One

by Conrad Williams

  'She nearly died. She turned black and her hair fell out. Her nose bled constantly and she was unable to keep food down. All she wanted to do was drink water. She never spoke again. Her vocal cords had been seared together.

  'I watched that programme and I could barely speak for a week. It felt as though I had experienced it. And now I have. I have.'

  They finished their whisky in silence. Jane was all for pulling up the table and throwing down a mattress but Becky told him not to be silly. They undressed and climbed into the bed. It was cold. She moved against him, her head on his chest, and he was reminded of how long it had been since he had felt someone as close as this.

  He somehow fell asleep with the maddening smell of her hair and a hot, chaotic thought of stumbling through limbs, trying to find where his face had landed while fire raged 200 feet high all around him and his son sang a song that turned to ash in his throat.

  In the night he turned and saw the face at the window, its lower half concealed by a dirty white mask. The eyes were as black as to not be there, shadows, sockets punched out of coke. Hair lashed the forehead. A hand left a greasy imprint on the glass. Then the face was gone. A lull. It woke him, spooked him. He lay in the darkness feeling certain that if he moved he would tumble into a chasm so deep that it would have no end. He would die of thirst before impact. He reached out and Becky was next to him. She made no sound while she breathed. She responded to his touch, though, rolling over and slipping her hand into the waistband of his boxer shorts. He stiffened immediately, felt the blood leave his head so quickly that an ache took its place as if he had swallowed an iced drink too swiftly. But he was too distracted by the face at the glass to be able to think of anything else. He turned to look at Becky but the darkness wouldn't soften. He edged away and swung his feet to the floor. The motorhome creaked as he picked his way to the door. He opened it and stepped outside. The wheelbarrow carrying their provisions was where he had left it. He wondered if he should have rooted around for his mask and goggles before leaving the vehicle. The sight before him wiped the thought immediately from his mind.

  The clouds had parted. There was a patch of the universe visible through it, about the size of a football field. The stars seemed packed within, as though so desperate to be seen they'd shifted their positions. He watched until the cloud knitted itself together again. It was as if it had never happened. The wind stirred his fringe. Soon it might be howling around them again. What was this? Eye of a storm? He could hear thunder coming up from the south. The familiar pulses of silver. It was warmer outside than in. He knelt and placed his hand against the tarmac. Residual heat. He wondered if it was from the event itself. He thought of his parents in their tiny garden, sitting together doing the crossword and drinking gin and tonics before dinner. He hoped that oblivion had reached them as quickly as it had those in Hiroshima. He couldn't cope with the thought of them surviving and struggling.

  Black, burned bushes at the side of the road. Scars in the embankment where cars had collided and rolled. He looked at all the dead vehicles, dozens of them, and wondered if they could ever be fixed. If something electrical made now by someone with know-how would work, or whether there was some atmospheric gremlin in the air that would not allow it.

  He walked around the motorhome to the off side. He peered into the dark. Another four hours until light, or its approximation. In the centre of the road was a diagram, scratched into the tacky skin of filth with a chunk of rock. It was a picture of a hand with six fingers and, within it, a stick figure.

  He remembered the bowl of meat. How he had scooped up the hot, greasy contents, chewing the skin which crackled under his teeth. The flavour of it rose in his throat now and he was sick, a thin gruel of whisky and soup. The tattoo. What had they given him?

  He looked up at the motorhome. On the window above the kitchen sink was a handprint.

  12. BREAKING AND ENTERING

  In the morning Jane broke into a barn and found a keeve filled with broken bottles and jars of fermenting pickle. There was a wooden chest filled with junk. He sorted through it but there was nothing worth taking although he did see a toy boat, painted blue and white, with a broken mast, no sail. He put it in his coat pocket. He emptied the keeve, wiped it clean with his gloved hand, and lugged it back to the motorhome. He used a pan to scoop up dirty water from a nearby brook, filtered it with a sieve and heated it on the burner. It took a while but the promise of a hot bath was worth it.

  'Go ahead,' he told Becky when she'd risen. She was standing at the door in her underwear, her hair tousled, looking down at the grey, steaming bathwater. 'A gift from me to you. A thank-you.'

