One

15. CITY OF CODE

Jane edged his way out of the alley, casting glances up and down a road that might or might not have once been called White Horse Street. Its sign had been prised off the wall years before. He checked windows and doors, rooftops, shadows. Shops here were long abandoned. Word had percolated through the city that the tiger had been seen in this area recently. He stopped outside a hairdresser’s. Dust covered every surface inside. Hairdryers lay on counters like science-fiction weapons. Foxed mirrors reflected a throat of stairs to the rear of the shop that he did not investigate. His white breath measured a pulse rate of fear. Black snow lay in drifts against doorways that had lacked for years the wood meant to fill them. It formed a slush that ran and refroze in the roads, creating strange shining curds of pitch. It fell in soft obliques against the dun of the cloud ceiling: slow black bullets, every one of them hitting their targets. The cold reached fingers under the cuffs of Jane’s coat and caressed his skin.

He couldn’t keep his eyes off those backstage city shadows. It was like seeing a car crash occur in front of you, or a Skinner uncoil within its epidermal prison for the first time. What if? The question had died in him long ago. Maybe? Just think… All of it had withered like a basil leaf scorched by frost. The secret slots and pockets of the city were too dangerous for casual checks these days. Leave it to the flushers. If he crops up, he crops up. Old enough to look after himself now.

Ahead of him lay Shepherd Market, a tiny enclave with neighbouring pubs and an alleyway between them leading to Curzon Street, if memory served correctly. To the left, curving away from him, more restaurants, chichi fashion boutiques, jewellers and chocolatiers. People sitting inside a Polish-Mexican bistro at pretty tables waiting for a meal that would never arrive, time having drawn deep runnels into their superdried faces. Nothing moved. He made his way towards the alley, keeping an eye on the oily windows of the pubs.

He walked down Curzon Street past the Mayfair cinema where he and Cherry had watched some Japanese horror film centuries ago. Afterwards, they’d walked home, a fair hike miraculously shortened by the excitement in their conversation and proximity. Love could do that to you, he thought, staring at the broken cinema entrance. It creased time and distance, put you in a bubble. He wasn’t going in there either. Not without a flame-thrower and plenty of back-up. And it was another two weeks before he was on incineration detail.

A gust of wind drove a blast of black hail into his face. He flinched from it and pulled the collar of his coat up around him, checked the positioning of his goggles, cycling mask and helmet. He had never grown used to the smell of sunblock; it stuck in his craw like the dense stench of a rancid dairy. He tucked himself into the doorway of a café while he went through his backpack, habit lifting his head to check the various approaches every few seconds. There was a bottle of water, a tin of emergency rations, a First Aid kit, a sheaf of tracing paper tucked into a plastic wallet and an Ordnance Survey map of London from 1968. He ignored these and picked out a battered notebook. Loose leaves, old tickets, photographs and torn pieces from maps were tucked in among its pages. Notes to himself. Reminders. Warnings. White spaces on the A–Z he had yet to explore. The city according to him, decked out in highlighter, pencil and paper clips.

The light was failing. He had to find shelter before it vanished completely. Some had taken to riding bicycles around the ruins but he preferred to go by foot. He didn’t like the way a bicycle switched you off. Your senses were dulled by the rush of wind and the exertion. You could coast around a corner into any amount of trouble. One step at a time. Stop, look, listen and think. Stay alive.

Jane thought of the places he had slept in over the years. He’d stayed in a bedroom in Buckingham Palace that he was pretty sure had belonged to Queen Elizabeth II. He’d slept on the grand old table in the Cabinet Office at 10 Downing Street; a lovely blue sofa in the United States Embassy in Grosvenor Square. But the novelty quickly wore off and he became more careful with his choices. He stayed in rooms close to well-connected roofs in case he had to make a quick getaway. Whenever he found a secure place to hide out, with excellent escape options, he marked it by the front door with a stick of orange chalk, making sure he found a spot that the sleet couldn’t get at. Orange marks crossed with blue meant that a previously good place was now infected, unsafe. You didn’t go there unless you had a canister of kerosene strapped to your back.

He moved now through Mayfair but paused at Berkeley Square, where he could see masses of bodies that had not been burnt piled up against railings. That would have to be reported. He made a note of the location and doubled back on himself, not keen to invite trouble by trying to pick a way through them. Not this late in the afternoon, anyway. He crossed Piccadilly and jinked up Jermyn Street. A sign in a window: Quality Cooled Offices. All the buildings failing in some way. Rain sanding the concrete back to reinforcement rods. Teeth marks where Skinners had, like leeches at fish-tank glass, sucked away the animal grease of fingerprints and sputum laid upon the stone by human beings over the decades. The venom in their saliva had reacted with the building materials, producing ugly seams of black decay that wormed through brick and breeze-block, like cavities in a tooth going unchecked. There could be only one outcome. Already some of the more recent constructions were sagging like sots at a happy-hour bar. Terraces made stovepipe shapes. Millionaire waterfront properties tossed up in the 1980s were throwing themselves into the river.

There were a number of hotels sharing space with classy formal dress shops. Mannequins in the windows had not changed their outfits in a decade. Those that had not melted looked more human than the people he saw every day, himself included. He caught sight of his reflection in the glass that remained in its frames. Long hair. Wild beard. He looked like a shabby mountaineer. All the razors were as blunt as a bad comedian’s punchline. Hillaby had taken to sharpening his old blades with a strop and shaved religiously, every day, but life was too short, way too short, for that kind of behaviour. One nick from those blades and there was no telling what might tumble into your bloodstream.

Jane stood and watched the entrance to a hotel at the Regent Street end of the road. Orange chalk mark on the steps leading to automatic doors long dead. Ornamental bay trees crumbled to ash in their grand marble pots. A man in a black suit and top hat lay dead just inside the entrance. He had fallen awkwardly, his left knee bent unnaturally, causing his shin to splay. Jane always felt a twinge of sympathetic cramp whenever he saw a body crumpled like this; felt the compulsion to straighten things out, give the body some dignity, some illusory comfort.

He panthered into the lobby and paused again, felt his skin prickling as he strained to hear noises that might give him a reason to leave. He hated this. Every night, the necessity of a roof over his head. It was like shutting yourself in a coffin, but statistically it was safer than a night spent treading pavements, ducking, hiding, trying to stay one step ahead. The reception area was empty. He took marble steps carpeted with red up to the top floor. A long corridor with subtle lighting that had not worked for ten years studded in the ceiling. Jane had forgotten what electric lighting was like. Sunlight too, for that matter. It would probably scour his eyes out.

He listened at the doors of all the rooms. Silence from within. He chose a room at the end and delicately closed the doors behind him, gritting his teeth at the soft, barely audible click of the lock. He listened for a while. Wind growling in the old city lungs. Snow spittle lashing glass and steel.

There was a body on the bed. A skeleton in ragged pyjamas with a white floss of hair. Most of the bones were still connected by leathery integument; he picked up the pyjamas like a bundle of faggots and tossed it into the wardrobe. He heard the scrabble and scratch of claws in the walls and sat on the bed, smelling the musty, rotten stench of ancient serous fluids rising from the mattress. It was rare to escape the filth. Occasionally he’d crack open the seal of a room that seemed never to have been occupied. A virgin territory, spotless, ghost-free, that breathed the faintest odour of new carpet and paint upon him as he entered. Mostly, though, he spent his nights in bedsit crypts and hotel-room mortuaries, clearing the beds of cringing bones or stiff, withdrawn bodies like so much unwrapped beef jerky.

He checked the exits. On the corridor there had been a fire escape next to his door. It would take him down to the ground floor and up to the roof. There were any number of options up there. The double-glazed windows didn’t open that far; they were on a security catch, but they were weak, shot through with cracks. A judicious blow would clear their frames.

Jane went to the wall separating this room from the next and pressed his ear against it. The journey of air through the hotel’s pipes and gutters and gulleys, little else. He returned to the bed and stripped the mattress. He lifted one corner but the body had emptied itself into the filling. It was rotten, the springs coming through the fabric as he inspected it. Good only for burning.

The sofa was a better option. It was a two-seater, which meant his legs would hang over the side, but it was better than the floor. He positioned his pack by the cushion where he would lay his head and placed his rifle alongside it, safety off, within easy reach. He lighted the stub of a half-inch candle and dripped wax on the dining table so that it would sit fast. The light didn’t matter; Skinners couldn’t see. He kicked off his boots, unzipped his sleeping bag and got into it, fully clothed.

From the pack he pulled a packet of chocolate buttons he’d found at the back of a fridge in a Holland Park kitchen. Best Before: over five years ago. They were white with age but they were delicious. So sweet he worried that his stomach might reject them. He unzipped a compartment in the top flap of the rucksack. A blister pack. Omeprazole. Protein-pump inhibitors. He pressed a bright yellow capsule into his palm and swallowed it. Twenty milligrams a day keeps the incubus at bay. What a chipper line Liggett had dreamed up; one that Jane could not shift from his thoughts every time he swallowed his medicine.

He lay back on the cushion and sighed. He felt age settle in his bones. What was he now? Forty? Give or take. His muscles would seize up by morning and he’d struggle to get his boots on. He thought back to a time of lying in hot baths while listening to the midweek football commentary on the radio. A glass of beer and the newspaper. Stanley lalling from his cot and the chatter of Cherry’s sewing machine as she worked the treadle. Maybe imagining his face under her foot. Some Thai food on its way from the local restaurant. Christ. Thai food. Close to sleep, he felt his mouth fill with saliva at the thought of prawn crackers and sweet chilli dipping sauce, curried chicken, jasmine rice.

Distant screams rose in the night. He knew what that was all about. He shut his eyes tight to it, and thought only of his son.

The candle was out when he wakened. But it was only recently extinguished; he could smell its acrid last breath. He heard the scratching in the plaster between the walls. He sat up, his hand falling to the stock of the rifle, which filled his hand and gave him a surge of confidence. There was a shocking, high-pitched cry, so loud he thought the rat that had loosed it must be upon him. He swung his feet out of the sleeping bag and they landed, not on his boots, but on the greasy, bristling backs of countless squirming animals. They recoiled before he did; he jerked back onto the sofa and pointed the barrel of the gun at the floor. He fired. Something screamed. There was the sound of bodies, an avalanche of bodies, falling over one another to get away. But then he realised he’d hit something and they weren’t trying to get away, they were fighting over the booty, they were tucking in.

Jane flipped over the back of the sofa. No light. No boots. Maybe a hundred, maybe two hundred rats in the room. Rats that he’d watched get fat and get thin again over the years, once the carrion ran out. Rats who had lost their timidity; he’d watched hunger push that right out of the rat set-up. Shit.

He leaned over the back of the sofa and snatched his rucksack towards him. He held it to his chest, and yelled out when a warm, bony body scuttled out of it, over his arm and away. A different rat might have buried its jaws in his throat.

There were three glowsticks in their wrappers tucked into an inner pocket. He tore two open and shook them awake: sudden acid-green light reflected back at him from dozens of eyes. More rats were pouring through a hole in the door beneath the desk. Fear turned him sluggish; his bladder slackened and he leaked piss. The sudden whiff of released chemicals sent the rats into a frenzy, but defocused them. Jane slammed the butt of the rifle into the window. A fist of wind did the rest of the work for him.

He felt claws at his feet and looked down as a rat attacked him, bared stained incisors shredding the leg of his denims. Its glistening fur seemed to ripple with pleasure as it inhaled the stink of his fear-sweat. Jane couldn’t shake it off. Another rat got a piggyback off its mate and launched itself at his eyes. Jane twisted his face away so violently that he felt a muscle pull in his neck; blindly he swung an arm and batted the rat away. He beat at the rat on his foot with the butt of the rifle. The rat continued to gnash at the air even as it was stove in.

Jane got a leg out of the window and, straddling the frame, fired three shots into the room. A squeal suggested he’d hit something, enough time to get out while they fought over the remains. He stood on the windowsill, grateful it was too dark to see how far down he would fall if he lost his footing. To his left, below the edge of the sill, was a ledge that ran to the end of the building, a distance of less than ten feet. A drainpipe waited for him there: another twelve feet above that and he’d be on the roof.

He sat on the windowsill, hands on either side of him, and inched along, using his palms to lift his bottom and swing himself incrementally towards the end. The wind plucked at his clothes – it felt to Jane as though it were assessing his weight, gauging how much it would take to drag him off into the night. He paused at the end of the sill, thinking how best to make the drop. How far life could take you, he marvelled, how far away from what you deemed to be normal could you be transported. Cups of tea, the crossword, a phone call home, all of this seemed as bizarre in the same way as what he was doing now would have appeared to his old self.

He anchored his hands as best he could to the windowsill and lowered himself towards the ledge. Almost immediately his muscles began to tremble. The breath hammered out of him; he was going to fall. But then his foot found concrete and he leant his weight upon it. The surface felt about as solid as a pack of muscovado sugar. He sidestepped as quickly as he dared to the end of the building, his hands flat against the wall by his sides, creeping along, giving him the illusion of control.

There was a hiss; rats were pouring like oil onto the window sill, sinuous, jet, intent. He grappled with the drainpipe, feeling his hold on the rifle slipping. As he reached around to secure the strap on his shoulder he felt the drainpipe lurch towards him. A great chunk of stone containing the screws that attached the top section of pipe to the masonry had come free, weakened by the corrosive drizzle. Jane shrugged the backpack from his shoulder and let it fall. He looped the strap of the gun around his neck and scrambled up the pipe until he felt close enough to grab the edge of the roof, but his fingers were a couple of inches shy.

This is it, he thought. The moment of my death. And he was not afraid; he felt a little foolish, that he had dodged the hammer blow that marked the end of humankind only to be snuffed out by a pratfall. He closed his eyes. The rats could have him, but not while he was breathing.

A gust of wind caught him, fed him to the wall with a smack. He snatched at the parapet and was dismayed at how the coping stones shifted under his fingers. Thankful for the first time at how much weight he had lost, he managed to hoist himself onto the roof before the stones slipped free. He paused for breath and took off, scuttling onto the rooftops of Regent Street before descending at Piccadilly Circus. He circled back and picked up his rucksack; the ledge writhed with shadow. It put a chill through the girdle of bone around his groin to see how far up the window was.

He took a detour around to the front of the hotel and with a blue stick of chalk slashed the orange mark with shaking hands, thinking all the while that the open doorway would suddenly bloat with the slithering bodies of millions of rats. Then he began walking north-west.

Every morning was a different route, more or less, to the same destination. He must have trodden the streets around W9 to a point where he’d be able to see his own path worn out of the pavements. Hunger, exhaustion and a build-up of lactic acid in his muscles conspired to bring him to the point of collapse. That and the projected disappointment. But he could not give up on his son. He would never give up.

His fingers strayed to the pocket of his jeans. The letter was there; he could make out its edges. It had become so worn by his constant folding and unfolding over the years, the salt and oil from his skin, that he’d ended up sealing it in a plastic wallet that he’d found in the Cabinet War Rooms under Whitehall. He felt cheated somehow, as if the closeness to his son was reduced by these microns of polythene. His fingertips could no longer press against the ink that had been so close to Stanley’s own. They could no longer feel the faint pattern of words in the paper that had been shaped by his son’s brain. He felt as if he were being gradually detached from him, like the dovetail join in two pieces of wood that has begun to fail over time.

Each step he took was accompanied by a crunch of broken glass; the boots he’d found on a platform at Paddington station had become studded with splinters picked up as he crossed the basin and its density of office blocks that was now little more than a desert of glittering scimitars and framework skeletons. He hurried under the Marylebone Flyover, shadowing the water, so aware of the pools of darkness that he felt himself involuntarily shrink, as if he were trying to withdraw like something crushed on a beach, retreating into a shell that was no longer there.

The bodies crammed into the basin had turned it into a slurry of rotting clothes, hair and fat. It disguised his own smell. You had to grasp that wherever you could, despite the inevitable unpleasantness. He skirted Little Venice and its houseboats, all of them floating coffins with their blinds drawn on secrets he wanted no knowledge of. People at a café were tumbled over their empty plates as if drunk, dull bones and mirrored grins, everybody having a whale of a time.

Stanley wasn’t home. Jane waited outside the door, kidding himself that he could hear Stanley playing with his battery-powered trains and wooden track or pestering Cherry for a beaker of apple juice. He stood at the door, listening. He stood at the foot of the stairs, listening. He stopped at every landing and waited. The building was empty.

He pushed his way into his son’s bedroom. Plaster and glass on the floor. Part of the ceiling was bowed and cracked; water created stalactites at its lowest point. The posters on the walls had been bleached to white oblongs; he could not remember what had hung there.

What do you want to be when you grow up, Stanley?

Lying in bed, this tiny boy, the duvet up to his chin. Hand on his soft blond hair, the heat of him rising through his fingers. A smell of soap. Sleepy-eyed. Some toy, some cheap piece of plastic that was his current favourite twisting in his fingers. Warm. Happy.

Umm, I want to be an actor in Star Wars. Because I want a real light saver.

Would you protect your mum and me if you had a light sabre?

It’s light saver, Dad. But yeah, I’d cut Darth Vader’s head off if he tried to hit you. And then push him off a clift.

A cliff?

No, I said a clift.

Good to know, Stan. Thanks.

He could convince himself that Stanley’s pillow bore an impression of his head or that his smell lingered in the room. It was easy to convince yourself of anything if you needed it badly enough. He checked the note on the table. He couldn’t distract himself by thinking that if Stanley were still around he’d probably not be able to read it, no matter that he was fifteen now. No schools. No teachers he knew of. Precious few children left to attend classes if there were.

Stanley. I come here every day. If you see this note, wait for me. I’ll be with you very soon. I love you. Dad. x

Jane closed his eyes and felt nausea swelling. He staggered out to the hall and was as sick as he could be.

The rest of the flat displayed its unremarkable ghosts to him, as it had every day for the past ten years. There were some who were irked by his behaviour; others who envied his dedication and faith. He knew of people who had lost partners or children and who would not countenance thoughts that they were still alive. They were easily given up, the alternatives too horrifying to tolerate.

He sat by the window and looked out at the dead gardens behind the row of houses in the next street. The houses were losing their shape, brick and stone crumbling, steel rods in reinforced concrete becoming exposed. Edges were rounding everywhere. One day there would be no house to return to. A solid yellow puddle was a plastic football. The frames of cloches burned away covered patches of ground where rhubarb or strawberries might have grown. The flavour of cream itched at his memory, but he couldn’t summon it. Nothing growing anywhere now. No dove to release; no green leaf to bring back.

A group had taken off, though, for the Continent shortly after he’d made contact with the capital’s survivors, people who had already invented a name – The Shaded – for themselves. Jane remembered two of the expedition team: Hinchcliffe and Henderson, because they had the same names as his accountant and his secondary-school headmaster respectively. He couldn’t remember anything of the other ten or twelve. They had set out for Dover, intending to steer a boat across the Channel to bring help back. They were like the Flat Earth Society, refusing to believe all evidence to the contrary, that this affliction had done for the entire planet. Wouldn’t help have arrived already if it was the UK alone that was suffering? was a question they refused to consider. Nobody had seen any of them ever again.

