by Simon Clark
I reached a road. The tar had melted; I felt my feet sink in as if I ran through wet sand. Then I was across it, smouldering road tar still sticking to my trainers.
With a savage rush of satisfaction I heard screams as the cannibal bastards sank up to their ankles in boiling tar.
It stopped a couple dead in their tracks. But most ran on—men, women, children—they weren’t going to give up the hunt just yet.
By now my breathing was coming in ragged tugs, my chest burning as much from exhaustion as from the smoke given off by the smouldering track. My legs ached; my left heel felt as if a nail had been driven through it where the Achilles tendon had been stretched further than it ought.
I was slowing down.
Uh-uh-uh-uh!
The chant turned from anger to triumph. They had me; and they knew it.
I was just wondering whether to stand and at least blow off a couple of heads before they overran me when I found I’d left the green world behind.
Suddenly the black track opened out into black desert. All the grass and bushes, as far as I could see, were burnt to nothing. The only variation was when black ash gave way to white powder. Trees still stood, only they were leafless and charcoal-looking. Here and there were dotted the bones of animals. Thousands of white snail shells scattered in the ash looked like stars against a black sky.
I pounded on by a cluster of human skulls. Dentures had melted to fuse jaws together into a sticky white mass. Stone walls wore a scorched look with soot-black streaks radiating along their flanks like zebra stripes.
I was slowing now. I couldn’t run much further. My chest burned. I could not breathe. Desperately, I was scanning the black landscape for a place to hide—anywhere: a hole in the ground; a ruined farmhouse; the burnt-out shell of a car.
Ahead I saw jets of flame spitting out of the ground. They were about knee high but burnt with that fierce blue Bunsen burner-like flame I’d seen before in the graveyard.
I weaved round them.
A hundred paces on I saw an iron manhole cover; a hundred paces further there was another; then another. Three in all, forming a line. Maybe I’d find one with the top loosened, then I could slip down into the inspection chamber. With luck the mob wouldn’t see where I’d gone and run on.
I took the rifle from my shoulder as I ran. Ahead of me the ground dropped suddenly.
I stopped, choking for breath. There in front of me was a steep-sided ditch with banks about as high as my head.
Letting gravity do the work now I slithered down into the water.
The water rose up just over my knees. It was as warm as a swimming bath. Here and there fish, killed by the rise in the water’s temperature, floated, silver bellies up.
I saw that the manhole covers followed the line of a subterranean storm drain that discharged into the ditch. For a second I stared dumbly at the round mouth of the concrete pipe that jutted out twenty centimetres or so from the dirt banking.
‘Sanctuary,’ I gasped, almost giddy at the thought of hiding myself inside that great concrete pipe. It was big enough for me to shuffle inside on my hands and knees. If the mob hadn’t seen me I was home and dry.
Holding the rifle in one hand I clambered inside. It was hot, airless—but, if it kept me from those bastards’ prying eyes, it would be the next best place to Heaven itself.
I’d managed to crawl maybe eight paces when my face struck something in the darkness. I reached out.
Damn.
Shit!
The pipe was blocked by an iron grille. Maybe I could snap the bars. They felt pitted with rust. I’d have to shuffle back out feet first, then return feet first to kick the grille through.
I’d shuffled back a couple of paces.
When I heard: uh-uh-uh!
Hands grabbed my feet; I felt myself being dragged savagely backwards.
With both hands I hung onto the iron bars. There was no way I could hang on for more than a couple of seconds. I tried to kick out into the faces of the cannibals but they caught hold of my ankles. In a second I’d be dragged out into the ditch to be torn apart. The bastards would be dining on my liver and heart by sunset.
My fingers began to lose their grip on the bars. I twisted my head round. I could see the heads of the mob in silhouette as they crammed eagerly into the storm drain to reach me.
Then I saw something else. The inside of the concrete pipe was blackened.
