by M. R. Carey
Within two minutes, a space has been cleared around the three chosen hungries. This is what the team has come to call fine clearance. What comes next is mass clearance: it’s done by the grunts using SCAR-H heavy assault rifles on full automatic. The three privates heft their weapons and take aim, insofar as aim is needed.
“Safeties off,” McQueen says to the grunts. “On my mark.” He holds up his hand. Wait for it. Why does he do that? Khan wonders. Is he testing the air or something? But that makes no sense. They’re wearing e-blocker gel to mask their bodies’ natural smorgasbord of scents, and in spite of that they’re standing downwind of the hungries, taking no chances. Either the drawn-out pause is some aspect of kill-craft that the laity can’t be expected to understand or else it’s pure melodrama.
The moment stretches. “Okay,” the lieutenant says at last. “Let’s—” But another voice, loud and clear, cuts him off.
“Hold your fire.”
It’s Carlisle. The colonel. He’s standing right on the shoulder of the slope, in full view from all directions. He has come up behind them while they were focused on what was going on down below and he has been watching all this.
To McQueen’s strong disapproval, evidently. The sniper pushes out his cheek as though there’s some half-chewed mass in there that he wants to eject.
“Permission to speak, sir,” he says.
The colonel doesn’t give it. He doesn’t not give it either: he just doesn’t acknowledge the request. “Guns down,” he says to the three soldiers on their knees in the gorse. “Watch and wait.”
McQueen tries again. “Sir, operational guidelines call for a complete clearance of—”
He stops because he’s just seen what everyone else has seen. Topping the rise a quarter of a mile away, standing for a moment on the summit in full, heraldic glory, is a stag the size of the wrath of God. It’s the most beautiful thing Khan has ever seen, or she thinks it is at that moment. They all gawp at it, reduced to tourists by the monarch of the glen as he makes time on his busy schedule to stop by and remind them of how small they are.
Then he starts down the slope. Khan registers what’s about to happen. But she can’t look away.
The stag is unaware of any danger. Nothing is moving. There are no loud noises. A few tattered clothes are drifting in a skittish wind, and the waves are lapping around a few recently deposited corpses. Nothing to see here, nothing to get alarmed about.
The animal is in among the hungries before the ones closest to it start to stir. Their heads come upright on their necks, swivel around to take in range and distance. And then they’re on the move.
The stag finds itself, with no warning, at the centre of a vast convergence.
It breaks into a gallop, but that’s not going to help because there’s nowhere to run to that isn’t already crowded. The hungries may have looked sparse spread out across the valley, but Jesus, do they rally to the sound of the dinner bell! They come sprinting in from every quarter, backs bent and heads thrust forward. Now there are sounds: the working of their jaws, the pounding of their feet, the occasional brute, blunt impact as one runs up against another in its haste and they both go sprawling down the hill.
The first hungry to reach the stag sinks its teeth into its flank. The second into its throat. Then it’s impossible to count, impossible to see. The stag disappears under a living wave of human bodies (or post-human, Khan corrects herself reflexively). The sound of its fall is a dull thud, muffled by distance.
The hungries feed. Dipping their heads, locking their jaws, tearing away whatever they can get in quick, convulsive jerks. The movement is like a collective peristalsis, a wave that goes through them all in sequence.
Khan understands now why the colonel said not to fire. The hungries—all but the ones already felled—are gone from the nearer slope. There’s nothing to stop the science team from strolling right on down and reaping what the snipers sowed.
5
The snipers stay high up on the slope, providing cover as the scientists go in. The grunts go in with them, rifles slung, catch-cans in hand. Time is still of the essence, and everyone has their job to do.
Which is why Khan carries a sampling kit even though her role on the mission roster is as an epidemiologist. The only line that matters here is between the people with rifles and the people with doctorates.
Three hungries. Three subjects, each with a brain, a spinal column, a skin surface and numerous organs. Four scientists, each with a field kit that accommodates a maximum of twenty-four separate samples. Fun for all.
