by Guy N Smith
"The sky's very red over there." Bertha Pitkin pointed beyond the Wrekin.
"Probably the reflection of the setting sun," Gerald replied. He knew perfectly well that it wasn't. It was too late, anyway. He knew in his heart what was causing the glow. Somewhere, far away, something was burning. Something big. Buildings. A town, maybe a city. Wolverhampton or Birmingham.
"We'll head west," he spoke in low tones. "Keep well clear of villages and roads until we get to Atcham. Shouldn't think they'll bother with guards out that far. We'll be well behind the lines then."
Gerald led the way, crawling under barbed-wire fences, holding up the wicked strands for Bertha to crawl beneath. Clothing was torn, hands and legs were scratched, but nobody complained.
There was silence everywhere. They knew that the road was no more than a quarter of a mile away, yet no sound of traffic came to their ears. No lights showed in houses or cottages. A dog barked somewhere as they passed a darkened farmhouse, but nobody came to investigate. It was as though the whole world had died and they were the sole survivors of some terrible disaster. Gerald Pitkin shuddered at the thought. It was a very real possibility.
The land ahead of them rose slightly. They could see trees and bushes outlined against the sky.
"How much further d'you think it is?" Bertha whispered hoarsely, holding on to her husband's arm for support.
"We must've covered about rive or six miles." he replied. "We're not doing too badly. If we can keep this pace up we'll be at Tom's before daylight"
Then, in one brief, horrifying second, their hopes were shattered. They were halfway up the slope when a voice called from the shadows, "Hold it right there. Keep perfectly still or you'll be shot!"
Gerald Pitkin caught his breath. Bertha whimpered softly. Harry remained silent. Footsteps came towards them, boots crunching on dry bracken and grass, and two men appeared. One was hanging back, covering the other. Both had guns.
"And where the hell d'you bastards think you're bleedin' well goin'?" the nearest man demanded. He approached them, and arrogantly spat at their feet.
They could see he was dressed in some kind of improvised uniform. A camouflage combat jacket bore white initials clumsily stitched on to the lapels. BVF. Added to this was a PVC jungle-style hat, denims and heavy working boots. The weapon he carried was a sporting gun, probably a twelve or sixteen gauge, Gerald decided. A cartridge belt was slung, Mexican-style across his chest.
"We're on our way to Shrewsbury." Gerald tried to keep the tremor out of his voice. "To see my brother."
"Well nobody goes any further than this. So piss off back where you came, all three of you."
"Our car broke down outside Wellington," Gerald said. "We had to leave it and walk."
"Well you can bloody well walk back to it."
"Please. My wife is exhausted . . . "
"Look, mate, I'm bloody exhausted too, turning back bastards like you who leave the roads and try to sneak out of the disease zone across country."
"Who are you?" Gerald asked, but he already knew, anyway.
"BVF. And if you don't piss off right now, you'll be shot." There was the click of a safety-catch being pushed forward. "All three of you. And you won't be the first tonight!"
Slowly Gerald Pitkin turned away, and the three of them trudged back down the hill. None of them spoke. When they reached the bottom they sank down on to the soft grass, huddling together in a way that they had not done for many years.
"What . . . what are we going to do now?" Bertha sobbed at last.
"I don't know," Gerald replied. "I just don't know." And in the east the sky had become a deeper red, the fiery glow spreading across the whole width of the horizon beyond the Wrekin.
Chapter Eleven
The city of Birmingham burned for two whole days and nights, dense columns of black smoke rising into the sky, spreading and obscuring the scorching rays of the sun. Fire brigades fought and lost a series of battles, being forced to concede several major buildings to the flames, and spraying adjacent ones in a futile effort to check the spreading blaze. And all the time they were hampered by missile-throwing crowds which even the combined Armed Forces and BVF squads were unable to drive back at times.
Rubber bullets were replaced by lead ones during the first day of street fighting. No longer were warning shots fired over the heads of the fear-crazed mobs. Tanks and armoured trucks formed barricades in an attempt to segregate New Street and Corporation Street whilst the battles with the flames continued.
