But nothing he could fasten on, bar Stanley, ever repelled the misery. Peacock feathers found under a slurry of ash and black slush in Holland Park. A tray of glittering butterflies rescued intact from the looted squalor of the Natural History Museum. A can of Guinness discovered inside one thigh-high PVC boot in a BDSM dungeon in Kentish Town. It was all just a different kind of dust. It was as if, resorting to his son – every day, every hour, every other minute – was diminishing him. He was using Stanley up, like a pencil. There was nothing but a stub left, it seemed. He dreamed sometimes of his boy and he appeared so tired, so exhausted by his father's demands that every rise of his ribcage had to be his last.
He watched the tiger slowly, almost lazily, pull itself on to all fours once more. He saw the great head swing his way, making hesitant curlicues as it sniffed the air, the jaws hanging open to aid its sense of smell. The wind was blowing up from the Thames today; his scent was being pushed in a different direction. Still, it terrified Jane to see the muscled hulk of three hundred pounds of big cat – or whatever filled the space it had once owned – working hard to draw Jane's taste into its flavour chambers, pausing as if unsure of what the weather was telling it.
The tiger slunk away, the frayed rope of its tail trailing behind it.
Jane exhaled slowly and rubbed his face with his hands. The smell of ink and soil and dust. He pressed the heels of his hands into his closed eyes for so long that he saw motes of colour spawn from the black. It reminded him of the weird light show he had seen all those years ago, standing at the bottom of the sea.
Jane opened his eyes. He blinked, but everything was blurred. Eventually, the soft edges regained their shape, except for one. Stopper sat next to him. Jane stared at his old friend, leaning forward over his forearms, which had withered to useless air-dried limbs, like Parma hams carved back to bone. Severed tendons had caused his hands to contract into famished fists. Stopper's face had been sucked clean by marine life. There was little left to distinguish him. The perished yellow Henrikson Subsea logo clung to the tatters of his jacket; it could be nobody else. He smiled, or grimaced, and black water drizzled from between his teeth. Something churned in the wet black reaches of his left eye socket, something with cilia. Something that made hard little
skritting
noises as it scraped parts of itself against Stopper's orbit.
'He warn't delivered t'me,' Stopper managed, and his voice was little more than the hiss of fossil-fuel ghosts released from ancient pockets in the seabed. His hair danced as if slowly animated by deep water. 'None of your kin fell t'me. S'all right, big man. S'all righhhh.'
Jane leant into his old friend, feeling his tears come. He wondered if he would ever cry himself dry, if that were at all possible. Stopper threatened to topple over, but managed to right himself. Jane smelled marine, deep water, the high ruin of matter that has fermented to oil over millennia. There was beauty in it, Jane supposed, as he felt the familiar weariness drag him down. You could be the ugliest, nastiest, most miserable piece of shit known to man, but if you had a beating heart there was always a chance you'd turn into a diamond after a million years. Everyone was composed of stardust, the random, immeasurable collision of atoms. We'd return to it again one day. He'd be reunited with Stanley then, that was for sure.
He fell asleep to that thought and woke up, seemingly seconds later, more refreshed than he had been for months. He gazed down at the spot where Stopper had been sitting and saw a thin film of oil on the waterproof surface of the roof, a rainbow shifting through it.
His head was thumping; he remembered to breathe.
Stupid, though. A stupid thing to do, to fall asleep on duty. He was glad of the rifle as he crept down through the opera house, pausing at the mouth of the auditorium as if there had been some minuscule sound, that just yards away in the vast black space were hundreds of people in the slashed, scorched seats, the wings and the gods, staring back at him in silence, waiting for the heavy velvet curtains to peel open and reveal the future.
He stepped, shaking, on to Saint Martin's Place. The dark was something almost solid between the buildings; moving through it was slow business. It clung to the lungs like tar. His head was craned out in front of him; he strained for any and every sound. All he could think was
orange
. He tried to recall the safe houses nearby but drew blanks at every remembered alley and aisle on the
A–Z
. There would be help in his bible if only he had a flame to read it by.
