One (17 page)

He left the food on the table, peeled four paracetamol and codeine tablets out of their blister packs and dissolved them in water. He swallowed the draught down, grimacing at the bitter taste and the sediment at the bottom of the glass. He unwrapped a waffled bathrobe and a pair of slippers. He was still a little cold but there were spare blankets in the wardrobe. In the mini-bar he found four miniatures – vodka, gin, whisky and rum – and a half-bottle of Australian Merlot. He lined them up on the coffee table and snapped open the ring-pull on the first of the tins. He forked meat into his mouth and now the hunger didn't care whether it was processed slabs of meat or the finest pâté or if there were any accompanying vegetables. The best part of two weeks spent guzzling cold canned produce didn't half put a muffler on your taste buds.

Jane finished the wine with indecent haste and set about the shorts. The pain in his head had dulled; it felt as though he were enclosed within cotton wool. He was warm and full and a little high on the codeine and booze. He wished he had the means to boil some water; a cup of coffee would pretty much set the seal on a perfect end to a shitty day.

He thought about Becky and Aidan. He hoped they had managed to put some distance between themselves and their attackers and, if they were safe, that they had not seen what he had seen. He wished them a warm, comfortable retreat, some food, some hope. He tipped his bottle to the oily scamper of clouds beyond the smeared windows. He was asleep before he'd sealed the toast with a sip from its mouth. He was chased through interminable hotel corridors by something with deep, dripping red jaws that were unstable, unravelling, leaving teeth the size of boning knives like mantraps to fox any hope he had of return. Shreds of white scarf dangled from them like flags of surrender. He was running out of routes. Becky's voice was somewhere, exhorting him to
turn this way, turn that way
, to
come on, for Christ's sake
. To
move
.

Light chanced across the way ahead; he arrowed for it. He could hear the rage and the upset in the throat of the thing that hunted him. He crashed through a revolving door that gritted and scraped upon lumpen shapes that threatened to block him in for good. But they did not catch and he was through and safe.

Here there was no stinging red rain or lightning or random fires. The ground was flat and there were animals grazing, swinging their heads up to regard him almost with bland amusement. The sea was topped by only the most occasional tilde of foam. He was no longer being pursued, but there remained the awful pressure of something at his shoulder, some presence demanding that he turn and sate the curiosity that was burning a hole through the back of his head.

He would not do it.

He felt a hand on his hair, pulling, scratching, trying to gain purchase on the ugly scar where the ice axe had glanced against his skull. A fingernail caught on the wound and he felt it loosen. He felt the matter inside him shiver like a barely set custard. He was going to come spluttering out of that gash, turned inside out like the contents of a plane's fuselage punctured at 40,000 feet.

But the hand only wanted him to turn and look. To acknowledge.

They had all been lashed to great posts of wood driven deep into the ground. Their arms had been broken behind them, tied against the wood so tightly that the canvas strips had bitten into their wrists. Their legs dangled. He could see where the heels of some of them had scraped into the wood as they tried to gain purchase, tried to lift themselves up enough to take a breath as they suffocated.

Something had been at them. Their bodies were torn and pecked. Their eye sockets were ragged holes. Their lips turned to purple scarecrow cross-hatchings where the integument was stabbed away.

The ground around them was a stew of feathers and blood. Their eyes swivelled to follow his progress beneath them. Open mouths struggling and failing to suck in the air they needed to cry for help or condemn him.

Jane jerked out of sleep, his mouth trickling with blood, his tongue filled with bright stitches of pain where he had bitten it. Had they been alive? Could he have helped any of them at all?

He sat up in bed. The slurry of rain at the windows. The dark hanging in the rooms like a poisoned cloud. The sheets were a tangled mess; he'd kicked them to the floor in the night. He could feel his heartbeat, very close, so close he almost mistook it for someone else's and sat there shivering, fists to his eyes, certain that someone would reach out and touch him in a moment. Someone whose blood was too cold and still to be deserving of such a heartbeat. He heard padded footsteps on the carpets in the halls. He heard the snuffle of his boy asleep, the occasional nonsense he would sometimes speak as an unknowable dream flitted around his mind:
Spiky crawns . . . Bye, George! Bye! Spiky crawns . . . you can't eat them.

Nance's jeans had been torn off her; the skin of her legs hung like badly adhered wallpaper. Chris's face was black, swollen to twice its size. The killers' meatless grins; fear shining through the narcotic haze in their eyes.

He shrank away from his own thoughts, dug his fists deeper into his eye sockets as if he could threaten the images away. It was past five a.m. There was no way back into sleep. He tried the water in the bathroom again but the spigots only breathed at him – they were dry. He dressed quickly and shouldered the rucksack. The room no longer seemed so inviting. The pile was too springy, it reminded him of walking on body parts in the Tyne tunnel. Too cold, too dark. A smell of staleness, of life in stasis.

Jane hurried down the stairs, his neck prickling as he imagined shadows leaping out behind him, begging him not to go, to stay in the hotel for ever with them because what was the point of trying any more? Death was thrown into ever more excruciating detail now, you couldn't focus on anything else. Surviving this only meant you wouldn't survive that, or the next thing, or the next. Death was queuing up to get you.

10. PICA

Jane got back onto the A1 and stretched his legs, found a rhythm and stuck to it. The shape of other dead towns grew firmer in his sight as his eyes accustomed to the dark. The chimneys and rooftops were depressing in their numbers. Endlessly replicated streets of punched-in windows and terror in every sitting room. These were not houses any more; they were mausoleums.

