. I guess that had been him, lying in the corner of the shed.
That night we’d walked the underground all the way to Stockwell. We couldn’t get any further than Stockwell because there was a train blocking the tunnel. God knows why it had stopped there. Maybe the driver had died? Maybe that’s where the train had been when the power went off. There were bodies in the train. You could smell them before you saw them.
On the way back from Stockwell, we passed through Kennington Station and then we carried on towards Elephant and Castle. I was shining my torch to see where we were going and to avoid tripping over the metal tracks. You wouldn’t believe how many rats are down there. And mice. Every time the beam of my torch swept across the floor of the tunnels, dozens of little scurrying shapes would go twitching away into the darkness.
There are some places where you can’t see far ahead because of the curvature of the tunnels. The tunnels themselves take practice to walk along. The floor beneath the tracks is uneven and has all kinds of metal bolts, sleepers, holes and recesses to trip you up. I often felt myself stumbling and automatically reaching out to steady myself against a wall only to find that the wall wasn’t where I thought it was due to the concavity of the tunnel. There a reason why they call it the tube. That’s exactly what it is – a long, twisting tube made to pump trains filled with passengers through the manmade cave system of the London Underground. The walls of the tunnels are supported by regularly-spaced reinforcements like ribs. By the light of my torch they made it look as though we were walking through some gigantic intestinal tract – the belly of the beast.
When we were in the tube, we always talked quietly. I’m not sure why because we’d never seen anyone else down there. It just seemed right somehow. The way you talk in whispers when you go into a church. I remember being taken to the Dan Yr Ogof caves in Wales when I was a kid and we talked quietly there too. That’s how we heard the gang before we saw them. The first sound we heard was like a distant clanging. Metal on metal. For a horrible moment I imagined that a train was heading towards us, rattling along the tracks. But it was not the sound a train makes. It was the sound a person makes if they happen to be banging a metal bar against the tracks of an underground railway. I didn’t know that’s what the sound was at the time. But I found out a few minutes later.
As soon as I heard that clanging, I switched off my torch. That made our situation twice as scary. I kept the light off for a while longer even so. Because in the pitch dark, I could see, faintly but certainly, a dim glow shimmering towards us from somewhere beyond the curvature of the tube ahead of us.
“What are we gonna do?” Geoff whispered.
I should probably mention that Bobby wasn’t with us. You might think we were slightly mad to go into the tube system late at night but we weren’t mad enough to bring a dog with us.
“We are going to back away very quietly and very slowly,” I whispered back.
That was pretty much an impossible thing to do with no light, so I turned the torch back on, at its lowest setting, and I tried to shade the beam as much as I could by putting my hand over the top. By keeping the torch pointed at the ground and shining it back down the tunnel in the direction from which we’d come, I was hoping that maybe whoever was around the corner wouldn’t be able to see it.
We turned around and tiptoed back down towards Kennington. Tiptoeing down a Northern Line tube tunnel by the dimmed light of a torch is easier said than done. I thought that, on the whole, we were doing pretty well. Until Geoff tripped over something. The tripping wasn’t the worst of it. He was wearing a parka and thick woollen pullover so he fell to the ground with no more than a muffled thud that might well have escaped the attention of the people further down the tunnel. His shocked scream in words of one syllable, on the other hand, didn’t escape their notice.
That they knew we were there was beyond doubt because in the far distance I heard a voice yell, “There’s someone in the tunnel!” That was bad enough. What was even worse was the sound of another voice shouting, “Let’s go and find them, my dearest chums!” And then there was the echoing sounds of whooping. It sounded like a tribe of Apaches on the warpath. Not that I’ve ever heard an actual tribe of Apaches on the warpath but I have seen lots of John Wayne films and that’s how they sound in those.
The thing about the London Underground is that once you are in a tunnel there is no way out apart from going forward or going backward. Maybe there are secret exits and side-branches that you could find if you knew your way around. We didn’t know our way around and so the only way to get away from the approaching gang was to run like blazes back the way we’d come.
It must have taken about five minutes to get back into the relatively open space of the Kennington Underground station but it seemed like a lifetime. All the time, we could hear the sound of running and banging and whooping as the gang behind narrowed the gap between us and them. Looking back as we emerged into Kennington, we could see half a dozen or so figures, partially illuminated by the lights from their own torches.
We pulled ourselves up from track-level onto the platform. By the light of our torches, the station looked much as it must have looked before the power went off. The walls were covered in advertising posters for shampoo and slimming products. The National Portrait Gallery was advertising an exhibition. Pages from newspapers and fast-food cartons littered the platform.
