Philip stopped the car and they pored over the map.
'East Anglia's going to be a death-trap,' Betty said. 'Look – even if 100 metres is grossly exaggerated, to give a safety margin, places like Bury and Cambridge are way below it… And right now we've got the Ely fens between us and the high ground. If we don't get the hell out of it, it'll be a toss-up whether the water or the stampede from the coast hits us first.'
'Double back south of Cambridge?' Philip suggested.
'I'd say it's the only way. Drive all night – we can take it in turns to sleep. And not stop till we're well into Bedfordshire or Northants.'
Tonia took her turn at driving but they only slept one at a time; with hazards every kilometre in the shape of wrecked cars, refugee bottlenecks (especially in the villages) and the occasional fissure, they needed at least two pairs of eyes. It took them some time to find a way across the Cam upstream of Cambridge because the first two bridges they tried were down. In the end they had to cross by the A 14, where the refugee stream was thicker but at least moving. As soon as they were over, they left it again, taking the side-roads towards Abbotsley and St Neots.
Another advantage of the side-roads was petrol. It could no longer be bought but there were wrecked cars everywhere from whose tanks petrol could be siphoned. On the main roads most of them had already been drained dry but full or half-full tanks were still to be found in the quieter places and Philip topped up at every opportunity. One family saloon from which he took the last three or four litres had hit a tree head-on (the road surface had tilted sideways by five degrees or more) and there were still two bodies in it, a man and a woman crushed by the impact and covered in dried blood. The sight of them, and the fumes of petrol in his mouth as he sucked at the siphoning-tube to start the flow, combined to make him vomit. But he managed to complete his task, and on a quixotic impulse used about half the salvaged petrol to turn the wreck into a funeral pyre. Betty and Tonia, who had stayed in the car, did not ask him why.
By the afternoon of the second day they had found a surprisingly quiet little wood west of Kettering where they decided they must stop and sleep because their exhaustion was beginning to make driving unsafe. Two other refugee families were camped in the wood but they were obviously unaggressive, and just as exhausted. And most important of all, none of them had the bronchitic coughing and wheezing they had heard so much since yesterday – the symptoms of a Dust-breather. So there was no danger, from them, of the sudden violent madness which was the terrible secret that Philip's little group nursed.
Since yesterday morning they had seen many thousands of refugees as well as those who clung stubbornly to ruined homes and had had personal contact with dozens of them.
One thing they had found heart-rending and one disturbing.
The heart-rending fact was that, in the face of universal disaster, people had been astonishingly cooperative with each other, astonishingly willing to give and receive help. Frayed tempers there had been, naturally, and the occasional selfish bully; but in general people had seemed eager to prove and to be reassured that even if Nature had turned on them, human nature at least had reserves of unity and ingenuity that might save something from the wreck. What tipped the balance in favour of non-aggression was that at least three-quarters of the refugees were already more or less ill with Dust 'bronchitis'. The healthy ones were anxiously making allowances for them and trying to nurse them through what they had no reason to believe would be more than a bad period of illness – for the Premier's broadcast had not hinted at anything worse. Philip, Betty, and Tonia, only too aware of the truth that all would soon know, found this unwittingly forlorn hope, this doomed tenderness, almost unbearable to watch.
The disturbing fact was that the anti-witch hysteria, which Betty had hoped would be less evident away from the hothouse environment of the Beehive mess, had not been swept aside by the disaster. It was not universal, certainly, but here and there it was virulent. In more than one village, they had passed fanatical street orators (Crusaders, probably, they thought) haranguing listeners on the responsibility of the witches for the visitation of God's wrath – and gathering surprisingly large and sympathetic audiences. Outside Sharnbrook, they had passed the most dreadful sight of alclass="underline" the bodies of an elderly woman and a teenage girl hanging from a makeshift gallows, with 'WITCH' placards round their necks. Philip wanted to stop and cut them down but Tonia, who was driving at the time, accelerated suddenly past them.
'Hell, we can't just leave them there!' Philip pleaded.
‘We can, you know,' Tonia said grimly. 'You didn't see what I did – the two guys along the hedge with shotguns. Reception committee for guys like us… It's rough, Phil, but it looks like the human race is sorting itself out into the- living, the mad and the dead. Let's concentrate on Category One, huh? Otherwise we might join Category Three.'
'She's right, you know, darling,' Betty said. 'If there'd been a chance to save them, we might have had a bash. While they were still alive, I mean. But we'll get no thanks for saving corpses.'
Philip had to agree but the vision of the two dangling bodies still haunted him as they settled down to sleep in the quiet wood, huddled under blankets in the car seats. Some time during the hours that followed they invaded his dreams, vividly, and their twisted features were those of Betty and Tonia. He woke gasping, to find himself held tightly in Betty's arms as she tried to soothe him.
'Sorry,' he muttered. 'Nightmare.'
'I know, love,' Betty whispered. 'I've been listening to it. Try not to wake Tonia… I'm glad she's with us, aren't you? Makes us stronger.'
He drifted back into sleep, wondering confusedly what she meant by that.
They all three woke at first light, having slept the clock round through sheer weariness, but stiff with discomfort. They lit a small fire in a clearing, gathering sticks from the woodland and crouched and stamped round it till they got warm. Betty managed to get. a saucepan of water hot enough to make instant coffee; they had sugar but no milk but the black sweet liquid refreshed them. Breakfast was a strange mixture – a tin of herrings in tomato sauce followed by one of sliced peaches. Tins and jars had been the only usable stores in Betty's ruined kitchen; bread, milk, butter, cheese and vegetables had been a long-decayed mess.
'We're going to have to do better than this,' she said. '… Phil – you're the only one who's read the official reports. When does the Madness start?'
'After about three days, in brief fits. By the fifth or sixth day it's continuous.' He felt a new vigour this morning, a new sense of realism; yesterday he could not even have discussed it without tension but today he could answer calmly. 'The violence, that is – there may be bouts of harmless delirium before that. The pattern's pretty uniform, apparently. As I remember, eighty-seven per cent of the cases in the Emergency Units followed that three-day, five-day timetable. The rest took a little longer – up to a week for the whole development.'
'So we've got till tomorrow morning to take cover somewhere.'
'Looks like it.'
'And for looting,' Tonia said. 'Looting?'
"What else? You don't imagine anyone's interested in money any more, do you? And we can't take cover without food.'
Philip sighed. True enough. It's just the word… Still, we might as well call a spade a bloody spade… Not from the living, though. The way the towns collapsed, there must be enough ownerless shops in them.'
'And fields in the country,' Betty pointed out. 'We've passed God knows how many hectares of vegetables. And it's been a good year for blackberries… Another thing -there'll be cows to milk with too few people to milk them, especially as it'll have to be by hand. I wish I could.'
'I can,' Tonia said unexpectedly. 'Learned when I was a kid, on vacation on my uncle's farm. Might come in useful at last.'