One

by Conrad Williams

  'You went in? Deep?'

  'We walked for about twenty minutes. Straight in. It went on for miles. It got colder. At one point I turned the torch off, having a laugh with Nance, pretending the batteries had gone flat. It was so dark you couldn't see . . . you know the colour of your own blood behind your eyelids? None of that. Nothing. Nance freaked out. I freaked out. Torch back on. We decided we'd pretty much had enough after that. There was that worry – what if the batteries did fail? What if I dropped the torch and smashed the bulb . . . so we were just heading back when this enormous tremor hit us.'

  Jane waited. He had held his breath. He let it out now in a steady quiet stream, not wanting to interrupt Chris's flow. Chris was looking at his hands; his too were tigered with thin, sore-looking weals, as if they had been stung with a whip. He picked at the dry flaking skin around the marks.

  'It put us on our arses. I thought the tunnel was going to collapse on top of us. We were both screaming, and I think that put us in more of a panic than what was going on. After it had stopped we were still screaming. It took a while to realise it was over. We weren't hurt. Maybe a bruise or two. And then we felt this enormous heat. It just came charging down the tunnel. Where it had been cool, cold even. Damp. Now it was roasting. It was like being in a sauna. Steam everywhere. We started running. We just wanted to get out.'

  'What did you see when you got outside?' Jane's voice had become a narrow choked thing. He kept thinking of Stanley. Maybe he had been on the balcony when the tremor hit. Five flights up. Maybe he had fallen. Maybe not. Maybe he had been burnt to a crisp up there. His lungs turned to leather.

  'What you see now,' Chris said. 'Only there were fires in the woods. The sky was on fire too. Sheep were still standing in the fields, but they were burning. The whole place was burning. I thought we'd bought it. We hid at the tunnel entrance, trying to breathe. After a while – I don't know how long . . . hours maybe, maybe only minutes – there was a difference. There was rain. Horrible, burning stuff. Like acid. Oily and orange. But the fire in the sky went out. There was just this disgusting coloured smog. It got everywhere, coated the back of your throat like lard. Nance was sick.'

  Chris picked up his penknife and fiddled with the hinge. He did not look at Jane. 'We came back here. We buried a farmer we found in the car park. He was . . . Jesus. He was . . .'

  'Yes,' Jane said. 'I know. It's OK.'

  'It's not OK, though, is it?' Chris asked gently. 'Nothing's OK. I mean, how big is this? I tried using my phone to call 999. To call home. No signal. Nothing is working. No TV. No radio. I mean, how fucking huge is this thing?'

  'I'm revising my estimates almost every day. Upwards.'

  They sat in silence for a while. Eventually Nance came out of the bedroom, pausing at the threshold as if to check on the content of their conversation.

  'Did you see any other survivors?' Jane asked.

  Chris shook his head. 'I thought we should head for Newcastle, but Nance . . . she isn't ready yet.'

  'It's a good idea. Newcastle. Hospitals. Someone must have survived there. From what you described, it seems that exposure was the danger up here. In Newcastle there's more shelter.'

  Chris seemed infected by his enthusiasm. 'If it even reached that far,' he said. He got to his feet. 'It's got to be localised. Some awful offshore fuck-up. A nuclear sub. Those things carry heaps of warheads, don't they? Hiroshima times ten or something. We're just wrong place wrong time.'

  'I don't think so,' Jane said, quietly, shooting a look at Nance. Her attention volleyed moistly from one man to the other. 'It doesn't matter,' he added.

  'I can handle it,' Nance said. 'You'd rather I was standing here giggling?'

  'It's just . . . well, there'd be help by now,' Jane went on. 'It's been a week. Over a week. This place should be crawling with Hazmat suits and outside broadcast units from the BBC.'

  Chris sat back down. 'Yeah, you're right. My God.'

  Nance said, 'So what now?'

  Jane spread his hands. 'I'm headed for London,' he said.

  'Why?'

  'My little boy is there. I have to find him.'

  'Family,' Chris sighed. 'Shit. My dad is in his eighties. He's got diabetes, angina . . . Lovely little combo.'

