'So you'll stay?' Loke asked him.
Jane found himself nodding although he had not come to any kind of decision. He had walked all this way to be with Becky. Maybe because there was some decision brewing to try to persuade her to stay in the UK. The thought of her on some rickety floating island with a baby inside her was unbearable.
If it's a boy . . . and it is a boy, I know that, I know . . . we'll call him—
'But what will you do?' Loke persisted.
'We'll keep going. It's all we've ever done. We'll fight them on the beaches.'
'Jesus. You must have kids. You must be a dad.'
Jane nodded again, and was able to smile. 'I was, I am. And will be again,' he said.
'I never had kids,' Loke said.
'It changes you,' Jane said. 'You lose your ego. You realise that life isn't just all about what you want, what you can have, or take. It's a good feeling. You slowly pull your head from out of your arsehole. You make sacrifices, and you do not resent it. Not one bit.'
'Yeah, well. Maybe now's not the best time to become a dad.'
Jane nodded. He hadn't really thought a great deal about that. The shock of the news had blinded him to what it actually meant. Becky giving birth would be hard enough. Where were the paediatricians, the midwives? What if the baby was born as Stanley had been, limp and grey, the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck? And what kind of world was this in which to bring up a child?
25. THE FARM
The beach grew chill and dark. Jane recalled a bluff in Keri, on the south-west tip of Zakinthos, a Greek island that he had visited with Cherry. It had been renowned for its sunsets. He remembered Cherry leaning against him as they sat on the rocks watching the sun sink. A girl of around nineteen took off her clothes and stood with her arms outstretched towards it, smiling broadly. Her skin had been dark pewter. When the sun vanished, they stayed on to watch the colours in its wake, amazed by the range it shifted through, as if someone were applying ever more dramatic filters to the sky.
He didn't know if it was the girl, or the way Cherry's body yielded against his, or the soft heat of the sun. He didn't know if it was the cool, spiced ruffle of dusk air against their skin as they drove back to the hotel in the open jeep. He didn't know if it was the ouzo, or Cherry's inky eyes, or the kiss she gave him as they stood on the balcony. But their lovemaking seemed to take on a fresh intensity that night. It was as if the dying of the sun had acted as some kind of omen. A reminder that life was no more than a blink of the eye in the grand scheme of things. She held him inside her and it was like desperation, or fear. They made love a lot on that holiday, but with nothing like the same intensity of that one night. Jane liked to think that Stanley was conceived then.
Now he searched the sky for some clue as to where the sun had set. He couldn't believe that beyond that layer of cloud was blue sky and a gorgeous blazing yellow star. It came to him, in dreams, as a cold steel sphere. It was hard to recall the colour of it. The colour was life but there was nothing, other than the beggared remainder of the human race, to remind him what that meant.
'PAUL!'
Jane started. He had been drifting into sleep, the drugs that the medics had given him removing the pain in his arm and reminding him of his tiredness. Now he felt fully awake. Loke was down by the shore, scurrying towards the oily tide as it retreated, withdrawing when it surged back up the sand. There was a body tumbling in the push and pull of the surf; Loke was trying to fish it out. Jane hurried down to the water. Loke clearly didn't want to feel the sea on him again. He had talked of it burning like bleach, and feeling greasy, a sensation he couldn't get out of his skin, no matter how many dry baths he took in the shingle. Jane was looking around for a piece of driftwood when the sea seemed to tire of playing with the body, and pushed it further up the beach where Loke was able to grab hold of it under the arms and pull it clear of the water's edge.
Jane could see that it was a dead man, but Loke was too pumped up to acknowledge it. 'Paul!' he kept crying. 'Dad!'
There were massive injuries to the torso. Something had taken bites out of him the size of serving platters. His legs ended at the knee; the rags of his trousers prevented any scrutiny of what remained. The face was clogged with shards and scraps of itself. Livid, bloodless wounds were carved into him like a poor Halloween pumpkin. He flapped and sagged in too many places to even be in one piece, let alone still be alive.