Something snagged on Jane’s vision, something that didn’t move when he did. At first he thought it was a flaw in the glass, or a shadow falling, but when he angled his head he saw the tiny, greasy remains of fingerprints. He stared at the patterns in those pads, drawing closer until he could make out the whorls and curlicues, the signature of his boy, a hello from across the years.

16. SKINNERS

Dawn was always a hurdle. The break of filthy yellow light over the city, like a diseased yolk, heralded a reminder of what lay in wait for anybody who had lasted this long. We are but dust and a shadow, Jane remembered, and some of us aren’t even that. London was shored up with bodies. They lay in drifts at the mouths of Tube stations and shop fronts. They foamed from the pits and ginnels of the cluttered interior, thickened the roads like browbeaten demonstrations. It was ceaseless, monotonous, Auschwitzian.

Jane gazed up at the bent and bowed and broken street lamps, the electrical wires, the dissolving architecture, and half expected to see vultures eyeing him, waiting for him to fall. But there weren’t any vultures. Everything that had had a heartbeat was lost for ever. You could only goggle at bones, or try to remember. Hunger was causing people to forget. Jane often worried about that. The scrabble for food was erasing every other trait that made them human. How far into the future before it was all scrubbed clean and they were falling upon each other? It had already started, he was sure, among some of the other splinter groups that were dotted around the city. It was galling to think that you had to keep an eye on your neighbour as well as the Skinners.

He plodded towards the base of the Shaded, through the corridors of Regent’s Park and the interstices of Somers Town, home to ghosts of diesel oil from the long-defunct termini of Euston, St Pancras and King’s Cross. Regent’s Park itself was a redzone. Short cuts were becoming a thing of the past. He turned north, along the old Caledonian Road, now marked only with painted black skulls on the walls. He had to wait at the railway bridge. A Skinner was prowling in the shadows. Jane watched it and wondered about its name. Who had come up with it? Olly Easby, was it? Or Lynn Botting? It was childishly simple, yet accurate. They might have stuck with something a little less graphic, that was all. It was unpleasant having to refer to them by way of a noun that also served as the verb for their actions. Although they wore evidence of that too, like jewellery, like trophies; there was no escaping what they did.

It was unusual to see a Skinner up and about at dawn or so soon after feeding, as this one undoubtedly had. The remains of a meal were strewn about its feet like some broken human jigsaw puzzle. Jane cast glances all around; they usually moved in packs of three or four, sometimes more. They weren’t fast, but they had some intelligence. They knew how to orchestrate a successful hunt. He hoped this was a rogue specimen. It swung its head from side to side like a distressed elephant in a cage. The ancient, tanned face that masked its own features shook and jiggled as if threatening to slide free. The eyes that sat in those chokers of biltong were nothing of the sort. They were the decoy flashes found on the fins of fishes. They were vestigial: un-eyes. But these animals compensated, he knew that. They were snakes when it came to smell; cats when it came to sound. There was something almost supernatural about their ability to find warm living things, as if they knew the flavour of thought, or the flares that leapt human synapses.

Eventually the Skinner moved off, sloping left up a dusty access road to the trackside where it began to follow the rails west towards Camden. Another city redzone. Jane let his breath out. There was no telling how keen their senses were; breathing – Jesus – blinking might make enough noise for them to begin a dogged pursuit. They didn’t give up when they had the scent of you in their nostrils. They would stalk you for weeks, long after you thought you were safe. Shaded advice now was, if you’ve been chased, consider yourself a hot target and do not touch any bases until you’ve been scrubbed down by medics.

Jane paused at the railway bridge to watch the hulking figure as it diminished. A final check, and he was through the crumbled perimeter wall of the prison, trotting towards the middle of the radial arms. Part of the wall here was caved in too. Inside he saw Linehan with a sub-machine gun.

‘You don’t have to point that at me,’ Jane said. ‘Do I look dangerous?’

‘You smell dangerous.’

Jane pushed by him into the corridor. All of the cells were locked. Dead men sat or lay inside them. There were claw marks on the walls, teeth marks on the bars. Most of these men had starved to death, their cries for help having gone unheard. Still nobody had found the keys to release them, to give them a burial, or cover their faces at least.

Jane’s boots rang out on the metal walkways. In the office at the front of the building he found Gerber, Simmonds and Fielding sitting around a table playing cards. Ombre. Gerber versus the others.

‘Hi,’ Gerber said and lifted a hand. He was a man of around sixty who had once been very large. He kept his hair clipped short and oiled, and did the best he could to keep his facial hair in check.

‘I saw a Skinner outside,’ Jane said. ‘Body, too.’

‘Loner?’ asked Simmonds. Simmonds was in her forties. She had large eyes that gave her the look of a St Bernard, always sad, expecting admonishment.

‘Yes. Just outside here. Just by the railway bridge.’

‘Gone now, though, yes?’ Fielding still hadn’t looked up to acknowledge Jane’s presence. He fiddled with the fan of cards, getting them in a neat line under his fingers. Then he’d tap them together and fan them out again.

‘Yes.’

‘So?’

‘So I thought you should know we’ve got fucking Skinners on the doorstep of the base.’

‘Base changes site tomorrow,’ Fielding said, handing him an envelope: this week’s cipher.

‘Time enough to have new holes eaten into your arse,’ Jane said. Fielding wound him up like a cheap watch.

‘I wouldn’t worry,’ Fielding said. ‘And anyway, we could be sitting pretty before too long.’

His phrases. Jane could hit him sometimes. They were all emaciated; hunger was dragging them down. But Fielding had this optimism that made it all sound as though it was little more than a rainy day. It would blow over soon. It would all come out in the wash.

Jane wanted to eat. He had squirrelled away maybe a week’s worth of tins for himself, Becky and Aidan by going without for a whole day, once in a while. It left him perilously close to fainting, and he knew that if he did that he would die – food for the Skinners. Or maybe someone else. He hadn’t thought that way at all before, not even in the most desperate moments when he could feel his own famished body feeding off itself. It seemed a taboo too far. He would never do it himself. But then there had been a meeting among the Shaded, or some supposed faction of theirs. Hollow faces sitting around a table. Steepled fingers. Furrowed brows. Chins stroked as they debated whether to enforce euthanasia on those that were draining supplies but not giving anything back to the community. The mentally handicapped. The lame. Babies. There was calm talk of what to do with the bodies. There was mention of recipes.

Jane had not been there for the meeting, and rumour was as slippery as ever, more so now, so he wasn’t sure what to believe. But he had to entertain the possibility. You keep the most dangerous option in view and it was one more safety measure, another peeled eye to keep you whole.

‘What is it?’ Jane asked. He hated having to probe and pry for information. Fielding was no further up the chain of command. There was no chain of command. ‘One of the gardens suddenly full of shoots?’

‘Would that it was. No, this is unsubstantiated…’ Jane felt the flare of excitement dimming already. More rumour. ‘… But there have been enough mentions, from disparate sources, to give it credence. Or at last make it a concern that deserves independent exploration.’

It was like listening to a formal speech. He’d never really talked to Fielding about his background but Jane wagered there’d been some ambition towards public office there.

‘What is it?’ he said again, patiently.

Fielding stopped fanning cards and blinked. In that moment his gaze switched from the suits to Jane’s eyes. Very theatrical, Jane thought. Very Fielding. ‘Have you ever heard of the raft?’

‘The raft? No. What about it?’

Fielding shrugged. ‘Conjecture, at the moment. But a picture is building up. Some say it’s a military op. Some refer to a ragtag group of engineers, architects, carpenters and metalworkers all pooling resources. But whatever, pretty much every report talks of a floating sanctuary being constructed off the Kentish coast. Self-sufficient. Currently anchored but with a crude propulsion system. Sheltered from the elements. And, um, capable of transporting a hundred people.’

‘A hundred?’ Jane spluttered. ‘On a raft? Get some grub down you, Alex. You’re delusional.’

‘It’s what we’ve heard.’

‘Well, it’s what I’ve heard too, now, and I think it’s bollocks.’

‘We have a duty to check it out.’

‘Right. Is this the same duty we have to follow the rainbow to its end, or put a tail on someone who may or may not be a leprechaun?’

‘We’ve got men on it right now. There’s a reconnaissance team on its way to Kent. Another doing the rounds here, collecting evidence.’

‘Evidence? Hearsay, you mean.’

‘We’re trying to ascertain where the rumours are originating.’

‘And then what? Punish the kid who’s been making this stuff up?’

‘It might be true. And even if it isn’t, it’s a good idea. We’ve got the manpower and the smarts. We need to be more proactive, Richard. We’re getting overrun.’

Gerber and Simmonds had quietly placed their cards on the table and removed themselves from the room. People tended not to chip in when Fielding was in full flow.

‘We have options open to us here,’ Jane countered. ‘We have secure bases all across the capital. We know the zones where the Skinners tend to congregate. Surely, once they discover that this place is not the free buffet they thought it was they’ll move on.’

‘Secure bases, you say?’ Fielding mugged, one eyebrow raising. Jane felt like an opposition politician who has let slip a crucial piece of information. He felt skewered. ‘Let me show you something.’ He led the way to what had once been the prison governor’s office. Any decoration – bookshelves, paintings, framed certificates – had been removed. The floors and walls displayed a series of pale parallelograms where things had once been. There was a map of London spread out on the floor, anchored at each corner by a shoe. Much of the centre of it had been whited out with Tipp-Ex.

‘Our main base at Elephant and Castle was attacked last week,’ Fielding said. ‘We’ve moved out. Burned it down. Their net is closing, Richard. We’re vastly outnumbered.’

‘And the answer to that is to play cards?’

Fielding did not look up from the map. He sighed. He was a big man, or had been once. Everyone was a shade now, a blueprint of what once was. ‘I just finished a twelve-hour shift burning dead bodies and scouring bad zones in south Tottenham. I watched Alan Poole get trapped in a loop of fire of his own making. Burned right through the oxygen hose on the tank on his back. We pulled him out – he’d been breathing fire for twenty seconds. He’s going to die. At the moment Doctor Sinclair is making a decision as to whether to let that happen without painkillers, as we really can’t spare them. Go down and have a listen to Poole breathing and then tell me what I should do to take my mind off things instead of playing cards.’

Jane chewed at his resentment. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘Forget it.’ Now Fielding raised his head, and there was spice in his eyes as he regarded Jane. ‘What have you been doing?’

Spoken as if he was in charge. The implicit needle: Whatever it is can’t be as important as what I’ve been up to. Jane felt disgust rising. The best part of sixty million people dead and here they were playing office bitches.

He tried to keep the resentment from his voice as he said: ‘Recon. We have a vermin problem in Mayfair. No more than anywhere, I suppose. No Skinners that I saw.’

‘And how about Maida Vale? Skinners there?’

‘Not my patch.’

‘No, it isn’t. So why were you seen there? Three times in the last week. At least.’

‘You know why.’

‘We need you elsewhere. We don’t have the numbers. The resistance has many weak spots. Only by adhering to the tight disciplines and schedules we’ve set ourselves can we hope to keep ahead of the Skinners.’

‘Spare me the team talk, Alex. I do my job. Anything outside of that I do in my own time.’

‘But you have to face up to the facts. It’s been ten—’

‘Shut up. I’m warning you to shut up. I haven’t slept well. I haven’t eaten today. I am in no mood for this discussion.’

Fielding gazed at him, his face a serene blank. Jane waited. He could see this inspection was meant to unsettle him. Let Fielding make his silent judgements and evaluations. Let him report back to his stupid committee with its imaginary powers.

‘The pills are running out, Richard,’ Fielding said. His voice had cracked – it was nothing like as calm and assured as the face that delivered it. ‘The booze is running out too. Someone – a Skinner, I hope – ransacked one of the warehouses. There’s nothing left: no grain, no barley, no potatoes with which to make any new stuff. There’s nobody with the knowledge, or the machinery, to synthesise new prophylactic drugs either. When we run out, we’ve had it. And I don’t intend to hang around long once that happens. Our only chance is to get off this island, find someone, a health team that can cure us, a surgeon who can cut this out of us, I don’t know, but staying here is sitting in a waiting room for a GP who isn’t coming into work any more.’

The soft tang of footsteps on a distant walkway. Jane thought about the cells. There was dried blood on some of the bars where inmates had tried to squeeze through or tear a way out. He could almost believe that the echoes of their cries were flying around the heights of the prison, like trapped birds.

‘How can you stand it in here?’ he asked, but he was only filling the silence. Fielding knew that. There was no answer to the question. Anywhere was better and worse than the place where you were. You’d still be trapped inside yourself, with yourself, with what you were likely to become. ‘I haven’t heard anything of these rumours. You mentioning the raft just now, that’s the first I’ve heard of it.’

‘It could just be a rumour, like I said. We have to take it seriously. But if it exists I don’t want us sitting on our arses here while people are paddling to safety. We have to hope it’s real and we have to hope that anywhere other than here is a safer, better place to be.’

‘It might be worse.’

‘I know you have more optimism in you than that, Richard.’

‘You want me to find out what I can?’

Fielding nodded. ‘We’ve got the whole of recon on this. Depending on what you dig up, we could be out of this shitpit within two weeks.’

‘Or up to our chins.’

‘There you go again. You know, this unremittingly sunny disposition of yours is beginning to get me down.’

Jane had to smile, despite his feelings towards the other man. He kept trying to convince himself that it was in order to prevent the muscles of his face from atrophying.

‘Come and find me if you get any leads,’ Fielding said. He curved his lips into a cold smile and held out his hand. Jane shook it. ‘Come and find me if you don’t.’

Jane struck north-east, consulting his bible. There was a much folded and annotated patrol map of the city glued into the back cover. He opened it on the lam and studied the zones he had whited out. No real rhyme or reason to their location, other than a preference for areas that contained Tube stations, especially those that serviced the deep Northern Line. There were a lot of Skinners in Camden, Oval, Kennington and Leicester Square. They congregated too in open spaces; pretty much all the parks were off-limits. But rogues had been spotted too. Including the tiger. There was talk of the tiger being a leader, but there was no understanding of who he was leading, or to what end.

Jane visited buildings across Crouch End. He found a terrace of boarded shops near Finsbury Park. Behind the blinds of corrugated iron and chipboard were empty rooms. No rat spoors. No evidence of Skinners. He chalked the walls orange and moved on. It was getting dark. Another day lost to fear and suspicion; work was the only way to carve a way through the hours without dropping to your knees, screaming and crying, immobile until the moment they came and drilled their fingers through your skull. It seemed pointless sometimes. This was no winnable war. It was running from shadows and shivering in the dark until morning, hoping you weren’t uncovered. It was hide-and-seek played for unspeakable stakes.

Jane was shivering by now. Cold had found the weak spots of his clothes and yanked them open with its insistent, powerful fingers. He felt it burning under his shoulder blades, in his knees and neck. A damp pain that would take a long time to shift. No hot showers. The luxury of a bath took far too long to create. He’d be little more than something serving itself in its own broth for the Skinners the moment he stepped into it. He wondered if all his years of diving had somehow made him more prone to feeling the cold; maybe his bones were less dense, therefore more sensitive to these sinking temperatures. Or maybe it had something to do with the drugs that he and everyone else were taking: a side effect, maybe. There were alternatives to these gastro-resistant capsules. Hard booze worked well, and many cleaved to it easily, but you had to drink a lot and keep topping it up; Jane didn’t like the associated loss of control. The omeprazole was a bind only insofar as he had to remember to keep taking it, but that was no hardship considering the penalty you paid if you missed a dose or two.

He remembered the panic in London when it had become clear that the seed that had been laid down by whatever cosmic wind had swooped upon the planet was germinating not only in the ready fertiliser of the dead but in the living too. People vomited blood and felt a searing pain unwrapping itself in their guts, in their lungs. Jane had never seen a case of what some bleak wit had termed a ‘moving-in party’, and he didn’t want to. There was a rumour that you could feel the shape of the body that was growing inside you, slowly devouring you from the inside out before you died. An inner shadow worming itself into your hollows and crevices like a hermit crab tucking into a new shell. You’d feel the unholy pain of your bones melting, your organs gnawed; a contained explosion. Creatures filled the casing of your skin, growing to whatever limits surrounded them: cat, horse, man. If they had blossomed within the remains of a cadaver, the Skinner would look like some animated scarecrow; you’d see the rumours of its true physiology through the ruins of what had gone before it. Jane had seen a mangy dog trotting in the night, looking for carrion, breath labouring through the holes in its hide. On one morning of noxious mists in Alexandra Palace he’d stood transfixed in awe as the broken silhouette of a stag clattered through a blasted coppice, its antlers like frozen black lightning, matted, slavering, skeletal.

Becky had been on the medical team who conducted emergency medical trials. Take-’n’-shake wards were set up in gutted churches, municipal offices, school halls. Pills of every kind were shovelled down the throats of men and women desperate to prevent or delay the fatal invasion. Nostrums were embraced. Self-harm. Self-help. Fervent prayer. They found that alcohol worked, but only in doses that rendered you insensate. A breakthrough was made with drugs associated with heartburn. Pharmacies were raided for their stocks of omeprazole, lanzaprazole. Those at risk swigged antacids from flasks. People were mugged for Rennies and Gaviscon.

Jane was grateful for the air filters he had used since day one. He was low-risk. What moved in him was little more than the juices of fear.

Jane hurried along Camden Road, one long thoroughfare of orange marks, one of the few places in London where he felt safe despite the road being topped and tailed by white areas: Camden to the south and north, Holloway. Perhaps it was a subconscious alertness to do with this new job; he always felt energised by some new task. Now he felt a tingle in the small of his back at the sight of the petrol station. He had passed this way so many times before without a pause, but now it radiated danger, or at last its potential. Jane tried to see where the threat was emanating. Like many buildings – especially one whose structure was a cheap amalgam of plastic and neon – this one had suffered from the initial blast and subsequent weathering; the shop was little more than a collapsed cabin, the forecourt a black scree of exploded fuel, glass and vehicles.

It took a while to work out why he felt so jumpy, but then he saw the service hatch in the ground; it was off-kilter, no longer flush with its housing. The explosion might have caused it to come off, but if it had it would have turned it into a weapon, flinging it a great distance through the air. This was a lid replaced by someone who didn’t want something to be found, or dragged back into position by someone hiding inside. That thought loosened him a little, and he crouched, trying to quell the melting feeling in his bowels, knowing that to shit or piss here was to bang a dinner gong.

He had to check it. What if it was as he had first thought, a cover for something meant to remain secret? That could only mean food. He would take a bite, just a little to keep him going, and leave a message for whoever had secreted it, telling of a safe place where resources were pooled and a resistance was being established. Maybe the people who used this den were dead and he’d find a treasure trove that he could later lay claim to. If he didn’t, someone else would.

