'48 by James Herbert
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.
12
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.
It didn’t take long to unload this, my last haul of the day, and soon I was on my way back across London, leaving the grimy walls of Wembley Stadium behind, a place where once crowds had gathered to roar their excitement, but which was now just one huge and silent burial vault.
One day, when I was satisfied I’d done all I could, it would be their crematorium.
13
I’D CLEANED MYSELF UP and was sprawled half-naked on the bed, a glass of Scotch held on my bruised chest, cigarette in my other hand, when there was a knock on the door.
‘Hoke? It’s me, Muriel. Can I come in?’
I inhaled, exhaled, lifted my head and took another sip of the Scotch.
‘Hoke.’
She sounded impatient The doorhandle rattled.
With a groan, I rolled off the bed, placed the glass on the cabinet, and grabbed my pants. Cigarette drooping from the corner of my mouth, I unlocked the door and opened it a few inches. Smoke curled out into the corridor.
Muriel was wearing a different outfit, a cream blouse and loose, brown slacks, her hair drawn back on one side with a slide. She looked good – even grubby she’d looked good – but I didn’t let that affect me.
Leaving the door open so that the option was hers, I picked up a shirt lying across the back of an easy chair and shrugged it on. I didn’t bother with the buttons, hoping her stay would be short; I sat on the edge of the bed, close to the Scotch. Muriel closed the door behind her and stood in front of me.
‘No point in asking where you went to, I suppose?’ Her neat, pencilled eyebrows were raised.
‘Had things to do,’ was my response.
‘Why so surly, Hoke? The other night…’ She left it there, waving a hand in exasperation.
What could I tell her? That guilt was busting my head, making me feel Sally’s presence all around me in that room? It was stupid; I knew it then, I know it now. Three years dead and I was still grieving for her, mourning for the life together we’d been denied. The whole fucking world gone to damnation and I was still focused on my own loss. And now I not only suffered the guilt of survival, but of betrayal also. It was morbid and it was irrational; but when I closed my eyes I still saw my young bride in this room with me, breathed in her perfume, heard her whispers. And I had closed my eyes.
I opened them quickly.
‘We…I…made a mistake,’ was all I could think of to say, and in truth, I wasn’t sure if I was addressing Muriel, or someone long since dead.
‘A mistake? My God, man, don’t you realize we’re living in a whole new world with a different morality? I wasn’t asking for love, just comfort, compassion. I was frightened, don’t you understand?’
Or staking a claim? I wondered, then hated myself for the cynicism. I dragged on the cigarette, confused, maybe even disgusted with myself. Anger was burning me.
‘All right,’ she said in a resigned, kind of stiff-backed voice. She was tired of reasoning with me and I couldn’t blame her for that. ‘I only wanted to let you know that Cissie and I have arranged a dinner party for us all downstairs in the Pinafore Room.’
I stared up at her as if she were the wacky one here.
‘Hoke, we’ve got to put the past behind us. It’s unreasonable of you to carry on despising Wilhelm Stern just because he’s a German. Gracious, not only did he not personally start the war against us, but he actually played very little part in it. He was shot down and captured in 1940, for God’s sake!’ Her tone changed and she looked at me appealingly. ‘We’ve got to forgive and forget, don’t you see? How else can we build a new life for ourselves? Some order has to come out of all this and that can only be if we cast past grudges aside.’
She strode to the writing desk and leaned back against it, arms folded, eyes intense. ‘It’s time for those of us who are left to come to our senses, to introduce some kind of order to our lives. What else is there otherwise? Lawlessness? Chaos?’
Calmer now, I swung my legs up onto the bed and rested my back against the headboard so that I could watch her across the room. She was serious. The planet had gone to blazes and she was talking law and order. Resting my cigarette hand on my raised knee, I cocked my head at her.
‘You don’t see it’s all finished?’ I was genuinely surprised. ‘You don’t see that our so-called civilization has gone AWOL? Jesus Christ, Muriel, there’s nothing left for any of us.’
‘We’re alive, blast you, and there are many more like us, waiting to make a fresh start, waiting for the survivors to come together again, perhaps even hoping for a new leader. It can be better than before, we can avoid the same age-old mistakes.’
Maybe she was right. That’s what I thought as I smoked the cigarette, my gaze never leaving hers. Someone had to start things rolling again and probably – no doubt – it was already happening in other parts of the globe. So why not here, in what used to be one of the world’s greatest cities? I studied Muriel in a way I hadn’t before. She was a slight, almost fragile, kind of girl, but I could see the resolve in her, a steeliness that I guess came with her breeding. Lord knows, as a kid my head had been filled with literature depicting England’s upper classes as people of fine character and great purpose (although Ma had warned me it wasn’t all true), and at that moment I was beginning to glimpse those qualities in Muriel. I’d witnessed the good old British stiff-upper-lip style in plenty of the RAF types I’d flown with, so I shouldn’t have been surprised to see the same trait in a lord’s daughter. Okay, a romantic view of the English – at least, of their gentry – but I’d had plenty of evidence to back it up since coming to these shores, and looking at Muriel across the room, that intensity still in her eyes, her jawline delicate but determined, I suddenly thought she might just have the backbone to see it through. Another thing I realized, though, was that my kind of cynicism could play no part in her vision of a bright new future. But that didn’t mean I’d discourage her. Truth was, I didn’t care one way or the other.
