by M. R. Carey
Caldwell has been here before, a long time ago. Pre-Breakdown. Memories stir, filling her mind with surreal juxtapositions. Houses she once aspired to live in flick past her, squat and dark like widows in a Spanish cemetery waiting patiently for the resurrection.
At the top of the hill, she turns again. She misjudges the angle, punches out part of the wall of a pub that stands on the corner. Rosie isn’t perturbed, though the rear-view cameras show the building slumping into ruin behind her.
There’s a narrow elbow of road, then a long, wide sweep down towards central London. Caldwell piles on the acceleration again, and leans hard over, deliberately scraping Rosie’s left flank against the long exterior wall of what looks like a school building. The sign above the gate reads La Sainte Union. Pulverised brick powders the windscreen, and there’s a shriek of tortured metal even louder than the engine roar. Rosie endures and Caldwell is rewarded by the sight of at least one of the hungries flung loose in the hard rain.
She yells at the top of her voice – a banshee shriek of triumph and defiance. Blood from her wounded mouth flecks the windscreen in front of her.
She veers back out into the centre of the road, glancing at the cameras again. No sign of the hungries now. She has to stop so that she can examine her prize and make sure it’s still intact. But the hungries she’s just shaken off might still be alive. She remembers the look on the painted face of the black-haired boy. He’ll follow her for as long as his legs still work.
So she drives on, more or less due south, through Camden Town. Euston lies beyond, and after that she’ll be approaching the river. The streets remain empty, but Caldwell is wary. Eleven million people used to live in this city. Behind these blind windows and closed doors some of them must still be waiting, stuck halfway between life and death.
She’s figured out the brakes by this time, and she slows, intimidated by the echoing bellow of Rosie’s engines in these desolate landscapes. She feels for a sickening moment that she might be the last human being left alive on the face of a necrotic planet. And that it might not matter after all. To have the race that built these mausoleums lie in them finally, quiet and resigned, and crumble into dust.
Who’d miss us?
It’s the comedown after the adrenalin high of taking her specimen and shaking off her enemies. That and the fever. Caldwell shudders, and her vision swims. The road ahead of her seems to dissolve all at once into a grey smear. The dysfunction is sudden and spectacular. Is she going blind? That can’t happen. Not yet. She needs another day. A few hours, at least.
She brings Rosie to a jerking, screaming stop.
Locks the column.
And runs a hand over her face, massaging her eyes with thumb and forefinger to clear them. They feel like hot marbles nestling in her skull. But when she ventures to open them and look out through the cockpit’s windshield, there’s nothing wrong with how they work.
There really is a grey wall, forty feet high, that’s been thrown across the road ahead of her. And finally, after a minute or more of baffled awe, she knows it for what it is.
It’s her nemesis, her mighty opposite.
It’s Ophiocordyceps.
63
Miss Justineau is furious, so Melanie does her best to be furious too. But it’s hard, for lots of reasons.
She’s still sad about Kieran being killed, and the being sad seems to stop the being angry from getting started. And Dr Caldwell driving away in the big truck means that Melanie won’t have to see either one of them again, which makes her want to jump up and down and punch the air with her hands.
So while Sergeant Parks is using all the bad words he knows, it seems like, and Miss Justineau is sitting by the side of the road with a sad, dazed face, Melanie is thinking Goodbye, Dr Caldwell. Drive far, far away, and don’t come back.
But then Miss Justineau says, “That’s it. We’re dead.”
And that changes everything. Melanie thinks about what’s going to happen now, instead of just about how she feels, and her stomach goes all cold suddenly.
Because Miss Justineau is right.
They’ve used up the last of the e-blocker. The food smell is really strong on them, and Melanie is amazed that she’s able to be this close without wanting to bite them. She’s become used to it somehow. It’s like the part of her that just wants to eat and eat and eat is locked up in a little box, and she doesn’t have to open the box if she doesn’t want to.