The soldiers wield their catch-cans with practised skill. It’s a tool that was designed for animal handling, an extensible metal pole that locks at any length and has a running loop at the business end. The loop is made out of parachute silk, with braided steel ribbon woven through it. You slip it around the neck—or any available limb—of a hungry and use it as a pinion point. Usually the drill is to loop and lock down the head and both arms of the chosen target, completely immobilising the upper body. The hungry still flails and squirms, but unless you actually put your hand in its mouth you’re not going to get bitten.
It’s not always easy to remember that. These hungries were infected years before. The Cordyceps pathogen has been growing through their bodies for all that time, and by now there is a rich carpet of fungal threads on the surface of their skin. It’s not dangerous: the only vector of infection is via bodily fluids, through blood and saliva. But some deep-seated instinct always makes Khan want to avoid the touch of that bleached, blotchy flesh with its coat of grey fur.
She can’t. Every second matters here. With a specimen secured, each of the scientists becomes a different kind of butcher. John Sealey wields the bone saw, with absolute and unblinking concentration. Akimwe is Mister Spinal Fluid, punching in with a hypo at the L5 vertebra without knocking. Penny goes for epidermal growth, a brief that has her ducking in and out between the two men with her little plastic scraper like the shuttle on a loom.
And Khan?
Khan cuts out the brains.
In this context, the brain is the prime cut, although it certainly doesn’t look like it. It looks like mouldering cheese, dried out and shrunk to about a third of its normal volume, swathed in fungal matter like clotted cobwebs. She doesn’t take it all. What she wants is a snapshot of penetration and mycelial density, which she can get from a biopsy.
So as soon as John levers off the top of each skull, Khan dips in with the eight-centimetre punch, driving it diagonally through the corpus callosum into the desiccated, unhealthy tissue beneath.
There’s a series of steel canisters hooked onto her belt. The filled punches slot into them so perfectly it’s practically a vacuum seal even before she screws on the lids.
“All good here,” she says.
“I’m done,” Akimwe answers.
“Give me a second,” Penny mutters. She’s running her scraper repeatedly around the curve of a shoulder as though the still-twitching hungry is a pat of butter straight out of the fridge. “Okay,” she says at last, spooning the grey froth carefully into her last empty sample jar. “Ready.”
John Sealey gives McQueen the okay sign, forefinger and thumb joined at the tips. Once again he’s trying to speak the lieutenant’s language, which is touching in a way but also futile. McQueen barely looks at him.
And in any case, now that Carlisle is here it’s him rather than McQueen who’s the ranking officer. “All finished, colonel,” Khan says, not wanting to correct John’s solecism but also quite keen not to let it stand. She feels respect for the colonel—respect deepened by her personal debt to him into something a lot harder to define. For McQueen, although he keeps her alive on a daily basis, she mainly feels a sort of uneasy mixture of awe and mild distaste. He’s very, very good at what he does. But what he does is not something to which she can entirely reconcile herself.
“Withdraw,” Carlisle orders. “Single file, on your name.”
He calls them
home, and they come. All this time, he hasn’t troubled to duck his head or take cover: he just keeps a weather eye on the hungries down at the bottom of the slope, who are still feeding on the remains of the stag. But whatever risks the colonel takes with his own person, he’s chary of the rest of them. He brings them out in good order, the scientists and their hard-won prizes at the centre of a protective cordon of outward-pointing ordnance, like a delicate flower in a nest of thistles.
At the head of the rise, Elaine Penny looks back down into the valley with a puzzled expression.
“What?” Khan asks.
“That was weird,” Penny says. “I thought I saw …” she points. “There were some kids down there.”
“Hungries?”
“No. I don’t know.”
“Well, who else is going to be down there? Junkers would have more sense.”
Penny frowns, then shrugs. “I suppose.”