  'He's in Sydney, right?' Jane asked. 'OK, so calm down a minute. It might be that this is localised after all, a UK thing. We don't know if it's global.' It hadn't occurred to him for a moment that it might be.

  'If it's global, it isn't terrorism,' Nance said. 'It isn't ''oops, I pushed the meltdown switch'' at the power plant.'

  'It can't be global,' Jane said.

  Chris turned his head to the window. 'Fire in the sky,' he said.

  They agreed to accompany Jane as far as Newcastle and assess the situation there. Chris had rebuilt his optimism and was convinced they would walk out of the danger zone into green grass and fresh air before they reached the city's outskirts.

  'There's nobody come to help because they looked at what happened and didn't expect any survivors,' he said, and he would not be shifted on his stance.

  Jane led them back across the field to his tent. They helped him dismantle it and pack it back in the rucksack.

  'Which way?' Nance asked. Sweat stippled her upper lip. She was clenching and flexing her fingers fast. He could see the tendons in her neck pulling the skin tight.

  Jane pointed south. 'Just keep the sea on your left and we can't go wrong,' he said. Nance was looking at Chris, signalling something with her eyes. 'Go on,' Jane said. 'I need to take a leak and get this pack on. I'll catch you up.'

  He watched them cross the road and sink out of view into the next field. Nance was talking intently, not allowing Chris to respond. Her head jerked towards him at the start of every sentence. Jane couldn't work her out. She seemed utterly uncoupled by events, but in the little bubble that she shared with her man she was determined, unshakeable, domineering. Jane had met a few people like that over the years and he didn't like them at all. They were often suspicious of other people and had a small circle of friends, if any at all. They never offered any solutions, never took the initiative, but behind the scenes they connived and agitated and planted seeds of doubt, usually with the one person they knew best, often a spouse who was so far under the thumb that they owned a flat head.

  He gave them a few moments to allow her to get whatever it was off her chest, then made to follow. But something held him back. He scanned the area where he had pitched the tent in case he had forgotten something, but there was nothing. He closed his eyes and tried to understand the feeling. Something was askew. Not the nude, scorched trees. Not the electricity of finding someone alive. Something else.

  He opened his eyes and wondered how he could have missed it.

  7. 2500°C

  They walked across the fields, boots scuffing on brittle furrow-slices, sending plumes of brown dust into the air. Chris and Nance quickly moved ahead, and Jane watched the argument they carried thickening between them, pushing them apart. Nance pecked at the air and Chris raised his arms as if to describe the size of some mythical fish he'd hooked. Jane left them to it. Despite having been alone for so long he didn't want to talk. The wind was beginning to alarm him; it was not any longer the hard, constant heel shoving him in the back, denting his eyeballs whenever he turned to look at the sea. It was becoming shapeless, directionless. Little tornadoes were fizzing up from the dusty fields. If he opened his mouth the wind stole in and made him gasp. The sky to the west had darkened, although it was still early morning.

  His fingers worried at the tiny curved cranium in his pocket. He wondered who might have left it for him. He ran his thumb over the horny beak sheath, and thought of its hue, and that of the chambers within, stained the colour of mahogany. Jane imagined litres of hot blood jetting through the pores in the bone over its lifetime. The skull was remarkably intact. The thin forked vomer was in evidence in the upper beak, as were the quadrates, which gave articulation to the lower jaw. No tissue clu
ng to the bone at all; it was as white as if it had been bleached. Whoever had cleaned this had done so with care and respect. Love, even.

  He took the skull out and inspected the great circles of its orbits. He blinked and something in the light allowed him to see the fierce, fixing yellow glare of what had once turned within those sockets. The focus, the deadly intent. It chilled him that something so small could be so violent. It had been built for the purpose of death. It had nothing in it other than the instincts of procreation and killing. He felt something stir inside him and suppressed laughter. He'd felt a sudden bond with the creature, with that way of life. He supposed it was in all people, that flicker of race memory, the hunter-gatherer mentality. The so-called civilised lifestyle had rubbed its edges away over the centuries. But it was still there, the romance of it, the grizzly part of you that got a thrill when you picked up a fishing rod or headed into the forest with a sleeping bag rolled up on your shoulders.

