One

Up ahead was an enormous linear bonfire, stretching a hundred yards or so between the headland and the water, the source of the quaking red light. The ribcages stretched as far as he could see. There must be fifteen hundred, maybe as many as two thousand, he thought. He felt the centre of himself deliquesce. The fire picked out the half-submerged wreck of a ship in the water, its skid fin peppered with rust-holes that gleamed like eyes. He thought he could hear the waves beating against the hull, but knew it was only the tumult of his own heart. To his right, where the beach rose up to meet the low wall of a promenade, he could see movement. He crouched, grimacing as a hand put out to balance him cracked a rib and brought a fresh sustained volley of protests from the blighted thing trapped within. He saw Skinners, fully three dozen of them, churning through the sand towards the upper ranks of the cages. The way they behaved itched at Jane. Something was not right in their movements. There was a desperation there, a motivation other than hunger.

Jane averted his gaze as they began plundering the ribcages. He covered his ears to the sounds of feasting, the horrendous glissando of screams and greenstick dislocations, and hurried on, moaning, shaking so hard that he thought he might simply vibrate to dissolution, like a cast of sand.

More Skinners were tripping and sprawling over the promenade wall, rolling down to the beach larder. There was nothing Jane could do. He had no Molotov cocktails in his coat pocket. The rifle was a toy. It made no difference. All his act of defiance would bring was his own death and that of Becky and all of these by-blows.

He angled down to the tide and approached the fire, feeling it, blowtorch-hot, from as far as fifty yards away. When the heat grew so intense that he could feel the hair on his face begin to singe, he inched into the sea, holding on to the sloping banister of a groyne. The water was more like warm grease; he felt it seep through his clothes and nestle against his skin as if enamoured of his flavour. He hurried, eager to be free of it, and almost fell headlong. He doubted that he'd have been able to drag himself clear. He rounded the end of the firewall; it hissed and sputtered where the tide tongued it. He didn't stare too hard at what was at the heart of the flames, fuelling them.

On the other side he saw the mothers, or what remained of them. He thought the screaming might have been worse here, but then he knew that trauma was an excellent soporific. Those who had died had been picked clean. Those that were pregnant sweated and thrashed in the sand, chained or nailed or becalmed by razor-wire garrottes. Some were giving birth as he scrambled up onto the beach, the emerging newborns delivered by surrogate midwives that smacked their chops over the emerging mooncalves.

They were visible far off into the distance, as far as the light from the fire reached. Skinners were pouring over the partition wall at the head of the beach now. He felt one at his back before he had time to do anything about it, but it ignored him. He caught a glimpse of panic behind the foul pretence of its former face.

He screamed Becky's name and felt his voice crack in the middle of it. What erupted from his throat felt at once both the most poisonous and the most pure thing that Jane had ever heard. He thought he saw a shadow pass over him, a bird of such immense proportions that its wingspan might eclipse the beach. And then it was gone, chased away by the shriek that came powering from his lungs.

26. THE RAFT

He saw the Skinners fleeing and being brought down by fast-moving figures in hoods. They used long curved knives to reach inside the bone-armour of their prey. They moved with purpose, aggression. They locked onto a target and did not falter until it was brought to ground. This close to a chance of freedom, the Shaded were behaving like cornered rats. The killing fields had altered. These weren't the narrow jack-in-a-box horror traps of London. The Skinners could not rely on darkness and dense architecture to help snaffle their prey.

Open land, common ground: it was all up for grabs now.

The Skinners were backing away from Jane, despite the swelling of their numbers. They charged towards him from the foot of the beach only to rear up like horses before snakes when they saw him. He thought it must be the wave upon wave of men and women at his shoulders, armed with wrenches and billhooks and cleavers, or the threat of the black sea, but no, they were recoiling from him. It was exhilarating to feel in power for a change.