Khan finds herself walking beside the colonel as they return to Rosie. That puts her at the back of the column, because even when he’s using his cane the colonel’s lopsided, rolling walk is not fast. His tall, gaunt body, carved into a stick by the winds of a dozen or so assorted battlefields, towers head and shoulders over hers. His face with its right-angled jaw and boat-prow nose, bald dome framed between two sparse brackets of grey hair, is no less heraldic than the stag’s. It’s so retro it’s actually funny. He turns to look down at her, shifting his grip on his (equally timeless) spiral Derby walking stick.
And they’ve known each other a long time—much longer than the two hundred and some days of the current expedition—so he can see that Khan is not happy. But he mistakes the reason. “You’ve no need to be afraid of Dr. Fournier, Rina,” he says. And then when she doesn’t answer: “You’ve committed an infraction, and he feels as though it will send the wrong signal if he ignores it. But he can hardly stand you down from the mission, and since it’s impossible right now to refer the matter back to Beacon, he doesn’t have any other sanctions to call on.”
Khan knows these things. She’s not looking forward to that particular interview, but she’s not afraid either. She just wants it to be over. But the colonel has just broached the Forbidden Subject. Now she’s thinking about the radio silence and what it might mean, and those thoughts are a spiral you have to pull out of before you hit the ground and explode in a stinky cloud of existential angst.
They’re in among the trees now and the soldiers have closed in, tense and alert. Visibility is bad here. A hungry could come running from any direction. They can’t even rely on sound because the wind has picked up: the trees are making a noise like the crowd in a distant football stadium cheering from hoarse lungs. The smell of wild flowers comes to Khan, and underneath it the smell of rot. The world has dabbed a little perfume on its spoiling wounds.
Colonel Carlisle can see he’s missed the mark. He guesses again.
“You think that was cruel,” he says. “What I did just now. Letting the stag draw off the hungries.”
“No,” Khan protests. But she’s hiding behind semantics. She thought it was ugly, and she doesn’t associate the colonel with ugliness. “I was geared up for something else, that’s all,” she half-lies. “It took me by surprise.”
“I was thinking of waste, Rina.”
“So was I,” Khan says.
“But you mean the stag. I mean the bullets.”
“The bullets?”
“Back in Beacon there’s a whole warehouse full, scavenged from here and there. Enough to last for years. Ten years, I’d say, if you pushed me to offer an estimate. Possibly a little longer. But nobody is making any more. Not to these tolerances. Every single cartridge in these magazines, every round these soldiers fire, is an exquisite piece of engineering from a finite and diminishing stock.”
The colonel tilts his hand, miming a shifting balance. “And if you follow the logic, every shot fired changes the odds on our survival as a species. Will our children fight with pikestaffs? Bows and arrows? Sharpened sticks? It’s hard enough to bring a hungry down with a ballistic round. Half the time they don’t seem to realise that they’re dead. Pending your expert opinion, of course.”
He offers her a quick smile to let her know that this last is a joke rather than an attack on her. The Caldwell doctrine, that ego-death occurs at the moment of infection, is widely accepted in Beacon but has never been satisfactorily proved. The alternative hypothesis—terrible but not implausible—is that the hungries have some kind of locked-in syndrome. That they’re conscious but unable to command their own limbs, sidelined by the pathogen that’s set up house in their nervous system. How would that feel? A soul peeping out through stained grey curtains while the body it used to wear celebrates its freedom with acts of random carnage?
Khan maintains a stubborn belief in the future—in the fact that there is going to be one—but sometimes the present daunts and defeats her. There used to be a world in which things made some kind of sense, had some kind of permanence. But the human race put that world down somewhere, left it carelessly behind, and now nobody can find it again or reconstitute it. Entropy is increasing. In her own affairs, too.
The colonel has assured her that she’s got nothing to worry about, but as a member of the science team she reports to the civilian commander, not the military one. In any given situation it’s impossible to say which way Dr. Fournier will jump. Most of the time he doesn’t even know that himself.
They’ve reached the camp perimeter. Carlisle tells McQueen to deactivate the motion sensors. The lieutenant does using the command channel on his walkie-talkie (which is still functional, proving that Beacon’s silence can’t be explained away by mechanical failure). There are three sets of sensors, carefully hidden among the gorse and towering thistles. The leg-breaker traps and barbed wire entanglements, by contrast, are left out in the open with no attempt at concealment. When hungries run, they run in a straight line towards their prey so there’s really no point in subterfuge.
