One

by Conrad Williams

  'Jesus,' he said, and picked her up. He blanched at the stiff, cold weight of her. The sudden change of position drew a sigh from her lungs that brushed his neck and made him cry out, but he did not drop her. He made to take the album from her hands but it wasn't going anywhere. He heard the scamper of claws as he took the body outside but the rats would not follow him into the field.

  He got into the kitchen and Becky was saying, 'Oh, Richard.' And Aidan was saying, 'Who's she? Is she dead?'

  'Don't let him in here,' Jane snapped as he kicked open the door to the living room. He put the woman next to her baby and covered them both. Could he have done to Cherry and Stan what this woman had managed to do to her family? No. No way. He didn't have it in him. He could kill himself, he reckoned, but not his boy. You survive and you think you're chosen for something special. You can't believe your luck. And then you find yourself envying the dead.

  He closed the door and told Becky to wait with Aidan.

  'I want to come with you.'

  'There's nothing to see. Get dinner ready.' As if he could eat anything now.

  Upstairs the man had died. His position had not altered. He stared at Jane but whatever it was that made life so beyond doubt was absent now. A sheen to the eyes. Elasticism.

  A memory from childhood. Lying in bed, getting Dad to play his favourite track from the White Album one last time, before lights out. Hey, Bungalow Bill, what did you kill, Bungalow Bill? Such memories had not impinged as much as they might. It was understandable now, he supposed, yet when he had been on the rigs he had often thought of home, when he was a toddler, usually when he was struggling with a job in the gelid deep. The family garden had been large and well tended. Dad was proud of his lawn, trimmed regularly with his Webb mower so that there were pretty stripes patterning the grass. What do you think, Rico? His dad would ask him, sweating over the handles. Wembley or Wimbledon?

  They had grown all kinds of fruit and vegetables in that back garden. Carrots he'd eat straight from the ground. Gooseberries. Beetroot they chopped together for pickling.

  That's glossy, Jane remembered saying of the succulent slices. Like a magazine. His dad had been impressed with that. Glossy . . . get you.

  Memories. Pain. He supposed it was because it might mean a link to Stanley that was too painful to experience. It might also lead him to thinking that Stanley might not remember who he was, or the things they had done together. He thought of photographs stored on hard drives now no more than irretrievable ghosts of code. There was nothing beyond memory. The painful thing was trying to come to terms with the possibility that before too long he'd discover that was all he would ever have.

  He pulled the gun from the man's hands. He clicked the safety catch on and checked the breech. One pellet spent, but otherwise fully loaded with .22s. Jane checked the man's pockets and found cigarettes, a lighter, two boxes of ammunition. There was a folded photograph of a woman, topless, reclined on a sofa, her arms outstretched. An inscription. Hi Loz. Waiting for you, babe. x Heartbreaking stories everywhere.

  He took the pellets and the lighter. He looked around him. A single bed covered in dust and dead insects. A chest of drawers contained nothing but a few wall hooks and a laminated copy of the Lord's Prayer. There must be more boxes of ammunition somewhere.

  He slung the rifle over his shoulder and went downstairs. The smell of curry from the kitchen was good, but it didn't inspire hunger. He doubted he could eat again after the last hour or so.

  In the cellar again he took more care over his search. There was an old pine cabinet pushed against a wall where all the white goods were arrayed. Inside were tools, all well cared for, clean, oiled, free of rust. Trays of nails and screws sorted into different sizes. Rawlplugs. Drill bits meticulously cleaned of plaster dust. All useful. All useless.

  But then he found a drawer that wasn't meant for the slot into which it was embedded. Instead of a handle, double loops of shoelace had been stapled into the front. Inside was gun oil, barrel brushes and jags, cleaning rods. A screw-in silencer that didn't look as if it had been used. The drawer was only half the length of its neighbours. Jane pulled it all the way out and ignited the lighter. Boxes hidden in the gap at the back. He fished them out. Six boxes of .22 pellets. Six boxes of .177 pellets. He pocketed everything.

