Jane approached, leaning over slightly as if he might be able to identify what it was before he got too close. He saw the flap and curl of torn clothing. He saw a separated blue-white hand lying on its knuckles like a dead crab, a few feet away from the main salmagundi of body parts. He thought he saw a swatch of striped pyjama in there but closed his mind to it, turned away. He was close enough now to see steam rising, to smell the rich, sour odours of fear and adrenaline that seamed the meat. He thought of his own teeth slicing through cooked flesh, tattooed skin crisped on a griddle. He put a brake on his bile before it could leap from his throat.
He heard the guttural, drool-laced rattle of something big nearby. It came again, each breath transformed into a wet snarl of aggression, catching in the throat. It sounded like the starter motor to some velvety engine. It was a beautiful, terrifying sound.
Jane backed away from the butchery as the tiger emerged from the collapsed north wall of a café, twenty yards away. It was deteriorating. Its once proud, blocky head was a cheap Halloween mask. The ears might have been flattened back in a classic intimidatory pose but they had frayed to nubs of gristle. Its fur was losing the stripe of a man-eater, gradually fading back into the insipid, featureless colour that death preserves for all. Its chipped, split claws scratched at the path, reminding Jane of the sound of skipping ropes in school playgrounds. The tail had long since worn away to a chewed, twitching stick barely two inches long.
It padded towards him, steam wreathing a grimace filled with black teeth. Its hollowed eyes were mesmerising; Jane could almost believe they were Jane-shaped, designed at the very moment of conception only to focus on him. They were full of him now, despite the blindness of the Skinner. The tiger was locked on.
Jane backed away. Nowhere to go. The zoo was an open arena. He raised the rifle and flicked off the safety catch. He shouldered the weapon and drew a bead. He shot the tiger in the centre of the chest when it lifted its head to check his scent. The tiger staggered back onto its haunches, a
phut
of complaint whiffling its chops. Its teeth oozed into view again, the eyes screwing up in a blind reflex of hatred and rage. The black corkscrews of its whiskers turned towards him as he was drawn into its olfactory glands. If the tiger was in pain, it wasn't showing it. A fresh sheet of drool unfolded itself from the open mouth. The wound was bloodless.
The tiger found its feet again and came on.
Jane ran. He did not look back, despite the roar, despite the spattering claws now sounding like grit tossed on an ice-covered pavement. He ran to the southern point of the zoo and clambered over and through what remained of the perimeter wall. The park beyond it was a morass of churned mud. He felt sudden, massive heat across the back of his left thigh, and then he was jumping. He was caught in the mud almost immediately. One boot was sucked from his foot. He turned to try to retrieve it and went down on his side, his arm disappearing almost to the shoulder. The tiger was struggling too. It was twelve feet shy of him; Jane could smell the baking, rancid heat that powered from its jaws. It lurched, trying to spring, but succeeded only in burying its hind legs more deeply. Jane forced himself flat on his stomach and wriggled clear, trying to swim across the surface of the mud, wriggling like a soldier, his gun held in front of him, across no-man's-land.
He chanced a glance over his shoulder and saw that the tiger was failing to close the gap. Its snarls grew ever more frustrated. At one point it seemed to try to take a bite out of its own flank. Gradually the mud turned drier and Jane was able to get to his feet. He ran past the festering waters of the Boating Lake and reached relatively solid ground at the Inner Circle road. Ten minutes later and he was on Marylebone Road, certain that he could hear the frustrated screams of the tiger, certain that at any moment it would come skittering out of York Gates and bring him down within seconds.
He ran for an age without thought of where he might be heading. The shock of the pursuit, the sadness of finding an orange zone massacred, the pain in his leg – blood was filling his remaining boot now; it rose out of the lace holes with each sickening step – was conspiring to cloud his mind. He must stop soon and rest, get himself patched up, or risk fainting.
Jane forced himself to study his surroundings. Maiden Lane, was this? He recognised it from a time in the 1990s when he'd met Cherry for a drink in some dark, poky little pub down an alley through which you'd have struggled to walk two abreast. Thoughts of Cherry, bizarrely, revived him a little. Something about the sass of her in those days, how she could get his prick hard within seconds of their meeting just in the way she'd nip his ear with her teeth after a kiss hello, or the way she'd look at him, a naked desire in her cool green eyes. Something about the bitch in her. Whatever it was, it slapped him awake as he limped into Southampton Street.
