severed, blackened hands. When he realized I wasn't gonna stop, he threw the axe at me. Luckily, his aim was poor and it broke through the windshield on the passenger side, so I kept going, heading straight for him, figuring he wasn't in the mood to discuss his complaint. Well, he didn't even try to dodge me, just kept coming forward, screaming and shaking his fists; and I didn't try to avoid him either. I ran right over him, and when I stopped further down the road and looked back, I saw his naked body was still twitching. By the time I'd climbed out and walked back to him, he was trying to crawl along the gutter, his back broken, both legs crushed. It wasn't out of mercy that I put the gun to his head and fired, nor was it out of spite: those feelings didn't come into it. No, I was just carrying on as usual; I was just tidying up.
When his body finally lay at rest, I added his corpse to the rest of my cargo and took him with me.
There were other creatures I had to keep a lookout for, mainly cats and wild dogs who'd lost any road sense, but mostly I kept my eyes open for Blackshirts, who had a nasty habit of appearing when I least expected it. Although it was a big city, it was inevitable that our paths should cross from time to time. Our battles were usually short and sharp, and I always had the advantage that their sickness had slowed them down considerably.
Today was a good day though, the summer making up for winter's severity, when there were twelve-foot high snowdrifts along the streets. The sky was clear again, but a slight breeze coming in from the east was keeping things a little cooler. With my full load, I avoided craters, debris and any other wreckage along the route, heading north, the way well known to me by now. Within twenty minutes I'd reached my destination.
I drove straight up the ramp into the stadium whose stands had once held over a hundred thousand people at a time. I passed through the tunnel and emerged inside the vast arena itself. Driving past stacked gasoline cans and boxes of explosives, I headed into the centre aisle whose banks were formed by piled-high rotted corpses, turning at its centre into a narrower lane, the stink hardly bothering me these days. Occasionally I spotted movement among the heaps, the vermin disturbed but not intimidated by my presence. I used to waste time taking potshots at them, at the scavenging dogs too, but nowadays I didn't bother: when the time came, they'd burn along with the corrupted things they feasted on.
Soon I reached a clearing, the grass there long and unhealthy-looking, and I brought the diesel flatbed to a halt I stood on the running board for a while, just listening, checking around me. As I gazed over those great mounds of human debris I wondered how much more I could accomplish. Almost three long years I'd been filling this huge arena with the dead, always aware it could be no more than a token gesture.
Lime pits and thousands of cardboard coffins had been made ready in the early days of the war in case they were needed, but nobody had predicted the Blood Death. Most of the population had remained where they'd dropped. 'Cept for these people. At least they were gonna receive some kind of burial.
It didn't take long to unload this, my last haul of the day, and soon I was on my way back across London, leaving the grimy walls of Wembley Stadium behind, a place where once crowds had gathered to roar their excitement, but which was now just one huge and silent burial vault.
One day, when I was satisfied I'd done all I could, it would be their crematorium.
13
I'D CLEANED MYSELF UP and was sprawled half-naked on the bed, a glass of Scotch held on my bruised chest, cigarette in my other hand, when there was a knock on the door.
'Hoke? It's me, Muriel. Can I come in?'
I inhaled, exhaled, lifted my head and took another sip of the Scotch.
'Hoke.'
She sounded impatient. The doorhandle rattled.
With a groan, I rolled off the bed, placed the glass on the cabinet, and grabbed my pants. Cigarette drooping from the corner of my mouth, I unlocked the door and opened it a few inches. Smoke curled out into the corridor.
Muriel was wearing a different outfit, a cream blouse and loose, brown slacks, her hair drawn back on one side with a slide. She looked good - even
'You've been gone most of the day again,' she said, and there seemed little sense in replying to the obvious. After a pause: 'Can I come in for a minute?'
Leaving the door open so that the option was hers, I picked up a shirt lying across the back of an easy chair and shrugged it on. I didn't bother with the buttons, hoping her stay would be short; I sat on the edge of the bed, close to the Scotch.
Muriel closed the door behind her and stood in front of me.
'No point in asking where you went to, I suppose?' Her neat, pencilled eyebrows were raised.
'Had things to do,' was my response.
'Why so surly, Hoke? The other night...' She left it there, waving a hand in exasperation.
What could I tell her? That guilt was busting my head, making me feel Sally's presence all around me in that room? It was stupid; I knew it then, I know it now. Three years dead and I was still grieving for her, mourning for the life together we'd been denied. The whole fucking world gone to damnation and I was still focused on my own loss. And now I not only suffered the guilt of survival, but of betrayal also. It was morbid and it was irrational; but when I closed my eyes I still saw my young bride in this room with me, breathed in her perfume, heard her whispers. And I had closed my eyes.
I opened them quickly.
'We ... I... made a mistake,' was all I could think of to say, and in truth, I wasn't sure if I was addressing Muriel, or someone long since dead.
'A mistake? My God, man, don't you realize we're living in a whole new world with a different morality?
I wasn't asking for love, just comfort, compassion. I was frightened, don't you understand?'
Or staking a claim? I wondered, then hated myself for the cynicism. I dragged on the cigarette, confused, maybe even disgusted with myself. Anger was burning me.
'All right,' she said in a resigned, kind of stiff-backed voice. She was tired of reasoning with me and I couldn't blame her for that. 'I only wanted to let you know that Cissie and I have arranged a dinner party for us all downstairs in the Pinafore Room.'
I stared up at her as if she were the wacky one here.
'Hoke, we've got to put the past behind us. It's unreasonable of you to carry on despising Wilhelm Stern just because he's a German. Gracious, not only did he not personally start the war against us, but he actually played very little part in it. He was shot down and captured in 1940, for God's sake!' Her tone changed and she looked at me appealingly. 'We've got to forgive and forget, don't you see? How else can we build a new life for ourselves? Some order has to come out of all this and that can only be if we cast past grudges aside.'
She strode to the writing desk and leaned back against it, arms folded, eyes intense. 'It's time for those of us who are left to come to our senses, to introduce some kind of order to our lives. What else is there otherwise? Lawlessness? Chaos?'
Calmer now, I swung my legs up onto the bed and rested my back against the headboard so that I could watch her across the room. She was
'You don't see it's all finished?' I was genuinely surprised. 'You don't see that our so-called civilization has gone AWOL? Jesus Christ, Muriel, there's nothing left for any of us.'
'We're alive, blast you, and there are many more like us, waiting to make a fresh start, waiting for the survivors to come together again, perhaps even hoping for a new leader. It can be better than before, we can avoid the same age-old mistakes.'
Maybe she was right. That's what I thought as I smoked the cigarette, my gaze never leaving hers.
Someone had to start things rolling again and probably -
