‘The keys!’ he gasped, as he approached the driver’s door. In his panic he had forgotten that vehicles had keys. Engines wouldn’t start without them.
It was too late to care. With superhuman strength he threw his pack into the cab and hoisted himself and the shotgun into the driver’s seat. A glance through the observation panel behind him revealed that the box was empty.
And there they were. The keys. The beautiful keys. Already in the ignition lock. Not in Steve’s pocket!
He yanked the key clockwise and touched the throttle.
Making an excruciatingly loud noise, the starter motor turned: and that was all.
A yellow lamp had started glowing on the dashboard. What did it mean? He knew nothing about diesels; had never driven anything bigger than a Transit van, and that had run on petrol.
Again he turned the key, this time without depressing the throttle. Again the engine wouldn’t fire. A red lamp, next to the yellow one, now lit up as well.
‘Jesus Christ!’
The gap between his two selves had become a gulf: he was seized by panic, rendered useless, hysterical; and he was supremely calm, ironic, masculine, in perfect control.
‘You’re dead, you’re dead!’
The cab reeked of tobacco smoke. An open packet of Marlboros on the dash. Rubbish on the floor. As if in a dream, part of him was taking in every detail.
‘One more time, Nitwit. Still no throttle.’
He paused a fraction of a second longer, during which he seemed to utter, or caused to issue from the maelstrom of his brain, what might just have been construed as a prayer. He turned the key. Something engaged, something right, something solid and German and well-engineered, and sweetly the engine obeyed. The red lamp went out, and the yellow.
When unladen, the power-to-weight ratio of a lorry like this enabled almost car-like acceleration. Suter was already in gear, applying torque, when he detected new colours and movement in the long oblong of the door-mirror to his right. An angry man in a blue and yellow jacket.
Suter’s boot floored the pedal and the shooting began. The opening burst flew wide: the next spattered into the box, smashing the observation panel behind his head and strewing the cab with tiny cubes of safety-glass. Crouching as low as he dared, he clumsily changed up, mangling the clutch, crashing the gears. At eye-level, the scarlet needle of the speedometer was already touching 40.
‘Crappy L85! Couldn’t hit a barn door!’
But the next and final burst caught the rear tyres which alternately exploded and hurled away their violently flapping shreds of steel and vulcanite. Suter heard and felt the lurching rear of the lorry drop as the rims made grinding contact with the road. Raising himself fully upright, wrestling with the wheel, he glimpsed in the mirror a spume of molten shards showering from the offside mudflap. The lorry started to yaw.
Suter was fighting for control. He did not see Redjacket as he came running from the second house: was otherwise engaged.
Redjacket’s AK47 delivered its full magazine of thirty rounds at the cab as it passed. By now Suter had changed up into third gear. He had reached a speed of over fifty miles an hour. Three or four bullets shattered the nearside window and the screen, showering him with yet more glass: but the Kalashnikov had aimed too quickly and too high, missing its target, and now, in over-compensation, sent the rest of its shots too low, straight into the transmission under the seat.
Suter managed to punch a hole in the white fog of the windscreen. At every moment he was convinced he would be hit, that the lorry would lose the road, strike the kerb, overturn, burst into flames. He was waiting for the second Kalashnikov to start up, for the L85 to reload. For several seconds now, acrid smoke had been gushing up through the floor. He could smell burning oil and rubber. There was an especially loud, ominous-sounding bang, and the gearbox added its own howl of agony to the lorry’s cacophony of mechanical despair.
The gear lever was jammed solid. Depressing the clutch, he found he was stuck in third. He brought the engine speed down. At once the steering became easier.
In the mirror he saw the three of them a long way back, idiotically running after him in the middle of the road. The AKMS must already have been discharged. He hadn’t even heard it. Maybe it had missed him altogether. He risked another glance. They were receding at a most satisfactory rate.
‘Eat my dust, you numskulls!’
Suter laughed aloud, despite his bleeding left hand and the alarming judder that had just arisen in the steering column, despite the noises of damage and imminent failure rising from under his feet.
