One (16 page)

Jane was sick where he stood, violent and without warning. It was as if someone had punched it out of him from within.

He didn't remember climbing back over the fence, collecting his bike, or returning to Carl.

'Where have you been, you bone-on?' Carl demanded. 'You nearly missed this.'

He stood back to allow Jane a look at the mirror carp lying in the grass. It was enormous. It seemed deformed. Its skin was olive-coloured, there were maybe four or five scales, dotted near the tail and the dorsal fin. Its eyes protruded, its huge mouth gawped, gasping in the air. Jane felt suddenly detached from nature. Atrocity was in front of his face and at his heels. He couldn't understand how this thing could still be living, how it could have come into being in the first place. There was this sudden impact in his mind about the outrageousness of animals. He had sucked up science-fiction films since the age of five and stared out at the night sky wondering if aliens truly existed without giving any thought whatsoever to the bizarre creatures that lived on his own planet. Elephants. Rhinoceros. Squid. Mirror carp. Here was as weird as you could get. He saw Carl for what he really was, a network of organs, blood vessels, bones and nerves. A brain with ganglia. Meat. The boy in the snorkel parka was gone for ever. Everything had changed.

'I have to go home,' Jane might have said. He didn't remember cycling back.

He woke up with Stanley's name on his lips and his cheeks wet with tears. The back of his head felt as though it had not risen with him; tentative fingers tripped across the lacquer of his own dried blood, but despite a large lump he believed there to be no fracture.

He was alone, but had not been left where he fell. He fretted over that for a long time. Their attackers had meant to kill him. Perhaps they thought they had. So then why move him? He looked around. He was by the door of a fast-food restaurant. A plastic yellow signed warned: CAUTION, WET FLOOR. People had died queuing for burgers. People had died in the process of eating them. A man was sitting with his face in a cardboard carton, a whitened newspaper before him. The smell of old cooking oil, the greasy light on lengths of chrome, the plastic locked-down seating made Jane feel sick.

He pushed himself upright and staggered outside, fumbling for the bicycle mask dangling around his neck, and the welder's goggles, which had remained on his face but become displaced. He wondered how long he had been unconscious. It felt like a long time; the blood on him was long dry. He was hungry and thirsty. He thought he should look for the others; he couldn't guess how events must have developed after he had been knocked out, but he wouldn't accept that some of the others had failed to get away.

He checked his position. He had not been moved far. He walked back to the hospital and almost immediately found Angela and Brendan. Angela was still in the wheelchair. Like Jane she'd received one blow to the head, but this had proved catastrophic. He could see how Brendan had tried to protect her: defence wounds split his hands. His back was a patchwork of punctures.

Jane covered them with a tarpaulin liberated from a skip in the hospital car park. That the others were nowhere nearby gave him hope, but then, he thought, neither were the attackers. He patted his pocket, suddenly hollowed clean by fear that Stanley's letter had been taken. He realised he was moving in circles, reluctant to move beyond the self-imposed perimeter he'd created with the tarp. Staying with these known dead was his safest option. He knew where he was. He knew what the score was. Moving on meant that he might find the others dead. And he'd had a bellyful of it. Moving on was one step, one second closer to his own demise. Maybe it was time to let the misery come and find him for a change. Walking only ever seemed to lead him into danger. Though he'd been suspicious and impatient with the survivors he'd come across, he realised he liked it better with the sound of them griping alongside him. Hell might well be other people, but hell was also solitary confinement.

He took out Stanley's letter and read his closing words.

Hug you till yor branes com out yor ears Dad and boges
com out yor noz. xxx

After a while he carefully folded the paper and replaced it in his pocket. He continued walking south.

He couldn't look. A second it had been, if that, to understand what he was seeing, before he tore his gaze away. But he knew the image would stay with him until death. Christ, maybe even longer.

They were all there, it seemed, arranged for him on the bank of land where the Angel of the North stood like an appeal at the foot of the dead city. Chris. Nance. The deranged killers. Strung up on telegraph posts, chests shredded, their tongues hanging from slashes in their throats like badly knotted school ties.

Jane had not happened upon any more survivors, despite checking the shopping malls, the football stadia, police cells and train stations on his way to pick up the A1 where it left Newcastle in motorway form. Whatever had broadsided the country seemed to have hit harder in some places than others. Perhaps it was to do with topography, the amount of land exposed to the sky. Perhaps it was just bad luck. He had to hold on to the possibility that survivors had massed and, like Jane, were marching on the capital, looking for the country's leaders to provide answers, protection, recovery.

He trudged by, head low, eyes on the road, always on the road, trying not to be too grateful that Becky and Aidan had escaped the kind of death visited upon the others. Trying not to think too much about who had committed their murders. Trying not to think about why.

There were other things to try not to think about. But the nearness of the Angel meant that he could cast his mind a little way back, to the road tunnel under the Tyne, and the girl in the car. The horror of proximity had receded, been trumped by other things.

He thought of the girl almost in sepia tones. It was as if it had never happened:

Cars mashed into each other. Darkness and ash. Every vehicle burned, matte, crumpled. No glimpse of road. Sometimes a jackknifed lorry meant that he had to climb down from the emergency footpath at the side of the tunnel and clamber over the bonnets and boots. He caught his hand in the shattered frame of a windscreen and hissed and swore, but he was lucky the skin had not been broken. Already he was worried about the break in his scalp. About what might have entered his body along with the edge of the axe.

Bodies hung out of windows or made abject shapes between cars. Everything carbon black. The smell of burning still in the air, cold, inescapable. This was what the air had become now. This was the smell of Earth.

