Conrad Williams - One

They filed out of the building into a coffee-coloured desert. Nance, her feet bound with strips from a torn shirt, winced at every step. The sky appeared to have been coated with another layer. Dust hung against the background of the clouds like swarms of insects looking for a crop to decimate. They felt it furring their hands and clothes. Jane remembered one time during his childhood when he wakened to red dust coating the cars outside, sand borne thousands of miles from the Sahara on a freak wind. This could have come from anywhere, any desert, any steppe, any prairie. Jane had a vision of the world turned opaque; just another dead planet to anybody looking down from outer space, a cold stone masked by a caul of toxic gas.

He looked north, along the raised strip of road. His pack would be gone, or so buried in dust it might take a lifetime to find. His shoulders felt naked without its weight. He had a good two litres of water in the bladder, food to last a couple more days, the First Aid kit, his own one-man tent, his maps. He did not share Chris's que sera sera attitude. Yes, they could replenish their supplies in Newcastle, but they had to get there first. They had no shelter. No provisions. If another dust storm came they would have to hope they were near enough to some kind of dwelling. If they were caught out in the open, they were dead.

He didn't say any of this out loud, but he saw that he didn't have to.

'Shall we?' he said, turning south.

Darkness was upon them before they knew it. They had walked for so long in something akin to a midnight sun, the light soapy, ill-defined, that they had not noticed the day tipping away from them. The temperature plummeted. There was nothing to do but keep going until they found a house where they could rest until dawn. Angela's breathing seemed to have levelled out, despite the exertion. He guessed the mask was helping. Maybe the cold did too.

Half an hour later they came upon what seemed to be little more than a beat-up shed for cattle. All the straw within it had burned to ash and been blown away, the shed's walls painted black by fire. A charcoal smell lingered. The walls and roof were intact, the columns supporting the open bays stout, undamaged. It had been built carefully, to last, by craftsmen who knew something about storms. A trough was filled with water that resembled molten lead. A little way off, bones lay in the dust, roasted curves partially buried. A large skull tilted onto its side, fat burned to black upon its surfaces, grinning as if floored by the irony of dying so close to shelter.

They huddled together under shared coats in one corner, like kids during playtime. None of them slept. The darkness became absolute. The baying of the wind was an animal trapped in a cage, trying to find a way out. Jane couldn't hear his own breathing above it. When he thought he might fall asleep after all, when the cold in his muscles seemed to reach a plateau, he felt another body, smaller, nestling into him, snuffling for warmth.

'Hi, Stan,' he said.

'Hi, Dad. Budge up, Dad, I'm freezing cold.'

'We've been colder than this. Remember when we went to Skye?'

'We've been in the sky in an airplane, Dad. It wasn't cold.'

'No, the Isle of Skye. Where we went fishing. We took your mum to clean out her sinuses after she had that awful cold that lasted so long.'

'I caught a fish.'

'You did. You did catch a fish. And it was massive.'

'It was as big as me, wasn't it, Dad?'

'It was, Stan. I thought it was going to eat you.'

'I can't get warm, Dad. You're not giving me any warm.'

Jane reached out but Stanley was no longer there. There was a sense of fingers brushing against soft cotton, of an opportunity missed. He felt a flutter of panic in his chest; he would lose him in this dark if he wandered away. He half called out to him and only just managed to disguise it as a cough.

'You all right, son?' Brendan's voice was warm, concerned. Jane was glad of its Lancastrian underpinning. It made the words somehow more genuine.

'I'm fine. I suppose I had a nightmare, but I don't feel as though I was asleep.'

'You can't tell, it's so dark. There's no telling how long we've got till morning. Could be hours yet. I've lost all track of time. My watch packed up the moment it happened.'

Jane saw the invitation to talk, but he couldn't accept it. Stanley was still too close. He knew it was an illusion, but he wanted to concentrate on his immediate proximity, in case the feeling of him returned. It was a poor substitute, this truffling for his boy's ghost, but it was all he had. Brendan, to his credit, did not pursue the conversation. After a while there were other half-shouts of alarm or bewilderment. The dream became the living moment became the nightmare. You reached a point where you did not know what path to follow in case it dissolved into a new, a different sort of reality.

Morning was later, rather than sooner. When it did arrive there was barely a change. Shapes grew out of the shadows. The sky paled only fractionally.

A mile further on down the road they reached a village. Chris groaned. 'If we'd put a spurt on we could have been sleeping in beds last night,' he said.

They broke into a house and found good coats that fit Nance and Angela. There were some stout walking shoes too that were the right size for the old woman. Her feet were blue and stiff when Brendan eased off her deck shoes, and she bit her lip in pain. Jane glanced at Chris to see if he might get a message from that but the other man was busy going through cupboards and drawers. There were some canned goods in the kitchen and Jane peeled them open and passed them around. They guzzled the contents where they stood, too hungry to talk or set a table. In the fourth house that they tried they found a coat and boots for Brendan. They also found a new canister of Ventolin. Angela almost cried when Nance handed it to her. She fired a few puffs down her throat and closed her eyes. When she opened them again they carried an extra sparkle.

'I'm ready to go jogging,' she said. 'Who can keep up with me?'

There was a wheelchair in the next house and Brendan rolled it out onto the road, deaf to Angela's protests. The rubber had melted away from one rim completely and was a bubbled mass stuck to the other, but the wheels turned, noisily. 'Last resort,' Brendan said, and Angela acceded.

There were no tents, and although they had been on the road for less than four hours Chris was keen to spend the rest of the day in the village.

'We need to recharge our batteries,' he said. 'A good night's sleep in a proper bed will give us something to smile about.'

'This isn't a holiday camp,' Jane said. 'We need to put some miles on the clock.'

' You need, you mean,' Nance said. Jane tried to remember if she'd ever said anything without that trademark snarl of hers.

'Yes, I need. You want to stay here, be my guest.'

'You're not my fucking captain,' Nance said.

'I refer you to the answer I gave some moments ago,' Jane said. He turned to Brendan and Angela. 'You with me? I'm sorry, I don't care all that much one way or the other. But I have to crack on.'

Brendan nodded. 'I understand,' he said. 'We're with you, and – I mean it – if you feel we're keeping you back, you go on and floor it. We're better off already for knowing you. You got us off our arses. We'll be all right.'

Chris and Nance went with them, but not without a volley of tuts and hisses and sighs. Jane heard Nance say something to Chris about sleeping out in the open again over her dead body. He wrestled with the urge to say that at least it would keep the damp out of Chris's clothes.

The griping stopped eventually. The slog of the journey and bodies becoming visible in the fields like soldiers downed by gunfire worked as an excellent conversation stopper. Angela improved steadily throughout the day. He saw in her the woman she must have been before emphysema dragged everything south. Some people, no matter how old they became, carried within them that essence of youth. It was like astonishment, Jane thought. A way of looking at the world that was all wow . Such people never became bitter or cynical.