One

by Conrad Williams

  'We'll all go,' Becky said. 'No more Scooby-Doo shit, right?'

  11. HIBAKUSHI

  They talked while the tarmac disappeared beneath their feet. Sometimes when Aidan grew tired Jane would give him a piggyback, or they took it in turns to push him in the wheelbarrow Jane himself had been carried in when he'd been found. Aidan was in there now, asleep, his arms over his head as if he were playing hide-and-seek.

  'Where did you find me?' Jane asked Becky.

  'We were looking for you. You said you'd stick to the A1. It was Aidan who saw you. Lying on a bench in the Shambles. I thought you were . . . God, this is awful to say . . . just another dead body. But he recognised you even though you'd been . . . swaddled.'

  'Swaddled?'

  'Wrapped head to toe in blankets. You looked like something parcelled up. Or an offering.'

  He didn't like the sound of that.

  'After we were attacked . . . after you got away,' he said, 'did you see—'

  'Yes, we saw.' And her tone put an end to that.

  'I think I'm being followed,' he said.

  Jane could see in the shape of Becky's face that she had thought about that, perhaps considered the wisdom of taking to the road with him again. She said, 'We can't be the only ones who made it. There's no telling how many survived, up in the mountains, say, or, like you're hoping, in the tunnels, the Tube. And there's no telling how many of them might be nutcases. Born mad, or turned mad by all this.' She cast her arm at the firestormed city. 'Maybe you are being followed, and maybe they're friendly. But we should suspect otherwise. I don't ever want the decision of how I bow out taken from my hands again.'

  They walked in silence and Jane stared at the boy, not knowing how to phrase his next question. Becky noticed it in him and understood what he was working on. 'It's not something we need to discuss now,' she said. 'It can wait.'

  He could not help but compare her to Cherry. Cherry's insistence had an edge to it that said, pester me about this at your peril. Becky was firm, but he could see the cracks. There was pleading there. He wondered how Cherry would deal with their situation. He thought about how it might change her. Maybe the cracks in her shell would be showing too by now. It bolstered him a little to think that she might welcome his arrival.

  If she survived, kiddo. Big fat if.

  The way that decay wormed its way into the structures that people in love built around them. He couldn't pinpoint a moment when he noticed that his and Cherry's lives had soured. He guessed it was the same for all doomed couples; a gradual disaffection. You suddenly found yourself spitting and sneering at each other, arriving at some awful location without remembering the route. You couldn't turn back or consult a map; the road behind you seemed to erase itself. There were other routes, but they never quite arrived back at the place where you were most happy.

  Jane remembered being in a pub in Stoke Newington one afternoon. Cherry and Stanley had gone off to visit her parents in Reading. He'd been flicking through a magazine, wondering whether to have another pint or wander down to the Keralan restaurant for lunch, when he noticed a couple sitting on a sofa in a far corner. Something in their body language that wasn't being replicated by any of the other couples caught the eye. A distance. Defensiveness. He was trying to mollify her; everything about her talked of barriers. Crossed arms, crossed legs, her body angled away from him. Her eyebrows knitted, the flatlining mouth. He would say something, his arms open; she would shake her head. He was crestfallen. She was determined.

  It was painful to watch, but enthralling too. How did things get to such a point? When did the smiles and the butterflies and the quickening heart become a folding inward? How could something as positive as love become dread? And then Cherry came to his thoughts, reading out the grim list, her breath hitching in her throat as she rushed to get it all out before he could argue a point.

  You got older, there were resentments and regrets. You felt stifled, unfulfilled. You felt trapped by the person you'd thought you'd go to the grave with. You were tired all the time. You had more important things to think about than curling up in front of the fire to read or watch a film together, to make love.

