One

He didn't remember much about what happened after that and was still so pumped up with excitement that he couldn't feel the extent of his injuries. His right arm was burned as far as his elbow. Not too bad, but the skin was tender and pink and hairless. He'd had to shrug himself out of his coat fast and slap the flames out with the part that wasn't on fire. It was an injury worth sustaining; he'd taken down three Skinners with the Molotov cocktail that had almost killed him. He'd been grabbed from behind at the moment of launching the bottle and had dropped it to the ground, igniting himself and his attackers as he bent to try and catch it before it smashed.

Others were less lucky. Roughly fifty per cent of the Shaded who had charged the Skinners had been overpowered. In the thick of the fighting he'd watched men dismantled as easily as wasps trapped on a floor of ants. The few women that had been in the group were dragged away. Even above the smell of the paraffin flames the musk of the creatures hung heavy, a wardrobe of mouldy winter coats opened after a long time. There was something deeply unnerving about grabbing hold of a hand or a face and feeling it come away in your fingers like a swatch of fabric. He had to keep reminding himself that these were no longer people, that they had been subjugated, replaced. If you kept your eyes away from the mangled, silently agonised faces and on the alien posture of their bodies you could avoid the question.

The Shaded broke through somehow, and the land on the other side of the Skinners seemed green and vital, although it was no different to the swidden they had travelled up to that point. The Skinners did not pursue them; they closed ranks and waited for the next wave of migrants. There was a slow, confident intelligence about them, the knowledge that they had time to mop up. Jane thought with a jolt of panic that they were aware of what things were like all over the globe. You didn't have to fight quite so valiantly if you knew you were going to overwhelm your enemy later when they'd had all hope crushed from their weakened bodies.

From a safe distance Jane watched the Skinners scrapping over the men who had fallen. He gritted his teeth against the raging pain in his arm and suspected that the injury was more serious than he had first diagnosed. He needed cold running water and there was none. He needed to wrap the limb in cellophane, and there was none. Already blisters were inflating under the skin, its colour deepening.

Thirty of them struck out along the road to the sea. He found someone who was willing to share his painkillers. Another who had an aerosol of burn spray in his rucksack. It would have to do. He held the arm out, naked, in front of him like a diviner.

They peeled off on occasion, little groups of them, to forage for food in the factories and houses that formed a broken guard of honour on either side of the motorway. They ate while they walked. They talked little. Jane asked if anybody had seen or heard of a woman, Becky. Nobody replied, but the faces he inspected turned darker, more inward. Everyone had a woman who was gone from their lives.

They walked through the night and through the day and through the night. The land grew flatter and less built-up. The wind cleared its throat and lashed them. Rain was a dreary, dismal constant. On either side of him, men were staggering, wearing masks and goggles of every description. Their hair was long and unkempt, their beards like those of fakirs. It was like being part of a nightmare army staggering towards death having developed a real appetite for it. Every form of horror and degradation was in their wake. They'd bumbled through it all, passed every examination, and now, struggling to stay on their feet, they approached the edge of the world, knowing that death, if it was waiting for them here, the final joke, the ultimate irony, well, it would be welcome; it would be greeted with a deep smile and arms held out.

24. CAST-IRON SHORE

Jane knew he was at the end of himself. He was a car that had been badly cared for, run into the ground, its odometer clocked. No amount of repairs was going to rescue him from a date with the crusher. Eating did not lift his spirits. Thoughts of Becky carrying the shred of his genes in her womb could not lift him out of his torpor. Worst of all, he could not concentrate for long enough to summon Stanley to the forefront of his thoughts. He was weak and tired beyond what he understood those words to mean. His soul was like an animal run over on a busy road. It had been flattened over time by so many tons of traffic that it resembled a dirty outline of what he was, who he had been. He was a memory in his own lifetime. He was dust, shadowless; he was shutting down.