Jane scanned the road north and south again, and peered at the houses of Tufnell Park that rose behind the petrol station. He held his breath so that he could hear more acutely over the suck and blow of his breath in the bicycle mask. No movement. Fear opened up in him like a black flower in poor soil. He picked a way through the rubble of bricks and concrete. Rain fell like something forced through an atomiser, adding faint noise to the picture before him. A hand went to his chest. The wound here that the man down at the lake had inflicted with that sword of his was healed as well as it ever would, but adrenaline was like a wormhole to that moment, opening him up with the memory of pain.

Jane thought of the letter he had begun, years ago, in reply to his son. He had yet to end it and knew that it would never come to Take care, all my love. He kept the latest pages on him, along with a supply of fresh sheets, so that he could add more whenever he was faced with a long wait or a sleepless night. When he felt lonely, or afraid, he found that it helped to shape the part he was working on. Stanley became his distraction and his saviour, although there was really no ‘became’ about it. He had always played this role.

Where was he up to? The delivery room. He had been describing the moment of Stanley’s birth.

Hey Stan, you know, your mummy burst into tears when I told her you were OK, and that you were a boy. I cried myself when the midwife put you in my arms. I sat with you while they took care of Mummy and even then, minutes old, you had your own little characteristics, your own set of expressions. I had to shade your eyes because the sunlight was streaming into the delivery room. I held your tiny hand in mine, and smelled the miraculous scent that was rising from your head. I will never forget that moment for as long as I live. I loved you all through Mummy’s pregnancy, even though I didn’t know what you looked like or how you might behave. In the second when you were born, I knew that I would do anything in my power to protect you from harm.

You will discover music, books and art, things that will sometimes move you to tears with their beauty. There will be friends of your own, and people you will love. There will be great happiness, and some sadness too, but even that is a good thing, an important thing to experience. I can’t wait until you are old enough so that I can play football with you, and laugh and joke with you, and show you all the amazing things there are to see. I’ll take you diving on the Great Barrier Reef. You won’t believe it.

Jane had his fingers under the edge of the hatch, lifting it, thinking of moon wrasse and morwong and blue puller, when he realised that its cack-handed replacement was nothing of the sort. It was a deadly come-on, the bait filaments jangling on a devil fish’s head.

He heard something lurching within and he felt himself hoping it was just his own limbs readjusting to cope with the weight of the hatch, but the sound was all wrong, too deep, too fast, too out of rhythm with what he was doing. He was stepping back, feeling his back give with the strain, about to drop the hatch and run, when a ragged, striped cuff shot out of the shadow, peeling back to reveal a claw, giraffe-tongue purple, each curved tip as sharp as a ceremonial blade thinned almost to invisibility on a whetstone.

Jane felt it grip him and jerk him towards the place of his death.

17. STALL WARNING

Fear made Jane laugh and vomit. He ran hard for maybe two miles, until he was so shattered he could barely stand and had to drop to his knees in order to breathe. He was shaking violently; he could still feel the claws on him squeezing as though to assess his tenderness. He wasn’t sure where he was; he hadn’t really paid any attention to direction. Away was good enough. Now that adrenaline was draining from his muscles he began to become aware of his surroundings. It wasn’t exactly the fire after the frying pan, but it was close. He was on the fringes of Hampstead Heath, the southern tip, where part of Gospel Oak train station, including the railway bridge, had collapsed into what had once been known as Mansfield Road.

They liked to congregate in this great park. Maybe something in its wintered desolation called to them. The desiccated trees against the sky like black fractures in unclean ice, agonised, all the sap bubbled out of them and rehardened like angry amber boils. The scorched, stubbled acreage of earth. The ponds filled with bodies: huge bowls of chilled consommé for them to guzzle. They crisscrossed the heath – Jane had watched them from the safety of a Highgate rooftop with his binoculars – like mendicants folded into their rags, deep in thought. Sometimes they dragged partially denuded victims along behind them by the hair, or a limb, to be stowed in the earth on Parliament Hill, or around the Vale of Health, for consumption later.

Jane struggled to think. The cold was freezing his head, turning him sluggish. It was a constant ache in his temples and nape; it had burrowed under his shoulder blades where it burned in his muscles like a slow blue fire. He remembered there was a bolt-hole in Belsize Park. Ten or fifteen minutes from here. It would mean cutting up by the Royal Free Hospital – hospitals were other places where they liked to bed down – but he had to get inside. The Skinner had gripped him so hard he was worried that the skin might be broken.

He ran up through Pond Street to Haverstock Hill and up past the hospital. There was no sign of anybody. Come night-time, though, this car park, this forecourt and street would be a scrum of bodies. He couldn’t bring himself to think what the hospital interior must be like. Belsize Park, once a desirable enclave of London, with its beautiful Georgian houses and broad leafy lanes, was now a demilitarised zone. The smell of copper was in the air; buildings were thickly painted with blood. Whatever fighting had happened here had been intensely one-sided. Bins rolled around, pushed by the ceaseless fingers of the wind. Glass teeth ringed grimacing black jaws in every single window along the parade of shops. He hurried as best he could through the obstacle course of felled lamp-posts and telegraph wires. Until he reached England’s Lane. At the top of this street was a pub that had been gutted by fire. Inside he saw figures hunched against each other in a corner, under a leaning beam of wood that was mackerel-striped with deep burns. He left them alone. He knew from bitter experience that sometimes such quaking, craven types were really Skinners trying to trick you into coming closer. Sometimes the figures were human, and not as shy or fear-beaten as they seemed. It was best to leave well alone or suffer a preemptive attack. Nobody wanted any comfort any more. Another trait that made humans who they were gradually erased from the banks of race memory.

On Fellows Road Jane paused, listening for movement. He checked behind him but of course the tiger wasn’t there. It would be shambling after him, perhaps having made no more than a hundred yards, but it was coming on and coming on. It had Jane’s stink in its nostrils and it would not be shaken from its pursuit of him. It had the pit-bull grip on him no matter where he was.

It had come out of that chamber like something being born. Mewls and whiffles and whimpers; breath shuffling in its deep wet throat. He had tried to move back but had felt the blades of its claw pinch his flesh and he had halted, knowing that if his skin were pierced he was dead, if not from infection then from the bloodlust that would be triggered by any open wound. The jaws of the tiger stretched wide, its teeth like twists of black glass. The coke-coloured pits of its eyes were ringed with a dry cake of pus. Its fur had long since lost its gloss; now it was like a thin coat, burred, plated with muck, with a novelty pattern picked up for pennies from a charity shop. There was no hint at the power and grace that had once swaggered within it. He’d dropped the heavy hatch cover, trapping one of its legs as it rolled over the lip. It was too much to hope that he’d broken the limb, not that it would matter; nothing seemed to put a check on their movement, except fire.

Once Jane was sure that he was safe he cut down past the side of the third house on the left to the rear where a large garden had once played host to children. A rusted swing with chains hanging free where a plastic seat had once been tethered; the circular frame of a large trampoline now nothing more than a silent mouth open to the sky. He had spent a lot of time, in those early months, searching for his son and finding evidence of thousands of other children. It was like cataloguing grief. There were scorched photograph albums under beds; children’s rooms; playthings torn into nightmare shapes by the heat and the weather. He had found the remains of boys Stanley’s age. Some of them were huddled into the far corners of their rooms, the flayed skeleton of a favoured toy in their famished hands. Teeth clenched on a final word, bitten off by pain. Daddy. He had to stop. It was so deeply sad. He wasn’t sleeping but whenever he managed to it didn’t last long: there was always some blistered bug-eyed thing slinking about in the shadows of his head, limping and stumbling towards him on limbs half devoured by fire.

Jane checked the wall next to the back door. Orange. Inside he moved through a dark hallway almost to the front of the house, his fingers trailing against the failing wallpaper. An edge. He stopped and put his hand to a point halfway down the wall. He pressed hard and fast and felt a magnetic shutter sink slightly against its seal. When he let go, the edge sprang clear of its flush join with the wall: the jib door opened, breathing its musk against him, a smell he never grew tired of sampling. That air had been trapped in here for decades. It was the whiff of safety.

It was really little more than a false wall, but the space was big enough, and long enough to contain a fold-up camp bed, a chair and a narrow table. Jane had a candle burning on the table now. Next to it he’d rested his naked foot; he was prodding the tender flesh of his ankle. A purple bruise encircled it. In places the black indents of claws remained. He had been mighty close to being punctured, but all seemed OK. Regardless, Jane cleansed the skin – revolted by the memory of its filthy entrapment – with alcohol wipes and bandaged it. His foot wrapped in startlingly clean cotton, his fright and exhaustion allayed somewhat by a bracer of vodka, Jane rubbed his eyes and reached for his bible. The Ordnance Survey map was folded tight and secured in a home-made flap in the back cover with elastic bands. He spread it out on the table and plucked the envelope from his wallet. The candlelight shivered for a moment, as if shuddering in sympathy at the tedious task ahead of Jane. Sometimes it took mere seconds: the shape of the paper almost drawing itself to the conjunction of roads that formed its boundaries and from which it had been traced. Other times he would sit blankly for hours like a man with a piece of a jigsaw puzzle that he was convinced belonged to another box. Now he slowly slid that cipher across the map with the tip of his forefinger. Everyone who was committed to the resistance had a copy of this map, published in 1968, or a facsimile of it; teams of copiers had spent days tracing the streets and key features onto sheets of paper. He’d been treated with disdain when he suggested that all maps would contain the same basic shapes. Why not use those? Because they won’t have this map, the Shaded told him. And what’s wrong with being as cautious as you can be?

This particular fragment reminded Jane of a dog in full flight, its legs off the floor, its head out flat and intent. Three black dots signified buildings. One of the dots was circled with red ink: the next location for the temporary headquarters. Sometimes there were complaints about what appeared to be an overly cautious knee-jerk response to the threat of attacks that didn’t necessarily occur. What was the point of this constant seven-day scramble for a new HQ when the old one was perfectly safe, perfectly serviceable? Jane knew it was all cosmetic, a façade to keep people busy, to keep their minds away from the open sore of a future not worth living for. None of the gardens they had tried to cultivate was coming on. Food was scarce. All of the talk at the meetings, of trying to grow phytoplankton in the ocean to absorb the carbon dioxide in the air, of building a machine to either blow away or suck in the cloud, countless other geo-engineering options from the possible to the outlandish, had come to naught. People had already spurned the rations offered by the resistance and had moved out of London, hoping to find richer pickings in Bristol or Birmingham or Manchester. Everyone was aware that to walk now was to go to your death, but that didn’t stop people. There was the illusion of positive action. It was better than hiding out with a fistful of crumbs, not knowing if you were going to wake up in the morning with some vibrating shredded head trying to gnaw a path to your vitals.

‘Got you,’ he muttered as the piece of paper found its echo on the map. Some bright spark had decided to take everyone for a hike. Jane wished someone had decided to limit their travels to the A406 ring road rather than the larger ripple of the M25, but there had been a clamour for a greater range of options. There was the feeling of being constricted. That damned circle. A feeling of a noose around the throat.

‘Heathrow it is, then.’

Jane napped briefly and woke up to find most of the night gone. He shifted in his chair, hoping it was the wood and not one of his own joints that was creaking. Fear cosied up to him and he stood up, wincing at the familiar aches and pains. He thought of that shambling tiger on England’s Lane. Softlee, softlee, catchee monkey, the tortoise to his hare. He felt his skin pucker.

He had been dreaming about Fielding. A fan of cards that had steadily drizzled blood across the man’s fingers as he spoke in his maddeningly calm monotone. Behind him the illuminated wings of the prison had darkened, block by block, the light snapped off as if someone were flicking an array of switches. Fielding kept talking despite night’s casual pursuit, despite the clatter of locks as the cell doors were sprung and whatever had died within them came staggering out onto the walkways.

Something Fielding had said about hoping Skinners had invaded the warehouse chimed with deep suspicions of his own. He thought of the rats piling into the room. An aspect that had needled him. There was a hole in the door, but it had not been there when he went to sleep. Surely. He always double-checked the doors, made certain they were secure. Maybe fatigue had caused him to miss this, but he doubted it. He didn’t know what that might mean.

Jane folded the map and tucked it into his bible; he stowed everything in the backpack and shouldered it. The wind was hardly heard in here. It was a surprise sometimes, not necessarily a happy one, to be able to hear the labour of your breath, or the riot of your own thoughts. But the moment you considered the wind, it was there in the background, like the breath of a baby in a cot, as if inspired to increase its volume by virtue of your mind snagging upon it. It moaned in the gaps of the houses and called out from the open mouths of flues. It carried the grief of the city’s destruction.

Walking those sagging, abject streets you could almost begin to take the damage for granted. Years of listening to the glass crunching underfoot and the groan of battered timber finding alien positions in which to settle softened your reaction to it. Like the stone edges of buildings dissolved by the rain, you became blunted, you curved away. You kept your eyes on the pavement while the jagged fingers of scaffolding and fence posts and foundations beseeched the sky. He was no engineer, but he knew they could not stay in London indefinitely. It was a muscular city only for so long as its pals stuck around to help out: the Thames Barrier, for example. Who was maintaining the flood defences now that most of the capital’s population were so much rat food? He woke up in cold sweats thinking of overheated rods in nuclear power stations melting concrete and spewing tons of radioactivity into the shattered sky. Would they even notice?

Jane closed the jib door and checked that the edges were concealed. He trod through the house to the back door and let himself into the garden. He waited, assessing, gauging.

Eventually he moved back along the side of the building to the road, the aches in his legs reawakening already. He walked south, skirting Primrose Hill on the west side. He was back in Maida Vale without realising his feet were taking him that way. He stood outside the house and called softly to Stanley, staring up at his window. He could still see that cheeky face with its arresting green-brown eyes. There was no effort in his recalling it; he seemed to wait, a good little boy, at the edges of his Dad’s thoughts until he was needed.

He waited for a while, feeling his hair whipped by the wind and filling with grit. The foul cake mix of the sky folded in scoops of cobalt and charcoal. He thought of the raft and wondered who had begun it – either the building of it, or the baseless rumour – and imagined himself sitting in a crude boat next to Stanley, holding hands, heading on gentle swells to a gap in the clouds where the sun was peeking through. He took that image with him, empty-handed once again, back onto the A5, ghosts clamouring, that hopeful road upon which he had entered the city ten years before, straight as an arrow shaft, cutting through his fear and doubt, slamming into a bull’s-eye so insubstantial that the arrow was still in flight, looking for a target. Anything.

He turned left onto Crawford Street and walked as far as Upper Montagu Street. The windows looking in on the children’s area of the library at the end of the road were boarded up. He could just make out the play of candlelight in the cracks around the chipboard. A side door was nailed shut with thick planks. On Marylebone Road he hurried up the steps, feeling woefully exposed in the twilight, and gave a patterned knock on the heavy main entrance. A woman wearing glasses with thick scratched frames let him in. He swept across the marbled hall and down the stairs to the children’s library. Becky was sitting in the corner drinking from a tin cup. She rose when she saw him, spilling her drink across her sweatshirt. They embraced and he felt her heart through their clothes, beating hard enough for both of them.

‘I missed you,’ she said. He nodded and smiled, kissed her. He missed her as soon as he was with her. It seemed to catch up with him. It was difficult when you were in the city. You were so busy trying to avoid Skinners, assess bolt-holes, keep a step ahead of the tripwire of your own dark thoughts that there was little time or space for others to share.

‘Is there any food?’

Becky shook her head. ‘No, wait. I saved you something. I haven’t seen you for days.’ She led him away from the small bookshelves furred with dust into the staffroom. He didn’t like the children’s library. It was too close to what he was all about. She dug out from her pocket a tablet of chocolate wrapped in silver paper.

‘What about you?’ he asked.

‘I’m watching my figure.’

Jane took the chocolate and broke it in half. He placed his half under his tongue and felt his mouth become immediately awash with drool. He pressed the other half against her lips. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Be a devil.’

The sweet served only to make his appetite more keen. If you kept busy enough you could forget about hunger, or at least press it into some ancient part of the brain, that lizard knot of slow thought. He was about to suggest going out to hunt for some real food when she told him about the body found that morning at Pentonville. Intact, which meant it was definitely not a Skinner attack.

‘Who?’

‘Fielding,’ she said. ‘Throat cut.’ Her voice stumbled over the violence in the words.

‘Suicide?’ Jane asked, but Becky was shaking her head before he’d even begun to shape the question. The dream he’d had tapped him on the shoulder.

‘This was a thorough job. And there were wounds inflicted after he died.’

Jane didn’t know how to react. Murder had become a thing from history; compared to what was going on today it was almost a polite crime. That fellow survivors had resorted to killing their own during an ongoing crisis seemed a behavioural aberration.

‘Do we know who did it? Did anybody see anything?’

‘No. Fielding was just clocking off. He said he was going to check out some buildings in De Beauvoir Town before calling it a night. He’d forgotten his chalk and his medipack. Jamie Cosgrove went after him. Found him near the Essex Road train station.’

‘Did we check this Jamie Cosgrove out?’

‘He was spotless, Richard. Unless he’d had a shower after slicing him up, he had nothing to do with this.’

‘I know, I know. I’m just thinking out loud. Jesus. I only saw him last night.’

Becky sighed. ‘Yeah. The prison is shut down now.’

‘I know. We’re moving west. Where’s Aidan?’

‘He’s at the river with his chemistry mates. Testing acid levels.’

‘That’s helpful.’

Becky jolted his arm. ‘He’s learning,’ she said. ‘You never know, he might be one of the people who pulls us out of this mess a few years from now.’

‘It’s being stuck in the mess now that’s kind of a pain,’ he said. ‘We’ve got enough eggheads scribbling equations. We could use Aidan on recon, or working the library.’

‘He does his share.’

Jane could feel a tension building up behind his eyes. His gums were sore and his tongue kept worrying at one of his molars; he was convinced it was loose. ‘All right. Look, I need to get out of here. I don’t like this place. I don’t like sub-street level. There’s nowhere to go.’

‘It’s secure, Richard. It’s safe.’

‘Nowhere’s safe,’ he said, and wished he hadn’t. ‘How are you, anyway?’

‘You’re not the only one who wants me to move on. I’m staying at a safe house in Balham from tomorrow. Word is that there are Skinners drifting south from Camden and the parks.’

‘Well, then, that’s good.’

‘What do they want with us?’ she asked him, her voice suddenly pressured, cracking. He was reminded of the Ceto; his mates in the chamber all trying to equalise as the pressure piled against their sinuses. Squeezing their noses and blowing, trying to yawn. The first sign of the heliox mix pulling their voices into falsetto.

