James Rouch - Overkill

His fists opening and closing, the boy’s face flickered through a spectrum of emotion, and fixed on sullen anger. He picked up his bike and led them at a fast pace away from the docks.

‘Bye now. You all come along and see us some time, y’hear?’ Ripper waved a farewell to the boy’s back as he pedalled off.

It was a little cooler now as the sun set, and the glare was no longer reflected from the masses of broken glass filling every street. They might as well have been walking through a city of the invisible. They had seen no one on the streets, but ample evidence that there had been. The deep drifts and layers of dust were imprinted with the marks of many footprints and cart tracks.

Across the city rolled the sound of artillery fire, and once, only a few blocks away, the massive crash and roar of a long-range bombardment missile impacting, followed by the rumble of its sonic boom.

Weakened by the intervening buildings the blast wave arrived as a swirling wall of dust that scoured the flesh of their face and hands with stinging wind-whipped particles.

‘This don’t seem to be too healthy a place.’ Dooley spat ground mortar and plaster. ‘How about we find somewhere with a spot of top cover. I’m getting the feeling that brat has dumped us in bomb alley.’

‘We’ll try in here.’

Revell led them down a ramp into the artificial cavern of an underground car park. The collapse of the buildings above had brought much of the roof down, but a route of sorts appeared to have been cleared between some of the crumbling pillars, and he struck that way.

At long intervals sputtering oil lamps had been strung up, and they headed from one to another, frequently stumbling as they reached the near pitch black area halfway between each.

For a moment it seemed that their journey ended abruptly at a blank wall, then Hyde spotted a tunnel opening in it, partially hidden by the wrecks of flattened Volkswagens to either side. He ducked to enter, and the barrel of a Russian pistol was stuck into his face.

‘I’ve been expecting you. Sorry I didn’t meet you up the top, but my telephone line has just been repaired for the first time in a week and I wanted to use it before it was put out of action again. I thought you’d manage to find your way here alright.’

The stench was almost overpowering. Raw sewage moved sluggishly past their boots, and every movement brought fat bubbles to its surface that burst and threw particles of the stinking effluent over them.

‘You’ll have to forgive the pong. I think I must have grown rather immune to it, but I expect you find it a bit ripe.’

By the dim light from a single oil lamp, Revell looked at the speaker. His age, under caked filth and in a face deep-lined by hunger, was impossible to determine with any precision, but around thirty might have been about right. He sat on a plastic bottle-crate behind a table constructed of several planks supported by more of the brightly coloured compartmented mouldings.

‘You’re British?’

‘Oh yes, very.’ His mouth opened in what might have been a smile, but the few teeth left that might have signalled it were no more than blackened stumps, rotted by disease. ‘I was secretary to a trade mission that was over here when the Ruskies did their Red Indian imitation and circled us in the night. The others tried to get out, never saw them again. I thought I’d stay on and do my bit.’

‘What do you want us for?’ Holding a cloth over his nose and mouth didn’t help, but Boris kept it there anyway.

‘I issue identity papers. The Ruskies have got up to all sorts of tricks to try and infiltrate the city. People are suspicious. You’re Russian aren’t you?’

Boris looked to the major, before nodding. ‘Not now you’re not. I’ll put you down as Polish. You won’t get past the first security check if I put the truth. You’d be lucky if they just shot you, bit at a time.’ From a small stack he took eight pieces of thick card and on each filled in their name, rank and number. On the reverse he jotted their country of origin.

Clarence queried the last entry.

‘Quite simple really. Such a lot of bodies to bury, it was beginning to get complicated, especially as all the non-combatants such as priests and the like are busy full time at the hospitals. The living have to come first. Nobody was too keen on indiscriminate mass burial, we leave that sort of callousness to the Reds, so we eventually plumped for plots determined by nationality as the best we could do. Catholic, C of E, Buddhist; now they’re all the same. Death is a great leveller.’ He jerked his pen towards the ruined city-above, and laughed at his own little joke. It was a brittle laugh, of short duration.

‘Where do we go now?’ Revell didn’t join in, doing nothing that would force him to take deeper breaths of the fetid atmosphere.

‘Baptism of fire actually for you. You’re earmarked for our fire-brigade… No, hold it, let me explain.’ He held up a hand to quell the sudden outbreak of argument. ‘That’s what we call our mobile squads. It helps confuse the Ruskies if they manage a radio intercept. It means you’ll be doing rather a lot of rushing about. In the next week or so you should see more of the city, what’s left of it, than I have in the last year. You’ll find yourselves rather in the thick of things I’m afraid. Hope you like fighting. Are you sure you want the woman with you, there’s plenty of other work for her…’

‘That is my work.’ Bending forward Andrea put her face close to the man’s. ‘You have no objection?’

‘No… none… I just thought I’d mention…’ He cleared his throat. ‘Yes, well, eh, that’s about it. If there’re no questions…’

‘The other troops from the convoy, what will they be doing?’ Not for the first time, Burke was getting the feeling that of all the jobs being handed round, they’d got the rough one.

‘Not really my province, I’m not really privy to the master plan, if there is such a thing. I suppose, though, the ships’ crews will be formed into labour battalions and the armour and infantry held for the big breakout, whenever that may be. I’m only processing units that don’t really fall into any definable category. If that answers your question…?’

‘It tells me we won’t be out of the shit when we leave here.’ The brittle laugh was of even shorter duration this time. ‘Very good, yes… Do you have torches? No? Oh dear, I was going to say that you could use the sewers and the underground railway tunnels to get to where you’ve got to go, but you’d need flashlights…’

‘Just mark it on my map. We’ll take our chances on the overland route.’ Revell held out his already crumpled piece of paper.

‘Here, the university building on Bundes Strasse. Can’t imagine what they want you there for, the Reds have never tried anything from that direction. Still, whatever it is, good luck.’

Sergeant Hyde held back a moment as the others filed out. ‘You don’t take up much room, couldn’t you find somewhere else to work, somewhere healthier?’

‘I expect so, in fact I’m sure I could, after all there’s fewer of us each day. We’re down to less than half a million, plenty of elbow room now, but I’ve got my reasons.’ He stirred his foot in the filth and provoked a series of large bubbles that doubled the strength of the pungent odours filling the tunnel. ‘The Reds haven’t used gas yet, they know there’s still a lot of neutrals trapped in the city, embassy staff and the like. It wouldn’t look good if they started using chemicals. But they might, eventually they just might.’ Again he dragged his foot through the glutinous stream. ‘If I really tried, I could generate a lot of gas of my own, I might be able to produce sufficient overpressure to keep the Commies’ muck out.’ The laugh came again.