Rod Savage began to piece the story together with the aid of his transistor and CB radio. The CB had served him well in the past, you could listen in to-all kinds of conversations, and he had been the first reporter on the scene of those macabre Muswell Hill murders simply because he had picked up a snippet from a police radio. Illegal, but in Rod's book of rules the end justified the means. You only got the top stories by sticking your neck out.
Radio broadcasts continued for a few days, national and local. There was a lot of confusion at first, the general opinion being that the western world had suffered a Soviet nuclear attack but there were no fireballs, no total destruction of populated areas. Just civilisation gone berserk.
Rod began to compile his notes systematically, sellotaped a large-scale road map to the wall, and using red and black ballpoints formed an overall picture of the state of the UK.
The centre of Birmingham had been gutted by fire and the inferno was still raging unchecked, mostly spread by exploding petrol tanks in abandoned vehicles. Casualties were virtually ignored because the rescue forces were primarily intent on saving 'survivors1. Mobs clashed and fought using weapons that created hideous injuries, shards of glass from broken shop windows and steel girders used as battering rams. No petrol bombs; gunsmiths' shops were ignored because the significance of firearms was not realised.
Gunfire from the small army patrols threw the rioters into a state of terror, had them fleeing and trampling their own kind in their stampede to escape the hail of lead. Yet the armed forces were so outnumbered that artillery counted for little; they were not bent on wholesale slaughter, only killing in self-defence. It transpired that there were more survivors than one would have thought possible; underground workers, miners, and those who had escaped for no apparent reason. The unprecedented storms and gales had been the one reason why the casualty rate had not been close on 100 per cent. Freak weather of the kind which brought about catastrophes in tropical countries had swept across the Atlantic, wreaking havoc but dispersing the micro-organisms out into the North Sea. Otherwise the poisoned atmosphere might have lingered for days, even weeks. Now it was gone, leaving behind it a civilisation thrown back to the state of its early ancestry.
Vehicles littered every street, fresh food stores were looted, but the rampagers were ignorant of canned or processed foodstuffs. Livestock were slaughtered in rural areas. Disease would follow surely, for decomposing corpses lay in their hundreds in every town and city; it was to be seen how resistant this new species of mankind was. Starvation was inevitable. Would they then turn to cannibalism?
The Royal Family had been safely transferred to the top-security underground headquarters in Hertfordshire. Helicopters were being used to air-lift survivors from urban areas, and 'safety regions' were being set up away from the towns, mostly fairly remote villages taken over by the army with defences erected to repel primitive hostile forces. Modern man had to be protected from the 'throwbacks' at all costs if civilisation was to survive.
Gradually, painstakingly, Rod Savage pieced together an overall picture. After radio transmission had petered out, and his CB went dead, he had to rely on forays into London itself. A fugitive, he dodged both the hate—and fear-crazed crowds as well as the rescue patrols. The last thing he wanted was to be forcibly hauled out of here. He would go when he was ready and not until.
Returning to his basement refuge at night he typed up his notes by candlelight, developed the photographs which he had taken. One bulging pseudo-leather briefcase contained the whole inside story and he slept with it in his sleeping bag.
The crowds were gradually leaving the city, dispersing into the home counties, an exodus from the concrete battlefields where flies swarmed on the bodies of the stain, where the stench of death and blood was overpowering.
The night he heard them rattling the door of his basement hideout, Rod Savage knew that it was time for him to be leaving, too. He left the next day, moving cautiously along deserted streets, a fugitive who would become a beast of the chase if he was spotted, clutching his briefcase to him for he owed its contents to the remnants of a civilised society. It was also worth an awful lot of money.
It was towards midday that he spied the low-flying helicopter, managed to attract the pilot's attention. Half an hour later he was gratefully breathing in the fresh sweet Essex air of Roydon, a picturesque village that now resembled a fortress, surrounded by barbed-wire fortifications and electric fences, the houses rehabilitation centres for the rescued, shocked men, women and children who were faced with the task of rebuilding society. It was going to be a long process, perhaps generations, always under the threat of attack from the wild tribes which inhabited the fields and hills.
Rod Savage had no intention of remaining here. The information he was busily gathering was far from complete. There was very little news of what was happening in Wales and he was determined to go back to his cottage and find out. It would be a long and dangerous trek, almost two hundred miles across terrain as it might have been thousands of years ago, with death an everyday occurrence.
He checked his roadmap again; the area to the west of the Midlands was virtually blank, terra incognita. The borderlands, hiils and tracts of moorland which would surely be teeming with squat hairy people who had gone back in time. But he would go all the same.
A week later Rod left the Roydon camp, a POW making an escape bid, for nobody was allowed to venture outside the perimeter. He cut a strand of barbed-wire, crawled on his stomach for over a hundred yards, dragging his briefcase with him. He had had second thoughts about taking it along; he might be killed, it might get stolen, but nevertheless it was unfinished work, his work, and, unlike his Falklands mission, there was nobody he could entrust it to. In all probability he would never return to Roydon. So he took it with him.
A warm moonless night, reaching the motorway and following the hard shoulder, ready to dive into the undergrowth at the first sign of anybody approaching. Multiple crashes, the stink of rotting flesh from the victims who had not been taken away. Carnage, prowling foxes slinking in to feed on the bodies under the cover of darkness; rats scurrying in and out of the battered vehicles.
This was Britain in the eighties, the start of the apocalypse, the New Stone Age.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
JACKIE COULD not get the prisoner out of her mind that night. She listened to Kuz's breathing; knew that he slept heavily. Instinctively she edged away from him, afraid of him. So fierce, so possessive, she had witnessed his anger amongst the others, seen how he had frightened them into subservience. They all lived in dread of him, not so much for what he had done but because of what he might do. There was no way of guessing that until it happened, and when it did she hoped she wasn't around.
A new side of him had emerged today although she had long been aware of its existence. Cruelty! He was more than cruel, sadistic; enjoyed inflicting pain on others. He hadn't needed to jab the prisoner with the sharp fork but he had done it because he liked doing it, had laughed behind his thick beard when the other had winced, half cried out. And she knew now that he liked hurting her too. He had done so only a very short time ago.
There was no gentleness in Kuz's advances. When lust was upon him he took her, neither expected nor accepted any response. His personal pleasure was all that mattered to him, she was an object to fulfil his primitive desires, nothing else. Her body screamed for orgasm but all too often he cast her roughly to one side seconds after he had climaxed. Let me sleep, woman, for I am tired. I will teli you when I need you again.