Конрад Уильямс - One

There was a bookshelf in the hallway. Volumes about birds of prey. A plate of keys. Maps. He sifted through them and found the village. At the top of the cliffs overlooking the harbour, the East Coast Main Line railway and the A1 ran parallel to each other, south along the Berwickshire coast.

He picked up a phone and put it to his ear but he was no longer listening. Downstairs he opened the refrigerator and checked the contents. Everything was spoiled. He picked through the tins in the cupboard and put some of them in his rucksack. He wanted to spit out the regulator; the synthetic sound of his own breath was a constant reminder of how close he was to losing it. It was too early to see if the ambient air was breathable, but he would have to find fresh tanks soon or prepare himself for an experiment.

Jane went back outside and broke the lock on the shed. Inside he found pricking pots containing seeds that would never come on, a couple of poorly maintained gardening tools and a metal box filled mainly with Rawlplugs and drill bits whitened by masonry. A dusty table with thin legs bore a pile of papyrus-dry Sunday supplements and a coffee cup with the legend No. 1 Grandpa . There was a bicycle with dribbling tyres. In a drawer he found a combination lock, a bottle holder and a bracket, and an anti-pollution mask with a packet of replacement filters. He pocketed these and stared at the shelves on the wall, the tools on the shelves. Nothing of any use. Nothing he knew how to use well enough to make it useful. He stared through the cracked, foxed window into the garden, and the dog and the man were softened to a point where they might still be alive. The man finishing off a little work on his hosta; the dog stretched out, enjoying a snooze. If he stayed here long enough maybe he could will the world back into true. Going back outside could only lead to more awful discoveries.

He closed the door and stood in the lane. He kept thinking of the man in the garden. No. 1 Grandpa . He imagined a daughter and her child coming to visit and finding him like that, roasted to the bone. He went around the side of the house to the garden and retrieved a spade from the shed. He dug a grave. It took a long time. By the end of it he was sweating so much he could not get a sense of his own skin. His breath churned through the regulator; perspiration pooled in his diving mask.

He dragged the old man to the lip of the hole and drew him into it as gently as he could. He hesitated, the spade in his hand, before arranging the dog alongside him. Then he filled in the hole and smoothed the earth flat with the blade. He stared at his work, his raw fingers gripping the ash timber handle. He felt eyes on him, a heat on his shoulders, but when he turned the windows were empty. Just the eyes of the house then. Just the enormity of what had happened, massing.

Jane walked along the front of the other cottages, cupping his hands to the glass where it wasn’t broken in order to see inside. Only in the last house in the line did he see anybody in the living room, a woman in an armchair, her body swollen into it as if she were a pile of badly fitted cushions. Her head was tilted back so he could only see the inverted V of her chin. He left the street and walked past a small roofed bus shelter and a red postbox on a wooden pole. He began the long steep ascent of the road to Upper Burnmouth and concentrated on his boots, one foot in front of the other. He had not eaten for some time. Fainting here might be the last thing he ever did.

At the top of the cliff the ribbon of the road held hands with the railway as far as he could see. The rails had buckled in places. No birds, no cats, no dogs. He stared at the village and thought about why he had survived. Something had roasted the face of the Earth while he’d been at the bottom of the sea. So what had saved him? Water? Then why so many dead fish? Depth, then. That must have been it. He knew, talking to some of his mates on the rig, that this area of the coast had been a popular landing point for smugglers. The precipitous cliffs and numerous inlets were a blessing to boats bringing in contraband. The place must have been riddled with cellars and secret tunnels. Maybe some were deep enough to survive in. At the very least he might find a serviceable bike.

Jane crossed the railway and spotted a pub on the other side of the dual carriageway. The planes of roofs were like broken solar panels. A tree burned. The mist north of here was thickening, congealing almost, like something that he might have to peel off his skin should he be captured by it. To the south the sky was more fluid. It moved constantly. Cables of rain glittered from it like guys slung to the earth. Out to sea the waves were still churning; their roar a persistent complaint over the noise of his own breath. The mist shifted again, lifting slightly, enough to show him a suggestion of hills to the north, shoulders turned away from him. The mist closed in again as if it were teasing him with glimpses of things forbidden.

Jane hurried across the road. He could hear his breath hissing in the regulator. He wondered if he was panicking or in the early stages of shock, but he couldn’t tell; he had no frame of reference. There was nobody to talk to, nobody against whom he could gauge his level of fragility. Nobody to give him an askance look. Not that anybody would be in any fit state themselves to decide what was normal any more. Panic might now well be the new default setting.

He pushed through the door into the lounge bar as the mist sweated in the air behind him, as though eager to assume form. A cleaner lay on the floor in a pale blue pinafore now several sizes too small for her. Her face was that of someone beaten featureless; everything was lost to a uniform swelling. Her cheeks shone, at splitting point. Jane felt the world tilt a little, as if he were in a fast lift that had just begun to ascend. His vision vignetted. He closed his eyes. He must get used to this. There were bound to be others. Christ, where were the emergency services? He felt, like a blow to the gut, the suspicion that this village, maybe even the entire north-east coastline, had been closed off, quarantined. What could have caused this? It was a question that kept tapping him on the shoulder; every so often he felt he had to turn to confront its ugly little face, but he couldn’t provide any satisfactory answers. Terrorism, he thought again. If so, they’d succeeded. He was scared beyond feeling. The nuclear power plant at Dounreay? Meltdown? A nuclear sub off Cape Wrath playing war games? Could an exploded sub rip the skin off the face of Scotland like this? He was no defence expert, but he didn’t think so. Something natural, then? Some catastrophic event?

He stared at the bruised air streaking by the windows, the glittering sediment piling into the corners. This didn’t look natural; this was a storm on Venus. This was Ray Bradbury.

He was on his knees. His left leg was pinning the cleaner’s left arm to the floor. The added pressure had caused her clenched hand to open; clear fluid sweated from the tips of her fingers like glue bubbling from the sponge applicator of a UHU pen. He couldn’t breathe.

He swung the O 2gauge in front of his face and blearily registered that he was in the red, sucking on the tank’s dust. He fumbled the bicycle mask from his backpack and held his breath, spat out the regulator, took off his face mask and clamped the filter over his nose and mouth. He breathed. There was a smell of burning, and something underpinning it, something chemical. His sight cleared, his lungs loosened. At least there was still something left to breathe in the midst of all this smog.

Behind the bar he drew a double whisky from an optic and gulped it quickly before replacing the mask, relishing the hot fumes that were trapped inside. He moved down a corridor to the doorway to the toilets. To his left was a door leading into the beer garden. Somebody was dead out there. He could just see a pair of legs sticking out from the side of a Vauxhall Corsa. To his left was a door under the stairs. A bolt on it was drawn back, an unhinged padlock hanging off the hasp. He flicked the bakelite switch above the banister without thinking and descended slowly in utter darkness.