Конрад Уильямс - One

At the other side of the viaduct he checked his watch. Gone three-thirty. How much ground had he covered? He checked his map. Five miles, roughly. Slow going, but still he was exhausted. It would take a long time to come back from these past five days; perhaps he never would, fully. He didn’t want to be walking in darkness if he could help it. A trip might result in a broken ankle, or a bloodied face. He doubted even his basic qualification in First Aid would help him if he was infected with some of the filth swirling around the sky.

Jane found an inn at the fork of Main Street and Dock Road and kicked in the door, wondering for a foolish second if he should have knocked first. Close to rest now, he felt exhaustion turning his sight grainy. His feet were heavy on the stairs. On the first floor he opened doors into rooms until he found one that was unoccupied. The windows were shattered, but the wind coming in from the sea was wailing against the back of the inn. He sat at the dressing table and wiped the mirror clean with his forearm. A wild man stared back, hair greasy and lank, fringing eyes that were deep-set, red-rimmed, grey-socketed. A beard, something he had never previously allowed beyond a day’s stubble at most, aged him. He was shocked to find patches of white in the hair around his chin.

He placed his valuables – the keys to the London flat, his letter from, and the photographs of, Stanley, the filters for the bicycle mask – on the table. He drank some water and opened a tin of tuna. Already he was sick of cold canned food. He wondered, very briefly, if the horse might have made good eating. Could anything that had been cut down by whatever it was? He might end up with a belly full of radioactive waste.

Would Stanley recognise him like this? He eased off his jacket and boots and shook plaster dust and pebbles of glass from the counterpane, then he crashed onto the bed. The ceiling was covered in cheap woodchip wallpaper, painted magnolia.

‘Looks like rice pudding,’ he heard Stanley say. ‘Can we have some rice pudding?’

Jane reached for his rucksack and picked through the tins. ‘’Fraid not, badger,’ he said. ‘But we’ve got some custard in here. That do?’

‘With sponge,’ Stanley said. ‘Chocolate sponge.’

Cherry giving him her look, the look that said, Sugar? At this hour? You deal with the fallout, then .

The light faded. The pillows were soft, the mattress firmer than he liked, but it was better than the lifeboat. A hammock of knives would have been more comfortable than the lifeboat. He stayed awake longer than he expected to. But he was so tired. He ached in so many places that it was difficult to locate the pain. He listened to the agonised scream of the wind, and beneath that the surge of the ocean. It was like a muscle working itself bigger. He imagined it rising, assuming shapes far more sophisticated than it ought to, flying at the towns and cities on the apron of land like a street fighter with their blood up. Bodies torn to nonsense by their rage. Buildings subsumed. Scarlet spindrift.

The door creaked.

He came out of a sleep he didn’t realise he had entered. His head was treacly, unresponsive; he turned to the sound too slowly: now others were joining it. Footsteps, but they were too light, too swift. Surely whatever it was would have cut the distance to the bed long before now. Jane couldn’t pull himself out of sleep’s suck. Fear helped. He blinked, but though he was ridding himself of sleep he couldn’t shake the shadows from his eyes. He thought he felt movement on him, but it was just his body tangled in the duvet. He kicked it away from him, sure there were rats trying to climb onto the bed. He saw the horse’s body rippling and could not stop his mind’s eye picturing his own body moving like that.

Lightning slashed through the room; Stopper was outlined before him, heralded by a thud of thunder. The footsteps had been made by the spatter of his blood as it drizzled out of the wounds in his arm. Hacked flesh slopped around his exposed tendons like the jaw of a dead animal. More lightning drew Stopper closer. Jane saw things writhe in his emptied eye sockets and he wondered for a moment if it might be the other man’s dreams. But then Stopper was leaning over him and trying to cut into his forearms with the blade. He couldn’t control the knife, though; the severed muscles in his arms would not do as he wanted.

Stopper’s lips, curiously thin, split open. ‘Pleased to see me?’ he asked, and his breath was foul with oil, with decay. The words were like a cork popped clean of a bottle: shadows welled out of him, blood and seawater and prawns bloated by the feast he had become.

Jane closed his eyes. Stopper didn’t leave him. His retina clung to his image, red in the black. ‘Stopper,’ Jane whispered. ‘Jesus.’

When he opened his eyes again, light had returned to the room. He gazed down from the bed, expecting to see the hotel-room floor matted with all kinds of filth, but he could see only his boots and a layer of that invasive, pervasive dust.

He yawned and stretched and sat up. He rubbed his eyes. The howl of the wind and the crash of the sea. Rain was sudden buckshot against the roof tiles. In this strange daylight, though, the weather’s menace seemed reduced. He went to the door and peered down the corridor. One time there might have been the smell of breakfast, the sound of muffled showers and doors breathing closed on their hydraulic hinges. Now there was just the wind moaning across broken windows and buckled doors.

Jane went to the bathroom and tried the taps. Nothing but a dusty cough. Out of habit more than need he pocketed the wrapped tablets of soap and the mending kit. He inspected his body in the mirror, checking for cuts or bruises to suggest internal bleeding, but he was clean. He eased his boots back on and turned his mind to the next portion of his journey. He took out the map from his jacket pocket and spread it on the bed. Belford was around thirteen miles from here. Could he do that in a day? Heavy boots and heavy weather? He reluctantly traced his finger further north, further away from Stanley, back towards Berwick. Haggerston. About half the distance. That would be his first target. See how late in the day, how frazzled he was by then.

His hands shook as he folded the map and stowed it back in his pocket. Weak. He lifted the curtain and looked out at the sky. Brooding, thick, low. But at least the mist seemed to be dissipating. Perhaps if he got onto high ground he’d be able to look for survivors. He was thinking of freshly squeezed orange juice, bacon with tomato ketchup, and was moving to the dressing table when he stopped.

Next to his belongings lay a large white-tipped feather.

Jane picked his way through the sludgy tan moss of the hillside, the rain like the heel of a hand pressing him towards the dead earth. Apart from the astonishing spectrum stuttering across the sky, the world had turned sepia. The meadows were scorched flatlands, the woods so many burnt matchsticks piled in occasional clumps. The exploded bodies of sheep lay in fields like fallen sunset clouds. It was hard going. The path had turned into a sluice; already there was evidence of minor mudslides where plates of the sodden, shocked ground had slipped free. An autumnal smell of decay and cold carbon hung in the air. It was deep in his clothes, his skin. He could smell it rising off his piss in the mornings. He wondered if his bones might smell of woodsmoke.

At the top of the hill he unshouldered his rucksack and rested. He had secured the feather in a strap on the bag. It fluttered now like a reminder. He had thought for a long time about the feather, where it had come from, how it appeared to have been placed next to his things. But that could not be the case. It must have already been in the room, and his movement, or that of the wind, must have caused it to fall. Maybe it had been a decoration, an ornament, a memento collected and then forgotten by the room’s previous incumbent.