Jane put out his hand to restrain Loke, who was checking his father's mouth, and tilting his head back to open his airway. Something gritted inside.
'Loke,' Jane said.
'Shut up.' Loke started performing cardio-pulmonary resuscitation. He laced the fingers of one hand into the other and rhythmically pumped them into Paul's sternum. He seemed oblivious to the black seawater pulsing from the jaws with each downward thrust.
Jane left him to it. He walked back to the little hollow he'd dug himself. Fires had been built up and down the beach. It was encouraging to see so many. He had a vision of more fires, hundreds and hundreds, burning on the beaches and in the hills of the country. Maybe there would be a way back from this. Maybe the Skinners could be defeated. Maybe the clouds would part and the sun would heal the planet. Green shoots and a nation of pregnant women.
He was so engrossed in his reverie that he didn't hear Loke approach. He slumped to the shingle like a sack dumped from a weary shoulder.
'This woman of yours,' Loke said in a voice that was resigned but also, it seemed to Jane, relieved. 'This Becky. Do you know where the Skinners took her?'
Jane turned his head to the south. The edge of his country. The lowest part of it. The world was fringed with a trembling red light there. He hoped it was just the colour of the fires that had been stoked all around, but he knew it was not.
'That way,' he said. 'Past the power station. I don't know how far.'
'And you're going? You're going to try and get her back? Even though you'll probably die?'
Jane turned back to the sea. Becky was carrying his child. It ought to have been a question that didn't need airing. Loke would know, one day, when he was staring down at a big raw mouth with a bunch of skinny limbs attached. Death was nothing when your child's safety was at stake. Death was a puny streak of piss. Beneath contempt.
'You know the answer to that.'
Loke nodded. He was wiping his hands on his jeans. He had done his best to bury his father in the shingle. 'I'll come with you,' he said.
They left the camp when the last of the fires had burned down. The rain returned, that soft, insistent mist that had blurred virtually every day of Jane's life since the Event. Loke helped him put on his coat, pausing every time Jane winced when the fabric caught on the blistered, bubbled length of his forearm. They walked south, heading for the black bulk of the nuclear reactors. The shivering line of red light was like a skin on the ground far in the distance. Jane remembered how a similar light had cowed him at the western edges of Heathrow airport. He wondered how long it would be before the screams reached their ears. He thought too of how tardy he was; what if she was dead already? He pictured her shaking with cold and terror in some awful Skinner idea of prison, a long way from the comforts of the Shaded's base at Pentonville. He turned away from thoughts of miscarriage brought on by trauma. The body protecting itself by self-aborting. That would not happen. Becky was strong. She was resourceful. His spirits lifted when he considered that she might have escaped already.
'Keep your wits about you, Loke,' he said. 'If someone got away, we might walk right past them.'
Loke grunted in return, and Jane knew he had instantly dismissed the idea, but Jane clung to the story of the woman who had fled from the Skinners encamped at Wembley stadium. She might have died later, her brain stalled with whatever barbarity she had been put through, but she got away. She got away.
Jane found the going became easier after a while as his muscles warmed up and the stiff feeling in his wounded leg was worked out. He had kept the cuts
scrupulously clean and sought advice from the medics. They'd pulled some classic faces when he'd showed them his thigh, but they were satisfied it was not infected and gave him pills to cope with the pain that those wounds and his burnt arm were feeding him.
The peninsula was broader than he'd thought. He had never been out this way before, although he had read about Derek Jarman's cottage and its weird garden of stones and iron and claws. The skeletons of fishing boats lay in the shingle along with that strange machinery, like unearthed fossils from an alien age. Occasionally they would trip over some rusted girder or spar, or see the shape of a cog half-submerged in the beach. Jane wondered how deep it reached and whether it was really discarded, or if it was part of some arcane Heath-Robinson contraption that served the coastline in some secret way.
