Most of the dairy cows – mild and stupid milk-producing machines – were unable to survive without the symbiotic attention of their masters. But bulls everywhere – unless, being chained up, they were condemned to perish miserably – rejoiced and flourished in their new-found freedom. They crashed through the remaining hedges and competed mightily to woo the surviving cows. Presently some of the cows calved down, and their offspring provided the nucleus of a new yet infinitely older strain. A survival strain.
Pigs were well placed in the survival stakes. When they were hungry enough, they would eat anything that was even vaguely edible – from carrion to the bark of trees. They were lean and hungry brutes, vicious and nimble. Some of them became cannibals, learning craftily to squash or stamp their opponents to death and then trample the corpses until they yielded the life-giving sweetness inside.
Hens – and cocks – also learned to survive. Their minds, narrow and dim and semi-mechanical, only vaguely perceived that something was wrong with the world. Many of the survivors provided satisfactory meals for weasels, dogs, foxes, rats, cats, hawks, eagles and even owls. But the cunning ones took to the trees, made secluded nests for themselves, brought forth young more adaptable and survival-conscious than their parents.
Rabbits multiplied with joyous abandon. So did stoats and weasels and foxes. So did otters and coypus.
And so did the red deer of old England. Small herds of them had been kept in parks here and there over the country. They were among the first of the animals to sense the new freedom conferred on them by the activity of sun-spots nearly a hundred million miles away. They exulted in it. The herds became large. They were not afraid of rats or cats, and they could outrun dogs. They began to spread, reclaiming the land that was once their kingdom.
And there were the horses. Not draught horses or racehorses. Now there was a wilder breed – wild as any slaves that ever survived the years of bondage. There were quick horses, heavy horses, killer horses. They thundered across the land that had once been farmland. Their numbers were still small, but they were growing. They, too, were reclaiming a kingdom.
And on the moors, on Exmoor and Dartmoor and in the New Forest the wild ponies ran. There were no more tourists left to tempt them with sugar. There was only the wind and the rain and the sky, and the rolling pattern of seasons. For normal man, the self-appointed master of all living things, was obsolete. And most of the remaining members of the human race were – for the first time, and in their own way – running wild …
Greville awoke with a start.
It was the sound of dogs that woke him. The sound of dogs with a quarry in view. The sound of dogs and the sound of rifle or pistol shots.
The grey pre-dawn light was rolling softly up the Thames. Shapes were vague and unfamiliar. The air was still, and there was nothing to suggest that London was not a dead city – nothing except gun shots and the sound of dogs.
Greville yawned and stirred. There was an ache in his back, an ache in his legs, an ache in his head. His tongue felt like the pitted surface of a dirt road. He yawned, cleared his throat, peered through the car window, then looked at his hands. They were fairly steady. He was surprised.
The barking of the dogs came nearer. And now there was another sound. The muted put-put-put of a two-stroke engine.
Greville was curious. Dogs hunting somebody on a bike or scooter at dawn. Somebody, evidently, had quite a taste for living dangerously.
He checked that the shotgun was loaded – both barrels – then got out of the car. He sniffed the clean air appreciatively, and listened.
The two-stroke was getting much nearer. Somebody on the South Bank seemed to be heading for Chelsea Bridge – somebody and a retinue of dogs.
He looked along the bridge, but the light was still poor enough to shroud the other end of it in a dark grey obscurity. He breathed deeply and stood there with the shotgun cradled in his arms. The aches were fading. He was beginning to feel reasonably human.
Suddenly there was a muffled thud, a doggy howl of anguish followed by a barking chorus of triumph. The put-put-put of the two-stroke stopped. It was followed by two shots in rapid succession.
There was movement at the other end of the bridge. Greville could see a figure running towards him. Behind the figure there was a tide of low moving shapes. Hungry and relentless shadows on four legs.
The figure turned and fired once more into the dark carnivorous tide. The fugitive managed to gain a few yards while some of the dogs turned upon their wounded comrade and the others were momentarily checked by renewed fear of the gun. But hunger was greater than fear. The fugitive wasn’t going to make it.
The running figure evidently realised that escape was now impossible, for he or she had begun to head from the centre of the bridge to its side. Death by drowning was certainly preferable to death by dogs.
It was at that point that Greville ceased being an interested spectator.
‘Over here!’ he bellowed. ‘This way!’
Then he, too, began to run.
He was about forty yards from the still indistinct shape of the fugitive. The dogs were nearer, and they were overhauling fast.
‘Drop flat!’ shouted Greville.
The fugitive didn’t seem to hear or understand.
‘Drop flat!’ he roared again, brandishing his shotgun.
This time the command was obeyed.
The figure fell in a sprawling, rolling, untidy heap.
The leaders of the pack were less than a dozen yards from it when Greville let them have the first barrel. One dog collapsed, screaming and writhing, another yelped and turned tail. Three dogs fastened upon their fallen companion.