  He turned away from her furious, strangely triumphant features, and saw the girl stand, shrug away from the beseeching hands. Jane could see this was the final summit, could see it in the crumbled look of the boy. He'd played every card and was left holding the Joker. Sitting near the door, Jane had watched the girl leave. She'd drawn herself upright, lost the tightness that drew her features together before she'd crossed the threshold. She appeared reborn. He wondered if there was another man she was already on her way to. There was a catalyst, he supposed. A sweetener. He considered, idly, on the point of sleep, whether Cherry's head had been turned by someone else, someone closer to home who chatted to her and Stanley, who didn't go off to the rigs every six months. Even now, when he thought he'd been immunised to every kind of pain there was left to know, the thought pierced him. Jane no longer had his map. But he wasn't so desperate to know where he was all the time. The road would take him where he needed to be, as long as he stayed on it and kept the paling sun to his left at dawn, right at dusk. When his watch stopped he felt a blip of panic, but it soon passed. He didn't need to know the time. He didn't need an alarm. It no longer mattered what date it was. It was liberating. He was paring away all the dead wood, the better to focus on his son. Sustenance, shelter and progress, that was what it all boiled down to.

  And these shades on your heels. Don't forget them.

  Jane ground the thought under his heel and upped his pace. He had developed a feel for distance and wanted to improve his daily mileage after his sickness had reduced him to a snail's meander. Becky didn't say a word but fell in step with him. The jolting of the wheelbarrow eventually wakened Aidan, but he didn't speak either. He watched Jane as if unsure of who he really was, or trying to assimilate him with the thin figure he had spotted on the bench, rattling in his sleep.

  They stopped at a place where the M1 and the A1 split into separate roads. West of here was a town. Jane found some hiking boots for Aidan, who was wearing trainers that were beginning to unravel. It was difficult to shield him from the worst of the casualties but in the end Aidan just told him it was OK. Dead things didn't scare him. It was the living he was worried about.

  Some of the dead bore unusually specific injuries, as if the heat had been focused on a plane. Jane thought about that a lot. It suggested something other than a random explosion or explosions. A woman whose clothes had been incinerated off her body had been burnt across her back, but there was an unaffected line of skin next to her spine, as if that scimitar of bone had shaded it from the fire. Other people were burnt only on their hands or faces. But it had not been this flash that had killed them; an ambient heat had cooked them from the inside out, like a microwave oven.

  They found a supermarket but Jane told them to wait a while before entering; they sat on a wall and watched the door. The shelves were packed with bad food. Thousands of tins that had been compromised in some way: splits and pits and punctures.

  'What happens when the food runs out?' Aidan asked.

  'It's not going to run out,' Jane said. 'Think of all those millions of houses. All those millions of tins.'

  'There isn't much here,' Becky said 'And a lot of the stuff we've found in the houses so far has been damaged. Exploded because whatever it was that hit us cooked everything inside the tins. Getting the shits from a dodgy meal isn't funny any more. It can kill you.'

  'There's plenty. We just have to think.'

  Aidan said, 'The shits.'

  Jane led them along the aisles and checked underneath the bottom shelf. Only a tin of broad beans. 'See,' Jane said. 'Everyone else missed this one.'

  'Or left it on purpose,' Aidan said. 'I don't like beans.'

  Jane led them to a curtain of plastic at the back of the supermarket. It had melted from the doorway and resolidified into a weird polymeric puddle. They crackled acr
oss it and into the delivery bays beyond. An articulated lorry was parked outside. All of the pallets in the bays were empty. A fork-lift truck lay on its side, whatever it had been carrying incinerated. Jane unclasped the hitches on the canvas flanks of the artic and threw them back.

  A smell, sweet and rank, hit him like a fist. He recoiled. Nothing good in there. He saw the soles of feet, maybe half a dozen people sitting up against the back of the lorry. Everything on the pallets already taken or spoiled. Back in the delivery bay there was nothing but a large lidded yellow skip, some cleaning fluid and mops. A radio that didn't work.

  'We'll find something at the next one,' Becky said. 'And all those houses. There must be tons of food.' Her face clouded at this, though. Jane could see how appetites might be tested if they had to resort to wading through bodies to get to their cans of button mushrooms and new potatoes.

  They were heading out but all Jane could think of was the skip. 'Wait for me here,' he said. 'I need to check something.'

  'But Richard—' Becky protested.

  'Please, let me do this,' he said. 'Think of it as training for the future.'

