Jane lifted the skull to his face and breathed in the air that was trapped in the fossae of its nasal cavities. He thought he caught a flavour of what it meant to be wild, untrammelled. A killing machine, something designed solely for the purpose of death.
He got lost on the way back to the tent. He couldn’t find it, no matter how often he looped back or measured his progress against the road and the lines of dead trees. He didn’t call out. He lay down in the sand of a bunker, burying himself in it. At least he was sheltered from the night’s breath. He fell asleep dreaming of the skull. How it was positioned looking away from him. The grind of spine as it rotated his head to look at him. Eyes behind the sockets, accusatory. Stanley’s eyes, rendered by this alien juxtaposition into something freakish and chilling. The bill opened to howl his name and blood began to gush out. He put out his hands to plug it but there was no stemming its ferocity.
When he wakened, he smelled the copper of blood and saw that the tent was less than twenty yards away from where he had bedded down.
Aidan had rallied. He was eating dry Rice Krispies from the box, supplying his own snap, crackle, pop sound effects. The raptor skull didn’t look quite so savage in the daylight and, after a moment’s pause, he handed it to the boy.
‘Keep it safe,’ he told him. ‘For luck.’
He saw Becky bite on some admonishment that she might have been considering. Aidan wouldn’t have been put off; he was fascinated by the skull, once he’d established that the bird was dead, although it meant that Jane had to field a series of questions about the bird’s skin and feathers and where they had gone and what, exactly, did decomposition mean?
They walked the A1 until lunchtime, when they stopped to eat. A blue shirt hung in the leafless branches of a tree. A brown shoe stood by the trunk, as if waiting for it to come down. Large, glittering worms hung and spun in the air: scraps of tape and insulating foam, and what looked like shreds of metallic paint.
Aidan munched his way through three hot dogs in brine, relishing the disgust on Jane’s face. ‘Look, I’m eating widgets,’ Aidan said. Jane covered his eyes and pretended to be sick.
The wind brought the smell of the city to them. A foul fossil smell of oil and rendered tallow and cadavers and standing water. There was mildew in it, and something faecal; something old and defeated, like the smell you got when you opened the wardrobe of a dying grandparent who no longer combed his hair or brushed his teeth. It was the smell of capitulation.
The road was blocked.
‘Holy fuck,’ Jane said, his voice full of awe, both at the horror before him and the fact that he could still have the wind punched from him, there were still sights to be seen. Aidan looked up at him quizzically, perhaps about to ask him about the bad word, but he too was distracted. Becky simply stopped walking. She sat down in the road and bowed her head.
Jane told Aidan to wait with her, but he refused. Together they approached what was left of the airliner. The M25 stretched its arms out before them as if offering a hug, or a shrug, unspoken sympathy for the disaster it had witnessed. One engine remained, as far as Jane could see. Debris was spread all over the road and across much of a large field, north-west of Junction 1 of the A1 motorway road. Around two hundred yards away they could see the deep black gouges in the blacktop where the aircraft had hit. Perhaps the aircraft had tried to land on the A1. Perhaps it had just been battered down out of the sky by the fierce strike of incinerated air, a newspaper swatting a fly.
‘It was a big one,’ Jane said.
‘How big? As big as a elephant?’
‘Oh yeah.’
He pointed out the immense crippled landing gear. ‘Look, see? Six wheels. That means it was a 777. Big plane. Big engine. If there were three of you inside standing on top of each other, you might just reach the top.’
‘How many people could it carry?’
Jane looked around at the wreckage. Little remained of the fuselage. Curved aft sections. A portion of wing. A portion of the great tail. He didn’t recognise the livery. Something from the Far East, most likely.
‘I don’t know. It depends on the route, I think. And the time. Three hundred and fifty, maybe. Maybe as many as five hundred. A little more.’
Aidan spread his arms wide. ‘About this many?’
‘Yes, that’s about right.’
Although the fuselage had disintegrated, there were sections of the interior that had survived the impact. Some passengers were strapped into their seats, bolted to the floor. One man, decapitated, held on to a plastic cup, imprisoned between clenched fingers. Most of the bodies, or body parts, lay in the field; some had hit with such force that they had partially buried themselves. Suitcases and handbags, wheelchairs and buggies. Someone had once told him that whenever you took a flight, the chances were there was a coffin in the hold. The shining dust from the crash skirled around the debris as if reluctant to leave the construct that had produced it.
Aidan had found a laminated emergency procedure sheet. He stared at it for a long time before tucking it under his arm. He seemed thoughtful, as if he’d done something wrong. Looking at children sometimes, Jane thought, you could almost see the cogs shifting.
They found what remained of the cockpit: instrument panels and throttle levers, the pilot’s chair. Miles of wire and hydraulic cables hanging out of bulkheads, like some lost ungodly page from Gray’s Anatomy. Nothing of use. Everything in the galleys broken or crushed. Jane found an ugly mass of metal and a great deal of blood but couldn’t work out what it was. There were hard impact marks – deep scars in steel – that suggested there had been some almighty meeting of surfaces. He saw the edge of a small plastic number plate and realised: the seats at the front of the aircraft, maybe four or five rows, had concertinaed into a compressed block barely a foot deep. There were people crushed paper-thin inside that. He saw tufts of hair. Little else, thank God.
‘I’ve seen enough,’ he said. They went back to Becky, who was playing with her bracelet, staring resolutely at the ground.
‘Think of how many aircraft are in the skies at any one time,’ she said, and he saw her shudder, an almost reptilian reaction that moved slowly through her body from her head to her feet. It was as if she were trying to slough her skin. ‘There’s just no end to this. No end at all to how low things can get. No end in sight.’
Jane didn’t know what to say. He muttered some bland platitude about survival, how she had to go on because she had no choice. But he didn’t really believe it. She stood up. She had either swallowed what he had to say – which he doubted – or decided to move on anyway. It was all for Aidan. Jane wondered what she might do if the boy wasn’t there. He felt almost guilty that he had Stanley to keep him motivated. How empty was your own life if you had nobody living in it?
The three of them picked their way through the wreckage and put the M25 behind them. They were within its circle now, and Jane knew that somewhere within its borders, somewhere within this 800 square miles, was Stanley. He thought it would give his gait added swing, but instead he felt more and more enervated. He couldn’t concentrate on anything but that great circular concrete road, how it seemed like a trap, a slip-knot that might close around them at any moment, trapping them for ever.
They bade farewell to the A1 where its motorway namesake crossed beneath it. They headed south-west across Edgware to the A5, the ancient Roman Road that would lead them, straight as a rule, to Marble Arch. The nearer Jane got to his goal, the slower the going. The bodies had been increasing in number ever since they passed into the northern environs of the city. In some places they had to double back and find a different route; it seemed as though every person in the street had come together in a mass huddle to die.