by Alan Hyder
Times we grew almost contemptuous of the Vampires, kicked them, and withdrew our boots before reaching muzzles could clamp on the leather. Then we shuddered at the sight of them, hid faces in arms, crouched at the bend hidden from the gates. And the things waited silently. If only they would move, make a noise, was the ominant thought throbbing ceaselessly in my brain during the last hours of our confinement. If only they would move!
The fourth night passed uneventfully but for a hectic five minutes when Bingen woke from a nightmare in which the Vampires had reached him, to spring at me, fighting, kicking, screaming. Limpetwise he clung to my throat. I had to lift him a crack to the jaw to loosen him. God knows the reality could not be improved upon even by nightmares, but that outburst did both of us good, for afterwards we smiled at each other and cracked sheepish jokes.
Bingen was asleep when, with the dawn, there came to me an eerie sensation, a feeling that something was different, something missing. Trying to analyze that premonition I fail. It might be my nostrils noticed the change. There was no perception of relief, safety, danger past; rather was there a tense nursing unconsciously of muscles ready for some new peril. Whatever it was, that impulse was sufficient to make me waken Bingen.
What had I wakened him for?
Gradually, green and red reflections from the river faded, and the tunnel was lighter than it had been with the things humped about the gates. They had gone! We sat silently watching the light, the empty gates, and I believe both of us doubted our eyes. And the river crept out of the tunnel. I nudged Bingen.
‘Let’s go to the gate.’
Up the tunnel we walked warily, expecting some fearsome development, but, with the gate clear to our gaze, Bingen jumped ahead of me to the bars. They were red-hot, and his hands fell from them as he peered into the brewery yard. Nothing could be seen but burned buildings, cobbles littered with fallen brickwork, and having stared we turned with one accord, raced down the slope for the river. Raced, I said, but it was a feeble run, for all our excitement. I felt almost too weak to run. We looked out to the river, our faces pulled back a few inches from the hot iron of the gate.
‘They’ve gone! God! They’ve gone!’ Bingen cried, and punched me so that I swore at him, for I wanted to do something foolish, cry. He shouted into the morning. ‘There’s not a damned horror in sight. Nothing. We’re going to get out of here.’
‘You fool,’ I answered thickly. ‘Not a horror in sight! What the hell do you call that?’
I gestured over the water.
On the north bank, the river lapped a grey embankment; the trees had gone, and, behind, rose a solid wall of white-heat. Above, rose the steel framework of burned buildings; below, drifted lifting clouds of grey ashes. As we watched, some half-burned houses fell, bursting into red flames. Fire shot skywards. Smoke intensified, billowing into the blue sky. To the east and the west, so far as we could see, peering first from one side of the gate and then the other, it was the same. A fiery desolation. London had gone in flame and smoke. There was nothing but glowing ash, broken here and there, where long scarlet fingers quivered upwards from the gutted framework of a building which burned slowly, with less combustion than its surroundings.
To our left, the girders of Hungerford Bridge twisted and dropped to the water about the caissons. Red and black, the burned-out carriages fell downwards, tethered together—empty, I thought as I looked up at them, but they were full of people. Corpses drained dry by the muzzling of Vampires and cindered by leaping flames. Barges on the flats, burned to the water’s edge, lay broken, gaping, and about those close at hand I could see little saucer-like depressions in the mud where melted rivets and bolts had fallen.
It was a dead world we two survivors stared into from our rat-hole.
A crashing tearing roar pulled our eyes to the east, and we saw a wall of dust and smoke rise slowly about the looming bulk of St Paul’s Cathedral. The huge dome tilted, swayed in the climbing flames, rose, flattened. A crackling of innumerable explosions, a great spurt of fire, and the dome was gone. But my thoughts were not on the destruction of London’s great buildings. My eyes were searching . . . searching for those terrible scavengers, the grey clustering Vampires. And as I looked for them, Bingen called vibrantly.
‘There they are! Look! There’s some of them.’