  He took Aidan's arm and guided him away. They walked along the carriageway and Jane showed him the cats' eyes set into the middle of the road. He wanted to show him how the fixed rubber dome they were set into wiped the glass clean when it was depressed, but all of the rubber had melted. He picked one of the eyes out with his knife and handed it to Aidan. The mist wouldn't allow them a view south further than two hundred feet. It looked like something from a war photographer's portfolio.

  'I've never been to London afore,' Aidan said. He was scratching the top of his plaster cast. Jane hoped the break would heal well. If they couldn't find anybody good at setting bones they would either have to find a textbook and learn or walk around wrapped in cotton wool. He'd done his mandatory First Aid courses. He knew how to perform cardio-pulmonary resuscitation and dress a wound with a piece of glass sticking out of it. But what if Becky severed an artery? What if Aidan fractured his skull?

  'London's great,' Jane said. 'Especially for people who don't live there.'

  'What's in London?'

  'What isn't?'

  'Are there helicopters in London?'

  'Yes,' Jane said. 'And a big zoo. And parks so big it would take you a day to walk across them. And a big wheel that you can ride on.'

  'How big? As big as the Earth?'

  'Nearly.'

  'Woah,' Aidan said. He was thoughtful for a while. 'Dad took me and Kerry on a big wheel at the fair.'

  'This one is much bigger than that.'

  'How do you know?'

  'Trust me.'

  They turned and made their way back to the motorhome. Jane could see Becky wrapped in a bed sheet, drying her hair. He whistled and waved so that she would know they were on their way back, although he supposed privacy was the least of their worries. The land either side of the road was wreathed in mist. He shook away a conviction of creatures in white masks just beyond its margins, watching them intently. He oughtn't to have left Becky to bathe alone, but something about these pursuers told him that it was all right. They were too timid. They seemed, for all their menace, to be in thrall to him, if that was the right word for it. A thought occurred to him, of protection, but he couldn't move beyond that inclination. He had surprised himself with it. It seemed an absurd notion. But the image of the bodies hanging from those great posts in the ground. The injuries they had sustained. It was like punishment. A statement, or a warning. Chris had physically attacked him, and he'd ended up on one of those posts.

  By the time they got back to the motorhome, Becky had made breakfast. Mugs of tea, tinned fruit, a box of cheese crackers she'd found at the back of a cupboard. Aidan got into the bath and Jane remembered the boat. He tossed it in after him. Aidan pushed it around on the water, pretending there were people on board falling into the sea and being eaten by sharks. He got out, shivering, and Becky wrapped him in a bed sheet.

  'Is there anything we can take with us?' Jane asked.

  'Can't we take the motorhome?' Aidan asked.

  'Afraid not,' Becky said. 'The engine's kaput.'

  'What means ''kaput''?'

  'Broken,' Jane said.

  'Dad says ''knackered''.'

  'Knackered works.'

  They ate breakfast and rifled the drawers and cupboards. Aidan pointed at a door under the rear bed that opened into storage space.

  'Good
boy, Aidan,' Jane said. 'Nice work.'

  They found a case of shrink-wrapped mineral water, a tin of Quality Street chocolates, blankets and waterproof coats. A tripod and a camera bag. Jane unzipped the case and pulled out a pre-digital Nikon SLR. It was loaded with film. Three exposures taken. He thought about taking it with him, but he didn't know anything about development. Enlargers wouldn't work any more. Safelights wouldn't work any more. He had never been into photography before. And it wasn't as if the world hankered for a couple of family portraits while it smouldered to cinders and ash.

  He tossed the camera back into the cabin.

  'Look,' said Aidan. He'd been at the glove compartment and found passports, a bunch of keys, and a wallet.

  'Mr and Mrs Lewis,' Jane read. 'From Plymouth.' The wallet contained one hundred and fifty pounds, credit cards, photo-booth snaps he didn't look at. He put it all back.

  They rolled the blankets up, stuffed them inside black bin liners and strapped them to the top of their rucksacks.

  'Thanks, Mr and Mrs Lewis,' Aidan said.

  They walked south.

  The things they saw.

  A woman in a lay-by wrapped around a child, their ribcages fused together.

  A man in a car, its windscreen blasted and molten, reset across his face in a syrupy gyre of bone and slag.