But that’s not going to help Miss Justineau and Sergeant Parks very much. They’ve got to keep walking through this city, smelling like food, and they won’t walk far before they meet something that wants to eat them.
“We have to follow her,” Melanie says, full of urgency now that she sees what’s at stake. “We have to get back inside.”
Sergeant Parks gives her a searching look. “Can you do it?” he asks her. “The way you did with Gallagher? Is there a trail?”
Melanie hasn’t even thought of it until then, but now she breathes in deep – and finds it at once. There’s a trail so strong it’s like a river running through the air. It’s got a bit of Dr Caldwell in it, and a bit of something else that might be a hungry or more than one hungry. But mostly it’s the stinky chemical smell of Rosie’s engine. She could follow it blindfolded. She could follow it in her sleep.
Parks sees it in her face. “Okay,” he says. “Let’s get going.”
Justineau stares at him, wild-eyed. “She was pushing sixty miles an hour!” she says, her mouth twisted in a snarl. “She’s gone. There’s no way in God’s green earth we’re going to catch up with her.”
“Won’t know unless we try,” Parks counters. “Want to lie down and die, Helen, or give it a shot?”
“It’s going to come to the same thing either way.”
“Then die on your feet.”
“Please, Miss Justineau!” Melanie begs. “Let’s go a little way, at least. We can stop when it gets dark, and find somewhere to hide.” What she’s thinking is: they have to get out of these streets, where the hungry children who are just like her live and hunt. She thinks she might be able to protect Miss J against ordinary hungries, but not against the painted-face boy and his fierce tribe.
Sergeant Parks holds out a hand. Miss Justineau just stares at it, but he keeps it there in front of her, and in the end she takes it. She lets him haul her to her feet.
“How many hours of daylight have we got left?” she asks.
“Maybe two.”
“We can’t move in the dark, Parks. And Caroline can. She’s got headlights.”
Parks concedes the point with a curt nod. “We follow until it’s too dark to see. Then we hole up. In the morning, if there’s still a strong trail, we carry on. If not, we look for some tar or creosote or some other shit like that to mask our scent, the way the junkers do, and we keep on heading south.”
He turns to Melanie. “Go ahead, Lassie,” he says. “Do your stuff.”
Melanie hesitates. “I think…” she says.
“Yeah? What is it?”
“I think maybe I’ll be able to run a lot faster than the two of you, Sergeant Parks.”
Parks laughs – a short, harsh sound. “Yeah, I think so too,” he says. “We’ll do the best we can. Keep us in sight, that’s all.” Then he has a better idea, and turns to Justineau. “Let her have the walkie-talkie,” he tells her. “If we lose her, she can call us and talk us in.”
Justineau hands the rig to Melanie, and Sergeant Parks shows her how to send and receive with it. It’s simple enough, but designed for much bigger fingers than hers. She practises until she gets it right. Then Parks shows her how to hook it on to the waistband of her pink unicorn jeans, where it looks ridiculously large and cumbersome.
Miss Justineau gives her a smile of encouragement. Underneath it Melanie can see all her fears, her grief and exhaustion. How close she is to empty.
She goes up to Miss J and gives her a short, intense hug. “It’ll be all right,” she says. “I
won’t let anything hurt you.”
It’s the first time they’ve hugged like this – with Melanie giving comfort rather than receiving it. And she remembers Miss Justineau making the same promise to her, although she couldn’t say exactly when. She feels a pang of nostalgia for that time, whenever it was. But she knows that you can’t be a child for ever, even if you want to be.
She sets off at a run, and slowly accelerates. But she holds herself to a speed that the two grown-ups can just about keep up with. At each junction she waits until they jog into sight before setting off again. Walkie-talkie or not, she’s not going to leave them to their own devices with the night coming on – a night that she knows contains so many terrible things.
64
Caroline Caldwell gets out of Rosie using the cockpit door rather than the midsection door. The midsection door still has the airlock attached and her hungry specimen jammed into it.