She didn’t mean us as in everyone, she meant the women. He knew that. Why did the Skinners choose to hunt the men but abduct the women? Together they’d watched it in the early weeks after their arrival. They’d seen a group of girls pulled from the ticket barriers at Shadwell and dragged away screaming by things that had once been men but whose skin was now swollen with the knuckles and ribs of something that didn’t quite fit inside. Black joke eyes staring out of dead holes of bone, a mimic with cheap props. They’d been strangled almost to senselessness, then flung on to the backs of tethered, invaded okapi. Steam had come off the frayed bodies: they’d looked like ghosts fading into the night. Nobody had said anything at the time. People still didn’t. You could posit all you liked, but it came down to the obvious in the end, and the obvious, if it was so repellent, so horrifying, was always ignored, concealed, skirted. He could answer her right now, but the question was a squeak from the safety valve. She didn’t really want to hear it. She knew what was going on.

‘I thought maybe we could walk down to the river, find Aidan, go on up to the power station, bed down there.’

‘It’s late. And it’s a long way. We have beds here. We can go up to the research rooms if you want.’

It wasn’t just that he was feeling cabin fever in a place that made Jane uncomfortable and nervous. He didn’t like Aidan going off on his own even though the river was generally safe and he was among friends. And Jane still had motion in his joints. He wanted to be on the street, tracking down the gossip about the raft. He didn’t like Fielding, but he was sorry to hear of his violent death. The threat of it was like a storm cloud that had slipped inside the building and was clinging to the ceiling, getting fat, building up the pressure on everyone beneath it.

Becky’s hands on his shoulders. He thumbed off the bicycle mask and the goggles and stood blinking in the candlelit room. She gave him a little half-smile; she knew she’d won. She slipped a hand into his. ‘Come on,’ she said.

They took the steps up through the oak-panelled stairwell and pushed through a door into an area filled with old bookcases. Some had collapsed against each other and had not been righted. Magazine racks were loaded with newspapers and glossies bloated and dulled by time and water that had coursed down the walls from a crack in the roof. Ranks of PCs with shattered screens sat on tables cluttered with cups and mugs and soup bowls.

A circular window in the dome of the library was filling with shade. Candlelight flickered from the far end of the room. They bypassed the loans desk and headed for the light. Sleeping bags were wadded into the gaps between the bookcases. There was a silence of deep sleep, the kind of sleep that punched people unconscious as soon as their head hit the pillow, the result of little food and much exertion.

There were two empty sleeping bags in the corner. Becky’s bag and coat marked her territory. She undressed quickly and slipped into her bag, pulling the corner up over her body, but not before he saw the rippled sandbar of her ribs, the deep shadow of her stomach. She patted the space next to her. Jane smiled. He looked out at the Marylebone Road as it sought the heart of the city. Figures drifted across it or along it. A fog was rising, or the clouds were sinking. Everything grey. Somebody screamed, far away, and he almost didn’t register it. You got to a point where you didn’t hear the tragedies unfolding around you. Wasn’t it always this way?

Becky unhooked her bra and he touched her breasts haltingly, as if the lambent light around them was being manufactured from within. They made love quietly, although Jane doubted whether anybody would have been roused had they given their fucking full volume. Jane withdrew at the moment of his climax and she held his penis as he came on her stomach. He didn’t look. She wiped herself clean and fell asleep almost immediately, her head on his chest, the smell of their sex rising from the sleeping bags whenever she moved. Bitter thoughts of Cherry. A shameful wish that she might walk in on them like this.

He raised himself up slightly and balled a coat and put it under his neck. He pulled a dead mobile phone from his pocket and dialled the number.

‘Hi, Stan,’ he said. ‘What you doing?’

‘Colouring in. I done a Batman but it got boring because he’s only blue and grey.’

‘What did you have for dinner?’

‘Pasta. And parmigiano.’

Jane laughed. He’d taught Stanley to say ‘parmigiano’ at a very early age, with a cartoon Italian accent, and it always tickled him when he said it.

‘You had a bath? Brushed your teeth?’

‘Roger, roger.’

‘Sleep tight, then. See you soon.’

‘Night, Dad.’

Jane was about to press the end-call button when a sharp bill shot out of the casing in an explosion of brushed steel and embedded itself in his cheek. He smelled the cloaca of the bird, and the carrion of what it had last dined upon. But he was so tired, so exhausted, that the nightmare could not impinge. He slept, looking down on himself, disinterested, as the bill stripped away the flesh of his face to reveal a thin white bowl filled with dust.

18. RAGCHEW

In the early morning the tiger broke down the library door and killed two men who tried to stop it from cantering up the stairs. Jane saw it happen. He’d been coming down to use the toilet and to check that Aidan had made it back from the river. The tiger swung its great spoiling head his way as Jane pushed his own scent down the stairs before him. There was a frozen moment, almost as if the air pressure they each produced had caused them to be still as it collided. Jane backed off; the tiger approached. Blood from the broken men in the foyer had created large fans across the floor. It appeared solid; you might lift up an edge and it would all follow, like a confection set to dry on baking parchment.

The tiger moved more circumspectly now that its quarry was in sight. Its bluster was spent; perhaps it was exhausted after expending so much energy on the door and the men. Perhaps it was wary of Jane, who had bested it once already. He heard movement behind him and Becky’s voice: ‘Oh.’ She kept the door open for him and it was only as they were pulling down filing cabinets to block the entrance that the tiger charged. It hit the swing doors and half a dozen squares of glass punched out of their frames onto Jane and Becky’s backs as they shouldered more furniture in front of the door. A paw came through, stinking of shit and rot, and almost swiped off Jane’s face; he felt the wind from it move the hair of his beard. The other sleepers were up now, and hurriedly grabbing the things they valued most: food in the main, but also thick winter coats, old stained albums of photographs. They made their way silently to the stairs, veterans of any number of emergency evacuations in the past. Nobody screamed any more. Too tired. Too knowing.

‘I shouldn’t have come here,’ Jane said. ‘I put everybody at risk.’

‘Shush,’ Becky said. ‘We can do all that later.’

They hurried to the small lift at the back of the room. During the years it had worked it had taken three people at most, and clanked as if about to disintegrate into a welter of hinges and screws. Jane had used it once, then stuck to the stairs. Now it had been hollowed out; a rope ladder hanging from the defunct overhead sheave. They descended it quickly in darkness, Becky going first. At the bottom they had to lever open the doors with a crowbar that was hanging by wire on the wall. They burst out through the fire doors into Salisbury Place and did not stop running until they were out of breath, leaning on each other. Spit dangled from Jane’s throat, quicksilver mined from the pits of his lungs. It was so cold he felt as though he was running on the stumps of his shin bones.

‘We should find Aidan,’ Becky said at last.

‘Maybe he’ll be at Plessey’s. It’s worth a look. I can’t think where else he might be.’

It was rare to see women on the streets, unless they were part of some captured chain being led off to the Western Avenue. Rumours filtered through that they kept the women in Wembley Stadium, but nobody had ever travelled that way to check. There were some zones that were off-limits because of the sheer weight of numbers. Any reconnaissance party or rescue squad would be decimated before they reached Willesden. Jane remembered, though, around three or four years ago, a woman who came limping down the A40, naked, her skin torn like strips of errant wallpaper on a well-sized wall. She had been struck dumb by shock. It was in the silver colour of her hair and the owlish protrusion of her eyes, as if she’d seen something of a magnitude too great for her brain to process. Her mouth had been messed around with: there were strange scars pitted in the cheeks, chin and jawline. Most of her fingernails had been torn off; people wondered if that was torture, or something that had happened during her bid to escape. People tried to talk to her. Some of the Shaded wrapped her in blankets and gave her what food was available, and in such a state as to be easily digested. You didn’t want to be thinking of chewing your food when shock was threatening to put a brake on your heart. She ate some soup and was getting warmer by the minute, but she didn’t say a word. Not then, not for the next five days, after which she died in her sleep.

Jane looked around. He didn’t recognise these streets. No signs. No buses bearing destination boards. A row of skulls in rags leered at him from the melted plastic bench under a bus shelter like a comedy audience in between laughs, waiting for the next gag. The buildings had lost any detail that might have pointed to an era or an architect. Blunted, edgeless edifices. Polished office blocks of steel and glass were now riddled dark monoliths, floors bowing with rain.

They moved quickly, hesitantly, dashing to doorways in a bid to find some plaque that would tell them where they were, or a forgotten piece of post behind the door bearing an address. Jane hated the way they scurried around, like mice knowing there was a predator on the wing.

Behind one door was a lipless drop into a benighted chasm that Jane almost toppled over. Becky’s hand on his belt saved him a fall that might have lasted minutes. It was like staring in on his own nightmares.

Eventually they hit a series of junctions that pulled at Jane’s memory. He took a turning, then another, came back, stared and thought and went another way. With each step he felt knowledge return. It gave him the same sense of relief as an accident missed by inches.

‘This way,’ he said.

‘Where are we?’

‘Good news, I think,’ Jane said. ‘I thought we might be heading towards the Tower, and trouble. But we’re further north than that. I think Liverpool Street Station is up here. Which means we’re close.’

The shattered forecourt of the station announced itself moments later. They bypassed it on their left, mindful of the baleful stare of figures hunched into the glittering cave of an old coffee shop where coals burned cherry red and something indistinct turned on a makeshift spit. They crossed the road and turned right. A web of ginnels and alleys where small restaurants and wine bars had once enjoyed brisk business at the weekends when the old Spitalfields Market had traded were now host to slouching gangs drinking red biddy or wrestling in the icy mud on the cobblestones. There were others, still and emaciated, sitting on kerbs at the very end of life, blood leaking from their eyes or smeared across their faces as it seeped from noses and gums. They were paper, these people, all but ready to be blown entirely away by the tireless winds. You could see the grooves and notches on their bones through the skin. The recessions and tugs in throat and stomach at each drawn breath was so pronounced that it seemed they must implode. You could hear the suck of it over the muted roar of weather, like something being rescued from thin mud. Becky and Jane moved silently through them, eyes averted whenever possible, knowing that this was them in time.

‘Where do we find Plessey?’

‘He’s inside,’ Jane said, gesturing with his chin at the sacked remnants of the old market. Much of the façade was caved in; the ironwork frame remained, albeit malformed by fire, along with dozens of roasted trestles, warehouse trolleys, roll-cage containers and lampblack scaffolds. ‘Or he should be. I’ve only ever seen him here. Aidan likes his shop. Lots of stuff to look at.’

They moved through the wreckage like vacationers at the beach searching for rock pools. In a far corner of the great hall was a shop with its windows boarded over, reinforced with sandbags and razor wire. Faded gold lettering on a purple awning heralded HOUSE OF CLASS.

Jane threw a fallen bracket from the scaffolding at the board. There was a dull clang. They heard a voice call out. Jane said, ‘It’s me, Richard Jane. Have you seen Aidan?’

There was the sound of bolts shooting back, fully half a dozen before the door cracked open and a small crushed face looked out from a ring of shadow. Plessey ignored the two of them and ranged his gaze over the rest of the marketplace. ‘We weren’t followed,’ Jane assured him.

‘Inside,’ he said, and left them to forge a path through the obstacles.

Once they were in, Jane closed the door and rebolted it. It was sepia-dark in the shop. Buttery light was reflected back at them in soft-edged rectangles from burnished copper, foxed glass, mottled tin. A smell of naphthalene. Jane felt a known claustrophobia, the kind of stifling he had felt whenever he went to visit his grandparents as a child. Small rooms containing too many things, not least the people who lived there, barnacled fast to ancient, heavy rocking chairs, like pilots in a steampunk story, all antimacassars and brown tartan.

Plessey had moved ahead. He was busy with a teapot and a tin of leaves. The smallness of his face was explained by his ubiquitous peaked balaclava; Jane had never seen him without it. Perhaps it protected some injury caused by the Event. Perhaps he was just cold. They followed him along a narrow corridor, columns of things from the past crowding in from either side. Scratched dusty gramophone records of dull shellac. Mountains of old cracked lacquer boxes for fountain pens. Rusting tins that had once contained boiled sweets. A cigar box overflowing with tickets for trams, trains, dancehall events, coupons and vouchers for rations never obtained. Horn-rimmed spectacle frames. Sheepskin coats. Every smell was brown. It was tobacco and tannin, leather and corduroy, heavy, oppressive. Jane felt sweat rising through his skin. At any moment his grandmother would bring him a bowl of stodgy suet pudding and custard, Camp coffee made with condensed milk. Chocolate lipstick bleeding into crow’s feet. Dusty haloes shining in the floss of her hair. The metronomic beat on the mantelpiece of a clock presented on their wedding day and ageing alongside them. Oak and ormolu. The grind of the rocking chair. Slow, inescapable punishment.

‘Are you all right?’ Becky asked.

Jane nodded. ‘Just forgot how much I hate this shop,’ he said.

‘I haven’t seen Aidan for at least a week,’ Plessey said. His voice was as soporific as the things he collected around him; he sounded as if he were just getting rid of something rich in his mouth: fruit cake or port or blue cheese. Wet sibilants. Contentment.

‘Fielding is dead,’ Jane said. ‘Murdered.’

Plessey didn’t reply. He turned from the water he was boiling on a small gas ring and widened his eyes. Jane could imagine what he might have said, camp, theatrical: You don’t say.

‘We haven’t got anybody for it. It was something of a surprise.’

‘No telling how we might behave when we’re thrust into the bear pit, hey?’ Plessey said. ‘The centre cannot hold. Falcons and falconers. Mere anarchy and all that.’ He stirred powdered milk into china cups with a silver spoon. The cups rattled briefly in their saucers as he handed them over. ‘I apologise for the absence of a little something to go with this. Fresh out of brandy snaps and macaroons, I’m afraid. No sugar, either. And there probably won’t be any for a thousand years.’

‘Fielding,’ Jane went on, ‘just before he was killed, he was talking to me about a rumour. Something about a raft. A way out, or forward. Something.’

Plessey tapped his spoon three times on the edge of his cup, placed it in the saucer and took a sip. ‘Not half bad,’ he said.

‘I thought maybe you’d heard something.’

Plessey sipped again, then gazed at Jane as if trying to assess him for trust. Jane felt impatience riddling him. He liked Plessey, but there was always the sense of you being part of his audience. Mention of falcons had made Jane twitchy.

‘Come with me,’ Plessey said.

They put down their cups and saucers and followed him through the shop to a hatch in the floor with an iron ring bolted into it. Plessey lifted the hatch and looked into their faces again. Then he disappeared into shadows.

At the bottom of the shaft was a series of rough cases made out of pallets, wine crates and what looked like banister posts, all held together with pins, braces, staples or twine. There was more stock here for the house owner who liked the vintage look. Wooden grooming sets inlaid with nacre. Glass boxes containing silver earrings and pearl necklaces. A corner filled with old transistor radios and their component parts: valves, connectors, wires, knobs. It was to these that he took them now. A workbench was covered in coils of copper wire and small lengths of planed and sanded wood.

‘What’s this?’ Jane asked.

‘None of the valves work, of course. We’re still struggling with electricity. God knows what’s been going on in East Enders. But I’ve been making crystal radios for the last six months.’

‘Why?’

‘Something to do, for one thing. When you find yourself on your own it’s good to keep busy. But also in the hope of making connections.’

‘You mean you’ve been broadcasting?’

‘God, no, dear boy. I don’t have the face for radio. I’ve been searching, looking for signals.’

‘You made a radio that works?’ asked Becky. She wore an expression almost of disgust, as if he had admitted to messing about in a laboratory and creating a lethal plague.

‘After a fashion. It’s very simple. You wind a coil of insulated wire around a cylinder – in this case, a plastic bottle – and strip away a little of the enamel coating from the loops. Solder a diode to the bottom of the wire. Solder one of the wires from a telephone handset to the diode and the other to the wire at the top of the bottle. Then you clip a grip to the antenna, that long piece of wire there, and clip the other end to one of the bare pieces of wire that we exposed. Then you earth the radio and theoretically, depending on which part of the coil you touch with your alligator grips, you should pick up different signals.’

Jane scanned the workbench. ‘And did you? Pick up different signals?’

‘Well… one, at least.’

‘Show us.’

Plessey sat down on a rug-covered office chair and pulled open a drawer on a heavy desk next to the bench. From it he pulled a shoebox. Inside this was something that resembled an abandoned physics project from school.

‘How do you power it?’

‘That’s the beauty of a crystal radio. You don’t need to power it. That said, there’s a big chest with a duffel bag filled with thousands of dry-cell batteries. I spent the best part of a week going through it, sorting the possibles from the ones that have leaked and then testing them all. I found maybe half a dozen that work. But they won’t last for ever. I’ve been very sparing with my midnight vigils.’

There were no lights to indicate that the radio was on. No frequency display. Plessey handed Jane the receiver and he placed it to his head. He touched a clip to the exposed wire and the soft, crackling nonsense sounds of the cosmos played tinnily through the earpiece.

Jane’s breath caught in his throat. A nothing noise, the voice of the void, but it had been so long since he had heard anything like it that he might well have been listening to his mother saying hello across the years. It had beauty and an immensity, despite the lack of rich amplification. He handed the receiver to Becky.

‘I don’t hear anybody,’ Becky said, and thrust the receiver back at him. Jane felt a stab of irritation. The man had made a radio, a working radio, and she wanted the shipping forecast.

‘Patience, my dear,’ Plessey said, and the performer in him was at the fore again. He moved the rod to a point on the coil that had been marked with blue felt pen, and this time Jane heard a distinct difference. The white noise was reduced. There was a rhythmic sound, a weird, percussive sound that Jane couldn’t identify, until Plessey, at his shoulder, said, ‘That… I think that might be hammers.’

Now that he’d said it, Jane couldn’t understand how he could have heard anything but. After about ten minutes, they heard something else. It sounded like a chair being scraped across a wooden floor.

‘Here we go,’ Plessey said. ‘Bang on schedule.’

Jane had to sit down himself when he heard the voice. It was female. It sounded as though she was from Wales. There was a musical undercurrent to her words. He barely registered what she was saying, he was so tied up in the moment of hearing a voice that wasn’t in the immediate vicinity. But she repeated it:

This is Radio Free UK calling all survivors. If you are out there and you can hear this – I know it’s a long shot, but what can you do? – then please do not give in. There is a way out of this. There is safety. You will find us off the south-east coast. Coordinates as follows: 50°, 54′, 37″N, 0°, 58′, 55″E. The raft exists. There is an escape. We are anchored off Dungeness, Kent. We launch in a week. We can take a hundred people. The raft exists.

The sound of footsteps moving off. The sound of the wind across an open doorway.

‘They repeat the message every quarter of an hour,’ Plessey said, switching off the radio. The disappearance of the sound was a wrench for Jane; he jerked towards the unit as if he was about to try to switch it back on. Plessey didn’t notice. ‘Sometimes it’s the girl you’ve just heard. Other times there’s an older woman, sounds like a newsreader – received pronunciation, you know. And there’s also a chap, sounds as though he’s from the West Country. They’ve never said, but I get the impression they’ve already got a fair-sized group down there.’

‘Why?’ asked Jane. He was thinking of Stanley, left behind in the city of butchers while everyone escaped.

‘A raft,’ Plessey said. ‘For one hundred? Hardly the work of a carpenter and his gofer, no?’