With a mighty shout, Greville ran towards them. Altogether there were about twenty dogs on the bridge. Their advance was momentarily checked while they considered this new factor.
Greville, still running, was about ten yards from the figure on the ground. He stopped, fired the second barrel at the dogs, broke open his shotgun, felt in his pocket for two fresh shells and simultaneously shouted: ‘Crawl here and get behind me, damn you!’
He didn’t even look at the person who silently obeyed his command. His attention was taken entirely by the ragged and menacing line of dogs across the bridge.
The light was getting better. They gazed at him malevolently. They knew the power of the thing in his hand, and knew also that its power was not infinite. They snarled and slavered and got ready for the final charge.
He fired again at a dog that seemed to be one of the leaders. Then he swung his gun round and brought down an Alsatian that was trying to outflank him. He knew that he would not get another chance to reload and with a wild and savage cry, he did the impossible, the totally unexpected. He charged the remaining dogs, swinging his shotgun like a club.
This, itself, was totally outside the experience of the pack. They had seen many humans running – but always away, never towards. They were confounded. And their inability to appreciate Greville’s act as an act of desperation led to their undoing.
For a second or two they froze and a lean mongrel fell with a broken neck beneath the butt of Greville’s gun. He gave another terrible cry, raised the gun again and brought down a terrier leaping for his stomach. There was a frightful hanging moment of uncertainty, then the rest fled.
With trembling fingers, Greville felt in his pocket for two more shells. He loaded, then began to retreat cautiously backwards towards the car. At the far end of the bridge the dogs were gathering themselves for yet another attack. But they had missed their chance. The crisis was passed.
The figure on the bridge – the fugitive that had crawled behind him like a frightened child – was now hobbling towards the car. Greville glanced at it in amazement.
On the bridge where, just ten years before, he had accidentally(?) killed a woman, he had now accidentally(?) saved one.
He began to laugh. The irony seemed to be of a quality to justify laughter …
FOUR
All of this Greville learned in the first ten minutes. All of this and a great deal more.
He had got back to the car to find that the girl had arranged herself comfortably on the passenger seat. Her left leg was troubling her. Evidently she had hurt it when, after running down a particularly enterprising dog, the impact of the collision had thrown her off the scooter.
Greville slammed the door and started the engine. The dogs at the other end of Chelsea Bridge had remembered that breakfast was still in the vicinity. Their numbers had increased – doubtless the commotion had served to recruit all available forces within a radius of a quarter of a mile on the South Bank. They began to pour across the bridge in a solid, bloodthirsty phalanx.
Greville slipped the car into second gear, kept the clutch pedal depressed, and let the engine idle. He waited until the dogs were about twenty yards away. Then his foot came down on the accelerator pedal and the car shot forward with a sharp jerk. He kept the accelerator pedal flat and drove straight at the dogs. They tried to scatter, but they were packed too close together.
His impact speed was about thirty miles an hour. He stayed in second gear, ploughing a bumpy lurching path right through the pack of dogs. The barking, the howls of pain and frustration rose high enough to drown the noise of the engine.
He carried right on to the end of the bridge. Then he did a quick U-turn and came back again. The crushed bodies of half a dozen dogs lay in the roadway. The rest were utterly confused. Some of them tore at their mangled comrades, but most of them stood on the bridge, barking as if the sheer volume of noise would resolve their bewilderment.
Greville drove the station wagon murderously and mercilessly at them. His second pass scored four more victims. At the North Bank he did another U-turn and came thundering back. But the surviving dogs had lost all stomach for the fight. They fled howling. Later, no doubt, they would return to devour the corpses of the fallen. But for the time being breakfast was less important than survival.
Greville turned once more and took the car back to the North Bank, away from the horrible sound of the dogs that had not been killed outright.
He switched off the engine and turned to examine his companion. ‘Well, that’s that,’ he said calmly. ‘Let’s have a cigarette.’
‘No, thanks. I don’t smoke.’ Her voice was pleasant. She seemed remarkably self-possessed for one who had so recently avoided a terrible kind of death.
‘I’m delighted to hear it. Cigarettes aren’t going to last much longer. One of the most significant tragedies resulting from depopulation.’ He inspected her without any effort to disguise the fact that he was doing so.
She was wearing a short sheepskin jacket, a faded blue shirt and a pair of men’s trousers tucked into calf-length boots. Her hair was short, black and untidy. Her face was pale and bruised. She had the body of a woman and the oddly innocent face of a child. Her eyes were blue and unafraid. She did not seem to mind his inspection at all.
‘How is your leg, now?’ he asked abruptly.
‘Feeling better. It got rather a nasty knock when I came off the scooter. I think it will be all right for walking … Would you like me to go, now?’
‘Don’t be stupid. You’d be dog-meat before you’d done a couple of hundred yards. Where’s your gun?’
‘I lost it on the bridge.’
Greville let out an exasperated sigh. ‘You’re not very interested in surviving, are you?’
She smiled. ‘I was so busy trying to survive when I saw you that I just forgot all about the gun. Anyway, it was empty.’
