The sudden silence was huge. The wrecked engine ticked and dripped, Jack groaned, and through the tilted windscreen he could see Mrs Haswell hauling herself to her feet.

Steadying her tattered limbs.

Setting out for their car with slow, broken steps.

"Okay, Jackie?" his mum said. She twisted in her seat and reached back, the look in her eyes betraying her thoughts: My son, my son!

Jack opened his mouth to speak but only blood came out. He shuddered a huge breath and realised he'd been winded, things had receded, and only the blood on his chin felt and smelled real.

"What's wrong with her?" his dad said, holding the steering wheel and staring through the windscreen. "That's Mrs Haswell. Under our car. Did I run her over? I didn't hit her, did you see me hit her?"

"Gray, Jackie's bleeding."

Jack tried to talk again, to say he was all right, but everything went fluid. He felt queasy and sleepy, as if he'd woken up suddenly in the middle of the night.

"Gray!"

"Jack? You okay, son? Come on, out of the car. Janey, grab the binoculars. And the sh.e.l.ls. Wait on your side, I'll get Jack out." He paused and looked along the road again. Mrs Haswell was sauntering between the fresh skidmarks, and now Gerald the Geriatric was moving their way as well. "Let's hurry up."

Jack took deep, heavy breaths, feeling blood bubble in his throat. The door beside him opened and his dad lifted him out, and as the sun touched his face he began to feel better. His mum wiped at his b.l.o.o.d.y chin with the sleeve of her jumper.

There was a sound now, a long, slow sc.r.a.ping, and Jack realised it was Mrs Haswell dragging her feet. She'd never done that before. She was eighty, but she'd always been active and forceful, like a wind-up toy that never ran out. She hurried through the village at lunchtime, darted around her shop as if she had wheels for feetashe had never, in all the times Jack had seen her or spoken to her, been slow.

Her arms were draped by her sides, not exactly swinging as she walked, but moving as if they were really no part of her at all. Her mouth hung open, but she did not drool.

"What's wrong with her, dad?"

"She's got the disease," his dad said quickly, dismissively, and Jack felt a pang of annoyance.

"Dad," he said, "I think I'm old enough for you to tell me the truth." It was a childish thing to say, Jack understood that straight away at some deeper level; petulant and prideful, unmindful of the panic his parents so obviously felt. But Jack was nearly a teenager, and he felt he deserved some trust. "Anyway," he said, "she looks like she's dead." He'd seen lots of films where people died, but hardly any of them looked like the old woman. She seemed lessened somehow, shrunken into herself, drained. She had lost what little colour she once possessed. In his mind's eye, this was how a true, real-life dead person should look.

His dad aimed the shotgun at Mrs Haswell.

Jack gasped. For the second time in as many minutes, he found himself unable to talk.

"Gray," his mother said cautiously, quietly, hands raised in a warding-off gesture, "we should go across the fields."

Jack saw his dad's face thena"tears stinging the corners of his eyes; lips pressed together tight and bloodless, the way they'd been on the day Mandy left home for the last timea"and he realised what a dire situation they were in.

His dad had no idea of what to do.

"Across the fields to the motorway," his mum continued, "if there's any help, we may find it there. And I'm sure they couldn't drive." She nodded at Mrs Haswell as she spoke. "Could they? You don't think they could, do you?"

His dad was breathing heavily, just as Jack did whenever he was trying not to cry. He grabbed Jack's hand.

Jack felt the cool sweat of his father's palmsalike touching a hunk of raw meat before it was cooked.

They walked quickly back the way they had come, then hopped over a stile into the field.

Jack glanced back at their car, canted at a crazy angle in the ditch, and saw that the two old people had stopped in their tracks. They stood as still as statues, and just as lifeless. This was more disturbing than evera"at least before, they had seemed to possess some purpose.

She was under our car, Jack thought. What purpose in that?

And then his own words sprang back at him: She looks like she's dead.

"You know what an open mind is, Jack?" Mandy said. She had crept into his room in the middle of the night after hearing him whooping and crying. Sometimes she would sit on the edge of the bed until daybreak, just talking. Much of what she said confused hima"she read all the time, and occasionally she even confused their mum and dada"but he remembered it allaand later, some of it began to make sense.

