Конрад Уильямс - One

Another thought cut across all this, unbidden, unconnected: What if Becky is dead?

It was no effort, really, to imagine her being peeled while something drooled above her, staring into her with black sockets, its teeth manifold, curved, like the spines you might find within an exotic carnivorous plant if you pushed it inside out. Beyond those rows of canines, something like the grinding bits at the business end of tunnelling machinery. He had heard that bizarre mouth working on occasion, mincing the life out of whatever it came into contact with.

Jane did not realise he was dreaming by now. The shadow line between real life and unconsciousness seemed to be growing softer by the day, a charcoal border smudged by a thumb almost to invisibility. He was aware of the bodies sitting all around him in their cramped rows. A Japanese woman in the next seat turned her head on the grinding apex of her barebone neck and leered at him. Her jacket yawned as she leaned nearer; he saw mould spots on the cup of her bra, the grey, sagging puffball within it. Flakes of her snowed on him as she struggled to speak.

Much more leg room now, don’t you think? It’s the ultimate diet.

Jane started awake. He was holding the famished claw of the woman next to him. He bolted out of the seat, disorientated. He had thought of his flare-up with Aidan, and was now convinced that when Aidan had screamed he’s dead he had meant himself, not Stanley.

‘Aidan?’ he called out. But there was silence. ‘Aid?’

For a second he thought the boy had left him, monkeying out of the aircraft and down to the tarmac, abandoning him here. But then he saw him where he had been all along, tipped forward, hands curled into his lap. The ghost of Stopper seemed to shimmer at his shoulder, a suggestion that this was the classic position of the vein-opener, and he rushed to Aidan, convinced he had killed himself. But the truth was far worse.

Jane stopped six feet short of the boy. Already he could see that Aidan, or what had once been Aidan, was near death if not dead already. The dull sound of gristle popping, like someone jointing a chicken, was a queasy explosion in the base of Jane’s head. He put his hands to his ears, but it was as persistent as a bad tune heard on the radio.

He could do nothing to save Aidan. By the youngster’s side he saw perhaps two dozen duotone capsules: protein-pump inhibitors that Aidan had saved but not ingested over the past three weeks or so. He was allowing himself to be hollowed out. He saw the physicality of what was invading him move through his bones, dissolving him, absorbing him, filling his shell. Aidan’s slender muscles bulged and deflated. His eyes, filling with red, sank into his face as his head tilted back.

‘Why?’ Jane asked it. Aidan’s shoulders jerked back, a violent shrug. His lips grimaced and pursed; blood pulsed from between them. The ring of his teeth was ejected; his jaw and soft palate slithered down the slick on the front of his jumper. Jane moaned, covered his mouth. Aidan’s hair jumped and danced as if it were teeming with lice. His hand turned from a fist to a star: a Stanley knife popped clear of it. Jane snatched it up. The blade was black with dried blood, the edge uneven where it had blunted itself against bone. A rag of cleanly shaven flesh had jammed in the slot where the blade could be retracted. Jane could almost smell Fielding’s cologne upon it.

He threw the tool away. He had maybe fifteen minutes before the Skinner emerged; already there were strains appearing in the thinned cyanotic flesh of the boy. He would begin to tear soon. Perhaps Aidan had come out here having duped Jane into making the trip. Perhaps he had intended to apologise. But it was too late; he had been doomed long before this moment, probably at the time he stopped taking the drugs. Possibly earlier, in the second they clapped eyes on each other in a Newcastle hospital.

Jane went back to the door at the rear of the 747. Long way down. He heard the splash of Aidan’s internal organs as the picky Skinner evicted them. There was a deep grunt, deeper than anything Aidan had ever said. Like the rest of him, his voice was broken for good.

Jane unclasped the overhead storage bins and swept through the luggage, looking for something that might help. Too late, he realised there would be an axe in the cockpit, but he would not be able to get past the Skinner in the starboard aisle now. The flight deck would be secured from the inside anyway.

He had to accept that Aidan was gone for good. What hulked and slobbered in his place, though it resembled the boy, was one hundred per cent meat-head. No reasoning. No compassion. No guilt. Aidan, at least, at last, had been unable to live with what he had done. It didn’t matter that he had put Jane in a dangerous position; he hoped that, in extremis , Aidan had failed to grasp that. He couldn’t believe he could be so calculating, no matter how thoughtless and unsympathetic Jane had been towards him over the years.

The wet sounds had stopped. The Skinner, recently born, was hungry. It was pulling Jane’s smell into its head, trying to differentiate his scent from the dead bodies arrayed around it. This was it; he was going to have to jump and risk a shattered ankle or a compound fracture of the shin. Crazily he thought of school, when a friend had told him that you had to bend your knees during a parachute-jump landing, otherwise your spine would come ramming through the top of your skull.

Thanks for that , he thought, peering through the window and trying to assess the severity of the drop. It must be twenty feet, straight down onto cold, hard concrete. He levered open the door and looked for handholds of any kind, but the skin of the jet was smooth. No vehicles nearby that he could leap onto. The nearest were a mobile belt conveyor and a commissary truck, both fully thirty yards away.

Jane glanced back and saw Aidan looking directly at him, the skin of his face flat, the frown ironed out of it, sheened with sweat or leeched fat or some other serous leakage. Not tears, though – Christ, never that. It can’t see you .

Jump. Use the box-cutter on your own throat. Something. Do something.

He sat on the edge of the doorway and propelled himself forward. The wind caught him and tried to suck him out. No way. No shitting way. Where was there a rope when you needed it?

He swung his legs back in and stood up. A body in the seat nearest his was shrugging herself out of her cardigan. He helped her. Then he was frantically tearing clothes off everyone within reach, tying crude knots into cuffs and hems; attaching belts, attaching ties. He had about fifteen feet of improvised line when the Skinner, attracted by the noise of his excited breathing, and the exotic dust he was causing to puff up from the bodies around him, came shambling over the seats diagonally towards him.

Jane cinched one end of his makeshift rope to an underseat baggage-restraint unit. He jerked on it twice, hard, and the knot only shrank, tightening itself. He stood on the edge of the doorway and leaned back, gripping the clothes, feeling the dust and grease of human decay seep out of the fibres. He wrapped one leg around the rope and began to lower himself as the face of the Skinner emerged from the darkness. He went so quickly that instead of being able to set himself at the end of the rope for the drop of five or six feet that remained, as he had planned, he fell to the floor awkwardly. For a second he thought he had twisted his ankle, but there was no damage to bone or ligament. He’d have a bruise. He could walk through the pain of that.

He glanced back at the jet but the Skinner was no longer facing his direction. Perhaps, his scent dispersed into the air, it had lost interest in him, had switched off. It was turned towards the north. He felt a pinch in his heart when he saw the Skinner wipe its nose with the back of its hand, a mannerism that Aidan had not been able to shake from childhood. Perhaps he was not yet fully absorbed. Perhaps Skinners assimilated little tropes of behaviour from their victims. It just made it all the more sad.