‘Didn’t you have any spare ammunition?’
‘No.’
‘Jesus! You’re a case, you are. What the hell were you trying to do?’
Then she told him.
He did not find her story hard to believe. In a fantastic world, the fantastic had become merely ordinary.
‘So you were setting off with a toy pistol and a motor-scooter to scour the length and breadth of England for sister Jane,’ he remarked drily when she had finished. ‘What made you think you were going to live long enough even to get clear of London?
‘I didn’t really know what things were going to be like,’ she confessed. ‘I haven’t been out a great deal in the last two years. They kept us pretty busy, you know.’
‘Who did?’
‘The Richmond Lot.’
The Richmond Lot, it transpired, were a group of nearly a hundred men who shared some fifteen to twenty women and were attempting to organise themselves into a tribal group. Their chief was a Canadian ex-wrestler who called himself Johnny Blue Fur – a great hulk of a man whose intelligence-to-weight ratio was possibly an improvement on that of the dinosaur, but not a startling one.
However, surprisingly enough, the Eskimo and French Canadian ancestry of Johnny Blue Fur had produced a mountainous human being who was not only a kindly person but one with a sense of justice. Also, not being in the slightest interested in women, he could remain – as it were – above party conflict.
The reign of Johnny Blue Fur seemed destined to be quite a long and remarkably peaceful one – until the arrival of about thirty well-armed men from the north. They came in a couple of ancient army trucks, and they did not come as enemies but simply as a band of men ‘on the scrounge’. After having made it clear that there was nothing to be scrounged in Richmond – a fact which he gently underlined by assembling his own scroungers, complete with rifles, sub-machine guns and pistols – Johnny Blue Fur hospitably invited them to stay the night at The House.
The House was one of those large, rambling Victorian mansions that had been built on the banks of the Thames for the greater glory of nineteenth-century industrialists. Now, at the beginning of the last two decades of the twentieth century it had been transformed into a combined brothel, hospital, headquarters, chief’s residence and storehouse for the Richmond Lot.
Johnny Blue Fur was simple enough, despite the anxious warnings of his lieutenants, to believe that the visitors would not abuse his hospitality – particularly in view of his numerical superiority in arms and men. But the Northerners (who were rather vague about their origin and would say no more than that they had ‘a little place in Lancashire’) were resolute, avaricious and very well organised. Far better organised than the Richmond Lot.
They were tough, they were short of weapons and women, and they had no intention of going away empty-handed.
Johnny Blue Fur laid on a lavish party for their benefit. The wine was passed around freely, and so were the women – among them Liz and Jane who, being twins, seemed to be especially favoured. The party did not break up until about a couple of hours before dawn.
An hour later, when most of the Richmond Lot were deep in their boozy slumbers and even The House guard was dozing, the Northerners came very much to life. Evidently they had only appeared to drink a lot, or else their capacity was quite remarkable.
There was very little shooting. In the dark it was difficult to tell friend from enemy, and there was neither the time nor the opportunity to light oil lamps.
For about five minutes sheer pandemonium existed. Johnny Blue Fur distinguished himself by throwing three men (one of them his own) through a second-storey window before he was felled by a rifle butt. And one of the guards in the grounds managed to cut down four of the raide
rs with a burst from his sub-machine gun as they ran to their trucks. Then he himself was shot.
But the Northerners managed to get away with six of the women (some of whom were probably too drunk or too exhausted to care), eight rifles and about two hundred rounds of ammunition. Liz might also have been taken as well as Jane, for she had had to spend what was left of the night with one of the visitors. But when he snatched her up, she began to scream and struggle. Then he panicked and tried to strangle her into submission, but somehow she managed to kick him in the stomach; and while he was recovering from that, she crawled away and was lost in the darkness and confusion.
Apparently she and Jane had been almost literally inseparable. They had been ‘requisitioned’ by the Richmond Lot – and saved from probable death by starvation or transnormal causes – in the summer of 1979. Prostitution, defined grandly by Johnny Blue Fur as free love, turned out not to be quite as repulsive as either of them had feared. At least they had enough food and were relatively safe. And when things could be shared, they did not seem quite so bad. But with Jane’s forced departure – which had taken place several days ago – a curious feeling of deadness came over Liz. It was as if she had been given a tremendous dosage of local anaesthetic in mind and body. Nothing mattered any more. Nothing, that is, except finding Jane somehow and finding a way of being together again. She decided to escape from the Richmond Lot at the first opportunity.
Greville had listened to the rest of her recital for the most part in silence. It did not surprise him. There was very little that could surprise him these days.
When she had finished, he said: ‘So now you are my problem.’
‘Not if you don’t want me to be,’ said Liz simply.
‘I saved your life, didn’t I?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then it seems reasonable for me to have a controlling interest in it.’
‘Have you got a woman?’ she asked bluntly.
‘No.’
Cloud Walker, All Fools' Day, Far Sunset Page 23