Конрад Уильямс - One

Jane averted his gaze as they began plundering the ribcages. He covered his ears to the sounds of feasting, the horrendous glissando of screams and greenstick dislocations, and hurried on, moaning, shaking so hard that he thought he might simply vibrate to dissolution, like a cast of sand.

More Skinners were tripping and sprawling over the promenade wall, rolling down to the beach larder. There was nothing Jane could do. He had no Molotov cocktails in his coat pocket. The rifle was a toy. It made no difference. All his act of defiance would bring was his own death and that of Becky and all of these by-blows.

He angled down to the tide and approached the fire, feeling it, blowtorch-hot, from as far as fifty yards away. When the heat grew so intense that he could feel the hair on his face begin to singe, he inched into the sea, holding on to the sloping banister of a groyne. The water was more like warm grease; he felt it seep through his clothes and nestle against his skin as if enamoured of his flavour. He hurried, eager to be free of it, and almost fell headlong. He doubted that he’d have been able to drag himself clear. He rounded the end of the firewall; it hissed and sputtered where the tide tongued it. He didn’t stare too hard at what was at the heart of the flames, fuelling them.

On the other side he saw the mothers, or what remained of them. He thought the screaming might have been worse here, but then he knew that trauma was an excellent soporific. Those who had died had been picked clean. Those that were pregnant sweated and thrashed in the sand, chained or nailed or becalmed by razor-wire garrottes. Some were giving birth as he scrambled up onto the beach, the emerging newborns delivered by surrogate midwives that smacked their chops over the emerging mooncalves.

They were visible far off into the distance, as far as the light from the fire reached. Skinners were pouring over the partition wall at the head of the beach now. He felt one at his back before he had time to do anything about it, but it ignored him. He caught a glimpse of panic behind the foul pretence of its former face.

He screamed Becky’s name and felt his voice crack in the middle of it. What erupted from his throat felt at once both the most poisonous and the most pure thing that Jane had ever heard. He thought he saw a shadow pass over him, a bird of such immense proportions that its wingspan might eclipse the beach. And then it was gone, chased away by the shriek that came powering from his lungs.

He saw the Skinners fleeing and being brought down by fast-moving figures in hoods. They used long curved knives to reach inside the bone-armour of their prey. They moved with purpose, aggression. They locked onto a target and did not falter until it was brought to ground. This close to a chance of freedom, the Shaded were behaving like cornered rats. The killing fields had altered. These weren’t the narrow jack-in-a-box horror traps of London. The Skinners could not rely on darkness and dense architecture to help snaffle their prey.

Open land, common ground: it was all up for grabs now.

The Skinners were backing away from Jane, despite the swelling of their numbers. They charged towards him from the foot of the beach only to rear up like horses before snakes when they saw him. He thought it must be the wave upon wave of men and women at his shoulders, armed with wrenches and billhooks and cleavers, or the threat of the black sea, but no, they were recoiling from him. It was exhilarating to feel in power for a change.

Jane concentrated on moving deeper into the farm. Wherever he could, he helped to free the women who were unable to help themselves. He scored his hands on the razor wire locking them into the beach and tore his nails on the brackets and shackles that kept their hands immobile. Intent on a slaughter before they could be stopped, some of the Skinners had taken to pulling the women up against their restraints, throttling them, a prelude to escape. Others were simply opening up the victims that remained, scooping this human caviar into their claws, final meals for the condemned.

The wall of fire came down. A great cloud of sparks and smoke swept across the sand, befogging the bodies and blood. Jane was too frantic in his search for Becky to be grateful that he could no longer see the atrocities committed by the Skinners, or the dismantling of them by his people as they came pouring over the promenade wall. It was a hell of noise. Of screams and howls and awful wet tearing. The wind would occasionally steal in to whip these sounds away, only to return them as if too disgusted by what it had taken. The smoke turned the shoreline into a besieged beachhead, a too-true re-enactment of some terrible wartime battle. Something exploded; a car, a drum of fuel. Jane heard, then felt shards of metal whizz past his ear. One of them embedded itself in his shoulder and he felt no pain, only an increasing heat. He patted and pawed at his clothes, ripping off his coat. A smoking rind of metal, two inches across, had buried itself in him. There was no blood; the foreign body had cauterised the wound before it had a chance to weep. He made to remove it but managed to quell that instinct. He would be no use to Becky if he pulled that clear only to find, in the most spectacular way, that one of his arteries had been punctured.

He staggered on, thinking of Stopper, thinking that for a moment he had seen his old friend keeping time with his uncertain step, twenty yards or so to his left, a shadowy, pale figure loping through the sea. It bolstered him – though he knew it could only be an illusion, or wishful thinking – to imagine his old buddy here, at the end of the world, as madness descended all around him. He cried out Becky’s name, but the pain in his throat was too great to usher forth anything stronger than a bruised rush of air. He tripped and sprawled on a limb sticking out of the sand. Whoever it was attached to was dead, smothered by the beach – if indeed the limb was attached to anything.

Someone let off a magnesium flare. Out to sea, hundreds of bodies dipped and rose in the oily swells. The Skinners were being pincered. The Shaded were massing at the western edges of the arc of light cast by the flare. Hundreds of them were pounding past Jane now from the east. The promenade wall writhed: a physical cordon. A dozen women lay to Jane’s left. He hurried to them as the spectral light began to fail. One of the women was giving birth. Her throat was a necklace of rubies where the razor wire had sawn against her contractions. She was choking on blood, trying to stay alive long enough to get the baby out of her. But then he saw that wasn’t what was happening. She was trying to kill herself on the ligature before the baby could emerge. A Skinner was between her legs, trying to get hold of the baby’s head. Its hands were streaked with blood. It couldn’t gain purchase. The dying light glistened on its slavering chops.

Jane strode over to it and hooked his fingers into the desiccated peepholes of its eyes. What inhabited that bone carcass shrank back from him, lifting famished claws in defence. Jane grabbed its left hand and ground the bones to so much dust within his fist. He yanked back on its mask and the boss detached. Something soft and malformed quivered within, a sac with a centre of spiny teeth. It reminded him of exotic food. Trips to the Chinese supermarket with his father where he would be allowed to choose something he had never tried before. Soft fruits you sliced open with a nail and turned inside out, disgorging pulp and seed and fibre that smelled of mushrooms or meat but tasted of nectar.

He had his face in there before he realised it. When the body had stopped twitching around the suck and maul of his mouth he staggered back, disgusted, exhilarated. He dropped to his knees by the body of the woman and saw that she was dead. The baby had died too. He sat back in the sand and pushed his hands through his damp, sticky hair. Sand coated him. He felt that it might penetrate him, turn him to the cold, granular being that seemed to have been some silent promise to himself ever since Cherry and he had begun to fragment.