Murmurs, not dissent, but horror. Men who were accustomed to facing up to unpleasant truths found themselves backing off.
There are survivors.' Caldecott's voice quavered slightly. "Somehow we must communicate with them, reorganise them if our country is not to be annihilated by mob rule, the law of primitive Man, for our enemy is our own kind, our own people robbed of their minds, reverted to their ancestors by a cruel and unscrupulous foe. Almost every means of communication has now failed.' Don't ask me right now how we are going to reorganise because I don't know. It might be an impossibility. 'At the moment we are waiting upon Professor Reitze and his team of scientists. They are working the clock round to find a way to combat this vile and despicable means of war.'
Silence.
There wasn't anything else left to say, nothing to argue about, a government that was suddenly devoid of politics, their only manifesto one of survival. They could only wait.
Reitze checked through his notes again after the PM and the Defence Minister had left. A hint of a worried frown, his forehead creased and smoothing out, Reitze becoming his old emotionless self again. It wasn't an act, this was how he was, what made him tick. If he died tomorrow he wouldn't know anything about it so what was the use of worrying? Slight concern that perhaps they had overlooked something somewhere, something just too obvious. They would check again. And again. But he had to admit that it was a hopeless task; not conceding defeat, just accepting facts. That was the hardest part of all, admitting that you were beaten.
He lit another Camel, pressed the buzzer on his desk. A few seconds later a sliding door opened and another white-coated scientist entered, A younger man than Reitze, tall and fair-haired, eyes red-rimmed as though he hadn't slept in the last thirty-six hours, just the odd catnap on the couch in the rest-room adjoining the lab.
'Brian,' Reitze looked up, almost smiled but not quite, 'we're gonna name this one the Evolution Bug. I don't reckon we can come up with anything else now. We've just gotta check in case we missed something, but I think we've gone as far as we can go and I'll have to tell them that soon. The ultimate in mutation. If we had lived in the Stone Age that's how we would have been, immune to diseases which would destroy mankind today and these throwbacks are just the same. Immune to anything we can give them because their body cells will resist everything. Evolution is the only answer, civilisation will have to start all over again! In a million years' time they'll be finding skeletons and scratching their heads, wondering how the hell civilisation reached its peak and went back again. I'm wondering whether those who have escaped can survive, even the bastards who started all this. We will be the ones without body resistance, diseases developing which modern medicine has never come across.'
'I see.' Brian Newman nodded. 'As a matter of fact that occurred to me but I kept it to myself.'
'We'll have to do just that. There's no point in panicking everybody and if we're right there's not a goddamn thing you or I or anybody else can do about it. In the meantime we just keep on working, hoping. And if you're a praying man, pray.'
Reports came in slowly over the next few days. The Continent had suffered badly, West Germany, France and Italy in chaos. Switzerland seemed to have fared better than most due to government legislation that all new houses had to be fitted with fall-out shelters. No warning except that strange and terrible things were befalling the French and Italians so the Swiss had dived for cover.
Nothing at all from the eastern-bloc countries. No communications. They might have been wiped out, they might be lurking safely below ground. There was no way of telling. The Kremlin was silent.
Rankine studied the large-scale maps in the operations room. The number of pins was increasing hourly, most of them red ones. The majority of survivors in remote rural parts had no way of contacting the authorities, probably did not even realise that anybody except themselves had survived. They would be fighting their own battles, rabbits living in warrens, isolated pockets of sanity until madness prevailed.
Fires were going unchecked, raging through towns and cities. The injured suffered and died agonising deaths because there was nobody to help them. But there was a pattern of behaviour amongst the new semi-human race. Like rats leaving doomed ships, they fled the built-up areas. Buildings were foreign to their nature, their in-born fear of anything beyond their basic understanding driving them out to the few wild places that remained in Britain.
The first step of a new evolution was beginning.
CHAPTER EIGHT
JACKIE QUINN followed where the man she knew as Kuz led. Through the night, along a main road, not knowing what it was or why it was there, making detours when they approached a village or hamlet.
In their wake came some twenty or thirty men and women, some of whom had started the journey with them from First Terrace, others they had picked up on the way. From the mists of time civilisation has always bowed to leaders, sought the security of another's decisions. And Kuz was one of those leaders.
They travelled at a fast walking pace, not slowing, not showing any signs of tiredness, and when dawn came they saw the rolling range of hills beyond. Kuz changed direction slightly, heading towards those bracken-covered slopes, and Jackie sensed the eagerness of the others, experienced the feeling herself; that of a traveller returning from a very long journey, weary, but on sighting his home in the distance is at once refreshed, hastening his arrival, that last mile seemingly ten, a mirage that you thought you would never reach.
The hills were home, nobody questioned that as they followed a narrow winding track through the new growth of bracken and heather. The sun climbed higher, beat down on them with a sadistic mercilessness, clouds of black flies swarming, settling on the thick hair of the travellers. Bees hunted relentlessly for pollen, and once a single grouse whirred up from beneath their feet, planed down the long slope and alighted when it thought it was safe.
They were high up now, 1,500 feet at least, below them the long valley with its wide main road littered with crashed and abandoned vehicles, a set of traffic lights that winked red, amber and green reflections in the bright sunlight as though they carried on working in defiance of everything around them. Moving dots signified people, others returning to the wild after a foray into the brick and concrete jungles of an unknown world, not knowing why they had been there in the first place.
Kuz had smelled the stream, then heard the trickling of clear fresh water, tearing his way through a thick barrier of brambles to reach it, throwing himself down full-length on the shallow bank and slurping noisily. The others followed, would have done so whether they were thirsty or not because it was expected of them. Animals at a watering hole, all else forgotten.
Suddenly Kuz sprang to his feet, roared at them, his squat features black with fury. They cowered, understood, whimpered their apologies. Two cut away, walked up a small grassy mound and shaded their eyes in every direction whilst the remainder returned to their interrupted drink. Their leader's message was only too clear: a guard must be mounted at all times so that they were not surprised by a lurking enemy.
Kuz rose and they all rose, shaking the water from themselves, their hair glistening with droplets. Then they were moving on. There was to be no respite.
Once they came upon another bunch of their own kind, the two groups regarding one another suspiciously from a distance of twenty yards. There was no exchange of greetings, just hostile stares and a mute agreement to go their own ways.
The climb was becoming much steeper now, Jackie felt her leg muscles beginning to pull but the idea of resting was dismissed; so long as Kuz kept going so would she. Travelling on all-fours for the last hundred yards or so, grabbing tussocks of coarse grass to pull themselves up by. And then they saw the caves.