One

by Conrad Williams

  'He warn't delivered t'me,' Stopper managed, and his voice was little more than the hiss of fossil-fuel ghosts released from ancient pockets in the seabed. His hair danced as if slowly animated by deep water. 'None of your kin fell t'me. S'all right, big man. S'all righhhh.'

  Jane leant into his old friend, feeling his tears come. He wondered if he would ever cry himself dry, if that were at all possible. Stopper threatened to topple over, but managed to right himself. Jane smelled marine, deep water, the high ruin of matter that has fermented to oil over millennia. There was beauty in it, Jane supposed, as he felt the familiar weariness drag him down. You could be the ugliest, nastiest, most miserable piece of shit known to man, but if you had a beating heart there was always a chance you'd turn into a diamond after a million years. Everyone was composed of stardust, the random, immeasurable collision of atoms. We'd return to it again one day. He'd be reunited with Stanley then, that was for sure.

  He fell asleep to that thought and woke up, seemingly seconds later, more refreshed than he had been for months. He gazed down at the spot where Stopper had been sitting and saw a thin film of oil on the waterproof surface of the roof, a rainbow shifting through it.

  His head was thumping; he remembered to breathe.

  Stupid, though. A stupid thing to do, to fall asleep on duty. He was glad of the rifle as he crept down through the opera house, pausing at the mouth of the auditorium as if there had been some minuscule sound, that just yards away in the vast black space were hundreds of people in the slashed, scorched seats, the wings and the gods, staring back at him in silence, waiting for the heavy velvet curtains to peel open and reveal the future.

  He stepped, shaking, on to Saint Martin's Place. The dark was something almost solid between the buildings; moving through it was slow business. It clung to the lungs like tar. His head was craned out in front of him; he strained for any and every sound. All he could think was orange. He tried to recall the safe houses nearby but drew blanks at every remembered alley and aisle on the A–Z. There would be help in his bible if only he had a flame to read it by.

  Cautiously, for want of any better idea, and in need to keep moving, Jane walked south. He might as well deliver the recent pages of his letter to the safeboxes at the hotel. He tried to remember which roads he was walking along, knowing that to get lost at night was to feed yourself to the Skinners. As long as he continued in this direction he would hit the water, and then things would become a little easier.

  The things we know, he thought to himself as he hugged the walls. The things we don't.

  We know you came from the Event, with the Event. You spread yourself wide and we thought you were dust. You settled in the damp folds of dead bodies. You found the deepest parts of lungs that would never breathe again. You coated everything in the way ash from a catastrophic volcanic eruption that travels around the globe does. You were both seed and preservative; after all, what use is a body without meat on it for a newborn to hatch into?

  Everything indoors, untouched by your dust, your seed, decayed. You exploded into life within the husks of the dead. You exploded into life within the bodies of the living. You assumed the shape of the thing you grew inside. I have seen horses, dogs, a crocodile. A tiger. No birds.

  You fed well, although you do not eat skin. Perhaps its taste is repellent. Perhaps you are incapable of digesting it. You fill the skins of your victims so that you wear them like the shell of a hermit crab, or maybe it's to do with decoration, or bragging rights. A modern-day scalp. In London, and no doubt in towns and cities all around the planet, millions, billions have been resurrected to seek food, to bring down the survivors.

  You cannot see. You cannot speak. You are afraid of nothing, save fire. You are bioluminescent, like some fish. You are translucent. Sometimes it is possible to see clearly into you, to look at what you are digesting.

  You kill and eat males on the spot. You incapacitate women and take them away. Why? Do you store them for later? Does female flesh taste better after it has been hung?

  What will you do when we are all gone? Will you turn to dust and blow away again on solar winds at the end of our planet's life? Will you travel for light years in stasis, waiting until you happen upon another paralysed Earth?