  A dog on a leash impaled by what looked like part of a human femur.

  'I'm hungry,' Aidan said.

  'Can we stop for a while?' Becky asked. Something in her voice made Jane look up sharply. He couldn't tell if she were angry, or scared. Or both.

  They got off the A1 and followed a track through a field to a farmhouse.

  'Where are we?' Aidan asked.

  'Yorkshire,' Jane said. 'Britain's largest county. Home of the pudding. And tea so strong you could arm wrestle with it.'

  'I've had Yorkshire pudding,' Aidan said.

  'I should hope so,' Jane said.

  'And that thing you put on it. Brown juice.'

  'Gravy.'

  'Yes. I like that.'

  'I'll make you some. I promise.'

  'Richard.' Becky was frowning at him. 'Don't promise.'

  'But I do. One day I will make you a roast dinner. I absolutely promise you.' He was about to say that it would be good meat, with a trustworthy provenance. No tattoos. But he kept his teeth clenched on that. He thought there and then that he might have gone a little mad. And why not? Who could go forward, given what had happened, without insanity shadowing them? He doubted everything he had seen, even as his hands moved through the thick furring of ash on a gatepost, or he hopscotched a way through the broken pieces of the dead. He wondered if the ghosts that pursued him were of his own imagining, and if the awful deaths of Chris and Nance were illusions too. That, or done by his own hand during a fugue that he'd believed was the result of a crack on the head.

  For the first time he thought of abandoning Becky and Aidan. Perhaps they would be safer without him. He didn't know himself well enough to trust his actions any more. He doubted how the future might play out. Every possibility was edged with black, with blood.

  They moved through a garden that sloped up to the farmhouse, their feet scratching through the thin bristle. Black remnants of haycocks dotted the fields around them. A rusted disc harrow embedded in lifeless, impacted soil, twisted and cracked augers, their spiral inner teeth spilling free, the tines of a shakaerator broken and bent as if set to work on earth turned to stone. The roof of the barn was punched in; a wall bending out from one corner, as if holding on for grim life. All of the machinery bore fresh pockmarks, as if it had been peppered with pellets. He turned back to the house. All the windows on the upper floor nude, framing black. It would have to've been a powerful air rifle if it had been fired from that distance.

  'Let's have a look in the kitchen,' Jane said. A door flapped in the rising wind, providing a beat that their feet marched to. Jane held up a hand and they hung back a little once they were near. Jane waited, checking the broken windows for movement. The kitchen was magazine rustic. Wheatsheaves burnt to fingers of charcoal on a cupboard made from recycled scaffold planks. Crisped cushions in an inglenook. An Aga. Welsh-slate floor. Shaker-style cabinets. Copper pots. A Belfast sink filled with bloody water. Jane hesitated over that, feeling the warning signs begin: the skin gathering at his nape, the hairs rising on his arms.

  They checked the drawers and cupboards. There was basmati rice in an old coffee tin. Dozens of cans of plum tomatoes. Spices stored in tins that had once contained Assam tea. In the cellar Jane found a freezer with its own generator. He opened it and recoiled at the stink of rotted chickens sloshing about in a defrosted broth. Another fridge containing bottles of wine, cans of bitter. No longer cold, but who cared?

  Becky and Aidan got a fire going in the porch, where they were shielded from the brunt of the wind. Aidan was given a pestle and mortar and shown how to grind the spices to powder. He worked at their names as he did so, struggling at first, but reciting them like a mantra to the rhythm of the pestle. Cor-i-an-der. Cu-min. Car-da-mom. Fen-u-greek. While Becky drained tins of chickpeas and new potatoes, Jane made his way into the hall. A rush-seated stool stood in an alcove beneath a coat rack crammed with coats of varying sizes. A restored Bakelite phone on a stand. A shoe rack with muddy wellington boots. There was a living room off to the left. Inside it Jane found bodies lying under torn-down blinds and a plastic shower curtain. A man, two boys in pyjamas, one maybe five, the other seven. And a baby girl. All had been shot in the head. The eldest boy had a gunshot through the palm of his left hand. Where was the wife, the mother?

  He closed the door, wishing there were a bolt he could shoot or a key he could turn.

