Конрад Уильямс - One

‘I’m on my way to London,’ Jane continued, as if that alone might be inducement enough.

‘Long way,’ the woman said.

‘Have you been out at all?’ he asked.

She shook her head. ‘I prefer to stay with what I know.’

‘What about home? Family?’

She shook her head again. He could tell she resented having to explain to a stranger, no matter the extraordinary circumstances. ‘My parents died when I was in my teens,’ she said. ‘I have brothers and sisters, but nobody local. I never married.’

Cruelly, he imagined her shaking her head whenever she was asked.

‘What about you, Aidan?’

‘Mum and Dad. Kerry, my sister.’

‘You tried to get home to see them?’

He shook his head. ‘They’re here.’

Jane felt the air stiffen around him. ‘OK,’ he said. He wanted to move on, but Aidan was making things difficult. He felt perfectly happy about leaving the others to fend for themselves, but Aidan was Stanley’s age. He couldn’t abandon him without making some effort to get him safe.

‘What about looters?’

The woman sighed. She still appeared nervous, uncertain about Jane. Her gaze flickered to Chris and Nance, who were dithering by the door, trying not to look at the stiff, shrouded body in the waiting area.

‘A couple of days after it happened – I think, perception of time all messed up – I heard a bunch of people come in here, running around the corridors. I thought help had arrived, but they were screaming, laughing. We hid. They must have been pissed or drugged up. Plenty of free goodies on offer now, I suppose.’

‘You saw them? They still around?’

‘They moved on,’ she said. ‘I think they were just kids.’

‘What did they take?’

The woman shrugged. ‘The pharmacy has been raided. A lot of uppers and downers gone. The snack machines have been emptied. I saw a lot of empty wallets and purses lying around.’

‘You can’t buy anything, actually,’ Aidan said. ‘Actually, they’re just idiots.’

The woman laughed, a little too breathily, a little too close to tears, but it broke the mood. She realised she was still holding the crutch and tossed it to one side.

‘How’s your head?’ she asked.

‘I think I need an X-ray.’

Jane liked her despite the assault. It wasn’t just the Pavlovian response a lot of his oil platform colleagues displayed when confronted by a woman, although it had been a long time since Jane had enjoyed female company. There was something about her that nibbled at him. Maybe it was the way she had selflessly protected Aidan – the latent mother come to the fore – or maybe it was just the way she was decked out. She wore simple clothes – a short-sleeved white blouse, jeans, leather sandals and a long amber necklace. She had an easy physicality about her. She was slender, long-limbed, but not gawky. He liked the way she turned a rub of her forehead into a slow trawl of her long shaggy hair. He’d always liked girls with a thick mane on them.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked. He was thinking, Jesus, hit me again .

‘Rebecca,’ she said. ‘Becky. Becky Bass. It should be like the fish, or the brewery, but I prefer it pronounced like the guitar.’

A cough from the doorway. Chris said, ‘This is fascinating, really. But we should get back to Angela and Brendan.’

‘Do you know if anybody else survived?’ Jane asked. ‘Anyone from the hospital?’

The shake of the head. She had it down pat – a skill no doubt learned in childhood. You could say no all you liked with eyes as beautiful as that.

Becky agreed to accompany them on their search for supplies; Jane saw it as a start. She looked as though she wanted to go but the professional in her was the anchor. ‘There’s nothing to be done here,’ Jane pressed.

‘Survivors,’ she said.

‘They’d be here by now.’

‘You weren’t.’

‘We’ve been on the road for days. I was thinking of Newcastle survivors.’

Becky turned to Aidan, as if silently canvassing for support.

‘You can’t stay here,’ Jane said.

In the pharmacy she led them to a few of the shelves where stock had been ignored. Painkillers and antiseptic, syringes and penicillin went into Jane’s rucksack, along with bottles he didn’t recognise.

‘Isn’t that for diarrhoea?’ Chris asked, intercepting a phial of potassium permanganate.

‘Yes,’ Becky said. ‘But mix it with this’ – she brandished a bottle of glycerin – ‘and you get fire.’

Jane did his best to shield Aidan from the casualties as they made their way back to the entrance – a quadrangle was heaped with bodies wearing bloodied, rain-scarred hospital gowns – but Aidan did not seem affected by the atrocity. He kept batting away Jane’s hand and asking, ‘Is he dead?’

‘He’s been doing that for a week,’ Becky explained. ‘On the X-ray bed he was asking, Will it hurt? Will I die? ’

It was probably the ideal age for a child to be caught up in an extinction-level event, Jane thought. Any younger and it would be non-stop crying. Any older and there’d be catatonia. Five-year-old boys and death were a fine match. In years to come, though, there could be some serious fallout in store for Aidan. Some enterprising young therapist, if there were any left, would get colossally rich on the back of this one day.

Brendan and Angela were in the same position in which they’d left them, holding on to each other as if afraid that one of them might defy gravity. They regarded Becky and Aidan with a naked pleading.

‘We found some portable oxygen canisters,’ Jane told them. ‘And enough Ventolin to clear out Kong’s chest.’

Brendan asked Becky: ‘Are you a doctor?’

Aidan said, ‘Am I looks like a doctor?’

They were readying to leave, Jane making his final appeals to Becky who was shaking her head, backing away, feeling for the entrance to the hospital behind her. A klaxon went off, dopplering through the blistered, blustery sky like the appetite cry of some fantastic beast. Jane swivelled on the step. He could see nothing beyond the thick ranks of cemetery cars. Dust had turned them all the same colour. It was piled thickly on the windscreens, obliterating any views within.

The klaxon came again, closer. Was this the sound they had heard in the nights on their approach to the city? Jane doubted it; that had been more organic – this was compressed, synthetic, impersonal. It had the air of code about it; he imagined a gathering of weaponised shadows closing in around them. Spies on rooftops coordinating an attack.

‘I don’t like this,’ he said.

‘What?’ Chris said. ‘Survivors? Like us? Are you worried your trip down to London is going to be delayed even more?’

‘It doesn’t feel right,’ Jane said.

‘That’s because nothing is right any more,’ Nance said. Chris curled an arm around her, trying to disguise his surprise at her support.

Jane’s eyes were fast on a road filled with shadow, fifty yards or so away, opposite the car-park entrance. Something had moved within it, he was certain. Now he saw it again. A figure peeled itself away from the shelter of an overturned ice-cream van. A white scarf clung to the lower half of its face. Jane squinted, confused. It looked like a child, no older than nine or ten. There was something wrong with it. Its pallor was waxen, unnatural. He might have guessed this was some kind of sculpture, a fashion dummy escaped from the shop window, had it not been for the movements it made.

The klaxon made itself known again through the treacly air. The child’s head snapped to the left; Jane followed her lead, again distracted by the apparent failure of her physicality. Was she sick? Was she disabled in some way? She raised her hand and he frowned and felt a tip of the tongue moment, a thing observed and then forgotten at the moment he noticed it. But all this was dismissed from his thoughts when he saw a half-dozen heads bobbing past the procession of naked trees at the far end of the car park. Steel flashed.