  Jane had hoped that distracting himself with facts might help his progress, but now he saw it was hampering it badly. He was almost crippled with terror. The thought, entertained on countless occasions, that Stanley had been riven by one of these creatures, either directly as a snack or via the unholy germination of its seed, never lost its potency. It gutted him every time. To stumble upon his son one day and find not the Stanley he loved but some shambling, pyjama-clad scarecrow was enough to make him want to leap from any of the tall buildings he favoured staying in. He would kill Stanley, quickly, if that was the case. Kill his son and then commit suicide. He almost fainted and had to slap himself awake in the middle of what he was sure was Northumberland Avenue to even briefly consider allowing his son – what his son had become – to feed on his dad, to get a head start. Eat up Stan, get big and strong for Daddy. This is protein. This will give you muscles.

  He reached Victoria Embankment and could just make out the patterns of the current in the skin of the river. Things floated past that he was glad – even now, after so many years of disgust – he could not see. He turned left, heading east. Waterloo Bridge within stumbling distance. Everything was dark apart from the occasional candle in a high-rise window. It reminded him of midnight train journeys through the Pennines when there was little around but the suggestion of hills, a slightly deeper shade of black against that which they rose before. A distant brief orange brick was a farmhouse window. Then nothing but black again.

  No figures he could see or hear on the bridge. No animal smell. No stripes. He picked up his pace and by the time he reached the steps up to the bridge he was sprinting. Left up Lancaster Place to the Strand. Now he saw Skinners. He almost stumbled into a party of them trying to separate a figure from its skin but they were having trouble getting it over the angles of its hips. They were quiet, intent. The silence always dismayed Jane. Even when there was a struggle of some sort they did not display any evidence of effort. One of the Skinners had given up peeling and had buried its face into the shining membrane on the figure's lower back that contained the fatty kidneys.

  They were too engrossed to register Jane. He backed away and hit Aldwych at full tilt. He was inside what remained of the swing doors of the hotel before he could meet a phalanx of Skinners coming the other way, from the direction of Kingsway. A cocktail bar to the left of the foyer resembled the scene of a water-pistol fight played out with gallons of blood. To the right, the reception desk was spotlessly clean.

  Jane took the stairs to the top floor. The Dome Suite was locked; he had a key. He let himself in and felt the tension of the last half an hour fall from him. He felt safe here, one of a few places he had claimed for himself, or that other survivors had not yet become aware of. He'd fight off any challenger to this place. From the boardroom you could look out over the Strand and Waterloo Bridge. Windows to the east of the room gave you an unhindered view of the area around Temple, while to the left you could check along Wellington Street as it sloped into Theatreland.

  He unlocked one of two dozen safeboxes lined up in the boardroom and carefully placed the pages of his letter to Stanley inside. On the lid was a number indicating that this was the latest collection. He placed his journal notes for the Shaded on top – they could go to Heathrow with him in the morning – and took off his clothes. In the expansive sitting area, he poured himself a drink and wished he had one of Plessey's radios with him. He wished for sound of any sort. He remembered how, before Stanley had been born, he would come home from a shift and fix himself a drink and listen to vinyl while he waited for Cherry to come through the door from work. They'd hold each other in the dark and dance for a while to Frank or Dean or Sammy. Sometimes he'd put on Chuck Berry or Fats Domino. It was difficul
t to remember those songs now, though at the time it felt as though they were as much a part of him as the colour of his eyes.

  He checked that the windows were secure and that the fire escapes were still destroyed. The only way in would be through the door and that was a five-inch firecheck. He had access to the roof and could make his way as far as Drury Lane if need be. Safety ensured, he felt exhaustion come on.

  He went to bed and fell instantly to sleep. When morning came he turned over to find the polished skull of a hobby on the pillow next to him.

  20. THE HINDMOST

  Jane made it as far as Ealing before the blisters on his feet caused him to put an end to his march. He found a hotel on The Broadway near the Tube station. None of the rooms were habitable, though, suffering from mould or awash with dirty water or host to families of huge rats that turned and regarded him insouciantly like street gangs looking for any excuse to rumble.

