Above His Station (7 page)

‘We’re not arguing,’ I said, calmly. ‘We’re just evaluating our options.’

‘We don’t
have
any fucking options, Gramps, don’t you get it?’ spat the rat. ‘If our only choice is to tiptoe quietly through those things and hope they don’t spot us, then we’re in trouble. And thanks to your shouting now we’re in even bigger trouble.’

‘How can we be in
bigger
trouble?’ I asked.

The rat thumbed over its shoulder at the panting pack of hungry wolves staring right at us. At least, I assumed they were hungry. I mean, their jaws were dripping with saliva and their pupils were fixed and dilated, which is usually a fairly reliable indication that something wants to eat you.

‘Ah,’ was all I could manage, when what I really wanted to say was ‘
Aaaahhhhhh!!!!
’

I picked up the rat and hobbled (undignified, I know) towards the exit as hurriedly as my painful thigh would allow. The wolves seemed surprised by this, because they just stood there watching me as I ran for the stairs.

I had made it as far as the bottom step before I felt a sharp tug on my shoulder and I turned to see the snarling jaws of a wolf clamped around the strap of my satchel. I desperately wanted to drop it and make a run for it, but something told me that if I ever let those precious objects go I would never find them again, and I dared not risk that - even if it meant my life. I yanked on the strap, trying to tear it from the beast’s mouth, but its grip was far stronger than mine. It pulled me right off the bottom step towards the rest of the pack and I felt like I was being offered up as a sacrifice; the other wolves standing with their muscles tensed, ready to pounce.

So what were they waiting for?

Something at the back of my mind replayed itself, yet another Attenborough; his silky smooth tones like a voiceover inside my head.

“When hunting, the rest of the pack always waits until the Alpha dog has taken its fill of their prey. Only once they are bidden will they feast”.

Sir David had just told me two things of importance; I only had to deal with one wolf and not a whole pack of them, and secondly, that I had a little over five seconds before I was dumped unceremoniously onto the wolves’ dinner table with the Alpha dog barking the canine equivalent of “
Get stuck in, lads!
”

‘Kick it in the face!’ called the rat, and it was only then that I’d noticed that it had gone. The coward had hopped off my shoulder and was now sat on the stairs; a lot closer to freedom than I was.

Still having a tug-o-war with the wolf, with the leather strap of my satchel at breaking point, I managed to drag myself back to the stairs and hung onto the railings for all I was worth, which, depending on who you happened to ask at that particular moment, was probably not very much (unless you happened to be hungry wolf, that is).

I fought so hard that my arms almost dislocated from their sockets. The wolf pulled, and I pulled back, with neither side gaining the territory it needed to claim a clear victory. How I wished for my Swiss Army knife at that moment, but I had already performed a mental inventory of my satchel earlier with the tiger, and I knew that I was unarmed.

As the wolf pulled, one of my satchel’s buckles popped open and the contents threatened to spill out. I got a good look at my little parcels all wrapped up in newspaper; Molly’s ornaments. If one of them smashed I would never forgive myself, even if technically it was the wolf’s fault. I doubted that would appease Molly, looking down from on high. And what would she see? Me about to get savaged by a pack of wolves in the middle of High Wharton Street Tube station, that’s what.

She’d be furious.

“
Fight back, you stupid old goat!
” she’d be saying. “
Give it what for!
”

‘Yes, dear,’ I said, lashing out with a kick.

My steel-toed boots connected with the wolf’s nose and it yelped, letting go of the strap instantly. The Alpha dog was only stunned; my blow surprising it more than anything. I needed something more permanent. My boots were heavy but I didn’t have the strength for a kicking contest; my wounded leg was killing me from all the strain as it was. Salvation came, as it often does, in the form of the bottle of
Captain Morgan’s
within my satchel.