‘Yeah! We got the Mercedes Benz!’
He was halfway down the hill. Below and before him he could see the tree-clad embankment of the Metropolitan Railway and its rusting bridge over the road. A few hundred yards beyond that, he knew, he would find the river and the Grand Union Canal. There he would abandon the lorry and refill his flasks before proceeding on foot into the ghostly, unfathomable maze of the town.
One more look in the mirror. He craned his head. His three little pals were no longer visible.
He had left them behind.
4
From its days as a sleepy Hertfordshire market town, twenty miles north-west of Charing Cross, Watford grew in parallel with the Industrial Revolution. Brewing, paper-making and printing brought its first factories and streets of terraced houses. The Grand Union Canal, the London and Birmingham Railway, the Bakerloo and Metropolitan lines, and the M1 and M25 motorways, each in turn, enhanced its prosperity. Close to the capital yet remaining distinct from it, the town had through the twentieth century increased steadily in population. By 2016, when the plague had struck, over a hundred thousand people had lived in the borough.
Suter had known it quite well. A married aunt had lived there, in one of the quieter and more expensive residential streets adjoining a spacious park. This incorporated a picturesquely landscaped section of the canal, abutted what had seemed to a romantically inclined ten-year-old an impossibly vast expanse of deciduous forest, and finally, further west, yielded to farmland which rolled out to Sarratt, Flaunden and the Chilterns beyond. When older, staying perhaps for a few days in the holidays, he had on occasion borrowed his uncle’s Raleigh and cycled half a mile to the shops or cinemas.
He remembered without affection the town centre and its marble-floored mall, and he remembered with distaste the buildings and environs of Watford General Hospital, sited right next to the stands and floodlights of the football ground. Even through double glazing and thick concrete walls, patients on the ward could not ignore the roar of a capacity crowd. One Saturday afternoon in January, the air saturated by obscene chants rising from the terraces, he and his parents had sat by a bed on the fifth floor and watched his uncle struggling with the final stages of bowel cancer.
The hospital had evolved on the site of the old workhouse, south of central Watford and a mile east of the place where the canal passed under the villagers’ route to the town. Since Suter had chained the locks, the canal was no longer that, but a river again, tranquil, untrammelled, clean, the stately volume of its flow impeded here and there only by fallen willows or the decaying hulks of narrowboats, sunk at their moorings or grounded adrift.
Cresting the bridge, Suter turned off the ignition and let the clutch effect a halt: the airbrakes had failed. The lorry had no more than a few yards of life left in it. When he jumped down from the cab and saw the extent of the damage, he was surprised it had even got this far.
Having helped himself from a case of provisions he had noticed in the back, he dropped the rest over the parapet and made a passage down the embankment to wash his bleeding knuckles and refill his flasks. Two minutes later he regained the roadway and set out at the fastest trot he could manage.
On his journey to this point from Shanley, Suter had guessed – correctly, as it now turned out – that the villagers’ route would eschew the main highway into Watford and follow instead a minor road which, branching off t
o the right of a roundabout just beyond the canal, climbed gently but steadily towards the south-western part of the town. By taking this minor road, the route was made to pass among many more houses. The side-streets held yet more: long rows of sturdy, two-floored workmen’s houses dating from the final quarter of the nineteenth century. After the widespread looting of the plague, such houses became the best remaining source of tinned food, timber, furniture, clothing, of almost everything needful. As Suter urged himself uphill, he saw that most of the houses on either side had been forced. Not a few had succumbed to rain and fungi, and some extensive sections of roof, spanning as many as ten or fifteen individual dwellings, had long since fallen in.
Houses could not provide much in the way of medical supplies: he had also guessed that the people of Shanley would have kept a way open to the hospital. At the second crossroads the route turned in that direction, to the right. The other three roads had been abandoned, to be throttled by the succession of plant growth, burying the tarmac and kerbs and footways and overgrowing the rusting rows of particoloured cars.
