One

by Conrad Williams

  Jane went back to the door at the rear of the 747. Long way down. He heard the splash of Aidan's internal organs as the picky Skinner evicted them. There was a deep grunt, deeper than anything Aidan had ever said. Like the rest of him, his voice was broken for good.

  Jane unclasped the overhead storage bins and swept through the luggage, looking for something that might help. Too late, he realised there would be an axe in the cockpit, but he would not be able to get past the Skinner in the starboard aisle now. The flight deck would be secured from the inside anyway.

  He had to accept that Aidan was gone for good. What hulked and slobbered in his place, though it resembled the boy, was one hundred per cent meat-head. No reasoning. No compassion. No guilt. Aidan, at least, at last, had been unable to live with what he had done. It didn't matter that he had put Jane in a dangerous position; he hoped that, in extremis, Aidan had failed to grasp that. He couldn't believe he could be so calculating, no matter how thoughtless and unsympathetic Jane had been towards him over the years.

  The wet sounds had stopped. The Skinner, recently born, was hungry. It was pulling Jane's smell into its head, trying to differentiate his scent from the dead bodies arrayed around it. This was it; he was going to have to jump and risk a shattered ankle or a compound fracture of the shin. Crazily he thought of school, when a friend had told him that you had to bend your knees during a parachute-jump landing, otherwise your spine would come ramming through the top of your skull.

  Thanks for that, he thought, peering through the window and trying to assess the severity of the drop. It must be twenty feet, straight down onto cold, hard concrete. He levered open the door and looked for handholds of any kind, but the skin of the jet was smooth. No vehicles nearby that he could leap onto. The nearest were a mobile belt conveyor and a commissary truck, both fully thirty yards away.

  Jane glanced back and saw Aidan looking directly at him, the skin of his face flat, the frown ironed out of it, sheened with sweat or leeched fat or some other serous leakage. Not tears, though – Christ, never that. It can't see you.

  Jump. Use the box-cutter on your own throat. Something. Do something.

  He sat on the edge of the doorway and propelled himself forward. The wind caught him and tried to suck him out. No way. No shitting way. Where was there a rope when you needed it?

  He swung his legs back in and stood up. A body in the seat nearest his was shrugging herself out of her cardigan. He helped her. Then he was frantically tearing clothes off everyone within reach, tying crude knots into cuffs and hems; attaching belts, attaching ties. He had about fifteen feet of improvised line when the Skinner, attracted by the noise of his excited breathing, and the exotic dust he was causing to puff up from the bodies around him, came shambling over the seats diagonally towards him.

  Jane cinched one end of his makeshift rope to an underseat baggage-restraint unit. He jerked on it twice, hard, and the knot only shrank, tightening itself. He stood on the edge of the doorway and leaned back, gripping the clothes, feeling the dust and grease of human decay seep out of the fibres. He wrapped one leg around the rope and began to lower himself as the face of the Skinner emerged from the darkness. He went so quickly that instead of being able to set himself at the end of the rope for the drop of five or six feet that remained, as he had planned, he fell to the floor awkwardly. For a second he thought he had twisted his ankle, but there was no damage to bone or ligament. He'd have a bruise. He could walk through the pain of that.

  He glanced back at the jet but the Skinner was no longer facing his direction. Perhaps, his scent dispersed into the air, it had lost interest in him, had switched off. It was turned towards the north. He felt a pinch in his heart when he saw the Skinner wipe its nose with the back of its hand, a mannerism that Aidan had not been able to shake from childhood. Perhaps he was not yet fully absorbed. Perhaps Skinners assimilated little tropes of behaviour from their victims. It just made it all the more sad.

  The shape of the wind changed. He heard screams on the edge of it, carried from the other end of the airfield, beyond Terminal 5. They were women's screams. Pained, almost bestial. Howling. Something in the sound made him want to go to them.

  He found himself striding across the tarmac, and it was only when the screams began to assault his ears without the sonically softening buffer of the wind that he hesitated. A thin red light trembled on the horizon, staining the lowest part of the sky. He could hear something else now, but his mind would not allow him to identify what it was. Know this and you shut down for good. There is no coming back from something so dark.

