Quatermass (17 page)

They rolled round a corner.

From habit now, Quatermass reached back to steady Isabel. She had been quiet for the past hour or so. More than once he had examined her anxiously to make sure she was still alive. There was little enough to show it: a tiny ticking pulse, a tremor in the skin, as if all her resources were flowing into the grotesque legs. He had not uncovered them.

Annie was braking.

“Road block ahead,” she said. “Get your ID ready.”

“And bribe?” He had learned the requirements.

She shook her head. “Official car, they wouldn’t be brazen enough to—”

She broke off.

They were almost up to the obstruction. It reached three-quarters of the way across the street. Shots were being fired not far away. The figures crouching by the barrier were not pay cops.

“No, it’s not, it’s a gang fight!” Annie yelled. “Hang on, I’m going through!”

She slammed her foot down.

The Land-Rover veered and burst through the end of the barricade, scattering it.

“Oh, my God!” cried Annie.

There was another barrier dead ahead, far bigger. It stretched from one side of the street to the other, blocking it completely. It was built like a fortress.

Annie braked hard. The car squealed and bucked. Quatermass could see dreadlocked figures swarming into view, some with guns. Annie threw the Land-Rover into reverse, crashing wildly through the mess she had just made. The four-wheel drive chewed its way through the debris.

Fighting the gears, she stalled. She jabbed at the balky ignition. Her eyes rolled. She was terrified.

“Don’t let them!” It was like a prayer. “See what they are? Lock your door!”

Figures were running towards the car and surrounding it. They were not Badders, he could see. They wore home-made uniforms assembled out of every shade of blue. A few had flags fluttering from both shoulders like the finery of warlords in the Chinese theatre. The flags were all-blue mockeries of the Union Jack.

“Blue Brigade!” Annie was shrieking. “They’re the worst of all!”

They were all round the car now, grabbing at any hold, rocking it on its springs. Quatermass saw purple cotton puttees, indigo jackets, mauve cummerbands. There were guns and bandoliers, and weapons he could not even identify. The whole body of the Land-Rover rang with the battering of fists.

“They want the car!” cried Annie. At last the engine fired.

A gun-butt smashed the lock on Quatermass’s side. The door was wrenched open. He found himself being pulled helplessly from his seat by a huge brute with a blue-dyed scarf round his face.

“Bernard!” yelled Annie.

“Get away!” he managed to shout back. “Annie—go!”

Terror did the rest. In a moment she had the car jolting and thudding its way over the debris, knocking blue figures aside.

Quatermass struggled.

Deafening shots were being loosed off after the car. Now he saw what the other weapons were . . . crossbows fashioned out of heavy springs, lovingly polished, discharging steel bolts. As the Land-Rover turned the corner the whole screaming crowd took off in pursuit.

Quatermass was lying in the road.

He saw the blue-clad figures halted at the corner, firing shots and bolts.

He started crawling.

There were broken buildings on both sides. He made towards the nearer. A shot hit the surface in front of him. For a moment he had forgotten the other barricade and its marksmen. He threw himself back and kept moving in the shelter of the Blue Brigade barrier.

In through a doorless doorway.

It had been a house. He was in a little room with flowered wallpaper slashed by bullets,
BLUE BRIGADES BUGGER BADDERS
! was painted on it. Most of the floorboards had been torn up, probably burned in the open grate. He clambered through to what had been a kitchen. A youth was lying on the floor. He was partially stripped of his blue garments and apparently dead. Quatermass did not stop to look. He could hear them coming back.

He was in a back yard with drab grass and the remnants of rabbit hutches. Then through the yard door into a lane.

They would know where to look, which way to come.

Back in the street he heard an explosion. It sounded like a small bomb or grenade. There was a moment’s silence, then an extraordinary screech that went on and on. Angry, as if something was trying to rid itself of its life. It must have succeeded because it stopped suddenly.

They were shooting again. Ferocious bursts long enough to empty magazines. The gang on the big barricade must have seized their chance and attacked.

