One

by Conrad Williams

  He was no longer exactly certain of his position. All of the road signs had been bleached white or burned black. The map was no longer of any use if he couldn't picture himself on its green dual carriageway, snailing his way south.

  'Hi, Dad.'

  'Hi, Stanley. You need a wee?'

  'No.'

  'Then stop fidgeting. You could fidget your way to Olympic glory, you could.'

  'What means linpic?'

  'Never mind.'

  'What your doin', Dad?'

  'Walking.'

  'I'm tired.'

  'Me too.'

  'Can I go on your shoulders?'

  'No. Carrying a bag up there.'

  'Aw.'

  'Come on, you're a big boy now. You can walk.'

  'Where's the car?'

  'Broken.'

  'You broked it?'

  'No. Something happened. All the cars broke.'

  'What about motorbikes?'

  'Them too.'

  'Are motorbikes faster than cars?'

  'Some.'

  'Are motorbikes faster than cheetahs?'

  'Oh yes.'

  'Are cheetahs faster than swordfish?'

  'We'll never know. Where's your mum?'

  'I don't like girls.'

  'You might, one day.'

  'Boys are best.'

  'We have our moments.'

  He looked down to his side where Stanley was walking, but he had gone. Jane inspected his hand, as if he might see some ghost of his son enclosed within it, but there was just the usual network of filth and blisters.

  He could no longer hear the ocean. He doubted he ever could, beyond its persistent echo in his thoughts. You lived and worked on the sea for long enough you heard its call when you were in the deepest parts of the inner city. You never forgot its voice. He had stopped. He was looking towards the coast, which was lost behind some urban pile that might have been Sunderland, Hartlepool or Middlesbrough. The only thing that shored up the misery was the way in which the land was condensing; there were fewer open tracts between cities. The bucolic sprawl towards Scotland was giving way to the industrial claustrophobia of the North-East.

  He sat down in the road, listening to the squeak and burble of fluid in his lungs. He thought of eating something and his stomach flinched. He kept walking. His eyes streamed so that the view through his smeared goggles was of a world of splinters that he had to fight to keep vaguely horizontal. The wind bullied the clouds along, but there was never a break in their ceiling. The sun was a piss stain on a grey blanket. The ceiling lowered; its colour deepened. After an hour he saw lightning stab the earth maybe twenty miles to the west. Thunder concussed the air around him. He sensed rain building long before he felt it. When it came it was tropical. Large bullets pelted him. He took refuge in a barn on the edge of a field where rape might once have blazed but was now only so much ash and stubble. Farm machinery stood like some pathetic exhibition of past glories. Already the shape and purpose of such vehicles struck him as faintly ridiculous. He couldn't remember the sound an engine made. The howl of the wind and the memory of surf was a white noise that erased all others. He poured water from the bladder into a metal cup tied to one of the rucksack straps and added four soluble painkillers. He downed it before it was ready, crunching on the tablets and feeling them fizz on his tongue. Almost immediately a coughing fit caused him to bend double; he had to put out a hand to steady himself against dizziness, the scatter of light seeds across his vision. He hawked and spat. No blood, at least. Not yet.

  He forced himself to eat: a small can of macaroni cheese, a small can of pineapple rings. The food rolled uneasily around; he lay on his side in swatches of straw that, if he pushed his face in far enough, smelled of childhood. He closed his eyes, concentrating on not vomiting. After a while he felt better, and realised that he must have slept: the fingers of light were pointing a different way through the cracks in the barn door. He sat up and a gruel of heat behind his sternum spread through the base of his lungs. It was a strange feeling, an itch deep inside him. He wondered if this was cancer's beginning; after all, he couldn't expect to escape every kind of physical repercussion.

  Jane checked in his rucksack but there was nothing to help beyond the painkillers and a packet of blackcurrant-flavoured throat lozenges. Tired of cold food, he cleared a space and built a fire out of straw. He broke off some decaying slats of wood from the apron of the barn and positioned them above his kindling. He poured a little of the glycerine and potassium permanganate onto the straw. A couple of seconds later they combusted. He felt a tremor of the thrill he used to get as a child whenever he saw good magic being performed. 'Good work, Dr Becky,' he said. The words came out on razor wire.

