Free One by Conrad Williams Page B

his dad was on nights and had the car. He'd alleviate the monotony of a long walk back in the dark, often accompanied by rain, by doing the Scout jog, which was twenty paces running, twenty paces at a fast walk: the fartlek before its time.
Stan-ley, Cher-ry, Rich-ard. Stan-ley, Cher-ry, Rich-ard. Stan-ley, Cher-ry, Rich-ard.
Jane was intoxicated by the distance he'd managed. His heart was pumping hard and he was alive. He was alive. He stopped to rest and lifted the Nikon glasses to sweep the area south of Alnwick. Newcastle was a knot of wet iron in the distance. He could make it in maybe four days, if he marched hard. The road was not flat, but it was not so undulating or jagged as to hamper him too greatly. The dried meat and dried fruit he had found in a farmhouse cellar was keeping his spirits up; he'd even lucked upon a couple of slabs of dark chocolate in a tin marked IZZY'S STASH – KEEP OUT! He wasn't wanting for energy. But finding such food, such good food, made him wonder a little about the future, despite his intention to keep himself focused on the present. The vegetation frazzled, the food chain compromised. No animals. No food. How much of this kind of thing was going to be buried treasure in the months and years to come? He could see himself stumbling, cadaverous, through villages, his clothes flapping on him, too weak to unscrew the top from an undiscovered jar of jam he might come across in a forgotten pantry. What about water? An image, unbidden, of vultures sitting on the shattered street lamps of Oxford Street, the birds' beaks stained crimson. An image of himself, a scarecrow, shambling beneath their keen eyes, calling out for his family, calling out for anybody, but there was nobody left. Just six million corpses mummifying in the furnace blast of a storm that would not cease.
Jane forced his thoughts outward, and his eye caught the feather nestled into his rucksack. No birds. No nothing. No people.
He snatched up the feather and studied it. He retrieved the guidebook and savagely flicked through the pages, looking for something that might help him identify its provenance. The pictures of birds calmed him, even though he knew they were eternally trapped between these pages, that he'd catch no sight of them here. A big wedge-shaped feather it was, edged with broad sections of creamy white. He held it to his cheek, felt the fragile, firm ruffle as he ran his fingers along its edge, then tried to scent something of the bird via the quill, but there were no smells beyond that of the burned, congealed sky.
He thumbed through the book until he found the large predators. He had to look away from some of the pages, the ones of photographs of raptors rending their prey. The slashing talons, the hooked razor beaks. The eyes were the worst, though. Angry, feral; alien colours. Piercing. He had always been squeamish. Jane tried to imagine being the focus of that unswerving attention as an eagle came at him, claws outstretched, great wings spread in some sacrilegious cuneiform aping, but thankfully it kept sliding away at the crucial point.
He found what he was looking for. The white tail. A yellow beak. Insane, intent eyes. Even as the rain squirmed across the paper, discolouring it, he read that the sea eagle was either a dedicated loner or a loyal partner. Once hunted to extinction in Scotland, it was now mainly confined to the west coast, having been reintroduced to the countryside in the latter decades of the twentieth century. So what was it doing here, east coast, many miles south of its natural habitat? He must have made a mistake, but the diagram of the feather in the book might have been a copy of the real thing clenched between his fingers. An ornament in a hotel room. That was all. A gewgaw. A knick-knack.
It was placed there for you.
Jane dropped the feather suddenly, as if it had turned hot. He stared at it and thought about what he'd just suggested to himself, what that might mean if it was true.