The streets were littered with the dead. The wounded cried incessantly for aid, but none heeded them except perhaps close relatives, many of whom paid the extreme penalty from either venturing into the line of fire, or being buried beneath falling, burning rubble. Nowhere were the casualties collected. The outbreak of violence had prevented the scheme for corpse clearance by means of refuse carts being implemented. It was hoped, unofficially, that the majority of the victims would be cremated in the holocaust.
Anarchy and fire were terrible indeed. But when compared with the terror which the bats were creating they were as mild irritations in a crumbling society. The burning city appeared to have enraged them beyond all comprehension. By day few were seen, but as dusk and smoke merged into darkness, they flitted over blazing streets as though winging their way through the flames of hell itself. They were impartial in their choice of victims. Members of the armed and fire-fighting forces or rioters, it made no difference to these tiny, insane creatures.
Many bats were seen lying dead in the gutters, along with rats and mice which had crawled from their holes in the final stages of suffering. But it was from the carriers of the mutated virus that the danger lay. Whilst they existed, death was a constant hazard.
The third day dawned. The flames had died down. Embers smouldered, and the still atmosphere was filled with the stench of burned flesh. Thousands had perished. The war in the city had been reduced to guerrilla status. Armoured trucks patrolled the streets, unhesitatingly opening fire on any hostile gathering, increasing the death toll hourly.
In the suburbs citizens cringed behind locked doors, answering to none. Fireplaces were either blocked up or else fires were kept burning as long as wood and coal supplies lasted. It was one way of keeping the bats at bay.
The disease was reaching its peak as those who had been unfortunate enough to come into contact with bats, after the exodus of the breeding flocks and their young from Villa Park, succumbed to the virus. Hospitals slowly ground to a standstill and became little more than extensions of the city's mortuaries. With no antidote available all that doctors could do was to attempt to ease the suffering of the dying. And this was no more than a token effort of goodwill on the part of the medical officers. Even morphine had little effect once the paralysis and madness stage was reached.
By the third evening, a stillness hung over the city. Only the occasional shot was to be heard. The rioters were skulking in the shadows, licking their wounds, watching and waiting.
The smoke haze thinned somewhat as dusk deepened. But there was something different, something strange in the air. It was difficult to determine what it was.
It was the Chief Fire Officer who finally diagnosed it, and there was a mixture of surprise and relief in his voice as he stared up at the smoky sky.
"It's the bats." he said. "There's not a single one to be seen!"
Reports from other parts of the city confirmed this. The bats had disappeared completely.
The Biological Research Center on Cannock Chase was under heavy guard, mostly by the BVF, The vigilantes were the worst threat. In the beginning they had contented themselves with organizing bat hunts throughout the countryside, even attempting to shoot the creatures in flight as they flitted to and fro in the half-light of dusk. This had proved to be little more than a waste of shotgun ammunition, one party having expended a hundred rounds one evening with only one kill to show for it. And that had been a fluke, the marksman himself had admitted, for the on
e which met its end in a charge Of number 8 shot was not the bat at which he had fired, but another which was flying close behind it!
The initial aims of the vigilantes were abandoned. Now they became the rural counterparts of the Birmingham rioters. Clashes with BVF patrols were frequent, and members of both factions had been killed in shoot-outs.
"Civil war is growing all around us," Sir John Stirchley said as he addressed the small group gathered in Haynes' office. "And it seems that Nature is doing her level best to aggravate the situation in every possible way. This heat wave continues, although it is now mid-September. The fact that the sun's rays are not quite as powerful as they were a month ago does nothing to lessen the fire danger which is stretching even the BVF to its limits. Birmingham is in smouldering ruins, and now this. There is not a bat left in the city, according to reports. They used it to breed, destroyed it, and now, for some unknown reason, they have deserted it. We haven't yet discovered where they've gone, which makes it all the more worrying. What d'you think, Newman?"
"The obvious reason which springs to mind is that the flames and smoke have driven them to seek refuge elsewhere, but I can't really accept that theory. If that was so, why didn't they scarper when the fires first broke out? They didn't seem unduly bothered by the blazing buildings. I think there's a much simpler solution."