  He thought that maybe she muttered something like 'What future?' but he didn't stop to argue the toss.

  He went back to the delivery bay and pulled a shopping trolley over to the skip. He tipped the trolley over onto its side and stood on it. The lid of the skip was secured with a padlock. Vents showed him how things were thrown in. He stepped off the trolley and looked around him. He saw a sign in the neighbouring car park. He walked to the back of the delivery area and clambered over a bowed diamond-link fence. He crossed a wasteland of aggregate and glass and cindered chickweed. Another fence led into the garden area of a DIY megastore. Everything black and cowed. Great twenty-litre packs of obliterated compost. Hostas and acers and rhondodendrons in large earthenware pots. Bamboo like cross-hatchings in a grim cartoon. Plastic garden furniture bent and bubbled by heat. Concrete statues reaching to the heavens, blinded by soot. He touched one of the hosta leaves and it collapsed to dust.

  Inside he found a collection of lump hammers. He hefted one, then looked around for anything else he might be able to take with him. Everything that could be used as a weapon had been lifted. Axes. Ball-peen hammers. Cold chisels. He rifled the pockets of a dead staff member. A few coins. A travel pass. Nothing. He stared at the man lying on his belly. He put his foot under him and levered him over onto his back. Jane had to look away when most of his torso stayed where it was on the floor. A Leatherman multi-tool and a Stanley knife were attached to a large key ring with lanyards. He cut them free and put them in his pocket.

  He carried the lump hammer back to the supermarket delivery bay. It took three strikes to knock the padlock off its clasp. He stepped onto the shopping trolley and with the heels of his hands pushed the lid up and off.

  Inside the skip were piles of waste. Nylon ties cut from pallet loads. Broken glass. Cardboard cylinders from till receipt rolls. Great wads of shrinkwrap. Bricks of polystyrene. And dozens of cans. He carefully picked out some of those nearest to him and studied the labels. Some of them didn't have labels. Some were punctured or rusted; these he discarded. The dented cans he checked more sedulously, pushing the tops to see if any air had got inside. He scooped up an armload of cans he thought were safe and carried them inside.

  They ate in the pet-food aisle. Mystery cans that turned out to be apple-pie filling, meatballs in gravy, kidney beans in chilli sauce. It didn't escape Jane's notice that all of the tinned cat and dog food was gone.

  When they'd finished, Jane wiped his mouth and stood up to get more for their rucksacks. Aidan rolled onto his back, belched and patted his belly. 'Dee-licious,' he said. 'I doff my cap to you, sir.'

  Jane thought he might laugh all the way to London.

  They walked maybe another three miles before the clouds began cosying up overhead again. A motorhome, a four-berth Fiat Mooveo, had come to a stop by the central reservation. Its occupants had crawled from the cabin to die; it was impossible to tell what gender they were, so denuded and leathery were they. Jane opened the door in the side and ducked in, checked there were no nasty surprises in store. He ushered them inside quickly, just as the first fat drops began to pound against the roof.

  Aidan was uncertain at first, hanging back by the door while Becky and Jane looked around. Jane wondered if he might have suffered an unpleasant shock recently. An unexpected body in a house, maybe. Just because Jane was tensed to see corpses at every turn didn't mean the boy had to be. Or should be. The whole country seemed to have turned into a house of horrors, jangling skeletons in every shadowed corner.

  It took a while to work out how the space ought to be used. There was a bunk above the driving area. You pulled a strap and it folded down. There was a harness system to prevent you from falling out. A mattress and pillows. There was a smell of burned plastic; the moulded air-vents on the roof of the motorhome had been melted out but there was a blind with a bolt that could be pulled across and locked. It would keep out the rain at least. At the rear of the motorhome was another bed. Behind the passenger seat was a folding table and behind the driver a small sofa. There was a cooking area too, with a hob. And a toilet and shower beyond that. The shower didn't work. Jane tried the gas and a burner jumped to life.

  'Oh, yes,' Becky said, and leaned into him, pushing her forehead gently into his chest. 'Please tell me there's some tea?'