  They ate in the kitchen but though it was the most flavourful meal he'd eaten in weeks – months, if the dishes scarfed under pressure in the Ceto were included – he didn't taste any of it. He kept gazing at the ceiling, expecting the man's blood to blacken the paint, to come seeping through the boards. Or he'd hear the turning of the doorknob and the woman poking her perforated head around the corner, breathing in stitches with words struggling through it all: My, that smells good.

  He put down his fork and pushed back from the table.

  'I'm going to reorganise the packs,' he said.

  Aidan was playing outside with some toy cars he'd found in a box under the stairs. Becky came to Jane while he was sorting through things they could do without.

  'Don't worry,' he said, gesturing at the clothes. 'I'm not going to just bin it. We'll put it to a vote.'

  'It's OK,' Becky said. 'It's not that.'

  'What, then?'

  She squatted next to him. 'All I'm asking, suggesting really, is that you keep us in the loop.'

  'I'm trying to protect you.'

  She smiled. 'There's nothing you'll see that I need to be protected from. I mean, really. I used to work in a hospital.'

  'OK. But Aidan. He doesn't need to see everything.'

  'Agreed. But let me in. I can help you. I know guys like you. This alpha-male shit. There's no need for it.'

  'All right. So from now on we only check things out if we all agree?'

  'Yes.'

  'And if we're starving?'

  'Yes.'

  'Every house, every place we see. There'll be people hiding out, maybe. Maybe not. We'll have to take chances eventually. Because I'm not thinking about just now. I'm thinking ahead. Three years. Five years. Ten. You think we can just waltz into the supermarkets every day and pick out a few cans for supper?'

  Becky couldn't reply. He saw it in her face. The future opening up before her like a rotten gourd. Suddenly she seemed to understand the unhealable nature of things, the struggle ahead. He saw her realisation that she was a young woman who might die long before she became old.

  She made to say something but nothing came. She walked away. Jane finished packing the rucksacks. Nobody complained about what he had decided to leave behind.

  'Can I take these?' Aidan asked, holding up the toy cars.

  'Of course you can,' Jane said, trying to swallow the bile, trying to cap a raging voice that wanted to ask if a couple of Matchbox toys meant more than an obliterated family lying under plastic in a room already sweating and stinking with decay.

  He moved off at a smart pace, not waiting to see if the others were coming with him. They'd spent far too long at the farmhouse; it sickened him that they'd been preparing fancy food, filling their stomachs while bodies grew cold around them. He thought of all the meals he might eat in the future, however frugal, however pathetic or desperate. And he wondered about all the people who would watch him while they did it, with blank, unblinking eyes.

  13. TRACHEOTOMY

  Jane woke up reaching for someone who wasn't there. He could feel his slender shoulders beneath his fingers, the fabric of his favourite pyjamas. Words from books they loved to read together fragmented in his mind, falling away as though incapable of being remembered without the vital missing ingredient. Daddy Island. Frog Finds a Friend. Dad Mine. Titles Jane could hardly give voice to without the prickle of tears.

  He sat up. His breath came in plumes. The climate was like that of a desert. Hot days. Frozen nights. Thin plaques of ice matted the canvas. He broke a piece off and sucked it. A taste of metal and chemicals. He spat. He wondered if dreams of Stanley had wakened him, or something else. The others were breathing stea
dily in the tent. He gripped the rifle stock loosely, glad of the weapon, but wary too, worried that it might inspire violence in others. He gazed out over the rooftops and countryside, the swollen, haphazard road. He had suggested finding a big house to stay in, or a hotel, but Aidan had begged them not to, preferring the tent.

  'I don't want to see anybody,' he explained. 'I don't like how their faces look soft. Like they're asleep but they're not.'

  It was too dark to see anything beyond the shapes of battered houses and factories, broken fingers of mills, the great shoulders of hills muscling up against the town. Again, he wasn't sure where they were. Somewhere between north and south, he told Aidan, and Aidan had been satisfied with that.

