'No,' Jane said. 'It would be kind of nice if they did, compared to their usual MO.'
'So maybe the same person who caught up with Fielding, you think?'
'Or someone in league.' Jane peered into Aidan's eyes. They were dark brown, so dark it was hard to discern their pupils. The rest of his face was open, fresh. He'd have had an innocent look about him if it weren't for those eyes and the soft frown above them. He'd seen a lot, Jane supposed. More than he ought. 'Where have you been, Aidan? You're your own man, I know, but we care about you. We're not your mum and dad, but we're your friends. It doesn't stop us from worrying.'
Aidan pressed his lips into a flat line. When he spoke again, it was with forced brittleness. Jane saw behind it immediately; he knew him too well by now. His hand at his belly again. Hungry, probably. Jane wished he hadn't snaffled that wafer.
'Just . . . hanging out with friends. Experiments, you know. Down at the river. Checking the air quality. Someone has to.'
'And how is the air quality?'
'Epic fail,' Aidan said. 'Major no.'
'Doesn't look like the HQ's moving in, does it?'
'No.'
Jane scratched at his beard. The sound seemed enormous. 'Fielding gave me the envelope . . .'
'An envelope.'
'Sorry?'
'Fielding gave you an envelope. It wasn't the envelope.'
'You mean I was given false information?'
Aidan didn't say anything. He couldn't meet Jane's gaze.
'Why are you here, Aidan? You get the same dodgy map?'
'Something like that,' he said.
'Something like that.'
The hand on the belly. A prickle of sweat drawing attention to the frown.
'You OK, Aid?' His mind went back to the first time they'd met. Becky's concern. The thought of his blood conspiring against him.
'Yeah. Just tired. Just hungry. You promised me a roast dinner once.'
'Shit. You didn't forget that, did you?'
'Can I have it now?'
They had picked through the debris of countless restaurants and bars to no avail. Everything worth eating had been carried off. What remained were the bones of people who had decayed where they'd dropped many years before. No chocolates or fudge in the duty-free boutiques. No snack packs dangled in the vending machines.
'What about out there?' Aidan asked.
'There's nothing out there,' Jane said. 'You mean the houses beyond the perimeter?'
'No. I mean the planes.'
They found a self-propelled passenger stairway in a maintenance hangar and trundled it out to a Virgin Atlantic 747 that had pushed back from its ramp at the moment the Event hit it, peeling off much of its paint and tearing the tail section clean off the rear of the aircraft. The flap canoe fairings had been snapped away from the underside of the wings like model parts, and the main jet-core shrouds were torn, revealing the intestinal squirm of the machine beneath. A telegraph pole had become a javelin, thrown by 200 mph winds from outside the perimeter fence, puncturing the fuselage above the sagging portside wing. Both wings had given up their yield of fuel; maybe 120 tons had poured out of the cracked tanks and evaporated, leaving a dark stain that reached out almost as far as the main runway. It was a wonder there had not been an explosion. The roof of the cockpit had been crunched in, a hard-boiled egg beneath a spoon, by something that was no longer in evidence. Jane thought he could see a white shirtsleeve, an arm thrown back on the flight deck, above a face that was nothing but shadow.
'Maybe we should try a different plane,' Jane said. 'I mean, this one was just setting off. There'll be a lot of bodies on it.'
'Then there'll be a lot of food too. They wouldn't have started serving until they got into the sky, would they?'
Aidan was right. A smaller plane taxiing towards the terminal would have had an empty galley. What was the point of protecting him from bodies when they were everywhere you looked? Jane sighed. Just to give him a break, he supposed. It would be nice not to have all that grinning in your face all day, every day.
The doors were sealed; the holes pitting the skin of the jet too small to climb through. They pushed the stairs around to the back of the plane. There was a ragged hole where the empennage had been.
'Big enough for you?' Jane asked. Aidan nodded.
Jane raised the stairs to the hole; they rattled in the spanks of wind gusting in from across the wide, open airfield.
'See if you can open that rear exit for me once you're in,' Jane said. 'Don't fanny about.'
