One

by Conrad Williams

  His reading of the general mood was misplaced. A man with a white beard, his right arm bandaged and smelling of rot, thrust his chin at him. 'Why would we want to go to France?'

  'There's the possibility that what happened was restricted to these shores,' Jane said. Hoots of derision. He didn't believe what he had said either, but it was his job to put the option on the table. 'We're running out of places to hide. They're closing the net. In France we might be better positioned. More options. If you were to get on the raft you might find a better life.'

  White Beard spat at Jane's feet. 'We might find a worse one, too,' he said. 'You just want us to leave so you can have the tunnels for yourself.'

  'I'm not interested in tunnels,' Jane said. 'I'm here to pass on information, that's all. What you do with it is your business. You're looking at eighty miles. Cross the river at Tower Bridge. Head for the A20. Maybe you'll join up with the rest, hundreds of them, before you get there.'

  He was turning to leave when someone called out, asking about the others.

  'What others?' Jane asked.

  'There's more of us,' the voice called. 'In the crossover passages at City Road. The old disused station.'

  'Can't you pass it on?'

  'You pass it on, pal. It's your job. We're leaving.'

  Jane stood on the platform as roughly two-thirds of the platform dwellers hastily packed up their things and streamed by him. One or two shook his hand and thanked him. A man wearing a trilby over a mass of sweaty rat-tails told him he should get going himself and fuck the City Roaders or he'd end up being the last pretzel in the Skinners' snack bowl.

  He watched their backs fade through the exit, heard them swearing and stomping and splashing up the escalators. About twenty men remained. Already they were repositioning their gear, seemingly happy with the grand space they had inherited.

  'Fucking mugs, the lot of them,' White Beard said. 'Fucking raft? Who'd go out on the sea? I'll take my chances with the Smoke. My grandad lived here in the Blitz. Didn't get a fucking scratch.'

  Jane loped down to the end of the platform and squinted into the tunnel's throat. A constant breeze shifted his hair, chilled the flesh of his arms. It was like the final protracted breath of a giant. It carried every scent you could associate with death upon it. It was a stew of bad things, dirty water run from the tap leading directly to the well of your nightmares.

  He dropped down into the gulley of sewage and allowed himself to be swallowed.

  It wasn't far to the defunct City Road section of the Northern Line tunnel but Jane's constant stumbling on the rails and the fragments of wall collapsing into the passageway lengthened his journey considerably. There were no platforms at the station any more, but candles had been left here too, lighting the way to the passage arches, seemingly hanging in the wall, five feet above the floor. Soot clung to every surface; it was as if everything had been carved from it. The floor seemed to shiver as he hauled himself up from the rails; his hands sank into inches of soft matter. Dead cables slinked around him, hanging from their routers like snakes sleeping in branches, roughly following the shape of the architecture as though they were its preliminary pencil sketches.

  Jane called out but his voice died immediately in the granular acoustics. Pieces of unrecognisable machinery lay by the tracks. A dust-veiled sign from the 1940s warned people not to leave their belongings behind after the all-clear. He saw a figure at the central corridor leading to the stairs. A child holding a toy, a stuffed animal. It looked like a lion. The slight figure was wearing pyjamas. He was barefoot. Jane's heart lurched as if it were making a break for freedom. He almost laughed out loud.

  'Stanley?' he called.

  The figure instantly turned and ran away, as if it had been waiting only for Jane's voice to trigger it. Jane stood in the passageway staring at the skirls of dust the figure had kicked up at the moment of its exit. Not Stanley. Stanley would not be five years old still. Stanley would be wearing a scowl and a hoodie and bumfluff on his upper lip. Stanley would not run away. He'd stand his ground and ask Jane, 'What's it to you, fuckhead?'

  Jane took off after him.

  He managed a couple of flights before the walls started to move. Figures detached themselves from the murk as if they had animated themselves from the soot. Soon he found himself trying to move through a corridor packed with black flaking bodies. He couldn't think beyond the character of Pigpen in Peanuts, who seemed to be constructed from dirt. All he could see were wild white eyes and teeth; a smell of humus and brackish water. It was as if the shored-up earth, failing now, deep beneath the capital, was shedding ghosts at every turn.

