One

by Conrad Williams

  The Skinner shuffled towards the rags and started sucking them dry. Immediately, Jane shot past it and headed for the exit. The Skinner ignored him. Jane paused to snatch what looked like a size nine from a tumble of leisure shoes. When he lifted his head, there was another figure standing in the doorway, backlit by the fire.

  She raised her hand. Six fingers. She closed her hand to a fist. A forefinger emerged. She pointed east. She stepped down from the doorway. She left. Fast; he could not pursue. He did not know what he would say could he have caught her.

  Stumpily, stiff-legged, he tottered to the hotel. Orange marks on the wall. Not that that meant anything any more. He was more cautious this time, mindful of his mindless charge through the zoo. He took each floor slowly, making sure the corridors were clear. Checking for any evidence of Skinners having moved in. There was nothing.

  He climbed to his favourite room and locked the door. He lit candles. The weather had booked in too, through a crack where the window frame had pulled away from the wall, turning one corner of the suite into a peeling, crumbling wreck. But it was a large suite; he could sleep in the boardroom. Jane stared at the locked cases lined up against the wall. He couldn't bring these with him. His letter remained unfinished. Never mind. He could save the last paragraphs for the day he saw Stanley again.

  He opened each case and took out the papers. He carried fully two reams to the window. The wind tore past the gap when he opened it. Jane fed handfuls of love to the wind and watched them sail away into deep night. When the last of the pages had gone

  Dear Stanley, I hope you are well. I miss you so much. Do you know, there's a little Stan-shaped hole right in the middle of my heart? Maybe there's a Daddy-shaped one in the middle of yours . . .

  he closed the window and bolted it. He took his gun to the boardroom. A sleeping bag was open on the grand table, waiting for him. He fell upon it. In the night, as he slept, three teeth oozed clear of his lips and danced across the varnish like strange dice.

  23. EXODUS

  Jane said goodbye to his hotel room. He would not be back. He stood at the north end of Waterloo Bridge remembering how beautiful everything had looked when he had first moved down to London with Cherry. They would make a point of visiting the bridge, especially on summer evenings when everything seemed to be honey-coated, softened. Cherry was so beautiful; her face had yet to take on the creases and frowns that drew everything into a tight, resentful pucker. The light seemed drawn to her. They watched the tugs and barges on the river, talking about everything and nothing, waiting for the darkness and the lights. It had seemed there was nobody else around, despite the frantic foxtrot of pedestrians, the endless laps of cars and buses. London was there just for the two of them.

  One, now.

  Beauty was erased from this world. Perhaps for ever. He stopped at the middle of the bridge, looking down at the fragmented skulls and the shrivelled skins, wondering if this spot was where the two of them used to stand all those years ago. There was no warm ghost of recognition. No magical exclamation mark making itself known in the air. His heart beat normally. Some of the skyscrapers along the waterfront were slowly sliding into the river. The tugs and barges were burnt-out shells floating on a scum of clothes and driftwood. Fires burned in more and more regions of the city; a pall of black smoke formed an underscore to the metallic ceiling of cloud. When the wind changed direction he might hear a scream or the concussion of an explosion as a gas pipe ruptured. He shot one last look back over his shoulder at Aldwych, certain he would see the figure in the striped pyjamas, but there were just the same old grim tumbleweeds of skin and soot, dust devils of peeled white faces, rising into the sky.

  Hope had wormed so many openings in him that he felt honeycombed. At any moment he might collapse in on himself. More dust to add to the drifts already shifting along the roads and pavements. Dunes of regret. A shattering desert.

  He felt old beyond his years. His thigh pulsed hotly as he walked. There was a hand of pain at the very centre of the wound and it had long fingers. His flesh was sensitive as far south as his knee and north just to the edge of his ribs. Not a good sign. He chewed painkillers and eyed the remaining ampoules as if they were golden chalices. They were, he supposed. He had to use them sparingly. Becky had slipped them into his palm with a kiss.

