One

Jane covered them with a tarpaulin liberated from a skip in the hospital car park. That the others were nowhere nearby gave him hope, but then, he thought, neither were the attackers. He patted his pocket, suddenly hollowed clean by fear that Stanley's letter had been taken. He realised he was moving in circles, reluctant to move beyond the self-imposed perimeter he'd created with the tarp. Staying with these known dead was his safest option. He knew where he was. He knew what the score was. Moving on meant that he might find the others dead. And he'd had a bellyful of it. Moving on was one step, one second closer to his own demise. Maybe it was time to let the misery come and find him for a change. Walking only ever seemed to lead him into danger. Though he'd been suspicious and impatient with the survivors he'd come across, he realised he liked it better with the sound of them griping alongside him. Hell might well be other people, but hell was also solitary confinement.

He took out Stanley's letter and read his closing words.

Hug you till yor branes com out yor ears Dad and boges com out yor noz. xxx

After a while he carefully folded the paper and replaced it in his pocket. He continued walking south.

He couldn't look. A second it had been, if that, to understand what he was seeing, before he tore his gaze away. But he knew the image would stay with him until death. Christ, maybe even longer.

They were all there, it seemed, arranged for him on the bank of land where the Angel of the North stood like an appeal at the foot of the dead city. Chris. Nance. The deranged killers. Strung up on telegraph posts, chests shredded, their tongues hanging from slashes in their throats like badly knotted school ties.

Jane had not happened upon any more survivors, despite checking the shopping malls, the football stadia, police cells and train stations on his way to pick up the A1 where it left Newcastle in motorway form. Whatever had broadsided the country seemed to have hit harder in some places than others. Perhaps it was to do with topography, the amount of land exposed to the sky. Perhaps it was just bad luck. He had to hold on to the possibility that survivors had massed and, like Jane, were marching on the capital, looking for the country's leaders to provide answers, protection, recovery.

He trudged by, head low, eyes on the road, always on the road, trying not to be too grateful that Becky and Aidan had escaped the kind of death visited upon the others. Trying not to think too much about who had committed their murders. Trying not to think about why.

There were other things to try not to think about. But the nearness of the Angel meant that he could cast his mind a little way back, to the road tunnel under the Tyne, and the girl in the car. The horror of proximity had receded, been trumped by other things.

He thought of the girl almost in sepia tones. It was as if it had never happened:

Cars mashed into each other. Darkness and ash. Every vehicle burned, matte, crumpled. No glimpse of road. Sometimes a jackknifed lorry meant that he had to climb down from the emergency footpath at the side of the tunnel and clamber over the bonnets and boots. He caught his hand in the shattered frame of a windscreen and hissed and swore, but he was lucky the skin had not been broken. Already he was worried about the break in his scalp. About what might have entered his body along with the edge of the axe.

Bodies hung out of windows or made abject shapes between cars. Everything carbon black. The smell of burning still in the air, cold, inescapable. This was what the air had become now. This was the smell of Earth.

Midway through the tunnel he heard water. Heavy water trickling, tapping hard on the ruined cellulose of the cars. The river coming through. He had to watch it. What use was he to Stanley if he was to survive the mother of all solar flares only to throw a seven drowning on river water? Despite the note of caution, he hurried on, slithering over the vehicles in his way, hoping that the darkness would not become absolute before he had picked a way through the tunnel.

He pushed his way past contorted bodies, grateful to the heat for disfiguring them to the point where he could not discern facial features or limb shapes; they were just nightmare trees, ugly and forbidding but easily avoided.

And then, insanely, a still point, a miracle. A car untouched by the flames, all of its glass intact. Torched, shattered shells of cars lay around it but had not come into contact with this one. There was a single occupant, a small girl perhaps aged ten or eleven. She was frozen into position on the back seat, a novel clutched in her hands. Next to her was a neat pile of comics, a hairbrush and a bag of chocolate éclairs. Her skin shone. Her hair was neat and long, the fringe held back with a green clip that had been fashioned to resemble a dragonfly.