All that, the urban environment everywhere, once so obsessively controlled and squabbled over, had become wilderness again. Like the clean-slate landscapes left by volcanoes or glaciers, it offered novel opportunities to plants and animals. He did not doubt that certain species of spiders had learned to exploit rotting vehicles, for example, or that hydrocarbon residues in dead sumps and tanks and bearings were the substrate of new strains of fungi and bacteria. Rubber, putty, paper, electronic circuit boards, bicycle saddles, gas stoves and street lamps, telephones: everything, everywhere, was home or food to something alive. Over the whole face of the planet the work was inexorably proceeding. Earth had given the order. The mark of Homo sapiens, her fascinating but unsustainable blunder, was to be effaced.
The grey bulk of the hospital buildings approached on his right hand side. He drew level with the main turning into the grounds. A narrow way threaded among the higgledy-piggledy clutter of disintegrating vehicles. Some had been bumped, dragged or rolled aside. Several lay on their sides or roofs. The car-parks, both open-air and subterranean, he knew, would be crammed to capacity. In the early stages of the plague, hospitals had been besieged. Later they had been avoided. At the end they had again been the scene of chaotic activity.
Suter passed on, indifferent to the tracks he was leaving, making for the football ground.
‘Wilier than them. More advanced. O yes.’
Look at the mess they had made of Baldwin’s Lane.
He grinned as he thought of their hand-picked provisions, hitting the canal with a splash. They couldn’t just go back to Bex without the lorry, reporting failure. They had to follow and finish the job.
Thanks to the lorry, he’d had a headstart of about three-quarters of a mile. At five miles an hour, say nine minutes. He’d spent three at the bridge. If his pursuers were more than six minutes behind, he was doing well. It was even possible, on the way up the hill, where the road was straight, that they had glimpsed him in the distance.
They were armed with assault rifles and, presumably, still had some hand-grenades, together with whatever else was in those nasty green haversacks. In open space even a pump-action 870 was no use against assault rifles. Inside a conventional building it was not much better against hand-grenades. Suter needed an arena of his choosing where he could dictate events, a compromise between an open and an enclosed space.
He had never been to a football match, had found the game, like most sports, tedious, a needless demonstration of the futility of all human activity, but he remembered enough about it to know that money had been its wellspring. Unless you paid for a ticket, you didn’t get to see the match. The tickets cost plenty. This explained the exaggerated height of the wall, in fawn brick, that divided the ground from the roadway. At intervals, wide and uncompromisingly solid doors, still bearing peeling yellow paint, no doubt concealed the turnstiles. Suter had hoped to find at least one of these doors open: with growing dismay he realised they were all locked. He came to the corner where the wall, in turning, adjoined a pair of high yellow gates and then the precinct of a petrol station. The gates too were locked.
He looked at his watch before hurrying across the forecourt and through the crazily twisted door of the station shop. The shelves had been stripped; the floor was ankle-deep in soggy rubbish. He removed his backpack and set it down in a dark, confined space behind the rotting desk in the back office.
‘Damn,’ he said, on seeing the torch protruding from one of the pockets. ‘I might have needed that.’
‘Too bad.’
If they found the pack, also too bad.
He thrust a flask of water into his jacket pocket and, unencumbered now except by his shotgun and bandolier, returned to the main shop, where a rear door, hanging open, gave access to a squalid yard. To the left, the yard lay open. Straight ahead, it was bounded by the back of another building. To the right, a close-boarded fence rose to a height of nine or ten feet and was topped by loose curls of barbed wire.
By getting up on an oil drum and thence on the curved lid of a dumpster, he was able to look over the fence and down into a roadway behind the yellow gates. This, bordered on its far side by a tall, corrugated iron fence, ran along the north-eastern boundary of the ground and was probably the way most of the spectators would have come and gone. Behind the iron fence he could see the rear of the covered stands, rising to a height of perhaps forty feet.
He climbed down from the dumpster and checked his watch again.
‘Tick tock.’
‘Hickory Dock.’
Without regular maintenance the close-boarded fence had fared badly. As he set about it, Suter noted that its erectors had used the wrong sort of nails. They had rusted, shrinking in the process. A few more sturdy kicks put paid to enough of the panel to let him through. He emerged in the roadway just behind the gates.