  Jane turned and fled.

  The journey back to the city centre was achieved in a fug of disgust and regret and pain. Despite the shutters coming down in his mind the previous night, Jane kept trying to tease them open. It was like a facial scab. Your fingers kept gravitating towards it without you realising. The pain in his foot helped. He had had to cut his bootlaces in the morning, the flesh having swollen during a night spent wrapped around his beloved rifle in a crumpled heap of groaning containers that had been blasted into the garden of a house backing onto the Longford river, just south of the airport. He'd wrapped a triangular bandage around the swelling, making sure he could still waggle his toes when it was tied off. He ate a packet of nuts and spat bloodily into the earth. His teeth felt as stable as decorations pushed into a cake. Two of them were loose, an incisor and a pre-molar. His gums bled at the slightest pressure. If he ran his tongue across his teeth he'd be spitting red for a good twenty minutes. The menace in the air was catching up with him after all this time. He wondered, if Becky could get any of her X-ray machinery to work, if his body would be riddled with black stains.

  He walked towards the suggestion of the sun as it dawned behind the thicket of bronze permacloud. He barely registered the topography as it altered around him. He was shivering, despite his thick waterproofs.

  East Bedfont. North Feltham. Spring Grove. Brentford. Kew. Turnham Green. Shepherd's Bush.

  Jane felt at one point as if he was not so much walking towards as being sucked into his destination. London was a plughole drawing anything down that was not tethered fast. When the sawtooth architecture at the river's edge emerged it reminded him of nothing other than the crippled shape of his own jaws. He didn't feel as if he had returned or arrived. He didn't feel at home. It wasn't places that did that for you, he understood now, way, way too late. It was people.

  It was getting dark. The sun had leapt over him and was at his back now, sinking into that part of the country that was a red rim of terror in the pit of his thoughts. The howling of the women. He thought he could never have felt anything but shock for a woman who screamed like that, but he had smiled into the face of one, once, long ago. He had kissed it, gently brushed away the damp hair that latticed it, whispered his love to it.

  Her hand had gripped his so hard that they were like white ice statues. She didn't have the spit to keep her lips dry. They were stuck to her bared teeth, cracking, a pain smile. Eyes slitted, turned to him, confused, afraid. He'd squeezed her hand as hard as she had gripped his and urged her on, told her how amazing she was, how much he loved her. Stanley had burst from her with the cord wrapped around his neck, a meconium-streaked shock. Jane had reared back at the violence and mess of it all. For one brittle second he feared his son and resented him for what he had done to his wife. But it all dissolved into concern and love. Love so pure and deep that it seemed to make a mockery of what he felt for Cherry.

  He made it back to Spitalfields in a gloom so dense he thought he must get lost. He forced his way through the razor-wire barricades and hammered on the door. Nobody came. He tried the handle and the door opened. Mothballs and soup. A smell of age. 'Becky?'

  No reply. He shrugged the rifle from his shoulder and followed its muzzle into the shop. He closed the door behind him. He checked each room but could find no Skinners, no evidence of a struggle or a death. Becky was gone.

  He went back outside and re
positioned the razor wire. He locked and bolted the door and pressed his head against it. Safe now, for a while. Darling, I'm home. He could feel an ache pulsing behind his skull, transmitting through to the wood, almost knocking at it. A cough was hatching in his chest. Cold had reached deep into him. What was it Stopper used to say? I feel like seven different kinds of shite all knocked into a one-shite thimble. He moved through to Plessey's workshop, thinking of listening to some broadcasts, but the crystal radio was gone. He couldn't find it in any drawer or filing cabinet. He thought about where it might be; who might have taken it. He wished Becky was around. He missed her terribly.