Cautiously, for want of any better idea, and in need to keep moving, Jane walked south. He might as well deliver the recent pages of his letter to the safeboxes at the hotel. He tried to remember which roads he was walking along, knowing that to get lost at night was to feed yourself to the Skinners. As long as he continued in this direction he would hit the water, and then things would become a little easier.
The things we know
, he thought to himself as he hugged the walls.
The things we don't.
We know you came from the Event, with the Event. You spread yourself wide and we thought you were dust. You settled in the damp folds of dead bodies. You found the deepest parts of lungs that would never breathe again. You coated everything in the way ash from a catastrophic volcanic eruption that travels around the globe does. You were both seed and preservative; after all, what use is a body without meat on it for a newborn to hatch into?
Everything indoors, untouched by your dust, your seed, decayed. You exploded into life within the husks of the dead. You exploded into life within the bodies of the living. You assumed the shape of the thing you grew inside. I have seen horses, dogs, a crocodile. A tiger. No birds.
You fed well, although you do not eat skin. Perhaps its taste is repellent. Perhaps you are incapable of digesting it. You fill the skins of your victims so that you wear them like the shell of a hermit crab, or maybe it's to do with decoration, or bragging rights. A modern-day scalp. In London, and no doubt in towns and cities all around the planet, millions, billions have been resurrected to seek food, to bring down the survivors.
You cannot see. You cannot speak. You are afraid of nothing, save fire. You are bioluminescent, like some fish. You are translucent. Sometimes it is possible to see clearly into you, to look at what you are digesting.
You kill and eat males on the spot. You incapacitate women and take them away. Why? Do you store them for later? Does female flesh taste better after it has been hung?
What will you do when we are all gone? Will you turn to dust and blow away again on solar winds at the end of our planet's life? Will you travel for light years in stasis, waiting until you happen upon another paralysed Earth?
Jane had hoped that distracting himself with facts might help his progress, but now he saw it was hampering it badly. He was almost crippled with terror. The thought, entertained on countless occasions, that Stanley had been riven by one of these creatures, either directly as a snack or via the unholy germination of its seed, never lost its potency. It gutted him every time. To stumble upon his son one day and find not the Stanley he loved but some shambling, pyjama-clad scarecrow was enough to make him want to leap from any of the tall buildings he favoured staying in. He would kill Stanley, quickly, if that was the case. Kill his son and then commit suicide. He almost fainted and had to slap himself awake in the middle of what he was sure was Northumberland Avenue to even briefly consider allowing his son – what his son had become – to feed on his dad, to get a head start.
Eat up Stan, get big and strong for Daddy. This is protein. This will give you muscles.
He reached Victoria Embankment and could just make out the patterns of the current in the skin of the river. Things floated past that he was glad – even now, after so many years of disgust – he could not see. He turned left, heading east. Waterloo Bridge within stumbling distance. Everything was dark apart from the occasional candle in a high-rise window. It reminded him of midnight train journeys through the Pennines when there was little around but the suggestion of hills, a slightly deeper shade of black against that which they rose before. A distant brief orange brick was a farmhouse window. Then nothing but black again.
No figures he could see or hear on the bridge. No animal smell. No stripes. He picked up his pace and by the time he reached the steps up to the bridge he was sprinting. Left up Lancaster Place to the Strand. Now he saw Skinners. He almost stumbled into a party of them trying to separate a figure from its skin but they were having trouble getting it over the angles of its hips. They were quiet, intent. The silence always dismayed Jane. Even when there was a struggle of some sort they did not display any evidence of effort. One of the Skinners had given up peeling and had buried its face into the shining membrane on the figure's lower back that contained the fatty kidneys.
They were too engrossed to register Jane. He backed away and hit Aldwych at full tilt. He was inside what remained of the swing doors of the hotel before he could meet a phalanx of Skinners coming the other way, from the direction of Kingsway. A cocktail bar to the left of the foyer resembled the scene of a water-pistol fight played out with gallons of blood. To the right, the reception desk was spotlessly clean.
