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.
They spent that night in a farmhouse. Bodies in the kitchen. Everyone had a bed to themselves.
Happy, Chris?
Jane found a new rucksack. Brendan found some maps of the north-east, but they couldn't work out how far they had come. It didn't matter. Knowing you were twenty miles or 120 miles from Newcastle didn't detract from having to cover that distance. Ignorance was bliss, in a way.
The days tumbled into one another. Jane couldn't be sure if it had been three or four or five since Bamburgh. Angela's breathing began to become more laboured, no matter how much Ventolin she took. But at least the road wasn't so bad and Brendan could push her in the wheelchair for fair stretches before she had to get out to circumnavigate a damaged section. Eventually there seemed to be more and more villages. Jane could sense a picking-up of pace. It was as though they were going slightly downhill. Conversation became lighter. Angela laughed, a wonderful sound. Even Nance was more gregarious.
The last night they spent before entering the outskirts of Newcastle, Jane awoke to the sound of screeching. He thought he'd dragged the sound with him out of a dream, but after a few seconds of hard breathing, and staring through a window opaque with heat discoloration, he heard it again and knew that it was outside, that it was following them. He sat up and pulled on his coat. Everyone else was asleep. He went downstairs and stood by the front door, his ear to the wood. The cry came at regular intervals, as though it was from the kind of creature that targeted its prey via sonic rebounds. He opened the door a little and felt the wind try to muscle it wide. He found himself trying to overlay the sound of Stanley crying over this, to try to make the sound that of his boy, so that he could do something. But it was nonsense. He remembered waking in the night as cats yowled in the street, thinking that it was a baby in trouble, but this sound was at the same time too bestial and too intelligent for that.
It was a hawk of some kind. Or an eagle. Or an owl, even. He wished he could differentiate, but he had never been much of a twitcher. Stopper had been a member of the RSPB. He always took his binoculars with him wherever he went. 'Goes a skua,' he'd say one day and you'd look up and see this shape in the distant sky. A while later: 'Goes a guillemot.' And there didn't seem to be an awful lot of difference.
Jane thought about going outside to see if he could spot it, but it was too dark. He'd only get lost and then he'd be in big trouble. He closed the door. Nothing had survived the Event, as far as he was aware, apart from a handful of people who had been shielded from its impact. Surely all the birds would have been wiped out. Which meant that whatever was making the noise was a human survivor. Or an approximation. What was it? An invitation or a warning? An all-clear?
Irritated, he wandered around the house. There were no dead here. The furniture was functional, the decoration spartan. It reminded him of a stage set for a one-act play. He sat down at the kitchen table and wished for his turntable, his records. A cup of tea and the sound of Stanley upstairs playing with his toy keyboard. The thoughts would not shut out the terrifying screeching coming to him from across the fields. He looked out at the dark and imagined the kind of throat that shaped that noise. He thought he could see the glare of yellow eyes and the controlled madness that burned within them. It had not occurred to him that other survivors might not be as community-spirited and would seek to harm anybody who crossed their path. Surely they were a long way from squabbling over the last tin of beans in the land. Some might not see it that way, of course. You can't reason with an animal when there's food in front of its face. And maybe that was the thing, maybe they weren't people any more. It was time to regress. Everybody was an animal, after all.
He fell asleep with his head on the ravaged wooden surface. Liberal parents. Naughty kids.
Granma smells of wee
. Don't we all, he thought.
The fields gave way to thickening villages. The villages became more and more built-up at the outskirts of the city. The A1 curved west, as if cowed by the sight of it, happier to bypass it altogether and leave the entrance to lesser roads. They moved towards Gosforth; Brendan had found reference to a hospital there in a newspaper the previous night. It was a little unnerving to find themselves walking streets again. Jane had been expecting to see people, perhaps some kind of patrol group set up on the northern perimeter to watch out for survivors. He'd expected army trucks and soldiers in fatigues. Hot soup and the best medical attention that Britain had to offer.
Within fifteen minutes they were wading through acres of dead.
'This way,' Chris called. 'It's less . . . busy . . . this way.'
They steered a course through the bodies, trying not to look, trying not to stand on anything. Angela kept her hand to her mouth. Some of the people had died with their hands fused to the handles of their doors, trying to get outside. Others had been partially incinerated; shadows of disappeared body parts remained against walls, like
anasazi
hand prints.
They reached the hospital and stood watching it for a while. Jane couldn't understand why there wasn't any activity. It couldn't have destroyed everybody, could it? He glanced south for a moment, imagining London like this. Utterly silent and still. Spending years rooting through the bodies until he found that of his boy.
He must have flinched because Angela took his hand, asked him a question with her eyes. He nodded, shrugged the moment away. To avoid any more inquisitive looks he strode away from them, over a mound of landscaped earth to the main entrance. The car park was like a dusty, hot garage forecourt of woebegone bangers.
'I'll not be going in there,' Angela said. 'I don't think I could bear seeing dead people in a place meant to help you. If that sounds daft I can but apologise.'
'It's all right,' Jane said, although privately he was irked that this diversion was for her benefit. 'Just tell me what you need and I'll see if I can find it.'
'Salbutamol, like the Ventolin inhaler I've got now. Or Atrovent. As many as you can carry. And if you see any steroids like, oh, what is it Brendan?'
'Cromolyn? Is it?'
'Cromolyn, that's the one. Or I think there's one called Tilade, something like that.'
Jane nodded, eager to be away. A goodie bag of drugs, a kiss, a handshake and
all the best
and it was him straight to the nearest Millets for a stock-up on camping supplies and off. Chris and Nance came with him, but he wished they'd stayed with Brendan to look after Angela.