  He put the skull back in his pocket and hitched his pack tighter around his shoulders. He gave one last troubled look at the sky and hurried after the others. There was a marked disintegration in their mood when he caught them up. They had stopped snapping and talking over each other. Now there was a grim silence and a distance between them. Chris seemed crestfallen; Jane wondered if Nance had finished their relationship. He felt like laughing. You survived the end of the world, fate dumping you, and you get all mopy because your girlfriend tells you to lump it.

  It was Nance who drew his attention, however. She was still sweating, still doing that weird flex of her hands, as if she was suffering from a muscle spasm or a trapped nerve. Chris noticed it too, but although he kept shooting her looks he didn't say anything.

  'We'll hit the road soon, then we can pick up some speed,' Jane said. 'I've been making good time. It's all about rhythm. And making sure the weight of what you're carrying is well distributed.'

  They didn't appear to hear him. He put his head down and concentrated on walking.

  They'd covered around five miles through the dusty expanses of meadows and fields and forestland, all of it layered with ash and limbs of charcoal, the heat causing them to gasp and swear; Jane could feel the burn through the soles of his boots. This land would be a long time cooling down. The road was not worth considering. It had bulged and buckled; it looked as if some giant hand had gripped it further along and yanked it like a strip of carpet. Crash barriers and fallen street lamps created further obstacles. It was tough going on the farmland, but at least it was level and consistent. Up ahead electrical pylons had crashed to the ground. Hopefully the road would be fit for walking before they had to navigate those. He didn't want his discovery that the country's electricity had died to be a bad mistake.

  They were coming to another stunted reach of incinerated wood when Nance shrugged her rucksack off and started running for the road.

  'Hey,' Jane called.

  Chris was already trotting after her. 'We won't catch her. She ran for her school. She had state trials.'

  'Great,' Jane spat. They both lumbered in her wake. It must have been a good three miles to the dual carriageway and she just kept diminishing into the distance. Jane saw, before she skipped like a goat across the burst lava mass of blacktop, that she was wearing running shoes.

  Five minutes later they were at the road too. Jane took his backpack off and rested it against the warped ribbon of a crash barrier, colour side towards the sea so that he'd spot it against the grey when he returned. Both of them were breathing hard. Jane thought the years of slog on the seabed, fighting currents, might have improved his fitness, but he guessed his lungs must have been damaged to some degree.

  They tripped and skidded across the tarmac and followed Nance along a B road past a battered grain merchant's. Its grounds were host to dozens of silos, all of which had been lopped like boiled eggs. Tons of grain had been swept by the wind into drifts against brick walls and the burnt black skeletons of lorries. Beyond that and the railway, the earth sloped towards the sea.

  'Where the hell is she going?' Jane cried.

  Chris didn't answer but Jane received a reply when they started to run past items of her clothing. Chris gathered them up in his arms. He was calling out to her, but she would not stop. By the time they reached the coast, a further three miles away, Jane thought maybe his heart would burst. His clothes squirmed against his body, a layer of sweat sandwiched between them.

  They staggered across a bluff of volcanic rock and onto the beach proper. An immense flash of heat had turned it into opaque leaves of obsidian: black, dark green, firebrick red. Their boots chinked and clinked. The sea was a horrendous churning stew. Bodies rolled upon the surf. Far away to the horizon, when the waves allowed them to see, they could see huge tankers upended.

  Nance was naked, standing at the edge of the black froth of the breakers. Her feet were bleeding but she didn't seem to notice. They approached her carefully. Chris said her name but she didn't turn around. Her hair was lashing around her face. They couldn't see her eyes.

  'I'm going for a swim,' she said.

  Jane said, 'Not a good idea.'

  Chris touched her on the shoulder and retracted his hand quickly, as if he'd been burned. Jane saw his confusion. He didn't know how to deal with her. She was wild, you could see it in the sweat that swicked off her, creamy as that of a racehorse. It was in the tension of her muscles. Jane reached for her arm and she was hot iron. She pushed him away. Her body gleamed as if she too had been turned to glass in the furnace of the beach.