That couldn’t be possible. There was nothing flammable to burn. But here were sooty streaks running along the pipe to the mouth of the drain.
My brain seized on this. Something burnt in here, something burns, something burns…
Christ…what do you find underground that burns? What caused the flaring jets to erupt through the soil?
What comes hissing from the cooker when you turn the knob?
I didn’t even think it through. Still holding on with my left hand, I released my right hand from the iron bar of the grill. Instantly a terrific pain shot through my shoulder to my elbow as my left arm took the strain.
It didn’t matter. If this didn’t work I’d be history anyway.
One-handed, I raised the rifle, slotted the muzzle of the barrel through the iron grille.
Then pulled the trigger.
The flash lit the concrete tunnel as the bullet cracked away into the distance beneath the fields. I even saw the bullet itself, moving like a spark of flaming silver, almost as if in slow motion. The crash of the report deafened me.
Then everything happened in one seamless movement. I let go of the grille with my left hand.
I shot back down the pipe; the gleeful shouts of the mob rose into an excited yell.
As I was plucked from the storm drain I saw a flicker of yellow somewhere way down in a distant part of the tunnel.
Next I was flicked high into the air, the force of the mob’s pull so great that my head even came above the banking.
Then I saw a sight that was all at once terrifying and awesome.
Just for a split second, as I moved in that free-falling arc, I saw the manhole covers running away across the field, following the line of the storm drain. First, the one furthest away erupted in a geyser of blue flame, then the middle one, then the nearest; a great shrieking flame of blue. Momentarily it looked as if jet motors had been set into the earth to vent superheated gas and fire fifty metres into the sky.
Still falling, I dropped down towards the water below.
It was as if a photograph had been taken of the scene, I remember it so clearly.
The mob had clustered into the ditch. They were all grinning; their eyes gleamed as they anticipated fresh meat. The man with the bald head stood framed by the opening of the storm pipe.
Chanting uh-uh-uh so loudly, they hadn’t heard the roar of the blazing gas venting through the manhole covers; and they certainly weren’t ready for where it would vent next.
Gravity swung me down into the water with an almighty splash.
I’d held my breath and dug my hands into the silt and hugged myself down to the bottom of the stream. My eyes were open. Through the brown swirl of stirred-up silt I saw hands swim down through the water to grab me and pull me out, where no doubt I’d feel just how sharp their butchers’ knives were.
I pulled myself deeper underwater. Jesus, sweet Jesus, I only needed another moment below the water’s surface before—
Vuu-uumph!
At that instant the water turned an incandescent blue. The concussion bucked the stream bed where I’d dug my hands to prevent myself floating back to the surface.
And then I saw that I seemed to be suspended in a bath of liquid gold. Bubbles streamed from my nose; I looked up. Just centimetres above me, the surface of the water. And above that it looked as if a chunk of the burning sun rested there in the ditch.
And in that same moment the hands that had reached down to me were gone, and through the water I could hear a muffled roar like a jet engine just above me.
I waited
as long as I could; until my lungs felt they were on fire and my stomach muscles twitched from oxygen deprivation.
Then I surfaced, gasping. For a second I could see nothing. All I could do was catch that same smell you get when you lose a beefburger through the grating of the barbecue and it burns, sizzling with fat. I blinked again, spat ditch water out of my mouth, looked round.
Steam rolled from the mouth of the storm drain, and every so often small balls of flame would roll out: pop…pop…pop…
The cannibals had gone. When I say gone, I mean they were no longer a danger. Most had run away when the concrete pipe had disgorged the gas like a monster flame thrower. Some hadn’t moved fast enough.
There, scattered along the banking, and in the water itself, were a dozen or more figures, all seared and still steaming. Men and women had even lost their faces to the blast of methane gas. That gas had ignited when my bullet ricocheted up the concrete pipe, striking sparks. Some of the figures were still alive; they lay there shivering as if caught by a sudden frost.