  Medic's perks. Just to prove that I like you, that I think you're a bit of all right.

  He pulled his hood up over his head and zipped the coat closed. His pockets clinked with four stoppered bottles of paraffin. His tongue took a tour of his mouth, squirming in the soft dips of his undressing gums. His remaining teeth seemed too long, too loose, his jaws receding from them as if they were foreign bodies to be ejected. But at least there was no blood in his fist when he coughed. No hair loss. He regularly checked his testicles for lumps, but nothing doing there either. No hard masses beneath the skin of his stomach. No fits, no blackouts. He was as healthy as he could expect to be. So just periodontal disease, then? Just the unlucky caries that come from too many sweets and not enough flossing.

  At the South Bank he got down off the bridge and followed the obstacle course of the Queen's Walk as far as Bermondsey and it was just him and his bad leg and the same old sound of his breath rasping inside the bicycle mask. As he passed beneath Tower Bridge he thought he heard laughter and song. But he also heard gunfire and screaming, further south. The laughter and song died pretty quickly after that.

  He stood on the pier and looked out at the lapping river. Rat Island rose out of it like a swollen belly from cold bathwater. He saw people moving over the great built-up mound of wreckage, looking for food, or for relatives. Bivouacs dotted this artificial island; people emerged from tunnels like maggots from bad apples.

  Jane called out: 'Hey!'

  Faces turned to the river bank. Most went back to their rooting; one man cupped his mouth and asked for a name.

  'Richard Jane. I have news.'

  The man untied a simple boat from a post and rowed his way over to where Jane stood. He was short and bald, his head strangely large on top of his wasted body, like an unsucked lollipop. He introduced himself as Jon Petersen, a printer from Bergen, Norway who had moved to London to live with his English wife who owned a luggage shop in Nunhead. His wife had disappeared during the Event while Petersen had been in the centre of town, travelling on the Tube, shopping for her birthday presents.

  'How many are you?' Jane asked.

  Petersen looked back at the island. 'There are a few hundred here,' he said. 'It's a hellish stink, but we feel safe. Skinners don't go swimming. And the rats we can cope with. They make good eating, if you can catch them. You have to fast them first, though, for a few days or they're bitter.'

  Jane saw the rats moving briskly across the skin of the island, surefooted and sleek, as if they were on rails. They did not seem as fat or aggressive as they used to be. Everything that had survived was losing weight. He was coming to see the raft as a last chance.

  He told Petersen what he knew and the other man listened without speaking, constantly licking his already wet lips so that Jane could not take his eyes from them; they resembled the flesh of cherries.

  'A raft,' Petersen said, when Jane was finished. 'In the water?'

  Jane nodded. 'There are people on the way now.'

  'I saw them. I wondered what was happening.'

  'Head for the south-east,' Jane said. 'Tell your people.'

  'The water,' Petersen said again. He seemed troubled as he pushed the boat off for the island. He kept looking into the river around him, as if it contained things that he found suddenly unpalatable.

  Jane felt liberated. He had done what had been asked of him. Everyone in London who hadn't struck out on their own had been made aware of the existence of the raft. The city was emptying. Now he hoped that the screams and howls he could hear belonged to the Skinners as the streets turned lonely and the houses grew used to the ageing echoes of human voices.

  He watched Petersen
tie the boat off at the platform. A crowd quickly grew around the Norwegian. Jane waved once to them, turned his back, and headed for the Old Kent Road.

  * * *

  After about an hour he heard little footsteps slapping through the wet, struggling to keep up.

  'Hello, Stanley.'

  'Hiya, Dad.'

  'Where've you been?' He was tempted to look to his side, but he didn't want the illusion to vanish just yet. It was enough to see the blue stripe of Stanley's pyjamas in his peripheral vision, the arc of his arm as he swung Walter up and down. He had walked the length of the A2; New Cross Gate was ahead, then Lewisham and the A20 that would take him into Kent. The crippled expanse of superstores lay around them like so many crushed sardine cans.

  'You sticking to the road, Dad?'

