
couldn't get lucky. I straightened up, keeping the Wolseley at my back, using it as a temporary shield.
Those Blackshirts were acting like good ol' boys from down South out on a nigger hunt, rednecks on a
roust, the local sheriff one of 'em. Back home we'd pretended that kind of bigot didn't exist - theirs was
another state anyways, a foreign country almost - and when the news informed us otherwise, we'd be
pretty damn certain some black buck had raped another white girl so he, along with all his blackass
cousins, was getting exactly what he deserved. You might say these days my opinion on such things has
changed a little, 'specially now I'd kind of taken the place of that black boy.
Admiralty Arch loomed up, sandbags piled high in front of the doorways and windows of buildings
around it, red London buses and other vehicles clearly visible in the square on the other side. I kept the
Matchless on a set course, building speed, putting distance between me and the truck behind. The roads
through the arches had been narrowed some by barbed wire and guard boxes, but that was no problem
for the bike -I was through in the blink of an eye and into the great square beyond.
With its loose jumble of immobile vehicles, Trafalgar Square looked like one of those frozen pictures you
used to see sometimes on a movie screen, as if at any moment the action would start right up again and
everything would get going, engines rumbling, car horns honking, people jerking into life. Last time Sally
had brought me here - she was like an excited kid showing me the sights - the square and the sky above
it had been full of grey pigeons; now even they were gone. The dry fountains with their silent sirens under
Nelson's Column were surrounded by wooden barricades and where sections were broken or had fallen
flat I could see brick shelters inside. I had it in mind to take refuge in one of them, or even hide behind a
barricade, but as I dodged between cars, taxicabs and buses, something moving caught my eye.
I'd never quite worked out how many survivors Hubble had recruited into his Fascist army - the
Blackshirts had always appeared in small groups before now - but had figured their numbers to be
maybe a hundred or so, and today they seemed to be out in force. Right then another vehicle was
heading towards me and from its camouflage marking this one also had to be military. I paused long
enough to establish it was a Humber heavy utility, a four-door station wagon that could carry at least
seven passengers over heavy terrain. Like the Matchless I was riding, it was probably intended for the
North Africa Campaign but never made it overseas. The Humber was entering the square from the
Strand and as I watched it nudged a black cab aside, then swung round a double-decker bus.
I took off in the opposite direction, weaving through the still traffic and catching a glimpse of the Bedford
pushing its way past the barbed-wire barricades of Admiralty Arch as I did so. The Humber and the
Bedford had to be in contact with one another by radio, maybe by one of those walkie-talkies, but I was
confident I could outrun 'em both, the bike ideal for slipping through blocked roads and over debris. If it
hadn't been for gasoline rationing during the war years, the roads would've been a lot more crowded,
which would've suited me fine. No matter, I still had the advantage.
A bus poster wanted to know if I'd Macleaned my teeth today, while a board at the base of Nelson's
Column said that England expected me to enlist today. I went on my way, steering around a quaint little
English taxi that looked like an upright piano on wheels, its headlights masked to narrow crosses, and
past a Dodge van with a loudspeaker mounted on its roof, then squeezing by a platform truck carrying
huge casks of God-knows-what, all of these vehicles abandoned by their drivers and passengers three
years before, Blood Death victims who had not understood what was happening to their bodies, why
their arterial veins were suddenly hardening and swelling, becoming rigid beneath their skins, why their
hands were darkening, extremities filling, why smaller veins were becoming engorged, bulging then
popping beneath the surface, blood beginning to trickle, then stream, from every orifice, their ears, their
eyes, their nostrils, their mouth, from their genitals, their anus, from the very pores of their body, not
realizing that their main arteries had begun to coagulate, their body's clotting factors all used up by their
major organs, the brain, the heart, the kidneys, causing instantaneous haemorrhaging and necrotic bruising