He recalled the first time it had happened with himself and Jackie, back in their courting days when life was nice and boring. They had been parked up in a field gateway one autumn night, had almost been scared to go the whole way but eventually they had gone too far to back down. Both of them scared, tense, in case they proved to be a disappointment to the other. Let's fuck and get it over with, for Christ's sake.
He always reckoned that she had faked an orgasm that night. He'd nearly had to do just that himself, had to make a concerted physical effort to achieve his climax. Hard work for both of them. That was what marriage was all about, working at everything to make it work. Crazy, but it was no good on your own.
Sylvia was asleep, he could tell by her heavy rhythmic breathing. He started to feel sorry for her. Sooner or later she would find out just what was going on out there and then she'd really need him. It might serve to bring them together.
Suddenly he was aware of something outside the workings of his own grasshopper mind, a noise that infiltrated his fantasies, wilted his erection. A distant baying sound, rising to a wailing pitch, so that it vibrated the night air like an electric storm, brought with it a lowering of the body temperature as your terror began. Dogs, at least Jon supposed they were canine, beasts of the chase running down their prey just as they had pursued Gilbert, pulled him down, torn the flesh from the goat's bones whilst it still lived, its screams growing weaker and weaker until death finally released it from its agonies. Then silence.
A silence that revealed a far more insidious noise, one that was closer than the forest on the skyline, one that chilled his blood almost to freezing point. He stiffened, listened and tried to relate the sounds to those who made them. Padding bare footsteps, a snuffling of breath like a jungle hunting beast trying to scent its prey. A metallic click, following by the creaking of rusted hinges; the shed door opening, another foray amongst the tools on the workbench.
He almost got out of bed, went to the window, tried to see these creatures of the night. No, he didn't want to see! His brain conjured up a vision of old Gwyther, those mad eyes, the killing look. Enough to drive a man right out of his mind because they had no right to exist on this earth.
Lying there, forced to listen, trying to make out how many of them there were. It was impossible to tell, a bunch of them certainly, maybe as many as a dozen. Bestial intruders.
Another click, a rattling: the latch on the front door. Please, Jesus, no, Jon remembered that the twelve-bore was still down in the porch, cursed himself for not bringing it upstairs. His reaction was to pull the sheets up over his head, shut himself off from the outside world, just himself and Sylvia. We don't belong here, they won't see us, won't harm us.
They'll kill you if they find you.
He could still hear them at the door, scraping the woodwork with ragged fingernails trying to find some way in, one of them wheezing as though he had asthma. Sylvia was still asleep, thank God. If they got inside then there was no hope for either of them, just brutal death. Jon wanted to clasp his hands over his ears, didn't want to hear them when they came up the stairs.
And suddenly he couldn't hear them at all, no stealthy footfalls, no stertorous breathing. Total silence. Even those animals up in the forest had stopped howling; a total cessation of those awful nocturnal activities.
It was some time before he realised that those semi-human beings had gone. He lay listening but there were no further sounds; nothing at all.
A reprieve, no more. They had discovered this place, knew that survivors were hiding out there.
And sooner or later they would return.
CHAPTER TEN
ROD SAVAGE had one regret and that was the fact that there was no newspaper still running which could print his feature article. When one is a leading freelance journalist, and has managed to escape from a London seething with primitive fury and death, then it is a major disaster to have an eye-witness account of happenings with nowhere to publish it.
Tall and lean, with sparse hair, balding faster now that he was past forty, he was rarely seen without a pipe in his mouth, most of the time unlit, the tobacco juice in the bowl bubbling every time he drew on it. A loner, he devoted his life to coming up with unusual and sensational articles, acquiring inside information which had on more than one occasion raised the eyebrows of officialdom.
Had he been a religious man he would have been convinced that God had spared him so that he might chronicle events which had, in fact, thrown Britain into a state of civil war. But he was an atheist and attributed the fact that he had been spared to coincidence, but he was determined to capitalise on it. One day things had to return to some kind of normality and when that happened there would be a paper somewhere only too eager to publish his story. He might even stretch it into a book.
Rod Savage had no permanent residence outside his cottage in Wales, a little two-up, two-down stone building to which he retired at infrequent intervals. Usually he rented a bedsit or small flat in the metropolis on a six-month lease and then moved on. No ties, he often quoted, was the secret of a successful journalist.
The basement flat in Finchley had been vacant for over a year, which was hardly surprising when one viewed its state of dereliction. The landlord was biding his time, waiting for the flats on the upper storeys to be vacated by their dissatisfied tenants and then the whole building would be renovated and put on the market. In the meantime he was not prepared to spend money on either repairs or decorations. But he was not averse to letting the basement on a weeky basis for cash.
Savage had wrinkled his nose at the smell of damp, noted that the only two windows had been broken and boarded up so that it was necessary to keep the electric light on the whole time. Unfit for human habitation, it might even have been condemned had its state been brought to the notice of the authorities, but the rent was less than half what he would have paid elsewhere. A sleeping bag and something to cook on were all that Rod Savage required; there was no lease involved for obvious reasons and the rent was paid in cash on a Friday. Convenient, he could come and go as he pleased, did not even have to give notice when he was moving on elsewhere.
A month later he went down with flu. Nothing to do with his living conditions, damp and airless, he told himself, just a virus he had picked up, possibly on the crowded undergrounds; nothing to get worried about, all you did was go to bed and let the fever run its course.
It was a bad attack all right, several days of feverishness, lying in that darkened basement flat, followed by a week of resting, noting a gradual improvement. Once he had almost made the effort to go outside and ask somebody to call a doctor but he didn't because he had no faith in GPs. All they did was to pack you with drugs which could produce very nasty side-effects. He also had a fear of hospitals and some well-meaning doctor might order him to be removed to one. He would fight the illness his own way.
So he just sweated it out, felt his strength returning, and by the time he was able to go outside the city was caught up in a frenzy of destruction and looting, tribal warfare that went back at least four thousand years to the days when London was no more than a cluster of stone-built huts.