  'Stanley?' he called out again, a reflex that he seemed to have no power over. When it came to his son, those moments when he felt close to Stanley, either during these mirages or in dreams, it was as if he could not rein in his excitement. It could only be a memory, or a wish, but the ever-hopeful part of his brain lit up, burning so brightly that no other function could be considered.

  Now he had reached the ancient locked-in ticket barrier. How long had this station been closed to the public? A good seventy years, surely. People were huddled together under their shifting blanket of dust as though resigned to death. Jane imagined them never moving, just sitting, waiting, waiting for a moment such as this, a person to release them from a stasis they had not noticed arriving and did not know how to shake off. They looked at him with a mixture of puzzlement and relief.

  Jane told them about the raft. He said they would have to go back through the tunnels because these doors had been locked so long they might well have sealed themselves shut. They stood and applauded him, and he began to cry, surrounded by shades, all of them weeping with gratitude, all of them missing somebody. Everyone was the same. Everyone sought solace of one kind or another.

  He looked around for Stanley as they filed past him, but he knew there would be nobody here who reminded him of his son. He had seen a ghost, that was all, a bruise in his memory. Stanley was still with him, in one way or another. There was no point in getting excited every time it happened. It was just his way of saying hi. It was the son in his blood. He would never leave him to be on his own.

  But then he saw him again a couple of hours later. A little boy, in blue-striped pyjamas plated with dry mud. A soft toy clutched in one hand. Hair mussed as if he'd just got out of bed. He was running along Primrose Hill Road, just north of Regent's Park, legs barely bending as he ran, leaning over so far it seemed he must trip and fall headlong, just the way that Stanley ran when he saw his dad approaching the house from a long shift on the rigs. Jane pursued. It could not be Stanley. Stanley had not been trapped at the age of five all this time. It didn't matter. The child still needed to be taken care of.

  He lost sight of the boy as he reached Albert Road. One moment he'd been there – Jane was sure he wasn't aware that he was being followed, he hadn't seen his head turn, he would have loved to glimpse the face, just to convince the old romantic, the gullible sap wishing for the impossible, in him – the next moment he was gone. There were plenty of hiding places. Jane didn't know where to start. He could be looking for him for an hour and the boy would be on the south side of the park, heading down Portland Place.

  Jane crossed the road and nipped through the park's exterior to the Outer Circle where the main entrance to London Zoo was located. He walked straight through the open gates. In. Pass on the details. Out. Job done. On to the next and then find Becky and scram.

  He marched along the zoo's paths trying to work out where everyone would be congregating. Every cage he walked past bore a sign that had been burned clean of information. Sometimes there was a body, an animal carcass beyond identification, trapped inside the bars, passed unsuitable for Skinner invasion or devourment. More often than not the cages were empty, whatever had lived within having bent the bars open in order to escape, once consumed by their Skinner hijacker. Behind him the great nets of the Snowdon aviary had collapsed; scorched patches of it lay flappi
ng around like failed spiders' webs. Cairns of dried shit were the only pointer to any kind of animal habitation now. Jane wondered where they had all gone.

  He checked the vivarium and aquarium, but both were empty, their glass tanks smashed, the animals within now gone, perhaps taken for food. He headed south-east, towards a shattered fountain, past areas where African birds had been kept, pygmy hippos, bearded pigs. He dug in his memory for what these creatures looked like.

  He stopped, his heart suddenly reminding him it was still beating, as a filthy, limping rhinoceros plodded across the wasteland of a former picnic area, its head swinging around as if trying to rid itself of a pain or a cloud of irritating insects. It paused and turned Jane's way. There was a Skinner inside it, he was certain of that. The poor animal was a shadow of what its genes had meant for it to be. Its face was slack, the tough hide turned in places to elastic bars, showing glimpses of the awful thing that dwelled within. Its great horn had sheared through like a lopped branch; the stump was cracked and sore-looking, surrounded with a collar of crusted pus. The black dinner plates of its eyes seemed without edge, a shadow that might keep on growing until it was totally consumed. Jane tensed himself, ready to make a run for it if the Skinner considered charging, but clearly it was unhappy within the body it had invaded; it turned its back on him and staggered away.

