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and settled the rifle in the footwell on that side, its muzzle leaning against
the open window opposite, pointed away from me but within easy reach. The girl
had been wrong, she was haunted by memories, not by spectres. Even I'd
imagined the sound of voices, laughter -music, too - drifting up to me as I'd
lain awake nights in that grand rotting mausoleum. Couple of times I'd even
gone to the door and listened, opening it when I was sure there really was
something going on downstairs, the noises always vanishing the moment I
stepped out into the corridor. Just night-notions, that's all they were.
Dreams when I hadn't even realized I'd been asleep. Muriel would soon get to
realize that imagination had a way of playing tricks on you when you
were in a low frame of mind. They weren't just dreams either, they were
wishful dreams, dreams you hoped would be true, cravings for life to return to
normal, to the way it had once been. Daybreak always put things right again;
as right as they were ever gonna be.
I turned on the engine, took one last look at the deserted street out the side
window, and drove off.
Although weary from my labours and a little hungover from the night before, I
kept alert, constantly on the lookout for the unexpected. One time about a
year and some months ago, a crazy had jumped out at the truck I was using, an
Austin 5-ton, as I recall, its flap sides and back easy for loading. He was
waving a butcher's meat axe over his head and hollering gibberish at me. Maybe
I should have stopped, but it was the middle of winter and this guy was stark
naked. And oh yeah, around his neck under a long greasy beard he wore a ragged
necklace of 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,
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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.
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