An uneasy murmur greeted his words.

'Think about it.' Vandon continued, 'We have an overpopulation problem. Immigration goes unchecked. Inflation is soaring. An application for an IMF loan has been turned down. Unemployment is approaching the two-and-a-half million mark. What is the answer? I ask you, what is the answer when a ruthless government is determined to stay in power and continue to pursue their policies which have already failed?'

He paused again. Angry mutterings reached his ears, and with difficulty he suppressed a smile.

'I'll tell you. Reduce the population. And that is exactly what this government is doing. It has sentenced all of you to death. Each and every one of you. They have chosen an area which is both highly populated and can be cordoned off efficiently. Within weeks each and every one of you will be dead. Myself included.'

'What are we going to do about it, then?' a man at the front of the crowd which surrounded Marcus Vandon asked. 'You tell us this, but what's the answer?'

'It is partly your own faults.' Vandon lowered his voice, a perfect mild reprimand, a father offering to forgive and help his erring son, 'You refused to heed me in the past. Only a small minority gave me their votes, I could have been your mouthpiece, asking these questions in Westminster, and it is doubtful whether this government would ever have dared to attempt such an atrocious act of treason and mass murder had they had one amongst them protesting and remonstrating with them. But it is still not too late, my friends! Are we going to huddle in our homes and await death, as they order us to?'

'We bloody ain't!'

'What else can we do?'

'I'll tell you!' Marcus Vandon stabbed his forefinger in all directions, singling out individuals, making them leaders of men in their own estimation. The choice is yours.., and yours... and yours, sir. We have the numbers, in spite of these hired killers, this so-called British Volunteer Force. They can no more contain us than they can stop the tide from flowing. We must show our strength, and drive these self-appointed upholders of a law which does not exist from our streets! We must break out of this human safari-park in which they have enclosed us! Courage is needed, friends. A few will die, but we will all die if we stay. I beseech you, act now! And remember afterwards that it was Marcus Vandon who saved you from certain death.'

The two policemen were trying to push their way through the crowd towards Marcus Vandon. Suddenly a dozen pairs of hands. pulled them down, and they were swamped by a human tide of seething fury. Their helmets rolled away, and their hands, clasped over their bared heads, were no protection from the raining kicks and blows as they became the first victims of the rising rebellion.

The clergymen outside the building were still attempting to give Holy Communion to those who knelt patiently in rows on the concrete flagstones, but their muttered blessings were lost amidst the roars of the crowd.

Glass tinkled in nearby Colmore Row where shop windows were already being smashed. A group of teenagers was on the rampage. They had not heard Marcus Vandon's oration, but they sensed the new atmosphere. Just like the old football days.

An old man with dark glasses, wearing a shabby raincoat in spite of the warmth, shuffled his way along the pavement with the aid of a white walking-stick. He heard the pounding of running feet and cowered in the darkness of his own blindness. Then the mob hit him, knocking him to the ground, booted feet treading over him as the rampaging youths surged towards Victoria Square.

He lay still, a scarlet pool forming beneath his head, oozing out from the wound in his skull where it had struck the kerbstone. Those following in the wake of the first bunch of rioters were slightly more compassionate. Their ranks parted, and they walked around the corpse. Some of them even gave the old man a passing glance, wondering idly how he had died. But it was only the start. There would be many deaths. It was something that each and every one of them had to learn to accept. For only through death would life eventually be found again.

Then the early morning stillness was shattered by the first volley of gunfire, crackling harshly in the city centre.

It was a busy day for Marcus Vandon. Later that morning he spoke to a milling throng from the steps of the Town Hall. For once in his life there were few hecklers. His words were greeted with cheers against a background of rifle fire from the bottom end of New Street.

'It is the only way,' he yelled, attempting to make himself heard as his speech reached its climax. 'We must fight on. Every one of us. For the sake of our families, our homes. Fight!'

Evening saw him in Villa Park, the terraces and stands packed beyond the legal capacity for football matches. Vandon's new band of followers had connected his microphone to the public address system, and as dusk began to cool the fierce heat of the day he exhorted those around him to even greater acts of anarchy.

The conquest of this stadium had not gone without bloodshed. Fifteen or twenty dead bodies lay on the pavements along by the Holte End turnstiles, a thin blue line which had been breached by sheer weight of numbers. Some of the casualties had been civilians, the forerunners of the 70,000-strong mob. As Marcus Vandon had pointed out earlier that day, victory would not be gained without some losses.

Vandon's face was contorted into an expression of maniacal triumph. For him a lifelong dream was coming true. He had seized on an unprecedented opportunity. The anarchy in the Midlands would spread faster than the virus which the bats carried. The government would fall within a week. It was already toppling.

'The hospitals are overcrowded,' he yelled. 'See for yourselves! The dead and the dying lie in the streets of this, your city. There is only one way to end this disease, and to defeat this militia which those clinging to power by their fingertips have called in at the eleventh hour. Fire, the greatest cleanser of all...'

A murmur of shocked horror, the note quickly changing to one of reluctant approval.

'I say that Birmingham must be razed to the ground. Destroyed in the form we know it, and the bats with it. And then we must rebuild. A bigger and better city will rise like a phoenix from the ashes of the old!'

Even 'as Marcus Vandon's words were echoing around Villa Park, screams were coming from the crowded stands and terraces. People were pushing, a crush-barrier collapsed, and bodies tumbled out on to-the pitch. A wave of instant panic was sweeping through the crowd.

'What. . . ' Marcus Vandon's eyes bulged, and at that moment he saw and understood. Like swarms of angry giant moths, bats were flitting from beneath the eaves of the stands, pouring out in their dozens, swooping, then hurling themselves venomously at the terrified people who stampeded wildly below them in an effort to escape.

Many of the bats were smaller than the others, uncertain of their newly acquired powers of flight, fluttering short distances then alighting again on the cross-sections of steel girders.

The death-swarms had given birth to their offspring. The time of fearful waiting was over. The new strain of the mutated virus was born!

The soaring, twisting bats were silhouetted against the pale blue of the night sky. It was impossible for the terrified watchers below to estimate the numbers as the creatures spiralled upwards as high as the floodlighting pylons, and then dived like irate hornets at the seething mass of humanity which milled on the pitch.

Marcus Vandon, a messiah to the crowds only seconds before, was forgotten instantly. Terrified men and women fought and clawed each other as they tried to force individual ways in the direction of the exits. Many stumbled, fell, and were trampled to death within seconds. A man was screaming, holding a small child above his head in a desperate act of fatherly protection, but the human tide took them both, and they disappeared from sight.