Jack had a grotesque vision of someone with a trapdoor in their skull, their brain pulsing and glowing underneath. He smiled uncertainly at this b.l.o.o.d.y train of thought.

"It's the ability to believe in the unbelievable," she continued, apparently unconcerned at his silence. "It's a free mind. Imagination. Growing up closes off so many doors. The modern world doesn't allow for miracles, so we don't see them. It's a very precious gift, an open mind, but it's not pa.s.sive. You've got to nurture it like a bed of roses, otherwise it will wither and die. Make sure you don't close off your mind to things you find strange, Jack. Sometimes they may be the only truth."

They sat silently for a while, Jack croaking as he breathed past the phlegm in his throat, Mandy twirling strands of her long black hair between her fingers.

"It's something you have," she said suddenly, "and you always will. And that's another secret, to keep and tend."

"How do you know I have it?" he asked.

Mandy smiled at him and he saw a sadness behind her eyes. Maybe she still blamed herself for him being lost in the woods. Maybe she could already see how different their family was going to be.

"Hey," she said, "you're my brother." As if that was an answer.

The further they moved away, the more Tall Stennington appeared normal. Halfway across the field they lost sight of the shuffling shapes in the road, the empty streets beyond, the pigeons sitting silently on the church tower. Jack found himself wishing for any sign of life. He almost called out, wanting to see windows thrust open and people he knew by name or sight lean out, wave to him, comment on what a lovely brisk spring morning it was. But his tongue hurt from the car wreck. His dad had crashed because a busy old lady had cut or torn the brake cables. And she had done that becauseabecause a There was nothing normal this morning. Not with Tall Stennington, not with Mr Jude, not with the fox at the edge of the woods. Not even with his parents, because they were tense and worried and hurrying across a newly-planted field, and his mum still had on her slippers. His dad carried a shotgun. His mum had her arms crossed, perhaps against the cold but more likely, Jack thought, against something else entirely.

No, nothing was normal today.

They followed the furrows ploughed into the field, stepping on green shoots and crushing them back into the earth whence they came. Jack glanced behind at his footprints, his ident.i.ty stamped into the landscape only to be brushed away by the next storm. When he was younger he wanted to be an astronaut, purely for the excitement of zero-G, piloting experimental s.p.a.cecraft and dodging asteroids on the way out of the Solar system. The idea still appealed to him, but his main reason now would be to walk on the moon and leave his footprints behind. He'd heard that they would be there forever, or at least near enough. When he was deada"perhaps when everyone was deada"some aliens might land on the moon, and see his footprints, and think, Here was a guy willing to explore. Here was a guy with no closed doors in his head, with an open mind. Here was a guy who might have believed in us.

Jack looked up at the ghost of the moon where it still hung in the clear morning sky. He wondered if his exact centre-line of sight were extended, would he be looking at Neil Armstrong's footprints right now.

He looked down at his feet and one of those doors in his mind flapped wide open.

Falling to his knees, he plucked at a green shoot. It felt dry and brittle between his fingers, not cool and damp as it should have. He rubbed at it and it came apart, shedding its faded outer skin and exposing powdery insides.

He picked another shoot and it was the same. The third bled a smear of greenish fluid across his fingertips, but the next was as dry as the first, and the next.

"Jack, what's up son? What are you doing?" His dad had stopped and turned, glancing nervously past Jack at the stile as if constantly expecting Mrs Haswell and Gerald the Geriatric to come stumbling after them.

Jack shook his head, not unable to understanda"he understood perfectly well, even for a twelve year olda"but unwilling. The doors were open but he was stubbornly grasping the frames, not wanting to enter the strange rooms presenting themselves to him now.

"This crop's dead," he said. "It looks fresh, Dad. Mum? Doesn't it all look so fresh?" His mum nodded, cupping her elbows in her hands and shivering. Jack held up a palm full of crushed shoot. "But look. It's all dead. It's still green, but it's not growing any more."

He looked back at the village. Their footprints stood out in the young crop, three wavering lines of bent and snapped shoots. And the hedge containing the stile they had hopped overaits colours like those of a faded photograph, not lush and vibrant with the new growth of springaHe'd once read a book called The Death of Gra.s.s. Now, he might be living it.

To his left the hillsides, speckled with sheep so still they looked like pustules on the face of the land.

