The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - Mike Ashley [61]
Later on I helped Mr Raines and some others block off either end of our street with some cars.
"What if we want to go somewhere?" I said.
"Where's there to go?" said Mr Raines, his face in that grimace again.
Looking at the news later on, commentaryless pictures of London burning and riots in Birmingham and Manchester, I had to concede he had a point. I wondered how Bob was getting on in the Lakes.
On the fourth day before the end, a huge lizard attacked Tokyo. As if Japan hadn't had enough problems. It was exactly like a dinosaur, 200 feet from nose to tail. It ran with a loping gait, head down and tail up, its spine almost perfectly level. It was something to do with the bombs that had landed on Osaka, they said. Either a normal lizard had been mutated by the radiation and grown to monstrous proportions, or an ages-old beast had been in some kind of suspended animation below the surface of the earth and had been awoken by the blast.
It was amazing how people were prepared to accept just about anything these days.
It was quite gripping viewing. The news pictures showed them trying to evacuate Tokyo, but there was nowhere for the people to go, pretty much the rest of Japan being an irradiated wasteland. The monster rampaged across the city, flattening buildings and flipping cars with its tail. I caught myself more than once thinking it's pretty realistic before realizing that it was real. Eventually they brought it down with fighter planes and it flopped, dead, in the street. The newsreader said the Japanese authorities had started to slice it up to use as emergency rations.
That afternoon looters kicked the kitchen door in. There were three of them, kids about eighteen or nineteen, and they all had baseball bats. I was in the kitchen at the time and they booted their way in, pushing me against the wall.
"What do you want?" I said.
One of them slapped me. "Everything," he said.
They took all the money they could find, which didn't amount to much. They didn't think to take the food, but one of them manhandled the TV off its stand.
"We'll take this as well," said the ringleader, slapping me again and ripping the stereo power lead out of the wall socket.
"What are you going to do with them?" I said. "The world's going to end."
They looked at each other uncertainly, then the ringleader punched me in the stomach, winding me. Then they left.
I boarded up the door with some wood I found in the shed and went upstairs to bring the portable telly down from the bedroom. While I was rooting in the wardrobe I came across my dad's old airgun and a box of pellets. Might come in handy.
We had a meeting of the Civil Defence Group in Mr Raines' front room. Half of the households in the street had already deserted; gone to Scotland or the Lake District or to be with family. Mr Raines approved of my gun. The water had gone off earlier in the day and the drains were getting backed up; there was a problem with rats but Mr Raines didn't want us to waste ammunition on them. A rat-catching division was set up, consisting of Wayne and Stu, who had got fed up of being barricaded into their house and had come down to live in one of the deserted terraces in our street. We still had electricity; a lot of places didn't.
By dusk Wayne and Stu had killed enough rats for Trevor the butcher to begin skinning them. There was a big pot put over a fire in the middle of the road and we had a bit of a street party. The rat stew wasn't too bad; I'd been getting a bit fed up with Chinese. A dozen bottles of gin were found in Mrs Hughes' house; her daughter had come to collect her two days ago. Everyone suspected Mrs Hughes liked the odd nip, but not to that extent. It was quite a jolly evening, until someone said that a girl at the top of the street had been raped. A Civil Defence Group meeting was called and Mr Raines led a small group of volunteers off to apprehend the most likely suspects. I left Wayne and Stu throwing up in the street and went to bed.
On the third day before the end, a tsunami swamped the western seaboard of the United States.