crawling, some stooped and bent, stumbling as if with age, a whining coming from them that was more frightening than piteous. In that moment of abject fear, it was hard to think of these unsteady, shambling figures as fellow humans, wretches who had had no time to shelter properly from the disaster and its disease-carrying aftermath, for they came at the three survivors like lepers escaping their colony, like hunched demons rising from unhallowed earth, like the undead reaching out to embrace and initiate the living ...
It was too much for Fairbank and McEwen, one trauma too many in that day of traumas. They backed away.
The ravaged faces, fully revealed in the torches' combined glare, pleaded for pity, for compassion, for relief from their suffering.
'Culver, there's too many of them. We can't help them all!' Fairbank's voice was shaky with its own special pleading.
'We can't stay here,' McEwen added from further away. The radiation count is too high! If we don't leave now we'll end up like these people!'
One figure, a woman, finding some last vestige of strength, lurched forward and clung to Fairbank.
'... nnleasennnnnn ..' she implored.
He reflexively pushed her away and she fell to the floor, a weak cry escaping her. Fairbank took a step towards her as if instantly regretting his action, a hand reaching out. The moans of others changed his mind.
'It's no good, Culver,' he said wearily. 'We can't help them. There's too many.' He turned and broke into a stumbling run towards the front of the store, chocolate bars and sweets tumbling from his overloaded pockets.
A hand scraped against Culver's cheek. He flinched, but did not pull away from the feverish man he knelt beside.
'Don't... leave us ...' the man whispered.
Culver took the hot trembling fingers from his face and held them. There's nothing we can do for you right now,' he told him, and added lamely: We've got a doctor among us. If she's agreeable, we'll bring her back; she may be able to do something for you.'
The man's grip suddenly strengthened. 'No ... no ... you can't...' His other hand, wavering but determined, clutched at Culver's collar.
Another weight fell across the pilot's shoulders.
Culver toppled onto his side, the other person bearing down on him, the man beneath pulling, refusing to let go. Culver groaned, a sharp, harsh sound, almost one of pain, and he struggled against them, quickly shrugging the weight
from his shoulders, grabbing the other man's wrists and slowly prising the hand away from his jacket.
The man's other hand, still gripping his, was less easy to dislodge and for one insane moment Culver considered using the gun. It would have meant instant release for him and instant relief for the radiation victim. But whatever it took for such an act, it was not in him. Not yet.
He squeezed the man's wrist unmercifully, and the claw-like fingers gradually opened. Culver broke free, rising to his feet, almost stumbling over a figure that had crawled up from behind. He avoided the grasping hand.
Tm sorry!' he shouted, and then he was running, staggering after the others, his only thought to be away from this dark limbo between life and death and away from these poor wretches whose best hope was to die sooner rather than later.
He heard their wailing cries, and he thought he heard footsteps coming after him, but he did not stop to look around until he was at the foot of the slope. His two companions were already through the narrow opening at the top, Fairbank reaching back to help him, his face a confused mask of fear and shame.
This is crazy, Culver told himself. They're just people, our own kind, injured and disease-ravaged; not lepers, not unclean, and not dangerous. Why then were he, Fairbank and McEwen so afraid? He looked back and the answer was there. The shuffling, imploring figures were the incarnation of extreme human distress, the material results of the long-awaited, feared and fearful holocaust. The nightmare come true.
And who could face their own nightmare?
Culver leapt at the slope, Fairbank grabbing his hand and yanking him upwards. He was through the opening, warm
rain and grey light enveloping him as he rolled down the other side, not stopping until he had reached the bottom, and even then rolling to a crouched position, facing the store as if expecting the dream to follow. Only Fairbank came sliding down to join him. McEwen stood a few yards away, poised to run.
'I guess there were just too many, right?' Fairbank said, clapping him on the shoulder.
Culver shuddered. ‘Yeah, too many.' He straightened. We'll get back to them. Dr Reynolds can give them drugs, medicines, anything to ease it for them.'
'Sure,' Fairbank replied.
'Maybe one or two will pull through.'
Fairbank wiped rain from his forehead and nose. He spat into the muddied dirt at his feet. We'd better get to the shelter.'
He walked away leaving Culver staring up at the few visible letters of the store name and the narrow gap beneath. The mausoleum's name was wort.
Culver caught up with the others as they squeezed between a bus, all its windows smashed, red paint in the front blistered and flaky, and a sky-blue van, the bottom of its side panels already showing rust. He tried to avert his eyes from the rotted corpse of the bus driver, thrown back in his cab, hands still on the driving wheel as though he had insisted upon carrying his passengers right up to the very doors of eternity. Culver tried not to look, but eyes can be skittishly curious. Glass shards impaled the figure, gleaming from the body like diamonds in an underground rock face, the largest segment neatly dividing the man's face in half. Something low in Culver's stomach did a mushy backflip and he forced himself to concentrate on the two men in front. McEwen was walking unsteadily, using the bonnets and tops of cars for support, geiger counter slapping against one hip, rain-soaked shoulders hunched forward.
Fairbank, who had turned to see if Culver was following, was white-faced, deep creases stretching from cheekbones to jawline making his normally broad countenance seem suddenly thin, almost gaunt. He opened his mouth to speak, but a distant muffled krumpf had them all staring towards the west.
Less than half a mile away, the remains of a partly-demolished building were collapsing completely, the exposed floors tumbling in on one another like a card-player's thumb-shuffle. Clouds of dust billowed into the air, the rain only slowly beating them back to earth, the building becoming a pile of concrete and rubble amid a landscape of similar piles. Anything could have caused its surrender - an explosion of gas, the last rending of twisted and overloaded metal, the exhaustion of its own concrete structure. The building's final acceptance of the inevitable was like a death-knell.
The urge to return as quickly as possible to their sanctuary was strong within them, for more than ever it represented a form of survival. They hoped.
Skirting a five-car collision that resembled an artist's metal sculpture, they climbed another hill of debris and were relieved to see the Chancery Lane underground sign once more, a section of its blue and red symbol missing.
'It ain't much, but it's home,' Fairbank said weakly, in an effort to shake off his own despondency.
'Can you see Bryce?' Culver peered at the cars below, rain bouncing off their roofs forming misty haloes.
Fairbank shook his head. 'He can't be far - he looked pretty done-in when we left him.'
Culver noticed that McEwen was visibly trembling. ‘You going to make it?' he asked.
'I just want to get away from here, that's all. It's like ... like one massive graveyard.'
'Pity some of the dead won't lie down,' added Fairbank in unappreciated black humour.
Culver ignored the remark. They all had different ways of coping; Fairbank needed to make jokes, no matter how lame, nor how tasteless.