The mutter of the camp faded behind them and dead silence fell. Jane felt much as he used to in the diving bell travelling between the Ceto and the seabed. A time when you collected your thoughts and focused yourself on the job. All the banter of the DSV was behind them. The hours of noisy respiration and the headache of high-pitched voices, the roar of the blowtorch was to come. It was the eye of the storm. And it had always been the time that scared him more than any other. He couldn't help but think, while the various aspects of the job impinged and the gauges were read and adjusted, that this journey would be his last. Once he was in his gear and tramping towards the coalface he was fine. It was the pause to take breath beforehand, the catalogue of things that might go wrong that caused his will to falter.
So it was now. He thought that despite all his best intentions, if Loke had not been walking alongside him he would not have been able to do this. The pain in his arm was too great. He was so tired that he thought he might begin to crumble. He feared that he would find Becky dead, and that would be the final black underscore to his chances of happiness, or hope.
It took some time to work their way around the nuclear reactors – Jane was expecting to hear some kind of hum, but all was silent – because of a number of downed pylons and security fences obstructing their path. Once on the other side they made better time. The sand was mired with deep pits and runnels; occasionally they stumbled upon items of clothing, or single shoes. It looked like the haphazard disrobing of suicides. The red line leapt in streaks of orange as they got closer.
'What's the fire for?' Loke asked.
Jane shrugged. 'I don't know. Maybe they're cooking. Or it's a sacrifice or something.'
'Nice. Wish I hadn't asked.'
Jane clenched his jaw; another tooth popped loose. He spat it out. Dull fire was spreading deep in the angles of his face. Bone cancer, he thought.
'Loke, are your teeth all right?'
He sensed the other man turning to him in the dark. 'They're OK. I mean, they could be better. I haven't been to a dentist in ten years. But they're not giving me any gyp.'
Jane fell silent. He must be dying. Much of the time, talking to other survivors, he had surreptitiously checked out their mouths, and, other than the occasional abscess or absence, most people's teeth had been intact. He had noticed the way people snatched glances at his own ruined gums and then looked away, like rubberneckers at a fatal crash who have seen more than they bargained for. The taste of blood was always in the back of his throat, the rust smell of it trapped in the mask all hours. He would lie awake at night, prodding and palpating his flesh, feeling for fibrous lumps, or for any too soft, bruised parts of him that suggested decay.
He ran his tongue delicately over his remaining teeth. How many? Ten? Twelve? All of them waggled in their sockets at the faintest touch. He shuddered with disgust and tried to push the thought of what it meant from his mind; a job needed doing.
Loke said, 'Oh no.'
The beach fell away. It was blasted open, as though it had been hit by some immense bombshell or meteorite. They crawled on their bellies to the lip of the crater and peered in.
You believe, once you've grown up, that you're hardened to the worst things the planet and its people can throw at you. You form a skin around you so tough it's like horn. You watch the footage of Katrina, of the Boxing Day tsunami, of 9/11 and you struggle to cope with it, to understand it; you find it hard to continue. But you do. You go on. You layer the pain around you and feel it become absorbed. Next time it doesn't hurt quite so much. You kind of begin to expect bad things.
What's the worst thing you've ever seen, Dad?
He thought of the abattoir and the mirror carp. But it was nothing. It was a confection. It was almost cosy.
Never mind, Stanley. How about you? What's . . .
But he couldn't finish the question. His boy had seen the worst thing in the world, and Jane had not been there to hold him while it blazed all around.
'Loke,' he whispered. He could see his companion to his left, lying on his back staring up at the sky. He seemed not to be breathing. For a second Jane thought he might have committed suicide. The lure of it hung thickly in the air like the remembered scent of summer flowers. 'Loke?'
'OK,' Loke said. 'I'm all right.'
Jane couldn't ask him about what was down there. To mention it was to confirm it and Jane had to cling on to the possibility that it was all a mirage, something dreamed up by his poisoned subconscious.
'I need to find Becky,' he said. The simplicity of it bolstered him. Everything else was scenery.
'What do you want me to do?' Loke asked.
'Just keep an eye on me,' Jane said. 'If it looks as though I'm getting into trouble, cause a distraction. Get them to come after you. And get the fuck away.'