  They searched the cupboards and found some sticks of granulated coffee and a tin of tea bags. Sticks of sugar. A couple of packets of chocolate powder.

  'No milk,' Jane said, but Becky couldn't have been happier. She boiled water and made them all hot drinks. They sat around the table. There were another two or three miles in the evening if the rain eased off, but there seemed tacit agreement that they would stay the night here. Aidan, now that the door was locked and he had a mug of hot chocolate, had kicked off his boots and was laying claim to the bunk.

  In a cupboard above the sofa they found books, a pack of cards, a board game they didn't recognise and that had no rulebook. They ate heated tins of pork sausages and baked beans on plates with forks, and played snap until the light faded and Adrian was nodding.

  Jane undressed him and hoisted him into the bunk, pulled the blankets up to his neck and secured the harness. He lit candles and poured whisky into the rinsed mugs and handed one to Becky.

  'Some music would be nice,' she said.

  'Not that you're a hard woman to please.'

  She laughed and sipped her drink. 'Music, though,' she said. 'I think this must be the longest I've ever gone without hearing any.'

  'Yeah,' Jane said. 'Although in my line of work, I have to confess I'm glad for the respite.'

  'Your line of work. Diver, right? Sounds interesting.'

  'Kind of.' He told her about his work, how it was much like any other hard, risk-filled labour once you got beyond the technicalities. 'Saved my life, though,' he said.

  'Fate throws us in or pulls us back,' Becky said.

  Jane watched her in the candlelight. She was gazing into her mug as if she might find a solution there. Aidan's breathing was like the soft hiss of an oil burner. It was soothing. It was something to alight upon other than the tragic wail of the wind.

  'Do you have anybody?' Jane asked. 'Anybody at all? We could check on them.'

  She was shaking her head. 'Even if there were someone, I wouldn't go to them. I don't want to have to remember them dead for ever.'

  'It might not be like that.'

  'No, you're right. I hope you're right. For you, above all. But I can't hope. It's not in me.'

  'Where are your family?'

  'Abroad, mostly. I have relatives in Canada.'

  'Quite a journey, if you decided to go looking.'

  'Yes,' she said. 'Something tells me I'll have a little trouble booking a flight.'

  They sat and digested this. It was another jolt; Jane hadn't considered what might have happened at the airports. A
ll that fuel. It didn't bear thinking about.

  Becky took a drink, the slightest sip; she'd done little more than moisten her lips. 'I remember one day, our teacher took us to the TV room. We were all excited. No proper lessons. We just get to veg out in front of the box. He put a tape in the machine and switched it on and left the room. He actually left the room. Everyone started monkeying around, and then the programme started. An atomic bomb going off. Mushroom cloud. Buildings turned to dust in the blink of an eye. Everyone went quiet. Sat down. Watched it. It was the mid-1980s. Cold War paranoia. Every siren you heard was a four-minute warning, every plane going over was filled with plutonium.

  'There was a woman on the screen who looked like a piece of rubber that has been left too close to the fire. She was writing her story and it was read out to the camera by her daughter. How she became pregnant by an American. There were some living there in Japan before the war started. He was eventually interned. She never saw him again. The daughter was born a couple of months before the attack on Pearl Harbor. The mother worked as a teacher. Towards the end of the war she moved around a lot. She was offered work at a school in Hiroshima.

  'She left her daughter at home with her parents, who had moved with her too. They lived in a traditional wooden house near the mountains. Their house overlooked an island. I remember her talking about deer. About how they used to walk through the streets. The mother used to collect wood and bring back fruit for the family breakfasts. Every day she would walk miles to the train station and get a train to the centre of Hiroshima. On the morning of the bomb, she was helping to organise the morning assembly. There was a flash, and the colour of violet. And then she doesn't remember anything until she was aware of something dripping on her face. She thought she was in heaven. There was dust over everything. She could hear singing. Girls singing the school song. Later she realised it was because the children had been forbidden to cry for help. She was able to stand up. The school was gone. She had been standing half a mile from the nuclear blast. She was the only teacher to survive. She tried to save others but the voices singing went out one by one. Four children survived.