They pulled her roughly to her feet and she felt the coldness of the automatic barrel against her neck, their hands smoothing over her, loosening the ties on her hide dress, baring her breasts, feeling at them.
'See this?' The one who had pushed his goggles up on to his forehead tapped the solid steel of the Magnum. 'Any trouble and BANG. Get it?'
She understood, nodded. The second one forced the door shut, poked at the fire. They weren't in any hurry. She let the other one undress her, didn't resist. The sooner it was over, the better. She lay back, watched as they began to take off their heavy clothing, saw how aroused they were. She turned her head away, did not want to watch.
Then they took her. And throughout the pistol was not far from her head. She closed her eyes, shuddered as they pawed at her, changed over, changed back again; kept going until they were spent.
Finally they were dressing, throwing her clothing at her. 'Get dressed, you stinking whore, you're coming with us. And when our boffins get doing things to you, you'll wish you were back here with us having the arse fucked off you!'
Jackie cried, the first time she had cried since . . . she could not remember the last time. Physical and mental hurt that had built up inside her for months suddenly bursting its dam. Sobbing, trembling, trying to fasten the thongs on her hide garments with shaking fingers.
'She cries.' The pilot gave a guttural laugh. 'Make a note of that for the files, Bill. We've heard'em scream but we've never yet found one that cried. Don't look so worried, Bill, they can't talk. But even if she did manage to squeal nobody would give a shit. They're animals.'
They pushed her ahead of them out through the door, the gun jabbing into her back. She saw the helicopter standing on a flat piece of ground that the gales which had brought the blizzards had swept clear, a huge silent metal bird of prey. And it had found its prey.
Please let me go, you've had what you want. Please! She stopped and something hard struck her across the back of the head so that she stumbled and nearly fell. She almost blacked out and then they were forcing her up the rungs of the short ladder into the helicopter, shoving her into the rear seat.
'Let's go out of this God-awful place,' the co-pilot muttered. 'I can't wait to get back to base. Hell, imagine anybody living out here.'
The chassis vibrated and Jackie clung to her seat. The man called Bill still had the pistol trained on her, maybe thought that she would attack them in a wild frenzy, afraid of a weeping girl who asked nothing else than to be freed back into this environment of death.
She felt the helicopter begin to take off, rising vertically, shuddering, straining, roaring its ferocity at the world below. A stark white unbroken landscape beneath, rolling hills that went on and on.
Jackie peered down, mutely screamed her frustration and hopelessness. It had taken her months to trek back here; she had almost made it back to her mate and then suddenly these men had appeared and were spiriting her away. Primitive fear, she wanted to leap out, to fall, to die down there in the snow. Because it was home.
Faster now, the scenic view a dazzling blur in the bright sunlight, the tops of coniferous trees dull green where they poked clear of the snow. Scattered dwellings like symmetrical buried boxes. All being left behind.
A sudden jerk that threw her forward so that she banged her head, cried out. The helicopter bucked, sent her slithering on to the floor. The two men were trying to shout to each other and she felt their fear rather than heard it, Bill's eyes wide with terror behind his thick goggles.
And at that moment the noise cut out. Nothing; just a rush of air, a sensation of dizziness, the only roaring that in her own ears.
'For fuck's sake!'
A scream, she thought it came from the pilot. Clung tightly to the stanchion of her seat, shut her eyes tightly.
'Fucking shit!' Both men were yelling, screaming, struggling desperately with levers on the instrument panel.
Plunging downwards, the rotor blades spinning slower and slower.
Jackie did not even brace herself for the inevitable impact, just saw in her mind the face which no longer eluded her, wept because she remembered more clearly than ever now, and knew that she would never see it again.
And then they hit the snow-covered hillside, bounced, slewed, the helicopter breaking up and leaving a trail of debris in its wake as it rolled downhill, finally struck an outcrop of rock and was crunched into a ball of mangled metal.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
REITZE HAD coughed and spat blood into the wash-basin that morning, then vomited, clinging on to the stand, otherwise he would have fallen. The room around him swam and he had to wait for it to steady.
He forced himself to think logically, didn't like what his thoughts came up with. The tests had proved conclusive, too conclusive. They would not be making any more tests because they had achieved the ultimate—death, the end of civilisation.
A cancerous side-effect to the skin disease, a contagious one. The reversion had only been a symptom of what was to follow. The body's resistance was lowered, vulnerable to just about anything that was going, like AIDS in a way. Severe cold had killed off most of the population and those who survived ended up with this spreading cancer that grew like couch grass in May. And if you missed it once you caught it off somebody else.
He brushed his teeth, tried to get the taste out of his mouth. It didn't work, smelled like your shit had come up the wrong way. Bastards, not just the fuckers who had started all this but the throwbacks themselves, disease-carrying apes that should have been driven into the hills in the beginning and left there. Instead they were brought in here for tests and this was what you ended up with, a dose of internal syphilis.
Reitze began to pull on his shirt, coughed again and spotted it with crimson. Even so he needed a Camel, he wouldn't gain anything by kicking the habit now.
He let himself out of his room and went down to the laboratory. There was no sign of Westcote, Barnes or Newman, and he didn't think they would be showing up.
Caldecott and his ministers had been moved across to the other centre, the one where Royalty was housed, the final bastion. The last step to preserve life as Mankind knew it.
Sketchy reports were still filtering in from the States but now winter had hit them hard too. Whole settlements of throwbacks were reported dead and there had been outbreaks of the Coughing Death reported in New York, Los Angeles and Houston. Undoubtedly it was in a lot of other places, too, but the news had not come through. Maybe nobody really wanted to know.
The Professor's lips tightened into a bloodless slit, those eyes behind the rimless lenses were no longer expressionless. He crossed to the first experimental chamber, peered in through the tiny window. One of them was stiH alive; two lay dead on the floor, their bodies streaked with pink phlegm as though haemorrhaging snails had crawled all over them. The third was sitting propped up against the far wall; for him time was running out too.
Reitze went to one of the cupboards, unlocked it and took down a red-labelled bottle, filled a syringe from it. He laughed softly to himself, heard his lungs rattle. There wasn't much time left for any of them.
There was fear in the captive's eyes when Reitze opened the door, sheer terror that had those twin orbs rolling right up until only the whites were visible, arms and legs twitching, the nearest they could get to crazy headlong flight. A rush of liquid anal wind. The bastard knows, Reitze thought. He might be the equivalent of a Stone Age man but he knows just what I'm going to do to him.