  In the kitchens behind a dining room where no furniture remained, Jane made a bed on a long stainless-steel work surface by wadding his coat on top of his backpack. He fell asleep almost immediately, the rifle, safety off, clasped between his legs and arms, the barrel pressing against his cheek.

  He dreamed of Stanley wiping orange chalk from his skin faster than Jane could apply it. He woke up after twelve hours feeling no more refreshed than when he had gone to sleep. He sat on the edge of the work surface feeling bad, feeling unsure of everything.

  Jane checked the cupboards and chest freezers. He found nothing to eat. He drank from the bladder in his backpack and wondered about the half-moons of filth under his nails; was there food in that? He closed his eyes and listened to his breathing. He felt he had been worn away, eroded like rocks in hard weather. He felt like rind.

  Outside he waited for a long time for some kind of sign that he was doing the right thing. He kept looking back to the bruise of the city but there was no curled finger in the smog above it. He carried on along the Uxbridge Road. He found orange chalk on the outer wall of St Bernard's Hospital. Inside, everyone had been slaughtered. A big kill, maybe over a hundred survivors huddling in the wards, waiting for some kind of signal, some indicator of hope. Skinners had swarmed all over the place. He came out fast, his nostrils stinging with the smell of recently shed blood, crossed the orange with slashes of blue, and cut south-west through Osterley Park, joining up with the Great West Road which took him to the airport's surrounding roads.

  Six hours had passed since he'd wakened and he'd walked them as if in a trance. He broke into houses abutting the airport grounds west of Waggoners Roundabout, mindless of the risk: there were many stories of desperate hunger driving survivors into the arms of the Skinners who had turned millions of houses into death-traps. In a house on Byron Avenue, after he'd checked all the kitchen cupboards and found everything turned bad, Jane stumbled upon a plastic container of bird seed, presumably forgotten, behind a bag of charcoal and a punnet of woodchips. He sat eating and choking on handfuls of this until his jaws hurt too much to continue. He stuffed his pockets and headed back to the melted perimeter fence, spitting out bloody husks and resigned to a following day of agony for his teeth and gums.

  He strode through the downed barriers and stared at the immense airfield. Jets, bleached and corroded, were still standing in the terminals or on the approaches to the great two-mile runways. Some of them appeared slumped, their wings having begun to part from the fuselages, tips lowered like sea-birds trying to pull free from an oil slick. He could see no living person. Ancient bodies lay around the aircraft like sunbathers, or pilgrims genuflecting at the feet of giants.

  Jane hurried across the taxiways and toasted grass verges. More than once he slipped in the oil that had sweated from the engines of the airliners. The ghosts of other aircraft, long gone, existed as shadow lines in the tarmac. Suitcases littered the bays. A stuffed toy was a black framework of wire. Blistered signs on the retractable passenger tunnels bid Jane Welcome to Heathrow. There was a sound of deep metallic cracking, the kind of fatigue that he recognised in his own body. His sighs and groans were really not that much different.

  He called out: 'Aidan!'

  The control tower was a gaping, deeply runneled fist of shapeless concrete. He thought he saw movement inside, but there were all kinds of dark grains sifting across his vision these days and, anyway, it would be too obvious to run things from there.

  He found a way into the terminal and headed for the baggage carousels. The rubberised conveyors were long gone, but the smell their burning had left behind was still detectable. He walked along featureless corridors that seemed to have been designed for days such as these. Places like this were meant for queues. Without them, they seemed unfinished. Bodies piled up at the end of moving walkways clutched boarding passes and hand luggage. They appeared to be sinking into, or emerging from, the floor.

  Jane found no edible food in the coffee islands dotted on his way through to the duty-free zones. Once there he saw how the fast-food restaurants had all been raided already, perhaps by rats, and not that long after the Event. Everything bore an impression of age about it. Everything smelled stale.