The pattern repeated itself. He walked. He fed. He slept. He restocked his supplies. He found new boots and clothes. He replaced the filters on his mask. He broke down at the side of the road and screamed and cried and wished things were different. He wished himself dead. His checks on conurbations he passed through became less thorough. He didn't want to pick up any more dependants.

He turned and looked back at the way he had come. He used the binoculars to see if he could find evidence of the figure he had seen in the white scarf. Already he was beginning to think it had been an hallucination. Nothing shifted on the horizon. It was as if he were dragging oblivion in his path, erasing everything in his tracks.

He wished Stanley dead.

He broke into a pub and drank himself into a stupor and woke up in some half-melted bus shelter apologising over and over and over . . .

Jane opened his eyes one morning to find he had overslept for the first time in weeks. He could feel illness sitting in his chest like flame just failing to catch on damp tinder. His breath was soggy, painful. He felt chilled to the bone yet saturated with perspiration. The light lanced him despite the tinted goggles.

He knew enough to drink plenty and often and was glad he'd recently replenished the fresh water in the bladder. But it quickly became obvious that this wasn't just some niggling cold. He developed a cough that soon began to saw in his throat; it sounded like some avian warning signal. He spat into the verge at the roadside and his waste was thick and green. Infection.

He was no longer exactly certain of his position. All of the road signs had been bleached white or burned black. The map was no longer of any use if he couldn't picture himself on its green dual carriageway, snailing his way south.

'Hi, Dad.'

'Hi, Stanley. You need a wee?'

'No.'

'Then stop fidgeting. You could fidget your way to Olympic glory, you could.'

'What means linpic?'

'Never mind.'

'What your doin', Dad?'

'Walking.'

'I'm tired.'

'Me too.'

'Can I go on your shoulders?'

'No. Carrying a bag up there.'

'Aw.'

'Come on, you're a big boy now. You can walk.'

'Where's the car?'

'Broken.'

'You broked it?'

'No. Something happened. All the cars broke.'

'What about motorbikes?'

'Them too.'

'Are motorbikes faster than cars?'

'Some.'

'Are motorbikes faster than cheetahs?'

'Oh yes.'

'Are cheetahs faster than swordfish?'

'We'll never know. Where's your mum?'

'I don't like girls.'

'You might, one day.'

'Boys are best.'

'We have our moments.'

He looked down to his side where Stanley was walking, but he had gone. Jane inspected his hand, as if he might see some ghost of his son enclosed within it, but there was just the usual network of filth and blisters.

He could no longer hear the ocean. He doubted he ever could, beyond its persistent echo in his thoughts. You lived and worked on the sea for long enough you heard its call when you were in the deepest parts of the inner city. You never forgot its voice. He had stopped. He was looking towards the coast, which was lost behind some urban pile that might have been Sunderland, Hartlepool or Middlesbrough. The only thing that shored up the misery was the way in which the land was condensing; there were fewer open tracts between cities. The bucolic sprawl towards Scotland was giving way to the industrial claustrophobia of the North-East.

He sat down in the road, listening to the squeak and burble of fluid in his lungs. He thought of eating something and his stomach flinched. He kept walking. His eyes streamed so that the view through his smeared goggles was of a world of splinters that he had to fight to keep vaguely horizontal. The wind bullied the clouds along, but there was never a break in their ceiling. The sun was a piss stain on a grey blanket. The ceiling lowered; its colour deepened. After an hour he saw lightning stab the earth maybe twenty miles to the west. Thunder concussed the air around him. He sensed rain building long before he felt it. When it came it was tropical. Large bullets pelted him. He took refuge in a barn on the edge of a field where rape might once have blazed but was now only so much ash and stubble. Farm machinery stood like some pathetic exhibition of past glories. Already the shape and purpose of such vehicles struck him as faintly ridiculous. He couldn't remember the sound an engine made. The howl of the wind and the memory of surf was a white noise that erased all others. He poured water from the bladder into a metal cup tied to one of the rucksack straps and added four soluble painkillers. He downed it before it was ready, crunching on the tablets and feeling them fizz on his tongue. Almost immediately a coughing fit caused him to bend double; he had to put out a hand to steady himself against dizziness, the scatter of light seeds across his vision. He hawked and spat. No blood, at least. Not yet.

He forced himself to eat: a small can of macaroni cheese, a small can of pineapple rings. The food rolled uneasily around; he lay on his side in swatches of straw that, if he pushed his face in far enough, smelled of childhood. He closed his eyes, concentrating on not vomiting. After a while he felt better, and realised that he must have slept: the fingers of light were pointing a different way through the cracks in the barn door. He sat up and a gruel of heat behind his sternum spread through the base of his lungs. It was a strange feeling, an itch deep inside him. He wondered if this was cancer's beginning; after all, he couldn't expect to escape every kind of physical repercussion.

Jane checked in his rucksack but there was nothing to help beyond the painkillers and a packet of blackcurrant-flavoured throat lozenges. Tired of cold food, he cleared a space and built a fire out of straw. He broke off some decaying slats of wood from the apron of the barn and positioned them above his kindling. He poured a little of the glycerine and potassium permanganate onto the straw. A couple of seconds later they combusted. He felt a tremor of the thrill he used to get as a child whenever he saw good magic being performed. 'Good work, Dr Becky,' he said. The words came out on razor wire.

He punched holes in the lids of cans of potatoes and stewing steak in gravy and placed them on the edge of the fire. He thought of hot baths and warm beds while he watched the food bubble, and ate with his fingers, juggling the scalding meat around his mouth and blowing out his cheeks. He blistered the roof of his mouth, but it was a good pain. He ought to cook more of his food; it improved it no end and it gave a brief illusion of normality.