One

The ground around them was a stew of feathers and blood. Their eyes swivelled to follow his progress beneath them. Open mouths struggling and failing to suck in the air they needed to cry for help or condemn him.

Jane jerked out of sleep, his mouth trickling with blood, his tongue filled with bright stitches of pain where he had bitten it. Had they been alive? Could he have helped any of them at all?

He sat up in bed. The slurry of rain at the windows. The dark hanging in the rooms like a poisoned cloud. The sheets were a tangled mess; he'd kicked them to the floor in the night. He could feel his heartbeat, very close, so close he almost mistook it for someone else's and sat there shivering, fists to his eyes, certain that someone would reach out and touch him in a moment. Someone whose blood was too cold and still to be deserving of such a heartbeat. He heard padded footsteps on the carpets in the halls. He heard the snuffle of his boy asleep, the occasional nonsense he would sometimes speak as an unknowable dream flitted around his mind: Spiky crawns . . . Bye, George! Bye! Spiky crawns . . . you can't eat them.

Nance's jeans had been torn off her; the skin of her legs hung like badly adhered wallpaper. Chris's face was black, swollen to twice its size. The killers' meatless grins; fear shining through the narcotic haze in their eyes.

He shrank away from his own thoughts, dug his fists deeper into his eye sockets as if he could threaten the images away. It was past five a.m. There was no way back into sleep. He tried the water in the bathroom again but the spigots only breathed at him – they were dry. He dressed quickly and shouldered the rucksack. The room no longer seemed so inviting. The pile was too springy, it reminded him of walking on body parts in the Tyne tunnel. Too cold, too dark. A smell of staleness, of life in stasis.

Jane hurried down the stairs, his neck prickling as he imagined shadows leaping out behind him, begging him not to go, to stay in the hotel for ever with them because what was the point of trying any more? Death was thrown into ever more excruciating detail now, you couldn't focus on anything else. Surviving this only meant you wouldn't survive that, or the next thing, or the next. Death was queuing up to get you.

10. PICA

Jane got back onto the A1 and stretched his legs, found a rhythm and stuck to it. The shape of other dead towns grew firmer in his sight as his eyes accustomed to the dark. The chimneys and rooftops were depressing in their numbers. Endlessly replicated streets of punched-in windows and terror in every sitting room. These were not houses any more; they were mausoleums.

The pattern repeated itself. He walked. He fed. He slept. He restocked his supplies. He found new boots and clothes. He replaced the filters on his mask. He broke down at the side of the road and screamed and cried and wished things were different. He wished himself dead. His checks on conurbations he passed through became less thorough. He didn't want to pick up any more dependants.

He turned and looked back at the way he had come. He used the binoculars to see if he could find evidence of the figure he had seen in the white scarf. Already he was beginning to think it had been an hallucination. Nothing shifted on the horizon. It was as if he were dragging oblivion in his path, erasing everything in his tracks.

He wished Stanley dead.

He broke into a pub and drank himself into a stupor and woke up in some half-melted bus shelter apologising over and over and over . . .

Jane opened his eyes one morning to find he had overslept for the first time in weeks. He could feel illness sitting in his chest like flame just failing to catch on damp tinder. His breath was soggy, painful. He felt chilled to the bone yet saturated with perspiration. The light lanced him despite the tinted goggles.

He knew enough to drink plenty and often and was glad he'd recently replenished the fresh water in the bladder. But it quickly became obvious that this wasn't just some niggling cold. He developed a cough that soon began to saw in his throat; it sounded like some avian warning signal. He spat into the verge at the roadside and his waste was thick and green. Infection.

He was no longer exactly certain of his position. All of the road signs had been bleached white or burned black. The map was no longer of any use if he couldn't picture himself on its green dual carriageway, snailing his way south.

'Hi, Dad.'

'Hi, Stanley. You need a wee?'

'No.'

'Then stop fidgeting. You could fidget your way to Olympic glory, you could.'

'What means linpic?'

'Never mind.'

'What your doin', Dad?'

'Walking.'

'I'm tired.'

'Me too.'

'Can I go on your shoulders?'

'No. Carrying a bag up there.'

'Aw.'

'Come on, you're a big boy now. You can walk.'

'Where's the car?'

'Broken.'

'You broked it?'

'No. Something happened. All the cars broke.'

'What about motorbikes?'

'Them too.'