Conrad Williams - Decay Inevitable

WHEN HE WOKE, his legs had stiffened and his arms were sore. He tried to move, but the wrenching pain in his back would not allow it. Sadie’s head was in his lap, her thumb in her mouth. Elisabeth no longer looked as though she was out of reach. She simply seemed to be asleep now.

Early morning sunlight became blades of colour as it hit the stained-glass windows: a civilised light for a brief time, playing lilac and green upon the nave. To go outside would be to reacquaint oneself with its wintry brittleness. There was no heat to be had from such light. The sun would be a dead, cold disc in the sky, mobbed by mist. You could stare at it at such times. It looked as though it should belong to a more savage, a more distant planet.

He regarded Sadie’s face in sleep, ironed of its worries. A child’s face. Guilt lanced him. He felt sick. But last night, had it been real? She had been too knowing, too in control, surely, for it to be real.

“How are you doing?” Will asked, pecking at Sadie’s shoulder with a finger. His voice was cracked with the previous day’s effort.

“Cold and wet,” she replied, rising. “And stiff.” She stretched and her spine crackled. Even when she reached the limit of movement, the sound continued, scuttling around the cavernous interior. She made no comment on the previous night, nor did she give him a look or a smile that would have confirmed his suspicions. Forget it , he thought.

“We should get going,” he said. “This place’ll be crawling with dog-collars before long. Eli?”

She responded to his barking of her name. Her eyes swam, trying to focus. There was even the hint of a smile.

But then something failed. Will found himself looking beyond her, as if somehow she had been rendered insubstantial by what was shifting slowly behind her, in one of the grainy corners of the church, seeping out of the shadows like a tide of thick oil.

“Is there an animal in here with us?” Will muttered.

Eli blinked and tried to move. She slumped to one side and the full breadth of what was coming detached itself from his eye and swelled.

It remained with him for a while, like a pattern of light imprinted on his retina. The muscled bulk of it, great liquid swirls that might have been eyes. Then it faded and became part of the shadows. In a moment, it was as though there had never been anything there at all.

“Did you see that?” he asked Sadie, trying to keep his voice calm.

Sadie was attending to Elisabeth, trying to get her to drink water from a cat’s bowl she had found by the door. Elisabeth was making a sound that might have been “Grue...”

“See what?”

“There was something in the corner... Never mind. Forget it.”

Sadie smiled at him. “You’re just tired, Will. I think Elisabeth will be okay. We should give her a little more time here.”

Will shook his head and started gathering their things. “I don’t think so. If Eli’s getting better, then she’ll have to do it on the move. We have to find some food too.”

“Do you have any money? I could go into the village and buy some sandwiches or something?”

Will fished in his pockets and pulled out a twenty-pound note. It was all he had.

“Here,” he said. “Hurry back. We’ll wait for you in the trees, where we watched the planes yesterday.”

Sadie gone, he strapped Elisabeth into the stretcher and criss-crossed the straps around his chest. He checked the corner of the church again but there was nothing there. Too tired. He hoped that was the case.

Outside, he found a vantage point under the trees from which he could see the motorway and a good portion of the sky. There were no engines thrumming through it. Just the sound of the wind in the leaves.

“You fret too much, Will. You always did. If you were a piece of jewellery, you’d be a set of worry beads.”

Will eased himself out of the straps. Elisabeth was cradling her jaw with a hand and trying to unpick the knots that were keeping her in the stretcher.

“I had a feeling that when you came round your first words would be some sort of crack at me.” He beamed at her regardless. When she tried to return it, her face fell apart.

“I think I broke my jaw.”

Will crouched next to her and gently cupped her head in his hands. “I don’t think so. You wouldn’t be able to talk.”

“I might be able to walk, if you could help me try to put some weight on my feet?”

“Are you sure?”

“If we take it easy. What happened, by the way?”

As they hobbled around the trees, Will explained about the bombs, pointing out some of the visible craters on the road. Thin streams of smoke continued to rise from them.

“I wasn’t aware of any great terrorist activity going on,” said Eli. “Were you?”

Will shook his head. This was beyond anything he had read about in the newspapers. Terrorist activity in the country’s history was sporadic; it might run to one or two bombs prior to a long period of inactivity. The peppering of one of Britain’s arterial carriageways pointed to some other organisation with a lot of money and a lot of personnel. Will wondered if the planes he had seen last night were part of it. If they were, and if they had been hunting him, then, by extension, the bombs had been meant for him too.

Sadie returned with pies from the village bakery and a newspaper. Apparently, there were few people around at this hour. And it helped that it was a Sunday. “Nobody’s going anywhere because they can’t,” she explained. “There were barricades on all the roads in and out of the village. Soldiers with guns. Everyone’s talking about the explosions.”

Elisabeth and Sadie talked while they ate. Will wolfed his pie and then returned to the vantage point in the trees. Not only must they dodge the surveillance aircraft, if that’s what they were, but now they had troops to deal with.

“Will!” Elisabeth, when he returned, looked even paler than she had directly after the accident.

“What is it?”

She was holding the newspaper open. On page three there was a photograph of Will, the one from his passport. He had had a hangover on the day it was taken. He looked startled, and his eyes seemed somehow too juicy for their sockets, as if someone had bathed them before plugging them back into his face. Next to his photograph was a picture of Cat, from the early days of her pregnancy. They had been holidaying in Greece. She was smiling and her forefinger was pointing to her tummy. The headline read:

BODY OF PREGNANT WOMAN HAD BEEN ‘FILLETED’

Will tore the newspaper from Elisabeth’s hands. As he read the story, his eyes kept returning to his wife’s face. She had been so happy on that day. He remembered that shortly after he took the picture they had made love on the balcony of their hotel room while below a boy carrying a basket of fruit called out: “ Meloni, meloni ... cool meloni for you hot people!” They hadn’t been able to stop laughing.

Filleted. Filleted .

“She’s dead then?” Will said. “What... you can’t survive a filleting, can you? Can you? ” He laughed, infected by the blissful memory and the preposterous thought of his wife, sliced and boned like a cut of meat.

“Will, they’re looking for us. You. They’re looking for you. They’re calling it a manhunt.”

“But I–”

Elisabeth reached for him, pain turning her face grey for a second. “I know you didn’t. But they think you did.”

“She’s–”

“She is dead, Will. She is dead.”

He felt the need to run, to take off across the field, screaming until he coughed up blood. He didn’t care who saw him or how quickly he would be caught. He wanted to die. He wanted the people who were responsible for Cat’s death to die. He wanted to kill them. But he wanted to die first.