I drew it out like Excalibur from the stone, and for a moment I don’t know what came over me. I swung the bottle as hard as I could, striking it across the wolf’s brow. As the beast reeled, I brought the bottle down with a more savage intent and it cracked. From the sound I heard, so did the wolf’s skull. It whimpered and slowly retreated towards the safety of its pack. For some inexplicable reason I chose to advance upon it, roaring like a madman, slashing the bottle through the air back and forth, causing the entire pack to scarper. They fled off a little way and then stood in a line with their tails drooped, showing their subservience. Every now and then one of them would test my defences and make a start towards me, but the Alpha dog snapped at it, putting it back in its place. I threw the bottle like a grenade and it smashed to pieces just inches from them. The pack of wolves whined like spoilt children before tearing off into the station as fast as they could.

Huffing and puffing, unable to catch a full breath, I steadied myself against the wall by the stairs. For some reason New Year’s Eve 1999 popped into my head, all that hullabaloo about Y2K and the Millennium Bug. I was working at Transport HQ on the night of the switchover. Whilst Molly saw the New Year in alone I was being paid double-time to sit in front of a computer screen and watch what happened when the clocks struck midnight. Absolutely naff all is the answer, yet all these so-called ‘experts’ had been on the TV spouting prophecies of doom, about how all the world’s clocks were going to have hissy fits and explode. Nothing did (at least not in our office) yet we were glued to those screens all night long, waiting for something to happen that never did. One of my colleagues (Roger Beckwith, dead now, heart attack) made me laugh by pretending that he was a policeman out on a stake-out. It eased the boredom. Up until this moment, that was probably the last time that I’d felt a burst of genuine adrenalin.

‘You sure showed them, Gramps!’ said the rat.

‘Yes, luckily for us,’ I said, my hands still shaking. ‘I scared them off, but it won’t take long before they decide to try their luck again. And I only had the one bottle.’

‘Waste of good rum if you ask me,’ said the rat. ‘But do you want to hear something that’ll cheer you up? I can see daylight at the top of these stairs, which means we’re almost there, compadre. Getting topside should allow us to get a better perspective on things…and then once you’ve stopped crying like a baby maybe you can help me figure out just what the fuck happened and what the fuck we’re going to do about it.’

4

Stepping up from High Wharton Street station onto High Wharton Street itself, the first question to grace both my mind and my mouth was:

‘What the hell happened here?’

When had London been turned into a living nightmare? For some people I suppose it always was, but not to me. To me it was more than just my place of work, it was my home. The historical capital city of England; catering to all the many needs of its varied citizens. With conflicting quarters; affluence and poverty sharing the same borough, it was a city rich in history, culture and commerce, with fine academies for the arts and a bounty of museums for virtually any subject. There was no other city like it on this earth. And as I took my first few staggered steps from the station to street-level, that statement was no truer than the moment that I witnessed chaos.

Completely and utterly.

Cars were abandoned in the streets. Buses and bicycles, too. Collisions everywhere I looked. Horns blaring, alarms going off all over the place, shattered windscreens on the tarmac. Fires raging in many of the shops. Warped windows, heat-damaged and melted shop dummies and litter floating upon the wind. What I saw was far worse than a nightmare because I knew that it was real.

But it was what I didn’t see that shocked me the most.

There was not a soul to be seen anywhere.

It had gone midday by now. The road was chock-a-block with traffic but it was all at a standstill. Traffic lights still illuminated in formation, green to amber, amber to red, but no cars were going anywhere. London was deserted of all its inhabitants, which I knew was just not possible. I held onto that fact between my trembling fingers, for it was one of only a few that I could rely on.

‘Want to talk about it?’ enquired the rat from my shoulder.

‘I’m not sure I know where to start,’ I admitted.

‘I told you so, didn’t I? And I told you that I was going to say I told you so too. I told you that you wouldn’t want to see this. I told you it’d be scary.’

‘It’s not scary!’ I snapped. ‘Just…confusing.’

‘Have you seen that?’ the rat said, pointing to one of the cars. The driver’s seat was absent of any human occupation, but it wasn’t exactly empty. On it was yet another pile of discarded clothes. ‘They’re all the same, Gramps. Everywhere you look. In cars, on buses, up and down the whole street. It’s like all the people everywhere, no matter what they were doing, were just snatched off the face of the planet, leaving only their clothes behind. It’s like something from the
fucking
Twilight Zone!
’

‘I no longer think that people ran away,’ I said, my voice but a whisper. ‘I think they were
taken
away.’

