He steered clear of survivors too. From time to time he found people who for a variety of reasons had escaped the devastation of germ warfare, had barricaded themselves in their houses and were determined to repel any invaders.
Once he was fired at with an air-rifle, a .177 slug chipping the brickwork of a low stone wall only a foot or so in front of him.
'Keep moving, you bastard!'
Savage saw the face at the upper window of a cottage on the opposite side of the road, an old man struggling to cock his weapon, trying to reload it with a shaking hand. Senile, trusting nobody. He couldn't blame him.
There were isolated troop movements. Rod Savage lay and watched them from a steep hillside. Sporadic gunfire, driving the raiders out of a blazing tract of suburbia, a couple of Green Goddesses moving in and playing their hoses on the flames. Some of the mob came back to within throwing distance, hurled stones. More shots. Two or three of them dropped, the rest ran. Guerrilla warfare; Britain was likely to be this way for a long time to come.
Occasionally Rod spied a helicopter or a light aircraft. Reconnaissance craft, maybe locating the movements of the tribes, doing a count of numbers. The remnants of civilisation had the technology to fight this war, the enemy had the advantage of numbers.
In Herefordshire he witnessed some ruthless counterattacks, commando-style, that could only be SAS manoeuvres. Three or four attackers surprised an encampment, mowed the fleeing occupants down with submachine gunfire.
Rod Savage almost threw up. Pointless slaughter. The area reeked of death.
It was early August, according to the calendar in his diary which he meticulously ticked off daily, when he finally reached his cottage outside the small market town of Knighton. The building had its usual look of dereliction which wasn't surprising, the small garden a mass of lush weeds.
He struggled with the lock and eventually the key turned. At least they had not broken in. Funny, they seemed afraid of locked houses, only raided outbuildings and open sheds.
He spent the first day straightening the interior, preparing for a long stay. He could even be here for the rest of his life. He only wished he could find out how the rest of the world had fared. Had the States reverted to pre-Columbus days, the redskins finally taking back their land from the invading white man? Europe overrun by primitive man? Syria and Lebanon fighting a meaningless war as they had done for years, the Soviet Union paying the supreme penalty for their interference?
Questions that would possibly never be answered because survival was a priority and you didn't give a damn about anybody else.
He went outside, sensed a change in the atmosphere, the coolness of a late summer evening. Soon it would be autumn. Then winter.
Winter would be the big test for everybody. The hardiness of the new race of Britons would be put to the supreme test. Would their change enable them to withstand the rigours of winter?
Only time would tell.
PART TWO
AUTUMN AND WINTER
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
PROFESSOR REITZE adjusted his rimless spectacles, surveyed the human-like creature which was chained to the wall of the small brightly-lit cell. No emotion showed on the Professor's features as he carefully checked the small syringe, plunged the long needle deep into the skin below the neck.
The victim mouthed a mute scream, tensed, but the manacles only allowed muscle movement, expansion and contraction. Reitze pressed the plunger, waited a second or two, then withdrew the needle, handed the instrument to the white-coated man at his side.
'We'll have to check him every hour.' He spoke flatly, a doctor perhaps concerned with a hospital patient's high blood pressure.
'Ugly devil, isn't he?' The second man could not disguise the revulsion he felt for the prisoner. 'The original missing link, if you ask me.'
'Maybe you're not far wrong.' Reitze stared into the throwback's eyes, saw how they rolled until the pupils virtually disappeared, egg-white without the yoke. The features were mongoloid, the body short and muscular. Water sprayed on to the tiled floor with force; the creature had emptied its bladder in its terror. 'It's like a kind of partial stroke, the brain stupefied but the body allowed full function. Just a change of skin texture, any surplus fat solidifying into muscle.'
'You reckon we can do anything?' Westcote's tone betrayed his own lack of confidence. He had spent five years at the animal research centre in Arizona. You took a cage of monkeys and injected them with drugs which, in theory, were supposed to give a certain reaction. They seldom did.
Most of the time you ended up with dead monkeys. The public protested so you were forced to keep your experiments under cover; you couldn't share success or failure with them.
*I don't know.' Reitze watched the eyes closely, saw the pupils click back down into focus. 'But it's worth a try. Anything's worth a try. In theory this should soften the arteries to the brain. These micro-organisms, and we still haven't been able to identify them, produce a kind of angina. Not fatal but slowing the blood supply to the brain. If we can open the arteries up, let the full flow of blood in, it should bring the brain almost back to normal. In theory! But of course we don't know what permanent damage has been done in the meantime.'
The victim's face was screwed up into a bestial expression of pain and fear, froth bubbling on the thick lips. Reitze wrinkled his nose. It was starting to shit itself, too. In future all specimens were to be given an enema before they were brought into the laboratories.
Westcote handed him another syringe and he moved on to where the female was pinioned. She was unsuccessfully trying to squirm; if she hadn't been given a tranquilliser a short time ago she would have been screaming. Screams were very distracting in such a confined space.
Reitze stood looking at her, almost gloating. By no means as hairy as her male counterpart there was less of a physical change in the female of the species, more a kind of coarseness as though she belonged to some hitherto undiscovered Amazon tribe. A predomination of the nipples, the vulva engorged like an animal on heat. Facially she was almost attractive, just a slight overall squatness of the features.
'It would be too much to experiment on both brain and body in the same specimen.' Reitze spoke expressionlessly, he might even have been talking to himself rather than to his companion. 'The female stands a better chance of body success. A skin softener and hair remover administered internally. It was tried in Mexico a few years ago and there was one fuck of a stink when a couple of women died. The drug was banned as a result. But I guess nobody's going to make too much of a shout if one or two of these died.'
This time he introduced the needle more gently, just a surface prick, watching her face the whole time. Teeth bit the lower lip, trickles of blood showed, dripped down on to the breasts. The eyes dilated, filled with tears. Why are you doing this to me?
You're the first of many. There'll be hundreds more, men, women and children, as fast as the security forces can bring them in. Most'11 die but we'll keep on until we get some kind of a result.
She was strangely placid now, beautifully moulded features serene, a hint of nobility in her bearing even when she was hanging from that stark wall. Proud. Reitze stiffened, seemed to sense it and it made him angry. You scum, we'll kill you if we can't cure you. He turned away abruptly.
They've been hit pretty hard back home,' Westcote said. 'Virtually the whole of New York State is wrecked, mobs on the rampage the whole time. They even had to defend the White House with heavy artillery.'