James Herbert: ‘48

My angle was better to take in the woman – the girl – driver, and as I studied her she threw a quick glance my way.

‘Who are you?’ she said, her voice raised, but no longer shouting. Her accent was pure London, but not from the smarter end.

Before I could answer, something – debris of some kind, I guess – struck the windshield, cracking the glass. The girl wrenched the steering wheel round, hissing something tight and nasty as she did so, and the Ford executed a squealing curve into the broad, littered and ruined street that was the Strand. Past taped shop windows we sped, avoiding small craters or foetal bundles that were carcasses in the roadway. Bullets thunked into metal behind us and I felt the girl beside me flinch. I took a peek out the rear window and saw the Bedford truck was back in the game; the Blackshirts in the rear section had lifted the front flap of the canvas roof so that they could lean on the cab’s top and take potshots at us. Luckily, the metal-encased spare tyre fixed to the Ford’s trunk was taking most of the strikes.

‘And just who the hell are those people?’

The driver wasn’t looking my way – she was too busy avoiding a Griff Fender removal van and a Shank’s open-back truck that had collided with one another years before and had remained locked together ever since, blocking most of the road’s centre – but there was no doubting who she wanted answers from. Before I could say anything a bullet shattered the rear window, whistling between the heads of me and the girl I shared the back seat with and finishing the job on the windshield in front. I pulled her down into my lap and crouched over her. The driver let loose some more curses as fresh air rushed through the car.

‘We’d have pinched an open-top if we’d wanted the wind in our hair,’ I heard her shout over the noise.

‘Keep going!’ I advised, my own voice a little louder than hers.

She said something that I didn’t catch.

‘I said, any idea where we should go?’ she yelled when I leaned close and pressed her.

‘Keep heading east. We’ll lose ‘em if you can pick up speed.’

‘Hey, you a Yank?’ She risked a glance over her shoulder, and I got a better look at her face.

Her eyes were a hazel-brown and she was pretty enough, although the thinnest of scars cut diagonally across her cheeks, rising over the bump of her nose. Her lips were unrouged, but still nicely shaped, and her jawline was firm, indicating some stubbornness in her nature. Her dark hair, curling over her forehead, was tucked neatly into a snood at the back of her head. Why I was noticing these things about the two women at this point of time, I had no idea; maybe I’d spent too long on my own and their effect on me was overriding more urgent considerations. I don’t know; but that’s how it was though.

‘Watch the road,’ I told her and she turned away, only just managing to pull round a two-toned Austin.

When she’d straightened up again, I said, ‘D’you have any weapons?’

At that time I had no idea of what had happened to my Colt

Now the man with the trilby, its brim slouched low and shading his eyes, craned his neck to look at me. He shook his head, saying nothing, and his appraisal was cool.

‘Why would we need weapons?’ the girl driver called out ‘The war ended three years ago.’

I didn’t answer her. We were passing the narrow street that served as forecourt to the Savoy and I was tempted to tell her to pull into it. We could have left the car and run through the hotel to its riverside entrance, easily picking up another vehicle parked on that side (I kept several there, keys in the ignitions). It might have been too risky though: our pursuers were close and probably would’ve caught up with us on foot Besides, the Savoy was one of my ‘home bases’ – I had my own grand apartment right up there on the third floor overlooking the Thames – so I was reluctant to bring the enemy so close to a sanctuary. Better to lose the Blackshirts before going to ground.

We passed blitzed buildings, some of them destroyed by the Luftwaffe’s bombs, others ruined later by gas explosions and electrical wires burning, still more by fallen cigarettes, lighted candles, or any manner of domestic accidents caused by victims of the Blood Death dropping dead in their tracks. The damage to the city was not yet over: gas mains still blew, waterpipes continued to burst, and bomb-hit buildings still toppled long after they’d been struck. London was a dangerous place, even without this army of lunatics roaming the streets.

Strangely, no epidemics had spread after that black day of Vergeltungswaffen – vengeance – despite all the rotting corpses left lying around, but maybe that had something to do with the nature of the Blood Death itself and its effect on human and animal body systems. An attempt to clear up the place had been made by those who had the Slow Death (and didn’t realize it) until eventually even they were gone. Leaving just the crazies behind.

Oh, and there was one other danger, but that hadn’t happened for a little while, so maybe it was over.

We entered the Aldwych, the gutted shell that had been St Clement Danes just visible beyond the logjam of traffic ahead.

‘Swing left!’ I ordered, checking on our pursuers as I did so. The Humber station wagon was catching up with the Bedford truck, but both were having a tougher time than the smaller Ford finding their way through the tangles behind us. The girl did as she was told, sweeping round into Kingsway, tyres bumping over tramlines. She had to reduce speed to work round a huge crater in the road.

I turned in surprise as the girl next to me spoke, her voice quiet but easily heard now that we were travelling more slowly.

‘Are you the same as us?’ she said.

I knew immediately what she meant. The man in front looked at me again, his eyes full of interest beneath the brim of his hat, and the driver stopped muttering curses for a moment to hear my reply.

‘AB negative? Yeah, I’m one of you,’ I said.

‘Well, welcome to the club.’ The driver tossed me a quick grin. ‘And how about these loonies chasing us?’

I shook my head. ‘Slow-dying. They’re finished, but they won’t accept it.’

‘Is that why they’re pissed off with you? Y’know – why them and not you?’

Once more I was a little taken aback by her language – girls in Wisconsin are not, were not, quite as loose-lipped – although it didn’t seem to bother her companions. Probably they were used to it.

‘They seem to think I can do them some good. At least, their leader does. When you come to the traffic lights up ahead, go right Keep heading east.’

‘He wants you as a guinea pig, to do tests?’ It was the girl next to me who spoke.

‘No. He wants me as a refill.’

‘Blood transfusion?’ It was the man in the hat and I thought I detected an accent Polish? Not French. Maybe Czech. ‘Yeah. He’s a fool.’

‘But they tried, they proved it could not work. Blood types do not mix.’

‘He refuses to believe it.’

The foreigner shook his head in pity, in disbelief, I don’t know which. The car lurched and I wedged myself in, one arm against the back of his seat, the other against my own.

‘Where you’ve come from,’ I said to the girl next to me, ‘were there many of you?’

She wore plain utility clothes. A pale blue dress with puffed shoulders, brought in by a belt at the waist, no stockings, brown shoes that were sensible rather than stylish. On her it all looked good.

‘Not too many. AB negative is rare.’

Yeah, I know it, I thought Too goddamn rare.

The driver, still carefully guiding the car around obstacles, cut in. ‘They took us away to a secret location after the plague struck and they discovered our type wasn’t affected. It was down in Dorset, a sanatorium of some kind. They did tests, all kinds of things, trying to find an antidote for everyone else, but they failed. I suppose they were doing the same all over the country – all over the world.’