  He punched holes in the lids of cans of potatoes and stewing steak in gravy and placed them on the edge of the fire. He thought of hot baths and warm beds while he watched the food bubble, and ate with his fingers, juggling the scalding meat around his mouth and blowing out his cheeks. He blistered the roof of his mouth, but it was a good pain. He ought to cook more of his food; it improved it no end and it gave a brief illusion of normality.

  He sucked his fingers clean and lay back in the straw. He watched the flames turn to embers. He was asleep again before the embers had lost their blush.

  Jane woke up cold and stiff. There seemed to be no change to the burning in his chest. At least he had suffered no nightmares in the night, or he had failed to remember them. He palmed some water from the bladder and washed his face, his hands scraping against stubble. Bearded again soon. He gingerly felt the wound in his head. It seemed to be healing well. He refreshed the dressing and carefully pulled the beanie down over it.

  He shouldered the backpack, repositioned the mask and goggles, and opened the barn door. He looked out at the bewarted, bewitched landscape and ran his tongue over furred teeth. The rain was still there but it had lost its muscle. Skeins of it hung like barrage nets. Hills slouched away from the road like the bellies of downed comeback boxers. Pylons marched into the mist, their cables impotent. A febrile, feral country now.

  The sky seemed a little lighter towards the south. He rejoined the A1 and fixed his eyes on a point on the ground four feet or so further on than the extent of his step. He did not look up for three hours.

  Jane's coughing had worsened. Each convulsion caused a flare of pain in his chest. He thought that if he contracted pneumonia he would die.

  He got off the road and made his way to the black crust of a town. Rooftops shivered with soot. A church steeple had been shattered; buckled ribs thrust out of it like the exposed frame of a burnt corset. Tree limbs and human limbs lay in his path, burnt into solid, fissured cords of carbon. Arse-end retail parks. Computer palaces offering any combination of frazzled, corroded processors and silicon chips. Deep-fried chicken for deep-fried customers. A supermarket the size of a small airport.

  Jane trudged, coughing, across the car park. Litter wheeled around him. A dent in the wall suggested that the wind had lifted heavier things in the recent past. Something thin grinned at him by the trolleys like a portion of hide draped on a chair to dry out in the sun. He paid it no heed. He bypassed calcined ranks of dead whose last act had been to queue for lottery tickets. It might be you. It was.

  The supermarket had been rifled. The perishables had cooked, melted and rehardened into their plastic baskets. Most of the tinned produce was gone. That which remained was fouled in some way. He got on his knees and checked underneath the shelves. He fished out some cans that seemed fine. Sardines, mushroom soup, tomatoes in herbs. He put them in the rucksack. He found more canned goods in the infant section that had been ignored or more likely unseen. Puréed spinach and apple. Apricot and vanilla custard. Sweet potato, rice and butternut squash. He was aiming to reach the top of this aisle and turn into the next when he heard a boot grind into glass. To his right, a little behind him. He snapped his head that way, and pulled the reins on a cough. He froze.

  After a few seconds h
e heard another step. Something shadowing his movements. Jane immediately turned and began creeping back the way he had come, his head turned to the left now, eyes burning into the empty shelves as if he could see his pursuer through the moulded steel. He tried to remember if he had made any noise beyond the gentle clacking of cans as he stowed them in his rucksack. He shot a glance towards the end of the aisle, panic rising, certain that he was surrounded. He had to face the possibility that not every survivor was a potential ally. Desperation drove people to do extraordinary things, not all of them laudable. He had made a mistake, been too blasé. He must be more diligent in future, if he had one.