  'Nance,' he said, trying to keep his voice low and calm but able to be overheard above the torment of the waves and the howl of the wind. 'Nance, look at the water. Look at the steam coming off it. Look at the bodies. You go in there and you won't come out again.' Jane had never seen the sea appear so impenetrable. It looked as though it wore a skin, shining and thick, that would need to be pierced before you could submerge yourself. It was the molten tar that ran off the roads into the gutters. There was no sense of depth. You couldn't see the shadow of bladderwrack within it, or of sand churned up from the bed.

  Nance's body glittered with dust. She resembled an exotic dancer with sequinned flesh, pumped up and ready to do her shift at the pole. Her breath came quick and shallow. Jane took off his coat and put it around her shoulders. She didn't make any attempt to squirm away. She turned quickly, within the temporary circle of his arms, and pressed her body to his. He held her, conscious of Chris's incredulous expression. He wondered if he would say something. There was that strange feeling with Chris, that he was involved in some silly domestic game of one-upmanship. He had the slouched, downturned look of someone who is in a perpetual sulk about one thing or another. It was an insult to the people who had died to see him here now with the pilchard lip, deflated by Nance's need. He couldn't realise that it was directionless. If it had been the Yorkshire Ripper standing here, she'd have fallen into his arms instead.

  Jane led Nance back up the beach, away from the sea. Chris followed, dragging his heels. Jane held Nance by the arms while Chris dressed her. She had slackened somewhat, but her eyes still ranged across the horizon. It reminded him of Treasure Island, a book that had terrified him as a child. She was Billy Bones keeping constant watch for the seafaring man with one leg. By the time Chris had pulled her coat on and zipped it up, glancing at Jane as he did so as if to show him that this was his woman and she was now closed to him, Nance had lowered her gaze. She was shivering. Jane turned away. His eye caught the trembling line of tobacco sky to the west. The colour had deepened since dawn, and it had spread. He chewed his lip over it. Maybe it was another wave of poison, or fire. They would not escape it this time.

  'I think we should get back on the road,' he said. 'We should try to find some shelter.'

  'We'll never swim again,' Nance was saying. 'No sandcastles. No ice cream if you're good. Playtime's over, isn't it? We all have to wear serious faces for the rest of our shitty little lives.'

  Ja
ne was about to try to bring the subject around to Newcastle, to retrieving his pack, anything, when they heard the whistle.

  It was an SOS. Three short blasts, three long blasts, three short blasts. Jane thought he could see its author, standing against the volcanic fist of rock beneath Bamburgh Castle. What about me? he thought bitterly. What about someone answering my mayday?

  He left Chris and Nance to their inevitable row and trotted through the slag towards the figure. The shrill blasts of the whistle were becoming more frantic, now delivered to him so clearly that the blower might have been standing nearby, now whisked away by the wind so that their patterns became lost. He saw the figure, a white head on a thin blue body, slump to its knees. The whistle stopped. When Jane reached him a few minutes later he saw it was an old man. He did not look up, even as Jane's feet crunched loudly towards him. Jane turned back and Chris and Nance might well have been infected by all the obsidian on the beach and become glass sculptures; they had not moved from their original positions. He could see the ovals of their faces turned towards him as if waiting for some signal from him to animate them again.

  Jane wondered if the man would not look at him because of how alien he must seem. His breath sucked and rattled behind the bicycle mask like in a child's nightmare. The man still had the whistle in his mouth and it tooted pathetically as he exhaled. He let it fall from his lips. He said, 'She's dead.'

  'Who's dead?'

  'Ella, my granddaughter.'

  Jane didn't know what to say. He was itching to get away, to retrieve his rucksack and get back on the roads and rails south. Every minute spent putting sticking plaster on wounds here meant another minute away from the needs of his boy. He sensed movement and turned to see an elderly woman making her uncertain way down the mounds of bare land abutting the castle ramparts. The oldman stood up and went to her. They bussed against each other, like clouds, yielding, finding each other's shape with the surety that comes from years of companionship. Jane envied them that. He and Cherry had been together for seven years. Prior to that, his longest relationship had fizzled out at three. He had longed for the kind of security he could see being played out here in front of him, albeit born out of grief.