One

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.

He ran his tongue delicately over his remaining teeth. How many? Ten? Twelve? All of them waggled in their sockets at the faintest touch. He shuddered with disgust and tried to push the thought of what it meant from his mind; a job needed doing.

Loke said, 'Oh no.'

The beach fell away. It was blasted open, as though it had been hit by some immense bombshell or meteorite. They crawled on their bellies to the lip of the crater and peered in.

You believe, once you've grown up, that you're hardened to the worst things the planet and its people can throw at you. You form a skin around you so tough it's like horn. You watch the footage of Katrina, of the Boxing Day tsunami, of 9/11 and you struggle to cope with it, to understand it; you find it hard to continue. But you do. You go on. You layer the pain around you and feel it become absorbed. Next time it doesn't hurt quite so much. You kind of begin to expect bad things.

What's the worst thing you've ever seen, Dad?

He thought of the abattoir and the mirror carp. But it was nothing. It was a confection. It was almost cosy.

Never mind, Stanley. How about you? What's . . .

But he couldn't finish the question. His boy had seen the worst thing in the world, and Jane had not been there to hold him while it blazed all around.

'Loke,' he whispered. He could see his companion to his left, lying on his back staring up at the sky. He seemed not to be breathing. For a second Jane thought he might have committed suicide. The lure of it hung thickly in the air like the remembered scent of summer flowers. 'Loke?'

'OK,' Loke said. 'I'm all right.'

Jane couldn't ask him about what was down there. To mention it was to confirm it and Jane had to cling on to the possibility that it was all a mirage, something dreamed up by his poisoned subconscious.

'I need to find Becky,' he said. The simplicity of it bolstered him. Everything else was scenery.

'What do you want me to do?' Loke asked.

'Just keep an eye on me,' Jane said. 'If it looks as though I'm getting into trouble, cause a distraction. Get them to come after you. And get the fuck away.'

'I love those no-risk strategies,' Loke said.

Jane took a deep breath, shut his eyes. Stanley was there. Nothing that happened to Jane could equal what his boy must have gone through. What he had seen beyond the crater's lip replayed itself against the black screen of his closed eyelids. He rolled over the edge and into the abyss. What's the worst thing you ever saw, Daddy?

Oh, Stanley. Oh my God.

There were no Skinners to be seen. He walked among the ribcage prisons, wondering if one of the malformed babies screaming within them belonged to Becky. It didn't seem to matter that she was less than two months pregnant. Logic had no place here. He didn't want to see, but he had to watch where he was putting his feet; the babies were packed together so tightly. Some of them were dead. Others had stopped crying or had never started, and looked out through the gaps in the bones with black eyes, open faces. Some of them were bloated to the point of featurelessness, others bore spare limbs, vestigial or fully formed. The pit stank of meconium and vomit and the ever-present civet-like musk of Skinner. It was like some monstrous collection of lobster pots.