We dashed down the nearest exit. Then down a walkway. Then we emerged onto another platform. We turned off our torches and flattened ourselves against the wall. In the total darkness the sound of our breathing seemed incredibly loud. Realistically, even in total silence, nobody could have heard us. In fact, our pursuers were making so much racket that they probably wouldn’t have heard us even if we’d been talking at normal volume. It was their intention to play cat and mouse with us. They were wandering around the various platforms, stairways and corridors, banging on the walls with that blasted iron bar and shouting taunts – “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” and “Don’t be shy, chums, we won’t hurt you,” to which someone else replied, with a laugh, “Oh yes, we will!” then a couple of others shouted, “Oh no, we won’t” and so on and on, “Oh yes, we will….”
I’m not brave, I’m not by nature a fighter, I’ve gone through life doing my level best to avoid confrontation and violence. Finding myself in a pitch dark tube station, being threatened by a gang of maniacs with iron bars and who-knew-what-else for weapons did nothing to calm my nerves. To be blunt, I was more terrified than I had ever been in my life. Geoff was shaking with fear. He grabbed my hand, for the sake of something to hold onto in the darkness. I gave his hand a squeeze and tried to sound reassuring. I tried to keep the tremor from my voice as I told him that we’d be all right. There was nothing to worry about. And even as I said that, I didn’t believe a single word.
I was hoping that the darkness would help us; that if we stayed absolutely still and quiet, the yelling gang wouldn’t be able to find us; they’d assume we had got away – made it to the surface or gone down another tube tunnel; they’d get bored of searching f
or us. My last desperate hope was that, if they did find us, we’d be able to make a dash for it. I wasn’t sure where. I’d have to turn my torch on again to see where we were and which was our nearest escape route. It was a desperate plan. No plan at all, really. But it was the only hope I had.
My hope that they might wander off in some other direction was ill-founded. The sound of that iron bar, banging against the walls, came closer and closer. Their shouted taunts got louder and louder. Soon we could see light from their torches as they moved through passages that led onto the platform where we were hiding.
And then, quite suddenly, they were there. A torch was shining into my face, its intense white beam momentarily blinding me. There was no point in running. There was nothing to do but face up to whatever they had in mind for us.
“Looky, looky, chums, see what we have here. Nice little Normals down in our tunnels. What are you doing down in our tunnels, chummy?” – he prodded me in the chest with something pointed. I thought it might be a sword or a spear. But when my eyes started to recover from their torch-blindness, I saw it was an umbrella. The man behind him, however, had a more dangerous-looking weapon. He was carrying the metal bar that we’d been hearing. The bar was about three feet long. I don’t know what its original purpose had been but I had a good idea of the purpose it could be put to now if I happened to antagonise the person carrying it. I did my best not to antagonise him.
“We’ve been to Kennington,” I said.
For some reason, that struck the man with the umbrella as funny. He laughed. Then the man holding the iron bar laughed. Soon all half dozen of them were laughing.
“Shut it!” commanded the man with the umbrella and, in an instant, they all stopped laughing.
Geoff said, “We were scavenging, mate. Down Kennington.”
“Scavenging?” said the man, “In my manor?”
“We didn’t know it was…” – Geoff was opening his rucksack, which he’d put on the ground next to him. The umbrella smashed down on his wrist and Geoff jumped back with a yowl of pain.
Someone in the gang laughed. The man with the umbrella glared at him and he fell silent. “Don’t touch that damn’ bag, chummy,” he said, “How do I know what you got hidden away in there?”
“I ain’t got nothing. I was just gonna show you the stuff we…”
“How do I know you haven’t got a nice little gun in there, chummy? Or a knife? Or a nice little bottle of acid, ’ey. I wasn’t born yesterday, my boy. Back away from the bag, chummy. Go on, further back.”
Geoff stepped away from his rucksack and the man with the umbrella stepped towards it. He undid the ties at the top and gently pulled back the flap. There were no guns or knives or acid in there. What there was, however, were several bottles of good booze: whisky, brandy, gin. Some tinned foods. And the coffee-grinder.
“Very tasty, very sweet,” said umbrella-man, “We’ll take that.”
“Hang on,” I said, giving a foolish imitation of bravery, “You can’t just…”
He poked his umbrella into my chest, “We can do whatever we want to do, chummy. So you can shut your bleedin’ chops, ’cos the one thing I can’t stand is a loud-mouthed git like you. OK?”
“OK, OK,” I said, reverting to my normal state of abject cowardice.
“Consider yourselves lucky,” said umbrella man, “For a minute there I was thinking you was red-eyes. And you know what’s we does to red-eyes, don’t you?”
“I can guess,” I said.
“He can guess, chummies!” He turned to look at the rest of the gang, “I don’t think he can, do you?”
“We could show him,” someone said.
Umbrella-man laughed. “You suggesting we give him a proper bashing, a smashing, a gutting and a mashing like what we’d give the red-eyes? Nah, I wouldn’t do that. Just a lesson is what we needs to give him. To make sure he don’t try to go scavenging on my manor again. Not without dealing through me, in the proper authorised channels, as you might say.”
