Conrad Williams - One

Stopper's lips, curiously thin, split open. 'Pleased to see me?' he asked, and his breath was foul with oil, with decay. The words were like a cork popped clean of a bottle: shadows welled out of him, blood and seawater and prawns bloated by the feast he had become.

Jane closed his eyes. Stopper didn't leave him. His retina clung to his image, red in the black. 'Stopper,' Jane whispered. 'Jesus.'

When he opened his eyes again, light had returned to the room. He gazed down from the bed, expecting to see the hotel-room floor matted with all kinds of filth, but he could see only his boots and a layer of that invasive, pervasive dust.

He yawned and stretched and sat up. He rubbed his eyes. The howl of the wind and the crash of the sea. Rain was sudden buckshot against the roof tiles. In this strange daylight, though, the weather's menace seemed reduced. He went to the door and peered down the corridor. One time there might have been the smell of breakfast, the sound of muffled showers and doors breathing closed on their hydraulic hinges. Now there was just the wind moaning across broken windows and buckled doors.

Jane went to the bathroom and tried the taps. Nothing but a dusty cough. Out of habit more than need he pocketed the wrapped tablets of soap and the mending kit. He inspected his body in the mirror, checking for cuts or bruises to suggest internal bleeding, but he was clean. He eased his boots back on and turned his mind to the next portion of his journey. He took out the map from his jacket pocket and spread it on the bed. Belford was around thirteen miles from here. Could he do that in a day? Heavy boots and heavy weather? He reluctantly traced his finger further north, further away from Stanley, back towards Berwick. Haggerston. About half the distance. That would be his first target. See how late in the day, how frazzled he was by then.

His hands shook as he folded the map and stowed it back in his pocket. Weak. He lifted the curtain and looked out at the sky. Brooding, thick, low. But at least the mist seemed to be dissipating. Perhaps if he got onto high ground he'd be able to look for survivors. He was thinking of freshly squeezed orange juice, bacon with tomato ketchup, and was moving to the dressing table when he stopped.

Next to his belongings lay a large white-tipped feather.

5. THE SEA EAGLE

Jane picked his way through the sludgy tan moss of the hillside, the rain like the heel of a hand pressing him towards the dead earth. Apart from the astonishing spectrum stuttering across the sky, the world had turned sepia. The meadows were scorched flatlands, the woods so many burnt matchsticks piled in occasional clumps. The exploded bodies of sheep lay in fields like fallen sunset clouds. It was hard going. The path had turned into a sluice; already there was evidence of minor mudslides where plates of the sodden, shocked ground had slipped free. An autumnal smell of decay and cold carbon hung in the air. It was deep in his clothes, his skin. He could smell it rising off his piss in the mornings. He wondered if his bones might smell of woodsmoke.

At the top of the hill he unshouldered his rucksack and rested. He had secured the feather in a strap on the bag. It fluttered now like a reminder. He had thought for a long time about the feather, where it had come from, how it appeared to have been placed next to his things. But that could not be the case. It must have already been in the room, and his movement, or that of the wind, must have caused it to fall. Maybe it had been a decoration, an ornament, a memento collected and then forgotten by the room's previous incumbent.

It was a large feather; Jane couldn't begin to guess what it had once belonged to. He had broken into a couple of the houses at the southern edge of the town and found a guidebook to British birds. He'd also liberated a pair of Nikon binoculars and an unopened bottle of Bladnochmalt whisky. He cracked the seal on that and took a brief swallow before putting the binoculars to his eyes and sweeping them slowly over the view.

East, the sea, huge and black and torrid in the lenses, its surface a choppy coating of spume. The beach was choked with tens of thousands of washed-up fish. Here and there something more exotic: white-beaked dolphins, grey seals, a basking shark, a minke whale. Endless fluthers of jellyfish. He peered through the glasses at the land to the south-west, turning through 360 degrees until his attention was back on the water. Nothing but stubbled countryside and the boiling horizon.

He took another belt of whisky and secured the bottle in the rucksack. He shouldered it, making sure that the straps were not twisted, and headed back down the hill.

'Careful, Stanley,' he called out. 'Mind you don't slip.'

He had climbed a hill with Cherry early on in their relationship. It wasn't lost on him that much of their time together since had felt like the same thing. They had taken a tent to the Brecon Beacons in South Wales. They'd climbed Pen y Fan, a day's trek, and then camped in the great valley beneath it, cooking packet foods in water taken from the nearby lake and boiled, smacking their lips, making appreciative groans even though the rehydrated rice had been appalling. The silence as night fell had freaked them out. That and the depth to the sky, the assault of stars. Their chattiness was cut by the spectacle. They lay on their backs in the grass, awed as stars materialised in the dark spaces between the brighter bodies. There was no limit. There was a point when they both swore there was more light than night in the sky.

They watched the scratches of light as meteors erased themselves on the skin of the Earth. They pointed out the uniform trajectories of satellites. Venus crept across their line of sight. Even though they were exhausted by their long walk, sleep had no chance of settling in them.

'It's amazing,' Jane had said.

Cherry's voice, when she replied, quavered, brimming with tears. 'I feel . . . small, and thrilled, and sad,' she said. 'I can't explain. I haven't the words.' He clasped her hand.

'We're on the edge of a galaxy that's expanding,' he said. 'We're the shrapnel from a bomb blast.'

'If we're on the edge, does that mean we're one of the oldest parts?'

'That would make sense, wouldn't it?'

'So the centre of the Milky Way, that's quite young?'

'Well, relatively, I suppose.'

'Should we take a physics degree now?'

They did not make love that night, the first time in three intense weeks since they had started seeing each other regularly. Jane, whose appetite for her was great, did not notice.

'Those meteors,' he said, as another chalked itself off, 'they're probably the size of golf balls. Maybe smaller.'

'Richard balls?'

'I said smaller, not bigger.'

Once you had become accustomed to the dense scatter of stars, and fastened your eyes to one patch, it was striking to realise how many meteors there were.

'It's beautiful,' Cherry said. 'But I wouldn't want to be out there.'

'We are out there,' Jane replied.

'You know what I mean.'

'Yeah. It's a pretty rough place. You wouldn't last a second. Nothing to breathe. Sub-zero temperatures. Radiation. Super-accelerated debris would fly straight through you. Pressure.'

'Perhaps only marriage comes close to rivalling it.'

He laughed nervously at that. 'If anything larger than a golf ball came down on us . . . I mean, considerably larger than a golf ball, like the size of Iceland, say, we'd be in big trouble.' 'I've seen the films.'

'You've seen the heroes save the day. What if one really hit? Came down tonight. If you survived the impact you'd be looking forward to a nuclear winter that lasted years. No sunlight. Death of vegetation. Food chain down. Everything dead.'

'Are you always such a hot date?'