One

by Conrad Williams

  26. THE RAFT

  He saw the Skinners fleeing and being brought down by fast-moving figures in hoods. They used long curved knives to reach inside the bone-armour of their prey. They moved with purpose, aggression. They locked onto a target and did not falter until it was brought to ground. This close to a chance of freedom, the Shaded were behaving like cornered rats. The killing fields had altered. These weren't the narrow jack-in-a-box horror traps of London. The Skinners could not rely on darkness and dense architecture to help snaffle their prey.

  Open land, common ground: it was all up for grabs now.

  The Skinners were backing away from Jane, despite the swelling of their numbers. They charged towards him from the foot of the beach only to rear up like horses before snakes when they saw him. He thought it must be the wave upon wave of men and women at his shoulders, armed with wrenches and billhooks and cleavers, or the threat of the black sea, but no, they were recoiling from him. It was exhilarating to feel in power for a change.

  Jane concentrated on moving deeper into the farm. Wherever he could, he helped to free the women who were unable to help themselves. He scored his hands on the razor wire locking them into the beach and tore his nails on the brackets and shackles that kept their hands immobile. Intent on a slaughter before they could be stopped, some of the Skinners had taken to pulling the women up against their restraints, throttling them, a prelude to escape. Others were simply opening up the victims that remained, scooping this human caviar into their claws, final meals for the condemned.

  The wall of fire came down. A great cloud of sparks and smoke swept across the sand, befogging the bodies and blood. Jane was too frantic in his search for Becky to be grateful that he could no longer see the atrocities committed by the Skinners, or the dismantling of them by his people as they came pouring over the promenade wall. It was a hell of noise. Of screams and howls and awful wet tearing. The wind would occasionally steal in to whip these sounds away, only to return them as if too disgusted by what it had taken. The smoke turned the shoreline into a besieged beachhead, a too-true re-enactment of some terrible wartime battle. Something exploded; a car, a drum of fuel. Jane heard, then felt shards of metal whizz past his ear. One of them embedded itself in his shoulder and he felt no pain, only an increasing heat. He patted and pawed at his clothes, ripping off his coat. A smoking rind of metal, two inches across, had buried itself in him. There was no blood; the foreign body had cauterised the wound before it had a chance to weep. He made to remove it but managed to quell that instinct. He would be no use to Becky if he pulled that clear only to find, in the most spectacular way, that one of his arteries had been punctured.

  He staggered on, thinking of Stopper, thinking that for a moment he had seen his old friend keeping time with his uncertain step, twenty yards or so to his left, a shadowy, pale figure loping through the sea. It bolstered him – though he knew it could only be an illusion, or wishful thinking – to imagine his old buddy here, at the end of the world, as madness descended all around him. He cried out Becky's name, but the pain in his throat was too great to usher forth anything stronger than a bruised rush of air. He tripped and sprawled on a limb sticking out of the sand. Whoever it was attached to was dead, smothered by the beach – if indeed the limb was attached to anything.

  Someone let off a magnesium flare. Out to sea, hundreds of bodies dipped and rose in the oily swells. The Skinners were being pincered. The Shaded were massing at the western edges of the arc of light cast by the flare. Hundreds of them were pounding past Jane now from the east. The promenade wall writhed: a physical cordon. A dozen women lay to Jane's left. He hurried to them as the spectral light began to fail. One of the women was giving birth. Her throat was a necklace of rubies where the razor wire had sawn against her contractions. She was choking on blood, trying to stay alive long enough to get the baby out of her. But then he saw that wasn't what was happening. She was trying to kill herself on the ligature before the baby could emerge. A Skinner was between her legs, trying to get hold of the baby's head. Its hands were streaked with blood. It couldn't gain purchase. The dying light glistened on its slavering chops.

  Jane strode over to it and hooked his fingers into the desiccated peepholes of its eyes. What inhabited that bone carcass shrank back from him, lifting famished claws in defence. Jane grabbed its left hand and ground the bones to so much dust within his fist. He yanked back on its mask and the boss detached. Something soft and malformed quivered within, a sac with a centre of spiny teeth. It reminded him of exotic food. Trips to the Chinese supermarket with his father where he would be allowed to choose something he had never tried before. Soft fruits you sliced open with a nail and turned inside out, disgorging pulp and seed and fibre that smelled of mushrooms or meat but tasted of nectar.