To his right the edge of a stretch of woodland, at the other end of which stood their house, doors open, toast burnt in the grille, perhaps still burning.

"Everything's dying."

His dad sighed. "Not everything," he said.

Jack began to shake, his stomach twisted into a knot and he was sure he was going to puke. Another terrible admission from his father, another fearful idea implanted when really, he should be saying, There, there, Jackie boy, nothing's changed, it's all in your imagination.

What could he name? How could he lay all this out to understanding, to comprehension, to acceptance, all as he had been told? He tried, even though he thought it was useless: The villagers, like walking dead, perhaps they are. The plants, dry and brittle even though it's springtime. Mum and dad, scared to deatha He thought at first there was nothing there that would work, but then he named another part of this terrible day and a sliver of hope kept the light shining: Mandy, in the town, saying it's safe.

"Not everything, Jack," his dad said again, perhaps trying to jolt his son back to reality.

"Let's go," his mum said. "Come on, Jack, we'll tell you while we're walkingait's only two or three fields awayaand there'll be help there." She smiled but it could not reach her eyes.

The motorway was not three fields away, it was six. His parents told Jack all they knew by the time they'd reached the end of the second field. He believed what they said because he could smell death in the third field, and he mentioned it, but his mum and dad lied to themselves by not even answering. Jack was sure as h.e.l.l he knew what death smelled like; he'd found a dead badger in the woods a year ago, after all, and turned it over with a stick, and run home puking. This was similar only richer, stronger, as if coming from a lot more bodies. Some of them smelled cooked.

They saw the stationary cars on the motorway from two fields away. Wisps of smoke still rose here and there. Several vehicles were twisted on their backs like dead beetles.

From the edge of the field ab.u.t.ting the motorway they saw the shapes sitting around the ruined carsa"the grey people in their colourful clothesa"and although they could not tell for sure what they were eating, it was mostly red.

Jack's dad raised his binoculars. Then he turned, grabbed Jack's and his mother's hand and ran back they way they had come.

"Were they eating the people from the cars?" Jack asked, disgusted but fascinated.

His fathera"white-faced, frowning, shaking his head slightly as if trying to dislodge a memorya"did not answer.

They walked quickly across another field, their path taking them away from the woods and between Tall Stennington and the motorway. Neither was in view any longera"the landscape here dipped and rose, and all they could see around them was countryside. Nothing to give any indication of humankind's presence; no chimney smoke or aircraft trails; no skysc.r.a.pers or whitewashed farm buildings.

No traffic noise. None at all.

Jack realised that he only noticed noise when it was no longer there.

"Dad, tell me!" Jack said. "The dead peoplea"were they eating the people from the cars?"

"No," his father said.

Jack saw straight through the lie.

He had taken it all in, everything his parents had told him, every snippet of information gleaned from the panicked newscasts yesterday, the confused reports from overseas. He had listened and taken it all in, but he did not really understand. He had already seen it for himselfa"Mr Jude and the people in the village did not have a disease at all, and the young crop really was deada"but he could not believe. It was too terrifying, too unreal. Too crazy.

He whispered as they walked, naming the parts that scared him the most: Dead people, dead things, still moving and walking. Dumb and aimless, but dangerous just the same.

Those fingers last night had not sounded aimless, those probings and proddings at their locked up, safe cottage. They had sounded anything but aimless.

He carried on naming. Those of you who are immune, stay at home. The broadcasts his parents had listen to had told of certain blood groups succ.u.mbing slower than others, and some being completely immune. In a way, these positive elements to the broadcastsa"the mentions of immunitya"scared Jack more. They made him feel increasingly isolated, one of the few survivors, and what was left? What was there that they could use now, where would they go when dead people could cut your brake cables (and that sure as s.h.i.t wasn't aimless, either), when they caused crashes on the motorway so they couldathey could a Jack stumbled, dug his toes into a furrow and hit the dirt. His face pressed into the ground and he felt dry dead things scurrying across his cheeks. He wanted to cry but he could not, neither could he shout nor scream, and then he realised that what he wanted most was comfort. His mother's arms around him, his father sitting on the side of his bed stroking his brow as he did when Jack had the occasional nightmare, a cup of tea before bed, half an hour reading before he turned out his light and lay back to listen to the night.