They had gone from the flats, the bridge, the embankment opposite, and in the flames we could find none. The blue sky was free of them, I thought; but Bingen saw them.
Away to the east, a cloud of Vampires rose slowly from a towering plume of smoke. At first I thought the cloud was smoke, for straight into the air they rose, flying like nothing I have seen fly before.
Later, at close quarters, I have examined their flight, and it is strange, for instead of lying parallel to the earth, they are upright, and twisting wings spiral into the air, cork-screw fashion. Those we stared at now did not seem to be moving very quickly, but they must have been travelling at an immense speed, for even as we watched they were disappearing into the west. We spotted others then. Far away over Westminster Bridge beyond the tower of Big Ben, standing like a blind man with an eyeless black cavity whence the clock had fallen, we saw a great grey cloud rise into the air. A tremendous cloud, spreading many a mile across country, and about that cloud there could be no mistake. They were Vampires. So far as I could judge, this edge of the flying millions must have risen from somewhere near Highgate, and they stretched away past the horizon! We saw isolated smaller groups coming faintly out of the sky, merging into the main body, and the vast cloud flew up, up to the blue of heaven, grey faded to blue, merged totally. But for hurrying little overtaking groups the sky was clear of them.
‘What now?’ I asked Bingen, and tried to move the stiffness from my neck. ‘Shall we risk making a dash for it? If those things drop on us out in the open . . . we’re done. Perhaps we ought to stay here a bit longer. Make sure they don’t come back. But we must get out soon. I’m hungry.’
‘We’d better wait,’ Bingen said after a while, his eyes still in the air. He shivered. ‘I daren’t get tangled with one of them again. I daren’t! Ugh! I can feel it on me now.’
‘What about seeing the brewery again? We ought to see to that.’
‘If we could get some beer out of it. I want something to buck me up. but we must wait and make sure.’
‘You stay here a minute, and I’ll have a look at the top end. Keep your eyes open for anything. I’ll see what I can, up there, and be back.’
My feet stumbled on the slope as I started to run, and by the brewery gates faintness swayed me, so that I had to squat on the floor to recover. Hunger and terror had told on me more than I realized, I was weak. Soon, I knew, I must get something to eat, to get strength for the coming effort of escape. We must take a chance, leave the tunnel while we had the opportunity. Who knew when those things might be back?
The yard was unchanged, except for a great piece of guttering fallen athwart the gate to drip molten lead from a steel angle. One end of the angle lay close, nearly under the bars, and I reached for it. I should be able to lever the gate open if I pulled one end of it into the tunnel.
The padlock wrenched from its staple, but I was scared to open the gate wide.
IV
The River Through the Dead City
‘BINGEN!’
My shout brought him running up the tunnel to dart into the yard like a rat with a terrier on its tail.
‘What is it?’
‘Nothing, except that we’re free,’ I answered. ‘Come out in the yard and explore.’
‘Garry!’ Bingen shot the words out and halted, ready to dive back into the security of the tunnel. ‘Garry, there’s one still there.’
‘Where?’
He pointed shakily.
Picking up the sword, I walked across the yard to where a great stone lintel had fallen from above the entrance. Protruding under the beam was the head of a Vampire, and its eyes, as I approached, held mine bleakly. The tip
of its wings were free, but the whole of its body, pressed under the beam, must have been squashed flat, and the thing lived, with no sign of pain, no hint of death. The sword fell, and the pursed muzzle quivered at the leather of my boot even as the live head rolled away from the dead body. No blood or moisture came from the neck. Rather, it looked like darkened cotton-wool intertangled with shreds of black thread. A protruding spinal cord showed dully black, greying as I watched. The head with the long, mouthless muzzle rolled to a stop, and on the forehead still beat a thin pulse. The expressionless eyes stared up at me. I kicked the thing into a pile of ashes.
‘For God’s sake,’ Bingen whispered huskily, ‘let’s try the watchman’s hut and see if we can get some beer.’
