One

He ran up through Pond Street to Haverstock Hill and up past the hospital. There was no sign of anybody. Come night-time, though, this car park, this forecourt and street would be a scrum of bodies. He couldn't bring himself to think what the hospital interior must be like. Belsize Park, once a desirable enclave of London, with its beautiful Georgian houses and broad leafy lanes, was now a demilitarised zone. The smell of copper was in the air; buildings were thickly painted with blood. Whatever fighting had happened here had been intensely one-sided. Bins rolled around, pushed by the ceaseless fingers of the wind. Glass teeth ringed grimacing black jaws in every single window along the parade of shops. He hurried as best he could through the obstacle course of felled lamp-posts and telegraph wires. Until he reached England's Lane. At the top of this street was a pub that had been gutted by fire. Inside he saw figures hunched against each other in a corner, under a leaning beam of wood that was mackerel-striped with deep burns. He left them alone. He knew from bitter experience that sometimes such quaking, craven types were really Skinners trying to trick you into coming closer. Sometimes the figures were human, and not as shy or fear-beaten as they seemed. It was best to leave well alone or suffer a preemptive attack. Nobody wanted any comfort any more. Another trait that made humans who they were gradually erased from the banks of race memory.

On Fellows Road Jane paused, listening for movement. He checked behind him but of course the tiger wasn't there. It would be shambling after him, perhaps having made no more than a hundred yards, but it was coming on and coming on. It had Jane's stink in its nostrils and it would not be shaken from its pursuit of him. It had the pit-bull grip on him no matter where he was.

It had come out of that chamber like something being born. Mewls and whiffles and whimpers; breath shuffling in its deep wet throat. He had tried to move back but had felt the blades of its claw pinch his flesh and he had halted, knowing that if his skin were pierced he was dead, if not from infection then from the bloodlust that would be triggered by any open wound. The jaws of the tiger stretched wide, its teeth like twists of black glass. The coke-coloured pits of its eyes were ringed with a dry cake of pus. Its fur had long since lost its gloss; now it was like a thin coat, burred, plated with muck, with a novelty pattern picked up for pennies from a charity shop. There was no hint at the power and grace that had once swaggered within it. He'd dropped the heavy hatch cover, trapping one of its legs as it rolled over the lip. It was too much to hope that he'd broken the limb, not that it would matter; nothing seemed to put a check on their movement, except fire.

Once Jane was sure that he was safe he cut down past the side of the third house on the left to the rear where a large garden had once played host to children. A rusted swing with chains hanging free where a plastic seat had once been tethered; the circular frame of a large trampoline now nothing more than a silent mouth open to the sky. He had spent a lot of time, in those early months, searching for his son and finding evidence of thousands of other children. It was like cataloguing grief. There were scorched photograph albums under beds; children's rooms; playthings torn into nightmare shapes by the heat and the weather. He had found the remains of boys Stanley's age. Some of them were huddled into the far corners of their rooms, the flayed skeleton of a favoured toy in their famished hands. Teeth clenched on a final word, bitten off by pain. Daddy. He had to stop. It was so deeply sad. He wasn't sleeping but whenever he managed to it didn't last long: there was always some blistered bug-eyed thing slinking about in the shadows of his head, limping and stumbling towards him on limbs half devoured by fire.

Jane checked the wall next to the back door. Orange. Inside he moved through a dark hallway almost to the front of the house, his fingers trailing against the failing wallpaper. An edge. He stopped and put his hand to a point halfway down the wall. He pressed hard and fast and felt a magnetic shutter sink slightly against its seal. When he let go, the edge sprang clear of its flush join with the wall: the jib door opened, breathing its musk against him, a smell he never grew tired of sampling. That air had been trapped in here for decades. It was the whiff of safety.