The supermarket had been rifled. The perishables had cooked, melted and rehardened into their plastic baskets. Most of the tinned produce was gone. That which remained was fouled in some way. He got on his knees and checked underneath the shelves. He fished out some cans that seemed fine. Sardines, mushroom soup, tomatoes in herbs. He put them in the rucksack. He found more canned goods in the infant section that had been ignored or more likely unseen. Puréed spinach and apple. Apricot and vanilla custard. Sweet potato, rice and butternut squash. He was aiming to reach the top of this aisle and turn into the next when he heard a boot grind into glass. To his right, a little behind him. He snapped his head that way, and pulled the reins on a cough. He froze.
After a few seconds he heard another step. Something shadowing his movements. Jane immediately turned and began creeping back the way he had come, his head turned to the left now, eyes burning into the empty shelves as if he could see his pursuer through the moulded steel. He tried to remember if he had made any noise beyond the gentle clacking of cans as he stowed them in his rucksack. He shot a glance towards the end of the aisle, panic rising, certain that he was surrounded. He had to face the possibility that not every survivor was a potential ally. Desperation drove people to do extraordinary things, not all of them laudable. He had made a mistake, been too blasé. He must be more diligent in future, if he had one.
He reached the end of the aisle and risked a look beyond its edge. Nothing. He turned and kept his eyes on the other aisle’s far end as he backed out of it. A shadow lengthened on the wall. One arm much longer than the other. Jane stepped out of sight before the shadow could shed its host. He moved as quickly as he dared, scanning every aisle around him as he drew alongside them, trying to work an angle to enable him to check the entrance for a sentry before he was on top of it. He thought of the Falkland Islands and the battalions who’d had to clear out the villages on their way to Port Stanley. He wondered if the soldiers sent into those houses had felt as soft in the middle of their bodies as he did now. Fear was fuel, he thought. Fear was good. Strangely, he did feel better than at any point over the last three or four days. The cough was in abeyance, the fire in his chest subsumed by the spike of adrenaline.
Jane hurried through the car park, feeling terribly exposed. At the exploded wreck of a tree stump he hid, watching the entrance. Nobody appeared. He waited for a long time, more than half an hour, and was beginning to doubt what he had heard and saw. He was shifting the pack into a more comfortable position, readying himself to move away, when the darkness within the entrance changed, and he could make out the white scarf concealing the face of the figure he had seen in Newcastle, before their encounter with the mob that had attacked them. Jane’s heart put a spurt on. The figure did not emerge fully, but hung back a little, as if aware that it was being observed. Pale, thin; even at this distance he could tell it was trembling. A fledgling fallen from the nest. There was something both repulsive and weirdly comforting about the figure. Its anatomy was all wrong; Jane wondered if it might be injured in some way, but that didn’t feel right. The shape of illness was in it. A body racked by convulsions; a physique drawing into itself due to the suck of failed lungs. Bad blood. Change and compromise. His mind flirted with images of mutations. He wondered if what had flashed across the surface of the Earth might also have damaged the little genetic kinks that made us human.
Jane was convinced now that he was being followed by the figure, but to what end? He didn’t feel threatened by it; he believed the appearance of the attackers at the same time to have been a coincidence. He wondered if the figure had something to do with their deaths, but then that would mean it had done for Chris and Nance too. Again he wondered why he had been spared.
The figure moved back inside the supermarket and Jane waited and watched for another quarter of an hour before moving on.
As Jane had expected, the travails of the day had an adverse effect on him. He could feel his strength sapping at each step. The fire had returned to his chest, with interest, and each breath bore a damp, rattling coda. If he looked up from the rhythm of his feet the edges of the road were blurred, and he felt he could no longer blame that on the mist, or the goggles. He thought he might be dying.
‘Stanley?’ he called out, but his voice wouldn’t rise above a bubbling whisper.
He couldn’t summon the sound of his boy’s voice, or his face from the grain that was writhing behind his eyes. He panicked, thinking that his mind was already shutting down, the brain cells switching off, and that any memory of Stanley he might have clung to in extremis was lost to him.
There seemed to be no towns or villages within reach. The wind was building; the storm he thought he had left behind was circling, coming back. He pitched his tent by the roadside but was too weak to bow the poles into position. He crawled into the tent as it was and chewed on cocodamol tablets till their foam parted his lips. He pulled out a tin but couldn’t read the label. He fell asleep squinting at it.
Footsteps gritting on the road. The tang of a shovel as it bit the ground next to him. If he reached out he might be able to touch the gravedigger’s boot.
A smell of cold, burnt fat. A hand in his hair, pulling it back. Rain on his face. The sound of something querulous, unsure. A glimpse of white scarves.
The smell of cooking, of fresh, hot meat. He saw firelight through the drizzled mess of his vision. Figures moving through it, like the winks and kinks of perspective in a mirage. He was handed a bowl and he took it, but stared only at the space above it, where the hand that proffered it had been seconds before. A pale, elegant hand. Long fingernails sharpened to claws. Feathers stitched into the skin of the hands. He ate the food in the bowl, a delicious stew of dumplings and what tasted like roast pork, but he knew he was dreaming when he got to the end of his meal and found a strip of meat with a crisp coating of tattooed skin attached.
The fire extinguished. The figures moving away. The hoot of an owl somewhere; an answering call in the distance. A blanket for his body, a pillow for his head. Hands on his face, soothing. A smell of cloaca. Something sharp pressed into his palm; his fingers gently closed one by one, locking it into his grasp. That querulous sound again. A soft trilling on the breath. A question or a comfort. Then gone and the hard acres of sky pressing down on him.
Something was darting around above them, too far off to be identified. Occasionally the swiftness would change to a slow circling. They birds, Stanners? Can you see?
Dad?
Jane reached for Stanley’s hands again, hearing the panic building in his son’s voice. He could see the birds now. Birds of prey. Owls and buzzards, kites and hawks. But there was something wrong with them. They spiralled, falling, not diving; they were struggling to stay aloft. And now Jane could see why; they were destroyed, their wings parting from the patagium. They seemed able to remain airborne, yet void of any counterweight they spun like seeds to the earth. There were hundreds of birds. It was like weather, of sorts.
Jane grabbed his son’s hands. ‘They’re going to hit us, Stan,’ he said. They would have to gain shelter, fast, if they were to have a chance of evading the talons and bills of so many plummeting birds.
He pulled and it was too easy. He rolled and the hands rolled with him. He glanced back and froze. Stanley’s hands ended at the forearm. What remained of the bone was socketed in the wet sleeve of flesh. The great chiselled bill of a foot-high raptor came suckingly free of Stanley’s opened chest. The screech it loosed as it gulped down bits of his son jagged along Jane’s spine like a curve of broken glass.