One

Breath trapped in his throat, Jane stood by her window for a long while, waiting. He reached out for the handle but it was locked. All of them were. Parents gone to look for help? No, one parent. It would be one. Otherwise one of them would have stayed with her. But in that case why not take her too? And then he thought maybe the driver had been dragged out of the car and his last act had been to lock the doors. But if they were desperate enough to do that they'd be more than prepared to smash the windows. He puzzled over the problem, knowing the answer was there but refusing to countenance it.

He found a car jack and stove in the front passenger window. The smell that lifted out from the car was of fresh peaches. He unlocked the door and clambered in, careful not to scrape his leg against the chunks of glass on the passenger seat. He sat down in the back next to her. She was dead.

He touched her and she was stiff. Her eyes were open, the irises the colour of ivory writing paper. He tried to wrest the book from her hands to see what it was but her grip was colossal. She wore an expression of hope. She seemed to have died from the inside out, and her body had been incapable of going through with it when it met her beautiful shell.

'I won't abandon you,' Jane said to his boy, and he almost jumped because she seemed to move. But it was only his breath in her hair.

He walked hard, concentrating on his rhythm and his breathing. He tried to walk angled forwards, as much to cope with the weight of the new rucksack as to prevent himself from seeing anything else bad that day. He walked past pubs and houses and shops and did not glance at them. He stepped around the bodies in the road, avoiding their fixed stares, if they had been allowed even that. He walked until the pain in his legs became a constant and his lungs roared like the surf at the shore.

Next decent place, he thought, and kept on until the clouds lost their definition and turned from coffee to steel grey to slate to black. He thought of the figure he had seen, the child wearing the white scarf, appraising him intently. An omen or a warning. A ghost. Something about her.

There was a hotel set a little way back from the road. Whatever sign it once displayed had been torn down by the wind. Some of the glass in the face of the building was intact. Darkness was its only living inhabitant.

He crunched through the lobby. The reception desk was deserted. A floor plan explained the hotel layout. The lift was open; darkness prevented him from seeing anything other then the soles of three pairs of feet. He took the stairs up to the top of the building, the darkness solidifying around him at each landing until he could barely see to put one foot in front of the other. There were two honeymoon suites up here. He checked them both and rejected the first because rain had found a way in.

He dumped his rucksack on the bed and stretched. He took off his boots and socks and let his feet sink into the deep pile of the carpet. It was cold, but at least it was dry. He placed his clothes over the radiators in the hope that the sweat would dry out of them by the morning. He lit candles and placed them around the room. In the bathroom a wild figure ducked out at him and he almost shouted. He stared at himself in the mirror, at the rings of black that the air filter and goggles had marked, at the thickening beard; he went hunting for a razor.

To his astonishment, the monsoon shower worked, after an age of groaning and gurgling and retching. Jane positioned himself beneath it and quickly scrubbed his skin clean. He was appalled to find a great many patches that wouldn't shift so readily under the soap: bruises. He shampooed his hair, gently working at the matted cake of blood at the back of his head. He winced as he fingered the knot of skin there, and watched, dismayed, as the water turned black around his feet. How close had he been to death? How much harder did he need to be hit before it accepted him? He couldn't understand why there were people left who wanted to do harm to others. Fear ought to have ended with the blast that eradicated so much life. It was hard enough to think about survival without having to worry about being attacked too.

He soaped his arms and chest and genitals. He closed his eyes and thought of his honeymoon with Cherry. They had been unable to go away for a proper holiday. Cherry was heavily pregnant and Jane was expected on the rigs within a week and a half of their wedding day. They promised each other a luxury break to the Bahamas as soon as they could find the time. Instead they had booked a night in a huge room at a boutique hotel in London with views of Waterloo Bridge. They had drunk champagne and made love on the balcony. Later he had whispered to Stanley in his mother's tummy in the dark while she slept in a bed so large he thought he might lose her.