‘It’s a trap,’ Becky said. ‘These people are being forced to lure survivors down there. They’ll be waiting for us. With the fucking salt and pepper.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Plessey said. ‘They’re doing well enough in the city, slowly picking us off. How many of us are left, do you think?’

‘It’s hard to say.’ Jane shrugged. ‘Latest estimates put us at around three to four thousand, give or take. The main survival hot spots are at Angel, Victoria and London Zoo.’

‘They’re running out of food and they know it,’ Becky said, her voice becoming edged with panic and indignation. ‘They’re chasing us to the corners of the country.’

Plessey shook his head. ‘Not the case. There’s a stiff cordon of Skinners all across the southern city limits, ditto north too, building across the North Circular. They’re tightening the noose, preventing escapes. There’s no evidence to suggest they’re moving out, hunting survivors in other parts of the country. Remember, they don’t need to. Wherever we are, they are.’

‘We have to make a break for it. As many as possible,’ Jane said. ‘If they can make one raft, they can build more, or come back for the stragglers.’

Becky was rubbing her hands together hard enough for their rasping to cut through his words. He had noticed this always happening whenever plans were discussed, change considered. She was frightened of any challenge to the status quo, and frightened of the status quo too. She recognised this paradox within herself, but it didn’t make it any easier to deal with.

‘What about Aidan?’ she said. ‘I know he likes to do his own thing, but he’s been away longer than usual. I worry he’s been… I think he might…’

Plessey shut away the radio in the desk drawer and lightly clapped his hands together.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘would you care to stay here tonight? I insist, really. It’s far too late for you to get back to the centre, and anyway, why would you want to? I have some mushroom soup, a large tin I’d like to break into, but much more than I can eat by myself and I wouldn’t want it to go to waste.’

Jane woke in the night and he was crying silently. Candles burned in their makeshift bedroom, a small kitchen in which the erstwhile staff could have taken their breaks and eaten lunch. He could hear Becky breathing next to him; she held a swatch of blanket tight in one fist. Plessey’s snores carried from the heart of the shop; he seemed to complement the creased, tired things that surrounded him. Jane could imagine him always being here, gradually melding with the furnishings and knick-knacks to the point where he would be camouflaged by them.

He had dreamed of sitting in Plessey’s office chair, the crystal radio assembled before him, switched on. It had hummed with potential; even the valves unconnected to the body, strewn across the workbench, had glowed with some arcane intent. He touched the rod to the tightly coiled copper wire and at every contact there exploded from the amplifier a terrible screech, the unselfconscious cry of a child in danger, scared and hurt, a boy with death only seconds away from him.

‘Stanley,’ Jane called, even though there was no transmitter. ‘Stan, it’s me. It’s Dad. Tell me where you are and I’ll come for you. Tell me where you are. Please.’

Stanley kept screaming. The sound of something familiar in the background, a weird, metallic, percussive beat. Each time Stanley paused for choking breath Jane heard it, a spastic, robotic infill. He realised with a euphoric pang that he was with the others at the beach, waiting to board the raft. In two days he could be reunited with his boy. He was dressing hurriedly, trying to pack his bag in poor light, wishing Stanley would stop screaming, calm down, say something, when the nature of the screams changed. If anything, they grew even more frantic. The hammering had stopped, or rather it had lost its metallic beat. Now it had increased its tempo but it was landing on something far less resistant that metal or wood. Jane stopped rushing around and dropped to his knees. He covered his ears but Stanley was behind them and even by the time he had begun to realise it was a dream it wouldn’t release him.

He woke up much later. Plessey was gluing pieces of wood together, a box to protect his precious radio. Becky was helping with another batch of batteries, throwing the ones encrusted with salt into a metal waste-paper basket. She was doing it with enough force to suggest she wasn’t fully engrossed in the task.

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘did I wake you? How thoughtless of me.’

‘I was awake anyway,’ Jane said, levering himself upright. ‘You forget that most of my working life I slept through worse noises than that. Once, a friend of mine called Carver was beating sheet metal for two hours not six feet away from my sleeping head. I didn’t even change position.’

His voice faltered at the utterance of the word ‘beating’ and both Becky and Plessey caught it, shooting him a look. But nobody asked any more; everybody had nightmares. Everyone had something that stuck in their craw.

‘The others, they’ll want a demonstration,’ Jane said, ‘before we can even think about planning an exodus.’ He stood up and began to get dressed.

‘I’ll nip over to HQ later today,’ he said, and Jane thought, Yeah, right. Nip on up to Heathrow. It’ll take you the best part of a day.

To Becky, Jane said, ‘We should try some of Aidan’s haunts. See if we can find out why he’s not turned up for so long.’

Becky went back to her batteries. ‘If Aidan likes it so much here then I’d rather be around when he turns up. I think I’ll stay here for a while, if that’s OK with Daniel.’

That Plessey didn’t look at her when she said this told Jane it was already a done deal.

‘Of course, my dear,’ said Plessey.

Becky nodded. ‘I’ve decided.’

‘All right,’ Jane said. ‘And if I find Aidan I’ll bring him over here, yes?’

‘He’s not my son, Richard,’ she snapped, and flung a battery more forcibly into the bin. ‘I’d prefer it if you stopped trying to compensate for… for…’ She broke off. Her shoulders hunched; she put her head in her hands and began gently to shake.

Jane left her like that, unable to cope with her sudden change of mood. Plessey caught up with him just as he cleared the buffer of razor wire. Something had been in the market the previous night. Clothes and bones and almost an entire human skin were spread across the hall. The signs of a scuffle were drying into the poured-concrete floor, along with human blood, Skinner blood, Jane wasn’t sure. It was black, there was a lot of it. A familiar sight, a familiar smell.

‘She’s a little raw, Richard,’ Plessey said, taking in the devastation. Out of his cosy bolt-hole and with his balaclava off for the first time since Jane had known him he looked too pale, waxy. His hair was a beige scrim grafted onto a sweating pate. ‘Aidan… it’s not that she doesn’t care. You can see that she does. But—’

‘But she fears the worst.’

‘I think so. I think that’s the case, yes.’

‘Plessey, I’ve been fearing the worst for the past ten years. But it’s the not knowing that’s the killer.’

‘I’ll pass that on,’ he said. ‘That will help, I’m sure. She’ll come round, eventually. She’s strong. People like her don’t give up easily.’

Jane looked away, in the direction of Commercial Street. He thought there was trust, some love, even, between himself and Becky, but her dismissal of him, her preference for Plessey’s nostalgic comforts indicated that there was no space for sentiment now. You took what comfort you could from people and you moved on. He supposed it was a kind of evolution. He would learn from it.

‘What about you?’ Plessey asked him. ‘Where are you going?’

‘I’ll see if I can find Aidan at my Library.’

‘You’re carrying on with that pointless job? When we’ve got this cause for hope gifted us?’

‘We have to make the effort,’ Jane said, not believing it for a second. ‘It’s the decent thing to do. Some of us want to carry on. Some of us want to keep busy.’

He didn’t mean it as a slight but he didn’t doubt that was how Plessey would take it. ‘Let me know what the Shaded think of the broadcasts,’ Jane added. He started for the road, then thought of something. ‘Plessey, one thing. The Skinners. Could they intercept those signals? Understand them?’ As soon as the question was out he thought it witless. Of course they couldn’t understand; they didn’t speak, they moved as though they had the brains of dinosaurs. They were driven only by hunger. But something in Plessey’s expression spoke of his not having even considered this possibility. Now he seemed to, and he began to shake his head, but the gesture was without conviction. They stared at each other, Plessey halted by the razor wire, his skin sickly white against the dark tweed of his jacket, a vampire in hawthorn.

19. FOETAL ECHO

The Library was wherever you wanted it to be. Jane liked to take his journals with him to Trafalgar Square. If the rain had paused he might climb to the top of the ENO building and sit under the dead neon letters of its tower, looking south past the amorphous, dissolving statue of Nelson on his column towards the great roads of Whitehall and The Mall. You could write anything as long as it was connected with the Event. Your experiences, fears, hopes. You were encouraged to write about what you knew of the Skinners, and the way they made you feel: reportage as therapy. You could write about how they killed, if you were up to it, or more prosaically, what your work had consisted of since you last were the Librarian. But you only had one day on the job. Someone had decreed, some psychologist manqué, that it was too damaging to dwell for any longer on the agonies of how you got here and what might yet come. There was a greater likelihood of burn-out this way, it was argued, than there was in cleansing the city of its corpses.

The words were designed to be a gift to whoever came after. A warning and a set of guidelines. How to survive. Parallel to Jane’s Event work (he usually wrote diary entries expanded from brief notes he made at the end of each day), he continued with his letter to Stanley. He guessed it must be around five thousand pages long now. All of these he kept in a series of fireproof suitcases in the boardroom of a boutique hotel in Covent Garden, fully intending to pass them on to his son one day.

Aidan liked it up here too. But he was not on the rooftop today. Jane looked out across the ceiling of London but could spot no other figure. The possibility that Aidan had been taken was strong, but he doubted it, somehow. Aidan had grown to be a tough, resourceful young man, despite his sickliness. He knew places to hide that Jane would ordinarily have walked right by. He could melt away like shadows on a cloudy day.

The skies around London had lost definition. Where once there had been a strange miasmal fog as black as sea-coal and thick mammatus hanging from the base of vast storm clouds, and the teasing of crepuscular rays suggesting that the sun still hung beyond and had not forsaken the planet, there was now a featureless blanket. The cloud was not leaving, merely retreating into the heights, as if aghast at the behaviour of what lay beneath it. It was becoming dangerous now to travel across the city’s ceiling. The persistent hungry rain had eaten away the waterproof outer layers and was tucking into less resistant parts of the rooftops. Already some older, less well-tended buildings had collapsed. Some of the warehouses on the banks of the Thames that had missed out on renovation were now little more than scruffy lines of brick dust on the wharves and dockyards nestling against the river. Fires were still breaking out in some buildings as gas pipes corroded and released pockets of fuel. Jane had been close enough to an explosion in a pizza restaurant in Waterloo East some years previously to have felt the ends of his beard crisp.

The grand plaza of Trafalgar Square was awash with dirty water, like a shallow lido that had been neglected by cleaning staff. The great bronze lions at the foot of Nelson’s eroding granite column had developed a patina of verdigris and sat hunched like moss topiary. Screams flew out of the city, confused by distance, dopplering towards or away from him like weird sirens, calls for help that were rarely answered. Although there were jobs to be done, there weren’t enough live bodies to cope with emergencies. You could hardly term it an acceptable level of collateral, but there were no feasible alternatives. There were no rapid response units, no electric-blue lights or souped-up engines. Nobody warned you about the dangers; everyone knew the score. The people screaming were either slowed down by injury, or the weight of the things they were carrying, or, Jane wrote: because they want to be caught.

He looked at the things that he took with him everywhere. Once it had been a wallet, a shoulder bag for his bottle of water, newspapers and novel. Now money meant nothing and he himself was the news. Reading novels seemed offensive, somehow, in these times; an insult to the people who had been killed. Books had once seen him through many a grim hour flushing his system of nitrogen on the Ceto, so long ago that to think of diving was to somehow question his own sanity. Hundreds of feet deep, wearing only a thin rubber skin and a helmet? It was work from nightmares. It was behaviour from one of the science fiction novels he’d read.

The mantra he had once uttered, getting ready in the morning, had been keys, money, bus pass. Now it was rifle, mask, goggles. The rifle, its walnut stock having changed its shape minutely over the years where he’d held it so that it might fit his own hand better, was an old friend; he felt as naked without it over his shoulder as he would if he’d forgotten to put on his boots. Filters for the bicycle mask. Sunblock. His bible. The new essentials. Not heavy now, but maybe they would be one day when age was piling into him, or a muscle strain had halved his walking speed.

I no longer know what day it is, Stanley, or what time of day. I know when it’s time to wake up and when it’s time to go to sleep. It’s kind of nice. I remember everything being geared to the clock and the watch when I was younger. Everything was an appointment. Getting you up and to nursery on time, if I was off duty. Picking you up in the afternoon. Tea by five, bath by six, bed by seven. Do you remember the game we played once, Stan? Last man on Earth, I called it. But you said you wanted to call it One. You said it was more serious to do that. More grown-up. You were really into your numbers. What’s a hundred add a hundred add one, you’d ask me. And I’d pretend to struggle, and you’d tell me the answer.

And I asked you, what would you do if you were the last person on Earth, the One, and you said you’d get into a rocket and fly off to another place to live. And I asked you, what if there were no rockets, and you got upset and started crying and it took me a long time to get you to calm down and your mum gave me a hard time for it, but I cuddled you and you stopped, you fell asleep in my arms and I held you for ages. I was going to put you to bed, we were on the stairs, and you woke up and smiled at me and gave me a kiss, and you said to me, Stan, you said to me that it would never be One, because we were together all the time. You said we’d been meant to be together all the years I’d been me without ever knowing you. And it’s true. Ever since you came into my life I can’t remember before it. Which sounds silly. I mean, I know I lived for thirty-odd years before we had you, but they seem so pale and pointless. I came into being at the same time you did, my gorgeous boy, my Stan. And you are always with me. You kept me alive for so long. You keep me going.

So we’re here and it’s now, maybe ten years since I last saw you, you a big boy now, already at the end of school and thinking about sixth form, maybe, and we’re playing One for real. Well, it’s not properly One, because there are some of us left. You too, I’m hoping. You and Mum, I’m praying every day that’s the case. Things are dangerous, Stan.

And sometimes I hope you went fast. Right at the start of things. With no danger of ever being alone and afraid, your innocence being torn to meaninglessness. I hope you did not suffer.

Jane’s pen hovered above the journal; he was unable to form into words what he doubted his son would ever understand anyway. Instead, he returned to his survey of this corner of the city. For maybe the thousandth time he counted the cars and buses that were ranged around Trafalgar Square. Forty-eight cars, including taxis; nine vans of varying size; one coach (what a day trip that turned out to be); twelve buses. Seven motorbikes. He remembered photographs he had seen of various parts of London, miraculously free of traffic. Dogs and horses and carts. One or two automobiles driven by people who had nowhere to go and few roads on which to take their shiny toys. Sheaves of mud and dung peeled to one side by thin wheels. Now, unless you were walking at night and alert to possible hiding places, you could easily miss the vehicles that cluttered the streets. Even if somebody could be bothered to shift them, their ghosts would remain in the parts of the road shielded by metal and cellulose like the outlines of bodies at the scene of a crime.

There were twelve buses ranged around Trafalgar Square. One of them was on its side. Four of them were black where fire had turned them to shells. A Brixton bus for ever veering left to travel down Whitehall had been turned into an armoured safe house. Steel braces had been bolted onto the sides of the bus and dug deep into the earth under the tarmac, to prevent anything from pushing it over. Steel shutters protected the empty frames of the windows. During the daylight hours, when few Skinners were seen, the people who lived in this tank would come out to fortify the braces where they had begun to be excavated, and reposition the thickets of barbed wire that had been pulled away in the night. Jane envied them their stoicism, but could not have done the same thing. All those weeks of walking down to London had instilled in him a fear of standing still, even for a short time. Although he liked this spot, he grew itchy after just quarter of an hour, and had to quell the instinct to get back on the road. This was orange. This was safe. For now.

Cold was creeping through the blanket and the fleece of his coat into his legs. Jane stopped writing and stood up, wishing for a flask of something hot. He did some exercises, unhappy with how quickly he grew tired and breathless. He made himself cough into his fist and inspected his sputum. Each time he did this he was braced for flecks of blood but they never came. His breath smelled rotten, though, and he knew this was due to some failure in his teeth, the decay he had felt working its way through his mouth for years. As for the rest of him, sometimes when he moved he caught a whiff of how ripe his flesh was, but that was true of everybody. Washing was a luxury. Sometimes he took cold showers if he could find a working spigot and a compliant pump. Mostly he went without. His hair hung in damp ropes. He’d tried to cut it once, but there was no point. You felt you could never get dry. Dirt was ingrained in the contours of your fingers, these fingers that had once touched the pulse in the wrist of a sleeping child. Your hands became maps of all the places you’d been, digging through the filth to get to something or get away from it. You lost sight of who you were and where you came from. You failed to recognise things and they began to matter less.

He tended to keep many of his clothes on these days; he had enough to worry about without the shock of his own emaciation. Resources among the Shaded were growing scarce; soon they would not be able to offer any kind of reward for this work. He foresaw a future of blank pages. Hunger eventually blotted out all other thought. You couldn’t write if you were going blind with the need for sustenance.

Jane knew he was following a dark path with all this negativity. He could see where it was leading him. It was a case of how far he was likely to travel. How much distance was there between forgoing basic hygiene and swallowing the pill of Stanley’s death?

He spent three hours on the rooftop of the ENO building – hoping that Aidan might stop by this way – before the rain came back and he spotted the tiger, drifting like smoke out of Northumberland Avenue. He saw it pad across to Canada House, where it sat and washed its paws, gazing at its frozen brethren. Jane clenched his teeth and felt the gums in his jaw shift like a thumb pressed into sponge. He delved for positive images, the bright, shiny packages wrapped up with string that he turned to when it seemed he must go under. He wanted to believe that he always felt like this during Library duty; not because of the bad memories that it necessarily forced you to dredge up, but because it always presaged the worst job he had ever had. Plodding through frigid, alien fathoms in utter darkness in order to weld closed any number of fatigue cracks was a doddle compared to incineration duty.

But nothing he could fasten on, bar Stanley, ever repelled the misery. Peacock feathers found under a slurry of ash and black slush in Holland Park. A tray of glittering butterflies rescued intact from the looted squalor of the Natural History Museum. A can of Guinness discovered inside one thigh-high PVC boot in a BDSM dungeon in Kentish Town. It was all just a different kind of dust. It was as if, resorting to his son – every day, every hour, every other minute – was diminishing him. He was using Stanley up, like a pencil. There was nothing but a stub left, it seemed. He dreamed sometimes of his boy and he appeared so tired, so exhausted by his father’s demands that every rise of his ribcage had to be his last.

He watched the tiger slowly, almost lazily, pull itself on to all fours once more. He saw the great head swing his way, making hesitant curlicues as it sniffed the air, the jaws hanging open to aid its sense of smell. The wind was blowing up from the Thames today; his scent was being pushed in a different direction. Still, it terrified Jane to see the muscled hulk of three hundred pounds of big cat – or whatever filled the space it had once owned – working hard to draw Jane’s taste into its flavour chambers, pausing as if unsure of what the weather was telling it.

The tiger slunk away, the frayed rope of its tail trailing behind it.

Jane exhaled slowly and rubbed his face with his hands. The smell of ink and soil and dust. He pressed the heels of his hands into his closed eyes for so long that he saw motes of colour spawn from the black. It reminded him of the weird light show he had seen all those years ago, standing at the bottom of the sea.