I had told the rat that I was not scared, and I’d meant it. I was more saddened than anything. How could something as catastrophic as this have occurred? Of course, I still had no idea what ‘
this
’ was, and I wasn’t all that sure I wanted to know either. But one thing was for sure, whatever it was, it was extremely widespread. The driver on my train (who, I was now convinced, was not a spontaneous stripper after all) was all the way over at Regal Street when he’d…let’s just say ‘
vanished’
for the time being…and then all those people in the station and now here on High Wharton Street. It was as if someone had pushed a big red button and every living soul on the planet had vanished in a puff of smoke. But no, I didn’t think that was entirely accurate. The rat was here, as was the tiger (in a posthumous sense anyway), the wolves, and the mynah bird or parrot or whatever it was. So it wasn’t exactly every living soul. Of course, I realise that theory only holds water if you believe that animals have souls.

‘Why’s it so dark?’ I wondered aloud. ‘It’s lunchtime.’

The rat pointed its tiny digit up. ‘That’s why.’

The sky was almost blackened by thousands upon thousands of birds. Some were swirling about randomly, whereas others were swooping around in synchronisation. Hardly any patch of the sky was visible. I had never seen so many birds before, not even on Attenborough, and never such a variety sharing the sky at the same time. I could make out the silhouettes of all kinds: swans, ducks, herons, owls, hawks (or they might have been kestrels or even falcons, I never could tell the difference). Something caught my eye, and just past my head flew a flock of canaries, like a stream of yellow paint floating upon the breeze.

I could hear a tap-tap-tapping sound not far away, something being struck against metal, and my ears pricked up. It was the sort of sound someone makes if they’re trapped. My heart started to speed valuable energy around my body as I listened again, straining to pinpoint the direction of the sound. I strode off down High Wharton Street and into Mizzen Street and kept on going, the sound getting louder and louder. I was like a human metal detector, listening with all my senses for the slightest fluctuation in sound.

Tap-tap-tap.Tap-a-tap-tap. Tap-a-tap-tap.

‘Hello?’ I called out, my head twitching left and right. There were cars blocking the narrow street and the tall buildings on both sides played with my ears, bouncing the sound from one side to the other, behind me and in front of me in the blink of an eye. Everywhere at once. Everywhere but nowhere. ‘Where are you?’

The tapping stopped.

‘Hello?’ I called again. ‘Are you hurt? Do you need help?’

The tapping started again, clearer this time, as if the originator could hear that I was close and they were desperately trying to get my attention. On I went, with the rat hanging on for dear life. I wasn’t about to let this person go. I wanted to find them (I suppose deep down I
needed
to find them).

And eventually I did.

The sound had originated from a Ford
Mondeo
parked diagonally across the street. The tapping was deafening as I approached it nervously. Taking an unsteady breath, I bent down and looked inside the car. What I saw made my jaw go slack.

Sat in the driver’s seat of the
Mondeo
, with the seatbelt still fastened, was a flamingo. It was going insane, flapping its wings frantically, smashing its beak onto the steering wheel (the tapping that I’d heard). I didn’t have time to try to make sense of the situation, as something compelled me to act. I quickly opened the passenger-side door and managed to control my shaking hands long enough to unclip the seatbelt so the flamingo could get free. Unfortunately, it mistook my attempts to help as an attack and it clobbered me about the head a few times with its wings. I needed to get it out of the car, so I went round to the driver’s side and quickly opened the door. I had expected it to take flight the moment that it was free, but instead it just flopped onto the street in a clumsy mess. The bird was obviously confused, stunned and shocked – feelings mirrored within myself. But I couldn’t just leave it there having a spasm, so I bent down and grabbed hold of its belly, lifting it up to its feet. Flamingos are bloody heavy, let me tell you. They might look all graceful and lithe, but they weight an absolute ton.

I stepped back a few paces, giving the bird some room.

‘It’s all right, you’re free,’ I said, in a tone similar to the type you might use if you were trying to talk someone down from the window ledge of a tall building. ‘Go on now. Off you go. Fly away.’