The team can now see the road ahead of them and below them. It’s just a ragged strip of asphalt that’s being torn apart in slow motion by weeds clawing their way through it from underneath. There’s a section about thirty yards long that they cleared by hand, soldiers and scientists together, hacking at the brambles and spear-thistles with machetes. The Rosalind Franklin sits in the middle of the clear space, an armoured mother hen waiting for her chicks to come home.
Her? Khan always falls into the trap of using the female pronoun, and always resents it. It’s only the name of the armoured olive-drab monster that enforces the logic. It also recalls none-too-subtly the quiet dedication of scientists who change the world and earn no glittering prizes. But by any name, Rosie is the bastard child of an articulated lorry and a Chieftain tank. Her front end is adorned with a V-shaped steel battering ram designed to function like a cow-catcher on an ancient steam train. On her roof, a field pounder and a flamethrower share a single broad turret. Inch-thick plate sheathes her sides, and broad black treads her underbelly. There is nothing in this post-lapsarian world that she can’t roll over, burn through or blow the hell apart.
But right now Rosie is base camp, her warrior self disguised as home sweet home. Her airlock is fully extruded from the mid-section, her extension blisters out to their furthest extent almost doubling the interior space. She has outriggers to hold her stable in spite of external pressure coming on any vector, at any speed. She would hold fast against a hurricane; and more to the point, against a massed charge. Thousands of hungries, flinging themselves against Rosie’s flanks in a flood tide of reckless bio-mass, would break and ebb harmlessly.
Have broken. Have ebbed.
McQueen cycles the airlock. He stabs irritably at the keypad, entering the day’s code correctly only on the second try. Mostly, these days, the airlock features in their lives as a pain in the arse. It’s like an over-large shower cubicle rigged up against the mid-section door, flimsy-looking but made of a rigid, robust plastic polymer.
Protocol dictates that it stays in place whenever there’s a team out in the field, but it’s pointless. Nobody is afraid at this point that they might bring unsuspected toxins or biological agents into Rosie’s interior. They know what the hungry pathogen is and how it travels, how it infects. The airlock defends against a risk that isn’t present. It’s a gesture, more than anything, a finger impotently raised against the apocalypse.
And it only holds six people, so two cycles are needed to get them all inside. The scientists go in first, with their tissue samples. That’s what the mission is all about, after all. The soldiers wait, facing outwards with rifles at the ready, until the outer door slides open again and they can enter in their turn.
Inside Rosie the same demarcation lines stay in place. The scientists retreat to the lab space, which is at the stern end. The soldiers go to crew quarters up at the front. It’s like some awkward high-school bop where the boys and the girls scuttle off to opposite ends of the school hall and nobody dares to go out on the dance floor. Except that the dance floor in this analogy is the mid-section, which houses nothing except the airlock and the access ladder for the turret.
Khan transfers her tissue samples into cryo. They won’t stay there long, but she’s going to miss out on the coming orgy of fixing, sectioning, staining and slide-mounting. She’s got other places to be.
She’s got to face the inquisition.
Carlisle has gone through into the engine room, even further astern than the lab. According to the book, which for the colonel is a real and vital thing, he has to check in with the civilian commander as soon as he returns from the field—and Dr. Fournier has seized on the engine room, a pathetic, claustrophobic little space, as his office.
Khan asked Carlisle once how he could bear it. A man who has led brigades, having to report and sometimes defer to a neurotic little pencil-pusher. Where is the sense in it? Especially now, in the deafening silence of the cockpit radio, wondering (as every one of them is wondering, all the time) whether Beacon has gone down and their remit has disappeared along with their whole world. Carlisle evaded the question with a joke. Khan can’t remember the punchline now, something about the chain of command not being an actual chain. But yeah, it is. At least if you let the powers-that-be add a padlock to it.