  He had his face in there before he realised it. When the body had stopped twitching around the suck and maul of his mouth he staggered back, disgusted, exhilarated. He dropped to his knees by the body of the woman and saw that she was dead. The baby had died too. He sat back in the sand and pushed his hands through his damp, sticky hair. Sand coated him. He felt that it might penetrate him, turn him to the cold, granular being that seemed to have been some silent promise to himself ever since Cherry and he had begun to fragment.

  Jane felt drifting over him a sleepiness that he had not felt for years. It was a feeling of contentment, the warmth of a good meal sitting in his belly. Almost immediately, he rolled over and was copiously sick. He felt his stomach heave as if it was eager to be out of his body and on the beach alongside his waste. He lost sight of what he was, where he was for a while. Dark grains shifted behind his vision. He felt that by vomiting he had loosened a little of what made him who he was supposed to be. He felt unhinged, dislocated. So much of his life had slid away from him, it was as if what he needed to make himself solid and real had been removed. He was like a computer without any software loaded into it. He was something awaiting instructions. He was potential – less than that.

  He raised himself to his feet, weak now, his legs shaking as if he had risen from a long coma. The sleepiness had not faded, it had simply changed into a nastier version of itself. This was bone-tired. This was an exhaustion that people just did not return from. It preceded the suicide note and the pills.

  The women stretched away from him along the beach like appalling sunbathers. Somehow he managed to get moving again. The Skinners were being overwhelmed. Bodies lay around like shellfish shucked of their fruits. Jane tried to ignore the churning of hunger in his sore guts and put one foot in front of the other. He saw a hairband dividing a sweep of dirty blonde hair. A still head nestled in the beach; she did not flinch when fans of sand were kicked across her face as the combat unfolded around her. He ran to her. She was breathing. Her hands and throat were laced with barbed wire, but she had not shifted against it. He said her name, his voice still little more than a wheeze. He checked her pulse. For a moment he thought he could feel two: hers and the strong, fast code of her baby underpinning it. Then her eyes were open and she was staring at him and it was like the day he first saw her. That wild, untrammelled look just before she had assaulted him. He knew she would be all right. She was a survivor in more ways than one.

  Jane freed her hands and then loosened the noose so that she could wriggle under it. He held her and asked if she was all right but his voice was so breathless that she couldn't have heard him.

  'Yes, yes, I'm OK,' she said. 'They didn't touch me. I'm not . . . I wasn't ready yet.'

  He shushed her and helped her to her feet. Her, well and unharmed with him, gave him strength. They hurried as fast as the sand would allow them.

  'Where's Aidan? Did you find him?'

  'Aidan's dead.'

  Becky didn't say anything, but he sensed a change in her movement and posture. He felt the need to back up his statement, but he didn't know how. To tell her how it had happened was to condemn Aidan. Better she should remember him how she preferred. His betrayal, his
threat no longer mattered.

  'He stopped taking his pills,' she said.

  'You knew that?'

  She nodded. 'I should have made him, but what can you do? He was sick. I think he understood that. I think he believed he was dying.'

  Or changing, Jane thought. It struck him that maybe Aidan had embraced his own internal demolition by the Skinners, favoured it over the auto-cannibalism of whatever disease lurked in his bones. Maybe the Event had tweaked his genes in some way. Maybe death wasn't so inevitable, for Aidan, for some others. Maybe futures too terrible to entertain lay in store. He thought of the girl in the scarf, the ghastly knowledge that gleamed in her eyes, and he shuddered.

  'Where are we going?' Becky asked.

  'The raft,' he said.

  'It's real? You saw it?'

  Jane nodded. It was hard not to smile, not to be infected by the sudden tremor of excitement in her voice. Fear too, he supposed. Death was settling in bodies all around them and it was a fair distance to the peninsula yet. Traps lay in wait, as they had done day after day, down all the miles, all the years.