"And what's that?" Sir John leaned forward.
"Food," Newman replied. "Millions of big fat insects which have multiplied beyond all comprehension in this freak heatwave. Remember 1976, the blackfly, greenfly, ladybirds? Well, it's happened again, although on a much larger scale. And the bats won't find them in any numbers in the cities. There's just the odd allotment here and there. No, I believe they're already back in the countryside, and any minute now we can expect to receive reports of their new locationl"
Jim Dunkley had lived and farmed outside Tamworth all his life. The land in question had belonged to his father, and his father before him. Gradually, though, it was shuddering beneath the march of progress. There were plans for the building of a link road through part of it. Compulsory purchase, naturally. A sand and gravel company were offering an extortionate price for the two lower fields. He was tempted, but it meant the end of his heritage. Nothing would be the same any more.
Jim Dunkley preferred to wear his old working clothes seven days a week. His one and only suit was kept strictly for funerals and weddings, and since he no longer had any next of kin, apart from his wife, he didn't envisage ever having to dress up again.
Untidy, rugged, at forty-five he was one of the last of a dying breed, a true son of the soil to whom farming was a way of life rather than a means of making money. Few of the nearby villagers had ever seen him without his battered old porkpie hat. Many did not know the colour of his hair. Perhaps he was bald, and was embarrassed by it, some said. Years ago his wife, Rachel, had protested when he had begun wearing that hat indoors, even to the extent of sitting down to meals with it on his head. In the end she had given up and accepted it.
Dunkley did not like changes. A true-blooded conservative, he also objected to people trespassing on his land. And, in his opinion, poaching was a crime that should have been punishable by imprisonment.
The bats did not worry him unduly. He only half-believed the story, anyway. Propaganda. The reason didn't interest him. He was even unmoved by the rioting and burning of Birmingham. That was fifteen miles away. His whole world consisted of ninety acres of arable and woodland. Outside of that nothing mattered. Nevertheless, he had to have money to carry on, and after two poor harvests in succession the only logical way seemed to be to sell off those bottom fields to the quarrying company. That was what his accountant had advised.
Dunkley was in a bad humour as he left the house that afternoon and set off across the fields, a rusty twelve-bore hammer-gun beneath his arm. Between the months of September and January he always went out shooting on Saturday afternoons. It was a ritual. Not that he shot much, nowadays. The spreading conurbation which surrounded his small rural island had been responsible for driving most of the wildlife away. There might be a covey of partridges up on the top field. There might also be some of those BVF bastards trespassing in the woods. If so, then his patience was running out. They carried arms. Shotguns. They were poachers, in effect. He'd heard a couple of barrels being discharged a few night ago when the moon was full. Only his wife's pleading had prevented him from going to investigate. The swines must have spotted a roosting pheasant.
The "Hanging Wood" still looked the same as it had when he had been a boy, a horseshoe-shaped covert with giant oak trees and tall Corsican pines which never seemed to lose their lush greenery even in the dead of winter. The place was so named because Oliver Cromwell had taken a hundred Royalist prisoners there, and hanged them from the topmost branches of those tremendous oaks, leaving their bodies suspended there as a warning to their followers until the hempen ropes were routed by the elements and one by one the corpses fell to the ground to become interred beneath a carpet of dying vegetation. Of course, there had always been rumours that the place was haunted, passersby claiming to have heard the creaking of bodies as they swung to and fro on a windy night.
The other spinney Jim Dunkley did not care for. Its name, the "Devil's Dressing Room" was derived from another legend whereby the devil was supposed to have stayed there for a short while upon his arrival on earth whilst he changed into human form. The center of this copse consisted of a deep quarry with sheer sides, caused by the removal of the stone which had been used in the building of nearby Tamworth church sometime during the Middle Ages. The sides of this deep and gloomy hole were covered with moss and lichen, small natural caves having formed over the years. Rarely did the sun penetrate there, and even after four months of continual drought it was still damp and forbidding.