She walks twenty paces forward. That’s as far as she can go, more or less.
She stares at the grey wall for a long time. For whole minutes, probably, although she doesn’t really trust her time sense any more. Her wounded mouth throbs in time with her heartbeat, but her nervous system is like a flooded carburettor; the engine doesn’t catch, the confused signals don’t coalesce into pain.
Caldwell registers the wall’s construction, its height and width and depth – the depth is just an estimate – and the time it must have taken to form. She knows exactly what she’s looking at. But knowing doesn’t help. She’s going to die soon, and she’ll die with this … thing in front of her. This gauntlet, flung down by a bullying, contemptuous universe that allowed human beings to grope their way to sentience just so it could put them in their place that bit more painfully.
Caldwell makes herself move, eventually. She does the only thing she can think of to do. She picks up the gauntlet.
Returning to Rosie, she lets herself back in through the cockpit door, which she closes and locks. She goes through the crew quarters and the lab to the midsection. She stops briefly in the lab to replace her face mask, which was ripped when the slingshot stone smacked into it. She scrubs up and dons surgical gloves, takes a bone-saw from a rack and a plastic tray from a shelf. A bucket would be better, but she has no bucket.
The hungry she caught is still moving sluggishly, despite the horrific damage the door mechanism has done to the muscles and tendons of its upper body. Seen from this close, the size of the head in relation to the body suggests that it may have been even younger at the time of initial infection than Caldwell had previously estimated.
But then she’s about to test that hypothesis, isn’t she?
The hungry’s right arm is jammed behind it, inside the airlock space. Caldwell secures the left arm by catching it in a noose of plasticated twine and tying the free end of the twine to a bracket on the wall. She wraps the twine around her own forearm three or four times and uses her body weight to pull it tight against the hungry’s struggles. The loops of twine bite deep into her arm, where the flesh has gone from angry red to sullen purple. She feels very little pain, which is a bad sign in itself. Nerve damage in necrotised flesh is irreversible and progressive.
As quickly as she can, but carefully, she saws off the hungry’s head. It grunts and snaps its jaws at her throughout the whole of this process. Both of its arms flail violently, the left one within a tight circular arc defined by the free play of the twine. Neither arm can reach her.
The fragile upper vertebrae yield to the saw almost instantly. It’s the muscle, on which the blade alternately sticks and slides, that’s hardest. When Caldwell is through the vertebrae, the hungry’s head sags suddenly, opening the incision wide to show the severed nubs of bone, shockingly white. By contrast, the liquor that drips down from the wound on to the tray and the floor all around is mostly grey, shot with rivulets of red.
The last thin ribbon of flesh tears under the head’s own weight, and the head abruptly falls. It hits the edge of the tray, flipping it over, and rolls away across the floor.
The hungry’s body is still moving very much as it did when the head was still attached. Its arms windmill uselessly, its legs step-slide on the airlock’s grooved metal floor. Colonies of Cordyceps anchored to the spine are still trying to commandeer the dead child and make it work for the greater good of its fungal passenger. The movements slow while Caldwell bends to retrieve the head, but they haven’t entirely stopped when she straightens again and takes the head through into the lab.
Safety first. She leaves the head on the work surface for a moment or two while she returns to clear the airlock, flinging the still-twitching headless corpse out on to the road. It lies there like a reproach not just to Caldwell but to scientific endeavour in general.
Caldwell turns her back on it and slams the door. If the road to knowledge was paved with dead children – which at some times and in some places it has been – she’d still walk it and absolve herself afterwards. What other choice would she have? Everything she values is at the end of that road.
She closes the doors, returns to the lab and sets to work.
65
Melanie is waiting when Justineau and Parks finally turn into the long road that has Euston station at the other end of it. Wordlessly she points, and Justineau looks. Breathless, lathered in sweat, her legs and chest knotting in agony, it’s all she can do.
