One (6 page)

At the top of the cliff the ribbon of the road held hands with the railway as far as he could see. The rails had buckled in places. No birds, no cats, no dogs. He stared at the village and thought about why he had survived. Something had roasted the face of the Earth while he'd been at the bottom of the sea. So what had saved him? Water? Then why so many dead fish? Depth, then. That must have been it. He knew, talking to some of his mates on the rig, that this area of the coast had been a popular landing point for smugglers. The precipitous cliffs and numerous inlets were a blessing to boats bringing in contraband. The place must have been riddled with cellars and secret tunnels. Maybe some were deep enough to survive in. At the very least he might find a serviceable bike.

Jane crossed the railway and spotted a pub on the other side of the dual carriageway. The planes of roofs were like broken solar panels. A tree burned. The mist north of here was thickening, congealing almost, like something that he might have to peel off his skin should he be captured by it. To the south the sky was more fluid. It moved constantly. Cables of rain glittered from it like guys slung to the earth. Out to sea the waves were still churning; their roar a persistent complaint over the noise of his own breath. The mist shifted again, lifting slightly, enough to show him a suggestion of hills to the north, shoulders turned away from him. The mist closed in again as if it were teasing him with glimpses of things forbidden.

Jane hurried across the road. He could hear his breath hissing in the regulator. He wondered if he was panicking or in the early stages of shock, but he couldn't tell; he had no frame of reference. There was nobody to talk to, nobody against whom he could gauge his level of fragility. Nobody to give him an askance look. Not that anybody would be in any fit state themselves to decide what was normal any more. Panic might now well be the new default setting.

He pushed through the door into the lounge bar as the mist sweated in the air behind him, as though eager to assume form. A cleaner lay on the floor in a pale blue pinafore now several sizes too small for her. Her face was that of someone beaten featureless; everything was lost to a uniform swelling. Her cheeks shone, at splitting point. Jane felt the world tilt a little, as if he were in a fast lift that had just begun to ascend. His vision vignetted. He closed his eyes. He must get used to this. There were bound to be others. Christ, where were the emergency services? He felt, like a blow to the gut, the suspicion that this village, maybe even the entire north-east coastline, had been closed off, quarantined. What could have caused this? It was a question that kept tapping him on the shoulder; every so often he felt he had to turn to confront its ugly little face, but he couldn't provide any satisfactory answers. Terrorism, he thought again. If so, they'd succeeded. He was scared beyond feeling. The nuclear power plant at Dounreay? Meltdown? A nuclear sub off Cape Wrath playing war games? Could an exploded sub rip the skin off the face of Scotland like this? He was no defence expert, but he didn't think so. Something natural, then? Some catastrophic event?

He stared at the bruised air streaking by the windows, the glittering sediment piling into the corners. This didn't look natural; this was a storm on Venus. This was Ray Bradbury.

He was on his knees. His left leg was pinning the cleaner's left arm to the floor. The added pressure had caused her clenched hand to open; clear fluid sweated from the tips of her fingers like glue bubbling from the sponge applicator of a UHU pen. He couldn't breathe.

He swung the O
₂
gauge in front of his face and blearily registered that he was in the red, sucking on the tank's dust. He fumbled the bicycle mask from his backpack and held his breath, spat out the regulator, took off his face mask and clamped the filter over his nose and mouth. He breathed. There was a smell of burning, and something underpinning it, something chemical. His sight cleared, his lungs loosened. At least there was still something left to breathe in the midst of all this smog.

Behind the bar he drew a double whisky from an optic and gulped it quickly before replacing the mask, relishing the hot fumes that were trapped inside. He moved down a corridor to the doorway to the toilets. To his left was a door leading into the beer garden. Somebody was dead out there. He could just see a pair of legs sticking out from the side of a Vauxhall Corsa. To his left was a door under the stairs. A bolt on it was drawn back, an unhinged padlock hanging off the hasp. He flicked the bakelite switch above the banister without thinking and descended slowly in utter darkness.