  He reached the end of the aisle and risked a look beyond its edge. Nothing. He turned and kept his eyes on the other aisle's far end as he backed out of it. A shadow lengthened on the wall. One arm much longer than the other. Jane stepped out of sight before the shadow could shed its host. He moved as quickly as he dared, scanning every aisle around him as he drew alongside them, trying to work an angle to enable him to check the entrance for a sentry before he was on top of it. He thought of the Falkland Islands and the battalions who'd had to clear out the villages on their way to Port Stanley. He wondered if the soldiers sent into those houses had felt as soft in the middle of their bodies as he did now. Fear was fuel, he thought. Fear was good. Strangely, he did feel better than at any point over the last three or four days. The cough was in abeyance, the fire in his chest subsumed by the spike of adrenaline.

  Jane hurried through the car park, feeling terribly exposed. At the exploded wreck of a tree stump he hid, watching the entrance. Nobody appeared. He waited for a long time, more than half an hour, and was beginning to doubt what he had heard and saw. He was shifting the pack into a more comfortable position, readying himself to move away, when the darkness within the entrance changed, and he could make out the white scarf concealing the face of the figure he had seen in Newcastle, before their encounter with the mob that had attacked them. Jane's heart put a spurt on. The figure did not emerge fully, but hung back a little, as if aware that it was being observed. Pale, thin; even at this distance he could tell it was trembling. A fledgling fallen from the nest. There was something both repulsive and weirdly comforting about the figure. Its anatomy was all wrong; Jane wondered if it might be injured in some way, but that didn't feel right. The shape of illness was in it. A body racked by convulsions; a physique drawing into itself due to the suck of failed lungs. Bad blood. Change and compromise. His mind flirted with images of mutations. He wondered if what had flashed across the surface of the Earth might also have damaged the little genetic kinks that made us human.

  Jane was convinced now that he was being followed by the figure, but to what end? He didn't feel threatened by it; he believed the appearance of the attackers at the same time to have been a coincidence. He wondered if the figure had something to do with their deaths, but then that would mean it had done for Chris and Nance too. Again he wondered why he had been spared.

  The figure moved back inside the supermarket and Jane waited and watched for another quarter of an hour before moving on.

  As Jane had expected, the travails of the day had an adverse effect on him. He could feel his strength sapping at each step. The fire had returned to his chest, with interest, and each breath bore a damp, rattling coda. If he looked up from the rhythm of his feet the edges of the road were blurred, and he felt he could no longer blame that on the mist, or the goggles. He thought he might be dying.

  'Stanley?' he called out, but his voice wouldn't rise above a bubbling whisper.

  He couldn't summon the sound of his boy's voice, or his face from the grain that was writhing behind his eyes. He panicked, thinking that his mind was already shutting down, the brain cells switching off, and that any memory of Stanley he might have clung to in extremis was lost to him.

  There seemed to be no towns or villages within reach. The wind was building; the storm he thought he had left behind was circling, coming back. He pitched his tent by the roadside but was too weak to bow the poles into position. He crawled into the tent as it was and chewed on cocodamol tablets till their foam parted his lips. He pulled out a tin but couldn't read the label. He fell asleep squinting at it.

  Footsteps gritting on the road. The tang of a shovel as it bit the ground next to him. If he reached out he might be able to touch the gravedigger's boot.

  * * *

  A smell of cold, burnt fat. A hand in his hair, pulling it back. Rain on his face. The sound of something querulous, unsure. A glimpse of white scarves.

  The smell of cooking, of fresh, hot meat. He saw firelight through the drizzled mess of his vision. Figures moving through it, like the winks and kinks of perspective in a mirage. He was handed a bowl and he took it, but stared only at the space above it, where the hand that proffered it had been seconds before. A pale, elegant hand. Long fingernails sharpened to claws. Feathers stitched into the skin of the hands. He ate the food in the bowl, a delicious stew of dumplings and what tasted like roast pork, but he knew he was dreaming when he got to the end of his meal and found a strip of meat with a crisp coating of tattooed skin attached.

  The fire extinguished. The figures moving away. The hoot of an owl somewhere; an answering call in the distance. A blanket for his body, a pillow for his head. Hands on his face, soothing. A smell of cloaca. Something sharp pressed into his palm; his fingers gently closed one by one, locking it into his grasp. That querulous sound again. A soft trilling on the breath. A question or a comfort. Then gone and the hard acres of sky pressing down on him.

