He unlocked one of two dozen safeboxes lined up in the boardroom and carefully placed the pages of his letter to Stanley inside. On the lid was a number indicating that this was the latest collection. He placed his journal notes for the Shaded on top – they could go to Heathrow with him in the morning – and took off his clothes. In the expansive sitting area, he poured himself a drink and wished he had one of Plessey’s radios with him. He wished for sound of any sort. He remembered how, before Stanley had been born, he would come home from a shift and fix himself a drink and listen to vinyl while he waited for Cherry to come through the door from work. They’d hold each other in the dark and dance for a while to Frank or Dean or Sammy. Sometimes he’d put on Chuck Berry or Fats Domino. It was difficult to remember those songs now, though at the time it felt as though they were as much a part of him as the colour of his eyes.
He checked that the windows were secure and that the fire escapes were still destroyed. The only way in would be through the door and that was a five-inch firecheck. He had access to the roof and could make his way as far as Drury Lane if need be. Safety ensured, he felt exhaustion come on.
He went to bed and fell instantly to sleep. When morning came he turned over to find the polished skull of a hobby on the pillow next to him.
20. THE HINDMOST
Jane made it as far as Ealing before the blisters on his feet caused him to put an end to his march. He found a hotel on The Broadway near the Tube station. None of the rooms were habitable, though, suffering from mould or awash with dirty water or host to families of huge rats that turned and regarded him insouciantly like street gangs looking for any excuse to rumble.
In the kitchens behind a dining room where no furniture remained, Jane made a bed on a long stainless-steel work surface by wadding his coat on top of his backpack. He fell asleep almost immediately, the rifle, safety off, clasped between his legs and arms, the barrel pressing against his cheek.
He dreamed of Stanley wiping orange chalk from his skin faster than Jane could apply it. He woke up after twelve hours feeling no more refreshed than when he had gone to sleep. He sat on the edge of the work surface feeling bad, feeling unsure of everything.
Jane checked the cupboards and chest freezers. He found nothing to eat. He drank from the bladder in his backpack and wondered about the half-moons of filth under his nails; was there food in that? He closed his eyes and listened to his breathing. He felt he had been worn away, eroded like rocks in hard weather. He felt like rind.
Outside he waited for a long time for some kind of sign that he was doing the right thing. He kept looking back to the bruise of the city but there was no curled finger in the smog above it. He carried on along the Uxbridge Road. He found orange chalk on the outer wall of St Bernard’s Hospital. Inside, everyone had been slaughtered. A big kill, maybe over a hundred survivors huddling in the wards, waiting for some kind of signal, some indicator of hope. Skinners had swarmed all over the place. He came out fast, his nostrils stinging with the smell of recently shed blood, crossed the orange with slashes of blue, and cut south-west through Osterley Park, joining up with the Great West Road which took him to the airport’s surrounding roads.
Six hours had passed since he’d wakened and he’d walked them as if in a trance. He broke into houses abutting the airport grounds west of Waggoners Roundabout, mindless of the risk: there were many stories of desperate hunger driving survivors into the arms of the Skinners who had turned millions of houses into death-traps. In a house on Byron Avenue, after he’d checked all the kitchen cupboards and found everything turned bad, Jane stumbled upon a plastic container of bird seed, presumably forgotten, behind a bag of charcoal and a punnet of woodchips. He sat eating and choking on handfuls of this until his jaws hurt too much to continue. He stuffed his pockets and headed back to the melted perimeter fence, spitting out bloody husks and resigned to a following day of agony for his teeth and gums.
He strode through the downed barriers and stared at the immense airfield. Jets, bleached and corroded, were still standing in the terminals or on the approaches to the great two-mile runways. Some of them appeared slumped, their wings having begun to part from the fuselages, tips lowered like sea-birds trying to pull free from an oil slick. He could see no living person. Ancient bodies lay around the aircraft like sunbathers, or pilgrims genuflecting at the feet of giants.
Jane hurried across the taxiways and toasted grass verges. More than once he slipped in the oil that had sweated from the engines of the airliners. The ghosts of other aircraft, long gone, existed as shadow lines in the tarmac. Suitcases littered the bays. A stuffed toy was a black framework of wire. Blistered signs on the retractable passenger tunnels bid Jane Welcome to Heathrow. There was a sound of deep metallic cracking, the kind of fatigue that he recognised in his own body. His sighs and groans were really not that much different.
He called out: ‘Aidan!’
The control tower was a gaping, deeply runneled fist of shapeless concrete. He thought he saw movement inside, but there were all kinds of dark grains sifting across his vision these days and, anyway, it would be too obvious to run things from there.
He found a way into the terminal and headed for the baggage carousels. The rubberised conveyors were long gone, but the smell their burning had left behind was still detectable. He walked along featureless corridors that seemed to have been designed for days such as these. Places like this were meant for queues. Without them, they seemed unfinished. Bodies piled up at the end of moving walkways clutched boarding passes and hand luggage. They appeared to be sinking into, or emerging from, the floor.
Jane found no edible food in the coffee islands dotted on his way through to the duty-free zones. Once there he saw how the fast-food restaurants had all been raided already, perhaps by rats, and not that long after the Event. Everything bore an impression of age about it. Everything smelled stale.
Once he might have been taken aback by the crowds he encountered at the security screening area, but other than a reflex glance at the slumped dead to check there was nobody breathing he ignored them. Skinners sometimes attempted to blend in with the dead in the hope of snaring the living but it was easy to spot them. They couldn’t stay still, fidgeting constantly as if uncomfortable within the shells they had invaded. Jane despised them, the way they were so unsubtle in their appetites and their methods of assuaging them. He hated them for assuming that human beings were stupid and for their utter lack of compassion. He hated them for what they had reduced him to. Searching for his son was the thing that kept him alive and the thing that prevented him from progressing. He lived for his son, but was not living. He supposed nobody was. People were still alive only because they feared death. He was a machine whose built-in obsolescence had refused to kick in.
Very clearly, he heard the chunk of a closing door.
He stopped, feeling the chill breath of all these surrounding corpses flutter upon him. He gazed down at the stained paper mask of a child whose expression, in death, might almost have been one of bemusement. He looked like Stanley just after waking up. Kind of stupefied. Kind of cross. What will you do? He could almost see the question squirm from between gritted, grinning milk teeth. The shadow of his eye might have turned a little to regard him better. It’s your move.