After what had happened to the blonde-haired woman they didn’t deserve mercy. Nevertheless, I pulled them from the banking and left them face down in the water to drown.
I didn’t know where the rifle was. I didn’t care. Rick Kennedy only wanted to get out; out of that burnt slice of Hell. So I dragged myself from the ditch and walked back the way I had come, the water dripping from my body sizzling as it hit the baking ground.
I found my friends beneath a tree, giggling drunkenly over what was left of the bottle of whisky. Astonished, they looked at me. I was dripping. My feet and legs were black with ash. My elbows and chin were skinless where I’d been dragged across the sandpaper-rough concrete pipe.
They looked up, open mouthed, waiting for me to tell them what had happened.
But I hadn’t got a word left in my body. Not one. Nor a single emotion. All horror, disgust, pity, hatred, anger had hemorrhaged from me. I picked up my backpack crammed with scavenged food, heaved the straps across my shoulders and set off walking, hearing nothing but the squelch of water in my shoes and the beat of my tired heart.
Chapter 44
Caroline smiled at me. Her green eyes sparkled as she looked up into my face. I loved that smile. It was always welcoming, trusting. And it made me feel good to know that I could make her happy just by saying hello, after two days away, scavenging the countryside for a few cans of beans or an overlooked cache of potatoes.
Caroline would give me that smile, whisper, ‘Five minutes,’ then she’d disappear into the trees that lined the gorge. And in five minutes I’d follow, heart beating hard, the heat spreading through my groin as I anticipated seeing her lying naked across the grass, or sitting on a boulder, her bare buttocks pressed against rough stone. Waiting for me, knowing my passion, sheer naked lust, call it what you want, had built to nothing less than a volcanic intensity in the time I’d been away.
The weeks flowed steadily by and this was the pattern we’d fallen into. Stephen worked day and night. It had become a holy quest for him, to make sure we survived. He organized food dumps—usually holes dug into the moor and carefully covered with heather and marked by stones. He wanted to be sure that if we were found by the armed gangs and raided we’d have instant access to fresh supplies of canned foods. He personally hunted out new camp sites, in case discovery of our camp by other survivors necessitated a move.
We formed small hunting parties. These would venture out into the big bad world beyond Fountains Moor searching every abandoned house, barn and garden shed. They’d been picked over pretty thoroughly by then. If you found a can of tomatoes or a pack of dried dates amidst the smashed furniture you waved it above your head and whooped. The rest of the hunting party would slap you on the back as if you’d just scored the winning goal in the Cup Final.
By then we were making two-day trips. But soon we’d have to up them to three days as we pushed further and further out in search of food.
Also by that time you avoided roads as if they’d all just sprouted particularly bad cases of leprosy. There were roadblocks everywhere, manned by men and women more than happy to help lighten your load of canned foods, maybe even relieve you of your life if they were so minded. Cannibalism was rife, too. Every so often you’d come across the remains of a camp fire with a human skull or two, burnt a banana-yellow in the ashes.
So we scurried along hedgerows with all the timidity of rabbits in the hunting season. Sometimes even covering a kilometre or two on our hands and knees. You learned to develop a sixth sense to divine whether or not a bunch of born-again savages sat sharpening their knives round the next corner.
And there were still a heck of a lot of people out there. You’d still come across villages, even towns, that had been turned into fortress communities. They were fiercely protective of what they had managed to scavenge; probably the better organized ones had livestock and were growing their own food on football pitches and school playing fields and in back gardens. From these do-it-yourself fortresses you might hear a clatter of machine-gun fire as a stranger wandered too close. Other times you would see them burn as perhaps a thousand starving men and women decided they’d rather risk dying from a bullet in the head than face a long lingering death from starvation; then those thousand men and women would rush the defences. Sometimes they got lucky. They’d overwhelm the villagers, take what they wanted, then torch the place.
