The Eternal War

CHAPTER 57

2001, Dead City

Sal felt a hand on her shoulder, tugging her insistently. ‘Wake! Now!’ She looked up to see one of Samuel’s pack, one of the ‘apes’. She recognized it as the one that had carried her here the night before last.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Them … come!’

Sal sat up on her bed, a loosely gathered pile of grubby coal sacks, to see the entire pack awake and hastily scrambling to gather their few possessions. She saw Lincoln sitting up beside her, just as confused and muddled from being so rudely awoken.

‘What the devil’s happening now?’ he growled.

Samuel padded over. ‘They’re here already! Sholdiersh! They coming! We musht leave!’ He reached down for Sal’s hand.

‘Please!’ She refused to get up. ‘Why don’t you just run! Me and Abraham will go to the soldiers … we’ll tell them we’re OK!’

Samuel looked for the briefest moment like he was considering that suggestion. But then he reached for her hand again. ‘No … you come with me!’

She snatched her hand back. ‘No!’

The eugenic muttered a curse under his breath. He turned to the ape standing beside him. ‘Get them up!’ He turned to address the others. ‘Let’sh go!’

Samuel led the way out of the coal cellar. The ape yanked Sal and Lincoln to their feet. ‘You come!’ he rumbled, pushing them both in front of him.

They climbed a flight of stone steps out of the cellar and crossed the creaking wooden floor of what was once a lounge. From the meagre daylight seeping in through shuttered windows, Sal saw old tall-backed armchairs draped with dust covers, a wall lined with books quietly mouldering away.

They were in a hallway, morning light streaming in through an open front door. Then they were stumbling down porch steps, through an overgrown front yard and past a rusting gate on to a wide weed-choked avenue flanked on either side by tall three-storey town houses, with proud verandas and entrance porticoes.

She caught a glimpse of wooden boards nailed over windows and front doors, the faded red-paint lettering of plague and infections warnings hurriedly scrawled decades ago.

Ahead of them she could see Samuel scooting along the avenue — a curious shambling gait — hunched over like a primate, his disproportionately short legs working so very hard to keep him ahead of his pack of ‘apes’, slender ‘salamanders’ and several other eugenic types.

She noticed several miniature ones, no more than a foot and a half tall, with slender bodies like meerkats, but bald and pale like all the others, and with similarly loaf-shaped skulls. They were all wearing the same miniature striped overalls and she suspected they must have been some sort of work team. She wondered what sort of mundane job they’d been designed for. Every now and then, to keep up, they used their arms, running like macaque monkeys. She heard their frightened gabbling, their twittering voices using pidgin English words.

Behind them, coming from some way down the end of the avenue and round a corner, Sal heard the echoing rattle of gunshots and the high-pitched death rattle of something brought down. A eugenic from one of the other packs, she guessed.

They’re close!

They scrambled together along the avenue until they came to an intersection. In front of them Sal saw a grand old redbrick building with marble columns supporting a large entrance portico. A clock tower stretched proudly from its roof. She guessed it might once have been a courthouse, or a library, or some building with a public purpose. Before it, decorative gardens had gone truly wild and native … gardens fronted by a low stone wall that still boasted patches of blistering and peeling white paint. On it she saw a faded street sign on a rusted plaque:

ROBERT E. LEE UNIVERSITY

Samuel was frantically waving his spindly arms to the left. ‘Thish way!’ he screamed. ‘Thish way! Hurry!’

From side streets and spilling out of the open doorways of abandoned homes other packs emerged to join them.

They were on a much wider avenue now, but it was cluttered with abandoned carts and old automobiles. Panic had swept through this city long ago, streets and avenues congested with civilians desperate to leave. Carts laden with suitcases, valuable heirlooms and gilt-framed family portraits had been left to rot, weather and fade out in the open.

NORTH CHARLES STREET. Now a graveyard of vehicles, and, yes … here and there she could see bleached bones, the dark leather of desiccated skin and tufts of hair in among the iron spokes of cartwheels and rusting chassis.

They’d just begun to pick their way through the jam of long-dead vehicles, when they heard the rattle of gunfire again. It sounded closer than last time. Sal wrenched her hand free of the ape that had been clasping it.

‘NO!’ she shouted. ‘Please! Just let us go!’

The ape grappled with her, hoisted her up and held her under one arm.

Samuel led the way through the barricade of vehicles and finally stopped. The clutter was slowing them down too much. He took a turning off the broad avenue into a smaller alleyway. The others followed him. He stopped and slumped against a brick wall, gasping and wheezing, exhausted from the last few minutes of running. Such a small body, with lungs and a heart not designed for this kind of exertion. The other eugenics crowded round his panting form, waiting for him to recover, waiting for further instructions.

