James Herbert - ‘48

Potter rambled on, amused and saddened in turn by his own stories, while across the room Muriel gave me an occasional long meaningful look, which I ignored, and Cissie, who’d taken over the cooking, shot me an angry glance from time to time, which I also ignored. We ate mostly in silence, Potter finally giving up the chatter, and both girls left the suite as soon as pans and plates were washed. Muriel’s ‘good night’ was kind of stiff, and Cissie didn’t bother. So the warden and me, we cracked open another Jack Daniel’s and finished it between us.

He was a mite unsteady when he left me that night, and he said a funny thing. He swayed in the doorway and laid a stubby finger against that beetroot nose of his, giving me a wink at the same time.

‘I know what yer business is, son. And it’s okay by me. Bloke’s got to do what he thinks is best, even if it is ‘opeless. I won’t tell another bleedin soul, seein as ‘ow yer keepin it secret yerself.’

He shook his head, his eyes bleary with the booze.

‘But it can’t be done, boy. It can’t bloody well be done. There’s too…’

He just shook his head again and walked away.

‘Too bloody many…’ I heard him say as he tottered down the corridor.

I’D CLEARED THE STREET. This was the last carcass. Any others were out of sight, inside the buildings. Like they say – said: Out of sight, out of mind. Only they weren’t; I could still see them in my mind’s eye, slumped in chairs, sprawled across tables, curled up on floors – dried-out, feather-light shucks, dusty, brittle refuse. My mind could always see them inside shops, restaurants, offices, dwellings, factories, stations, vehicles…Christ, the list went on forever. But I couldn’t take them all. As Potter had remarked: ‘There were too bloody many…’

I lifted the bag of bones onto the back of the truck, oblivious to its shrivelled eyes, like black raisins above its yawning, meatless mouth, and it slithered down at me from the pile, a reluctant evacuee. Its bony fingers snagged against my sweatshirt as I pushed it back and I was too tired and too seasoned to feel any revulsion. When the desiccated corpse was settled, I picked up my jacket lying on the kerbside and the rifle leaning against the truck’s rear wheel, then climbed into the cab.

Once this had been an ordinary city street, its houses untouched by Hitler’s worst, the corner pub still open for business; but weeds now grew between the cracks in the pavements and vehicles rusted away in the road. But it was the silence that got to me. After three long and lonely years, I still hadn’t become used to that eerie hush, not in undamaged streets like this where everything seemed so normal. It was as if the place was…well, haunted. I thought of Muriel’s ghosts back at the Savoy and got angry with myself.

Slamming the truck’s door after me, I tossed my jacket onto the passenger seat and settled the rifle in the footwell on that side, its muzzle leaning against the open window opposite, pointed away from me but within easy reach. The girl had been wrong, she was haunted by memories, not by spectres. Even I’d imagined the sound of voices, laughter – music, too – drifting up to me as I’d lain awake nights in that grand rotting mausoleum. Couple of times I’d even gone to the door and listened, opening it when I was sure there really was something going on downstairs, the noises always vanishing the moment I stepped out into the corridor. Just night-notions, that’s all they were. Dreams when I hadn’t even realized I’d been asleep. Muriel would soon get to realize that imagination had a way of playing tricks on you when you were in a low frame of mind. They weren’t just dreams either, they were wishful dreams, dreams you hoped would be true, cravings for life to return to normal, to the way it had once been. Daybreak always put things right again; as right as they were ever gonna be.

I turned on the engine, took one last look at the deserted’ street out the side window, and drove off. Although weary from my labours and a little hungover from the night before, I kept alert, constantly on the lookout for the unexpected. One time about a year and some months ago, a crazy had jumped out at the truck I was using, an Austin 5-ton, as I recall, its flap sides and back easy for loading. He was waving a butcher’s meat axe over his head and hollering gibberish at me. Maybe I should have stopped, but it was the middle of winter and this guy was stark naked. And oh yeah, around his neck under a long greasy beard he wore a ragged neck-lace of severed, blackened hands. When he realized I wasn’t gonna stop, he threw the axe at me. Luckily, his aim was poor and it broke through the windshield on the passenger side, so I kept going, heading straight for him, figuring he wasn’t in the mood to discuss his complaint. Well, he didn’t even try to dodge me, just kept coming forward, screaming and shaking his fists; and I didn’t try to avoid him either. I ran right over him, and when I stopped further down the road and looked back, I saw his naked body was still twitching. By the time I’d climbed out and walked back to him, he was trying to crawl along the gutter, his back broken, both legs crushed. It wasn’t out of mercy that I put the gun to his head and fired, nor was it out of spite: those feelings didn’t come into it. No, I was just carrying on as usual; I was just tidying up.

When his body finally lay at rest, I added his corpse to the rest of my cargo and took him with me.

There were other creatures I had to keep a lookout for, mainly cats and wild dogs who’d lost any road sense, but mostly I kept my eyes open for Blackshirts, who had a nasty habit of appearing when I least expected it. Although it was a big city, it was inevitable that our paths should cross from time to time. Our battles were usually short and sharp, and I always had the advantage that their sickness had slowed them down considerably.

Today was a good day though, the summer making up for winter’s severity, when there were twelve-foot high snow-drifts along the streets. The sky was clear again, but a slight breeze coming in from the east was keeping things a little cooler. With my full load, I avoided craters, debris and any other wreckage along the route, heading north, the way well known to me by now. Within twenty minutes I’d reached my destination.

I drove straight up the ramp into the stadium whose stands had once held over a hundred thousand people at a time. I passed through the tunnel and emerged inside the vast arena itself. Driving past stacked gasoline cans and boxes of explosives, I headed into the centre aisle whose banks were formed by piled-high rotted corpses, turning at its centre into a narrower lane, the stink hardly bothering me these days. Occasionally I spotted movement among the heaps, the vermin disturbed but not intimidated by my presence. I used to waste time taking potshots at them, at the scavenging dogs too, but nowadays I didn’t bother: when the time came, they’d burn along with the corrupted things they feasted on.

Soon I reached a clearing, the grass there long and unhealthy-looking, and I brought the diesel flatbed to a halt. I stood on the running board for a while, just listening, checking around me. As I gazed over those great mounds of human debris I wondered how much more I could accomplish. Almost three long years I’d been filling this huge arena with the dead, always aware it could be no more than a token gesture. Lime pits and thousands of cardboard coffins had been made ready in the early days of the war in case they were needed, but nobody had predicted the Blood Death. Most of the population had remained where they’d dropped. ‘Cept for these people. At least they were gonna receive some kind of burial.