Jane took the stairs to the top floor. The Dome Suite was locked; he had a key. He let himself in and felt the tension of the last half an hour fall from him. He felt safe here, one of a few places he had claimed for himself, or that other survivors had not yet become aware of. He'd fight off any challenger to this place. From the boardroom you could look out over the Strand and Waterloo Bridge. Windows to the east of the room gave you an unhindered view of the area around Temple, while to the left you could check along Wellington Street as it sloped into Theatreland.
He unlocked one of two dozen safeboxes lined up in the boardroom and carefully placed the pages of his letter to Stanley inside. On the lid was a number indicating that this was the latest collection. He placed his journal notes for the Shaded on top – they could go to Heathrow with him in the morning – and took off his clothes. In the expansive sitting area, he poured himself a drink and wished he had one of Plessey's radios with him. He wished for sound of any sort. He remembered how, before Stanley had been born, he would come home from a shift and fix himself a drink and listen to vinyl while he waited for Cherry to come through the door from work. They'd hold each other in the dark and dance for a while to Frank or Dean or Sammy. Sometimes he'd put on Chuck Berry or Fats Domino. It was difficult to remember those songs now, though at the time it felt as though they were as much a part of him as the colour of his eyes.
He checked that the windows were secure and that the fire escapes were still destroyed. The only way in would be through the door and that was a five-inch firecheck. He had access to the roof and could make his way as far as Drury Lane if need be. Safety ensured, he felt exhaustion come on.
He went to bed and fell instantly to sleep. When morning came he turned over to find the polished skull of a hobby on the pillow next to him.
20. THE HINDMOST
Jane made it as far as Ealing before the blisters on his feet caused him to put an end to his march. He found a hotel on The Broadway near the Tube station. None of the rooms were habitable, though, suffering from mould or awash with dirty water or host to families of huge rats that turned and regarded him insouciantly like street gangs looking for any excuse to rumble.
In the kitchens behind a dining room where no furniture remained, Jane made a bed on a long stainless-steel work surface by wadding his coat on top of his backpack. He fell asleep almost immediately, the rifle, safety off, clasped between his legs and arms, the barrel pressing against his cheek.
He dreamed of Stanley wiping orange chalk from his skin faster than Jane could apply it. He woke up after twelve hours feeling no more refreshed than when he had gone to sleep. He sat on the edge of the work surface feeling bad, feeling unsure of everything.
Jane checked the cupboards and chest freezers. He found nothing to eat. He drank from the bladder in his backpack and wondered about the half-moons of filth under his nails; was there food in that? He closed his eyes and listened to his breathing. He felt he had been worn away, eroded like rocks in hard weather. He felt like rind.
Outside he waited for a long time for some kind of sign that he was doing the right thing. He kept looking back to the bruise of the city but there was no curled finger in the smog above it. He carried on along the Uxbridge Road. He found orange chalk on the outer wall of St Bernard's Hospital. Inside, everyone had been slaughtered. A big kill, maybe over a hundred survivors huddling in the wards, waiting for some kind of signal, some indicator of hope. Skinners had swarmed all over the place. He came out fast, his nostrils stinging with the smell of recently shed blood, crossed the orange with slashes of blue, and cut south-west through Osterley Park, joining up with the Great West Road which took him to the airport's surrounding roads.
Six hours had passed since he'd wakened and he'd walked them as if in a trance. He broke into houses abutting the airport grounds west of Waggoners Roundabout, mindless of the risk: there were many stories of desperate hunger driving survivors into the arms of the Skinners who had turned millions of houses into death-traps. In a house on Byron Avenue, after he'd checked all the kitchen cupboards and found everything turned bad, Jane stumbled upon a plastic container of bird seed, presumably forgotten, behind a bag of charcoal and a punnet of woodchips. He sat eating and choking on handfuls of this until his jaws hurt too much to continue. He stuffed his pockets and headed back to the melted perimeter fence, spitting out bloody husks and resigned to a following day of agony for his teeth and gums.