He made his way down the back lane, keeping low. It was where dustmen would have come to empty bins. He sensed air against his calf and looked anxiously down for blood. He might not feel the wound, he knew. But there was no sign of one, just the trouser leg ripped away from the knee down.

The lane became blocked with brickwork. A wall had collapsed into it. Some sort of workshop, probably a backstreet garage to judge by the battered roofs of cars he could see as he climbed over the pile. He glanced round—and saw to his horror that he was directly in line with the bigger barricade, in full view of the dreadlocked figures clinging behind it. They were scarcely thirty yards away. He threw himself down among the clinking bricks. He waited, and peered again. Their attention must all have been on their enemies. Guns were firing and he could see arrows being strung to crude bows. One youth swung a sledge-hammer round and round to get speed before releasing it like a missile.

There was a continuous high-pitched screeching. A number of the capering figures were undoubtedly female, their shapes picked out by their shining red upper garments. It took him a moment to realize that the shine was of sweating skin. The girls were bare to the waist, their breasts painted with some red grease. A taunt to the enemy, some sexual mockery at work.

One of them was on top of the barricade now, shrilling and gesturing across at the Blue Brigade. Before she could jump down again something hit her—a missile of wires and weights, probably from a crossbow. It almost severed the girl’s head. She tumbled, choking, without a sound.

A moment of shock, then Badders were flinging themselves to the top, guns blazing. Shots went in all directions. Quatermass could hear them ricochetting and clattering among the houses.

He was over the brick heaps and running.

At first the lane took him away from the battle. When it seemed to turn back he left it. He found himself in a little street so long wrecked that tall grass sprouted in the middle of its roadway. He turned again. Another back lane, another street. He had only one purpose—to keep the sound of firing fainter.

He saw one or two street names that had not been used as targets yet.
LONDON BOROUGH OF HOUNSLOW
, ran the district notation at the bottom of each.

One of the worst no-go areas, wasn’t that what Kapp had said?

And he was lost in it.

He saw a brightly lit window and started towards it. A house with a light must have people in it, surely. But after a few yards he realized it was only a last glow of sunlight, reflected.

Still, that was something. It meant direction, as good as compass reading. If he could keep moving away from that glow he would be heading eastwards, into London, away from them. He turned another corner.

He was in a larger street.

There was a bus stop, a shelter with all its glass panels shattered, of course. Perhaps Annie had come this way, had even stopped to see if he would catch up. He began to hurry again.

There was nobody about. Probably the whole area was too dangerous to live in now. He kept close to the wall. Safer in the back lanes, of course, but he would only get lost again. It was a chance he had to take.

A junction, with a few stove-in, abandoned shops. A butcher’s, a record shop. Streets joined at oblique angles.

He stopped, puzzling which way to take.

He heard what sounded like a cat. He glanced about. Even that would be a welcome fellow-creature. There must be many abandoned pets fending for themselves. But no purring shape showed itself.

He heard it again, unmistakably, a faint mewing. It came from somewhere above.

He saw them then.

They were slung from taut, clustered wires that ran across the roadway at roof height. Three bundles. One of them was moving slightly, and from it the sound came again.

They were bulky and green. For a moment he thought absurdly of chrysalises, somehow lodged there by monstrous insects. Then he saw the dangling labels.
Cut Price!
read one, and
Special Offer Bargain!
and
All Stock Must Go!
They were rolls of plastic netting, he recognized them now, the sort of thing keen gardeners would have used to train their roses or protect their flowerbeds. Looted in bulk from some store.

Inside each was a human being.

Quatermass had to force himself to go closer. One of the bundles was bobbing gently from the wires. It knew he was there. The mewing came again and this time it managed to turn into a voice. “Help me,” it said.

“What are you?”

After a moment the bundle said: “Kidnap.”

“Who did it?”

“Blues.” It bobbed again and the label fluttered.
All Stock Must Go!

“They want money?”

