But then his eyes picked out other details on the shambling form: the tattered scraps of clothing, fluttering like ragged pennants on a washing line, boots tattered and torn and held together by strips of vine or leather.

‘What the hell…?’ he muttered, his terror replaced with horror of a different sort.

Jeff, standing beside him, now began to pick out those same details and realised his error.

‘Oh shit. It’s a man.’

Other heads in the thoroughfare had, by now, turned and witnessed the thing as it took several tentative steps forward, finally stumbling, as Jeff had done, on one of the deep wheel ruts. It fell forward, landing heavily on the hard, ridged ground and then curled up into a pitiful foetal position.

‘Somebody get this poor sonofabitch some help!’ Gordon shouted as he rushed forward and knelt down beside the thing. Closer now, he could see this quivering pale creature in rags had once been human but could barely be described as that now. Looking at the gaunt, starved-to-within-an-inch-of-death face, the deeply recessed and shadowed eyes, he saw an emptiness that would haunt him for the rest of his life and flavour the way he would tell this story to his children, and their children.

Those were the eyes of someone who had glimpsed the Angel of Death himself.

He leaned closer to the man. ‘We’ll get you some help. Some food and water,’ he whispered, suspecting it was already long past doing the poor wretch any good. Those empty eyes met his and Gordon swore for a moment that he saw the flickering flames of hell in those wide, dilated pupils.

My God, he may die right here.

Gordon reached out and gently held one of this poor man’s bony claws. The loose folds of skin on his hands reminded him of the turkey-wattle skin of an old man.