  At the barrier they kicked sand into the fire until a cold path was cleared. They rushed through and Jane touched her on the shoulder, told her not to look, but of course she did and he felt her change beneath his fingers. It was a strange tensing and relaxing, as if she might implode in an arthritic drawing-in of fear and revulsion, or simply collapse, fade away where she stood.

  'We can help. We can save them,' she said, but the quavering in her voice was its own acknowledgment of the truth. She did not resist him when he drew her on.

  'There's nothing we can do,' he said. 'All we can do is save ourselves.'

  An ecstasy of tripping and stumbling and sprawling. Every foot of beach seemed to have been taken up by a body. Dead or close to death or screaming as though volume alone might ward it off. They breasted the lip of the crater; Loke was nowhere to be seen. The ancient, rusted angles of Dungeness returned to the beach. The bodies thinned out. The noise of fighting receded.

  He saw the girl.

  She had made herself known to him by peeling away from the stream of fighting bodies. She was a sudden stillpoint in the current. She raised her hand and he saw now what it was about her that had itched at his mind for so long. The alien meld of her hand against his; the misted imprint of her fingers on the motorhome window. He understood the significance of the drawing he had seen, of the six-fingered hand enclosing the stick figure within. He thought of protection and assistance. Of species intertwined, interweaved, interdependent. Of mutualist relationships. Of pilot fish and sharks. Of the jaws of the fates.

  He thought, perhaps, that she must have chosen him as her little project. A way to maybe convince herself that there was a shred of humanity left in her. Like Aidan, she was fighting against a stacked deck. He wondered if she was the girl whose house he had invaded in Burnmouth, a hundred thousand years ago. A bedroom filled with the accoutrements of the seriously ill. Stuffed toys and sleeping draughts. Posters of Disney characters and a diary filled with appointments to see specialists. Nobody could say how a failed physique might react when bombarded by the special chemistry of the cosmos. A trillion photons passing through the flesh were bound to have some kind of impact. Time bombs and slow releases. The savagery of the mutated cell. Maybe she had witnessed his tender interment of her No. 1 Grandpa – no matter how tokenistic the act – and it had helped her to ignore the death knell of her own heart. For Jane, it was something to cling to, at least.

  A Skinner came pounding across the sand and the girl turned and floored it with the heel of her hand. Very clearly, Jane heard the crack of its host's sternum upon instant deceleration. The girl looked back towards Jane, as if seeking approval, and hooked a finger over the edge of her scarf. She pulled it clear of her lower face. The glands in Jane's mouth squirted sour enzymes on to his tongue in some kind of recognition. Her jaws were deep, powerful. The ring of her teethwas too great for her lips to close over them. He felt a wave of love for her. She had seen on or around him some shade that he could not recognise in himself. A scar on race memory, some brief verse from DNA's long lament. The dedication he showed for his son was echoed in her looking out for him. They were nesting parts of the same Russian doll. She was the outer figure; Stanley was the baby at the core that could not open. He was somewhere between, rattling around, seeking closure.

  'Come on,' Becky urged.

  He turned away from the girl when she bent to the body, a long, curved knife sliding out of the sheath of her hand and opening the Skinner with the deep Y-cut of a pathologist. He ran with Becky and he couldn't give voice to his fear that the raft might, in the face of the vicious fighting, have cut loose its mooring ropes and be scudding across the Channel. They had said they would return, but he didn't believe that. He knew that the boat was making one journey and it was more about getting away than arriving.

  They reached the broad curve of the peninsula. The fires along the shore had burned down to embers; they looked like the sullen eyes of great lizards basking in the shingle. Jane thought he saw a swatch of striped fabric, the blue and white of Stanley's pyjamas in the mad criss-cross of bodies, but he couldn't be sure. His mind would not banish the illogicality. He wanted to believe anything and everything that his desperation sowed in him. Pain was unfolding in his shoulder now; no matter how still he kept his arm, it was as if he could feel the ball of his humerus being ground into a socket lined with glass splinters. The deep beat of heat around the shrapnel gave the illusion that his heart had shifted location.