'I love those no-risk strategies,' Loke said.
Jane took a deep breath, shut his eyes. Stanley was there. Nothing that happened to Jane could equal what his boy must have gone through. What he had seen beyond the crater's lip replayed itself against the black screen of his closed eyelids. He rolled over the edge and into the abyss. What's the worst thing you ever saw, Daddy?
Oh, Stanley. Oh my God.
There were no Skinners to be seen. He walked among the ribcage prisons, wondering if one of the malformed babies screaming within them belonged to Becky. It didn't seem to matter that she was less than two months pregnant. Logic had no place here. He didn't want to see, but he had to watch where he was putting his feet; the babies were packed together so tightly. Some of them were dead. Others had stopped crying or had never started, and looked out through the gaps in the bones with black eyes, open faces. Some of them were bloated to the point of featurelessness, others bore spare limbs, vestigial or fully formed. The pit stank of meconium and vomit and the ever-present civet-like musk of Skinner. It was like some monstrous collection of lobster pots.
Up ahead was an enormous linear bonfire, stretching a hundred yards or so between the headland and the water, the source of the quaking red light. The ribcages stretched as far as he could see. There must be fifteen hundred, maybe as many as two thousand, he thought. He felt the centre of himself deliquesce. The fire picked out the half-submerged wreck of a ship in the water, its skid fin peppered with rust-holes that gleamed like eyes. He thought he could hear the waves beating against the hull, but knew it was only the tumult of his own heart. To his right, where the beach rose up to meet the low wall of a promenade, he could see movement. He crouched, grimacing as a hand put out to balance him cracked a rib and brought a fresh sustained volley of protests from the blighted thing trapped within. He saw Skinners, fully three dozen of them, churning through the sand towards the upper ranks of the cages. The way they behaved itched at Jane. Something was not right in their movements. There was a desperation there, a motivation other than hunger.
Jane averted his gaze as they began plundering the ribcages. He covered his ears to the sounds of feasting, the horrendous glissando of screams and greenstick dislocations, and hurried on, moaning, shaking so hard that he thought he might simply vibrate to dissolution, like a cast of sand.
More Skinners were tripping and sprawling over the promenade wall, r
olling down to the beach larder. There was nothing Jane could do. He had no Molotov cocktails in his coat pocket. The rifle was a toy. It made no difference. All his act of defiance would bring was his own death and that of Becky and all of these by-blows.
He angled down to the tide and approached the fire, feeling it, blowtorch-hot, from as far as fifty yards away. When the heat grew so intense that he could feel the hair on his face begin to singe, he inched into the sea, holding on to the sloping banister of a groyne. The water was more like warm grease; he felt it seep through his clothes and nestle against his skin as if enamoured of his flavour. He hurried, eager to be free of it, and almost fell headlong. He doubted that he'd have been able to drag himself clear. He rounded the end of the firewall; it hissed and sputtered where the tide tongued it. He didn't stare too hard at what was at the heart of the flames, fuelling them.
On the other side he saw the mothers, or what remained of them. He thought the screaming might have been worse here, but then he knew that trauma was an excellent soporific. Those who had died had been picked clean. Those that were pregnant sweated and thrashed in the sand, chained or nailed or becalmed by razor-wire garrottes. Some were giving birth as he scrambled up onto the beach, the emerging newborns delivered by surrogate midwives that smacked their chops over the emerging mooncalves.
They were visible far off into the distance, as far as the light from the fire reached. Skinners were pouring over the partition wall at the head of the beach now. He felt one at his back before he had time to do anything about it, but it ignored him. He caught a glimpse of panic behind the foul pretence of its former face.
He screamed Becky's name and felt his voice crack in the middle of it. What erupted from his throat felt at once both the most poisonous and the most pure thing that Jane had ever heard. He thought he saw a shadow pass over him, a bird of such immense proportions that its wingspan might eclipse the beach. And then it was gone, chased away by the shriek that came powering from his lungs.
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