Conrad Williams - One

This particular fragment reminded Jane of a dog in full flight, its legs off the floor, its head out flat and intent. Three black dots signified buildings. One of the dots was circled with red ink: the next location for the temporary headquarters. Sometimes there were complaints about what appeared to be an overly cautious knee-jerk response to the threat of attacks that didn't necessarily occur. What was the point of this constant seven-day scramble for a new HQ when the old one was perfectly safe, perfectly serviceable? Jane knew it was all cosmetic, a façade to keep people busy, to keep their minds away from the open sore of a future not worth living for. None of the gardens they had tried to cultivate was coming on. Food was scarce. All of the talk at the meetings, of trying to grow phytoplankton in the ocean to absorb the carbon dioxide in the air, of building a machine to either blow away or suck in the cloud, countless other geo-engineering options from the possible to the outlandish, had come to naught. People had already spurned the rations offered by the resistance and had moved out of London, hoping to find richer pickings in Bristol or Birmingham or Manchester. Everyone was aware that to walk now was to go to your death, but that didn't stop people. There was the illusion of positive action. It was better than hiding out with a fistful of crumbs, not knowing if you were going to wake up in the morning with some vibrating shredded head trying to gnaw a path to your vitals.

'Got you,' he muttered as the piece of paper found its echo on the map. Some bright spark had decided to take everyone for a hike. Jane wished someone had decided to limit their travels to the A406 ring road rather than the larger ripple of the M25, but there had been a clamour for a greater range of options. There was the feeling of being constricted. That damned circle. A feeling of a noose around the throat.

'Heathrow it is, then.'

Jane napped briefly and woke up to find most of the night gone. He shifted in his chair, hoping it was the wood and not one of his own joints that was creaking. Fear cosied up to him and he stood up, wincing at the familiar aches and pains. He thought of that shambling tiger on England's Lane. Softlee, softlee, catchee monkey , the tortoise to his hare. He felt his skin pucker.

He had been dreaming about Fielding. A fan of cards that had steadily drizzled blood across the man's fingers as he spoke in his maddeningly calm monotone. Behind him the illuminated wings of the prison had darkened, block by block, the light snapped off as if someone were flicking an array of switches. Fielding kept talking despite night's casual pursuit, despite the clatter of locks as the cell doors were sprung and whatever had died within them came staggering out onto the walkways.

Something Fielding had said about hoping Skinners had invaded the warehouse chimed with deep suspicions of his own. He thought of the rats piling into the room. An aspect that had needled him. There was a hole in the door, but it had not been there when he went to sleep. Surely. He always double-checked the doors, made certain they were secure. Maybe fatigue had caused him to miss this, but he doubted it. He didn't know what that might mean.

Jane folded the map and tucked it into his bible; he stowed everything in the backpack and shouldered it. The wind was hardly heard in here. It was a surprise sometimes, not necessarily a happy one, to be able to hear the labour of your breath, or the riot of your own thoughts. But the moment you considered the wind, it was there in the background, like the breath of a baby in a cot, as if inspired to increase its volume by virtue of your mind snagging upon it. It moaned in the gaps of the houses and called out from the open mouths of flues. It carried the grief of the city's destruction.

Walking those sagging, abject streets you could almost begin to take the damage for granted. Years of listening to the glass crunching underfoot and the groan of battered timber finding alien positions in which to settle softened your reaction to it. Like the stone edges of buildings dissolved by the rain, you became blunted, you curved away. You kept your eyes on the pavement while the jagged fingers of scaffolding and fence posts and foundations beseeched the sky. He was no engineer, but he knew they could not stay in London indefinitely. It was a muscular city only for so long as its pals stuck around to help out: the Thames Barrier, for example. Who was maintaining the flood defences now that most of the capital's population were so much rat food? He woke up in cold sweats thinking of overheated rods in nuclear power stations melting concrete and spewing tons of radioactivity into the shattered sky. Would they even notice?

Jane closed the jib door and checked that the edges were concealed. He trod through the house to the back door and let himself into the garden. He waited, assessing, gauging.

Eventually he moved back along the side of the building to the road, the aches in his legs reawakening already. He walked south, skirting Primrose Hill on the west side. He was back in Maida Vale without realising his feet were taking him that way. He stood outside the house and called softly to Stanley, staring up at his window. He could still see that cheeky face with its arresting green-brown eyes. There was no effort in his recalling it; he seemed to wait, a good little boy, at the edges of his Dad's thoughts until he was needed.

He waited for a while, feeling his hair whipped by the wind and filling with grit. The foul cake mix of the sky folded in scoops of cobalt and charcoal. He thought of the raft and wondered who had begun it – either the building of it, or the baseless rumour – and imagined himself sitting in a crude boat next to Stanley, holding hands, heading on gentle swells to a gap in the clouds where the sun was peeking through. He took that image with him, empty-handed once again, back onto the A5, ghosts clamouring, that hopeful road upon which he had entered the city ten years before, straight as an arrow shaft, cutting through his fear and doubt, slamming into a bull's-eye so insubstantial that the arrow was still in flight, looking for a target. Anything.

He turned left onto Crawford Street and walked as far as Upper Montagu Street. The windows looking in on the children's area of the library at the end of the road were boarded up. He could just make out the play of candlelight in the cracks around the chipboard. A side door was nailed shut with thick planks. On Marylebone Road he hurried up the steps, feeling woefully exposed in the twilight, and gave a patterned knock on the heavy main entrance. A woman wearing glasses with thick scratched frames let him in. He swept across the marbled hall and down the stairs to the children's library. Becky was sitting in the corner drinking from a tin cup. She rose when she saw him, spilling her drink across her sweatshirt. They embraced and he felt her heart through their clothes, beating hard enough for both of them.

'I missed you,' she said. He nodded and smiled, kissed her. He missed her as soon as he was with her. It seemed to catch up with him. It was difficult when you were in the city. You were so busy trying to avoid Skinners, assess bolt-holes, keep a step ahead of the tripwire of your own dark thoughts that there was little time or space for others to share.

'Is there any food?'

Becky shook her head. 'No, wait. I saved you something. I haven't seen you for days.' She led him away from the small bookshelves furred with dust into the staffroom. He didn't like the children's library. It was too close to what he was all about. She dug out from her pocket a tablet of chocolate wrapped in silver paper.

'What about you?' he asked.

'I'm watching my figure.'

Jane took the chocolate and broke it in half. He placed his half under his tongue and felt his mouth become immediately awash with drool. He pressed the other half against her lips. 'Go on,' he said. 'Be a devil.'