One

by Conrad Williams

  'You need, you mean,' Nance said. Jane tried to remember if she'd ever said anything without that trademark snarl of hers.

  'Yes, I need. You want to stay here, be my guest.'

  'You're not my fucking captain,' Nance said.

  'I refer you to the answer I gave some moments ago,' Jane said. He turned to Brendan and Angela. 'You with me? I'm sorry, I don't care all that much one way or the other. But I have to crack on.'

  Brendan nodded. 'I understand,' he said. 'We're with you, and – I mean it – if you feel we're keeping you back, you go on and floor it. We're better off already for knowing you. You got us off our arses. We'll be all right.'

  Chris and Nance went with them, but not without a volley of tuts and hisses and sighs. Jane heard Nance say something to Chris about sleeping out in the open again over her dead body. He wrestled with the urge to say that at least it would keep the damp out of Chris's clothes.

  The griping stopped eventually. The slog of the journey and bodies becoming visible in the fields like soldiers downed by gunfire worked as an excellent conversation stopper. Angela improved steadily throughout the day. He saw in her the woman she must have been before emphysema dragged everything south. Some people, no matter how old they became, carried within them that essence of youth. It was like astonishment, Jane thought. A way of looking at the world that was all wow. Such people never became bitter or cynical.

  They spent that night in a farmhouse. Bodies in the kitchen. Everyone had a bed to themselves. Happy, Chris? Jane found a new rucksack. Brendan found some maps of the north-east, but they couldn't work out how far they had come. It didn't matter. Knowing you were twenty miles or 120 miles from Newcastle didn't detract from having to cover that distance. Ignorance was bliss, in a way.

  The days tumbled into one another. Jane couldn't be sure if it had been three or four or five since Bamburgh. Angela's breathing began to become more laboured, no matter how much Ventolin she took. But at least the road wasn't so bad and Brendan could push her in the wheelchair for fair stretches before she had to get out to circumnavigate a damaged section. Eventually there seemed to be more and more villages. Jane could sense a picking-up of pace. It was as though they were going slightly downhill. Conversation became lighter. Angela laughed, a wonderful sound. Even Nance was more gregarious.

  The last night they spent before entering the outskirts of Newcastle, Jane awoke to the sound of screeching. He thought he'd dragged the sound with him out of a dream, but after a few seconds of hard breathing, and staring through a window opaque with heat discoloration, he heard it again and knew that it was outside, that it was following them. He sat up and pulled on his coat. Everyone else was asleep. He went downstairs and stood by the front door, his ear to the wood. The cry came at regular intervals, as though it was from the kind of creature that targeted its prey via sonic rebounds. He opened the door a little and felt the wind try to muscle it wide. He found himself trying to overlay the sound of Stanley crying over this, to try to make the sound that of his boy, so that he could do something. But it was nonsense. He remembered waking in the night as cats yowled in the street, thinking that it was a baby in trouble, but this sound was at the same time too bestial and too intelligent for that.

  It was a hawk of some kind. Or an eagle. Or an owl, even. He wished he could differentiate, but he had never been much of a twitcher. Stopper had been a member of the RSPB. He always took his binoculars with him wherever he went. 'Goes a skua,' he'd say one day and you'd look up and see this shape in the distant sky. A while later: 'Goes a guillemot.' And there didn't seem to be an awful lot of difference.

  Jane thought about going outside to see if he could spot it, but it was too dark. He'd only get lost and then he'd be in big trouble. He closed the door. Nothing had survived the Event, as far as he was aware, apart from a handful of people who had been shielded from its impact. Surely all the birds would have been wiped out. Which meant that whatever was making the noise was a human survivor. Or an approximation. What was it? An invitation or a warning? An all-clear?