Jane called out when he reached the bottom of the stone steps. His voice was loud and flat and scared. Nothing replied. He reached out with his hands and moved into a cool room. His foot clanged against what he assumed was a beer keg. Further on there were crates of bottles and a wooden door. He pushed against it. Inside there were plastic containers, mops, brushes, heavy tins. He felt along the walls for a resting bike, but there was nothing. Light filtered through the cracks in the delivery chute and shapes began to solidify. A chest freezer filled with melted sacks of ice. A fuse box on a wall next to a graphic of a skeleton being electrocuted. A deckchair. A child's scooter.

Jane unfolded the deckchair and sat down. He thought about going upstairs, checking the bedrooms, but he didn't know what for. All he knew was that he would find more bodies, and he didn't want to look at a dead child.

His hand went to his pocket and felt the edges of Stanley's letter. Stanley had been asking for a scooter, as well as a bike without stabilisers, a skateboard . . . all kinds of stuff. His 'I want' phase. There were all kinds of petty aches that broadsided you as a parent. It pierced Jane that Stanley didn't want to watch the programmes aimed at his age group on TV. Dora the Explorer. Pingu. Noddy. A couple of weeks at reception and he was coming home talking about Power Rangers and Ben 10 and Darth Maul kicking people in the face. Guns and punches. He was calling people
stupid
and
poo-head
. He was a boy growing up, that was all, but it was tough to stomach sometimes. Innocence eroding. You could see it in the darkening intelligence of his eyes and the disappearance of his pudgy cheeks. The baby's clean blackboard was filling up with chalk marks.
Dad? When you called that man in the car a tit, what means tit?

He wondered if London was aware of what was going on up here. It was such a terrible occurrence, perhaps Whitehall was shielding the public from the truth.

Jane peeled off the gloves and touched his face, his hair. He felt normal, if a little hot and sweaty. He considered how he felt inside. He was hungry, which was a good thing, he thought. He didn't feel nauseous. Apart from the burns on his hands where the gloves had melted, there were no blemishes on his skin. No headaches, or rather, no pains inside his head that couldn't be dismissed by a couple of co-codamol.

He unclipped the lid of the First Aid box and cleansed the skin of his hands with an alcohol wipe. There was an unbroken tube of antiseptic cream; he applied some of that too. Care needed to be taken now. If he fell and broke his leg there was nobody around to cart him off to A&E. And he didn't relish the prospect of any wounds sucking the filth of the sky into them. Slow and sure.

He peeled back the lid on a tin of baked beans and guzzled them straight down. He followed them with a tin of peaches. He found a crate of Pinot Noir and unscrewed a bottle top.

He and Cherry had discussed death, early on, when things had been good between them and dying naturally at an old age seemed something that one of them would do with the other close by. But they had also talked about what-ifs. They had both written private letters to Stanley and sealed them without reading each other's words. In the event that one of them died prematurely, Stanley would at least have a message from his missing parent, a way of making contact with a son who might otherwise have no recollection of a dead mother or father.

Jane fell asleep imagining Cherry handing over the envelope to their son.

4. THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

Jane woke suddenly, into terror. The jolt from sleep was down to some external factor, not a bad dream, not a gradual returning from unconsciousness. He knew this feeling: Stanley grizzling in his cot. Cherry knocking over the pot of toothbrushes in the bathroom. A sound had brought him back. Something near. He sat up in the deckchair and felt his muscles complain. No light in the cracks of the delivery chute. The luminous hands of his watch shrugged at him: ten past two in the morning.

He hadn't thought to equip himself with a weapon, but maybe he needed to. What if there were squads of armed soldiers sweeping the area, briefed with orders to shoot any survivors to prevent the leak of damning information? He clenched his eyes tight. Nothing was too bizarre now.

The sound came again. A scrabbling, a skittering. Like loose plaster. Maybe that was all it was. He called out. His voice sounded nothing like his own. He felt already that he was losing the sense of who he was. He had made a place for himself in the world, defined himself by his job, his behaviour, his appearance. All of that was shot to pieces. There were no rules now. There were no guidelines. For the first time in his life he had no idea of what might happen. Probability had become obsolete.