  There was a distant thrum, a brief vibration. Jane thought he felt something in his feet, but couldn't be sure. The horizon they had left behind contained a burnt orange smear. His mouth went dry at the thought of some power station having finally reached tipping point and gone into meltdown. It was inevitable. Maybe life on Earth from now on would be dictated by whichever way the wind was blowing.

  He moved away from the tents and leant back against the badly crumpled bonnet of a car. The engine block had rocketed into the driver's zone, lifting the top of the man and depositing him in the back seat. Oblivion. Out like a light.

  The idea of death had caused Jane many moments of panic as a younger man. Newspaper articles about random attacks: samurai swords in London churches, knives on Manchester buses, guns in Liverpool nightclubs. People set on fire. People tortured and gut-shot. Left for dead. But death didn't go on. Your nerves were incinerated beyond use by fire; your lungs filled with water. The struggle to survive was out of your hands. You were insensate before the end. Death came and calmed you down. And it could only happen once. He was no longer scared of death. He didn't feel he had the right to be, not after what had happened to Stopper and the others. But he was scared for Stanley. He wanted to be able to assuage his son's fears, hold his hand, show him there was nothing to be frightened of beneath the bed or in the wardrobe. Because Dad was here and everything would be all right.

  He thought he sensed movement a way back off the road. Shadows congealing, dispersing. But it could just be the colour of the night, writhing in his eyes.

  Something came sailing past him, riding high on the wind. A piece of clothing, perhaps. A plastic bag or the remnant of a flag. 'No standards left,' he said, and coughed a bitter chuckle. An ache was building around his teeth, an itchiness. His gums bled whenever he brushed his teeth. They bled when he bit into food. He wondered if it might be gingivitis. A friend of his mother's had lost all her teeth to gingivitis in her twenties. He half-wished Becky was a dentist instead of a radiologist.

  He was tired, his feet, back and neck ached, but sleep played games with him. They were averaging, he guessed, between ten and twelve miles a day. Good going, with such a small boy in tow. Jane suspected his exhaustion was down to pushing Aidan in the wheelbarrow, but there was also the rain to contend with, and the diminishing food supplies. Some days he went without so that Aidan and Becky did not. While they slept he went hunting for cans, but it was alarming to discover that there were few to be found. Already the stockpiles had been rifled. There were survivors in their houses – maybe half a dozen so far – who said nothing as he approached, but showed him the grin of something sharp in their hands. They would not talk to him. Once he had been shot at.

  He found a jar of pickled red cabbage in an end-of-terrace hovel taken over by rats. A skeleton sat in a squirming armchair, a china cup and saucer at its feet. There was a tin of bamboo shoots in a flat where someone seemed to have melted into the floorboards and left only his clothes behind. He had thought, Fuck bamboo shoots, you might as well can rabbit tods. And then he'd knifed the lid back and eaten it all there and then. It had been delicious. The supermarkets had become ghost buildings. Everything taken apart from DVDs, household electrical items, barbecues. Where were all these people? Where were all the survivors? Was everyone on the A1 ahead of him?

  He wondered about his leisurely pursuers. He wondered if they were pursuing him at all. Maybe they were stripping provisions from his way ahead, pushing him towards some kind of test. He thought of the meat in the bowl. He thought of Becky and Aidan. God. The way your mind worked when you were up against it. All that trickle-down shit. A confrontation was ahead, he thought, one way or the other. Before they made it to London, perhaps. Or once they were ensconced there. He wondered what that meant, the moment it occurred to him. Just because he had lived there before didn't mean he had to stay there now. He would find Stanley and Cherry and they would leave, try to make it across the Channel to France, somewhere where this fury had not touched, if there was anywhere like that left. He wasn't going to spend the rest of his life fighting over crumbs in Kentish Town larders and carrying the gun with him every time he took his boy to play in Coram's Fields.

  His throat ached for cold beer. The whisky was too strong to drink greedily, and he could do a good session, he felt he deserved a night on the lash. Thirsty, he went back to the tent and drank from the bladder. Becky and Aidan were in the same positions he'd left them. He heard the scrabble of pebbles loosed from a bank of earth, the hush of dead vegetation kicked to dust as bodies hurried by it.