Aidan skipped up the stairs and hoisted himself into the Jumbo. A few moments later his face appeared at one of the windows. He gave Jane a thumbs-up. He ducked clear of the window and a few seconds later the door folded outwards. Jane withdrew the stairs and repositioned them at the doorway. Inside he drew the door to, not closing it completely. A sudden snapshot in his head: Rae and Carver exploding through the crack in a door. He couldn't get on with doors any more. Closed, open, they would never stay still in his thoughts.
'All right?' Aidan asked.
'Yes,' Jane said, a little too stiffly, and looked beyond Aidan's shoulder to the ranks of dead sitting strapped into their seats. They had died primly, hands clasped in front of them, watching a stewardess at the front of this section of the cabin who had collapsed in the middle of performing her safety procedures. There were children with colouring books and iPods and hand-held game consoles. Everyone was thin in their clothes, dwindled into seats. Oxygen masks hung from the cabin ceiling, octopoid creatures reaching for prey. Punkah louvres in the overhead units had melted and hardened before they could drip to the floor. They resembled waxy stalactites. One of the bulkheads had been split by the telegraph pole that now blocked the portside aisle leading to the front of the plane; part of the vacuum-moulded wall panel had sheared free; insulation was a frozen cloud seeping from behind it. Rainwater had poured in through the fissure, warping fixtures, swelling the bodies it touched.
Jane said, 'Let's check the galleys.'
They ransacked the six galleys and found meal-tray trolleys loaded with spoiled food that had rotted away to a crisp film on the plates, like dried algae, over the years. But there were plenty of packets of nuts that, although past their use-by date, seemed fine. The two of them sat on the cabin floor gobbling snacks so quickly that there wasn't much tasting going on. Minutes later, the floor strewn with empty wrappers, they were too full to speak. Jane picked crumbs from his sweatshirt and fed them to himself. Aidan pressed his hand to his belly and slowly lost his expression of satisfaction as it became one of harrowed concern.
'We should have taken it easy, shouldn't we?' Jane asked, patting his own stomach. 'We'll probably cramp up something chronic.'
Aidan nodded. 'We should get some stuff for Becky,' he said. His voice wavered for a second, as if he was going to start crying. Nothing strange about that, thought Jane. A young lad who finds something tasty for the first time in many months, maybe a year or two. Even I'm filling up. And all the while, beneath that, Something is wrong, something is very wrong.
He followed Aidan to the next galley, stepping over withered limbs sticking out into the aisle; his feet turning tacky in whatever had washed and set upon the floor. They unloaded the bagged snacks from the trolleys and stashed them in Jane's backpack. They found miniatures of gin, rum, vodka and whisky; tins of mixer. There was Coca-Cola and 7-Up and Carlsberg lager.
'Let's get sloshed,' Jane said, and mixed himself a gin and tonic. 'No ice, no lemon. Hardly a civilised drink.' But it sluiced through the desert of his mouth like a monsoon. 'Bubbles,' he sneezed. 'Jesus, that's good.'
Aidan refused the alcohol, sipped instead at a can of lemonade. Jane felt bright, alert, refreshed, but Aidan did not look as though he was returning from his enervated state. His eyes retained their dull lustre; they resembled glass eyes. They almost fooled you, but they lacked that essential something.
'Are you OK?' Jane asked, hating the wheedling in his voice; he'
d asked the question already a dozen times since they'd met.
'I'm fine,' Aidan said.
'Becky was worried about you,' Jane said. 'She misses you when you're not around.'
Now the gloss came to his eyes. He was crying and trying to hide it, his small chest barely able to keep from jerking. Jane was conscious of the small boy still within Aidan, and when he dropped his head he could almost believe that this was how Stanley might look. It was gloomy in the passenger cabin. He might be standing here with his own son; his boy needed him.
Jane put out a hand, whispered, the words barely denting the air as they slipped from his lips: Stan.
'Don't you!' Aidan screamed, whipping his head up and fixing Jane with a hot stare. He shook his head, nodded, shook his head again. A knowing smile deepened the shadows in his face.
'I'm sorry,' Jane said. 'I meant nothing by it.'
'Ever since I saw you. That first day in the hospital. You've been looking at me like you love me and you hate me at the same time.'