Howard Sparkman had, at last, found a four-seater Cessna light aircraft. Now he spent his days flying out across the countryside from a cow pasture in the valley that served as our airstrip. He’d spot places—an isolated house or abandoned delivery truck—that might be useful for us earthbound scavengers to pick over. Or he might warn us to avoid such-and-such a village where he’d spotted twenty thousand refugees camped out in the surrounding fields.
He confirmed that the migration of humankind was from west to east. He’d overflown the countryside further east towards York and Selby where he’d seen the land carpeted with hundreds of thousands of men, women and children crowded as closely together as stalks of com in a field. There he’d seen relatively few hot spots, characterized by the blackening of vegetation. Whatever was heating up the Earth elsewhere hadn’t reached there yet; or it was somehow immune.
He’d flown high to avoid anyone taking a sour-tempered pot shot at him but he didn’t doubt the refugees were starving to death by the thousand. Maybe some were quite civilized, deciding who would be eaten next on the toss of a coin or a game of chess. But we knew that pretty soon the whole county would be thigh-deep in rotting flesh and human bones.
The countryside to the west was now largely depopulated. Howard had once tried to fly as far as Manchester. He’d reported that most of the countryside had been burnt black by the heat leaking up through the Earth’s crust. There were great rents in the ground that glowed red. Everywhere columns of smoke or steam rose into the sky as high as the plane could fly. Also, there’d been a constant sizzling sound as black grit hit the cockpit windows. He’d turned back when his throat began to burn from the sulphur fumes.
‘There’s nothing in the west now but black desert,’ he’d told us. ‘Anyone going there will be as good as dead.’
I’d caught up with Caroline. She kissed my face and threw her arms round my neck, hugging me tight. She told me how much she missed me. Still smiling, her brown eyes twinkling sexily, she pulled me by the hand along the bank of the stream, away from the camp to somewhere quiet where we could be alone. I could feel her hunger for me. Every few paces she’d stop, then with both hands reach to grasp my head and pull my face down to her lips.
I wanted her, too. After all the shit and destruction and death I’d seen on the hunting trips I wanted to blot it out with five solid hours with this beautiful, sex-powered woman. She’d brushed her hair and dabbed her throat with some secretly hoarded perfume. Christ, she looked and smelt good.
Still we hadn’t gone public with the relationship. Caroline seemed m
ore than happy to keep it secret; in fact she relished the secrecy. I wondered if she’d had affairs before and perhaps keeping them hidden from her husband had given them that added frisson.
As we walked hand in hand along the path, ducking beneath low branches, we talked. The big news around the camp at the moment was that the radio stations were going off the air by the hour. Britain was down to one station. It described itself as the BBC. For a while it had been based at the Air Force station at Waddington. Then you began to hear the sound of gunshots in the background as DJs and newsreaders made their broadcasts. Then, after a twenty-four hour break in transmission, it reappeared on a different wavelength but from a secret location. The general consensus of opinion was that they were broadcasting from a warship off the coast.
We were deep into September. The summer showed no sign of dying on us just yet. The days were still hot. Although it had been strange weather. Even on the sunniest day clouds might bubble up to bring flurries of snow. Only this was black snow. When it melted it left gritty black streaks on the tent canvas. It was impossible to avoid the conclusion that those savage geological changes happening beneath our feet would have global consequences for climatic conditions too. When Krakatoa erupted in 1883 just about the entire world suffered a lousy summer the following year as the huge amount of volcanic dust dumped into the upper atmosphere screened out some of the sun’s rays. Now we had a hundred, maybe a thousand, Krakatoas spewing out dust and rock all over the world. What effect would that have on the climate?
Few of us doubted that we were heading into the icy maw of another ice age.
But at that moment, with the evening sunlight coming in low and painting everything a soft reddish gold, my head was full of Caroline. Earlier in the day I’d decided to bring up the topic of the Grey Men at that evening’s meeting with Stephen and the others. So far we’d enough problems without speculating on what some had dismissed as fairy stories. But I’d kept quiet about it for long enough.