Hands did touch him, voices did try to soothe, but all Jack could hear was the silence. All he could smell was the undercurrent of death in the motionless spring air.

Before the world receded into a strange flat brightness, Jack saw in sharp detail a line of ants marching along a furrow. They were moving strangelya"too slowly, much slower than he'd ever seen one moving before, as if they were in watera"and he pa.s.sed out wondering how aimless these red ants really were.

He was not unconscious for long. He opened his eyes to sunlight and sky and fluffy clouds, and he suddenly knew that his parents had left him. They'd walked on, leaving him behind like an injured commando on a raid into enemy territory, afraid that he would slow them down and give the dead things a chancea"

And then his mother's face appeared above his and her tears dropped onto his cheeks. "Jackie," she said, smiling, and Jack could hear the love in her voice. He did not know howa"it did not sound any different from usuala"but out here, lost in a dying landscape, he knew that she loved him totally. She would never leave him behind. She would rather die.

"I want to go home," Jack said, his own tears mixing with his mother's on his face. He thought of the cottage and all the good times he had spent there. It would be cold inside by now, maybe there were birdsadead birds, arrogantly roosting on plate racks and picture frames. "Mum, I want to go home, I want none of this to happen." He held up his arms and she grabbed him, hugging him so tightly that his face was pressed into her hair, his breath squeezed out. He could smell her, a warm musk of sweat and stale perfume, and he took solace in the familiar.

"We can't stay here too long," his father said, but he sat down in the dirt next to his wife and son. "We've got to get on to Tewton."

"To find Mandy?"

"To find safety," his dad said. He saw Jack's crestfallen expression and averted his eyes. "And to find Mandy."

"She never hurt me, you know," Jack muttered.

"She scared you, made you run away!"

"I ran away myself! Mandy didn't make me, she only ever hurt herself!" Once more, he tried to recall his time in the woods, but the effort conjured only sensations of cold, damp and dark. Ironically, he could remember what happened afterwards with easea"the coughing, the fevers, the nightmares, Mandy by his bed, his shouting parents, Mandy running down their driveway, leaving her home behinda"but still a day and a night were missing from his life.

It was a pointless argument, a dead topic, an aimless one. So nothing more was said.

They were silent for a while, catching their breath and all thinking their own thoughts. His mother continued to rock him in her lap but Jack knew she was elsewhere, thinking other things. His dad had broken open the shotgun and was making sure the two cartridges in there were new.

"How do you kill a dead thing, Dad?" Jack asked. A perfectly simple question, he thought. Logical. Reasonable.

His dad looked across the fields. "Tewton should be a few miles that way," he said. He looked at his watch, then up at the sun where it hung low over the hills. "We could make it by tonight if we really push it."

Jack's mum began to cry. She pulled a great clod of mud from one of her slippers and threw it at the ground. "We can't go that far alone," she said. "Not on foot. Gray, we don't know what's happened, not really. They'll come and help us, cure everyone, send us home."

"*They'?"

"You know what I mean."

"There was a film called Them once," Jack said. "About giant ants, and nuclear bombs. It was nothing like this, though." Even as he spoke it, he thought maybe he was mistaken. He thought maybe the film was very much like this, a monstrous horror of humankind's abuse of nature, and the harvest of grief it reaps.

"It's all so sudden," his dad said then. Jack actually saw his shoulders droop, his head dip down, as if he was being shrunken and reduced by what had happened. "I don't think there's much help around, not out here. Not yet."

"It'll be all right in Tewton," Jack said quietly. "Mandy said it was safe there, she phoned us because she was worried, so we've got to go. I don't want to stay out in the dark. Not after last night, Mum. Remember the noises?"

His mother nodded and tightened her lips.

"I don't want to know what made those noises." Jack felt close to tears once more but he could not let them come, he would not.

A breeze came up and rustled through the dead young crop.

Jack jerked upright, eyes wide, mouth hanging open.

There was something around the corner of the L-shaped field, out of sight behind a clump of trees. He could not hear it, nor smell it exactly, but he knew it was dead, and he knew it was moving this way.

"Mum," he said, "Dad. There's something coming."

They looked around and listened hard, his dad tightening his grip on the shotgun. "I can't?"

"There!" Jack said, pointing across the field a second before something walked into view.