Lying in bed, this tiny boy, the duvet up to his chin. Hand on his soft blond hair, the heat of him rising through his fingers. A smell of soap. Sleepy-eyed. Some toy, some cheap piece of plastic that was his current favourite twisting in his fingers. Warm. Happy.
Umm, I want to be an actor in Star Wars. Because I want a real light saver.
Would you protect your mum and me if you had a light sabre?
It’s light saver, Dad. But yeah, I’d cut Darth Vader’s head off if he tried to hit you. And then push him off a clift.
A cliff?
No, I said a clift.
Good to know, Stan. Thanks.
He could convince himself that Stanley’s pillow bore an impression of his head or that his smell lingered in the room. It was easy to convince yourself of anything if you needed it badly enough. He checked the note on the table. He couldn’t distract himself by thinking that if Stanley were still around he’d probably not be able to read it, no matter that he was fifteen now. No schools. No teachers he knew of. Precious few children left to attend classes if there were.
Stanley. I come here every day. If you see this note, wait for me. I’ll be with you very soon. I love you. Dad. x
Jane closed his eyes and felt nausea swelling. He staggered out to the hall and was as sick as he could be.
The rest of the flat displayed its unremarkable ghosts to him, as it had every day for the past ten years. There were some who were irked by his behaviour; others who envied his dedication and faith. He knew of people who had lost partners or children and who would not countenance thoughts that they were still alive. They were easily given up, the alternatives too horrifying to tolerate.
He sat by the window and looked out at the dead gardens behind the row of houses in the next street. The houses were losing their shape, brick and stone crumbling, steel rods in reinforced concrete becoming exposed. Edges were rounding everywhere. One day there would be no house to return to. A solid yellow puddle was a plastic football. The frames of cloches burned away covered patches of ground where rhubarb or strawberries might have grown. The flavour of cream itched at his memory, but he couldn’t summon it. Nothing growing anywhere now. No dove to release; no green leaf to bring back.
A group had taken off, though, for the Continent shortly after he’d made contact with the capital’s survivors, people who had already invented a name – The Shaded – for themselves. Jane remembered two of the expedition team: Hinchcliffe and Henderson, because they had the same names as his accountant and his secondary-school headmaster respectively. He couldn’t remember anything of the other ten or twelve. They had set out for Dover, intending to steer a boat across the Channel to bring help back. They were like the Flat Earth Society, refusing to believe all evidence to the contrary, that this affliction had done for the entire planet. Wouldn’t help have arrived already if it was the UK alone that was suffering? was a question they refused to consider. Nobody had seen any of them ever again.
Something snagged on Jane’s vision, something that didn’t move when he did. At first he thought it was a flaw in the glass, or a shadow falling, but when he angled his head he saw the tiny, greasy remains of fingerprints. He stared at the patterns in those pads, drawing closer until he could make out the whorls and curlicues, the signature of his boy, a hello from across the years.
16. SKINNERS
Dawn was always a hurdle. The break of filthy yellow light over the city, like a diseased yolk, heralded a reminder of what lay in wait for anybody who had lasted this long. We are but dust and a shadow, Jane remembered, and some of us aren’t even that. London was shored up with bodies. They lay in drifts at the mouths of Tube stations and shop fronts. They foamed from the pits and ginnels of the cluttered interior, thickened the roads like browbeaten demonstrations. It was ceaseless, monotonous, Auschwitzian.
Jane gazed up at the bent and bowed and broken street lamps, the electrical wires, the dissolving architecture, and half expected to see vultures eyeing him, waiting for him to fall. But there weren’t any vultures. Everything that had had a heartbeat was lost for ever. You could only goggle at bones, or try to remember. Hunger was causing people to forget. Jane often worried about that. The scrabble for food was erasing every other trait that made them human. How far into the future before it was all scrubbed clean and they were falling upon each other? It had already started, he was sure, among some of the other splinter groups that were dotted around the city. It was galling to think that you had to keep an eye on your neighbour as well as the Skinners.
He plodded towards the base of the Shaded, through the corridors of Regent’s Park and the interstices of Somers Town, home to ghosts of diesel oil from the long-defunct termini of Euston, St Pancras and King’s Cross. Regent’s Park itself was a redzone. Short cuts were becoming a thing of the past. He turned north, along the old Caledonian Road, now marked only with painted black skulls on the walls. He had to wait at the railway bridge. A Skinner was prowling in the shadows. Jane watched it and wondered about its name. Who had come up with it? Olly Easby, was it? Or Lynn Botting? It was childishly simple, yet accurate. They might have stuck with something a little less graphic, that was all. It was unpleasant having to refer to them by way of a noun that also served as the verb for their actions. Although they wore evidence of that too, like jewellery, like trophies; there was no escaping what they did.
It was unusual to see a Skinner up and about at dawn or so soon after feeding, as this one undoubtedly had. The remains of a meal were strewn about its feet like some broken human jigsaw puzzle. Jane cast glances all around; they usually moved in packs of three or four, sometimes more. They weren’t fast, but they had some intelligence. They knew how to orchestrate a successful hunt. He hoped this was a rogue specimen. It swung its head from side to side like a distressed elephant in a cage. The ancient, tanned face that masked its own features shook and jiggled as if threatening to slide free. The eyes that sat in those chokers of biltong were nothing of the sort. They were the decoy flashes found on the fins of fishes. They were vestigiaclass="underline" un-eyes. But these animals compensated, he knew that. They were snakes when it came to smell; cats when it came to sound. There was something almost supernatural about their ability to find warm living things, as if they knew the flavour of thought, or the flares that leapt human synapses.
Eventually the Skinner moved off, sloping left up a dusty access road to the trackside where it began to follow the rails west towards Camden. Another city redzone. Jane let his breath out. There was no telling how keen their senses were; breathing – Jesus – blinking might make enough noise for them to begin a dogged pursuit. They didn’t give up when they had the scent of you in their nostrils. They would stalk you for weeks, long after you thought you were safe. Shaded advice now was, if you’ve been chased, consider yourself a hot target and do not touch any bases until you’ve been scrubbed down by medics.
Jane paused at the railway bridge to watch the hulking figure as it diminished. A final check, and he was through the crumbled perimeter wall of the prison, trotting towards the middle of the radial arms. Part of the wall here was caved in too. Inside he saw Linehan with a sub-machine gun.
‘You don’t have to point that at me,’ Jane said. ‘Do I look dangerous?’
‘You smell dangerous.’