  He went back to the kitchen, considering what to say, but Becky and Aidan were engrossed in their cooking. Instead, Jane made his way upstairs. He stood for a moment on the landing, looking out at the field below. A good view of the dual carriageway from here; they could have been tracked easily as they approached the house. Someone with a gun would have made themselves known by now, surely? Warning shots? Hands up. Turn around. Leave.

  Dead, then. Or long gone.

  Jane entered the front bedroom. The man was lying in a pool of blood. He could have been any age between twenty and sixty. A gunshot wound had opened up his thigh; he'd cut his trouser leg up the seam and the two halves of fabric hung off him like grey skin. He'd stitched himself shut but the wound had become infected. His head seemed dented. Blood had flowed and coagulated there; it sheened the shoulders of his biker jacket and it cracked whenever he moved. His skin was as pale and lustreless as wax. He was scut-bearded. A silver hoop glinted in his earlobe. He viewed Jane through a curtain of white, ratty hair. Jane wondered how much blood he'd lost. The walnut stock of a rifle was buried in his armpit. The barrel pointed at the floor. His bloodied fingers lifted and rested, lifted and rested on the trigger, the polished thumbhole. His other hand played in the fans of blood, drawing shapes, fingering the crassamentum. That bothered Jane more than the weapon.

  'That's a nice gun,' Jane said.

  'Too right. It's even got a ventilated butt.'

  'It and me both,' Jane said.

  The man laughed. There was death in it. He coughed and Jane saw him taste it, what was coming to him. It caused his face to screw up.

  'Those prison issue?' Jane asked, nodding at his clothes.

  'Yeah.'

  'Where were you?'

  'Lindholme. About fifteen miles from here. If you're travelling by crow.'

  'What were you in for?'

  'Stealing sweets off kids.'

  Jane waited.

  'Rape. Manslaughter.' He pronounced it man's laughter. 'I was bored. It was something to do.'

  'How did you get this far?'

  'Walked.'

  'In that state?'

  The man coughed, shook his head. 'I was attacked,' he said. 'Fucking crazy bitch comes running out the farmhouse, carrying this gun. She was screaming. I ran
off but she shot me in the leg. She'd killed everyone in her family. Husband, two sons. Baby daughter. Claire. Told me that she'd always wanted a girl and it was their last try at it. Meant to pull the trigger on herself next but couldn't bring herself to do it. Told me that if I didn't shoot her, she'd kill me too.'

  'You didn't kill them?'

  'I didn't kill them.'

  They regarded each other for a while. The man was in too much pain for Jane to gauge his honesty.

  'So you shot her?'

  'I shot her, yes. What else could I do?'

  'So where is she? There's only four bodies in the room downstairs.'

  'Outside.'

  'Mind if I check?'

  'I'm not lying.'

  'Still . . .'

  'Knock yourself out. Down in the barn.'

  Jane bit his lip and eyed the gun. He'd be dead before he made one step to wrestle it from the man. 'I'll be here when you get back. I'm not going anywhere.'

  He was turning to go when the man said: 'You been here a day earlier, could have been you she got hold of. Think about that, lucky fuck.'

  Downstairs Jane pulled Becky to one side. Aidan was scooping rice into a pan.

  'There's a guy upstairs,' he murmured. 'He doesn't know you're down here, I think. He's in pretty bad shape.'

  'You want me to help him?'

  'He's beyond it. He has a gun. I think he's dangerous, but he won't be able to make it down here. I need to check something out. I'm going to the barn. If you hear anything, movement upstairs, you shout at me, loud as you can.'

  'OK.'

  'He shoots me, you take Aidan and fast out the front door. Not the back. No trying to save me. OK?'

  'OK.'

  Jane went straight outside and moved fast to the barn. His back seemed to expand. He wouldn't hear the shot; but there might be enough time to see his heart as it exited his chest. He glanced to his left just before he met the collapsed barn wall and thought he saw skulking figures down by a clump of Corsican pine trees. Inside the barn he found the woman almost immediately. She was sitting up against the far wall, a photograph album in her hands. A single gunshot to her left eye. Jane looked around for something to cover the body but there was nothing. He noticed half a dozen big rats eyeing him and wondered whether they'd got started on the woman somewhere he couldn't see.