  Once he might have been taken aback by the crowds he encountered at the security screening area, but other than a reflex glance at the slumped dead to check there was nobody breathing he ignored them. Skinners sometimes attempted to blend in with the dead in the hope of snaring the living but it was easy to spot them. They couldn't stay still, fidgeting constantly as if uncomfortable within the shells they had invaded. Jane despised them, the way they were so unsubtle in their appetites and their methods of assuaging them. He hated them for assuming that human beings were stupid and for their utter lack of compassion. He hated them for what they had reduced him to. Searching for his son was the thing that kept him alive and the thing that prevented him from progressing. He lived for his son, but was not living. He supposed nobody was. People were still alive only because they feared death. He was a machine whose built-in obsolescence had refused to kick in.

  Very clearly, he heard the chunk of a closing door.

  He stopped, feeling the chill breath of all these surrounding corpses flutter upon him. He gazed down at the stained paper mask of a child whose expression, in death, might almost have been one of bemusement. He looked like Stanley just after waking up. Kind of stupefied. Kind of cross. What will you do? He could almost see the question squirm from between gritted, grinning milk teeth. The shadow of his eye might have turned a little to regard him better. It's your move.

  He realised he had been following the routes any passenger might when entering an airport, albeit in a reverse direction. But there was another territory at Heathrow unknown to the civilian and Jane had unconsciously been respecting its boundaries, a throwback to those days of heightened security and the sheep mentality immediately assumed once you found yourself in a world of cordons, channels and arrows.

  He checked that the rifle was loaded and pushed through a door badged with the words Staff Only. There was a brief moment when he felt he might be granted some glimpse of nirvana, but there was no mystique to this prohibited area, just a grey, quotidian continuation of what he'd left behind. Offices, storerooms, corridors. He felt the dead echo of the closed door hanging in these smothered heights. The impression that what had caused the sound had passed by this way recently was strong.

  He moved past a canteen where he pickpocketed a security guard for a caramel wafer that was as tough as cardboard but brought Jane to the edge of tears while he devoured it. There was nothing else but broken crockery and pans coagulated with inedible plaque. A newspaper offered headlines from a time he couldn't believe he had lived through. He was distracted from its fragile pages by a sound like a broom handle clattering to the floor.

  As soon as he resumed his journey he felt a change, as if in the mood of the building. Prior to this moment he had not experienced any sense of wrongness, just the disorientation of an unfamiliar building and a mystery to be solved. Now came a
foreboding similar to any number of awful events that had followed him down through the years. He was thinking about retreating, getting back out into the vast wilderness of the airfield where he would be able to see danger encroaching for miles in every direction, when he heard the grinding cry of hinges clotted by dust and years. And then a voice, muffled by the proximity of walls and ceiling, that called his name. It didn't matter that that could only be a good thing. He screamed anyway.

  Their voices scrambled over each other, trying to disguise fear and relief with news and gossip and apologies. Aidan kept putting a hand to his belly and Jane kept meaning to ask if he was all right, but then there'd be a pause and a look and another hug and the question had missed its cue and could wait. In their collision of stories, Jane heard something that slapped him out of his excitement at seeing Aidan again. He had to ask him to repeat himself. Now that they were allowing each other to speak, fear crept back in, aware of the little moments of quiet, the space that was inveigling itself between them.

  'Plessey is dead. I mean, he died. Was killed, is what I mean.'

  'An accident?' Jane asked, knowing full well.

  Aidan shook his head. 'I arrived at the market in the morning. Nobody in the shop, even though I used a secret knock. I didn't know what to do, so I was going to get over to one of the places you told me to find if I was in trouble or, you know, scared. Not that I was scared, but I was worried about Becky.

  'But then I found him. He hadn't even made it out of the market. The Skinners had been at him, but his throat had been slit.' He suddenly grabbed Jane's arm, appeared unsure. He was fifteen – a wispy beard was a mask under which a man was being formed. But at moments like this, he was still just a boy. You looked hard enough, you could see the baby in him. 'Skinners . . . they don't do that, do they?'