What did you see?
There had been those oily miasmal colours, impressive even at the depths Jane had experienced it. What must it have been like at the doorstep? He felt a pang of envy, despite knowing that to have seen it would have been to die. These people in the cars flash-fried, brains scrambled, the upholstery of the seats in which they perished barely touched in many cases. It must have hit like a tidal wave, tearing the breath from everything in its path.
He stopped in the road. Aidan had tired of his skipping game and was walking alongside Becky, his hand enfolded by hers. The broad green bandeau she was wearing glittered with dust. The bodies in the cars, lying on the floor swollen, split and black, like baked apples left too long in the oven. The rats wouldn’t touch them. They ate only the bodies they found indoors. They didn’t eat what was outside. The dust, was it some kind of appetite suppressant? And something else. He had been blind.
‘Becky?’ he called. She turned in the road, swinging Aidan around with her. He was still giggling when Jane asked: ‘Why is nobody decomposing?’
They found a veterinary surgery in Stevenage’s industrial area where it cosied up to the motorway. A small laboratory was connected to it at the rear, where cages contained dead animals that had tried to bite their way through the wire mesh. Boxes of drugs were stacked in a cupboard. Someone had been here before them. Drawers had been pulled out and tipped empty: laryngoscope blades and draining tubes; worming treatments and syringes. Refrigerators and cupboards had disgorged their contents, none of which were of any use to desperate people. Watchglasses of agar. Test tubes and flasks. Injectables. Liquids, powders and pastes. Dermatological oils. Becky pocketed a skin stapler and some removal forceps as well as some pads and tape and a sealed pack of suture needles.
A microscope had been knocked over but Becky checked it over and it seemed all right. She prepared a well slide with the dust added to a few drops of quieting solution and clipped it to the stage. She was quiet for some time, alternating between the coarse- and fine-focusing knobs.
‘Any news?’ Jane asked. Aidan was inspecting a broken centrifuge, when he wasn’t glancing at the evidence of the animals’ frenzied attempts to escape.
‘I… I’m not sure,’ Becky said. She lifted her head away from the eyepiece. ‘It looks…’ She sighed. Shook her head. ‘Well, it looks… cellular.’
They camped that night on the fairway of a golf course west of Welwyn Garden City. Large amounts of litter were sweeping through the air. London’s love letters to them. Some of it plastered against the face of the tent. A Washington Post. Sheets of unintelligible data. An airline sick bag. They could see the motorway from their tent, through a clutch of famished trees. Aidan hadn’t said much all day. Jane wanted to talk to him, bring him out of his shell and find out what was wrong, but he was still digesting the revelation in the laboratory. He couldn’t understand what it meant. And it was doubly confusing to think that it might mean nothing. Cells. Dead spores on dead air. Just another thing that had shot its bolt at the end of the world.
Only Becky had not said they were dead. She’d told him that she’d read about cells that had survived for millennia, trapped in ice.
‘But the soil. It’s too dry. Anything good in it has been blowtorched out of it. It’s dead ground.’
‘I know,’ Becky had said. And chewed her lip, looking at him with that mix of worry and compassion.
She was still wearing it. He watched her shape soften as darkness came on, as if she were losing the edges of herself to it.
He said, ‘You’re thinking that whatever this stuff is – cells, seed – it doesn’t necessarily need earth for germination.’
‘I don’t know what I’m thinking,’ she said.
‘Aidan, what about you? What do you think?’
‘I miss my mum and dad,’ the boy said. His eyes were metal discs. They both went to him and held him. He cried hard and for a long time. By the time he had stopped he was asleep and the darkness was complete.
The way a child develops. Playtime and learning and meals and sleep. Aidan no longer had a timetable. It was walk and eat what you could and fall down exhausted and then walk some more. No time or space in which to read stories about animals. There were no more animals. No latitude for being scared about the things that didn’t matter. This was adult worry and adult fear all the way. Five years old and he was looking at beasts who’d shredded their muzzles to mince in their desperation; the agonies of people steamed in their own liquor. Five years old and he knew what the face of painful death looked like.
Jane laid Aidan’s head down gently on a folded coat. ‘I’m going out for a while,’ he said.
‘For a walk?’ He could imagine the smile on her face.
He touched her shoulder. ‘Just a bit of me time. I won’t be far.’
She held on to his hand when he made to duck out of the tent. Her face came up from the shadows. She kissed him, clumsily, on the mouth.
The wind had abated again. Maybe the storms had circulated, were laying siege to other parts of the planet. They would be back, though. He knew that. This wasn’t a winding down, an underscore. A time to patch up, take stock and forge a way forward. It would take more than he had, in terms of effort and lifespan, to see the Earth back to anything like its normal self. Although he realised that this was what the Earth had been like for billennia, before the first life forms uncoiled themselves from their pits of sulphur and nitrogen.
Movement. The snap of twigs. He saw figures flitting through the trees, white scarves flashing like the tails of fleeing rabbits. Without thinking, he took off after them, sudden anger fuelling his muscles. He was tired of playing this game of hide and seek, or follow my leader, whatever it was. But they eluded him easily. They were more agile, sleeker, more athletic. He ran until his chest was too tight and hot to continue. He stood in a field, hands on thighs, coughing. He sensed them around him, watching, gauging. He jerked upright when he heard a stream of noise that was too ordered to be anything other than a voice. Not that it contained any word he could understand. He heard other noises. Something heavy falling, being dragged. His mind flashed up images of holes being dug into the ground, of posts being hoisted.
She emerged from the gloom, a spectre with a deep cartoon smile. It was only the mask, covering her mouth and chin like a rustler’s disguise, hanging down to her chest. She wore little other than tribal swatches of cloth, tied around her limbs like filthy bandages. She was maybe seven or eight. Her limbs swarmed with curlicues and cross-hatchings, tattoos depicting a world and a people that had been hidden from him, from everybody, until now. Survivors. But they looked as though they knew all about how best to do that.
‘Who are you?’ he asked. She stopped about ten yards away from him. Something in her eyes told him she was smiling. She didn’t answer.
‘Where are you from?’ he asked. ‘Why are you following us?’
She held up her hand. She disappeared back into the darkness. He heard footsteps, quickening. By the time they’d hit full stride they were already too distant to hear properly. He was alone again.
He turned and there was the polished skull of a raptor lying on the ground. Tiny, basilisk, fragile. He picked it up, a weight that was almost not there. It was like holding an origami conceit. He inspected the boss and the bill and the eye sockets, turning the skull in his hands delicately, feeling its egg-shell thinness flexing beneath his fingers. He could feel the hot stare of intent yellow, smell the blood of its prey, so much of it gushing through these chambers that had it had crept like a stain through the porous bone, its own kill badge.