One

by Conrad Williams

  The Shaded broke through somehow, and the land on the other side of the Skinners seemed green and vital, although it was no different to the swidden they had travelled up to that point. The Skinners did not pursue them; they closed ranks and waited for the next wave of migrants. There was a slow, confident intelligence about them, the knowledge that they had time to mop up. Jane thought with a jolt of panic that they were aware of what things were like all over the globe. You didn't have to fight quite so valiantly if you knew you were going to overwhelm your enemy later when they'd had all hope crushed from their weakened bodies.

  From a safe distance Jane watched the Skinners scrapping over the men who had fallen. He gritted his teeth against the raging pain in his arm and suspected that the injury was more serious than he had first diagnosed. He needed cold running water and there was none. He needed to wrap the limb in cellophane, and there was none. Already blisters were inflating under the skin, its colour deepening.

  Thirty of them struck out along the road to the sea. He found someone who was willing to share his painkillers. Another who had an aerosol of burn spray in his rucksack. It would have to do. He held the arm out, naked, in front of him like a diviner.

  They peeled off on occasion, little groups of them, to forage for food in the factories and houses that formed a broken guard of honour on either side of the motorway. They ate while they walked. They talked little. Jane asked if anybody had seen or heard of a woman, Becky. Nobody replied, but the faces he inspected turned darker, more inward. Everyone had a woman who was gone from their lives.

  They walked through the night and through the day and through the night. The land grew flatter and less built-up. The wind cleared its throat and lashed them. Rain was a dreary, dismal constant. On either side of him, men were staggering, wearing masks and goggles of every description. Their hair was long and unkempt, their beards like those of fakirs. It was like being part of a nightmare army staggering towards death having developed a real appetite for it. Every form of horror and degradation was in their wake. They'd bumbled through it all, passed every examination, and now, struggling to stay on their feet, they approached the edge of the world, knowing that death, if it was waiting for them here, the final joke, the ultimate irony, well, it would be welcome; it would be greeted with a deep smile and arms held out.

  24. CAST-IRON SHORE

  Jane knew he was at the end of himself. He was a car that had been badly cared for, run into the ground, its odometer clocked. No amount of repairs was going to rescue him from a date with the crusher. Eating did not lift his spirits. Thoughts of Becky carrying the shred of his genes in her womb could not lift him out of his torpor. Worst of all, he could not concentrate for long enough to summon Stanley to the forefront of his thoughts. He was weak and tired beyond what he understood those words to mean. His soul was like an animal run over on a busy road. It had been flattened over time by so many tons of traffic that it resembled a dirty outline of what he was, who he had been. He was a memory in his own lifetime. He was dust, shadowless; he was shutting down.

  The beach described a flat arc from north-east to southwest. It curved before him and it did not appear to incline towards the sea, nor erase itself against a different kind of landscape behind him. The sea seemed to join the beach at a random point, sewn on like a dark hem. It did not seem to have any depth to it. The violence that he had seen in the North Sea was gone here, as if it had spent itself. The sea was flat and black and indolent. Stiff gusts of wind drew some motion from its surface – frail, corpse-grey combers – but it was reluctant, tacked on, almost, like some remembered reconstruction of how oceans ought to behave. The fruits of a decade's worth of slow tides lay on the sand, a scruffy, impromptu market. Orange barrels. Endless lengths of timber. Bleached streamers of plastic. Bodies face down into the sand as if trying to burrow, to escape the embarrassment of scrutiny. Buy one, get one free.

  Jane rolled over onto his side, his good side. Despite the flare of pain along his arm, the flesh purpuric and angry, and the dull throb in his savaged thigh, it was comforting to sit in the shingle. He pushed his fingers through the flint pebbles, enjoying the feel of the cool stones against his skin. There was hard work going on all across the headland. The raft itself was a trembling disc of pale blue sitting on the water. It was hard to see, but it seemed to be buoyed by a series of floats lashed to its outer rim. Someone had talked of how it was necessarily open at the centre, so that more floats could be added as a counterbalance to prevent the raft collapsing.