'That's not—'
'It is true. You want me to be Stanley. And you hate me for not being him. You hate me for surviving and you wish he had lived and I was dead.'
Jane reached for him again, but Aidan flinched, stepped back. His foot landed on a shin which crumbled like chalk. 'Stanley's alive, Aidan,' he said.
'See?' Aidan yelled, gesturing wildly, as if he were beseeching the passengers around him. 'See? You can't leave him alone. When it's the two of us alone in a room? It's actually three.'
'You can't condemn me for that, Aidan. It's not my fault. You—'
'HE'S DEAD! HE'S FUCKING DEAD!'
Jane only realised he had hit the boy when he felt the raw sting in the knuckles of his right hand. Aidan was on the floor, one hand covering his mouth, the other scrabbling against an armrest as he tried to pull himself upright.
Jane held up his hands. 'Aidan. God, I'm sorry. I'm . . . I was bang out of line. I should not have done that.'
The spark was gone from Aidan. The matte eyes blinked at Jane. He wiped blood from the corner of his lip, regarded it for a long time with some fascination, as if he were looking at a rare jewel. He stared back at Jane and his voice was no longer edged. 'He is dead.'
21. SOMA
They spent the next few hours at separate ends of the aircraft. Aidan would not leave, despite Jane's pleas. It was getting dark. Figures were moving around the edges of the airstrip, stopping, and turning their way. Even if they could not see Jane and Aidan maybe they were nonetheless baffled by the new scents. It was early enough, and there were sufficiently few Skinners around, for Jane and the adolescent boy to make a getaway, but they had to go now.
'Why did you bring me out here, Aidan?'
Aidan wouldn't answer.
The dark came on, creeping through the fuselage like black ink drawn into the reservoir of a fountain pen. The emptied windows provided soft charcoal shapes against the jetblack. Jane heard the shuffle of feet on the runway apron. After a while he could hear the phlegmy breath of them beneath the aircraft. Something barged against the stairs, causing them to rattle massively. Jane remembered he had left the door open. He ran to it now and shut it, locked it. Hissing and howling from outside; they knew there was something to be had in here.
Jane glanced at the ragged hole in the tail. If they moved the stairs and came up there they would not fit through, but they would shred the thing wider within minutes. He had to hope that their being unable to see the hole was enough. You couldn't smell what wasn't there, surely. But then they did move the stairs. Jane heard them being wheeled away from the door. He cast around for a weapon, expecting them to attack, but they were returning the stairs to the main building.
'Just great,' he murmured. 'Three storeys up now, Aidan. What are we going to do? Jump down in the morning? We going to carry each other back to the centre with broken legs?'
Aidan wasn't saying anything. Jane looked down the aisle at him; he could just make out his shape, limned by the palest ambient light, sitting in the dark like a Buddha. His head was down over his chest, his hands resting on his crossed legs. He might have been asleep, but Jane didn't think so.
He wanted to say something, but there seemed to be no way back from what had happened. Aidan was right. All this time he had looked at Aidan and seen his own son. He wondered if he shouldn't be excused for that. But then he realised that Aidan had lost everyone too: his father, his mother, his sister; a worse scenario than Jane's in many ways, but he had been too wrapped up in the epic scenes of his own mind – the eventual reunion with Stanley chief among them – to show even a rudimentary empathy. Becky had been the gauze on his wounds, the kiss goodnight, the arms to fall into during the worst of the nightmares. Jane had either been turned in on his own reveries or trying to measure Aidan for a body cast that would never fit, and should never have been tried on in the first place.
He looked out at the night. Tow tractors crouched low at the edge of the airfield, as if trying to dodge out of view. Shreds of a windsock rippled violently against the sky like an escaped, frantic thought.
'Why did you bring me here, Aidan?'
He thought of Becky at Plessey's shop, sorting through batteries or touching an alligator clip to the crystal radio, listening to voices hundreds of miles away offering hope or some bastardised version of it. He thought of a raft so great that you could build villages on it. He thought of fetching up on Normandy beaches lined with a welcoming party of skeletons in their millions, or Skinners sharpening blades on strops made from the hides of children.
