The bed was empty. One of them approached it, leaned over and smelled at the blankets, grunted. An odour of mating, this had been the rutting stand!
Snarling, looking about them, seeing the window wide open. A chorus of frustrated cries as they rushed towards it, looked out, saw where she had escaped; down the thick ivy which grew on the stonework.
They followed, one at a time, their dead forgotten, descending with the ease of jungle monkeys, hitting the ground below at a run, giving voice to their cries of lust, a hunting pack that would run down its prey. Ten of them, howling their anger and lust. They would follow the trail until they dropped from exhaustion.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE SECURITY patrol was systematically scouring a section of suburbia, a convoy of armoured trucks infiltrating a pedestrianised shopping precinct, weaving its way between piles of debris, powdering broken glass beneath its wheels. Alert to any movement amongst the heaped wreckage.
Most of the enemy had gone, fled to the open spaces. Just a few remained, stubborn guerrilla fighters without a cause, the old and the young. The wounded. And the dead. The air was thick with the stench of decomposing corpses but the commandos were unaware of this behind their sterilised air-filters. Raiders from another planet in the aftermath of a terrible war, the victors of Armageddon come to loot. And to take prisoners!
Private Kenny King did not like it at all, neither did he tike Sergeant Walters. The young rookie had been regretting his decision to join the Regulars from the very first posting to Whittington Barracks in the Midlands. At eighteen he was 'gawky' (the sergeant's description of him), his features a mass of acne, possibly because he had been late going into puberty. He was a bloody fool, he repeatedly told himself, signing on for this when he could have enjoyed a more leisurely life on the dole. And like an even bigger bloody fool he had signed on for a further two years following his return from Northern Ireland. On the other hand, he consoled himself, if he had not opted for army life he wouid have been 'one of them out there' undoubtedly. Or dead.
Walters was a fucking bastard, enjoyed being that way, and with administration handing out responsibility way above the status of jumped up bleedin' sergeants because officers were almost an extinct species, a parade-ground bawler found himself elevated to the role of captain. It was the Year of the Bully but most of all Kenny found himself feeling sorry for these wretches trying to hide out in the remnants of suburbia. They were scared to hell, they didn't want to fight; the army was pushing them into corners.
Their instructions were to take prisoners, transport them back to that place in Hertfordshire. Fill the big prison van up until you couldn't get any more in, like Nazis taking Jews to the gas chamber. There wasn't a lot of difference. The buggers were human after all, well. . . sort of.
The armoured cars were parked at strategic points, a cordon that took in the multi-storey car park, an ugly high-rise edifice that suddenly resembled a medieval castle. If you looked up you saw faces peering over the ramparts; the occupants were ready to defend their castle with their lives. They were under siege.
'There's a good twenty of the fuckers up there.' Walters climbed down from the Land Rover, riot shield in his left hand, automatic pistol in his right. 'They can't go anywhere.' There was a leer on his swarthy face, his small eyes seeking out Kenny as they usually did, making him flinch. 'We need to take another ten.' He laughed.
Kenny would love to have had the courage to enable him to ask, 'And what about the other ten, Sergeant? Or are we just going to slaughter the bloody lot?'
That's up to them, boy. Our orders are to drive 'em out of the towns but there's only one way up and one way down from the multi-storey. It's a long way down from the top, the choice'll be theirs.
'Look out!' The shout came from over to the left, triggering trained soldiers into instant evasive action; a line of riot shields forming a semi-circular barricade, rifles at the ready. Looking up.
A maroon Marina with a black vinyl roof was mounting the concrete wall of the top storey, the underside of the chassis scraping and screeching on the concrete blocks. Front wheels spinning in space. A jerk; it rested level for a second then began to tip downwards. The back wheels caught, held it like a fly on a wall. Then it was free, airborne, an aeroplane without wings, a clumsy useless thing yielding to the law of gravity. A weapon of death.
Maybe in other circumstances Kenny would have screamed but he had got used to not doing a lot of things that came naturally when Walters was around. The rookie's mouth opened in terror and he would have run had he not been hemmed in by riot shields. Something inside him said in a calm, matter-of-fact voice, 'You're OK, son, it won't reach us from there.'
The car fell vertically, a straight drop down, once catching a jutting parapet that dented and spun it, seemed to slow it up, a circus acrobat falling from the high wire; a trick, he did it twice a day, got some kind of sadistic pleasure from making his audience throw up, kids screaming and crying, hiding their faces.
The car hit the concrete pad adjacent to the park, a crash of buckling metal and showering glass, leaped up a good six feet as its suspension found enough bounce for a spectacular swan song; came down on its roof, a heap of scrap that gave it anonymity.
'Get in there, up the ramp,1 Walters roared, led the charge forward, a habitual zig-zag that would have made him a difficult target for any marksman. 'Shoot at will.'
Some of the soldiers were already firing, a hail of rifle bullets aimed at the radiator of a Datsun which was just appearing over the rampart where the Marina had come from, ripping into highly polished metalwork.
Then they were on the ramp, safe from an overhead attack. Another car smashed on the forecourt outside. The throwbacks had not forgotten the battle techniques of their ancestors; repel all boarders.
The ground and first storey were deserted. Systematically the soldiers searched every parking lot, checked vehicles; most of them were locked. Shoppers and businessmen had parked their cars and never returned to them. Probably some of those very people were up above now engaged in a last-ditch defence. Innocent victims of a vile unspeakable mode of warfare who would be over-run by the very soldiers who should have been protecting them against a foreign foe. Kenny King hated himself almost as much as he hated his jumped-up commander.
Sergeant Walters fired. It was a woman, darting out from the open back of a van, sprinting for the second elevation. She screamed, bowled over like a shot rabbit, a complete somersault, and came to rest hard against a Cortina 2000, spottling its grey finish with crimson. She sat bolt upright, cursing them with dead eyes; somewhere behind her blood was pouring out, seeping round her body and following the fall of the floor.
Walters approached her, pushed her with his foot so that she slid slowly sideways. Now the wound was visible, a jagged hole at the nape of the neck where the dum-dum bullet had struck her. That was good shooting.
Kenny King swallowed, his eyes misting up and distorting the scene. She was young, maybe not quite seventeen yet, and her features could have been Asiatic; apart from the straggling hair and rough skin, dressed in modern clothes she might not even have attracted a second glance, except for the obvious reasons. He had dated a girl up in Wakefield before he joined up who had looked very similar to this one. It might even have been her lying there in that spreading pool of blood. A chance in several millions. He hoped it wasn't. You bastard, Walters, you didn't have to kill her!