  'Yeah, why? I'll probably catch up with more people before long. It'll be safer then.'

  'Safer? How?'

  He wanted to reach out and plant his hand on the boy's hair, feel the heat of his scalp run through his fingers. Drop his hand to Stanley's slender neck, feel the muscles shift against each other under the impossible soft skin.

  'You've heard of safety in numbers haven't you?'

  'No.'

  'Well. It means the more of you there are, the less afraid you need to be.'

  'I think that's a load of rubbish.'

  Jane stopped. He checked behind him, but there were no refugees. The road was empty. It had been preying on his thoughts; he believed that by now he would either have caught up with a convoy, or been assimilated by one joining the A2 at any of the main junctions.

  He no longer wanted to look down at Stanley, but not because he was concerned the boy would fragment and drift apart, like desert cloud. He was scared. Stanley's eyes, what he could make out from the corner of his own, were too large for his head, too dark. His voice had faltered, but it was not the change in vocal cords you would expect from a boy who was in his fifteenth year. It was slurred, scorched, splintered. It had been interfered with in some way. Now he suspected that the way Stanley kinked his neck to look up to his father was no longer some endearing facet of his behaviour but an enforced failing in his physicality, a terrible injury.

  'Are you all right, Stanley?'

  'Fine,' came the voice. It was no longer that of his son. It was filled with fluid. The boy's face vibrated; he could hear the chomp and smack of his own lips as he chewed through the flesh of his cheeks and mouth. Shadows descended. Jane thought it might be unconsciousness but it was a dozen or so birds – vicious grey shrikes – fluttering down to tear strips from his boy's face. He scattered them with his fists and turned to sweep Stanley into his arms.

  There was little left of him. He was an effigy, a voodoo-doll death threat. Spurs of bone shone through where the hard beaks had drilled him. Jane could see through the plundered sockets of his eyes to a part of his son that had once flickered with happy memories of chases in the park and cuddles on a sofa watching cartoons. The boy turned to nothing under his fingers. He was sure he could hear the creak and caw of airborne birds but when he looked above him there was only the iron-plaited insult of the sky.

  He turned his attention back to the road ahead. What had Fielding said that day? Something about a cordon? A slip-knot tightening. The wind gusted into him like the over-affectionate shoulder charge of a drunken friend. Danger was in it. He was sure he heard cries and shouts from up ahead, although he'd hoped he might have left that behind. Screams in the daytime. 'Get off the road, Dad,' Stanley said. His voice. His good voice. Jane heeded the advice. He got onto the railway line at New Cross and followed the track along the backs of schools and works and supermarkets. The embankments wore a second skin of fly-tipped rubbish, machinery and cadavers eroded by the weather almost to nothing. He hurried beneath those bridges that still stood, aware of their weakness, or manoeuvred a route through those that had crashed to the rails, sometimes topped by cars bearing occupants who bore the same gritted expression he'd seen everywhere for the past ten years. The look of death was the look of someone concentrating, or grimacing in pain or embarrassment, or concealing a hilarious secret.

  The track wound through Lewisham, bypassing depots and shuttling under the high street. He hurried by ruptured, stinking stock at the Hither Green sidings without bothering to look at what was inside. No food here. No hope of help. Human bones had sifted to the surface of the embankment outside the cemetery, sprawling over the rails as if left there by some untidy scavenger. The land opened up. The arid span of a former golf course. The spent matchsticks of a wood.

  As the day lengthened, Jane felt London's grip on him loosen. He felt like a finger tracing a route in the A–Z. It had reached a section where there were no more arrows pointing to the next pages. He was falling off the map. He was leaving the city where his child used to play, used to stand on the balcony and watch out for his return. He looked back at the miles he had covered and wondered about his boy. Maybe he and Cherry had heard about the raft too and were making their way out here. Maybe they had reached the coast already, and were hunting for Jane among the others lying exhausted on the beach.

  The hope would not lie down in him.

