Конрад Уильямс - One

‘Yes,’ Jane said. ‘I know. It’s OK.’

‘It’s not OK, though, is it?’ Chris asked gently. ‘Nothing’s OK. I mean, how big is this? I tried using my phone to call 999. To call home. No signal. Nothing is working. No TV. No radio. I mean, how fucking huge is this thing?’

‘I’m revising my estimates almost every day. Upwards.’

They sat in silence for a while. Eventually Nance came out of the bedroom, pausing at the threshold as if to check on the content of their conversation.

‘Did you see any other survivors?’ Jane asked.

Chris shook his head. ‘I thought we should head for Newcastle, but Nance… she isn’t ready yet.’

‘It’s a good idea. Newcastle. Hospitals. Someone must have survived there. From what you described, it seems that exposure was the danger up here. In Newcastle there’s more shelter.’

Chris seemed infected by his enthusiasm. ‘If it even reached that far,’ he said. He got to his feet. ‘It’s got to be localised. Some awful offshore fuck-up. A nuclear sub. Those things carry heaps of warheads, don’t they? Hiroshima times ten or something. We’re just wrong place wrong time.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Jane said, quietly, shooting a look at Nance. Her attention volleyed moistly from one man to the other. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he added.

‘I can handle it,’ Nance said. ‘You’d rather I was standing here giggling?’

‘It’s just… well, there’d be help by now,’ Jane went on. ‘It’s been a week. Over a week. This place should be crawling with Hazmat suits and outside broadcast units from the BBC.’

Chris sat back down. ‘Yeah, you’re right. My God.’

Nance said, ‘So what now?’

Jane spread his hands. ‘I’m headed for London,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘My little boy is there. I have to find him.’

‘Family,’ Chris sighed. ‘Shit. My dad is in his eighties. He’s got diabetes, angina… Lovely little combo.’

‘He’s in Sydney, right?’ Jane asked. ‘OK, so calm down a minute. It might be that this is localised after all, a UK thing. We don’t know if it’s global.’ It hadn’t occurred to him for a moment that it might be.

‘If it’s global, it isn’t terrorism,’ Nance said. ‘It isn’t “oops, I pushed the meltdown switch” at the power plant.’

‘It can’t be global,’ Jane said.

Chris turned his head to the window. ‘Fire in the sky,’ he said.

They agreed to accompany Jane as far as Newcastle and assess the situation there. Chris had rebuilt his optimism and was convinced they would walk out of the danger zone into green grass and fresh air before they reached the city’s outskirts.

‘There’s nobody come to help because they looked at what happened and didn’t expect any survivors,’ he said, and he would not be shifted on his stance.

Jane led them back across the field to his tent. They helped him dismantle it and pack it back in the rucksack.

‘Which way?’ Nance asked. Sweat stippled her upper lip. She was clenching and flexing her fingers fast. He could see the tendons in her neck pulling the skin tight.

Jane pointed south. ‘Just keep the sea on your left and we can’t go wrong,’ he said. Nance was looking at Chris, signalling something with her eyes. ‘Go on,’ Jane said. ‘I need to take a leak and get this pack on. I’ll catch you up.’

He watched them cross the road and sink out of view into the next field. Nance was talking intently, not allowing Chris to respond. Her head jerked towards him at the start of every sentence. Jane couldn’t work her out. She seemed utterly uncoupled by events, but in the little bubble that she shared with her man she was determined, unshakeable, domineering. Jane had met a few people like that over the years and he didn’t like them at all. They were often suspicious of other people and had a small circle of friends, if any at all. They never offered any solutions, never took the initiative, but behind the scenes they connived and agitated and planted seeds of doubt, usually with the one person they knew best, often a spouse who was so far under the thumb that they owned a flat head.

He gave them a few moments to allow her to get whatever it was off her chest, then made to follow. But something held him back. He scanned the area where he had pitched the tent in case he had forgotten something, but there was nothing. He closed his eyes and tried to understand the feeling. Something was askew. Not the nude, scorched trees. Not the electricity of finding someone alive. Something else.

He opened his eyes and wondered how he could have missed it.

They walked across the fields, boots scuffing on brittle furrow-slices, sending plumes of brown dust into the air. Chris and Nance quickly moved ahead, and Jane watched the argument they carried thickening between them, pushing them apart. Nance pecked at the air and Chris raised his arms as if to describe the size of some mythical fish he’d hooked. Jane left them to it. Despite having been alone for so long he didn’t want to talk. The wind was beginning to alarm him; it was not any longer the hard, constant heel shoving him in the back, denting his eyeballs whenever he turned to look at the sea. It was becoming shapeless, directionless. Little tornadoes were fizzing up from the dusty fields. If he opened his mouth the wind stole in and made him gasp. The sky to the west had darkened, although it was still early morning.

His fingers worried at the tiny curved cranium in his pocket. He wondered who might have left it for him. He ran his thumb over the horny beak sheath, and thought of its hue, and that of the chambers within, stained the colour of mahogany. Jane imagined litres of hot blood jetting through the pores in the bone over its lifetime. The skull was remarkably intact. The thin forked vomer was in evidence in the upper beak, as were the quadrates, which gave articulation to the lower jaw. No tissue clung to the bone at all; it was as white as if it had been bleached. Whoever had cleaned this had done so with care and respect. Love, even.

He took the skull out and inspected the great circles of its orbits. He blinked and something in the light allowed him to see the fierce, fixing yellow glare of what had once turned within those sockets. The focus, the deadly intent. It chilled him that something so small could be so violent. It had been built for the purpose of death. It had nothing in it other than the instincts of procreation and killing. He felt something stir inside him and suppressed laughter. He’d felt a sudden bond with the creature, with that way of life. He supposed it was in all people, that flicker of race memory, the hunter-gatherer mentality. The so-called civilised lifestyle had rubbed its edges away over the centuries. But it was still there, the romance of it, the grizzly part of you that got a thrill when you picked up a fishing rod or headed into the forest with a sleeping bag rolled up on your shoulders.

He put the skull back in his pocket and hitched his pack tighter around his shoulders. He gave one last troubled look at the sky and hurried after the others. There was a marked disintegration in their mood when he caught them up. They had stopped snapping and talking over each other. Now there was a grim silence and a distance between them. Chris seemed crestfallen; Jane wondered if Nance had finished their relationship. He felt like laughing. You survived the end of the world, fate dumping you, and you get all mopy because your girlfriend tells you to lump it.

It was Nance who drew his attention, however. She was still sweating, still doing that weird flex of her hands, as if she was suffering from a muscle spasm or a trapped nerve. Chris noticed it too, but although he kept shooting her looks he didn’t say anything.