  Irritated, he wandered around the house. There were no dead here. The furniture was functional, the decoration spartan. It reminded him of a stage set for a one-act play. He sat down at the kitchen table and wished for his turntable, his records. A cup of tea and the sound of Stanley upstairs playing with his toy keyboard. The thoughts would not shut out the terrifying screeching coming to him from across the fields. He looked out at the dark and imagined the kind of throat that shaped that noise. He thought he could see the glare of yellow eyes and the controlled madness that burned within them. It had not occurred to him that other survivors might not be as community-spirited and would seek to harm anybody who crossed their path. Surely they were a long way from squabbling over the last tin of beans in the land. Some might not see it that way, of course. You can't reason with an animal when there's food in front of its face. And maybe that was the thing, maybe they weren't people any more. It was time to regress. Everybody was an animal, after all.

  He fell asleep with his head on the ravaged wooden surface. Liberal parents. Naughty kids. Granma smells of wee. Don't we all, he thought.

  The fields gave way to thickening villages. The villages became more and more built-up at the outskirts of the city. The A1 curved west, as if cowed by the sight of it, happier to bypass it altogether and leave the entrance to lesser roads. They moved towards Gosforth; Brendan had found reference to a hospital there in a newspaper the previous night. It was a little unnerving to find themselves walking streets again. Jane had been expecting to see people, perhaps some kind of patrol group set up on the northern perimeter to watch out for survivors. He'd expected army trucks and soldiers in fatigues. Hot soup and the best medical attention that Britain had to offer.

  Within fifteen minutes they were wading through acres of dead.

  'This way,' Chris called. 'It's less . . . busy . . . this way.'

  They steered a course through the bodies, trying not to look, trying not to stand on anything. Angela kept her hand to her mouth. Some of the people had died with their hands fused to the handles of their doors, trying to get outside. Others had been partially incinerated; shadows of disappeared body parts remained against walls, like anasazi hand prints.

  They reached the hospital and stood watching it for a while. Jane couldn't understand why there wasn't any activity. It couldn't have destroyed everybody, could it? He glanced south for a moment, imagining London like this. Utterly silent and still. Spending years rooting through the bodies until he found that of his boy.

  He must have flinched because Angela took his hand, asked him a question with her eyes. He nodded, shrugged the moment away. To avoid any more inquisitive looks he strode away from them, over a mound of landscaped earth to the main entrance. The car park was like a dusty, hot garage forecourt of woebegone bangers.

  'I'll not be going in there,' Angela said. 'I don't think I could bear seeing dead people in a place meant to help you. If that sounds daft I can but apologise.'

  'It's all right,' Jane said, although privately he was irked that this diversion was for her benefit. 'Just tell me what you need and I'll see if I can find it.'

  'Salbutamol, like the Ventolin inhaler I've got now. Or Atrovent. As many as you can carry. And if you see any steroids like, oh, what is it Brendan?'

  'Cromolyn? Is it?'

  'Cromolyn, that's the one. Or I think there's one called Tilade, something like that.'

  Jane nodded, eager to be away. A goodie bag of drugs, a kiss, a handshake and all the best and it was him straight to the nearest Millets for a stock-up on camping supplies and off. Chris and Nance came with him, but he wished they'd stayed with Brendan to look after Angela.

  They pushed their way through the revolving doors of the hospital entrance. A security guard was swollen into his black serge suit so completely that he had split its seams. It hung off him like a soiled superhero cloak. A porter in a luminous orange vest drew attention that ought never
to be paid. Nurses in once-white uniforms were marbled with all the colours of the vital rainbow.

  There was an arrow pointing to the pharmacy. Jane headed for it quickly, hoping to put some distance between himself and the bickering Aussies. He tried to avoid looking at the figures slouched in wheelchairs, or on gurneys from which they would never rise. He imagined all the Do Not Resuscitate signs on the ends of beds. He thought of the morgue. No need for a discreet room now. Or body bags – the whole country was doing that job now.

  A short corridor led them past the radiology department. A man with a pair of crutches and his foot in an orthopaedic shoe was waiting for an X-ray. His face was covered with a towel. Jane stopped.

  'What is it?' Chris asked.

  'Where did that towel come from?'

  They couldn't answer. There was the slightest creak. Jane turned to see the heavy door to the X-ray room widen, a grimy hand with split nails white upon its edge. Before he could raise his hand, a woman with wild eyes came out of the darkness and slammed the end of a desk lamp into the side of his head.