  Jane waited, watching the animal move slowly past the sinkhole of the old flamingo pond. He thought that maybe there was nobody left here now. Orange zone suddenly turned blue. It gave him a nasty jolt. He'd been stupid, brazen, to come here without checking the perimeter first. He resumed his walk through the grounds, but now his eye was caught by something to his left, a shapeless mass on an area of pathway between a children's cratered playground and the dry, weathered edifice of the penguins' fake iceberg.

  Jane approached, leaning over slightly as if he might be able to identify what it was before he got too close. He saw the flap and curl of torn clothing. He saw a separated blue-white hand lying on its knuckles like a dead crab, a few feet away from the main salmagundi of body parts. He thought he saw a swatch of striped pyjama in there but closed his mind to it, turned away. He was close enough now to see steam rising, to smell the rich, sour odours of fear and adrenaline that seamed the meat. He thought of his own teeth slicing through cooked flesh, tattooed skin crisped on a griddle. He put a brake on his bile before it could leap from his throat.

  He heard the guttural, drool-laced rattle of something big nearby. It came again, each breath transformed into a wet snarl of aggression, catching in the throat. It sounded like the starter motor to some velvety engine. It was a beautiful, terrifying sound.

  Jane backed away from the butchery as the tiger emerged from the collapsed north wall of a café, twenty yards away. It was deteriorating. Its once proud, blocky head was a cheap Halloween mask. The ears might have been flattened back in a classic intimidatory pose but they had frayed to nubs of gristle. Its fur was losing the stripe of a man-eater, gradually fading back into the insipid, featureless colour that death preserves for all. Its chipped, split claws scratched at the path, reminding Jane of the sound of skipping ropes in school playgrounds. The tail had long since worn away to a chewed, twitching stick barely two inches long.

  It padded towards him, steam wreathing a grimace filled with black teeth. Its hollowed eyes were mesmerising; Jane could almost believe they were Jane-shaped, designed at the very moment of conception only to focus on him. They were full of him now, despite the blindness of the Skinner. The tiger was locked on.

  Jane backed away. Nowhere to go. The zoo was an open arena. He raised the rifle and flicked off the safety catch. He shouldered the weapon and drew a bead. He shot the tiger in the centre of the chest when it lifted its head to check his scent. The tiger staggered back onto its haunches, a phut of complaint whiffling its chops. Its teeth oozed into view again, the eyes screwing up in a blind reflex of hatred and rage. The black corkscrews of its whiskers turned towards him as he was drawn into its olfactory glands. If the tiger was in pain, it wasn't showing it. A fresh sheet of drool unfolded itself from the open mouth. The wound was bloodless.

  The tiger found its feet again and came on.

  Jane ran. He did not look back, despite the roar, despite the spattering claws now sounding like grit tossed on an ice-covered pavement. He ran to the southern point of the zoo and clambered over and through what remained of the perimeter wall. The park beyond it was a morass of churned mud. He felt sudden, massive heat across the back of his left thigh, and then he was jumping. He was caught in the mud almost immediately. One boot was sucked from his foot. He turned to try to retrieve it and went down on his side, his arm disappearing almost to the shoulder. The tiger was struggling too. It was twelve feet shy of him; Jane could smell the baking, rancid heat that powered from its jaws. It lurched, trying to spring, but succeeded only in burying its hind legs more deeply. Jane forced himself flat on his stomach and wriggled clear, trying to swim across the surface of the mud, wriggling like a soldier, his gun held in front of him, across no-man's-land.

  He chanced a glance over his shoulder and saw that the tiger was failing to close the gap. Its snarls grew ever more frustrated. At one point it seemed to try to take a bite out of its own flank. Gradually the mud turned drier and Jane was able to get to his feet. He ran past the festering waters of the Boating Lake and reached relatively solid ground at the Inner Circle road. Ten minutes later and he was on Marylebone Road, certain that he could hear the frustrated screams of the tiger, certain that at any moment it would come skittering out of York Gates and bring him down within seconds.

  He ran for an age without thought of where he might be heading. The shock of the pursuit, the sadness of finding an orange zone massacred, the pain in his leg – blood was filling his remaining boot now; it rose out of the lace holes with each sickening step – was conspiring to cloud his mind. He must stop soon and rest, get himself patched up, or risk fainting.