  'Show yourselves,' he whispered. 'Talk to me.'

  He fell asleep sitting upright, in an awkward position. Aidan nudged him awake as he hopped from foot to foot, trying to unzip the tent's entrance so he could go out for a piss. Jane's neck flared with pain. He stood up, rubbing at it. Cold had seeped into his bones.

  'Where's Becky?' He blinked, looking out at the pale morning, finding it hard to believe that he had been asleep for any length of time; the darkness, and the sounds, and his uneasy thoughts seemed to have been the product of only a few seconds previously.

  'She said she was going to try to find us some breakfast. She said she was sick to the back teeth of dried apricots. She said don't worry. She said she was going to do things and buy a book.'

  'By the book,' Jane corrected. 'So much for democracy.'

  'What?'

  'Never mind.'

  Aidan helped him take down the tent and pack it in the rucksacks. They sat together on the rucksacks, feeling the temperature climb, waiting. They talked about books. Aidan liked Where the Wild Things Are.

  'Do you still like it?' Jane asked, but Aidan didn't understand what he meant.

  The thought of books had stayed with him. He supposed there would be no more. Not for a long time, at least. He thought of all the books he had read over his lifetime, a great deal of them in those prison cells of hyperbaric chambers where there'd been little else to do. Were they still important? Maybe yes. Maybe more so than ever. Aidan had not been read a bedtime story since they'd found him. That wasn't good enough. It was time to remember the stories Jane had been told as a child, or make up some new ones. It had been a while – he remembered singing silly, off-the-cuff songs to lull Stanley to sleep – but it was in him; it was in everyone, like the skill to make fire, or love.

  Becky came back empty-handed. He was harder on her than he should have been, perhaps because of that.

  'I just looked in a corner shop,' she said. 'I waited a long time to make sure there was nobody inside.'

  'But that's not the problem, is it?' he asked. 'It's people on the outside, watching you, waiting for you to make your move.'

  'Well, I'm here aren't I?' she snapped.

  'Have a dried apricot.'

  They walked most of the day in silence.

  'How many minutes until we get to London?' Aidan asked.

  'I don't know,' Jane said.

  'Ten?'

  'A bit more than that.' But he wasn't really listening any more. Up ahead, maybe a mile away, there was a strange glinting on the road, as if someone were sending messages by reflecting light off glass.

  'What's that?' Becky asked. They had all stopped.

  'I don't know,' Jane said.


  'Code?' As if she had read his mind.

  'Maybe. I don't like it. Let's get under cover somewhere for a while.'

  They scampered down the embankment to a ploughed field. They had to leave the wheelbarrow. Jane dumped it in a ditch and they hurried across the field, dust pluming up from every footstep and lifting from their clothes, their hair, as if they were made from the stuff. At the far end of the field they climbed over a charred fence. There was a lake beyond it, dark and flat as a lithograph.

  They lay down by the fence and watched the road. Their dust ghosts rose too slowly, but were then whipped away by the currents of wind. They had barely dissipated when the first of the figures appeared.

  It was like looking at a mirror image of themselves. A man led the way for a woman pushing a young child in an old-fashioned pram. The child was too big for it, legs hanging over the side, jouncing at every bump and crater. He seemed to be wrapped from head to toe in shiny material, similar, perhaps, to the reflective insulating blankets that marathon runners wrapped around themselves at the end of a race. Was that what he had seen glinting earlier? Jane thought the child must be injured, or sick. He wanted to go to them, to ask them if they had come from London and why they were heading north, but there was something he didn't like about the senseless motion of the child's limbs.

  'Is that a little boy?' Aidan asked. 'Like me?'

  'I think so,' Jane said.

  'Can we play? He can have my boat. I've played with that enough now.'

  'Let's just watch them. I'm not sure if they're friendly.'

  Jane could sense Aidan's scrutiny of him. He hated having to seed his mind with doubt. Boys of five shouldn't have to be saddled with issues of trust when it came to other children. He didn't want him growing into a suspicious, lonely man. But he didn't know what else he could do.