  Jane lit candles and put a flame to the wood stove in Plessey's cosy little kitchenette. There was a water butt labelled Lavage at the heavily barred fire escape at the back of the shop. He knocked his hip against it, listened. Plenty. He carried countless pans of water to the stove and to the bath. When it was full and steaming, Jane undressed, closing his eyes against the dips and hollows and shadows, and slid into the water. He shampooed his hair and clipped his fingernails. He massaged the blood back into his toes. When he got out, the bath revealed a tidemark of dark grey scum. He towelled himself dry in front of the warm stove. He cut his hair with a pair of sharpish barber's scissors from one of Plessey's chests of wonders and shaved, carefully, with a cut-throat razor and some rose-scented cream whisked onto his bristles with a shaving brush made from badger hair.

  He ate warm chicken soup with stale water biscuits crumbled into it. He sat in Plessey's leather armchair in a towelling bathrobe sipping cognac, his other hand on the stock of the rifle lying across his lap. He felt reborn. When he slept, he dreamed of a black lake, still and deep, surrounded by black mountains and a sky bluing at its edges, brimful of stars. He dreamed of Cherry's body, the way it had been when they met, not towards the end when she refused to be naked in the same room as him. She had been slender, almost athletic. She liked to squeeze her breasts when he made love to her. It turned him on to see her so thrilled by her own body. He dreamed of her now, beneath him, moving to his rhythm, her fingers snagging and tickling at her nipples. She looked up into his eyes and there was nothing there. No recognition. No love. No sense of who she was herself. He was looking up at himself through her eyes. No sweat, no expression of mounting excitement. They both stopped fucking. They both deflated, like rubber dolls under a knife. There was nothing to them whatsoever.

  Knocking at the door.

  Jane wakened feeling drowsy and unfamiliar. He was hot. He wiped sweat from his brow. The room was baking. He got up from the armchair and slopped cognac over the bathrobe. He got his finger behind the trigger of the rifle, the butt under his armpit, and scurried to the door, the muzzle of the gun pointing at the ground by his foot. He held his breath and placed his ear to the door. He heard something shuffling outside. He heard a muttered oath and knew this was no Skinner.

  'Who is it?' he called.

  'It's Simmonds.'

  He opened the door a crack and her lachrymose expression dipped into view.

  'What's going on?' he asked.

  'You've scrubbed up well,' she said. 'Hot date?'

  He waited, staring at her.

  'We're on the move,' she said.

  'What? Where? How do you mean?'

  Simmonds looked behind her. 'You think you might let me in? I know it's daytime and all that, but I still get the heebie-jeebies being outside.'

  He let Simmonds in and put a kettle of water on the stove.

  'Nice place Plessey sorted himself out with here.'

  Jane nodded. 'Some people feel safer locked in, having just one place. Not for me, though. I don't know how he manages.' He stopped preparing cups of tea and glanced back at Simmonds. 'Managed, I mean.'

  'Yes,' she said. 'Most unfortunate, that.'

  'So who's on the move?'

  'Becky came to us. She brought the radio. We heard the broadcasts.'

  Jane handed her a cup. 'And you think it's worth exploring?'

  'Of course,' she said. 'Anything has to be better than this. It's like being a cured ham hanging in a room for months, waiting for someone to come and select you. I'd rather take my chances out in the wilds than have slices taken off me by some churning mouth with a sac attached to it.'

  'Well, when you put it like that,' Jane said.

  'There are some hot zones in need of a messenger. We've got Harris, MacCreadle and Barrett on it at the moment. You up for a mercy mission?'

  'Where's Becky?' he asked.

  'We're hiding her. Priority case. Wrapping the poor dear in cotton wool.'

  'Why?'

  The sad eyes grew larger. A crack appeared in Simmonds's niggardly mouth, the closest she would ever get to a smile. 'You don't know? Oh, my dear sir. There's congratulations in order, clever boy. She's pregnant.'

  22. FEARFUL SYMMETRY

  Jane saw two or three knots of people heading for the A20 out of London that day. He wished he could go with them, but he was committed to this task. He couldn't leave knowing that Harris, MacCreadle and Barrett, all older than him, all family men, were dashing around the London survivor hot spots, disseminating information, getting people up onto their feet for the long march south. He checked each face that floated owlishly by, though. He could not and would not stop searching. It was difficult, trying to imagine how Stanley might have changed over the past ten years. There had been a marked alteration in Aidan's features; he had been hardened by experience. He guessed Stanley would have been too. But nobody he saw fit the identikit portrait in his mind.