Jane opened his eyes. He blinked, but everything was blurred. Eventually, the soft edges regained their shape, except for one. Stopper sat next to him. Jane stared at his old friend, leaning forward over his forearms, which had withered to useless air-dried limbs, like Parma hams carved back to bone. Severed tendons had caused his hands to contract into famished fists. Stopper’s face had been sucked clean by marine life. There was little left to distinguish him. The perished yellow Henrikson Subsea logo clung to the tatters of his jacket; it could be nobody else. He smiled, or grimaced, and black water drizzled from between his teeth. Something churned in the wet black reaches of his left eye socket, something with cilia. Something that made hard little skritting noises as it scraped parts of itself against Stopper’s orbit.

‘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 difficult 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?’

‘No,’ Jane said. ‘It would be kind of nice if they did, compared to their usual MO.’

‘So maybe the same person who caught up with Fielding, you think?’

‘Or someone in league.’ Jane peered into Aidan’s eyes. They were dark brown, so dark it was hard to discern their pupils. The rest of his face was open, fresh. He’d have had an innocent look about him if it weren’t for those eyes and the soft frown above them. He’d seen a lot, Jane supposed. More than he ought. ‘Where have you been, Aidan? You’re your own man, I know, but we care about you. We’re not your mum and dad, but we’re your friends. It doesn’t stop us from worrying.’

Aidan pressed his lips into a flat line. When he spoke again, it was with forced brittleness. Jane saw behind it immediately; he knew him too well by now. His hand at his belly again. Hungry, probably. Jane wished he hadn’t snaffled that wafer.

‘Just… hanging out with friends. Experiments, you know. Down at the river. Checking the air quality. Someone has to.’

‘And how is the air quality?’

‘Epic fail,’ Aidan said. ‘Major no.’

‘Doesn’t look like the HQ’s moving in, does it?’

‘No.’

Jane scratched at his beard. The sound seemed enormous. ‘Fielding gave me the envelope…’

‘An envelope.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Fielding gave you an envelope. It wasn’t the envelope.’

‘You mean I was given false information?’

Aidan didn’t say anything. He couldn’t meet Jane’s gaze.

‘Why are you here, Aidan? You get the same dodgy map?’

‘Something like that,’ he said.

‘Something like that.’

The hand on the belly. A prickle of sweat drawing attention to the frown.

‘You OK, Aid?’ His mind went back to the first time they’d met. Becky’s concern. The thought of his blood conspiring against him.

‘Yeah. Just tired. Just hungry. You promised me a roast dinner once.’

‘Shit. You didn’t forget that, did you?’

‘Can I have it now?’

They had picked through the debris of countless restaurants and bars to no avail. Everything worth eating had been carried off. What remained were the bones of people who had decayed where they’d dropped many years before. No chocolates or fudge in the duty-free boutiques. No snack packs dangled in the vending machines.

‘What about out there?’ Aidan asked.

‘There’s nothing out there,’ Jane said. ‘You mean the houses beyond the perimeter?’

‘No. I mean the planes.’

They found a self-propelled passenger stairway in a maintenance hangar and trundled it out to a Virgin Atlantic 747 that had pushed back from its ramp at the moment the Event hit it, peeling off much of its paint and tearing the tail section clean off the rear of the aircraft. The flap canoe fairings had been snapped away from the underside of the wings like model parts, and the main jet-core shrouds were torn, revealing the intestinal squirm of the machine beneath. A telegraph pole had become a javelin, thrown by 200 mph winds from outside the perimeter fence, puncturing the fuselage above the sagging portside wing. Both wings had given up their yield of fuel; maybe 120 tons had poured out of the cracked tanks and evaporated, leaving a dark stain that reached out almost as far as the main runway. It was a wonder there had not been an explosion. The roof of the cockpit had been crunched in, a hard-boiled egg beneath a spoon, by something that was no longer in evidence. Jane thought he could see a white shirtsleeve, an arm thrown back on the flight deck, above a face that was nothing but shadow.

‘Maybe we should try a different plane,’ Jane said. ‘I mean, this one was just setting off. There’ll be a lot of bodies on it.’

‘Then there’ll be a lot of food too. They wouldn’t have started serving until they got into the sky, would they?’

Aidan was right. A smaller plane taxiing towards the terminal would have had an empty galley. What was the point of protecting him from bodies when they were everywhere you looked? Jane sighed. Just to give him a break, he supposed. It would be nice not to have all that grinning in your face all day, every day.

The doors were sealed; the holes pitting the skin of the jet too small to climb through. They pushed the stairs around to the back of the plane. There was a ragged hole where the empennage had been.

‘Big enough for you?’ Jane asked. Aidan nodded.

Jane raised the stairs to the hole; they rattled in the spanks of wind gusting in from across the wide, open airfield.

‘See if you can open that rear exit for me once you’re in,’ Jane said. ‘Don’t fanny about.’

Aidan skipped up the stairs and hoisted himself into the Jumbo. A few moments later his face appeared at one of the windows. He gave Jane a thumbs-up. He ducked clear of the window and a few seconds later the door folded outwards. Jane withdrew the stairs and repositioned them at the doorway. Inside he drew the door to, not closing it completely. A sudden snapshot in his head: Rae and Carver exploding through the crack in a door. He couldn’t get on with doors any more. Closed, open, they would never stay still in his thoughts.

‘All right?’ Aidan asked.

‘Yes,’ Jane said, a little too stiffly, and looked beyond Aidan’s shoulder to the ranks of dead sitting strapped into their seats. They had died primly, hands clasped in front of them, watching a stewardess at the front of this section of the cabin who had collapsed in the middle of performing her safety procedures. There were children with colouring books and iPods and hand-held game consoles. Everyone was thin in their clothes, dwindled into seats. Oxygen masks hung from the cabin ceiling, octopoid creatures reaching for prey. Punkah louvres in the overhead units had melted and hardened before they could drip to the floor. They resembled waxy stalactites. One of the bulkheads had been split by the telegraph pole that now blocked the portside aisle leading to the front of the plane; part of the vacuum-moulded wall panel had sheared free; insulation was a frozen cloud seeping from behind it. Rainwater had poured in through the fissure, warping fixtures, swelling the bodies it touched.

Jane said, ‘Let’s check the galleys.’

They ransacked the six galleys and found meal-tray trolleys loaded with spoiled food that had rotted away to a crisp film on the plates, like dried algae, over the years. But there were plenty of packets of nuts that, although past their use-by date, seemed fine. The two of them sat on the cabin floor gobbling snacks so quickly that there wasn’t much tasting going on. Minutes later, the floor strewn with empty wrappers, they were too full to speak. Jane picked crumbs from his sweatshirt and fed them to himself. Aidan pressed his hand to his belly and slowly lost his expression of satisfaction as it became one of harrowed concern.

‘We should have taken it easy, shouldn’t we?’ Jane asked, patting his own stomach. ‘We’ll probably cramp up something chronic.’

Aidan nodded. ‘We should get some stuff for Becky,’ he said. His voice wavered for a second, as if he was going to start crying. Nothing strange about that, thought Jane. A young lad who finds something tasty for the first time in many months, maybe a year or two. Even I’m filling up. And all the while, beneath that, Something is wrong, something is very wrong.

He followed Aidan to the next galley, stepping over withered limbs sticking out into the aisle; his feet turning tacky in whatever had washed and set upon the floor. They unloaded the bagged snacks from the trolleys and stashed them in Jane’s backpack. They found miniatures of gin, rum, vodka and whisky; tins of mixer. There was Coca-Cola and 7-Up and Carlsberg lager.

‘Let’s get sloshed,’ Jane said, and mixed himself a gin and tonic. ‘No ice, no lemon. Hardly a civilised drink.’ But it sluiced through the desert of his mouth like a monsoon. ‘Bubbles,’ he sneezed. ‘Jesus, that’s good.’

Aidan refused the alcohol, sipped instead at a can of lemonade. Jane felt bright, alert, refreshed, but Aidan did not look as though he was returning from his enervated state. His eyes retained their dull lustre; they resembled glass eyes. They almost fooled you, but they lacked that essential something.

‘Are you OK?’ Jane asked, hating the wheedling in his voice; he’d asked the question already a dozen times since they’d met.

‘I’m fine,’ Aidan said.

‘Becky was worried about you,’ Jane said. ‘She misses you when you’re not around.’

Now the gloss came to his eyes. He was crying and trying to hide it, his small chest barely able to keep from jerking. Jane was conscious of the small boy still within Aidan, and when he dropped his head he could almost believe that this was how Stanley might look. It was gloomy in the passenger cabin. He might be standing here with his own son; his boy needed him.

Jane put out a hand, whispered, the words barely denting the air as they slipped from his lips: Stan.

‘Don’t you!’ Aidan screamed, whipping his head up and fixing Jane with a hot stare. He shook his head, nodded, shook his head again. A knowing smile deepened the shadows in his face.

‘I’m sorry,’ Jane said. ‘I meant nothing by it.’

‘Ever since I saw you. That first day in the hospital. You’ve been looking at me like you love me and you hate me at the same time.’

‘That’s not—’

‘It is true. You want me to be Stanley. And you hate me for not being him. You hate me for surviving and you wish he had lived and I was dead.’

Jane reached for him again, but Aidan flinched, stepped back. His foot landed on a shin which crumbled like chalk. ‘Stanley’s alive, Aidan,’ he said.

‘See?’ Aidan yelled, gesturing wildly, as if he were beseeching the passengers around him. ‘See? You can’t leave him alone. When it’s the two of us alone in a room? It’s actually three.’

‘You can’t condemn me for that, Aidan. It’s not my fault. You—’

‘HE’S DEAD! HE’S FUCKING DEAD!’

Jane only realised he had hit the boy when he felt the raw sting in the knuckles of his right hand. Aidan was on the floor, one hand covering his mouth, the other scrabbling against an armrest as he tried to pull himself upright.

Jane held up his hands. ‘Aidan. God, I’m sorry. I’m… I was bang out of line. I should not have done that.’

The spark was gone from Aidan. The matte eyes blinked at Jane. He wiped blood from the corner of his lip, regarded it for a long time with some fascination, as if he were looking at a rare jewel. He stared back at Jane and his voice was no longer edged. ‘He is dead.’

21. SOMA

They spent the next few hours at separate ends of the aircraft. Aidan would not leave, despite Jane’s pleas. It was getting dark. Figures were moving around the edges of the airstrip, stopping, and turning their way. Even if they could not see Jane and Aidan maybe they were nonetheless baffled by the new scents. It was early enough, and there were sufficiently few Skinners around, for Jane and the adolescent boy to make a getaway, but they had to go now.

‘Why did you bring me out here, Aidan?’

Aidan wouldn’t answer.

The dark came on, creeping through the fuselage like black ink drawn into the reservoir of a fountain pen. The emptied windows provided soft charcoal shapes against the jetblack. Jane heard the shuffle of feet on the runway apron. After a while he could hear the phlegmy breath of them beneath the aircraft. Something barged against the stairs, causing them to rattle massively. Jane remembered he had left the door open. He ran to it now and shut it, locked it. Hissing and howling from outside; they knew there was something to be had in here.

Jane glanced at the ragged hole in the tail. If they moved the stairs and came up there they would not fit through, but they would shred the thing wider within minutes. He had to hope that their being unable to see the hole was enough. You couldn’t smell what wasn’t there, surely. But then they did move the stairs. Jane heard them being wheeled away from the door. He cast around for a weapon, expecting them to attack, but they were returning the stairs to the main building.

‘Just great,’ he murmured. ‘Three storeys up now, Aidan. What are we going to do? Jump down in the morning? We going to carry each other back to the centre with broken legs?’

Aidan wasn’t saying anything. Jane looked down the aisle at him; he could just make out his shape, limned by the palest ambient light, sitting in the dark like a Buddha. His head was down over his chest, his hands resting on his crossed legs. He might have been asleep, but Jane didn’t think so.

He wanted to say something, but there seemed to be no way back from what had happened. Aidan was right. All this time he had looked at Aidan and seen his own son. He wondered if he shouldn’t be excused for that. But then he realised that Aidan had lost everyone too: his father, his mother, his sister; a worse scenario than Jane’s in many ways, but he had been too wrapped up in the epic scenes of his own mind – the eventual reunion with Stanley chief among them – to show even a rudimentary empathy. Becky had been the gauze on his wounds, the kiss goodnight, the arms to fall into during the worst of the nightmares. Jane had either been turned in on his own reveries or trying to measure Aidan for a body cast that would never fit, and should never have been tried on in the first place.

He looked out at the night. Tow tractors crouched low at the edge of the airfield, as if trying to dodge out of view. Shreds of a windsock rippled violently against the sky like an escaped, frantic thought.

‘Why did you bring me here, Aidan?’

He thought of Becky at Plessey’s shop, sorting through batteries or touching an alligator clip to the crystal radio, listening to voices hundreds of miles away offering hope or some bastardised version of it. He thought of a raft so great that you could build villages on it. He thought of fetching up on Normandy beaches lined with a welcoming party of skeletons in their millions, or Skinners sharpening blades on strops made from the hides of children.

He dismissed the image and turned away from the window, disgusted with himself. The grim thought had never been far from his mind, even during the days of normality. Evenings sitting on the balcony with his wife, sharing a bottle of wine, listening to Johnny Mercer or Bobby Darin, the bricks, the roads, the sky touched by that soft pink stain of summer, he’d envisage, suddenly, Stanley falling from the heavens to impale himself on railings. He’d imagine a gas pipe shearing and igniting, hosing his son in the face with thousands of degrees centigrade. The balcony crumbling, sending him to unforgiving concrete twenty yards below. The worry could never be confined, it was never something over which he held sway. It was always a wild uncontainable panic that had so many strands to it that he could not keep track. It was like trying to put an eel in a jam jar with greased hands.

Another thought cut across all this, unbidden, unconnected: What if Becky is dead?

It was no effort, really, to imagine her being peeled while something drooled above her, staring into her with black sockets, its teeth manifold, curved, like the spines you might find within an exotic carnivorous plant if you pushed it inside out. Beyond those rows of canines, something like the grinding bits at the business end of tunnelling machinery. He had heard that bizarre mouth working on occasion, mincing the life out of whatever it came into contact with.

Jane did not realise he was dreaming by now. The shadow line between real life and unconsciousness seemed to be growing softer by the day, a charcoal border smudged by a thumb almost to invisibility. He was aware of the bodies sitting all around him in their cramped rows. A Japanese woman in the next seat turned her head on the grinding apex of her barebone neck and leered at him. Her jacket yawned as she leaned nearer; he saw mould spots on the cup of her bra, the grey, sagging puffball within it. Flakes of her snowed on him as she struggled to speak.

Much more leg room now, don’t you think? It’s the ultimate diet.

Jane started awake. He was holding the famished claw of the woman next to him. He bolted out of the seat, disorientated. He had thought of his flare-up with Aidan, and was now convinced that when Aidan had screamed he’s dead he had meant himself, not Stanley.

‘Aidan?’ he called out. But there was silence. ‘Aid?’

For a second he thought the boy had left him, monkeying out of the aircraft and down to the tarmac, abandoning him here. But then he saw him where he had been all along, tipped forward, hands curled into his lap. The ghost of Stopper seemed to shimmer at his shoulder, a suggestion that this was the classic position of the vein-opener, and he rushed to Aidan, convinced he had killed himself. But the truth was far worse.

Jane stopped six feet short of the boy. Already he could see that Aidan, or what had once been Aidan, was near death if not dead already. The dull sound of gristle popping, like someone jointing a chicken, was a queasy explosion in the base of Jane’s head. He put his hands to his ears, but it was as persistent as a bad tune heard on the radio.

He could do nothing to save Aidan. By the youngster’s side he saw perhaps two dozen duotone capsules: protein-pump inhibitors that Aidan had saved but not ingested over the past three weeks or so. He was allowing himself to be hollowed out. He saw the physicality of what was invading him move through his bones, dissolving him, absorbing him, filling his shell. Aidan’s slender muscles bulged and deflated. His eyes, filling with red, sank into his face as his head tilted back.

‘Why?’ Jane asked it. Aidan’s shoulders jerked back, a violent shrug. His lips grimaced and pursed; blood pulsed from between them. The ring of his teeth was ejected; his jaw and soft palate slithered down the slick on the front of his jumper. Jane moaned, covered his mouth. Aidan’s hair jumped and danced as if it were teeming with lice. His hand turned from a fist to a star: a Stanley knife popped clear of it. Jane snatched it up. The blade was black with dried blood, the edge uneven where it had blunted itself against bone. A rag of cleanly shaven flesh had jammed in the slot where the blade could be retracted. Jane could almost smell Fielding’s cologne upon it.

He threw the tool away. He had maybe fifteen minutes before the Skinner emerged; already there were strains appearing in the thinned cyanotic flesh of the boy. He would begin to tear soon. Perhaps Aidan had come out here having duped Jane into making the trip. Perhaps he had intended to apologise. But it was too late; he had been doomed long before this moment, probably at the time he stopped taking the drugs. Possibly earlier, in the second they clapped eyes on each other in a Newcastle hospital.

Jane went back to the door at the rear of the 747. Long way down. He heard the splash of Aidan’s internal organs as the picky Skinner evicted them. There was a deep grunt, deeper than anything Aidan had ever said. Like the rest of him, his voice was broken for good.

Jane unclasped the overhead storage bins and swept through the luggage, looking for something that might help. Too late, he realised there would be an axe in the cockpit, but he would not be able to get past the Skinner in the starboard aisle now. The flight deck would be secured from the inside anyway.

He had to accept that Aidan was gone for good. What hulked and slobbered in his place, though it resembled the boy, was one hundred per cent meat-head. No reasoning. No compassion. No guilt. Aidan, at least, at last, had been unable to live with what he had done. It didn’t matter that he had put Jane in a dangerous position; he hoped that, in extremis, Aidan had failed to grasp that. He couldn’t believe he could be so calculating, no matter how thoughtless and unsympathetic Jane had been towards him over the years.

The wet sounds had stopped. The Skinner, recently born, was hungry. It was pulling Jane’s smell into its head, trying to differentiate his scent from the dead bodies arrayed around it. This was it; he was going to have to jump and risk a shattered ankle or a compound fracture of the shin. Crazily he thought of school, when a friend had told him that you had to bend your knees during a parachute-jump landing, otherwise your spine would come ramming through the top of your skull.

Thanks for that, he thought, peering through the window and trying to assess the severity of the drop. It must be twenty feet, straight down onto cold, hard concrete. He levered open the door and looked for handholds of any kind, but the skin of the jet was smooth. No vehicles nearby that he could leap onto. The nearest were a mobile belt conveyor and a commissary truck, both fully thirty yards away.

Jane glanced back and saw Aidan looking directly at him, the skin of his face flat, the frown ironed out of it, sheened with sweat or leeched fat or some other serous leakage. Not tears, though – Christ, never that. It can’t see you.

Jump. Use the box-cutter on your own throat. Something. Do something.

