Конрад Уильямс - One

Jane felt drifting over him a sleepiness that he had not felt for years. It was a feeling of contentment, the warmth of a good meal sitting in his belly. Almost immediately, he rolled over and was copiously sick. He felt his stomach heave as if it was eager to be out of his body and on the beach alongside his waste. He lost sight of what he was, where he was for a while. Dark grains shifted behind his vision. He felt that by vomiting he had loosened a little of what made him who he was supposed to be. He felt unhinged, dislocated. So much of his life had slid away from him, it was as if what he needed to make himself solid and real had been removed. He was like a computer without any software loaded into it. He was something awaiting instructions. He was potential – less than that.

He raised himself to his feet, weak now, his legs shaking as if he had risen from a long coma. The sleepiness had not faded, it had simply changed into a nastier version of itself. This was bone-tired. This was an exhaustion that people just did not return from. It preceded the suicide note and the pills.

The women stretched away from him along the beach like appalling sunbathers. Somehow he managed to get moving again. The Skinners were being overwhelmed. Bodies lay around like shellfish shucked of their fruits. Jane tried to ignore the churning of hunger in his sore guts and put one foot in front of the other. He saw a hairband dividing a sweep of dirty blonde hair. A still head nestled in the beach; she did not flinch when fans of sand were kicked across her face as the combat unfolded around her. He ran to her. She was breathing. Her hands and throat were laced with barbed wire, but she had not shifted against it. He said her name, his voice still little more than a wheeze. He checked her pulse. For a moment he thought he could feel two: hers and the strong, fast code of her baby underpinning it. Then her eyes were open and she was staring at him and it was like the day he first saw her. That wild, untrammelled look just before she had assaulted him. He knew she would be all right. She was a survivor in more ways than one.

Jane freed her hands and then loosened the noose so that she could wriggle under it. He held her and asked if she was all right but his voice was so breathless that she couldn’t have heard him.

‘Yes, yes, I’m OK,’ she said. ‘They didn’t touch me. I’m not… I wasn’t ready yet.’

He shushed her and helped her to her feet. Her, well and unharmed with him, gave him strength. They hurried as fast as the sand would allow them.

‘Where’s Aidan? Did you find him?’

‘Aidan’s dead.’

Becky didn’t say anything, but he sensed a change in her movement and posture. He felt the need to back up his statement, but he didn’t know how. To tell her how it had happened was to condemn Aidan. Better she should remember him how she preferred. His betrayal, his threat no longer mattered.

‘He stopped taking his pills,’ she said.

‘You knew that?’

She nodded. ‘I should have made him, but what can you do? He was sick. I think he understood that. I think he believed he was dying.’

Or changing, Jane thought. It struck him that maybe Aidan had embraced his own internal demolition by the Skinners, favoured it over the auto-cannibalism of whatever disease lurked in his bones. Maybe the Event had tweaked his genes in some way. Maybe death wasn’t so inevitable, for Aidan, for some others. Maybe futures too terrible to entertain lay in store. He thought of the girl in the scarf, the ghastly knowledge that gleamed in her eyes, and he shuddered.

‘Where are we going?’ Becky asked.

‘The raft,’ he said.

‘It’s real? You saw it?’

Jane nodded. It was hard not to smile, not to be infected by the sudden tremor of excitement in her voice. Fear too, he supposed. Death was settling in bodies all around them and it was a fair distance to the peninsula yet. Traps lay in wait, as they had done day after day, down all the miles, all the years.

At the barrier they kicked sand into the fire until a cold path was cleared. They rushed through and Jane touched her on the shoulder, told her not to look, but of course she did and he felt her change beneath his fingers. It was a strange tensing and relaxing, as if she might implode in an arthritic drawing-in of fear and revulsion, or simply collapse, fade away where she stood.

‘We can help. We can save them,’ she said, but the quavering in her voice was its own acknowledgment of the truth. She did not resist him when he drew her on.

‘There’s nothing we can do,’ he said. ‘All we can do is save ourselves.’

An ecstasy of tripping and stumbling and sprawling. Every foot of beach seemed to have been taken up by a body. Dead or close to death or screaming as though volume alone might ward it off. They breasted the lip of the crater; Loke was nowhere to be seen. The ancient, rusted angles of Dungeness returned to the beach. The bodies thinned out. The noise of fighting receded.

He saw the girl.

She had made herself known to him by peeling away from the stream of fighting bodies. She was a sudden stillpoint in the current. She raised her hand and he saw now what it was about her that had itched at his mind for so long. The alien meld of her hand against his; the misted imprint of her fingers on the motorhome window. He understood the significance of the drawing he had seen, of the six-fingered hand enclosing the stick figure within. He thought of protection and assistance. Of species intertwined, interweaved, interdependent. Of mutualist relationships. Of pilot fish and sharks. Of the jaws of the fates.

He thought, perhaps, that she must have chosen him as her little project. A way to maybe convince herself that there was a shred of humanity left in her. Like Aidan, she was fighting against a stacked deck. He wondered if she was the girl whose house he had invaded in Burnmouth, a hundred thousand years ago. A bedroom filled with the accoutrements of the seriously ill. Stuffed toys and sleeping draughts. Posters of Disney characters and a diary filled with appointments to see specialists. Nobody could say how a failed physique might react when bombarded by the special chemistry of the cosmos. A trillion photons passing through the flesh were bound to have some kind of impact. Time bombs and slow releases. The savagery of the mutated cell. Maybe she had witnessed his tender interment of her No. 1 Grandpa – no matter how tokenistic the act – and it had helped her to ignore the death knell of her own heart. For Jane, it was something to cling to, at least.

A Skinner came pounding across the sand and the girl turned and floored it with the heel of her hand. Very clearly, Jane heard the crack of its host’s sternum upon instant deceleration. The girl looked back towards Jane, as if seeking approval, and hooked a finger over the edge of her scarf. She pulled it clear of her lower face. The glands in Jane’s mouth squirted sour enzymes on to his tongue in some kind of recognition. Her jaws were deep, powerful. The ring of her teethwas too great for her lips to close over them. He felt a wave of love for her. She had seen on or around him some shade that he could not recognise in himself. A scar on race memory, some brief verse from DNA’s long lament. The dedication he showed for his son was echoed in her looking out for him. They were nesting parts of the same Russian doll. She was the outer figure; Stanley was the baby at the core that could not open. He was somewhere between, rattling around, seeking closure.

‘Come on,’ Becky urged.

He turned away from the girl when she bent to the body, a long, curved knife sliding out of the sheath of her hand and opening the Skinner with the deep Y-cut of a pathologist. He ran with Becky and he couldn’t give voice to his fear that the raft might, in the face of the vicious fighting, have cut loose its mooring ropes and be scudding across the Channel. They had said they would return, but he didn’t believe that. He knew that the boat was making one journey and it was more about getting away than arriving.