Midway through the tunnel he heard water. Heavy water trickling, tapping hard on the ruined cellulose of the cars. The river coming through. He had to watch it. What use was he to Stanley if he was to survive the mother of all solar flares only to throw a seven drowning on river water? Despite the note of caution, he hurried on, slithering over the vehicles in his way, hoping that the darkness would not become absolute before he had picked a way through the tunnel.

He pushed his way past contorted bodies, grateful to the heat for disfiguring them to the point where he could not discern facial features or limb shapes; they were just nightmare trees, ugly and forbidding but easily avoided.

And then, insanely, a still point, a miracle. A car untouched by the flames, all of its glass intact. Torched, shattered shells of cars lay around it but had not come into contact with this one. There was a single occupant, a small girl perhaps aged ten or eleven. She was frozen into position on the back seat, a novel clutched in her hands. Next to her was a neat pile of comics, a hairbrush and a bag of chocolate éclairs. Her skin shone. Her hair was neat and long, the fringe held back with a green clip that had been fashioned to resemble a dragonfly.

Breath trapped in his throat, Jane stood by her window for a long while, waiting. He reached out for the handle but it was locked. All of them were. Parents gone to look for help? No, one parent. It would be one. Otherwise one of them would have stayed with her. But in that case why not take her too? And then he thought maybe the driver had been dragged out of the car and his last act had been to lock the doors. But if they were desperate enough to do that they'd be more than prepared to smash the windows. He puzzled over the problem, knowing the answer was there but refusing to countenance it.

He found a car jack and stove in the front passenger window. The smell that lifted out from the car was of fresh peaches. He unlocked the door and clambered in, careful not to scrape his leg against the chunks of glass on the passenger seat. He sat down in the back next to her. She was dead.

He touched her and she was stiff. Her eyes were open, the irises the colour of ivory writing paper. He tried to wrest the book from her hands to see what it was but her grip was colossal. She wore an expression of hope. She seemed to have died from the inside out, and her body had been incapable of going through with it when it met her beautiful shell.

'I won't abandon you,' Jane said to his boy, and he almost jumped because she seemed to move. But it was only his breath in her hair.

He walked hard, concentrating on his rhythm and his breathing. He tried to walk angled forwards, as much to cope with the weight of the new rucksack as to prevent himself from seeing anything else bad that day. He walked past pubs and houses and shops and did not glance at them. He stepped around the bodies in the road, avoiding their fixed stares, if they had been allowed even that. He walked until the pain in his legs became a constant and his lungs roared like the surf at the shore.

Next decent place
, he thought, and kept on until the clouds lost their definition and turned from coffee to steel grey to slate to black. He thought of the figure he had seen, the child wearing the white scarf, appraising him intently. An omen or a warning. A ghost. Something about her.

There was a hotel set a little way back from the road. Whatever sign it once displayed had been torn down by the wind. Some of the glass in the face of the building was intact. Darkness was its only living inhabitant.

He crunched through the lobby. The reception desk was deserted. A floor plan explained the hotel layout. The lift was open; darkness prevented him from seeing anything other then the soles of three pairs of feet. He took the stairs up to the top of the building, the darkness solidifying around him at each landing until he could barely see to put one foot in front of the other. There were two honeymoon suites up here. He checked them both and rejected the first because rain had found a way in.

He dumped his rucksack on the bed and stretched. He took off his boots and socks and let his feet sink into the deep pile of the carpet. It was cold, but at least it was dry. He placed his clothes over the radiators in the hope that the sweat would dry out of them by the morning. He lit candles and placed them around the room. In the bathroom a wild figure ducked out at him and he almost shouted. He stared at himself in the mirror, at the rings of black that the air filter and goggles had marked, at the thickening beard; he went hunting for a razor.

To his astonishment, the monsoon shower worked, after an age of groaning and gurgling and retching. Jane positioned himself beneath it and quickly scrubbed his skin clean. He was appalled to find a great many patches that wouldn't shift so readily under the soap: bruises. He shampooed his hair, gently working at the matted cake of blood at the back of his head. He winced as he fingered the knot of skin there, and watched, dismayed, as the water turned black around his feet. How close had he been to death? How much harder did he need to be hit before it accepted him? He couldn't understand why there were people left who wanted to do harm to others. Fear ought to have ended with the blast that eradicated so much life. It was hard enough to think about survival without having to worry about being attacked too.

He soaped his arms and chest and genitals. He closed his eyes and thought of his honeymoon with Cherry. They had been unable to go away for a proper holiday. Cherry was heavily pregnant and Jane was expected on the rigs within a week and a half of their wedding day. They promised each other a luxury break to the Bahamas as soon as they could find the time. Instead they had booked a night in a huge room at a boutique hotel in London with views of Waterloo Bridge. They had drunk champagne and made love on the balcony. Later he had whispered to Stanley in his mother's tummy in the dark while she slept in a bed so large he thought he might lose her.

The water sputtered. Jane quickly rinsed the rest of the soap from his body as the stream became a stutter of drips. He was sobbing and hardly realised. He always did his best crying in the shower; he'd done a lot of it back home. It meant that Stanley couldn't tell there was something wrong if he wandered into the bathroom.

He shaved by candlelight, rinsing his razor in a bowl of drinking water poured from the plastic bladder. A man he didn't recognise emerged. Thin. Eyes couched in soft grey pouches. Skin blistered and pale.

There was plenty of food but his body craved something green. Salad. Steamed French beans. Peas thumbed out of a pod. Buttered asparagus spears. A sour apple. His stomach complained. He turned to what remained in his pack. Hot-dog sausages in brine. Spam. Tinned fruit salad. Condensed milk. A tinned strawberry-flavoured protein shake. He could feel the food sitting heavily in his gut before he'd taken a spoonful.