On the Strand he checked both ways before continuing, conscious of the heavy Skinner traffic that had been in evidence the last time he had ventured this way. Empty now, thank God. He must smell like an abattoir skip. He looked back at the blood trail and dreamt he saw Skinners following on their knees, sucking up his vital fluids as they inched after him. He could not risk compromising his safe house. He crossed to the south side and crunched through the broken glass of a shoe shop. In the storeroom he found a boiler bolted to the wall. A tray next to it held cracked mugs, an empty tea caddy and a bowl of congealed sugar with a spoon trapped inside it. He chipped some of the sugar off and sucked it as he worked at the seized tap. It gave a little. He held a rag under the spigot and forced it open. About a pint of rusty water gurgled from it. He soaked the rag and gingerly removed his jeans. The tiger's claws had slashed through the denim and left three deep gouges in his upper thigh. Blood oozed freely from them. Jane almost blacked out at the prospect of a vein having been opened. Death would be a long time coming. He'd feel it settle on him by degrees as his life pulsed from him. There was no point in shoving a finger in there, putting pressure on the severed blood vessel. He couldn't suture it closed. He wouldn't find anybody with the requisite skills to do so before his heart stopped.
Me and you, both, Stopper. Just a little slower than you copped it. Typical me, eh?
He dug in the rucksack for the First Aid pack. He took out the stapler and some sealed squares of antiseptic tissue. He wiped the wounds clean, gritting his teeth against the pain. The blood was still coming, but it was less freeflowing. He pinched the edges of the wounds together and, swearing copiously, stapled them shut. Once all three slashes were gathered, he snapped off the end of an ampoule of antibiotics and drew them into a syringe. He plunged the needle into his thigh, just above the wound. Then he wrapped a clean bandage around the whole sorry mess and secured it with a tubular bandage pulled up over his leg. He stood up, testing the leg with his whole weight. It hurt like a bastard, but it felt supported, secure.
Jane thought of the filthy claws of the tiger and what might have been swarming on their points. He couldn't believe he had isolated all possibility of infection, regardless of how careful he had been in washing the wound. He was dead if his leg required amputating.
He turned to go and heard a crunch of glass in the shop front. He saw a Skinner standing among the overturned displays like a man who has forgotten his shopping list and is trying to summon the items back from memory. Fire in a bank of shops across the road leapt at its shoulders, enhancing its silhouette. Jane wiped his hands on a fresh antiseptic wipe and pocketed it; he toed the bloody rags of the used ones into the far corner of the room. It landed with a splat. He saw the Skinner cock its head like an inquisitive dog. Jane backed into the other corner and made his breathing shallow.
The Skinner came. It moved into the room, blocking the entrance with its bulk. In another life it had been a woman in a suit; her black leather briefcase was still snagged on one arm. Her blonde hair had once been a styled, angular cut. Now it was tangled with all kinds of street debris: old litter, soot, blood. There was a finger in there. Her face was the colour of pastry, riddled with tears as though kneaded by a child. Thick saliva had poured from the jaws of the Skinner and hardened against its chin, like melted drips from a candle. Dirt was a cracked glaze across its chest. Its head was a pendulum swinging first his way, then the rags'. Death hung on a simple decision. Jane was not frightened any more. It had been dogging him for so long that it didn't seem to possess the finality it once had. He imagined himself being clawed inside out, turned to a pulp, and then sitting up once the Skinner had moved on, pulling himself back into some kind of order and getting the old stapler out again.
The Skinner shuffled towards the rags and started sucking them dry. Immediately, Jane shot past it and headed for the exit. The Skinner ignored him. Jane paused to snatch what looked like a size nine from a tumble of leisure shoes. When he lifted his head, there was another figure standing in the doorway, backlit by the fire.
She raised her hand. Six fingers. She closed her hand to a fist. A forefinger emerged. She pointed east. She stepped down from the doorway. She left. Fast; he could not pursue. He did not know what he would say could he have caught her.