Jane stood up and there was a responsive scratching noise. Mice, he thought. Or rats. Probably as spooked as him to find something breathing in the neighbourhood. He climbed the steps back into the pub and felt his way in the dark to the foot of the stairs leading up to the living quarters. There was a bathroom here. He tried the taps. Cold water sputtered and gushed into the basin. He peeled off his clothes and the bicycle mask and, holding his breath, splashed his face, feeling the growth of a week's worth of stubble. He towelled himself dry and replaced the mask. He moved through to a bedroom and opened a wardrobe, grabbed a handful of shirts and tried one on. Too large, but at least it was clean. It made him feel happier. He stole some jeans and a belt and pulled on his own boots. A long leather coat and leather gloves. There was a mound on the bed; he left it undisturbed. On a dressing table was a tea light in a red glass container. He lit it with a wax-coated match from the First Aid box. He avoided the bedroom door dotted with Spider-Man stickers and drew his shivering shadow along the corridor to the living room.

The living room was large; a dining table and an upright piano dominated one half. A fruit bowl contained mouldering shapes; their smell was cloying, dusty almost. A woman in black underwear was reclining on the sofa, a magazine opened on the floor beside her. A mug. A bar of chocolate. She glittered at him, her flesh pitted with shards of glass from an exploded window. He went to it and looked out at the silent village. Lightning pulsed in the clouds like something trapped, desperate to be set free. It afforded him views of desolation. Cars turned over in the road, windshields spidered with cracks, tyres gone. Bodies lay in the street. A house burned: restive orange eyes shivering in blistered sockets. Behind him, a page of the magazine turned. He imagined the woman stroking the ball of her thumb across the death-dry edge of her swollen tongue. He removed the mask and vomited hard. He spat and choked against the fire in his throat and nostrils, then rinsed his mouth with water from a bottle. He trudged downstairs and pushed his way out into the street. A bicycle could wait. He didn't want to stumble upon any more nasty little surprises in these homes.
Get pounding. Put some miles under you
.

Jane was grateful of the dark as he made his way to the edge of the village and onto the dual carriageway. Suggestions and shapes and murmurs remained so. The sea was an urgent incessant booming to his left, restless beneath a sky that, even at night, roiled with sombre colours, a melancholy oil painting failing to dry.

The A1 would take him all the way to London. The thought of a ribbon of tarmac connecting this shattered community with his son's feet quickened his blood. He imagined his boy sitting on the doorstep of the flat in Sevington Street, with Walter, grubby and matted, next to him. The big smile when he saw his dad. The leap into his arms. His little boy, so light, as he swung him up for a kiss. The astonishing colour of his eyes. Baize-green with an outer rim of cobalt. Freckles and milk teeth. He could feel his warmth, could smell the magic of his hair, his scalp.

Jane suddenly, reflexively, shouted his son's name. He realised he was running, sprinting, as if he might cover the hundreds of miles between here and Maida Vale before dawn. He wanted his boy so badly that he thought his heart would clench itself into a knot. Tears drizzled across his vision; he had to stop. He dropped to his knees and cried so violently that it felt as though he had pulled a muscle in his chest. He was nodding. Cars and lorries and coaches threw freakish shapes across the lanes for miles in either direction. He wished he'd been caught in this. He wished he had never left his family. He cursed the moment he had signed up for diving lessons and applied for a job on the rigs. He wished he had been infertile and had never met Cherry. He wished for utter oblivion.

'I know,' he said. 'I know.'

He was fooling himself. This was no isolated event. The whole country had been hit by this.
Depth
, he thought. Cherry might have taken their son on the Tube. He might be safe. He must be safe.

Jane kept his eyes on the ground and watched it disappear under his feet. At the English border he passed three flagpoles bearing flapping black scraps; a blistered sign might have bade welcome to his country. He did not look up. He didn't know how far he had walked before the light changed and began to creep across the rocky coastline and seep through the mist, to bring edges to the darkness. He rummaged in cars, trying not to touch their ruptured occupants, until he found a pair of sunglasses in a glove compartment. All the time he was trying to quell his panic, trying to assess himself for the signs of shock. It would be almost criminal to survive whatever had happened only to succumb to heart failure. When the traffic became too much for him to deal with, he cut across a field to the railway. The rain came again; it never really went away, just a variation between gossamer breath and tropical muscle.