One

Something came sailing past him, riding high on the wind. A piece of clothing, perhaps. A plastic bag or the remnant of a flag. 'No standards left,' he said, and coughed a bitter chuckle. An ache was building around his teeth, an itchiness. His gums bled whenever he brushed his teeth. They bled when he bit into food. He wondered if it might be gingivitis. A friend of his mother's had lost all her teeth to gingivitis in her twenties. He half-wished Becky was a dentist instead of a radiologist.

He was tired, his feet, back and neck ached, but sleep played games with him. They were averaging, he guessed, between ten and twelve miles a day. Good going, with such a small boy in tow. Jane suspected his exhaustion was down to pushing Aidan in the wheelbarrow, but there was also the rain to contend with, and the diminishing food supplies. Some days he went without so that Aidan and Becky did not. While they slept he went hunting for cans, but it was alarming to discover that there were few to be found. Already the stockpiles had been rifled. There were survivors in their houses – maybe half a dozen so far – who said nothing as he approached, but showed him the grin of something sharp in their hands. They would not talk to him. Once he had been shot at.

He found a jar of pickled red cabbage in an end-of-terrace hovel taken over by rats. A skeleton sat in a squirming armchair, a china cup and saucer at its feet. There was a tin of bamboo shoots in a flat where someone seemed to have melted into the floorboards and left only his clothes behind. He had thought, Fuck bamboo shoots, you might as well can rabbit tods. And then he'd knifed the lid back and eaten it all there and then. It had been delicious. The supermarkets had become ghost buildings. Everything taken apart from DVDs, household electrical items, barbecues. Where were all these people? Where were all the survivors? Was everyone on the A1 ahead of him?

He wondered about his leisurely pursuers. He wondered if they were pursuing him at all. Maybe they were stripping provisions from his way ahead, pushing him towards some kind of test. He thought of the meat in the bowl. He thought of Becky and Aidan. God. The way your mind worked when you were up against it. All that trickle-down shit. A confrontation was ahead, he thought, one way or the other. Before they made it to London, perhaps. Or once they were ensconced there. He wondered what that meant, the moment it occurred to him. Just because he had lived there before didn't mean he had to stay there now. He would find Stanley and Cherry and they would leave, try to make it across the Channel to France, somewhere where this fury had not touched, if there was anywhere like that left. He wasn't going to spend the rest of his life fighting over crumbs in Kentish Town larders and carrying the gun with him every time he took his boy to play in Coram's Fields.

His throat ached for cold beer. The whisky was too strong to drink greedily, and he could do a good session, he felt he deserved a night on the lash. Thirsty, he went back to the tent and drank from the bladder. Becky and Aidan were in the same positions he'd left them. He heard the scrabble of pebbles loosed from a bank of earth, the hush of dead vegetation kicked to dust as bodies hurried by it.

'Show yourselves,' he whispered. 'Talk to me.'

He fell asleep sitting upright, in an awkward position. Aidan nudged him awake as he hopped from foot to foot, trying to unzip the tent's entrance so he could go out for a piss. Jane's neck flared with pain. He stood up, rubbing at it. Cold had seeped into his bones.

'Where's Becky?' He blinked, looking out at the pale morning, finding it hard to believe that he had been asleep for any length of time; the darkness, and the sounds, and his uneasy thoughts seemed to have been the product of only a few seconds previously.

'She said she was going to try to find us some breakfast. She said she was sick to the back teeth of dried apricots. She said don't worry. She said she was going to do things and buy a book.'

'By the book,' Jane corrected. 'So much for democracy.'

'What?'

'Never mind.'

Aidan helped him take down the tent and pack it in the rucksacks. They sat together on the rucksacks, feeling the temperature climb, waiting. They talked about books. Aidan liked Where the Wild Things Are.

'Do you still like it?' Jane asked, but Aidan didn't understand what he meant.