  He still wasn't certain he could get onto the raft knowing his boy remained on this soil. He understood that this might mean a lifetime of picking through rubble and entering buildings of shadow that harboured beings that wanted him dead, but all other alternatives possessed no attraction for him. A life free from threat in another country would be hollow; he would barely register what happened from day to day. He would be thinking only of the UK, and his boy squirrelled away in some alley or attic, wishing for his dad, wondering why his dad had not come for him.

  The raft was there. It had been hauled to the beach and now drifted in the shallows, anchored with mooring irons, a great white standard whipping around on a mast rising from its centre. People were already on board. The raft seemed to hang a few feet above the ground like a disc of shadow. The people appeared to float in mid-air. It was a disconcerting, disorientating sight. Jane could not be excited by it. Becky too seemed to hang back, despite the howling conflict at her shoulder. He knew that designers and tradesmen had grafted hard over that vehicle for months, but it seemed too flimsy for the water it rested upon. They found themselves approaching it almost against their will; their hearts eager to fling themselves into the void even as their minds threw up all manner of warning signs.

  Again Jane was distracted by some subtler movement than that going on across Romney Marsh and the weatherboard cottages along the Dungeness Road. He peered into the shadows and thought he could see the flicker of blue and white stripes; a small body struggling against the tide of inhumanity, a shuttle in some ghastly loom.

  'Stanley?' he called out.

  'This way, Richard,' Becky said. Her arm was around him. Suddenly he was aware of how terrible he felt. It was as if the fire and smoke, the sand in his throat and the awful mealy smell of bodies strewn across the beach had taken him out of himself to the point where he was unaware of what he was feeling. Even the agony of his shoulder had gone away to some extent, had some distance about it, as if it was remembered – or imagined.

  He had to rest by a coil of chain that rose up from the shingle like some weird snake. To his left, a giant anchor had lost its shape to the creep of oxidant. Machinery emerged from or immersed itself into the beach, metalwork so large it might have some sway over how the world turned. Jane thought he could hear the spit and crackle of static barking from the radios in a fishing-boat wheelhouse but it was his unsteady feet on the chips of stone.
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br />   'Stanley,' he gasped, trying to focus on Becky's features. She leant down towards him and the face he had fallen in love with found clarity. It was stippled with sweat that clung like small beads to skin greased with diesel. Her eyes were wide and brimful of concern. She kissed Jane and held him. 'We're close,' she said, but he didn't know if she meant their relationship, or their proximity to some kind of end. 'Don't leave me now.'

  'I saw Stanley,' he said. The boy's name was like a living thing on his tongue. It reanimated him. He hurried Becky towards the raft. Someone was blowing a horn. Fighting was breaking out at the water's edge. People were being dragged off the raft, or pushed on. Human chains clung to it, desperate to be a part of this maiden voyage.

  'They're going to leave.' She sounded panicky; relieved.

  'Not without you,' he said. 'I promise.'

  They splashed through the surf, Jane grimacing inwardly at the warm, viscous beat of the tide against his legs. Someone swung an arm his way; he pushed Becky to one side and ducked. His attacker bowled over into the water and was lost under dozens of thrashing limbs. Jane didn't see him resurface. They kept being repulsed at moments when it seemed he might get Becky onto the raft. Her boots squealed against its lip – 'Hook a leg on!' – but others scrambled over her, causing her to cry out as her knee threatened to bend the wrong way. She tumbled back against him, her head dipping under the waves. He bent to retrieve her and almost lost his footing as more people charged into him. He felt himself crushed against the edge of the raft, and it, drawn by the tide, was dragging up the shingle, rising out of the sea. Screams from the far edge of the raft. He imagined people tipping off the end. The balance was screwed. It was going to come ramming down on his head and that would be that. Something would have to give and Jane saw it would have to be him. He sucked in his breath and ducked underwater. He had not let go of Becky and could feel her thrashing beneath his fist. The raft came back down and jerked to the right. The hull tore into his back and he cried out. Panic leapt around inside him as he sought the surface again, but the raft had slid across his exit routes.