Halfway along the broad avenue, Rosie has slewed to a halt on a steep diagonal, practically touching the kerb on both sides. Directly in front of the vehicle a huge barricade blocks the street. It rises to a height of forty feet or so, which puts it higher than the houses on either side. In the low, slanting sunlight, Justineau can see that it continues over the houses, into them and beyond them. It looks like a sheer vertical, at first, but then its subtle tones resolve themselves and she can see that it’s a slope like the side of a mountain. It’s as though a million tons of dirty snow has fallen in this one spot.
Parks joins her and they continue to boggle in unison.
“Any idea?” the sergeant asks at last.
Justineau shakes her head. “You?”
“I prefer to look at all the evidence first. Then I get someone smarter than I am to explain it to me.”
They go forward slowly, alert for any hostile movement. Rosie has been in the wars, and they can see the aftermath. The dents and scrapes on the armour plating. The blood and tissue plastered around the midsection door. The small, crumpled body lying in the street, right beside the vehicle.
The body is a hungry. A child. Male, no older than four or five. His head is gone – no sign of it anywhere nearby – and his upper body is crushed almost flat, as though someone put his narrow chest in a vice and tightened it. Melanie kneels to examine him more closely, her expression solemn and thoughtful. Justineau stands over her, searching for words and not finding any. She can see that the boy wears a bracelet of hair, perhaps his own, on his right wrist. As a badge of identity, it couldn’t be clearer. He was like Melanie, not like the regular hungries.
“I’m sorry,” Justineau says.
Melanie says nothing.
A movement in Justineau’s peripheral vision makes her turn her head. Sergeant Parks is looking the same way, towards Rosie’s central section. Caroline Caldwell has stripped the duct tape away from the lab window and slid back the light baffles. She’s staring out at them, her expression hard and impassive.
Justineau goes over to the window and mouths: What are you doing?
Caldwell shrugs. She makes no move to let them in.
Justineau hammers on the window, gestures to the midsection door. Caldwell goes away for a few moments, then comes back with an A5 notepad. She holds it up to show Justineau what she’s written on the top sheet. I have to work. Very close to a breakthrough. I think you might try to stop me. Sorry.
Justineau throws out her arms, indicating the empty street, the long shadows of late afternoon. She doesn’t have to say or mime anything. The message is clear. We�
��re going to die.
Caldwell watches her for a moment longer, then once again closes the baffles right across the window.
Parks is on his knees now, a few feet to Justineau’s left. He’s working the crank to open the door. But it’s not opening, even though he’s encouraging it with a continuous stream of bad language. Caldwell must have disabled the emergency access.
Melanie is still kneeling beside the beheaded body, either grieving or else so lost in thought that she’s not aware right now of what’s going on around her. Justineau’s stomach is churning and she feels sick. From the hard running, and now from this lethal smack in the face. She walks on a little, trying to outdistance the nausea, until she comes to the outermost reaches of the wall.
It’s not a wall at all but an avalanche, a formless sprawl of matter in slow-motion advance. It’s made from the tendrils of Ophiocordyceps, from billions of fungal mycelia interwoven more finely than any tapestry. The threads are so delicate that they’re translucent, allowing Justineau to peer into the mass to a depth of ten feet or so. Everything within is cocooned, colonised, wrapped in hundreds of thicknesses of the stuff. Outlines are softened, colours muted to a thousand shades of grey.
Justineau’s dizziness and nausea return. She sits, slowly, rests her head in her hands until the feelings stop. She’s aware of Melanie walking past her, skirting the edge of the thing and then seemingly about to walk into it.
“Don’t!” Justineau yells.
Melanie looks at her in surprise. “But it’s only like cotton, Miss Justineau. Or like a cloud that’s come down to the ground. It can’t hurt us.” She demonstrates, bending to run a hand lightly through the fluffy mass. It parts cleanly, retains a perfect image of the hand’s passage. The threads she’s touched cling to her skin like spiderwebs.