  'We're going to sea on a blue Polo mint,' someone had called out, incredulous.

  The peninsula was dotted with the remains of fishing boats. Beachcombers sifted through the wreckage, looking for workable pieces of wood. Sometimes Jane looked in a direction where there were no people, no buildings, and it was like viewing a moonscape. The end of the world was desolate and grey. You couldn't see the coast of France. He thought that maybe much of the rest of the world had dissolved into the oceans. It wouldn't take long for the same to happen here.

  Jane drew himself up to a sitting position. He was with maybe twenty other wounded. Medical volunteers were slowly tending to the injuries, on a sliding scale of need. A badly burned arm and slashes to the arse were low priorities compared to the man with half his head caved in, or another with an arterial bleed. Jane watched the life puddle out of that one, turning the stones crimson. When he died, nobody cried. There was no sighing or oaths to God. Nobody turned away. The medics covered him up and moved on to the next. Two other men died before they could receive treatment, rattling away into the stones, their faces smoothing as death claimed them. It seemed almost preferable.

  Eventually the medics turned their talents to Jane. He had seen one of them before, a wiry man in his forties with a tattoo of an octopus, its tentacles winding around his muscles on his forearm. Edwards, he thought his name was. He and his colleague, a younger man with black skin and alopecia, peeled away Jane's dressings, bathed his wounds and gave him injections. The world drifted away a little. Warmth washed through him. They bandaged his thigh with clean dressings and slathered a cream on his arm that turned it chill. They put a pillow under his head and he lay down on it. Nobody had said a word. There was no need for comfort, or reassurance. You died or you lived. Everyone was beyond the niceties that once accompanied such attention.

  Jane slept.

  It was growing dark when he revived. The drugs had worn off and he was shivering, his arm laced with pain. Someone had tucked a blanket around him, but it was no good now. The shingle he had enjoyed the feel of earlier was now a relentless sharp digging in his back and buttocks.

  'Goes it?'

  Jane jerked his head in the direction of the voice. A grainy shape folded into the shingle. Green clothes crusted with black blood.

  'I'm all right. A bit stiff, but then I've been feeling like that for years. Edwards, is it?'

  ''Tis.'

  'How long have you been here?'

  'Months. Since they began building the fucker. This is the busiest we've been for a while. The worst injuries we had before this were splinters and sprains.' The voice sounded so tired that Jane thought it might simply fade out. He supposed everyone sounded like that now. Tired, strung out. Maybe just giving up the ghost without even realising it.

  Jane scrambled to his feet and stretched, keeping his arm tucked in against him. The raft was no longer visible on the water and he thought it might have left without him, or been sunk, but his panic was short-lived. Labourers were huddled together checking plans and drinking hot water from metal cups. Fires had been started all along the beach. He heard laughter from somewhere and it almost scared him. It was such an alien sound, like the sudden cry of an attacking animal. Gradually he allowed himself to relax, to feel safe for the first time in a long time.

  'So what's it like, back in London?' Edwards asked him.

  'Not great,' Jane said. 'You got anyone there?'

  'London? No. Never set foot in
the place me entire puff. Nearest I got was Leatherhead, Surrey. Grew up in Leeds. Everyone dead.'

  Jane didn't know what to say. As in most cases, he allowed the silence to build a wall between them. Then he turned and walked along the beach, his movements ungainly in the deep, shifting pebbles. Forgotten angles of machinery poked out of the ground like relics from an alien era unearthed by archaeologists. Chains and cogs and pistons and gears, larger than lorries. He felt a little like these submerged weird machines. Machines needed people to work them. Once they disappeared, or the knowledge of their purpose was lost, they became redundant, useful only for scrap. He had felt more and more rudderless in recent weeks. He felt like someone who has aged to a point where he no longer feels relevant, someone pale and lined who drifts around the periphery of things, who escapes attention because he has come to the end of his life.