Stumpily, stiff-legged, he tottered to the hotel. Orange marks on the wall. Not that that meant anything any more. He was more cautious this time, mindful of his mindless charge through the zoo. He took each floor slowly, making sure the corridors were clear. Checking for any evidence of Skinners having moved in. There was nothing.
He climbed to his favourite room and locked the door. He lit candles. The weather had booked in too, through a crack where the window frame had pulled away from the wall, turning one corner of the suite into a peeling, crumbling wreck. But it was a large suite; he could sleep in the boardroom. Jane stared at the locked cases lined up against the wall. He couldn't bring these with him. His letter remained unfinished. Never mind. He could save the last paragraphs for the day he saw Stanley again.
He opened each case and took out the papers. He carried fully two reams to the window. The wind tore past the gap when he opened it. Jane fed handfuls of love to the wind and watched them sail away into deep night. When the last of the pages had gone
Dear Stanley, I hope you are well. I miss you so much. Do you know, there's a little Stan-shaped hole right in the middle of my heart? Maybe there's a Daddy-shaped one in the middle of yours . . .
he closed the window and bolted it. He took his gun to the boardroom. A sleeping bag was open on the grand table, waiting for him. He fell upon it. In the night, as he slept, three teeth oozed clear of his lips and danced across the varnish like strange dice.
23. EXODUS
Jane said goodbye to his hotel room. He would not be back. He stood at the north end of Waterloo Bridge remembering how beautiful everything had looked when he had first moved down to London with Cherry. They would make a point of visiting the bridge, especially on summer evenings when everything seemed to be honey-coated, softened. Cherry was so beautiful; her face had yet to take on the creases and frowns that drew everything into a tight, resentful pucker. The light seemed drawn to her. They watched the tugs and barges on the river, talking about everything and nothing, waiting for the darkness and the lights. It had seemed there was nobody else around, despite the frantic foxtrot of pedestrians, the endless laps of cars and buses. London was there just for the two of them.
One, now.
Beauty was erased from this world. Perhaps for ever. He stopped at the middle of the bridge, looking down at the fragmented skulls and the shrivelled skins, wondering if this spot was where the two of them used to stand all those years ago. There was no warm ghost of recognition. No magical exclamation mark making itself known in the air. His heart beat normally. Some of the skyscrapers along the waterfront were slowly sliding into the river. The tugs and barges were burnt-out shells floating on a scum of clothes and driftwood. Fires burned in more and more regions of the city; a pall of black smoke formed an underscore to the metallic ceiling of cloud. When the wind changed direction he might hear a scream or the concussion of an explosion as a gas pipe ruptured. He shot one last look back over his shoulder at Aldwych, certain he would see the figure in the striped pyjamas, but there were just the same old grim tumbleweeds of skin and soot, dust devils of peeled white faces, rising into the sky.
Hope had wormed so many openings in him that he felt honeycombed. At any moment he might collapse in on himself. More dust to add to the drifts already shifting along the roads and pavements. Dunes of regret. A shattering desert.
He felt old beyond his years. His thigh pulsed hotly as he walked. There was a hand of pain at the very centre of the wound and it had long fingers. His flesh was sensitive as far south as his knee and north just to the edge of his ribs. Not a good sign. He chewed painkillers and eyed the remaining ampoules as if they were golden chalices. They were, he supposed. He had to use them sparingly. Becky had slipped them into his palm with a kiss.
Medic's perks. Just to prove that I like you, that I think you're a bit of all right
.
He pulled his hood up over his head and zipped the coat closed. His pockets clinked with four stoppered bottles of paraffin. His tongue took a tour of his mouth, squirming in the soft dips of his undressing gums. His remaining teeth seemed too long, too loose, his jaws receding from them as if they were foreign bodies to be ejected. But at least there was no blood in his fist when he coughed. No hair loss. He regularly checked his testicles for lumps, but nothing doing there either. No hard masses beneath the skin of his stomach. No fits, no blackouts. He was as healthy as he could expect to be. So just periodontal disease, then? Just the unlucky caries that come from too many sweets and not enough flossing.