  The numbers of people thinned out soon. It was disheartening to think that so few had made it. In terms of percentages dead, he couldn't know for sure, but after the ninety-nine and the decimal point, he was willing to bet there were lots more nines involved. By the time he reached the City Road he was on his own again, his shoes slapping echoes from a thin gruel of slush and ash. A pipe had burst underground; water was geysering from a crack at the southern end of Upper Street. He splashed through a small river at the mouth of the Tube station, struggling to pull back the barrier gates, their runners snagged in years of accumulated litter. He stood in the entrance hall, water sluicing past him, roaring down the escalators. It would be dark, properly dark, before he'd made it halfway down there. He thought there might have been a mistake. Of all the places people could choose to live, why here, in permanent night? He wondered if his exhortations to leave might not be understood. Too long out of the real world and everything shut down.

  Chalk marks adorned the walls, all of them orange. Someone had scrawled Come and play. Jane went to the mouth of the escalators and peered down. He supposed the tunnel network offered a freedom that wasn't necessarily available on the surface. But he still would not swap the skin of the earth with the veins beneath it. Like veins, the tunnels would become more and more furred. There was structural collapse occurring all over the city. He didn't fancy being marooned between stations with flood water hammering towards him from both ends. Or a ceiling giving way. Or a fire breaking out. There was nobody to maintain the upkeep of the system any more. People choosing to come down here, he thought, descending the longest escalators in the entire network, were out of their minds.

  At the base of the escalator he was groping blindly. His foot reached level ground and he stood still for a while, head cocked, listening for signs of life. Shapes began to become known to him: the edge of a wall, the outline of a maintenance doorway, the familiar London Underground roundel against white tiles. His scalp crept as he considered the possibility of Skinners, lots of them, standing mere feet away. But popular wisdom spoke of Skinners rarely sinking below street level. They didn't like the stink, some said. Or maybe there was some kind of interference with their internal compasses, an anomaly in the magnetic flow. Maybe they were confused by the various scents barrelling around the tunnels, pushed and pulled from unknowable sources any number of miles away. Maybe they were just smart, biding their time, knowing that the inevitable col
lapse of the honeycomb would send people running into their arms.

  Jane gripped the rifle, holding it out in front of him as if it were a torch. As he neared the broad southbound platform, though, he saw that there were lights down here, albeit crude and lacking in power. Candles were dotted between sleeping bags and tents pitched all along the platform. Their uncertain light reflected in the scarred curve of the ceiling, showing how it had crumbled back to its supportive ribs. Posters on the trackside wall had peeled to the extent that nothing could be made out in their messages. Water sheened the walls; nitre was a series of slow white blossoms. A stench rose up from the latrine that the tracks had been turned into. He had to zip his coat up over his nose and mouth. 'Jesus,' he whispered. 'Mind the crap.'

  People began to unfold from their beds, like insects shedding their chrysalides. Thin, shivering figures approached him, every one of them with eyes so large they seemed painful to carry in the cross-hatched wastelands of their faces. A woman touched his arm; the light of the candles gave her skin a pale, waxy sheen, as if she were assuming the form of what illumined her.

  'Have you seen my little boy?' she asked. 'He's my only boy. I lost him a couple of months ago. He vanished in the night. I woke up and it was all I could do to convince myself I'd ever had a boy in the first place. Have you seen him?'

  Jane shook his head and backed away. Scurvy was sinking her eyes, paling her skin; her hand on her lower stomach clutched at blood – the reopening of a Caesarean scar, he supposed. He could read chapters of pain on every face. They regarded him as if he was here to deal them the coup de grâce. Fear and resignation mixed to a pathetic uniform look.

  He said, 'People are leaving London. You should too. There's a raft . . . a boat off the south-east coast that can take you across the Channel to France.'