The survivors tried to hide in the darkest corners of the dining hall as the black hordes swept down. At first they did not understand what these creatures were, seeing only a flowing devil's spawn, an invasion of demonic beasts, perhaps returning to their hell's womb in which they, the survivors, had been incarcerated. The desperate screams of the tunnel-lers had forewarned of the irruption, petrifying the people in the dimly lit hall. They scattered and hid as the dark beasts scampered through the narrow opening and descended the rubbled slope, their traumatized minds unable to cope with this new nightmare, to recognize the demons for what they were. The fear would have been no less if they had.
Only when their very flesh was being shredded by flailing teeth and claws did they fully realize that vermin were to be
their final adversity, not radiation poisoning, not disease, not hunger and not despair. They hid, but the rats sought them out; they barricaded themselves behind upturned tables and chairs and the vermin squirmed their way through. The kitchens offered no refuge and those who hid in store cupboards only prolonged the waiting, lengthened the torment as razor-sharp incisors gnawed away the barriers. Those who escaped into the walk-in freezer store with its rancid meat might have found some protection had not others belatedly tried to gain entry, pulling open the big metal door and allowing their attackers to storm through.
One elderly man hid inside an oven, cramming his body in, pulling the door closed, holding on to it for dear life, panting and sobbing, legs drawn up in foetal position. Unfortunately for him, the enemy was within. His old heart had given warning twice in the past and it finally lost patience with its host who would not avoid excitement. The old man suffered an undignified death, stuffed in an oven, now his coffin, his feet and arms feebly beating at the iron walls.
An elderly woman pushed open the double-doors to the bar, the stench of the more-recentiy dead of no concern, and slammed them shut behind her. She stood alone in the total darkness with her back to the doors, listening to the frightening noises outside, her frail legs barely able to hold her weight. A bump against the door made her start; something slid down the other side. More bumping at the base of the doors as though someone was struggling there. The woman stumbled away, hands groping the blackness, heading for the mound of old and new deceased who were wrapped in tablecloth shrouds.
She fell against something and her probing hands found the nose, an open mouth, of an upturned face beneath its thin covering of cloth. She crawled onto the pile of bodies, burrowing down, pulling them around her, flinching as cold hands brushed her arms, as rigid lips kissed her cheek, as the receptive cadavers crowded in on her, hugging her close as if to steal her warmth. Like the corpses, she tried not to breathe lest the sound give her away, but it seemed that her heart beat loud enough for them all. Encased in the stifling bundles, she waited, silently mouthing prayers not remembered since childhood, corpses tight around her as if conspiring to keep her hidden. She might well have eluded the attention of the predators had not other fugitives burst through the doors. The voracious rats quickly overwhelmed them, dragging them to their knees. The concealed woman tried to close her mind to the shrieks.
A quietness eventually fell. Most of the people had been swiftly killed; those still alive could only moan helplessly as the vermin fed.
The woman thought she was safe. Until she heard the rummaging among the mound of corpses in which she lay, the scrabbling of claws, strange childlike sounds. Weight shifted around her. Something nuzzled against the loose fat above her hip. Something began nibbling at the side of her neck.
She scratched at the itch on her cheek, her eyes still closed, her other senses still captive of sleep. The insect moved on in search of less resisting prey. Kate's full awakening was sudden, eyelids snapping open like released blinds, sprung by returning fear. The white blanketing mist did not disappear with the blinking of her eyes.
It was several minutes before she was aware that the rain had stopped and the sun had turned the earth's wetness to rising vapour. Her fear quietened.
They had escaped the underground refuge and its unnatural vermin. Flight through the rubbled city had been a continuation of the torment, terror of being pursued driving them on through the rain, each jagged streak of lightning making them flinch, the ensuing thunder causing them to cringe. They had stopped only when they found a clearing, each of them dropping to the ground, drenched, exhausted, with little will left to carry on. She had crawled into Culver's arms, and some time in the night the rain itself had wearied and finally, after so many weeks, relented. The day's heat was clammy and insects droned in the steamy air; the sky was a bright, white haze, only a faint colouring indicating the sun's position.
Kate glanced at her watch: nearly eleven-twenty; they had slept the morning away.
Culver lay like a dead man next to her, one arm thrown across his face as if to shield his eyes from the sun's nebulous presence - or perhaps to cover them against further horror. Without disturbing him, she raised herself on one elbow and looked around.
The mist was almost impenetrable beyond thirty yards or so, although occasionally warm air currents disturbed the swirling veils to reveal glimpses of the destroyed landscape beyond. Kate shivered, even though her body was soaked in perspiration.
The area they sheltered in had once been a park, a green, path-patterned oasis surrounded by tall, once-gracious buildings. To one side had been the older law offices of Lincoln's Inn, a complex comprised of buildings dating as far back as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a high wall separating it from the park. The wall no longer stood, nor did the legal ghetto, for she knew they had climbed through its ruins the night before. She was sure, although she could not see them, that the other buildings which bounded the park would be gone, too, and that the nearby scrubbed stonework of the Law Courts - the huge gothic Royal Courts of Justice - would be nothing but crushed rubble. The park, with its tennis and netball courts, cafeteria, and seat-fringed lawns, had always bustled with life, especially around lunchtime and particularly in the spring and summer months when local office workers poured into it for a brief respite from the city itself; now the grass and leafless trees - those still standing - were scorched black and the only bustle was that of milling insects, their constant droning replacing the sound of voices, of laughter.
And she noticed that the peculiarity was not just in the number of insects, but in the unusually large size of many of them. Maybe they were the meek who would inherit the Earth.
Culver stirred, groaning a little as he wakened. Kate turned to him.
His eyes flickered open and she saw alertness spring into them. There was something more, too: the spectre of deep dread was visible for just an instant as he looked into the drifting mists. Kate quickly touched his face.
'It's all right, we're safe,' she said softly.
He relaxed only slightly and stared up at the white sky. 'It's hot.'
'Humid, almost tropical. The sun must be fierce beyond the mists.'
'Any idea of where we are?'
'I'm pretty sure it's Lincoln's Inn Fields.'
'Uh-huh, I know it.' He raised himself on both elbows. 'It used to be pleasant.' He turned his face towards hers and she saw the question.
'I'm all right,' she told him. 'A little battered, a little bruised, but alive.'
'Did we all make it?'