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.
They pushed their way through the revolving doors of the hospital entrance. A security guard was swollen into his black serge suit so completely that he had split its seams. It hung off him like a soiled superhero cloak. A porter in a luminous orange vest drew attention that ought never to be paid. Nurses in once-white uniforms were marbled with all the colours of the vital rainbow.
There was an arrow pointing to the pharmacy. Jane headed for it quickly, hoping to put some distance between himself and the bickering Aussies. He tried to avoid looking at the figures slouched in wheelchairs, or on gurneys from which they would never rise. He imagined all the Do Not Resuscitate signs on the ends of beds. He thought of the morgue. No need for a discreet room now. Or body bags – the whole country was doing that job now.
A short corridor led them past the radiology department. A man with a pair of crutches and his foot in an orthopaedic shoe was waiting for an X-ray. His face was covered with a towel. Jane stopped.
‘What is it?’ Chris asked.
‘Where did that towel come from?’
They couldn’t answer. There was the slightest creak. Jane turned to see the heavy door to the X-ray room widen, a grimy hand with split nails white upon its edge. Before he could raise his hand, a woman with wild eyes came out of the darkness and slammed the end of a desk lamp into the side of his head.
Jane touched the compress to the lump above his ear and winced. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked. They were in the X-ray room. The woman had apologised profusely, assured him it was a case of mistaken identity. A boy sat in a plastic chair, his arm in a muddy-coloured cast. He watched Jane with big hopeful eyes, a child who has seen Santa unmasked and doesn’t want to accept the truth.