‘GO!’ he gasped. ‘GO! There’sh no time to wait for me. Go! GO!’

‘But which way, Sam?’ asked one of them.

‘Go north!’

‘Which way izzat north?’ asked one of the salamanders.

‘North!’ He pointed up at the strip of sky above the alleyway. ‘Keep the shun, the shun up there! In the shky … keep it on your right!’ he said, slapping his right shoulder for those in his group that didn’t know their lefts from their rights. ‘Keep the shun … on that shide of you!’ he gasped. ‘Now GO!’

Several of the eugenics did as they were told and shambled off reluctantly down the alleyway towards a smaller intersection at the far end, looking over their shoulders unhappily … hoping Samuel was following close behind.

The ape holding Sal and dragging Lincoln by the arm, hesitated to leave Samuel as some of the others waivered uncertainly, shuffling from one foot to the other.

‘Sam? You come too?’

Samuel flapped his hands. ‘Go … all of you … jusht go!’

Sal wriggled. ‘Let me go! Please!’

The ape’s voice growled. ‘Sam … you come too?’

‘I … can’t … keep … up … any more.’

Coming from further down North Charles Street, they heard more gunshots and the screams of eugenics brought down. It seemed the whole city was beginning to stir to life with creatures emerging from their bolt-holes in blind panic, like rats leaving a sinking ship. Sal suspected the city had been home to far more than the hundred and fifty or so they’d seen at the theatre meeting.

The gunshots seemed to be echoing from different ends of the avenue. The soldiers were coming from all directions, tightening a noose round them.

Sal looked up at the ape’s face. ‘Put me down! Let us go, and pick Sam up instead!’

The ape nodded, loosening his hold on Sal. ‘I carry you!’

The small eugenic shook his oversized head. ‘No … but … do ash she shaid. Let ’em both go.’

The ape placed Sal down and released Lincoln’s wrist. Lincoln snarled with relief and rubbed his arm where the brute’s hand had been wrapped round it.

Sam sighed. ‘You go to thoshe sholdiersh if you want.’

Sal remained where she was. She knelt down in front of Sam. ‘Sam, you’ve got to run now!’ she said. ‘Me and Abraham, we’ll stop them, stall them somehow. Buy you some time! But you’ve got to leave now!’

His brow creased. Confused. ‘You want me to eshcape?’ he wheezed.

‘Yes!’ She looked at Lincoln. ‘Yes, we do, don’t we?’

He nodded. ‘Odd creature as you are, I see in you — ’ he looked for the right words — ‘I see in you admirable qualities, sir. A good soul.’ He knelt down beside Sal. ‘Better than quite a few I’ve met.’

Sam looked up at him, wide-eyed. ‘Never been called shir before.’

They heard gunfire and shrieking from the far end of the alley. Sal turned to see the eugenics who’d headed down that way doubling back to rejoin them. Beyond their shambling forms at the far intersection she saw a row of four-legged creatures, like hunting dogs, but no … not quite. Behind them, a row of uniformed men with guns. The far end of the alley was blocked off.

‘Shadd-yah!’ She shared a glance with Lincoln.

What do we do?

The alleyway — it was little more than a rat-run — lay in the dark shadow between two old brick-built tenement blocks. Most of the windows and doors were boarded up, but some of the boards had worked loose and fallen away. The creatures could lose themselves inside those buildings, hide in the gloomy labyrinth of rooms and hallways, but only for a while. They’d be trapped in there.

She heard noises from North Charles Street: soldiers pulling the jam of vehicles roughly aside. The splintering crack of old cartwheel spokes, the groan of stressed rusting metal being dragged to the kerbside. They were busy clearing a way through the traffic jam.

And then she felt it … a cold tickle on her cheek. She felt it again. Moisture.

I’m not crying, am I?

She felt a cold tingle on the back of her hand and looked at Lincoln. A snowflake was fluttering lazily between them, seesawing down.

‘Snowing?’ grunted Lincoln.

It was. More dancing flakes of snow descended around them. She looked up at the narrow strip of daylight above and saw nothing but blue sky. For a moment her mind instinctively queried why, how, it could snow on a sunny September morning … then a dark form obscured the sky. The alleyway dimmed as the blue vanished to be replaced with the smooth dark copper hull of some gigantic vessel.

‘They here now,’ said the ape, looking up, his small eyes wide as pennies.