‘Will you join us this evening, Hoke?’ Her tone softened, her arms had unfolded. ‘Stern and Potter cleared some of the rooms downstairs and even raided the hotel’s foodstores. We’ve set up a makeshift kitchen in the private dining room next door to the Pinafore, and Wilhelm even went out and found us two portable oil cookers bigger and a touch more sophisticated than the ones you’ve been using.’
‘He left the Savoy?’ I didn’t like the idea.
‘We’ve all been out today. What did you expect us to do – remain cooped up all day in this place waiting for your return? For myself, I travelled across town to Daddy’s Kensington apartment.’
‘By yourself? Christ, woman, why?’
‘Are you really that dense, Hoke? I wanted to visit our old home, is that so unreasonable? After all, it was why we returned to London. I have certain things of sentimental value there, photographs, diaries and, yes, even jewellery. Things I want to keep to remind me of better times. And clothes, my own clothes. Yes, I know I could choose from any fashionable Knightsbridge shop, but I wanted certain items I already possessed, is that so difficult to understand? Cissie would have done exactly the same if she’d still had a home to go to. Instead she stayed behind and helped get everything ready.’
‘But-’ I started again, then let it go. ‘Okay. How did you get there?’
For the first time since she’d entered the suite she smiled. ‘I was going to use any motorcar I could find still working. Instead I found a bicycle that wasn’t rusted completely – it was inside a shop – so I used that. It squeaked a lot and the tyres need pumping up, but it got me through all the parked traffic in the streets.’
‘D’you have any idea where Stern went to?’
‘I told you, he found us some better cookers, so obviously he got those from one of those big camping stores nearby. Potter went off on his own too, probably patrolling the streets looking for UXBs and incendiaries. He’s quite dotty, you know.’ She moved from the writing desk and stood at the end of the bed. ‘Why so pensive, Hoke? What’s troubling you now?’
Dogging the cigarette, I replied, ‘The city’s a dangerous place.’
‘The Blackshirts, you mean? I didn’t catch a glimpse of one. But then, it is a huge city. Anyway, I’m sure they assumed they’d killed us all when they set fire to the Underground station.’
I wondered. Would Hubble and his Looney-Tunes army think we were dead by now? The notion that he’d lost four valuable blood donors would have sent Hubble into a frenzy and I pitied the fool who’d broken the news to him that they’d fire-bombed the station. If only that were the case, if only Hubble believed we were gone for good…On my own travels that day I’d seen neither hide nor hair of any Blackshirts, although that wasn’t unusual; as Muriel said, it was a big city. Besides, I always kept off the beaten track, taking side streets rather than main thoroughfares. But heck, it was a pleasant enough thought on an otherwise grim day. Muriel took advantage of my sudden smile.
‘You’ll come, then?’
I blinked.
‘Our little celebratory din
‘What’re you celebrating?’
‘Just being alive. Isn’t that enough?’
Sometimes I thought it was too much, but I didn’t say that ‘Okay, I’ll be there. But don’t get the idea I’ll be making any new friends.’
‘All I ask is that you be civil to Wilhelm.’ She left it at that
They’d found hundreds more candles from somewhere and had filled every nook and cranny with them so that the Pinafore Room resembled some holy shrine. They were supplemented by two or three oil lamps in strategic positions around the room, and the heat and waxy smell took some getting used to at first Behind the thick, rich drapes daylight was fading and, despite the candleglow, there were dark shadows in the room, especially in its corners. Warm scintillas of light reflected off tall glasses and cutlery set around the long table, and cedar panelling, studded with silver buttons, on the walls and central square column lent a soft ambience to the proceedings. It was a ritzy setting for a dinner party, an evocation of more pleasant times.
I paused in the open doorway, Cagney at my side, his nose in the air, sniffing out food.
Muriel was chatting to Wilhelm Stern before a tall mirror over an empty fireplace at the far end of the room, and an elegant couple they made, she in a slim floor-length gown that shimmered silver, cut high from shoulder to shoulder, with long tight sleeves, her hair once again held to one side but this time by a decorative comb, while he wore a dark evening suit, white handkerchief, probably silk, peeping from his breast pocket, his tie a deep grey worn against a white shirt. They’d made an effort for this evening’s soirée (clinging to the wreckage?) and I was relieved to see that Potter, who’d suddenly appeared at a double door on my left, hadn’t bothered to fancy himself up at all: he still wore his warden’s all-in-one outfit, although he’d brushed it down and his helmet was nowhere in evidence.