  He supposed that the future would come to resemble the past. Hundreds of years ago, you outlived your usefulness to the planet once you'd procreated. Life expectancy was mid-thirties. He felt another tooth coming loose. Lower incisor. Once your teeth were gone, it became harder to take in the nutrients you needed. Aches and pains everywhere. It didn't matter any more that he knew how to weld, could determine how long to stay underwater on a tank of heliox. These were skills the world no longer needed. He was a shot bolt. He sat down again, weary, sapped to the bone.

  An old woman with beautiful hair, silver and soft and long, leaned over him and asked if he was all right. He smiled at her and he saw her wince; blood in the teeth, he thought, and shut his lips. He turned away, looking at the nuclear reactors to the south, the dome of the decommissioned Sizewell A. Jane remembered his concern over these plants, but nothing had come of the threat. He remembered Becky rubbing his shoulder when he became upset that they had survived only to face an impossible future, one fraught with danger at every turn.

  'I know a girl,' he said. 'Her name's Becky. She . . . she's pregnant.' He turned back to the old woman. Her eyes were bright blue; remarkably there was no corona edging the iris to speak of her age. She had the eyes of a teenager.

  'I know Becky,' she said. She averted her gaze and Jane knew there was something wrong.

  'I'm the father,' he said. 'I . . . well, I think. I hope. A woman called Simmonds. She said she was being looked after. Protected.'

  The old woman nodded. She sat next to Jane and put a callused hand on his knee. He stared at the liver spots on her skin and thought he'd never seen anything so beautiful in his life. Her nails were long and pretty. He thought he might have fallen in love with her, a little.

  'Becky's gone,' she said.

  'Gone.' He was finding it hard to imbue anything he said with any emotion.

  'She was taken.'

  'She was being protected.'

  'There was an attack,' she said.

  'She was taken.'

  'That's right.'

  'Where?'

  The old woman raised her head and pointed beyond the power station, to where the peninsula swept back to the west and Camber Sands.

  Jane stared at the workers in their overalls, hair tied back with bandanas. 'Has anybody tried looking for her?'

  The woman looked at him as if he had just made a pass at her. 'Nobody has seen her since she was taken. We just assumed . . .'

  'People survive,' Jane said.

  'There's nothing we can do.'

  The old woman drifted away, so slowly that he thought he could still feel her fingers leaving him even though she now had her back to him and was moving off towards other loners, other groups of crying survivors at tether's end. He stayed where he was for a while, thinking about women and why the Skinners took them. He assessed the damage to his body and realised that while he was in no fit state to play frisbee, he could maybe walk a few miles and see what was what. He imagined talking to Stanley about it, the complication of explaining Becky to him. The concept of a new mummy, a second mummy. Getting him to understand that they were having a baby. Trying to make him see that this was a good thing. He believed he would not have to talk him around that much. Stanley was a good boy. He liked people. Although he had only been at school a short time, he seemed to make friends easily, much more easily than Jane had when he'd been that age. School in the 1970s was difficult, especially at the rough northern comprehensive he'd had to survive.

  He wandered down to the shore, standing a good distance back from the treacly tide. The ancient bones of fish lay all around him. Now he could see the raft, a darker shape, lenticular on the surface. How many people had died in the building of that thing? He doubted he would have the guts to go wading through that caustic soup, and he was mildly amazed by the thought, given that he had spent so much of his adult life submerged in water. He turned back and walked up the shingle to a group of men hunched over square billycans, Sporks clenched in grimy fists. They glared up at him guardedly, shoulders drawing in, protective of their food.

  'I'm going to find Becky,' he said. 'I wondered if you might come with me.'

  'Where is she?' asked one of the men. He had shaved his head badly; it was blue, nicked and slashed all over with cuts that had become infected. The swelling had wormed down across one eye. Lines of gravy on either side of his mouth gave him the look of a ventriloquist's dummy. The rain began to fall again. Another man, deep within his fur-lined hood, began swearing, covering his can with a gloved hand.

  'We're eating, friend,' he said.

  'There's a woman been taken by those bastards,' Jane said. 'She's pregnant.'

  'She's gone,' the man said, scooping thin brown liquid into his mouth. 'You the father?'