Behind the hut, one wall of which stood, burned buildings crumbled in a heap of fallen bricks between two high gables tottering precariously above ashes which glowed redly beneath a grey surface. Over by the tall entrance gates, flat now on the cobbles, was an unexpectedly clear space. It looked as though it had been covered by some fireproof material during the conflagration, and centrally in that space lay two bodies.
‘It’s old Dad,’ Bingen said in answer to my gesture. ‘The other’s the manager.’
‘That’s the car he came back for.’ I motioned towards a tangle of twisted metal by the gate, and with a sudden inspiration comprehended the reason for that clear space about the bodies. ‘Bingen! The clear space round them is where those things were heaped!’
We were silent.
‘They must have been covered in the middle of the fire, and any falling ash or bricks fell on to the Vampires. Then, when the things flew away, they swept the debris clear from the circular space.’
I could imagine the filthy things rising like a cluster of scavenger flies from refuse, and forced myself to stoop and examine the two bodies closely.
‘Every drop of moisture’s been drained from them,’ I whispered. ‘They’re nothing but dried skin and bone. All these little red pin-prick marks all over them are where . . .’
‘For God’s sake come away,’ Bingen cried. ‘Come away.’
The blue sky above was a mockery, with those two at my feet.
Sucking muzzles dissolved flesh to moisture and pumped it away through minute apertures. Afterwards, we discovered that this draining away of flesh and blood, to leave only a skin-enclosed skeleton, let men and cattle lay where they had fallen under the Vampires, for weeks, without any appreciable sign of decomposition. Only when the bodies soaked in rain did they begin to smell, to decay. And for months we had no rain. Those two, the first of so many, left me sick in the stomach when I rose from stooping over them.
‘Garry! Garry!’
Beyond the watchman’s hut I could see Bingen delving excitedly amid the ashes. He stood in a moment, then tilted a bottle to his lips. I went towards him.
Warm beer gurgled soothingly down my throat, washing the heat away. How good it tasted! And it endowed me with fresh courage, for on an empty stomach it reacted strongly. Bingen emptied his bottle and searched afresh, but there was no more, for which I was glad. I did not want Bingen on my hands, drunk.
With courage from the bottle, he looked across at the body of the watchman and spoke hesitatingly:
‘Let’s put him somewhere safe away from . . . I shouldn’t like to be left like that.’
‘Not much use bothering about them now. They won’t be touched again, even if the things come back, and pray God they won’t. What we’ve got to do, is to look after ourselves.’
It sounded callous, but it was true. The watchman and the manager were but two out of Heaven knew how many.
‘What we’ve got to do, is get away. We wouldn’t stand a chance among all that glowing ash if we tried to get out this way. The streets are white-hot. We must attempt the river. We’d be better off on the water if they came. We might be able to shelter at the bottom of a boat with something over us. At least we’d drown. I’d sooner drown than burn or . . .’
I pointed towards the bodies, and Bingen shuddered.
‘Is there a way down to the river through the buildings?’
‘There is, but I’m not trying it. Not through that,’ said Bingen, indicating the mass of grey and red embers. ‘You used to be able to get down the lift in the store, but the store’s gone. The only way is to go back through the tunnel, and force the gate down there.’
‘That’s what we’ll do,’ I agreed, staring about the yard until the wavering, rising heat made my eyes smart. ‘Going through there would just shrivel us up. We’ll have to get down to the river through the tunnel.’
‘Bring the sword along. We’ll be able to force the padlock off the gate with it.’
For the last time we passed into the tunnel, and I for one breathed a prayer of gratitude to its dank walls. God knows what it had saved us from.
The rusted gate forced open easily, and we went out on the mud-flat by the barges.
‘Down-river I think,’ I said. ‘Neither of us want to go under there.’
We headed away from Hungerford Bridge, where those trains, with their ghastly passengers, hung like dead snakes through the twisted girders.
Warily out to the water edge we went, our eyes searching. Smoothly the river ran through a City of Dead. At every point of the compass fire belched smoke to the heavens, walling the river along its length with an embankment of red, grey, and white heat. Two terror-stricken survivors in hell, we flinched from the fire, staring at each other hopelessly.