No reply. He could see it shaking.

Perhaps they were captured Badders up there swaddled in the cocoons, and the labels were a challenge. Or they were just trophies. The other two were quite motionless. They must have died.

Quatermass was suddenly in the grip of wild terror.

He ran without any awareness, just to be away from them. Straight across the junction. Round a burned-out car that had been driven into a shop window. Past other burned shops, one after another, a whole block gone. He was hardly conscious of it.

He did not look back. There was nothing he could have done to help, he kept telling himself.

Then a big doorway, wide open.

It was like sanctuary.

He ran in.

He was safe. Heart thundering, lungs at their limit, he clung to a rail. It was many seconds before he could even see.

He was in a supermarket.

It had been one, a supermarket for frozen foods. Dozens of massive white-enamelled freezer chests still stood in place. A faded list on the wall proclaimed prices for frozen turkeys, salmon, pizzas. It had been there a long time. More recent were the huge words
BLUE BRIGADE
, and more carefully painted than the usual spattered graffiti.

There was a stench of decay.

Not to be wondered at. When the electricity supply was cut off there must have been a horrible spoilage of the food in these storage freezers. Tons and tons of it, steadily decomposing for years. Only surprising that they had not been robbed first. Emptied and vandalized and overturned.

Odd.

They were still neatly labelled. He glanced at the nearest chest. Where it should have announced its contents as fish or meat or prepared foods, there was a name. Two names.
H. W. Dunne . . . B. T. Hammond.

He would have to open it.

He knew what it would be like. He covered his nose and mouth with his other arm, blocking nostrils with the sleeve. He lifted the lid.

Two bodies in blue home-made uniforms. Faces gone almost to the skull, a shapeless mess beneath.

He dropped the lid and looked into the next one, immediately, before he had time to think. The same. Worse. There were three in it, crushed together. The label confirmed it.

He was in a Blue Brigade mausoleum.

At least they were dead, he thought. They were not like the unspeakable hanging things.

Nausea, waves of it. And not just from the stench of the place.

He was at the entrance when he saw a party of them coming, half a dozen in parti-coloured blue, strutting with guns and shining crossbows.

He did not wait to guess if they had seen him. He was on his way towards the back of the store between the shining white chests with names on every lid.

A door. Locked? But the lock had been smashed long ago and nobody cared. This was Blue Brigade no-go territory, sacrosanct.

He was out. A car park, once busy with suburban wives. Panic struck him at the sheer emptiness of the space to be traversed. He ran, stumbled, winding himself and scraping hands and feet. Another fear struck quickly. A broken bone here and he was done for. His bones were brittle.

The wall ahead had been pulled down in places. He could get through.

He had completely lost his bearings and it was getting dark.

He had tried several times to find his way back to that main street. When the light had gone it would be less dangerous, he thought. At least he could try to use it to guide him, finding where it ran, keeping to the alleys behind it. But he had lost it.

He attempted to think about Annie and whether she had got through, but sheer weariness stopped him. There was nothing in his head but his aches and his hunger.

He was suddenly convinced he was moving in a circle, back to where he had started. There was a broken shed he was certain he had seen before, though one broken shed looked much like another. But there was no sign of the street junction and its dreadful bobbing bundles.

He told himself he would stop when it became dark. The moon was already up but he discounted that. He would not rely on his poor night vision.

He was being followed.

He was all in a moment quite sure of it. He halted and strained to listen. No sound, but that brought little comfort. He could not trust his old man’s ears. His other senses were better, the self-consciousness of being watched. He
was
being watched, he knew it.

His foot struck away an unseen, empty tin, sent it clattering. The small sound horrified him. He drew back into a doorway and waited for running figures with guns.

He saw a dog.

It stood sniffing the air a hundred yards away. He smiled with relief. The poor creature was probably as lonely as himself. If it joined him it would be welcome company.

There were two dogs.

Then a third. They trotted forward together, tails waving, interested. And behind them came others.