  Jane touched the compress to the lump above his ear and winced. 'What are you doing here?' he asked. They were in the X-ray room. The woman had apologised profusely, assured him it was a case of mistaken identity. A boy sat in a plastic chair, his arm in a muddy-coloured cast. He watched Jane with big hopeful eyes, a child who has seen Santa unmasked and doesn't want to accept the truth.

  'I work here,' the woman said. 'I'm a radiographer.'

  'What happened?'

  'I don't know. Fire. An explosion.'

  'How did you and the boy . . .?'

  'The shield we use, for the X-rays. Aidan here, I was showing him what I do, to calm him down. I was showing him the buttons I needed to press before giving him his X-ray. Then there was this flash. I thought it was the machinery. A malfunction. But there was thunder in the corridors. I thought the whole building was going to come down.'

  Jane told them about his own experiences, toning it down for the sake of the boy. The woman shook her head throughout. He thought maybe it was in astonishment, but it turned out to be a rehearsal for her answer when he asked if she and Aidan were ready to leave.

  'I haven't been out since it happened,' she said. She gave Jane a loaded stare, gesturing lightly towards the boy. 'Not sure how good an idea it would be. Maybe best to wait for help.'

  Jane drew her to one side and lowered his voice. 'What's up with him?'

  She shrugged. 'He's been having a series of tests. Doctors are worried he might have some kind of blood disease. It's early days.'

  'And now, what? We won't know?'

  The woman shook her head and turned to regard Aidan. He was flicking switches on the malfunctioned control panel. 'He's always been a sickly child, according to his reports. Maybe things will iron themselves out over time. Maybe not. There's no help for him now, if it's serious.'

  'It might be that we're as much help as you're likely to see,' Jane said. 'There's a lot of . . . casualties out there.'

  'But we're fairly safe, secure here. There's plenty of food and water. Medical supplies. People will come to the hospitals. You proved it.'

  'If there are people, they will come.' He lowered his voice. 'I'm not sure how many people are left.'

  Aidan watched them owlishly. He seemed fascinated, as if he were being read some amazing bedtime story. Jane wondered about the boy. About his parents.

  'I'm on my way to London,' Jane continued, as if that alone might be inducement enough.

  'Long way,' the woman said.

  'Have you been out at all?' he asked.

  She shook her head. 'I prefer to stay with what I know.'

  'What about home? Family?'

  She shook her head again. He could tell she resented having to explain to a stranger, no matter the extraordinary circumstances. 'My parents died when I was in my teens,' she said. 'I have brothers and sisters, but nobody local. I never married.'

  Cruelly, he imagined her shaking her head whenever she was asked.

  'What about you, Aidan?'

  'Mum and Dad. Kerry, my sister.'

  'You tried to get home to see them?'

  He shook his head. 'They're here.'

  Jane felt the air stiffen around him. 'OK,' he said. He wanted to move on, but Aidan was making things difficult. He felt perfectly happy about leaving the others to fend for themselves, but Aidan was Stanley's age. He couldn't abandon him without making some effort to get him safe.

  'What about looters?'

  The woman sighed. She still appeared nervous, uncertain about Jane. Her gaze flickered to Chris and Nance, who were dithering by the door, trying not to look at the stiff, shrouded body in the waiting area.

  'A couple of days after it happened – I think, perception of time all messed up – I heard a bunch of people come in here, running around the corridors. I thought help had arrived, but they were screaming, laughing. We hid. They must have been pissed or drugged up. Plenty of free goodies on offer now, I suppose.'

  'You saw them? They still around?'

  'They moved on,' she said. 'I think they were just kids.'

  'What did they take?'

  The woman shrugged. 'The pharmacy has been raided. A lot of uppers and downers gone. The snack machines have been emptied. I saw a lot of empty wallets and purses lying around.'

  'You can't buy anything, actually,' Aidan said. 'Actually, they're just idiots.'

  The woman laughed, a little too breathily, a little too close to tears, but it broke the mood. She realised she was still holding the crutch and tossed it to one side.

  'How's your head?' she asked.

  'I think I need an X-ray.'