He sat on the edge of the doorway and propelled himself forward. The wind caught him and tried to suck him out. No way. No shitting way. Where was there a rope when you needed it?

He swung his legs back in and stood up. A body in the seat nearest his was shrugging herself out of her cardigan. He helped her. Then he was frantically tearing clothes off everyone within reach, tying crude knots into cuffs and hems; attaching belts, attaching ties. He had about fifteen feet of improvised line when the Skinner, attracted by the noise of his excited breathing, and the exotic dust he was causing to puff up from the bodies around him, came shambling over the seats diagonally towards him.

Jane cinched one end of his makeshift rope to an underseat baggage-restraint unit. He jerked on it twice, hard, and the knot only shrank, tightening itself. He stood on the edge of the doorway and leaned back, gripping the clothes, feeling the dust and grease of human decay seep out of the fibres. He wrapped one leg around the rope and began to lower himself as the face of the Skinner emerged from the darkness. He went so quickly that instead of being able to set himself at the end of the rope for the drop of five or six feet that remained, as he had planned, he fell to the floor awkwardly. For a second he thought he had twisted his ankle, but there was no damage to bone or ligament. He’d have a bruise. He could walk through the pain of that.

He glanced back at the jet but the Skinner was no longer facing his direction. Perhaps, his scent dispersed into the air, it had lost interest in him, had switched off. It was turned towards the north. He felt a pinch in his heart when he saw the Skinner wipe its nose with the back of its hand, a mannerism that Aidan had not been able to shake from childhood. Perhaps he was not yet fully absorbed. Perhaps Skinners assimilated little tropes of behaviour from their victims. It just made it all the more sad.

The shape of the wind changed. He heard screams on the edge of it, carried from the other end of the airfield, beyond Terminal 5. They were women’s screams. Pained, almost bestial. Howling. Something in the sound made him want to go to them.

He found himself striding across the tarmac, and it was only when the screams began to assault his ears without the sonically softening buffer of the wind that he hesitated. A thin red light trembled on the horizon, staining the lowest part of the sky. He could hear something else now, but his mind would not allow him to identify what it was. Know this and you shut down for good. There is no coming back from something so dark.

Jane turned and fled.

The journey back to the city centre was achieved in a fug of disgust and regret and pain. Despite the shutters coming down in his mind the previous night, Jane kept trying to tease them open. It was like a facial scab. Your fingers kept gravitating towards it without you realising. The pain in his foot helped. He had had to cut his bootlaces in the morning, the flesh having swollen during a night spent wrapped around his beloved rifle in a crumpled heap of groaning containers that had been blasted into the garden of a house backing onto the Longford river, just south of the airport. He’d wrapped a triangular bandage around the swelling, making sure he could still waggle his toes when it was tied off. He ate a packet of nuts and spat bloodily into the earth. His teeth felt as stable as decorations pushed into a cake. Two of them were loose, an incisor and a pre-molar. His gums bled at the slightest pressure. If he ran his tongue across his teeth he’d be spitting red for a good twenty minutes. The menace in the air was catching up with him after all this time. He wondered, if Becky could get any of her X-ray machinery to work, if his body would be riddled with black stains.

He walked towards the suggestion of the sun as it dawned behind the thicket of bronze permacloud. He barely registered the topography as it altered around him. He was shivering, despite his thick waterproofs.

East Bedfont. North Feltham. Spring Grove. Brentford. Kew. Turnham Green. Shepherd’s Bush.

Jane felt at one point as if he was not so much walking towards as being sucked into his destination. London was a plughole drawing anything down that was not tethered fast. When the sawtooth architecture at the river’s edge emerged it reminded him of nothing other than the crippled shape of his own jaws. He didn’t feel as if he had returned or arrived. He didn’t feel at home. It wasn’t places that did that for you, he understood now, way, way too late. It was people.

It was getting dark. The sun had leapt over him and was at his back now, sinking into that part of the country that was a red rim of terror in the pit of his thoughts. The howling of the women. He thought he could never have felt anything but shock for a woman who screamed like that, but he had smiled into the face of one, once, long ago. He had kissed it, gently brushed away the damp hair that latticed it, whispered his love to it.

Her hand had gripped his so hard that they were like white ice statues. She didn’t have the spit to keep her lips dry. They were stuck to her bared teeth, cracking, a pain smile. Eyes slitted, turned to him, confused, afraid. He’d squeezed her hand as hard as she had gripped his and urged her on, told her how amazing she was, how much he loved her. Stanley had burst from her with the cord wrapped around his neck, a meconium-streaked shock. Jane had reared back at the violence and mess of it all. For one brittle second he feared his son and resented him for what he had done to his wife. But it all dissolved into concern and love. Love so pure and deep that it seemed to make a mockery of what he felt for Cherry.

He made it back to Spitalfields in a gloom so dense he thought he must get lost. He forced his way through the razor-wire barricades and hammered on the door. Nobody came. He tried the handle and the door opened. Mothballs and soup. A smell of age. ‘Becky?’

No reply. He shrugged the rifle from his shoulder and followed its muzzle into the shop. He closed the door behind him. He checked each room but could find no Skinners, no evidence of a struggle or a death. Becky was gone.

He went back outside and repositioned the razor wire. He locked and bolted the door and pressed his head against it. Safe now, for a while. Darling, I’m home. He could feel an ache pulsing behind his skull, transmitting through to the wood, almost knocking at it. A cough was hatching in his chest. Cold had reached deep into him. What was it Stopper used to say? I feel like seven different kinds of shite all knocked into a one-shite thimble. He moved through to Plessey’s workshop, thinking of listening to some broadcasts, but the crystal radio was gone. He couldn’t find it in any drawer or filing cabinet. He thought about where it might be; who might have taken it. He wished Becky was around. He missed her terribly.

Jane lit candles and put a flame to the wood stove in Plessey’s cosy little kitchenette. There was a water butt labelled Lavage at the heavily barred fire escape at the back of the shop. He knocked his hip against it, listened. Plenty. He carried countless pans of water to the stove and to the bath. When it was full and steaming, Jane undressed, closing his eyes against the dips and hollows and shadows, and slid into the water. He shampooed his hair and clipped his fingernails. He massaged the blood back into his toes. When he got out, the bath revealed a tidemark of dark grey scum. He towelled himself dry in front of the warm stove. He cut his hair with a pair of sharpish barber’s scissors from one of Plessey’s chests of wonders and shaved, carefully, with a cut-throat razor and some rose-scented cream whisked onto his bristles with a shaving brush made from badger hair.

He ate warm chicken soup with stale water biscuits crumbled into it. He sat in Plessey’s leather armchair in a towelling bathrobe sipping cognac, his other hand on the stock of the rifle lying across his lap. He felt reborn. When he slept, he dreamed of a black lake, still and deep, surrounded by black mountains and a sky bluing at its edges, brimful of stars. He dreamed of Cherry’s body, the way it had been when they met, not towards the end when she refused to be naked in the same room as him. She had been slender, almost athletic. She liked to squeeze her breasts when he made love to her. It turned him on to see her so thrilled by her own body. He dreamed of her now, beneath him, moving to his rhythm, her fingers snagging and tickling at her nipples. She looked up into his eyes and there was nothing there. No recognition. No love. No sense of who she was herself. He was looking up at himself through her eyes. No sweat, no expression of mounting excitement. They both stopped fucking. They both deflated, like rubber dolls under a knife. There was nothing to them whatsoever.

Knocking at the door.

Jane wakened feeling drowsy and unfamiliar. He was hot. He wiped sweat from his brow. The room was baking. He got up from the armchair and slopped cognac over the bathrobe. He got his finger behind the trigger of the rifle, the butt under his armpit, and scurried to the door, the muzzle of the gun pointing at the ground by his foot. He held his breath and placed his ear to the door. He heard something shuffling outside. He heard a muttered oath and knew this was no Skinner.

‘Who is it?’ he called.

‘It’s Simmonds.’

He opened the door a crack and her lachrymose expression dipped into view.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked.

‘You’ve scrubbed up well,’ she said. ‘Hot date?’

He waited, staring at her.

‘We’re on the move,’ she said.

‘What? Where? How do you mean?’

Simmonds looked behind her. ‘You think you might let me in? I know it’s daytime and all that, but I still get the heebie-jeebies being outside.’

He let Simmonds in and put a kettle of water on the stove.

‘Nice place Plessey sorted himself out with here.’

Jane nodded. ‘Some people feel safer locked in, having just one place. Not for me, though. I don’t know how he manages.’ He stopped preparing cups of tea and glanced back at Simmonds. ‘Managed, I mean.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Most unfortunate, that.’

‘So who’s on the move?’

‘Becky came to us. She brought the radio. We heard the broadcasts.’

Jane handed her a cup. ‘And you think it’s worth exploring?’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Anything has to be better than this. It’s like being a cured ham hanging in a room for months, waiting for someone to come and select you. I’d rather take my chances out in the wilds than have slices taken off me by some churning mouth with a sac attached to it.’

‘Well, when you put it like that,’ Jane said.

‘There are some hot zones in need of a messenger. We’ve got Harris, MacCreadle and Barrett on it at the moment. You up for a mercy mission?’

‘Where’s Becky?’ he asked.

‘We’re hiding her. Priority case. Wrapping the poor dear in cotton wool.’

‘Why?’

The sad eyes grew larger. A crack appeared in Simmonds’s niggardly mouth, the closest she would ever get to a smile. ‘You don’t know? Oh, my dear sir. There’s congratulations in order, clever boy. She’s pregnant.’

22. FEARFUL SYMMETRY

Jane saw two or three knots of people heading for the A20 out of London that day. He wished he could go with them, but he was committed to this task. He couldn’t leave knowing that Harris, MacCreadle and Barrett, all older than him, all family men, were dashing around the London survivor hot spots, disseminating information, getting people up onto their feet for the long march south. He checked each face that floated owlishly by, though. He could not and would not stop searching. It was difficult, trying to imagine how Stanley might have changed over the past ten years. There had been a marked alteration in Aidan’s features; he had been hardened by experience. He guessed Stanley would have been too. But nobody he saw fit the identikit portrait in his mind.

The numbers of people thinned out soon. It was disheartening to think that so few had made it. In terms of percentages dead, he couldn’t know for sure, but after the ninety-nine and the decimal point, he was willing to bet there were lots more nines involved. By the time he reached the City Road he was on his own again, his shoes slapping echoes from a thin gruel of slush and ash. A pipe had burst underground; water was geysering from a crack at the southern end of Upper Street. He splashed through a small river at the mouth of the Tube station, struggling to pull back the barrier gates, their runners snagged in years of accumulated litter. He stood in the entrance hall, water sluicing past him, roaring down the escalators. It would be dark, properly dark, before he’d made it halfway down there. He thought there might have been a mistake. Of all the places people could choose to live, why here, in permanent night? He wondered if his exhortations to leave might not be understood. Too long out of the real world and everything shut down.

Chalk marks adorned the walls, all of them orange. Someone had scrawled Come and play. Jane went to the mouth of the escalators and peered down. He supposed the tunnel network offered a freedom that wasn’t necessarily available on the surface. But he still would not swap the skin of the earth with the veins beneath it. Like veins, the tunnels would become more and more furred. There was structural collapse occurring all over the city. He didn’t fancy being marooned between stations with flood water hammering towards him from both ends. Or a ceiling giving way. Or a fire breaking out. There was nobody to maintain the upkeep of the system any more. People choosing to come down here, he thought, descending the longest escalators in the entire network, were out of their minds.

At the base of the escalator he was groping blindly. His foot reached level ground and he stood still for a while, head cocked, listening for signs of life. Shapes began to become known to him: the edge of a wall, the outline of a maintenance doorway, the familiar London Underground roundel against white tiles. His scalp crept as he considered the possibility of Skinners, lots of them, standing mere feet away. But popular wisdom spoke of Skinners rarely sinking below street level. They didn’t like the stink, some said. Or maybe there was some kind of interference with their internal compasses, an anomaly in the magnetic flow. Maybe they were confused by the various scents barrelling around the tunnels, pushed and pulled from unknowable sources any number of miles away. Maybe they were just smart, biding their time, knowing that the inevitable collapse of the honeycomb would send people running into their arms.

Jane gripped the rifle, holding it out in front of him as if it were a torch. As he neared the broad southbound platform, though, he saw that there were lights down here, albeit crude and lacking in power. Candles were dotted between sleeping bags and tents pitched all along the platform. Their uncertain light reflected in the scarred curve of the ceiling, showing how it had crumbled back to its supportive ribs. Posters on the trackside wall had peeled to the extent that nothing could be made out in their messages. Water sheened the walls; nitre was a series of slow white blossoms. A stench rose up from the latrine that the tracks had been turned into. He had to zip his coat up over his nose and mouth. ‘Jesus,’ he whispered. ‘Mind the crap.’

People began to unfold from their beds, like insects shedding their chrysalides. Thin, shivering figures approached him, every one of them with eyes so large they seemed painful to carry in the cross-hatched wastelands of their faces. A woman touched his arm; the light of the candles gave her skin a pale, waxy sheen, as if she were assuming the form of what illumined her.

‘Have you seen my little boy?’ she asked. ‘He’s my only boy. I lost him a couple of months ago. He vanished in the night. I woke up and it was all I could do to convince myself I’d ever had a boy in the first place. Have you seen him?’

Jane shook his head and backed away. Scurvy was sinking her eyes, paling her skin; her hand on her lower stomach clutched at blood – the reopening of a Caesarean scar, he supposed. He could read chapters of pain on every face. They regarded him as if he was here to deal them the coup de grâce. Fear and resignation mixed to a pathetic uniform look.

He said, ‘People are leaving London. You should too. There’s a raft… a boat off the south-east coast that can take you across the Channel to France.’

His reading of the general mood was misplaced. A man with a white beard, his right arm bandaged and smelling of rot, thrust his chin at him. ‘Why would we want to go to France?’

‘There’s the possibility that what happened was restricted to these shores,’ Jane said. Hoots of derision. He didn’t believe what he had said either, but it was his job to put the option on the table. ‘We’re running out of places to hide. They’re closing the net. In France we might be better positioned. More options. If you were to get on the raft you might find a better life.’

White Beard spat at Jane’s feet. ‘We might find a worse one, too,’ he said. ‘You just want us to leave so you can have the tunnels for yourself.’

‘I’m not interested in tunnels,’ Jane said. ‘I’m here to pass on information, that’s all. What you do with it is your business. You’re looking at eighty miles. Cross the river at Tower Bridge. Head for the A20. Maybe you’ll join up with the rest, hundreds of them, before you get there.’

He was turning to leave when someone called out, asking about the others.

‘What others?’ Jane asked.

‘There’s more of us,’ the voice called. ‘In the crossover passages at City Road. The old disused station.’

‘Can’t you pass it on?’

‘You pass it on, pal. It’s your job. We’re leaving.’

Jane stood on the platform as roughly two-thirds of the platform dwellers hastily packed up their things and streamed by him. One or two shook his hand and thanked him. A man wearing a trilby over a mass of sweaty rat-tails told him he should get going himself and fuck the City Roaders or he’d end up being the last pretzel in the Skinners’ snack bowl.

He watched their backs fade through the exit, heard them swearing and stomping and splashing up the escalators. About twenty men remained. Already they were repositioning their gear, seemingly happy with the grand space they had inherited.

‘Fucking mugs, the lot of them,’ White Beard said. ‘Fucking raft? Who’d go out on the sea? I’ll take my chances with the Smoke. My grandad lived here in the Blitz. Didn’t get a fucking scratch.’

Jane loped down to the end of the platform and squinted into the tunnel’s throat. A constant breeze shifted his hair, chilled the flesh of his arms. It was like the final protracted breath of a giant. It carried every scent you could associate with death upon it. It was a stew of bad things, dirty water run from the tap leading directly to the well of your nightmares.

He dropped down into the gulley of sewage and allowed himself to be swallowed.

It wasn’t far to the defunct City Road section of the Northern Line tunnel but Jane’s constant stumbling on the rails and the fragments of wall collapsing into the passageway lengthened his journey considerably. There were no platforms at the station any more, but candles had been left here too, lighting the way to the passage arches, seemingly hanging in the wall, five feet above the floor. Soot clung to every surface; it was as if everything had been carved from it. The floor seemed to shiver as he hauled himself up from the rails; his hands sank into inches of soft matter. Dead cables slinked around him, hanging from their routers like snakes sleeping in branches, roughly following the shape of the architecture as though they were its preliminary pencil sketches.

Jane called out but his voice died immediately in the granular acoustics. Pieces of unrecognisable machinery lay by the tracks. A dust-veiled sign from the 1940s warned people not to leave their belongings behind after the all-clear. He saw a figure at the central corridor leading to the stairs. A child holding a toy, a stuffed animal. It looked like a lion. The slight figure was wearing pyjamas. He was barefoot. Jane’s heart lurched as if it were making a break for freedom. He almost laughed out loud.

‘Stanley?’ he called.

The figure instantly turned and ran away, as if it had been waiting only for Jane’s voice to trigger it. Jane stood in the passageway staring at the skirls of dust the figure had kicked up at the moment of its exit. Not Stanley. Stanley would not be five years old still. Stanley would be wearing a scowl and a hoodie and bumfluff on his upper lip. Stanley would not run away. He’d stand his ground and ask Jane, ‘What’s it to you, fuckhead?’

Jane took off after him.

He managed a couple of flights before the walls started to move. Figures detached themselves from the murk as if they had animated themselves from the soot. Soon he found himself trying to move through a corridor packed with black flaking bodies. He couldn’t think beyond the character of Pigpen in Peanuts, who seemed to be constructed from dirt. All he could see were wild white eyes and teeth; a smell of humus and brackish water. It was as if the shored-up earth, failing now, deep beneath the capital, was shedding ghosts at every turn.

‘Stanley?’ he called out again, a reflex that he seemed to have no power over. When it came to his son, those moments when he felt close to Stanley, either during these mirages or in dreams, it was as if he could not rein in his excitement. It could only be a memory, or a wish, but the ever-hopeful part of his brain lit up, burning so brightly that no other function could be considered.

Now he had reached the ancient locked-in ticket barrier. How long had this station been closed to the public? A good seventy years, surely. People were huddled together under their shifting blanket of dust as though resigned to death. Jane imagined them never moving, just sitting, waiting, waiting for a moment such as this, a person to release them from a stasis they had not noticed arriving and did not know how to shake off. They looked at him with a mixture of puzzlement and relief.

Jane told them about the raft. He said they would have to go back through the tunnels because these doors had been locked so long they might well have sealed themselves shut. They stood and applauded him, and he began to cry, surrounded by shades, all of them weeping with gratitude, all of them missing somebody. Everyone was the same. Everyone sought solace of one kind or another.

He looked around for Stanley as they filed past him, but he knew there would be nobody here who reminded him of his son. He had seen a ghost, that was all, a bruise in his memory. Stanley was still with him, in one way or another. There was no point in getting excited every time it happened. It was just his way of saying hi. It was the son in his blood. He would never leave him to be on his own.

