He stared at the bruised air streaking by the windows, the glittering sediment piling into the corners. This didn’t look natural; this was a storm on Venus. This was Ray Bradbury.
He was on his knees. His left leg was pinning the cleaner’s left arm to the floor. The added pressure had caused her clenched hand to open; clear fluid sweated from the tips of her fingers like glue bubbling from the sponge applicator of a UHU pen. He couldn’t breathe.
He swung the O2 gauge in front of his face and blearily registered that he was in the red, sucking on the tank’s dust. He fumbled the bicycle mask from his backpack and held his breath, spat out the regulator, took off his face mask and clamped the filter over his nose and mouth. He breathed. There was a smell of burning, and something underpinning it, something chemical. His sight cleared, his lungs loosened. At least there was still something left to breathe in the midst of all this smog.
Behind the bar he drew a double whisky from an optic and gulped it quickly before replacing the mask, relishing the hot fumes that were trapped inside. He moved down a corridor to the doorway to the toilets. To his left was a door leading into the beer garden. Somebody was dead out there. He could just see a pair of legs sticking out from the side of a Vauxhall Corsa. To his left was a door under the stairs. A bolt on it was drawn back, an unhinged padlock hanging off the hasp. He flicked the bakelite switch above the banister without thinking and descended slowly in utter darkness.
Jane called out when he reached the bottom of the stone steps. His voice was loud and flat and scared. Nothing replied. He reached out with his hands and moved into a cool room. His foot clanged against what he assumed was a beer keg. Further on there were crates of bottles and a wooden door. He pushed against it. Inside there were plastic containers, mops, brushes, heavy tins. He felt along the walls for a resting bike, but there was nothing. Light filtered through the cracks in the delivery chute and shapes began to solidify. A chest freezer filled with melted sacks of ice. A fuse box on a wall next to a graphic of a skeleton being electrocuted. A deckchair. A child’s scooter.
Jane unfolded the deckchair and sat down. He thought about going upstairs, checking the bedrooms, but he didn’t know what for. All he knew was that he would find more bodies, and he didn’t want to look at a dead child.
His hand went to his pocket and felt the edges of Stanley’s letter. Stanley had been asking for a scooter, as well as a bike without stabilisers, a skateboard… all kinds of stuff. His ‘I want’ phase. There were all kinds of petty aches that broadsided you as a parent. It pierced Jane that Stanley didn’t want to watch the programmes aimed at his age group on TV. Dora the Explorer. Pingu. Noddy. A couple of weeks at reception and he was coming home talking about Power Rangers and Ben 10 and Darth Maul kicking people in the face. Guns and punches. He was calling people stupid and poo-head. He was a boy growing up, that was all, but it was tough to stomach sometimes. Innocence eroding. You could see it in the darkening intelligence of his eyes and the disappearance of his pudgy cheeks. The baby’s clean blackboard was filling up with chalk marks. Dad? When you called that man in the car a tit, what means tit?
He wondered if London was aware of what was going on up here. It was such a terrible occurrence, perhaps Whitehall was shielding the public from the truth.
Jane peeled off the gloves and touched his face, his hair. He felt normal, if a little hot and sweaty. He considered how he felt inside. He was hungry, which was a good thing, he thought. He didn’t feel nauseous. Apart from the burns on his hands where the gloves had melted, there were no blemishes on his skin. No headaches, or rather, no pains inside his head that couldn’t be dismissed by a couple of co-codamol.
He unclipped the lid of the First Aid box and cleansed the skin of his hands with an alcohol wipe. There was an unbroken tube of antiseptic cream; he applied some of that too. Care needed to be taken now. If he fell and broke his leg there was nobody around to cart him off to A&E. And he didn’t relish the prospect of any wounds sucking the filth of the sky into them. Slow and sure.
He peeled back the lid on a tin of baked beans and guzzled them straight down. He followed them with a tin of peaches. He found a crate of Pinot Noir and unscrewed a bottle top.
He and Cherry had discussed death, early on, when things had been good between them and dying naturally at an old age seemed something that one of them would do with the other close by. But they had also talked about what-ifs. They had both written private letters to Stanley and sealed them without reading each other’s words. In the event that one of them died prematurely, Stanley would at least have a message from his missing parent, a way of making contact with a son who might otherwise have no recollection of a dead mother or father.
Jane fell asleep imagining Cherry handing over the envelope to their son.
4. THE GREAT NORTH ROAD
Jane woke suddenly, into terror. The jolt from sleep was down to some external factor, not a bad dream, not a gradual returning from unconsciousness. He knew this feeling: Stanley grizzling in his cot. Cherry knocking over the pot of toothbrushes in the bathroom. A sound had brought him back. Something near. He sat up in the deckchair and felt his muscles complain. No light in the cracks of the delivery chute. The luminous hands of his watch shrugged at him: ten past two in the morning.
He hadn’t thought to equip himself with a weapon, but maybe he needed to. What if there were squads of armed soldiers sweeping the area, briefed with orders to shoot any survivors to prevent the leak of damning information? He clenched his eyes tight. Nothing was too bizarre now.
The sound came again. A scrabbling, a skittering. Like loose plaster. Maybe that was all it was. He called out. His voice sounded nothing like his own. He felt already that he was losing the sense of who he was. He had made a place for himself in the world, defined himself by his job, his behaviour, his appearance. All of that was shot to pieces. There were no rules now. There were no guidelines. For the first time in his life he had no idea of what might happen. Probability had become obsolete.
Jane stood up and there was a responsive scratching noise. Mice, he thought. Or rats. Probably as spooked as him to find something breathing in the neighbourhood. He climbed the steps back into the pub and felt his way in the dark to the foot of the stairs leading up to the living quarters. There was a bathroom here. He tried the taps. Cold water sputtered and gushed into the basin. He peeled off his clothes and the bicycle mask and, holding his breath, splashed his face, feeling the growth of a week’s worth of stubble. He towelled himself dry and replaced the mask. He moved through to a bedroom and opened a wardrobe, grabbed a handful of shirts and tried one on. Too large, but at least it was clean. It made him feel happier. He stole some jeans and a belt and pulled on his own boots. A long leather coat and leather gloves. There was a mound on the bed; he left it undisturbed. On a dressing table was a tea light in a red glass container. He lit it with a wax-coated match from the First Aid box. He avoided the bedroom door dotted with Spider-Man stickers and drew his shivering shadow along the corridor to the living room.
The living room was large; a dining table and an upright piano dominated one half. A fruit bowl contained mouldering shapes; their smell was cloying, dusty almost. A woman in black underwear was reclining on the sofa, a magazine opened on the floor beside her. A mug. A bar of chocolate. She glittered at him, her flesh pitted with shards of glass from an exploded window. He went to it and looked out at the silent village. Lightning pulsed in the clouds like something trapped, desperate to be set free. It afforded him views of desolation. Cars turned over in the road, windshields spidered with cracks, tyres gone. Bodies lay in the street. A house burned: restive orange eyes shivering in blistered sockets. Behind him, a page of the magazine turned. He imagined the woman stroking the ball of her thumb across the death-dry edge of her swollen tongue. He removed the mask and vomited hard. He spat and choked against the fire in his throat and nostrils, then rinsed his mouth with water from a bottle. He trudged downstairs and pushed his way out into the street. A bicycle could wait. He didn’t want to stumble upon any more nasty little surprises in these homes. Get pounding. Put some miles under you.