CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

REITZE HAD coughed and spat blood into the wash-basin that morning, then vomited, clinging on to the stand, otherwise he would have fallen. The room around him swam and he had to wait for it to steady.

He forced himself to think logically, didn't like what his thoughts came up with. The tests had proved conclusive, too conclusive. They would not be making any more tests because they had achieved the ultimate—death, the end of civilisation.

A cancerous side-effect to the skin disease, a contagious one. The reversion had only been a symptom of what was to follow. The body's resistance was lowered, vulnerable to just about anything that was going, like AIDS in a way. Severe cold had killed off most of the population and those who survived ended up with this spreading cancer that grew like couch grass in May. And if you missed it once you caught it off somebody else.

He brushed his teeth, tried to get the taste out of his mouth. It didn't work, smelled like your shit had come up the wrong way. Bastards, not just the fuckers who had started all this but the throwbacks themselves, disease-carrying apes that should have been driven into the hills in the beginning and left there. Instead they were brought in here for tests and this was what you ended up with, a dose of internal syphilis.

Reitze began to pull on his shirt, coughed again and spotted it with crimson. Even so he needed a Camel, he wouldn't gain anything by kicking the habit now.

He let himself out of his room and went down to the laboratory. There was no sign of Westcote, Barnes or Newman, and he didn't think they would be showing up.

Caldecott and his ministers had been moved across to the other centre, the one where Royalty was housed, the final bastion. The last step to preserve life as Mankind knew it.

Sketchy reports were still filtering in from the States but now winter had hit them hard too. Whole settlements of throwbacks were reported dead and there had been outbreaks of the Coughing Death reported in New York, Los Angeles and Houston. Undoubtedly it was in a lot of other places, too, but the news had not come through. Maybe nobody really wanted to know.

The Professor's lips tightened into a bloodless slit, those eyes behind the rimless lenses were no longer expressionless. He crossed to the first experimental chamber, peered in through the tiny window. One of them was stiH alive; two lay dead on the floor, their bodies streaked with pink phlegm as though haemorrhaging snails had crawled all over them. The third was sitting propped up against the far wall; for him time was running out too.

Reitze went to one of the cupboards, unlocked it and took down a red-labelled bottle, filled a syringe from it. He laughed softly to himself, heard his lungs rattle. There wasn't much time left for any of them.

There was fear in the captive's eyes when Reitze opened the door, sheer terror that had those twin orbs rolling right up until only the whites were visible, arms and legs twitching, the nearest they could get to crazy headlong flight. A rush of liquid anal wind. The bastard knows, Reitze thought. He might be the equivalent of a Stone Age man but he knows just what I'm going to do to him.

A prick just beneath the skin on the neck, pressing the plunger slowly until all the grey fluid had emptied out of the cartridge. Withdrawing, standing back to watch, to gloat.

The eyeballs dropped back down; Reitze thought they clicked. The mouth opened, the tongue protruded, darted like a snake's, the saliva thick and frothy, mucus beginning to ooze out of the flared nostrils.

The limbs jerked, twitched, went into spasms, the head nodding like a puppet's, stretching so that the veins in the neck bulged and stood out. One scream and then the vocal cords gave out, just left the victim mouthing his cries of agony mutely. Fingers and toes bent over, long nails digging deep into the flesh so that blood began to flow.

A silent scream, a choking cough that brought up a blob of black congealed blood, almost drowning in a second until he got it out. Pain and hate in those eyes, an expression that bridged a gap spanning thousands of years.

And Reitze stood back and laughed, coughed his own blood and still laughed. If only the other two had not died overnight they could have had the same. ML 273, a formula that destroyed the body in much the same way as strychnine did only much, much faster, did not act on the brain. You only died when you couldn't stand the pain any longer.

He watched the throwback disintegrating, nerves stretch and break, vomiting his life's blood in huge splodges until the skin whitened to the colour of pork. Twitching because he hadn't the strength to writhe and convulse, biting on his teeth until they chipped and broke.

Just the heart pumping weakly and the brain still functioning. Reitze knelt down and pushed his face close to the other's, stared into those bloodshot eyes.

'I wish you didn't have to die/ He unloaded his hate in a terse whisper. 'I wish you could go on like this for ever because you bastards have killed the world off. Sure, there'll be a few survivors but they'll be the unlucky ones. I'm dying now but what few fuckers of you remain are going to pay!'

He stood up, lurched unsteadily. Time was running out for him, too. He had to be going, he could not stop here any longer. Down the corridor and into the vehicle bay. The duty soldier did riot question him when he made for the end Land Rover, took a rifle out of the rack and filled his pockets with ammunition. Nobody travelled unarmed these days.

Reitze pulled himself up into the driver's seat, collapsed into it. Only hate and will power gave him the strength he needed, spun the wheels as he misjudged the clutch. Up the ramp and out into the open.

Most of the snow had blown off the lane and drifted the hedgerows; he hoped the Land Rover would make it. Soft powdery patches created wheel-spin in places and once he had to hit a drift at 30 mph to bulldoze his way through. He skidded, hit something beneath the snow with a metallic clang, bumped over it and kept going.

God, he hoped he would find some of 'em, that the soldiers hadn't driven 'em all to the woods and fields, that the cold and the coughing hadn't wiped the last of 'em out. The shitfuckers, he wanted 'em now more than he had ever done all along.

Within a mile he found the first one, a female coming towards him, limping, dragging herself along. She saw him, stopped, but did not attempt to run. In all probability she had not the strength.

He hit her dead centre with the Land Rover, the speedometer needle flickering on 35, a crunching impact that slewed the vehicle sideways on, sprawled her across the bonnet, gushing blood like a burst flagon of claret. Reitze jammed on his brakes, threw the Land Rover into a 390-degree spin and threw her off into the road. Then he went over her with the nearside front wheel, caught her with the rear one as well. He didn't even glance in his mirror because he had spied some more throwbacks further up the lane.

They ran for the bank, floundered in the snow and had to grab hawthorn branches in the hedge to save themselves from sliding back down. Suspended up there they thought they were safe. The Professor cruised slowly forward, slid to a stop fifteen yards from them. Slowly, deliberately, he picked up the rifle and climbed out. There was nowhere they could go, it was easier than the kids' airgun gallery at the fairground.

Five of them, he took the furthest first, a teenage girl, disintegrated her features with a dum-dum bullet, transferred his sights to the second and blew out his jugular vein so that bright scarlet blood sprayed technicolour patterns all down the snow-capped hedge. The third had turned his back so Reitze blasted his spine, sent him writhing down the slope.