  * * *

  Jane spent the night in an overturned coach in the south-east corner of Orpington. All the windows were smashed. Nothing else shared the space with him. Various fluids on the ceiling of the vehicle had dried to a homogeneous black glaze. The coach was so old that it had shed any smells that might have identified the stains, or the cause of its accident.

  He was tired to his bones, but he couldn't sleep. Worry gnawed at him. He wanted to see Becky again, despite accepting that she was safer with the others. He wanted an end to the wearisome plodding that his life had become. He measured his days in how many miles he had clocked up. There was no humour in him or for him, no tenderness. All he looked forward to was the face of his boy; he hoped he would remain tear-free for long enough to register his first expression. Not gritted. No. Death could not find its way into a boy with such laughter inside him. Death would mope away, shamefaced for even trying.

  He was up and within view of the M25 before the bastardised dawn congealed around him. The previous night he had happened upon a camp that the Shaded had pitched about a mile north of the ring road. Skinners moved up there, a great wall of them stretching away in each direction: part of the noose that Fielding had talked about. There had been much talk about what to do. Some were for the long trek back to London: stick with what you know. But most of them – Jane could see it in the tension bunching their shoulders – were itching for a fight.

  Now, to his left, ranged south of the A20, were dozens of the Shaded, like him ducked low into the dusty countryside abutting the fractured strip of road. Everyone hefted some kind of weapon. There were shivs and gardening forks and heavy-duty motorbike chains with shackles swinging on the end, knurled so that steel burrs stuck out of them. Shotguns and butchers' cleavers. Bottles of hydrochloric acid. One man held a Heckler & Koch semi-automatic carbine in each fist, his chest criss-crossed with bandoliers, his cargo pants stuffed with magazines. Jane had to believe that the cordon of Skinners was only one figure deep. He didn't want to rush any breach they might be able to enforce only to find legions of the monsters waiting to mop them up as they poured through. He saw some of the Shaded carrying guns that looked far more powerful than his own. There were others who carried axes and knives. He saw someone with a hand resting on the scabbard of a sheathed samurai sword, another holding nunchaku, another holding what looked like piano wire between fists protected with grey bandage.

  Jane watched as heads began to turn and bodies unfolded from their hiding places. He felt the crackle of electricity in the air, the thrill and relief that aggression brought, the liberation of positive movement. He understood immediately why people went to war, were prepared to die. It wasn't Pro Patria Mori – Wilfred Owen's 'old lie' – it was to do with the people you knew and loved. It was the fear that they would suffer if you d
id not come through.

  Jane rose with the others and put a match to the wick of his petrol bomb. Once it was burning, he hurled it as hard as he could at the Skinners. The explosion as the bottle shattered was drowned out by a roar from the Shaded as they stormed the motorway. Jane was roaring too. Jane was smiling, fit to split his face in half.

  He didn't remember much about what happened after that and was still so pumped up with excitement that he couldn't feel the extent of his injuries. His right arm was burned as far as his elbow. Not too bad, but the skin was tender and pink and hairless. He'd had to shrug himself out of his coat fast and slap the flames out with the part that wasn't on fire. It was an injury worth sustaining; he'd taken down three Skinners with the Molotov cocktail that had almost killed him. He'd been grabbed from behind at the moment of launching the bottle and had dropped it to the ground, igniting himself and his attackers as he bent to try and catch it before it smashed.

  Others were less lucky. Roughly fifty per cent of the Shaded who had charged the Skinners had been overpowered. In the thick of the fighting he'd watched men dismantled as easily as wasps trapped on a floor of ants. The few women that had been in the group were dragged away. Even above the smell of the paraffin flames the musk of the creatures hung heavy, a wardrobe of mouldy winter coats opened after a long time. There was something deeply unnerving about grabbing hold of a hand or a face and feeling it come away in your fingers like a swatch of fabric. He had to keep reminding himself that these were no longer people, that they had been subjugated, replaced. If you kept your eyes away from the mangled, silently agonised faces and on the alien posture of their bodies you could avoid the question.