‘We can’t get past there.’ Bingen indicated the red shore. ‘We can’t go along the bank. We’ll have to get a boat or something and get past the fires in the middle of the river.’
We went so far as we could, walking in water to our waists, stooping to duck sweating bodies, passing the hotter places, until we could go no farther. We stood peering miserably up and down the river.
‘There’s a boat!’ It was though in answer to a prayer. ‘Bingen, I’ll go in after it. It is a boat, isn’t it?’
From behind a partly sunken ship to which it was made fast, a dinghy swung slowly into sight on the tide not more than fifty yards from where we stood.
‘It’s broken loose,’ Bingen said. ‘It’s floating away.’
Wading into the river, I swam towards it and, foolishly, for some time, tried vainlessly to heave myself over the side, failing through sheer weakness until Bingen called to me to push the boat ashore. He waded out to meet me.
‘The water’s hot,’ he said, as he pulled both boat and myself to the bank. ‘It’s hotter than hell, and gets more like hell every time I look at it.’
‘I must have a rest before I pull this out in the stream. Unless you can row, Bingen?’
‘Not those kind of oars!’
But for a deep burn in her gunwhale, where something had dropped and flamed before falling into the river, the dinghy was intact. Astern floated a burned rope. It was Providence that rope had held, to sever at the very moment we wanted her.
‘Downstream with the tide. The rowing’ll be easier and we might as well go this way as the other,’ I said, after shipping oars and pulling out to midstream. For a while I sat panting, resting, then recovered my breath to pull away from the tunnel and Hungerford Bridge. Bingen crouched in the stern staring around dazedly, shooting quick nervous glances skywards. ‘Get hold of the rudder lines and keep your eyes on the clouds as much as the banks.’
The rowlocks creaked noisily, and we went steadily along the river of the dead between the fiery banks.
‘I’ll have my work cut out to row this thing very far unless I get some grub. I feel just about dead beat.’
‘Oh, we’ll soon get somewhere where there’s grub,’ replied Bingen offhandedly, anxiously scanning the sky. ‘We’ll soon get amongst people now.’
‘I’m not so sure.’
‘Look out!’ he shouted, and leant to heave frantically on a rudder line. ‘God! We’re going right into the flames.’
With my head over my
shoulder, I loosed one oar to heave on the other with all my might, but still the boat drifted towards the flames, until I saw that Bingen was tugging idiotically on the wrong line.
‘Let go that damned rudder and leave it to me!’
With heart bursting in my breast, I pulled the boat away from a line of barges with cargoes blazing terribly on the water. We missed them by no more than a foot, and I had to shield my face with one arm while pulling with the other. Bingen crouched helplessly in the stern, his arms about his head. A tongue of flame licked a blistering weal across my shoulders, as we passed.
‘For Heaven’s sake don’t trouble so much about things in the sky,’ I enjoined him. ‘Leave the rudder be, but watch where we’re going and tell me the direction.’
‘Pull us out of here.’
‘I’ll pull us out all right so long as you don’t let us run into anything else like that.’
From both sides of the river came a white heat which made the distance dance and shimmer. Ash eddied about in whirling columns, sparks burned in the air, now and then came explosions to stay the oars momentarily and set me pulling with renewed vigour. And, eternally in our ears, was a thundering crackling roar, as the ruins of London burned away.
Under the one remaining arch of London Bridge we spurted, for it was hot, and a great mass of stuff flamed fiercely, sending out streamers of fire to drop about our boat. Then we were in the Pool, where great vessels’ burned red sides leant drunkenly against smouldering wharves, and mast-heads pointed from the water, marking sites of sunken ships.
‘Garry!’ Bingen’s voice yelped at me, vicious with fright. He leaned across the boat to clasp my arm. ‘What . . .’
There was a roar, and from the shore came hurtling, for all the world as though it were thrown directly at us, a glowing length of wood. It dropped across the dinghy with a thump, and one end steamed, sizzled in the river.
‘What the hell!’
