One

They stopped off at Baskin Robbins for ice cream on the way home. Stanley was nodding into his raspberry sorbet. Blond hair. The cowlick over his left ear that would not stay down. 'Daddy, um, when we get home which toy do you want to play with? Walter or red Power Ranger? You can have Walter if you like, but I love Walter the best.'

He was snoring almost before he finished his sentence. Jane scooped him up and carried him onto a bus. They got off at Maida Vale and Stanley was deeply asleep, head on Jane's shoulder, melded to it, as though this configuration of muscle and bone had been waiting all these decades for just this one boy.

Cherry had been at him the moment his key found the lock. Needs his sleep. Worn him out. A three-year-old boy can't. A three-year-old boy shouldn't. You. You. You.

He'd let it all slide past him, moved slowly past her and put Stanley to bed. Best day of my life, Stanley. Thank you, mate. Night-night.

They followed the hard narrative of the road, navigating their way around its punctuative tragedies. Jane found himself thinking how it had gone for them, these car-bound travellers, long-distance or quick hop, going to or returning from. No time to get away. They must have seen what it was, perhaps had the vision melted into the back of their skulls before life was struck from them. He remembered an old annual he had been given for his birthday, something that had bothered him greatly when he was a boy. It was supposedly filled with adventures and excitement, but all he saw were nightmares. Nuclear war. Man-eating polar bears. Innocent aliens hunted for sport.

There had been a story about a man who tests a dream machine; his dreams are relayed to a screen for scientists to view. He dreams he is on a spaceship moving faster than anything in the galaxy. He reaches the end of space and sees what is beyond it. But something goes wrong. There is an explosion. His body dematerialises. The scientist dies and his assistant, blinded by the explosion, calls out vainly to find out what was revealed, but, as the last panel explained, It was not for living men to tell.

The scientist's body had been in close-up, his mouth open, his eyes open, strangely pimpled. It had stayed with Jane for months, that image. It was with him now.

What did you see?

There had been those oily miasmal colours, impressive even at the depths Jane had experienced it. What must it have been like at the doorstep? He felt a pang of envy, despite knowing that to have seen it would have been to die. These people in the cars flash-fried, brains scrambled, the upholstery of the seats in which they perished barely touched in many cases. It must have hit like a tidal wave, tearing the breath from everything in its path.

He stopped in the road. Aidan had tired of his skipping game and was walking alongside Becky, his hand enfolded by hers. The broad green bandeau she was wearing glittered with dust. The bodies in the cars, lying on the floor swollen, split and black, like baked apples left too long in the oven. The rats wouldn't touch them. They ate only the bodies they found indoors. They didn't eat what was outside. The dust, was it some kind of appetite suppressant? And something else. He had been blind.

'Becky?' he called. She turned in the road, swinging Aidan around with her. He was still giggling when Jane asked: 'Why is nobody decomposing?'

They found a veterinary surgery in Stevenage's industrial area where it cosied up to the motorway. A small laboratory was connected to it at the rear, where cages contained dead animals that had tried to bite their way through the wire mesh. Boxes of drugs were stacked in a cupboard. Someone had been here before them. Drawers had been pulled out and tipped empty: laryngoscope blades and draining tubes; worming treatments and syringes. Refrigerators and cupboards had disgorged their contents, none of which were of any use to desperate people. Watchglasses of agar. Test tubes and flasks. Injectables. Liquids, powders and pastes. Dermatological oils. Becky pocketed a skin stapler and some removal forceps as well as some pads and tape and a sealed pack of suture needles.

A microscope had been knocked over but Becky checked it over and it seemed all right. She prepared a well slide with the dust added to a few drops of quieting solution and clipped it to the stage. She was quiet for some time, alternating between the coarse- and fine-focusing knobs.

'Any news?' Jane asked. Aidan was inspecting a broken centrifuge, when he wasn't glancing at the evidence of the animals' frenzied attempts to escape.

'I . . . I'm not sure,' Becky said. She lifted her head away from the eyepiece. 'It looks . . .' She sighed. Shook her head. 'Well, it looks . . . cellular.'