One

He shouldered the backpack, repositioned the mask and goggles, and opened the barn door. He looked out at the bewarted, bewitched landscape and ran his tongue over furred teeth. The rain was still there but it had lost its muscle. Skeins of it hung like barrage nets. Hills slouched away from the road like the bellies of downed comeback boxers. Pylons marched into the mist, their cables impotent. A febrile, feral country now.

The sky seemed a little lighter towards the south. He rejoined the A1 and fixed his eyes on a point on the ground four feet or so further on than the extent of his step. He did not look up for three hours.

Jane's coughing had worsened. Each convulsion caused a flare of pain in his chest. He thought that if he contracted pneumonia he would die.

He got off the road and made his way to the black crust of a town. Rooftops shivered with soot. A church steeple had been shattered; buckled ribs thrust out of it like the exposed frame of a burnt corset. Tree limbs and human limbs lay in his path, burnt into solid, fissured cords of carbon. Arse-end retail parks. Computer palaces offering any combination of frazzled, corroded processors and silicon chips. Deep-fried chicken for deep-fried customers. A supermarket the size of a small airport.

Jane trudged, coughing, across the car park. Litter wheeled around him. A dent in the wall suggested that the wind had lifted heavier things in the recent past. Something thin grinned at him by the trolleys like a portion of hide draped on a chair to dry out in the sun. He paid it no heed. He bypassed calcined ranks of dead whose last act had been to queue for lottery tickets. It might be you. It was.

The supermarket had been rifled. The perishables had cooked, melted and rehardened into their plastic baskets. Most of the tinned produce was gone. That which remained was fouled in some way. He got on his knees and checked underneath the shelves. He fished out some cans that seemed fine. Sardines, mushroom soup, tomatoes in herbs. He put them in the rucksack. He found more canned goods in the infant section that had been ignored or more likely unseen. Puréed spinach and apple. Apricot and vanilla custard. Sweet potato, rice and butternut squash. He was aiming to reach the top of this aisle and turn into the next when he heard a boot grind into glass. To his right, a little behind him. He snapped his head that way, and pulled the reins on a cough. He froze.

After a few seconds he heard another step. Something shadowing his movements. Jane immediately turned and began creeping back the way he had come, his head turned to the left now, eyes burning into the empty shelves as if he could see his pursuer through the moulded steel. He tried to remember if he had made any noise beyond the gentle clacking of cans as he stowed them in his rucksack. He shot a glance towards the end of the aisle, panic rising, certain that he was surrounded. He had to face the possibility that not every survivor was a potential ally. Desperation drove people to do extraordinary things, not all of them laudable. He had made a mistake, been too blasé. He must be more diligent in future, if he had one.

He reached the end of the aisle and risked a look beyond its edge. Nothing. He turned and kept his eyes on the other aisle's far end as he backed out of it. A shadow lengthened on the wall. One arm much longer than the other. Jane stepped out of sight before the shadow could shed its host. He moved as quickly as he dared, scanning every aisle around him as he drew alongside them, trying to work an angle to enable him to check the entrance for a sentry before he was on top of it. He thought of the Falkland Islands and the battalions who'd had to clear out the villages on their way to Port Stanley. He wondered if the soldiers sent into those houses had felt as soft in the middle of their bodies as he did now. Fear was fuel, he thought. Fear was good. Strangely, he did feel better than at any point over the last three or four days. The cough was in abeyance, the fire in his chest subsumed by the spike of adrenaline.