  Jane liked her despite the assault. It wasn't just the Pavlovian response a lot of his oil platform colleagues displayed when confronted by a woman, although it had been a long time since Jane had enjoyed female company. There was something about her that nibbled at him. Maybe it was the way she had selflessly protected Aidan – the latent mother come to the fore – or maybe it was just the way she was decked out. She wore simple clothes – a short-sleeved white blouse, jeans, leather sandals and a long amber necklace. She had an easy physicality about her. She was slender, long-limbed, but not gawky. He liked the way she turned a rub of her forehead into a slow trawl of her long shaggy hair. He'd always liked girls with a thick mane on them.

  'What's your name?' he asked. He was thinking, Jesus, hit me again.

  'Rebecca,' she said. 'Becky. Becky Bass. It should be like the fish, or the brewery, but I prefer it pronounced like the guitar.'

  A cough from the doorway. Chris said, 'This is fascinating, really. But we should get back to Angela and Brendan.'

  'Do you know if anybody else survived?' Jane asked. 'Anyone from the hospital?'

  The shake of the head. She had it down pat – a skill no doubt learned in childhood. You could say no all you liked with eyes as beautiful as that.

  Becky agreed to accompany them on their search for supplies; Jane saw it as a start. She looked as though she wanted to go but the professional in her was the anchor. 'There's nothing to be done here,' Jane pressed.

  'Survivors,' she said.

  'They'd be here by now.'

  'You weren't.'

  'We've been on the road for days. I was thinking of Newcastle survivors.'

  Becky turned to Aidan, as if silently canvassing for support.

  'You can't stay here,' Jane said.

  In the pharmacy she led them to a few of the shelves where stock had been ignored. Painkillers and antiseptic, syringes and penicillin went into Jane's rucksack, along with bottles he didn't recognise.

  'Isn't that for diarrhoea?' Chris asked, intercepting a phial of potassium permanganate.

  'Yes,' Becky said. 'But mix it with this' – she brandished a bottle of glycerin – 'and you get fire.'

  Jane did his best to shield Aidan from the casualties as they made their way back to the entrance – a quadrangle was heaped with bo
dies wearing bloodied, rain-scarred hospital gowns – but Aidan did not seem affected by the atrocity. He kept batting away Jane's hand and asking, 'Is he dead?'

  'He's been doing that for a week,' Becky explained. 'On the X-ray bed he was asking, Will it hurt? Will I die?'

  It was probably the ideal age for a child to be caught up in an extinction-level event, Jane thought. Any younger and it would be non-stop crying. Any older and there'd be catatonia. Five-year-old boys and death were a fine match. In years to come, though, there could be some serious fallout in store for Aidan. Some enterprising young therapist, if there were any left, would get colossally rich on the back of this one day.

  Brendan and Angela were in the same position in which they'd left them, holding on to each other as if afraid that one of them might defy gravity. They regarded Becky and Aidan with a naked pleading.

  'We found some portable oxygen canisters,' Jane told them. 'And enough Ventolin to clear out Kong's chest.'

  Brendan asked Becky: 'Are you a doctor?'

  Aidan said, 'Am I looks like a doctor?'

  They were readying to leave, Jane making his final appeals to Becky who was shaking her head, backing away, feeling for the entrance to the hospital behind her. A klaxon went off, dopplering through the blistered, blustery sky like the appetite cry of some fantastic beast. Jane swivelled on the step. He could see nothing beyond the thick ranks of cemetery cars. Dust had turned them all the same colour. It was piled thickly on the windscreens, obliterating any views within.

  The klaxon came again, closer. Was this the sound they had heard in the nights on their approach to the city? Jane doubted it; that had been more organic – this was compressed, synthetic, impersonal. It had the air of code about it; he imagined a gathering of weaponised shadows closing in around them. Spies on rooftops coordinating an attack.

  'I don't like this,' he said.

  'What?' Chris said. 'Survivors? Like us? Are you worried your trip down to London is going to be delayed even more?' 'It doesn't feel right,' Jane said.

  'That's because nothing is right any more,' Nance said. Chris curled an arm around her, trying to disguise his surprise at her support.