The man with the iron bar stepped forward then. It was the first time I’d got a really good look at him. He was over six feet tall and he was wearing a ripped denim shirt that showed an impressive mountain-range of muscle protruding through the rips. His nose looked as though it had been broken more than once, there was an old, ragged scar down the left side of his face and hair was cropped close to his skull. He looked like someone who was used to excessive violence and enjoyed it.
He kept thumping the iron bar into the palm of his left hand, the way a more conventional thug might use a blackjack or a baton. “I’ll do them over then, shall I boss?”
Umbrella-man smiled. “Be my guest.”
I saw the man take a step toward me and raise the iron bar in the air. Then all hell broke loose.
8
The man with the iron bar slammed into the ground, the bar skittering out of his hand, across the platform. The man with the umbrella turned to see what had happened and then he was on the ground too, crying in agony, his left arm stretched out at an unnatural angle as though his shoulder had been smashed or dislocated. Then there was a cry from one of the others as he was whammed against the wall with almighty force. The scene was one of sheer chaos. Umbrella man (no longer holding his umbrella) staggered, with difficulty, to his feet, his left arm dangling uselessly at his side. He shouted an order to someone but it was lost in the hubbub of frantic yelling. The gang, most of whom were holding bars or staves of some kind, were swinging their weapons wildly, but the only damage they did was to one another as bar and baton made contact with arms and shins in the chaotic darkness. Screams of rage mixed with cries of agony. They were running around in total disorder now, flashing their torches this way and that, trying to find their unseen attacker. But to no avail. And then, in desperation, they ran. They retreated back the way they had come. Umbrella man was the last to leave, the pain in his shattered arm was slowing him down. But as he left he shouted curses, promised we wouldn’t get away with this, told us he’d hunt us down and kill us.
It was another two or three minutes, I guess, before the sound of the fleeing mob finally died away into the echoing distance of the tunnels. Only then did I muster the courage to turn on my torch and take a good look around. The iron bar was lying at my feet. The man who’d been holding the iron bar was lying a few yards away. He wouldn’t be getting up again.
Geoff was standing next to me. I shone the torch towards the other and of the platform. That’s when I saw the tall, slim figure, dressed all in black. It was Leila. It wasn’t until that moment that I realised that she hadn’t been there with me and Geoff all the while. She must have slipped away before the gang arrived. She was holding her long wooden stick in one hand, the one she always took when she was out walking.
“In case you are wondering,” she said, “It’s a bo.”
“A what?”
“A bo. A Japanese weapon. Oh, dear-heart, you really are so ignorant! Well, actually, any big heavy stick will suffice. Anyway, that lot were all bluster and no skill, which put me as a distinct advantage, I should say. Since I actually know how to use my stick.”
“You killed this chap with a walking stick?” I said.
She swung the stick through the air. It made a loud whooshing noise. “If you doubt it, I could try hitting you over the cranium to see how resilient you are.”
“No, no, that’s OK. I’ll take your word for it. Still,” I said, “You didn’t have to kill him, did you. You could have just scared him.”
She snorted with derision. “You heard what they said they’d do to red-eyes, didn’t you? They’d give them a bashing, a smashing, a gutting and a mashing. That’s what that fellow said. Well, my dear, have you taken a look at my eyes recently? What do you think they’d have done to me?”
I conceded that she had a point. Up until that moment, I’d worked on the assumption that the infected, the red-eyes, were the greatest danger that we faced. Now, I was no longer sure. The gang that had attacked
us were all Normals, just like me and Geoff. They were what Elvira called ‘vigilantes’: gangs that took advantage of the death, destruction and devastation to establish their own little fiefdoms, ruled by greed and terror. And it seemed that one of their greatest pleasures was killing red-eyes. I could see why Leila felt no compunction in killing someone who would gladly have killed her.
Then I recalled the night when we had left the cocktail bar and Leila had deliberately, cold-bloodedly, aimed the Land Rover at an approaching crowd of red-eyes, smashing it straight into them with no sense of reluctance or remorse. And I wondered just how much pleasure she took in killing?
9
The last straw was when the water went off. It was the morning after our encounter with the vigilante gang in the Underground. I went to get a shower, I turned on the tap, there was a rattle, a gurgle, a sputter and a drip and then no more. Running water had been one of the flat’s main attractions. Without water, how would we wash, what would we drink? It didn’t bear thinking about.
The fact of the matter is that we’d been shacked up in that flat in the Elephant and Castle for too long already. It had never been our intention to stay in London. There was no future for us there. We’d been seduced by the unexpected comfort of the accommodation. But we couldn’t stay much longer. We had no reason to do so. And the situation, bad as it already was, could only get worse. The time had come to move on.
The Exodus Plague | Book 1 | The Snow Page 15