Conrad Williams - One

The track wound through Lewisham, bypassing depots and shuttling under the high street. He hurried by ruptured, stinking stock at the Hither Green sidings without bothering to look at what was inside. No food here. No hope of help. Human bones had sifted to the surface of the embankment outside the cemetery, sprawling over the rails as if left there by some untidy scavenger. The land opened up. The arid span of a former golf course. The spent matchsticks of a wood.

As the day lengthened, Jane felt London's grip on him loosen. He felt like a finger tracing a route in the A–Z . It had reached a section where there were no more arrows pointing to the next pages. He was falling off the map. He was leaving the city where his child used to play, used to stand on the balcony and watch out for his return. He looked back at the miles he had covered and wondered about his boy. Maybe he and Cherry had heard about the raft too and were making their way out here. Maybe they had reached the coast already, and were hunting for Jane among the others lying exhausted on the beach.

The hope would not lie down in him.

* * *

Jane spent the night in an overturned coach in the south-east corner of Orpington. All the windows were smashed. Nothing else shared the space with him. Various fluids on the ceiling of the vehicle had dried to a homogeneous black glaze. The coach was so old that it had shed any smells that might have identified the stains, or the cause of its accident.

He was tired to his bones, but he couldn't sleep. Worry gnawed at him. He wanted to see Becky again, despite accepting that she was safer with the others. He wanted an end to the wearisome plodding that his life had become. He measured his days in how many miles he had clocked up. There was no humour in him or for him, no tenderness. All he looked forward to was the face of his boy; he hoped he would remain tear-free for long enough to register his first expression. Not gritted. No. Death could not find its way into a boy with such laughter inside him. Death would mope away, shamefaced for even trying.

He was up and within view of the M25 before the bastardised dawn congealed around him. The previous night he had happened upon a camp that the Shaded had pitched about a mile north of the ring road. Skinners moved up there, a great wall of them stretching away in each direction: part of the noose that Fielding had talked about. There had been much talk about what to do. Some were for the long trek back to London: stick with what you know. But most of them – Jane could see it in the tension bunching their shoulders – were itching for a fight.

Now, to his left, ranged south of the A20, were dozens of the Shaded, like him ducked low into the dusty countryside abutting the fractured strip of road. Everyone hefted some kind of weapon. There were shivs and gardening forks and heavy-duty motorbike chains with shackles swinging on the end, knurled so that steel burrs stuck out of them. Shotguns and butchers' cleavers. Bottles of hydrochloric acid. One man held a Heckler & Koch semi-automatic carbine in each fist, his chest criss-crossed with bandoliers, his cargo pants stuffed with magazines. Jane had to believe that the cordon of Skinners was only one figure deep. He didn't want to rush any breach they might be able to enforce only to find legions of the monsters waiting to mop them up as they poured through. He saw some of the Shaded carrying guns that looked far more powerful than his own. There were others who carried axes and knives. He saw someone with a hand resting on the scabbard of a sheathed samurai sword, another holding nunchaku , another holding what looked like piano wire between fists protected with grey bandage.

Jane watched as heads began to turn and bodies unfolded from their hiding places. He felt the crackle of electricity in the air, the thrill and relief that aggression brought, the liberation of positive movement. He understood immediately why people went to war, were prepared to die. It wasn't Pro Patria Mori – Wilfred Owen's 'old lie' – it was to do with the people you knew and loved. It was the fear that they would suffer if you did not come through.

Jane rose with the others and put a match to the wick of his petrol bomb. Once it was burning, he hurled it as hard as he could at the Skinners. The explosion as the bottle shattered was drowned out by a roar from the Shaded as they stormed the motorway. Jane was roaring too. Jane was smiling, fit to split his face in half.

He didn't remember much about what happened after that and was still so pumped up with excitement that he couldn't feel the extent of his injuries. His right arm was burned as far as his elbow. Not too bad, but the skin was tender and pink and hairless. He'd had to shrug himself out of his coat fast and slap the flames out with the part that wasn't on fire. It was an injury worth sustaining; he'd taken down three Skinners with the Molotov cocktail that had almost killed him. He'd been grabbed from behind at the moment of launching the bottle and had dropped it to the ground, igniting himself and his attackers as he bent to try and catch it before it smashed.

Others were less lucky. Roughly fifty per cent of the Shaded who had charged the Skinners had been overpowered. In the thick of the fighting he'd watched men dismantled as easily as wasps trapped on a floor of ants. The few women that had been in the group were dragged away. Even above the smell of the paraffin flames the musk of the creatures hung heavy, a wardrobe of mouldy winter coats opened after a long time. There was something deeply unnerving about grabbing hold of a hand or a face and feeling it come away in your fingers like a swatch of fabric. He had to keep reminding himself that these were no longer people, that they had been subjugated, replaced. If you kept your eyes away from the mangled, silently agonised faces and on the alien posture of their bodies you could avoid the question.

The Shaded broke through somehow, and the land on the other side of the Skinners seemed green and vital, although it was no different to the swidden they had travelled up to that point. The Skinners did not pursue them; they closed ranks and waited for the next wave of migrants. There was a slow, confident intelligence about them, the knowledge that they had time to mop up. Jane thought with a jolt of panic that they were aware of what things were like all over the globe. You didn't have to fight quite so valiantly if you knew you were going to overwhelm your enemy later when they'd had all hope crushed from their weakened bodies.

From a safe distance Jane watched the Skinners scrapping over the men who had fallen. He gritted his teeth against the raging pain in his arm and suspected that the injury was more serious than he had first diagnosed. He needed cold running water and there was none. He needed to wrap the limb in cellophane, and there was none. Already blisters were inflating under the skin, its colour deepening.

Thirty of them struck out along the road to the sea. He found someone who was willing to share his painkillers. Another who had an aerosol of burn spray in his rucksack. It would have to do. He held the arm out, naked, in front of him like a diviner.

They peeled off on occasion, little groups of them, to forage for food in the factories and houses that formed a broken guard of honour on either side of the motorway. They ate while they walked. They talked little. Jane asked if anybody had seen or heard of a woman, Becky. Nobody replied, but the faces he inspected turned darker, more inward. Everyone had a woman who was gone from their lives.

They walked through the night and through the day and through the night. The land grew flatter and less built-up. The wind cleared its throat and lashed them. Rain was a dreary, dismal constant. On either side of him, men were staggering, wearing masks and goggles of every description. Their hair was long and unkempt, their beards like those of fakirs. It was like being part of a nightmare army staggering towards death having developed a real appetite for it. Every form of horror and degradation was in their wake. They'd bumbled through it all, passed every examination, and now, struggling to stay on their feet, they approached the edge of the world, knowing that death, if it was waiting for them here, the final joke, the ultimate irony, well, it would be welcome; it would be greeted with a deep smile and arms held out.