Another click, a rattling: the latch on the front door. Please, Jesus, no, Jon remembered that the twelve-bore was still down in the porch, cursed himself for not bringing it upstairs. His reaction was to pull the sheets up over his head, shut himself off from the outside world, just himself and Sylvia. We don't belong here, they won't see us, won't harm us.
They'll kill you if they find you.
He could still hear them at the door, scraping the woodwork with ragged fingernails trying to find some way in, one of them wheezing as though he had asthma. Sylvia was still asleep, thank God. If they got inside then there was no hope for either of them, just brutal death. Jon wanted to clasp his hands over his ears, didn't want to hear them when they came up the stairs.
And suddenly he couldn't hear them at all, no stealthy footfalls, no stertorous breathing. Total silence. Even those animals up in the forest had stopped howling; a total cessation of those awful nocturnal activities.
It was some time before he realised that those semi-human beings had gone. He lay listening but there were no further sounds; nothing at all.
A reprieve, no more. They had discovered this place, knew that survivors were hiding out there.
And sooner or later they would return.
CHAPTER TEN
ROD SAVAGE had one regret and that was the fact that there was no newspaper still running which could print his feature article. When one is a leading freelance journalist, and has managed to escape from a London seething with primitive fury and death, then it is a major disaster to have an eye-witness account of happenings with nowhere to publish it.
Tall and lean, with sparse hair, balding faster now that he was past forty, he was rarely seen without a pipe in his mouth, most of the time unlit, the tobacco juice in the bowl bubbling every time he drew on it. A loner, he devoted his life to coming up with unusual and sensational articles, acquiring inside information which had on more than one occasion raised the eyebrows of officialdom.
Had he been a religious man he would have been convinced that God had spared him so that he might chronicle events which had, in fact, thrown Britain into a state of civil war. But he was an atheist and attributed the fact that he had been spared to coincidence, but he was determined to capitalise on it. One day things had to return to some kind of normality and when that happened there would be a paper somewhere only too eager to publish his story. He might even stretch it into a book.
Rod Savage had no permanent residence outside his cottage in Wales, a little two-up, two-down stone building to which he retired at infrequent intervals. Usually he rented a bedsit or small flat in the metropolis on a six-month lease and then moved on. No ties, he often quoted, was the secret of a successful journalist.
The basement flat in Finchley had been vacant for over a year, which was hardly surprising when one viewed its state of dereliction. The landlord was biding his time, waiting for the flats on the upper storeys to be vacated by their dissatisfied tenants and then the whole building would be renovated and put on the market. In the meantime he was not prepared to spend money on either repairs or decorations. But he was not averse to letting the basement on a weeky basis for cash.
Savage had wrinkled his nose at the smell of damp, noted that the only two windows had been broken and boarded up so that it was necessary to keep the electric light on the whole time. Unfit for human habitation, it might even have been condemned had its state been brought to the notice of the authorities, but the rent was less than half what he would have paid elsewhere. A sleeping bag and something to cook on were all that Rod Savage required; there was no lease involved for obvious reasons and the rent was paid in cash on a Friday. Convenient, he could come and go as he pleased, did not even have to give notice when he was moving on elsewhere.
A month later he went down with flu. Nothing to do with his living conditions, damp and airless, he told himself, just a virus he had picked up, possibly on the crowded undergrounds; nothing to get worried about, all you did was go to bed and let the fever run its course.
It was a bad attack all right, several days of feverishness, lying in that darkened basement flat, followed by a week of resting, noting a gradual improvement. Once he had almost made the effort to go outside and ask somebody to call a doctor but he didn't because he had no faith in GPs. All they did was to pack you with drugs which could produce very nasty side-effects. He also had a fear of hospitals and some well-meaning doctor might order him to be removed to one. He would fight the illness his own way.
So he just sweated it out, felt his strength returning, and by the time he was able to go outside the city was caught up in a frenzy of destruction and looting, tribal warfare that went back at least four thousand years to the days when London was no more than a cluster of stone-built huts.
Rod Savage began to piece the story together with the aid of his transistor and CB radio. The CB had served him well in the past, you could listen in to-all kinds of conversations, and he had been the first reporter on the scene of those macabre Muswell Hill murders simply because he had picked up a snippet from a police radio. Illegal, but in Rod's book of rules the end justified the means. You only got the top stories by sticking your neck out.
Radio broadcasts continued for a few days, national and local. There was a lot of confusion at first, the general opinion being that the western world had suffered a Soviet nuclear attack but there were no fireballs, no total destruction of populated areas. Just civilisation gone berserk.
Rod began to compile his notes systematically, sellotaped a large-scale road map to the wall, and using red and black ballpoints formed an overall picture of the state of the UK.
The centre of Birmingham had been gutted by fire and the inferno was still raging unchecked, mostly spread by exploding petrol tanks in abandoned vehicles. Casualties were virtually ignored because the rescue forces were primarily intent on saving 'survivors1. Mobs clashed and fought using weapons that created hideous injuries, shards of glass from broken shop windows and steel girders used as battering rams. No petrol bombs; gunsmiths' shops were ignored because the significance of firearms was not realised.
Gunfire from the small army patrols threw the rioters into a state of terror, had them fleeing and trampling their own kind in their stampede to escape the hail of lead. Yet the armed forces were so outnumbered that artillery counted for little; they were not bent on wholesale slaughter, only killing in self-defence. It transpired that there were more survivors than one would have thought possible; underground workers, miners, and those who had escaped for no apparent reason. The unprecedented storms and gales had been the one reason why the casualty rate had not been close on 100 per cent. Freak weather of the kind which brought about catastrophes in tropical countries had swept across the Atlantic, wreaking havoc but dispersing the micro-organisms out into the North Sea. Otherwise the poisoned atmosphere might have lingered for days, even weeks. Now it was gone, leaving behind it a civilisation thrown back to the state of its early ancestry.
Vehicles littered every street, fresh food stores were looted, but the rampagers were ignorant of canned or processed foodstuffs. Livestock were slaughtered in rural areas. Disease would follow surely, for decomposing corpses lay in their hundreds in every town and city; it was to be seen how resistant this new species of mankind was. Starvation was inevitable. Would they then turn to cannibalism?