  Something was darting around above them, too far off to be identified. Occasionally the swiftness would change to a slow circling. They birds, Stanners? Can you see?

  Dad?

  Jane reached for Stanley's hands again, hearing the panic building in his son's voice. He could see the birds now. Birds of prey. Owls and buzzards, kites and hawks. But there was something wrong with them. They spiralled, falling, not diving; they were struggling to stay aloft. And now Jane could see why; they were destroyed, their wings parting from the patagium. They seemed able to remain airborne, yet void of any counterweight they spun like seeds to the earth. There were hundreds of birds. It was like weather, of sorts.

  Jane grabbed his son's hands. 'They're going to hit us, Stan,' he said. They would have to gain shelter, fast, if they were to have a chance of evading the talons and bills of so many plummeting birds.

  He pulled and it was too easy. He rolled and the hands rolled with him. He glanced back and froze. Stanley's hands ended at the forearm. What remained of the bone was socketed in the wet sleeve of flesh. The great chiselled bill of a foot-high raptor came suckingly free of Stanley's opened chest. The screech it loosed as it gulped down bits of his son jagged along Jane's spine like a curve of broken glass.

  Voices. Whispered, urgent. Happy. Sad. No, don't moveme. From a sort of warmth to definite cold. He felt himself being lifted. He could do nothing about it. Something hard and edged and cold beneath him. He slithered into it. A sense of movement.

  The scratch of a needle in his arm. The sound of water. A smell of wood burning. They will scald me first. It will help them to pluck the hair out. Will they kill me before they cook me? A warm blanket. A cool flannel.

  He was tensed to the slash of a hunting knife at his throat. He kept waiting for the rage of a smoking griddle to tiger his skin. The spit and crackle of his own fat. The rending of open mouths unable to wait for the meat to cook through. These things were inevitable, but they never came.

  Instead, by degrees, he felt the fire in his chest dampened. The pulses and jolts in his head evened out. The irritation in his lungs disappeared so swiftly it was as if someone had reached into his windpipe and plucked it free. He looked down at his fist, opened it. Stared at the thing within.

  'The tent fall on top of you while you were sleeping?'

  He turned to see Aidan looking at him. He held a toy in his hands. A plastic figure disfigured by heat. Aid
an's plaster cast was dark grey, fraying at the end.

  'It must have done,' Jane said rustily, unable to keep the wobble from his voice. 'What you got there?'

  'General Grievous,' Aidan said. 'He's in Star Wars. The third film. My dad won't let me watch it because he says it's too scary. He's got a cough nearly as bad as yours.'

  'Your dad?'

  Aidan rolled his eyes. 'No. General.'

  'It's really good to see you again,' Jane said.

  'Do you want a hug?'

  'I'd love a hug.'

  Aidan came to him and put his good arm around Jane's neck. Jane was unable to stop himself from sobbing. He closed his eyes as the tears came and Aidan patted him gently.

  'You might want to keep that cast away from me. I don't want to catch anything nasty.'

  'Lick it,' Aidan said, pushing the bandage into Jane's face. They were wrestling happily together when Jane realised they were being watched.

  'You need to rest,' Becky said. She was smiling. He smiled too.

  'Where are we?'

  'Sunny York,' she said. 'You've been asleep for nearly twenty hours.'

  'I feel better.'

  'You had a chest infection. You were so hot. The sweat was flying off you. It was really worrying.'

  'I didn't mean to alarm you.'

  'I pumped you with antibiotics. Good that you did this now, while they were still effective.'

  'How do you mean?'

  'Drugs have a use-by date, just like food. Their efficacy wears off after a while.'

  Jane sat in silence, digesting the significance of this. Aidan quietly swapping his attention from one to the other, a trait Jane noticed he fell back on when he was unsure of a situation, or how it might develop.

  'I'm moving on,' Jane said. 'I can't stay here.'