One (27 page)

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.'