  Jane forced himself to study his surroundings. Maiden Lane, was this? He recognised it from a time in the 1990s when he'd met Cherry for a drink in some dark, poky little pub down an alley through which you'd have struggled to walk two abreast. Thoughts of Cherry, bizarrely, revived him a little. Something about the sass of her in those days, how she could get his prick hard within seconds of their meeting just in the way she'd nip his ear with her teeth after a kiss hello, or the way she'd look at him, a naked desire in her cool green eyes. Something about the bitch in her. Whatever it was, it slapped him awake as he limped into Southampton Street.

  On the Strand he checked both ways before continuing, conscious of the heavy Skinner traffic that had been in evidence the last time he had ventured this way. Empty now, thank God. He must smell like an abattoir skip. He looked back at the blood trail and dreamt he saw Skinners following on their knees, sucking up his vital fluids as they inched after him. He could not risk compromising his safe house. He crossed to the south side and crunched through the broken glass of a shoe shop. In the storeroom he found a boiler bolted to the wall. A tray next to it held cracked mugs, an empty tea caddy and a bowl of congealed sugar with a spoon trapped inside it. He chipped some of the sugar off and sucked it as he worked at the seized tap. It gave a little. He held a rag under the spigot and forced it open. About a pint of rusty water gurgled from it. He soaked the rag and gingerly removed his jeans. The tiger's claws had slashed through the denim and left three deep gouges in his upper thigh. Blood oozed freely from them. Jane almost blacked out at the prospect of a vein having been opened. Death would be a long time coming. He'd feel it settle on him by degrees as his life pulsed from him. There was no point in shoving a finger in there, putting pressure on the severed blood vessel. He couldn't suture it closed. He wouldn't find anybody with the requisite skills to do so before his heart stopped.

  Me and you, both, Stopper. Just a little slower than you copped it. Typical me, eh?

  He dug in the rucksack for the First Aid pack. He too
k out the stapler and some sealed squares of antiseptic tissue. He wiped the wounds clean, gritting his teeth against the pain. The blood was still coming, but it was less freeflowing. He pinched the edges of the wounds together and, swearing copiously, stapled them shut. Once all three slashes were gathered, he snapped off the end of an ampoule of antibiotics and drew them into a syringe. He plunged the needle into his thigh, just above the wound. Then he wrapped a clean bandage around the whole sorry mess and secured it with a tubular bandage pulled up over his leg. He stood up, testing the leg with his whole weight. It hurt like a bastard, but it felt supported, secure.

  Jane thought of the filthy claws of the tiger and what might have been swarming on their points. He couldn't believe he had isolated all possibility of infection, regardless of how careful he had been in washing the wound. He was dead if his leg required amputating.

  He turned to go and heard a crunch of glass in the shop front. He saw a Skinner standing among the overturned displays like a man who has forgotten his shopping list and is trying to summon the items back from memory. Fire in a bank of shops across the road leapt at its shoulders, enhancing its silhouette. Jane wiped his hands on a fresh antiseptic wipe and pocketed it; he toed the bloody rags of the used ones into the far corner of the room. It landed with a splat. He saw the Skinner cock its head like an inquisitive dog. Jane backed into the other corner and made his breathing shallow.

  The Skinner came. It moved into the room, blocking the entrance with its bulk. In another life it had been a woman in a suit; her black leather briefcase was still snagged on one arm. Her blonde hair had once been a styled, angular cut. Now it was tangled with all kinds of street debris: old litter, soot, blood. There was a finger in there. Her face was the colour of pastry, riddled with tears as though kneaded by a child. Thick saliva had poured from the jaws of the Skinner and hardened against its chin, like melted drips from a candle. Dirt was a cracked glaze across its chest. Its head was a pendulum swinging first his way, then the rags'. Death hung on a simple decision. Jane was not frightened any more. It had been dogging him for so long that it didn't seem to possess the finality it once had. He imagined himself being clawed inside out, turned to a pulp, and then sitting up once the Skinner had moved on, pulling himself back into some kind of order and getting the old stapler out again.