One

No hope here, though. The soles of his feet slapped echoes around the walls. He thought he could hear his own breath reflected back at him but it might have been the churning sea, still audible over half a mile away. Skirls of glistering dust swept along the street, creating little dunes and hillocks where it met overturned cars, doorways, corpses. Behind a bus slewed across the thoroughfare, Jane was shocked and excited to see a horse lying at the mini-roundabout on Marygate, where the West Road reached out across the old bridge. The horse seemed badly injured, but there was life in it yet; it was struggling to get up. Jane hurried to it, wondering if it might help him to cover ground more quickly if he could nurture it back to health. He stopped twenty feet shy of the creature, hope puddling out of him. The horse was dead. What he had thought was life was the writhing of rats animating the horse from within. He turned away sharply and followed the road south, wondering how long it might be before he was given the same treatment.

He crossed the river Tweed via the railway viaduct. He stopped counting bodies in the water when he reached fifty. A train was halted halfway across the bridge. Burnt strips of curtain danced from the left-hand windows. As he neared the train he saw a woman's arm resting casually on the window frame, fingers splayed slightly as if she had been holding an apple. Something, perhaps the rain, perhaps a crow or rat, had stripped the flesh to the bone. He strode past the windows, boots crunching on gravel and glass, and did not look in at the sunken creatures in their seats. He stepped around more bodies that had either been thrown free of the train or had jumped in extremis, perhaps with their lungs already boiling up in their throats.

He was beginning to wish that he had stayed on the road, but a glance to the parallel bridge showed him traffic piled up; an articulated lorry jackknifed, hanging over the side, somehow defying gravity. Jane kept his eyes on the horizon, looking for a break in the mist, a return to normal cumulonimbus and cirrus. Already, the thought of blue skies was difficult to remember. The colour seemed too unnatural, too bizarre. Everything was muted, dun. There was nothing to claim his attention: no boats offering rescue, no packs of rescuers hunting through the wreckage for survivors. Only the heat and the diffuse light in those deep-shade zones of rust and ochre, fading now, suggested that it was daytime. Lightning skittered on the underside of the cloud mass, like a white spider clinging to the ceiling. More fires raged in a cluster of houses on the south bank of the river. Smoke rose from others nearby; the rain was doing nothing to check the flames. Jane wondered if its astringent qualities were feeding them in some way.

At the other side of the viaduct he checked his watch. Gone three-thirty. How much ground had he covered? He checked his map. Five miles, roughly. Slow going, but still he was exhausted. It would take a long time to come back from these past five days; perhaps he never would, fully. He didn't want to be walking in darkness if he could help it. A trip might result in a broken ankle, or a bloodied face. He doubted even his basic qualification in First Aid would help him if he was infected with some of the filth swirling around the sky.

Jane found an inn at the fork of Main Street and Dock Road and kicked in the door, wondering for a foolish second if he should have knocked first. Close to rest now, he felt exhaustion turning his sight grainy. His feet were heavy on the stairs. On the first floor he opened doors into rooms until he found one that was unoccupied. The windows were shattered, but the wind coming in from the sea was wailing against the back of the inn. He sat at the dressing table and wiped the mirror clean with his forearm. A wild man stared back, hair greasy and lank, fringing eyes that were deep-set, red-rimmed, grey-socketed. A beard, something he had never previously allowed beyond a day's stubble at most, aged him. He was shocked to find patches of white in the hair around his chin.

He placed his valuables – the keys to the London flat, his letter from, and the photographs of, Stanley, the filters for the bicycle mask – on the table. He drank some water and opened a tin of tuna. Already he was sick of cold canned food. He wondered, very briefly, if the horse might have made good eating. Could anything that had been cut down by whatever it was? He might end up with a belly full of radioactive waste.

Would Stanley recognise him like this? He eased off his jacket and boots and shook plaster dust and pebbles of glass from the counterpane, then he crashed onto the bed. The ceiling was covered in cheap woodchip wallpaper, painted magnolia.

'Looks like rice pudding,' he heard Stanley say. 'Can we have some rice pudding?'