It had not been Jim Dunkley's intention to go to the "Devil's Dressing Room" that afternoon. Even wildlife seemed to avoid it. Yet he had ample time to spare, and at least it would give him some respite from the heat.
The stile over the barbed-wire fence which was the boundary of the spinney was as rotten as it had been the first time his father had brought him there when he was seven. Yet it had survived, and fulfilled everything that was required of it.
There was total silence within the small wood. Not even the clatter of a disturbed wood pigeon could be heard as he forced his way through the foliage. It was uncanny.
Then came the flies, as suddenly as though they had been forewarned of his coming and had lain in ambush, allowing him to enter before descending upon him. They were not the midges which sting all exposed areas of the human flesh on balmy summer evenings, but swarms of the common black variety, buzzing, settling. He broke off a stem of bracken and used it as a swat, but it only seemed to encourage them more. He cursed, propped his gun up against a tree trunk, and proceeded to fill a short, stubby pipe with dark, long-stranded tobacco. It took him four or five matches to light it, and only when he was puffing out clouds of strong brown smoke did the flies retreat.
Jim Dunkley picked up his gun and pushed further into the wood. He had never known so many flies here before. Surely they would have preferred the warmth and dryness of the Hanging Wood.
The bracken was chest high, lush green with hardly a tint of brown on its fronds, defying the drought even as it now attempted to impede his own progress, entwining around his body as he forced his way through.
There was an area of silver birch trees leading up to the old quarry, half an acre of flattened undergrowth with mounds of excavated soil rising up above the trampled bracken. Beneath the surface was a badger set which had been there in his youth, the solitary position affording these nocturnal creatures all the peace and quietness they needed. Yet his experienced eye noted that the footprints in the soil, and the scoring of the bark on the surrounding trees where they had sharpened their claws, were not fresh. The badgers had moved on elsewhere, a week or more ago at a rough guess, Jim Dunkley decided.
> It was strange indeed. Civilization had not encroached this far. Not yet, anyway. Perhaps it was the presence of the BVF guards. Those two shots the other night . . . He moved forward, an angry expression on his face. Well, they weren't coming on to his land with guns any more. Nor those damned vigilantes. It was just an excuse to poach the surrounding countryside. If they tried it again he'd see how they felt about being on the receiving end of a double charge of buckshot.
Dunkley was ten yards from the edge of the old quarry when he became aware of the smell, nauseous, putrifying, penetrating even his own barrier of strong tobacco smoke. He coughed. It was like decomposing flesh. In his time he had dug out a number of fox earths and he was familiar with the stench, the half-consumed carcasses, rotting and rank. But this was much more powerful. A dozen foxes would not be capable of making a smell as bad as that. And it was definitely coming from the pit.
He moved forward, treading warily, knowing that the edge was crumbling and that in some places it would not bear the weight of a fully grown man. He dropped to his hands and knees, crawled the last five yards and peered down into the depths.
He had to wait whilst his eyesight adjusted to the gloom below. Scrub bushes grew on the bottom. One or two birch seedlings had even managed a precarious hold on the sides, rooted in the soft moss. And the smell was sickening. Something was dead down there.
Then he saw them, tiny bodies practically forming a carpet over the entire bottom, lying in a variety of positions. Unnatural. Stiff. Many were propped up by the corpses of their companions, and all were in various stages of decomposition, as though they had been dying at intervals over the past couple of weeks.
"Bats!" he grunted. "Bloody hundreds of 'em!"
He was astounded, but not frightened. He did not believe the reports anyway. The trouble with people today was that they did not understand the ways of the countryside. They were all too involved in modern living. A surplus of bats had coincided with some outbreak of disease. They had to have a scapegoat, so they blamed the bats. Harmless little creatures, really. He recalled the time when there were supposedly armies of rats on the march. It had come about as a result of flooding in the west country, and the rodents had been forced to move on in search of new quarters. The rat population hadn't increased, it was just that people saw more of them. It was the same with these bats. All the demolition and rebuilding in the towns and cities had compelled them to move out into the country, so folks began panicking. There was a logical explanation for everything if one just took the trouble to think about it.