The wet sounds had stopped. The Skinner, recently born, was hungry. It was pulling Jane’s smell into its head, trying to differentiate his scent from the dead bodies arrayed around it. This was it; he was going to have to jump and risk a shattered ankle or a compound fracture of the shin. Crazily he thought of school, when a friend had told him that you had to bend your knees during a parachute-jump landing, otherwise your spine would come ramming through the top of your skull.
Thanks for that, he thought, peering through the window and trying to assess the severity of the drop. It must be twenty feet, straight down onto cold, hard concrete. He levered open the door and looked for handholds of any kind, but the skin of the jet was smooth. No vehicles nearby that he could leap onto. The nearest were a mobile belt conveyor and a commissary truck, both fully thirty yards away.
Jane glanced back and saw Aidan looking directly at him, the skin of his face flat, the frown ironed out of it, sheened with sweat or leeched fat or some other serous leakage. Not tears, though – Christ, never that. It can’t see you.
Jump. Use the box-cutter on your own throat. Something. Do something.
He sat on the edge of the doorway and propelled himself forward. The wind caught him and tried to suck him out. No way. No shitting way. Where was there a rope when you needed it?
He swung his legs back in and stood up. A body in the seat nearest his was shrugging herself out of her cardigan. He helped her. Then he was frantically tearing clothes off everyone within reach, tying crude knots into cuffs and hems; attaching belts, attaching ties. He had about fifteen feet of improvised line when the Skinner, attracted by the noise of his excited breathing, and the exotic dust he was causing to puff up from the bodies around him, came shambling over the seats diagonally towards him.
Jane cinched one end of his makeshift rope to an underseat baggage-restraint unit. He jerked on it twice, hard, and the knot only shrank, tightening itself. He stood on the edge of the doorway and leaned back, gripping the clothes, feeling the dust and grease of human decay seep out of the fibres. He wrapped one leg around the rope and began to lower himself as the face of the Skinner emerged from the darkness. He went so quickly that instead of being able to set himself at the end of the rope for the drop of five or six feet that remained, as he had planned, he fell to the floor awkwardly. For a second he thought he had twisted his ankle, but there was no damage to bone or ligament. He’d have a bruise. He could walk through the pain of that.
He glanced back at the jet but the Skinner was no longer facing his direction. Perhaps, his scent dispersed into the air, it had lost interest in him, had switched off. It was turned towards the north. He felt a pinch in his heart when he saw the Skinner wipe its nose with the back of its hand, a mannerism that Aidan had not been able to shake from childhood. Perhaps he was not yet fully absorbed. Perhaps Skinners assimilated little tropes of behaviour from their victims. It just made it all the more sad.
The shape of the wind changed. He heard screams on the edge of it, carried from the other end of the airfield, beyond Terminal 5. They were women’s screams. Pained, almost bestial. Howling. Something in the sound made him want to go to them.
He found himself striding across the tarmac, and it was only when the screams began to assault his ears without the sonically softening buffer of the wind that he hesitated. A thin red light trembled on the horizon, staining the lowest part of the sky. He could hear something else now, but his mind would not allow him to identify what it was. Know this and you shut down for good. There is no coming back from something so dark.
Jane turned and fled.
The journey back to the city centre was achieved in a fug of disgust and regret and pain. Despite the shutters coming down in his mind the previous night, Jane kept trying to tease them open. It was like a facial scab. Your fingers kept gravitating towards it without you realising. The pain in his foot helped. He had had to cut his bootlaces in the morning, the flesh having swollen during a night spent wrapped around his beloved rifle in a crumpled heap of groaning containers that had been blasted into the garden of a house backing onto the Longford river, just south of the airport. He’d wrapped a triangular bandage around the swelling, making sure he could still waggle his toes when it was tied off. He ate a packet of nuts and spat bloodily into the earth. His teeth felt as stable as decorations pushed into a cake. Two of them were loose, an incisor and a pre-molar. His gums bled at the slightest pressure. If he ran his tongue across his teeth he’d be spitting red for a good twenty minutes. The menace in the air was catching up with him after all this time. He wondered, if Becky could get any of her X-ray machinery to work, if his body would be riddled with black stains.
He walked towards the suggestion of the sun as it dawned behind the thicket of bronze permacloud. He barely registered the topography as it altered around him. He was shivering, despite his thick waterproofs.
East Bedfont. North Feltham. Spring Grove. Brentford. Kew. Turnham Green. Shepherd’s Bush.
Jane felt at one point as if he was not so much walking towards as being sucked into his destination. London was a plughole drawing anything down that was not tethered fast. When the sawtooth architecture at the river’s edge emerged it reminded him of nothing other than the crippled shape of his own jaws. He didn’t feel as if he had returned or arrived. He didn’t feel at home. It wasn’t places that did that for you, he understood now, way, way too late. It was people.
It was getting dark. The sun had leapt over him and was at his back now, sinking into that part of the country that was a red rim of terror in the pit of his thoughts. The howling of the women. He thought he could never have felt anything but shock for a woman who screamed like that, but he had smiled into the face of one, once, long ago. He had kissed it, gently brushed away the damp hair that latticed it, whispered his love to it.
Her hand had gripped his so hard that they were like white ice statues. She didn’t have the spit to keep her lips dry. They were stuck to her bared teeth, cracking, a pain smile. Eyes slitted, turned to him, confused, afraid. He’d squeezed her hand as hard as she had gripped his and urged her on, told her how amazing she was, how much he loved her. Stanley had burst from her with the cord wrapped around his neck, a meconium-streaked shock. Jane had reared back at the violence and mess of it all. For one brittle second he feared his son and resented him for what he had done to his wife. But it all dissolved into concern and love. Love so pure and deep that it seemed to make a mockery of what he felt for Cherry.
He made it back to Spitalfields in a gloom so dense he thought he must get lost. He forced his way through the razor-wire barricades and hammered on the door. Nobody came. He tried the handle and the door opened. Mothballs and soup. A smell of age. ‘Becky?’
No reply. He shrugged the rifle from his shoulder and followed its muzzle into the shop. He closed the door behind him. He checked each room but could find no Skinners, no evidence of a struggle or a death. Becky was gone.
He went back outside and repositioned the razor wire. He locked and bolted the door and pressed his head against it. Safe now, for a while. Darling, I’m home. He could feel an ache pulsing behind his skull, transmitting through to the wood, almost knocking at it. A cough was hatching in his chest. Cold had reached deep into him. What was it Stopper used to say? I feel like seven different kinds of shite all knocked into a one-shite thimble. He moved through to Plessey’s workshop, thinking of listening to some broadcasts, but the crystal radio was gone. He couldn’t find it in any drawer or filing cabinet. He thought about where it might be; who might have taken it. He wished Becky was around. He missed her terribly.