Conrad Williams - One

She was still wearing it. He watched her shape soften as darkness came on, as if she were losing the edges of herself to it.

He said, 'You're thinking that whatever this stuff is – cells, seed – it doesn't necessarily need earth for germination.'

'I don't know what I'm thinking,' she said.

'Aidan, what about you? What do you think?'

'I miss my mum and dad,' the boy said. His eyes were metal discs. They both went to him and held him. He cried hard and for a long time. By the time he had stopped he was asleep and the darkness was complete.

The way a child develops. Playtime and learning and meals and sleep. Aidan no longer had a timetable. It was walk and eat what you could and fall down exhausted and then walk some more. No time or space in which to read stories about animals. There were no more animals. No latitude for being scared about the things that didn't matter. This was adult worry and adult fear all the way. Five years old and he was looking at beasts who'd shredded their muzzles to mince in their desperation; the agonies of people steamed in their own liquor. Five years old and he knew what the face of painful death looked like.

Jane laid Aidan's head down gently on a folded coat. 'I'm going out for a while,' he said.

'For a walk?' He could imagine the smile on her face.

He touched her shoulder. 'Just a bit of me time. I won't be far.'

She held on to his hand when he made to duck out of the tent. Her face came up from the shadows. She kissed him, clumsily, on the mouth.

The wind had abated again. Maybe the storms had circulated, were laying siege to other parts of the planet. They would be back, though. He knew that. This wasn't a winding down, an underscore. A time to patch up, take stock and forge a way forward. It would take more than he had, in terms of effort and lifespan, to see the Earth back to anything like its normal self. Although he realised that this was what the Earth had been like for billennia, before the first life forms uncoiled themselves from their pits of sulphur and nitrogen.

Movement. The snap of twigs. He saw figures flitting through the trees, white scarves flashing like the tails of fleeing rabbits. Without thinking, he took off after them, sudden anger fuelling his muscles. He was tired of playing this game of hide and seek, or follow my leader, whatever it was. But they eluded him easily. They were more agile, sleeker, more athletic. He ran until his chest was too tight and hot to continue. He stood in a field, hands on thighs, coughing. He sensed them around him, watching, gauging. He jerked upright when he heard a stream of noise that was too ordered to be anything other than a voice. Not that it contained any word he could understand. He heard other noises. Something heavy falling, being dragged. His mind flashed up images of holes being dug into the ground, of posts being hoisted.

She emerged from the gloom, a spectre with a deep cartoon smile. It was only the mask, covering her mouth and chin like a rustler's disguise, hanging down to her chest. She wore little other than tribal swatches of cloth, tied around her limbs like filthy bandages. She was maybe seven or eight. Her limbs swarmed with curlicues and cross-hatchings, tattoos depicting a world and a people that had been hidden from him, from everybody, until now. Survivors. But they looked as though they knew all about how best to do that.

'Who are you?' he asked. She stopped about ten yards away from him. Something in her eyes told him she was smiling. She didn't answer.

'Where are you from?' he asked. 'Why are you following us?'

She held up her hand. She disappeared back into the darkness. He heard footsteps, quickening. By the time they'd hit full stride they were already too distant to hear properly. He was alone again.

He turned and there was the polished skull of a raptor lying on the ground. Tiny, basilisk, fragile. He picked it up, a weight that was almost not there. It was like holding an origami conceit. He inspected the boss and the bill and the eye sockets, turning the skull in his hands delicately, feeling its egg-shell thinness flexing beneath his fingers. He could feel the hot stare of intent yellow, smell the blood of its prey, so much of it gushing through these chambers that had it had crept like a stain through the porous bone, its own kill badge.

Jane lifted the skull to his face and breathed in the air that was trapped in the fossae of its nasal cavities. He thought he caught a flavour of what it meant to be wild, untrammelled. A killing machine, something designed solely for the purpose of death.

He got lost on the way back to the tent. He couldn't find it, no matter how often he looped back or measured his progress against the road and the lines of dead trees. He didn't call out. He lay down in the sand of a bunker, burying himself in it. At least he was sheltered from the night's breath. He fell asleep dreaming of the skull. How it was positioned looking away from him. The grind of spine as it rotated his head to look at him. Eyes behind the sockets, accusatory. Stanley's eyes, rendered by this alien juxtaposition into something freakish and chilling. The bill opened to howl his name and blood began to gush out. He put out his hands to plug it but there was no stemming its ferocity.

When he wakened, he smelled the copper of blood and saw that the tent was less than twenty yards away from where he had bedded down.

Aidan had rallied. He was eating dry Rice Krispies from the box, supplying his own snap, crackle, pop sound effects. The raptor skull didn't look quite so savage in the daylight and, after a moment's pause, he handed it to the boy.

'Keep it safe,' he told him. 'For luck.'

He saw Becky bite on some admonishment that she might have been considering. Aidan wouldn't have been put off; he was fascinated by the skull, once he'd established that the bird was dead, although it meant that Jane had to field a series of questions about the bird's skin and feathers and where they had gone and what, exactly, did decomposition mean?

They walked the A1 until lunchtime, when they stopped to eat. A blue shirt hung in the leafless branches of a tree. A brown shoe stood by the trunk, as if waiting for it to come down. Large, glittering worms hung and spun in the air: scraps of tape and insulating foam, and what looked like shreds of metallic paint.

Aidan munched his way through three hot dogs in brine, relishing the disgust on Jane's face. 'Look, I'm eating widgets,' Aidan said. Jane covered his eyes and pretended to be sick.

The wind brought the smell of the city to them. A foul fossil smell of oil and rendered tallow and cadavers and standing water. There was mildew in it, and something faecal; something old and defeated, like the smell you got when you opened the wardrobe of a dying grandparent who no longer combed his hair or brushed his teeth. It was the smell of capitulation.

The road was blocked.

'Holy fuck,' Jane said, his voice full of awe, both at the horror before him and the fact that he could still have the wind punched from him, there were still sights to be seen. Aidan looked up at him quizzically, perhaps about to ask him about the bad word, but he too was distracted. Becky simply stopped walking. She sat down in the road and bowed her head.

Jane told Aidan to wait with her, but he refused. Together they approached what was left of the airliner. The M25 stretched its arms out before them as if offering a hug, or a shrug, unspoken sympathy for the disaster it had witnessed. One engine remained, as far as Jane could see. Debris was spread all over the road and across much of a large field, north-west of Junction 1 of the A1 motorway road. Around two hundred yards away they could see the deep black gouges in the blacktop where the aircraft had hit. Perhaps the aircraft had tried to land on the A1. Perhaps it had just been battered down out of the sky by the fierce strike of incinerated air, a newspaper swatting a fly.