One

He had to make sure. He ran around the back of the building, where lorries were backed up against open bays. He heard the cows again. And other noises. Screams and squeals. This sounded nothing like the deaths that occurred on Kojak. Through a window he saw cows being led to pens. A man with what looked like a large black wand bent over them and pressed it to their heads. There was a hiss, a deep ka-chunk sound, and the animals dropped.

He didn't know whether what he felt then was relief or sickness. It was another kind of murder, after all.

He was thinking of bacon sandwiches, and whether he would miss them if he decided to become a vegetarian, when he heard another scream. This one was altogether different. It was high-pitched. Somehow wetter. It suggested a knowledge of what was happening to its owner.

He ran back to the windows, thinking of intelligent animals, wondering crazily when the British public had developed a taste for dolphins or octopi, and saw a long steel trench with lots of metal teeth turning within it. Someone had been piling indeterminate cuts and wobbling, shiny bits of offal from a plastic chute into one end but had got his arm trapped. His mates were running towards him and the man was screaming Shut it off, shut it off. Thankfully, Jane couldn't see his face. He didn't say anything else after that, because the auger ground him into the trench and he was killed. Jane heard the scream cut out as if the man had flicked off his own power switch. He'd heard, even at this distance, through the glass, the pulverisation of thick bone. He'd seen the teeth of the machine impacted with flesh and torn clothes. The man's face had risen from the trench, scooped up by a blade, like a bad horror mask on a pound-shop hook.

Jane was sick where he stood, violent and without warning. It was as if someone had punched it out of him from within.

He didn't remember climbing back over the fence, collecting his bike, or returning to Carl.

'Where have you been, you bone-on?' Carl demanded. 'You nearly missed this.'

He stood back to allow Jane a look at the mirror carp lying in the grass. It was enormous. It seemed deformed. Its skin was olive-coloured, there were maybe four or five scales, dotted near the tail and the dorsal fin. Its eyes protruded, its huge mouth gawped, gasping in the air. Jane felt suddenly detached from nature. Atrocity was in front of his face and at his heels. He couldn't understand how this thing could still be living, how it could have come into being in the first place. There was this sudden impact in his mind about the outrageousness of animals. He had sucked up science-fiction films since the age of five and stared out at the night sky wondering if aliens truly existed without giving any thought whatsoever to the bizarre creatures that lived on his own planet. Elephants. Rhinoceros. Squid. Mirror carp. Here was as weird as you could get. He saw Carl for what he really was, a network of organs, blood vessels, bones and nerves. A brain with ganglia. Meat. The boy in the snorkel parka was gone for ever. Everything had changed.

'I have to go home,' Jane might have said. He didn't remember cycling back.

He woke up with Stanley's name on his lips and his cheeks wet with tears. The back of his head felt as though it had not risen with him; tentative fingers tripped across the lacquer of his own dried blood, but despite a large lump he believed there to be no fracture.

He was alone, but had not been left where he fell. He fretted over that for a long time. Their attackers had meant to kill him. Perhaps they thought they had. So then why move him? He looked around. He was by the door of a fast-food restaurant. A plastic yellow signed warned: CAUTION, WET FLOOR. People had died queuing for burgers. People had died in the process of eating them. A man was sitting with his face in a cardboard carton, a whitened newspaper before him. The smell of old cooking oil, the greasy light on lengths of chrome, the plastic locked-down seating made Jane feel sick.

He pushed himself upright and staggered outside, fumbling for the bicycle mask dangling around his neck, and the welder's goggles, which had remained on his face but become displaced. He wondered how long he had been unconscious. It felt like a long time; the blood on him was long dry. He was hungry and thirsty. He thought he should look for the others; he couldn't guess how events must have developed after he had been knocked out, but he wouldn't accept that some of the others had failed to get away.

He checked his position. He had not been moved far. He walked back to the hospital and almost immediately found Angela and Brendan. Angela was still in the wheelchair. Like Jane she'd received one blow to the head, but this had proved catastrophic. He could see how Brendan had tried to protect her: defence wounds split his hands. His back was a patchwork of punctures.