One

The water sputtered. Jane quickly rinsed the rest of the soap from his body as the stream became a stutter of drips. He was sobbing and hardly realised. He always did his best crying in the shower; he'd done a lot of it back home. It meant that Stanley couldn't tell there was something wrong if he wandered into the bathroom.

He shaved by candlelight, rinsing his razor in a bowl of drinking water poured from the plastic bladder. A man he didn't recognise emerged. Thin. Eyes couched in soft grey pouches. Skin blistered and pale.

There was plenty of food but his body craved something green. Salad. Steamed French beans. Peas thumbed out of a pod. Buttered asparagus spears. A sour apple. His stomach complained. He turned to what remained in his pack. Hot-dog sausages in brine. Spam. Tinned fruit salad. Condensed milk. A tinned strawberry-flavoured protein shake. He could feel the food sitting heavily in his gut before he'd taken a spoonful.

He left the food on the table, peeled four paracetamol and codeine tablets out of their blister packs and dissolved them in water. He swallowed the draught down, grimacing at the bitter taste and the sediment at the bottom of the glass. He unwrapped a waffled bathrobe and a pair of slippers. He was still a little cold but there were spare blankets in the wardrobe. In the mini-bar he found four miniatures – vodka, gin, whisky and rum – and a half-bottle of Australian Merlot. He lined them up on the coffee table and snapped open the ring-pull on the first of the tins. He forked meat into his mouth and now the hunger didn't care whether it was processed slabs of meat or the finest pâté or if there were any accompanying vegetables. The best part of two weeks spent guzzling cold canned produce didn't half put a muffler on your taste buds.

Jane finished the wine with indecent haste and set about the shorts. The pain in his head had dulled; it felt as though he were enclosed within cotton wool. He was warm and full and a little high on the codeine and booze. He wished he had the means to boil some water; a cup of coffee would pretty much set the seal on a perfect end to a shitty day.

He thought about Becky and Aidan. He hoped they had managed to put some distance between themselves and their attackers and, if they were safe, that they had not seen what he had seen. He wished them a warm, comfortable retreat, some food, some hope. He tipped his bottle to the oily scamper of clouds beyond the smeared windows. He was asleep before he'd sealed the toast with a sip from its mouth. He was chased through interminable hotel corridors by something with deep, dripping red jaws that were unstable, unravelling, leaving teeth the size of boning knives like mantraps to fox any hope he had of return. Shreds of white scarf dangled from them like flags of surrender. He was running out of routes. Becky's voice was somewhere, exhorting him to turn this way, turn that way, to come on, for Christ's sake. To move.

Light chanced across the way ahead; he arrowed for it. He could hear the rage and the upset in the throat of the thing that hunted him. He crashed through a revolving door that gritted and scraped upon lumpen shapes that threatened to block him in for good. But they did not catch and he was through and safe.

Here there was no stinging red rain or lightning or random fires. The ground was flat and there were animals grazing, swinging their heads up to regard him almost with bland amusement. The sea was topped by only the most occasional tilde of foam. He was no longer being pursued, but there remained the awful pressure of something at his shoulder, some presence demanding that he turn and sate the curiosity that was burning a hole through the back of his head.

He would not do it.

He felt a hand on his hair, pulling, scratching, trying to gain purchase on the ugly scar where the ice axe had glanced against his skull. A fingernail caught on the wound and he felt it loosen. He felt the matter inside him shiver like a barely set custard. He was going to come spluttering out of that gash, turned inside out like the contents of a plane's fuselage punctured at 40,000 feet.

But the hand only wanted him to turn and look. To acknowledge.

They had all been lashed to great posts of wood driven deep into the ground. Their arms had been broken behind them, tied against the wood so tightly that the canvas strips had bitten into their wrists. Their legs dangled. He could see where the heels of some of them had scraped into the wood as they tried to gain purchase, tried to lift themselves up enough to take a breath as they suffocated.

Something had been at them. Their bodies were torn and pecked. Their eye sockets were ragged holes. Their lips turned to purple scarecrow cross-hatchings where the integument was stabbed away.