He dismissed the image and turned away from the window, disgusted with himself. The grim thought had never been far from his mind, even during the days of normality. Evenings sitting on the balcony with his wife, sharing a bottle of wine, listening to Johnny Mercer or Bobby Darin, the bricks, the roads, the sky touched by that soft pink stain of summer, he'd envisage, suddenly, Stanley falling from the heavens to impale himself on railings. He'd imagine a gas pipe shearing and igniting, hosing his son in the face with thousands of degrees centigrade. The balcony crumbling, sending him to unforgiving concrete twenty yards below. The worry could never be confined, it was never something over which he held sway. It was always a wild uncontainable panic that had so many strands to it that he could not keep track. It was like trying to put an eel in a jam jar with greased hands.
Another thought cut across all this, unbidden, unconnected: What if Becky is dead?
It was no effort, really, to imagine her being peeled while something drooled above her, staring into her with black sockets, its teeth manifold, curved, like the spines you might find within an exotic carnivorous plant if you pushed it inside out. Beyond those rows of canines, something like the grinding bits at the business end of tunnelling machinery. He had heard that bizarre mouth working on occasion, mincing the life out of whatever it came into contact with.
Jane did not realise he was dreaming by now. The shadow line between real life and unconsciousness seemed to be growing softer by the day, a charcoal border smudged by a thumb almost to invisibility. He was aware of the bodies sitting all around him in their cramped rows. A Japanese woman in the next seat turned her head on the grinding apex of her barebone neck and leered at him. Her jacket yawned as she leaned nearer; he saw mould spots on the cup of her bra, the grey, sagging puffball within it. Flakes of her snowed on him as she struggled to speak.
Much more leg room now, don't you think? It's the ultimate diet.
Jane started awake. He was holding the famished claw of the woman next to him. He bolted out of the seat, disorientated. He had thought of his flare-up with Aidan, and was now convinced that when Aidan had screamed he's dead he had meant himself, not Stanley.
'Aidan?' he called out. But there was silence. 'Aid?'
For a second he thought the boy had left him, monkeying out of the aircraft and down to the tarmac, abandoning him here. But then he saw him where he had been all along, tipped forward, hands curled into his
lap. The ghost of Stopper seemed to shimmer at his shoulder, a suggestion that this was the classic position of the vein-opener, and he rushed to Aidan, convinced he had killed himself. But the truth was far worse.
Jane stopped six feet short of the boy. Already he could see that Aidan, or what had once been Aidan, was near death if not dead already. The dull sound of gristle popping, like someone jointing a chicken, was a queasy explosion in the base of Jane's head. He put his hands to his ears, but it was as persistent as a bad tune heard on the radio.
He could do nothing to save Aidan. By the youngster's side he saw perhaps two dozen duotone capsules: protein-pump inhibitors that Aidan had saved but not ingested over the past three weeks or so. He was allowing himself to be hollowed out. He saw the physicality of what was invading him move through his bones, dissolving him, absorbing him, filling his shell. Aidan's slender muscles bulged and deflated. His eyes, filling with red, sank into his face as his head tilted back.
'Why?' Jane asked it. Aidan's shoulders jerked back, a violent shrug. His lips grimaced and pursed; blood pulsed from between them. The ring of his teeth was ejected; his jaw and soft palate slithered down the slick on the front of his jumper. Jane moaned, covered his mouth. Aidan's hair jumped and danced as if it were teeming with lice. His hand turned from a fist to a star: a Stanley knife popped clear of it. Jane snatched it up. The blade was black with dried blood, the edge uneven where it had blunted itself against bone. A rag of cleanly shaven flesh had jammed in the slot where the blade could be retracted. Jane could almost smell Fielding's cologne upon it.
He threw the tool away. He had maybe fifteen minutes before the Skinner emerged; already there were strains appearing in the thinned cyanotic flesh of the boy. He would begin to tear soon. Perhaps Aidan had come out here having duped Jane into making the trip. Perhaps he had intended to apologise. But it was too late; he had been doomed long before this moment, probably at the time he stopped taking the drugs. Possibly earlier, in the second they clapped eyes on each other in a Newcastle hospital.
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