But then he saw him again a couple of hours later. A little boy, in blue-striped pyjamas plated with dry mud. A soft toy clutched in one hand. Hair mussed as if he’d just got out of bed. He was running along Primrose Hill Road, just north of Regent’s Park, legs barely bending as he ran, leaning over so far it seemed he must trip and fall headlong, just the way that Stanley ran when he saw his dad approaching the house from a long shift on the rigs. Jane pursued. It could not be Stanley. Stanley had not been trapped at the age of five all this time. It didn’t matter. The child still needed to be taken care of.

He lost sight of the boy as he reached Albert Road. One moment he’d been there – Jane was sure he wasn’t aware that he was being followed, he hadn’t seen his head turn, he would have loved to glimpse the face, just to convince the old romantic, the gullible sap wishing for the impossible, in him – the next moment he was gone. There were plenty of hiding places. Jane didn’t know where to start. He could be looking for him for an hour and the boy would be on the south side of the park, heading down Portland Place.

Jane crossed the road and nipped through the park’s exterior to the Outer Circle where the main entrance to London Zoo was located. He walked straight through the open gates. In. Pass on the details. Out. Job done. On to the next and then find Becky and scram.

He marched along the zoo’s paths trying to work out where everyone would be congregating. Every cage he walked past bore a sign that had been burned clean of information. Sometimes there was a body, an animal carcass beyond identification, trapped inside the bars, passed unsuitable for Skinner invasion or devourment. More often than not the cages were empty, whatever had lived within having bent the bars open in order to escape, once consumed by their Skinner hijacker. Behind him the great nets of the Snowdon aviary had collapsed; scorched patches of it lay flapping around like failed spiders’ webs. Cairns of dried shit were the only pointer to any kind of animal habitation now. Jane wondered where they had all gone.

He checked the vivarium and aquarium, but both were empty, their glass tanks smashed, the animals within now gone, perhaps taken for food. He headed south-east, towards a shattered fountain, past areas where African birds had been kept, pygmy hippos, bearded pigs. He dug in his memory for what these creatures looked like.

He stopped, his heart suddenly reminding him it was still beating, as a filthy, limping rhinoceros plodded across the wasteland of a former picnic area, its head swinging around as if trying to rid itself of a pain or a cloud of irritating insects. It paused and turned Jane’s way. There was a Skinner inside it, he was certain of that. The poor animal was a shadow of what its genes had meant for it to be. Its face was slack, the tough hide turned in places to elastic bars, showing glimpses of the awful thing that dwelled within. Its great horn had sheared through like a lopped branch; the stump was cracked and sore-looking, surrounded with a collar of crusted pus. The black dinner plates of its eyes seemed without edge, a shadow that might keep on growing until it was totally consumed. Jane tensed himself, ready to make a run for it if the Skinner considered charging, but clearly it was unhappy within the body it had invaded; it turned its back on him and staggered away.

Jane waited, watching the animal move slowly past the sinkhole of the old flamingo pond. He thought that maybe there was nobody left here now. Orange zone suddenly turned blue. It gave him a nasty jolt. He’d been stupid, brazen, to come here without checking the perimeter first. He resumed his walk through the grounds, but now his eye was caught by something to his left, a shapeless mass on an area of pathway between a children’s cratered playground and the dry, weathered edifice of the penguins’ fake iceberg.

Jane approached, leaning over slightly as if he might be able to identify what it was before he got too close. He saw the flap and curl of torn clothing. He saw a separated blue-white hand lying on its knuckles like a dead crab, a few feet away from the main salmagundi of body parts. He thought he saw a swatch of striped pyjama in there but closed his mind to it, turned away. He was close enough now to see steam rising, to smell the rich, sour odours of fear and adrenaline that seamed the meat. He thought of his own teeth slicing through cooked flesh, tattooed skin crisped on a griddle. He put a brake on his bile before it could leap from his throat.

He heard the guttural, drool-laced rattle of something big nearby. It came again, each breath transformed into a wet snarl of aggression, catching in the throat. It sounded like the starter motor to some velvety engine. It was a beautiful, terrifying sound.

Jane backed away from the butchery as the tiger emerged from the collapsed north wall of a café, twenty yards away. It was deteriorating. Its once proud, blocky head was a cheap Halloween mask. The ears might have been flattened back in a classic intimidatory pose but they had frayed to nubs of gristle. Its fur was losing the stripe of a man-eater, gradually fading back into the insipid, featureless colour that death preserves for all. Its chipped, split claws scratched at the path, reminding Jane of the sound of skipping ropes in school playgrounds. The tail had long since worn away to a chewed, twitching stick barely two inches long.

It padded towards him, steam wreathing a grimace filled with black teeth. Its hollowed eyes were mesmerising; Jane could almost believe they were Jane-shaped, designed at the very moment of conception only to focus on him. They were full of him now, despite the blindness of the Skinner. The tiger was locked on.

Jane backed away. Nowhere to go. The zoo was an open arena. He raised the rifle and flicked off the safety catch. He shouldered the weapon and drew a bead. He shot the tiger in the centre of the chest when it lifted its head to check his scent. The tiger staggered back onto its haunches, a phut of complaint whiffling its chops. Its teeth oozed into view again, the eyes screwing up in a blind reflex of hatred and rage. The black corkscrews of its whiskers turned towards him as he was drawn into its olfactory glands. If the tiger was in pain, it wasn’t showing it. A fresh sheet of drool unfolded itself from the open mouth. The wound was bloodless.

The tiger found its feet again and came on.

Jane ran. He did not look back, despite the roar, despite the spattering claws now sounding like grit tossed on an ice-covered pavement. He ran to the southern point of the zoo and clambered over and through what remained of the perimeter wall. The park beyond it was a morass of churned mud. He felt sudden, massive heat across the back of his left thigh, and then he was jumping. He was caught in the mud almost immediately. One boot was sucked from his foot. He turned to try to retrieve it and went down on his side, his arm disappearing almost to the shoulder. The tiger was struggling too. It was twelve feet shy of him; Jane could smell the baking, rancid heat that powered from its jaws. It lurched, trying to spring, but succeeded only in burying its hind legs more deeply. Jane forced himself flat on his stomach and wriggled clear, trying to swim across the surface of the mud, wriggling like a soldier, his gun held in front of him, across no-man’s-land.

He chanced a glance over his shoulder and saw that the tiger was failing to close the gap. Its snarls grew ever more frustrated. At one point it seemed to try to take a bite out of its own flank. Gradually the mud turned drier and Jane was able to get to his feet. He ran past the festering waters of the Boating Lake and reached relatively solid ground at the Inner Circle road. Ten minutes later and he was on Marylebone Road, certain that he could hear the frustrated screams of the tiger, certain that at any moment it would come skittering out of York Gates and bring him down within seconds.

He ran for an age without thought of where he might be heading. The shock of the pursuit, the sadness of finding an orange zone massacred, the pain in his leg – blood was filling his remaining boot now; it rose out of the lace holes with each sickening step – was conspiring to cloud his mind. He must stop soon and rest, get himself patched up, or risk fainting.

Jane forced himself to study his surroundings. Maiden Lane, was this? He recognised it from a time in the 1990s when he’d met Cherry for a drink in some dark, poky little pub down an alley through which you’d have struggled to walk two abreast. Thoughts of Cherry, bizarrely, revived him a little. Something about the sass of her in those days, how she could get his prick hard within seconds of their meeting just in the way she’d nip his ear with her teeth after a kiss hello, or the way she’d look at him, a naked desire in her cool green eyes. Something about the bitch in her. Whatever it was, it slapped him awake as he limped into Southampton Street.

On the Strand he checked both ways before continuing, conscious of the heavy Skinner traffic that had been in evidence the last time he had ventured this way. Empty now, thank God. He must smell like an abattoir skip. He looked back at the blood trail and dreamt he saw Skinners following on their knees, sucking up his vital fluids as they inched after him. He could not risk compromising his safe house. He crossed to the south side and crunched through the broken glass of a shoe shop. In the storeroom he found a boiler bolted to the wall. A tray next to it held cracked mugs, an empty tea caddy and a bowl of congealed sugar with a spoon trapped inside it. He chipped some of the sugar off and sucked it as he worked at the seized tap. It gave a little. He held a rag under the spigot and forced it open. About a pint of rusty water gurgled from it. He soaked the rag and gingerly removed his jeans. The tiger’s claws had slashed through the denim and left three deep gouges in his upper thigh. Blood oozed freely from them. Jane almost blacked out at the prospect of a vein having been opened. Death would be a long time coming. He’d feel it settle on him by degrees as his life pulsed from him. There was no point in shoving a finger in there, putting pressure on the severed blood vessel. He couldn’t suture it closed. He wouldn’t find anybody with the requisite skills to do so before his heart stopped.

Me and you, both, Stopper. Just a little slower than you copped it. Typical me, eh?

He dug in the rucksack for the First Aid pack. He took out the stapler and some sealed squares of antiseptic tissue. He wiped the wounds clean, gritting his teeth against the pain. The blood was still coming, but it was less freeflowing. He pinched the edges of the wounds together and, swearing copiously, stapled them shut. Once all three slashes were gathered, he snapped off the end of an ampoule of antibiotics and drew them into a syringe. He plunged the needle into his thigh, just above the wound. Then he wrapped a clean bandage around the whole sorry mess and secured it with a tubular bandage pulled up over his leg. He stood up, testing the leg with his whole weight. It hurt like a bastard, but it felt supported, secure.

Jane thought of the filthy claws of the tiger and what might have been swarming on their points. He couldn’t believe he had isolated all possibility of infection, regardless of how careful he had been in washing the wound. He was dead if his leg required amputating.

He turned to go and heard a crunch of glass in the shop front. He saw a Skinner standing among the overturned displays like a man who has forgotten his shopping list and is trying to summon the items back from memory. Fire in a bank of shops across the road leapt at its shoulders, enhancing its silhouette. Jane wiped his hands on a fresh antiseptic wipe and pocketed it; he toed the bloody rags of the used ones into the far corner of the room. It landed with a splat. He saw the Skinner cock its head like an inquisitive dog. Jane backed into the other corner and made his breathing shallow.

The Skinner came. It moved into the room, blocking the entrance with its bulk. In another life it had been a woman in a suit; her black leather briefcase was still snagged on one arm. Her blonde hair had once been a styled, angular cut. Now it was tangled with all kinds of street debris: old litter, soot, blood. There was a finger in there. Her face was the colour of pastry, riddled with tears as though kneaded by a child. Thick saliva had poured from the jaws of the Skinner and hardened against its chin, like melted drips from a candle. Dirt was a cracked glaze across its chest. Its head was a pendulum swinging first his way, then the rags’. Death hung on a simple decision. Jane was not frightened any more. It had been dogging him for so long that it didn’t seem to possess the finality it once had. He imagined himself being clawed inside out, turned to a pulp, and then sitting up once the Skinner had moved on, pulling himself back into some kind of order and getting the old stapler out again.

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 did 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.

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.

‘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, rolling 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.

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.

‘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.

He readjusted his grip on Becky, and on his dread, and struck out deeper, away from shore and the forest of legs blocking his progress. He turned left and kicked. Feeling above him with his free hand for the edge of the raft. He thought it might never come, but it did, and he hauled Becky coughing and spluttering from the water. It filmed his eyes like oil; he could feel it in his mouth like the residue of a pastry saturated with lard. They were both sick as they splashed from the water, around fifteen yards away from the worst of the squabbling. People were dying. Jane shouted at them, an incoherent bellow of anger and frustration.

He wheeled around at the sudden crunch of approaching footsteps, ready to launch his forearm into whatever face came at him, but it was Loke, his nose and mouth bloodied. He looked tired, hunted. Jane supposed they all did.

‘I couldn’t stay,’ he said. ‘It was getting very, very nasty out there.’

‘It’s all right,’ Jane said. ‘Mission accomplished. Becky? Meet Loke.’

They all turned to watch the raft. Another horn blared through the grey nets of retreating dark; Jane couldn’t see the player. It would be dawn in an hour or two. He envied them their place on the raft at the same time that he was secretly thanking whatever invisible guardian had kept him from that insane binding of waterproofed wood and tarpaulin. He heard the ‘chunk’ of an axe as it bit through the ropes attaching the raft to land. There was a great cheer, subsumed by an even greater caterwauling of dismay. The raft slid slowly away from the shore.

Becky began to cry.

‘It’s all right,’ Jane said, without conviction. He placed a hand on her belly, imagined it swelling, becoming a curve that arrived almost by stealth but then could not be ignored. He imagined the baby’s hands reaching for them, the knock of its limbs and the faint tremor of its heart.

‘They’ll come back. They’ll come back.’ He kissed her cheek, the top of her head.

He stepped away from Becky, drew Loke in towards her. He touched Loke’s arm. ‘Look after her for a moment,’ he whispered.

He turned towards the headland and the cottages that dogged the coastline for half a mile or so. The figure had moved this way. He crunched towards the flimsy buildings. Many had been turned to so much driftwood by the Event, or the winds that it had created. His ears were pricked, listening out for Becky’s voice. If she called him back, he would go to her. This would stop, if she decided it. But she didn’t call him. He did not look back.

Over the years he had tried to project the babyish face of his son on to a fifteen-year-old boy. A manchild. He had never been able to do it. Trying to imagine that face without its remnants of baby fat, the pudgy cheeks and wide eyes, the trim, pouting bow of his mouth, was beyond him. Further, he didn’t like to do it. It was negating who his boy really was for some fantasy that could never even approach the truth. The likelihood, although he baulked whenever he confronted it, was that he would walk straight past Stanley in the street. The difference between the baby and the five-year-old was greater than he perceived. Add another ten years and you had a new person, in effect. Maybe the shape of the eyes remained, but there was a change in the bone structure, a moving away from the infant that made you strangers, no matter how tight these factions of the family.

Movement now, up ahead. A shifting of shadow around the edges of a stoved-in cottage, window frames gone, door blown in by the wolf that was the wind.

A whimper turned his head. He saw someone duck out of sight beyond the dry gardens and their blasted configurations of sea kale and yellow horned poppy, santolinas and crambes. Starfish lay around his feet as if the heavens had turned to stone at the insult to the world and had fallen on this spot. He had to step over a wreckage of railway sleepers and shattered floorboards, downed telegraph poles and great cairns of bleached crab carapaces. It was like walking a moonscape infected by dreams of violence and perversion.

There was a slight incline up ahead, a dip that exposed the rear of the cottage and a hole dug into it, leading to deep shadow beneath the building itself. He saw the figure hunker down and wriggle into the hole. He felt a jerk in his chest at the sight of blue and white striped pyjamas, his son’s favourite pyjamas. He was sure of it.

I luff these jim-jams, Daddy, they’re all warm and soft and make me look like toofpaste…

‘Stan?’ he called out, and he ignored the thickening pain in his jaw, the fresh seep of blood from his ruined gums. The swelling had puffed his left eye almost completely shut. He could still see through the right, just, a blurred, splintered view. He supposed he would have to cut into an eyelid to reduce the swelling if it blinded him completely.

‘Stanley?’ He strode towards the house, ignoring any pretence he’d made at caution. ‘It’s me,mate. It’s Dad. Don’t be scared.’

He slithered down the shingle into the dip and leant close to the hole. He could see nothing in there but the pure black of childhood nightmares. But then there was a flurry of movement. The grimy striped swatch of his pyjamas shifting back and forth beyond the edge of the hole, settling now, his back to Jane. The whimpering continued. Cold, afraid, alone for so long.

‘Hey,’ Jane said. Tears were forming. He could almost feel the slender bones under his fingers, the shivering of his boy. ‘I’ll make you warm. I’m here, Stan. Dad’s here. I never left you, you know. I’d never let you go. Come on.’ He was finding it hard to keep his voice level.

He bent to the hole, resting one hand on the cold shingle, reaching his other towards his boy.

‘Stanley, it’s time to go.’ His fingers touched the cotton. It did not feel right.

The whimpering stopped. The shivering of his boy stopped.

The tiger turned around within the black circle of the hole and showed Jane what properly rotten jaws ought to look like.

‘Stan,’ Jane said, and his voice was nothing but an old man’s breath, tired, played out, defeated. He kicked back against the shingle but managed only to dig his heels deeper into the loose stones. He was going nowhere. The strength was gone from him. The tiger clawed a path towards him, muscling out of the hole like something born of darkness. Its ragged, matted cloak stank of death. It placed one massive paw on the centre of Jane’s chest, pinning him back against the cold ground. The pitted box of its muzzle wrinkled as it bared its black fangs. The shrivelled tubes of its eye sockets told of distances that Jane could never comprehend. How many millennia had these things drifted through the stars, waiting to find food? How many dead planets had they impacted upon, waiting for an atmosphere, a primordial scenario, an evolution that would never come?

He was thinking this as the tiger almost nonchalantly swatted a claw across his throat. Jane felt an instant numbing chill there and found that he could not swallow. He tried to say something, but his mouth only filled with blood. He jerked against the weight of the rotting animal but it did not budge. Jane couldn’t breathe. He was vaguely aware of footsteps in the shingle slowing. He couldn’t see who it was.

Light.

A gap as the clouds parted. The moon appeared, gibbous; osteal white. The tiger raised its great head towards it, growling, unsure. Jane put his hand to his own shoulder and withdrew the long shard of shrapnel. He didn’t feel a thing. He drove it deep into the tiger’s eye. The tiger made no sound but slumped against him, like Stanley used to as a baby when he was tired. His sweet, warm head on Jane’s chest. The passage to sleep, so swift as to be almost seamless.

Jane felt like that now. He could close his eyes and drift into oblivion and it would not be any effort. He placed a hand against his throat and there was nothing but pumping wetness.

A snuffling noise.

But he felt no pain. He saw the girl and behind her, coming up the beach, Loke with his arm around Becky, who was steadfastly looking out to sea. The girl raised her hand. Protection. He knew the baby would be cared for. He knew there could be a future.

That snuffling noise.

Jane turned his head and Stanley was standing there in his pyjamas, at the edge of the dip, Walter dangling from his hand.

‘Hiya, Dad,’ his boy said. ‘Where’ve you been? I’m freezing.’

Jane struggled free of the tiger’s dead weight and stood up. He moved slowly towards his son. He was cautious, unsure. He didn’t want to be tricked again. He clambered up to level ground and Stanley reached out a hand, slid it through the gap between Jane’s thumb and forefinger.

‘Makeme warm, Dad. I’ve been cold for such a long time. Waiting for you.’

Jane wiped away tears, eager after all this time to have Stanley clear in his sight. ‘I’m here. I’ve always been here.’

‘Me too, Dad. Come on, it’s this way.’

Jane allowed himself to be led. He did not look back. After a while, he reached down and picked his boy up. He closed his eyes to his magical, unique smell, the soft measure of his breath, his strong, regular heartbeat. He closed his eyes and it was as if nothing had changed.