Jane could see that it was a dead man, but Loke was too pumped up to acknowledge it. ‘Paul!’ he kept crying. ‘Dad!’
There were massive injuries to the torso. Something had taken bites out of him the size of serving platters. His legs ended at the knee; the rags of his trousers prevented any scrutiny of what remained. The face was clogged with shards and scraps of itself. Livid, bloodless wounds were carved into him like a poor Halloween pumpkin. He flapped and sagged in too many places to even be in one piece, let alone still be alive.
Jane put out his hand to restrain Loke, who was checking his father’s mouth, and tilting his head back to open his airway. Something gritted inside.
‘Loke,’ Jane said.
‘Shut up.’ Loke started performing cardio-pulmonary resuscitation. He laced the fingers of one hand into the other and rhythmically pumped them into Paul’s sternum. He seemed oblivious to the black seawater pulsing from the jaws with each downward thrust.
Jane left him to it. He walked back to the little hollow he’d dug himself. Fires had been built up and down the beach. It was encouraging to see so many. He had a vision of more fires, hundreds and hundreds, burning on the beaches and in the hills of the country. Maybe there would be a way back from this. Maybe the Skinners could be defeated. Maybe the clouds would part and the sun would heal the planet. Green shoots and a nation of pregnant women.
He was so engrossed in his reverie that he didn’t hear Loke approach. He slumped to the shingle like a sack dumped from a weary shoulder.
‘This woman of yours,’ Loke said in a voice that was resigned but also, it seemed to Jane, relieved. ‘This Becky. Do you know where the Skinners took her?’
Jane turned his head to the south. The edge of his country. The lowest part of it. The world was fringed with a trembling red light there. He hoped it was just the colour of the fires that had been stoked all around, but he knew it was not.
‘That way,’ he said. ‘Past the power station. I don’t know how far.’
‘And you’re going? You’re going to try and get her back? Even though you’ll probably die?’
Jane turned back to the sea. Becky was carrying his child. It ought to have been a question that didn’t need airing. Loke would know, one day, when he was staring down at a big raw mouth with a bunch of skinny limbs attached. Death was nothing when your child’s safety was at stake. Death was a puny streak of piss. Beneath contempt.
‘You know the answer to that.’
Loke nodded. He was wiping his hands on his jeans. He had done his best to bury his father in the shingle. ‘I’ll come with you,’ he said.
They left the camp when the last of the fires had burned down. The rain returned, that soft, insistent mist that had blurred virtually every day of Jane’s life since the Event. Loke helped him put on his coat, pausing every time Jane winced when the fabric caught on the blistered, bubbled length of his forearm. They walked south, heading for the black bulk of the nuclear reactors. The shivering line of red light was like a skin on the ground far in the distance. Jane remembered how a similar light had cowed him at the western edges of Heathrow airport. He wondered how long it would be before the screams reached their ears. He thought too of how tardy he was; what if she was dead already? He pictured her shaking with cold and terror in some awful Skinner idea of prison, a long way from the comforts of the Shaded’s base at Pentonville. He turned away from thoughts of miscarriage brought on by trauma. The body protecting itself by self-aborting. That would not happen. Becky was strong. She was resourceful. His spirits lifted when he considered that she might have escaped already.
‘Keep your wits about you, Loke,’ he said. ‘If someone got away, we might walk right past them.’
Loke grunted in return, and Jane knew he had instantly dismissed the idea, but Jane clung to the story of the woman who had fled from the Skinners encamped at Wembley stadium. She might have died later, her brain stalled with whatever barbarity she had been put through, but she got away. She got away.
Jane found the going became easier after a while as his muscles warmed up and the stiff feeling in his wounded leg was worked out. He had kept the cuts scrupulously clean and sought advice from the medics. They’d pulled some classic faces when he’d showed them his thigh, but they were satisfied it was not infected and gave him pills to cope with the pain that those wounds and his burnt arm were feeding him.
The peninsula was broader than he’d thought. He had never been out this way before, although he had read about Derek Jarman’s cottage and its weird garden of stones and iron and claws. The skeletons of fishing boats lay in the shingle along with that strange machinery, like unearthed fossils from an alien age. Occasionally they would trip over some rusted girder or spar, or see the shape of a cog half-submerged in the beach. Jane wondered how deep it reached and whether it was really discarded, or if it was part of some arcane Heath-Robinson contraption that served the coastline in some secret way.
The mutter of the camp faded behind them and dead silence fell. Jane felt much as he used to in the diving bell travelling between the Ceto and the seabed. A time when you collected your thoughts and focused yourself on the job. All the banter of the DSV was behind them. The hours of noisy respiration and the headache of high-pitched voices, the roar of the blowtorch was to come. It was the eye of the storm. And it had always been the time that scared him more than any other. He couldn’t help but think, while the various aspects of the job impinged and the gauges were read and adjusted, that this journey would be his last. Once he was in his gear and tramping towards the coalface he was fine. It was the pause to take breath beforehand, the catalogue of things that might go wrong that caused his will to falter.
So it was now. He thought that despite all his best intentions, if Loke had not been walking alongside him he would not have been able to do this. The pain in his arm was too great. He was so tired that he thought he might begin to crumble. He feared that he would find Becky dead, and that would be the final black underscore to his chances of happiness, or hope.
It took some time to work their way around the nuclear reactors – Jane was expecting to hear some kind of hum, but all was silent – because of a number of downed pylons and security fences obstructing their path. Once on the other side they made better time. The sand was mired with deep pits and runnels; occasionally they stumbled upon items of clothing, or single shoes. It looked like the haphazard disrobing of suicides. The red line leapt in streaks of orange as they got closer.
‘What’s the fire for?’ Loke asked.
Jane shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Maybe they’re cooking. Or it’s a sacrifice or something.’
‘Nice. Wish I hadn’t asked.’
Jane clenched his jaw; another tooth popped loose. He spat it out. Dull fire was spreading deep in the angles of his face. Bone cancer, he thought.
‘Loke, are your teeth all right?’
He sensed the other man turning to him in the dark. ‘They’re OK. I mean, they could be better. I haven’t been to a dentist in ten years. But they’re not giving me any gyp.’
Jane fell silent. He must be dying. Much of the time, talking to other survivors, he had surreptitiously checked out their mouths, and, other than the occasional abscess or absence, most people’s teeth had been intact. He had noticed the way people snatched glances at his own ruined gums and then looked away, like rubberneckers at a fatal crash who have seen more than they bargained for. The taste of blood was always in the back of his throat, the rust smell of it trapped in the mask all hours. He would lie awake at night, prodding and palpating his flesh, feeling for fibrous lumps, or for any too soft, bruised parts of him that suggested decay.