  'Yes.'

  He shrugged. 'You ought to take care of your women better,' he said.

  Jane made to swipe at him but the bald man stood up and put a hand on his injured arm, squeezed, dug his nails in. Jane cried out.

  'Want me to set fire to your other arm? Give you barbecued wings?'

  Jane turned away. Didn't anybody care any more? He tried talking to the medics, but they shooed him from the forest of sucking wounds and slashed limbs. Everyone was staggering around, or so exhausted that they were lying in shingle, many of them partially submerged, as if the beach was steadily, stealthily, sucking them down. He saw two men pull free of some people wearing medical aprons and pound across the shingle, aiming for the sea. The medics went to pursue, but they gave up pretty soon. You ran only when you had to; it was better to preserve your energy. Everyone stood and watched the men as they crashed into the surf, one slightly ahead of the other. The man at the rear surfaced fast and back-pedalled out of the water, spitting and hawking, wiping his hand repeatedly across his mouth. The man in front of him did not come up.

  The survivor stood yelling the other man's name – it sounded like 'Paul' – and made to re-enter the water a few times. But then he gave up and sat down on the shingle. After a while, when it was clear that the medics had given up on him and that his friend was gone for good, Jane crunched through the gravel towards him.

  The man was crying. His clothes were soaked on his body, the colour leaching out of them on to his skin.

  'What happened?' Jane asked. He sat down carefully a couple of yards away. The man didn't seem to register his presence. He was sobbing quietly, his eyes screwed up, wet. He had an injury. His shoulder was a shining curve where something had scraped it. It was sore-looking. Infected, too. It was kind of encouraging to know that microbes had lived on, no matter how damaging they might be to the body. It pointed to a future of returning life. Maybe.

  'He's gone,' the man said. The way he said it made him sound as if he was ten.

  'Who's he?'

  'My dad,' the man said. He wore jeans with an ID patch on the left thigh. It read: Sutton.

  'He drowned?'

  'I don't know. He just slipped out of sight.'

  Jane put his hand to his face and swore softly. He didn't know how many hours had passed since he'd woken up. He felt it could have been days.

 
'We were going to swim to the raft,' the man said, his eyes strafing the shore. 'We were going to cut it free and fuck the fuck off. Sick of hanging around. Waiting for people to turn up. Too many people get here, they said they'd start some fucking lottery to decide who was in the first bunch to leave. Fuck that. We were here first. Me and Dad. First.'

  His voice became strangled. He screamed and pounded his fists into the shingle. He collapsed into it and quietened down. Jane thought he might have gone to sleep. After a while, he pushed himself up into a sitting position and stared out at the water.

  Jane talked to him. They talked for a long time. They talked about fathers and sons. They both cried. Sutton was known as Loke. His real name was Eddie, but he'd always been called The Bloke by his dad and gradually, as all names seemed to do, it got whittled down over time.

  'I don't know if the raft is the answer, Loke,' Jane said. 'It's given people hope. Maybe that's the thing that matters. I just can't see what it can offer. You untie it. You launch it. You go where?'

  'Anywhere is better than this,' Loke said.

  'Is it?'

  Loke nodded, wiped the tears away from his face. He was gradually cleaning his hands with that water. 'I don't want to be pissing into the pebbles when the Skinners finally suck all the meat off the bone of the big cities and come down here to pick their teeth with what's left of us.' 'What if you go to France, or Holland, or wherever, and it's the same? If it's worse?'

  'Dad's gone. It doesn't fucking matter. I don't care one way or the other any more. I just want some kind of result. I want to force the issue. I want to be a catalyst.'

  He looked out to the water as if he was considering charging back in to make some attempt at rescue. Perhaps it bothered him that he'd given up so easily. Jane wanted to put an arm around him, to tell him that it was all right. Things had changed so much, it was hard enough to keep track of it, to keep ahead mentally, let alone react quickly enough when something horrible happened right in front of your eyes. Everyone had a tale to tell. Tragedy had not spared a single person. He didn't need to say a word.