‘The mouse ran up the clock.’
For the next sixty yards there was no break in the iron fence. He trotted beside it until he came to a wide flight of three concrete steps. These had led the faithful up into a broad propylaeum fitted with three turnstiles, all of which had seized. But the service door on the left yielded to his shoulder: he passed through the remains of a ticket office, out through another door, and found himself at last looking out over the ground.
It was enclosed on three sides by stands, two of which had deeply overhanging, cantilevered roofs. Just as he had expected, the pitch itself, unmown, unrollered, unhallowed, had been seeded by bramble, birch and blackthorn, with here and there sycamore, lime, even horse chestnut, and was a dense tangle of twenty-foot scrub well on its way to becoming woodland.
He moved down the ramp to the clinkered surface of the perimeter track. This had been more resistant to invasion, and was but sparsely covered with brambles and buddleia, allowing him to pass fairly freely. He turned south-eastwards, to his left, and resumed his trot. He wanted to get round to the opposite side of the pitch. The players’ tunnel would lead to the dressing rooms and the labyrinth of offices and whatnot where the day-to-day management of the club would have been conducted. The tunnel, the showers, the stairways, the directors’ box, the corridors, the tiered seating: all these would provide him with opportunities to separate his pursuers and deploy the shotgun to maximum effect. On the way, he wanted to check the south-eastern side of the ground in case he needed to make an emergency exit.
He came to the corner and turned right, parallel to the goal-line. Above him and to his left rose a terrace of open-air seating, backed by iron fencing and sectioned off by crowd screens. Two of the five crush-gates were standing ajar. By the time he reached the goalposts he saw that part of the rear fence some way further along, next to the hospital grounds, had blown or been broken down. Nothing was visible in the gap but bright noonday sky. There might be a way out on the other side – or a sheer drop.
As he debated with himself whether he had time to go and look, Suter f
elt a familiar chill tightening his neck and shoulders. It was as if he had developed an eye in the back of his head, an eye whose vision was attuned to one thing only, to one stimulus: to the cunning, confident, following lope, to the detection and pursuit of his vulnerable human reek, to his inclusion in an age-old conspiracy of cooperation and intent.
He jerked his head round.
‘Oh, no.’
‘Not now.’
More proof of God’s malevolence. Just as if he needed it.
Seeing his face, perhaps, the dog-pack hesitated and came to an indecisive halt, twenty yards behind him on the clinker.
There were seven altogether, in their loose, silent group, unmistakably bound together by long experience of hunting success. More might be hiding in the vegetation of the pitch. Yet more might be approaching in the other direction.
The leading animal had much of the rottweiler about it, though all were mongrels, and about the same size. Two resembled Alsatians, another looked like a Labrador, another a lurcher, another a large terrier, the last a Doberman. As time passed, the various breeds were reverting more and more to type. Soon they would all look the same. Something could be inferred about the Germans by the selection of breeds that had survived and come to dominate: rottweiler, Doberman Pinscher, German shepherd. And about the Americans, who, Suter believed, had perfected that most bloodthirsty monster, the bandog.
Dogs had acquired a taste for human bodies, dead or alive, in the first few weeks of the pestilence. They had also eaten whatever livestock had remained. Then they had started on the rats. Then, Suter supposed, they had eaten each other, until, now, only the big ones were left.
As the numbers of rats had dwindled, so too had the dog population. There was today roughly one pack, averaging about twelve animals, to every twenty square miles. Their diet consisted mainly of the deer and rabbits that had thrived in the absence of human interference, but they would eat anything else they found, including carrion. They had assumed the crown of top mammalian predator, utterly ruthless, usually unstoppable except with a repeating shotgun. For this reason, Suter had to carry one every time he ventured out of doors, even to visit his latrine. He favoured the Remington 870 for its reliability and kept several spares. Disdaining oil, he lubricated the lock with gin, which imparted a crisp, foolproof action, no matter how rapidly he needed to fire.
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