base where you'll be taken care of. You'll find it's still chaotic, but some order is beginning to return under military rule. And they say a new coalition government's about to be formed any time ...'
The sergeant stood, patting Culver's shoulder. ‘You take it easy.' He turned to go.
Who started it?' Culver shouted after him. Who started the fucking war? America or Russia?'
He wasn't sure if he heard right, the noise of the rotor blades almost drowning the reply. It sounded like
'China'.
The winchman was standing at the cockpit opening, the same humourless smile on his face. Culver thought he heard him say, 'Of course, there isn't much left of it any more.'
Culver returned his gaze to the small windows, eager for their light, surprised, but too weary to be further shocked. The gloom of the Puma's interior depressed him; there had been too many sunless days.
His mind roamed back, seeing images, scenes he would never be free of.
And he thought of the final irony. The slaying of those who had long before plotted out their own survival while others would perish, choiceless and without influence. The slaying of a weakened master-species by a centuries-repressed creature that could only inhabit the dark underworld; mankind's natural sneaking enemy, who had always possessed cunning, but now that cunning - and their power -
enhanced by an unnatural cause. He thought of the giant, black-furred rats with their deadly weapons, their teeth, their claws, their strength. And again, their cunning. He thought of the even-more-loathsome, bloated, slug- like creatures, brethren to and leaders of the Black monsters of the same hideous spawn.
And he thought of the Mother Creature.
The medic, intent on treating the girl's wound, glanced around in surprise when he heard the man laughing. He
quickly began to prepare a sedative when he noticed tears flowing down Culver's face.
Culver thought of the Mother Creature and her offspring, her tiny, suckling litter. The government headquarters had been attacked so ferociously because the Black rats had believed their queen to be under threat. The poor fools had been wiped out as soon as the shelter became occupied, the mutant vermin disturbed by the terrible sounds of bombs, alarmed at the sudden invasion. The onslaught had been instant and merciless.
Culver tried to stop laughing, but he couldn't. It was all too ironic. And the greatest irony of all was the Mother Creature's children. The little creatures who fed at her breasts.
He wiped a shivering hand across his eyes as if to wipe out the vision. He and Fairbank had been distraught with the discovery. Through their shock, the possibilities had assailed them, the implications had terrified them.
For the small, newborn creatures had resembled human ... human! ... embryos. They had claws, the beginnings of scaly tails, the same wicked, slanting eyes and the humped backs. But their skulls were more like the skulls of man, their features were those of grotesque, freakish humans. Their arms, their legs, were not those of animals. And their brains, seen clearly through their tissue-thin craniums and transparent skin, were too large to belong to a rat.
His shoulders shuddered with the laughing. Had mankind been created in the same way, through an explosion of radiation, genes changed in a way that caused them to evolve into walking, thinking, upright creatures? Another dreadfully funny notion: had mankind evolved not from the ape, as the theorists, those wretched interpreters of it all, thought? Had mankind . . had mankind evolved from these other foul creatures? And had that same course of evolution been unleashed once again?
He wanted to stop laughing, but he could not. And neither could he control the tears. It drained him, it nauseated him. And presently someone was leaning over him, aiming a needle, anxious to release him from the hysteria.
The rats went back.
They swam to the Embankment and leapt from the water, black skins glistening in the bright sunlight.
Others, those on the bridge, ran squealing from the thunderous, death-dealing creature in the sky. They gathered in the open, trembling, confused by the violence against them and by the loss of the beasts below who had ruled them. And something else was gone. The Mother Creature and her strange litter, the new alien breed that the Black rats had yearned to destroy, for they were not of their kind, no longer existed. The difference of these newborn was beyond understanding and had sent fear coursing through the black mutants.
But they had not been allowed to kill them. The Mother Creature was all-powerful, controlling their will, ruling them and allowing no dissent. Her own special guard had dealt with those who rebelled. And the guard had been felled by the sickness.
Still the rats had protected their matriarch, governed and conditioned by her thoughts. Now those thoughts were no longer in their heads. And their numbers had grown small.
They returned to the gloomy underworld, safe there below the ground, away from the sun. They soon found the human who hid among them in the darkness, his burbling anguish - his smell of pungent fear - drawing them to him. They scratched on the door he hid behind. Then began to gnaw at the wood. They took pleasure in his screams.
When there was nothing left of him, they roamed the dark tunnels, content to stay, to rest, to procreate.
When they were hungry, they left the dark, ever-nocturnal underworld, silently creeping into the open where the night sky and fresh breezes soothed them. They slithered among the rubble of the old city, seeking sustenance and easily finding it.
And only when the first haze of dawn broke did they slink back into the holes, back into the tunnels below, reluctant to leave this new, free territory. This new world that was to become their domain.
