The Boy on the Bridge

by M. R. Carey

  “The four of us,” Sixsmith amends. “Phillips is on sentry.” Sixsmith doesn’t like it when McQueen criticises the colonel, and tends to try to shut him down. She’s one of those—and there are a fair number—who think Carlisle is a hero because he got eleven thousand people out of a city that used to have a population of eight and a half million. Apparently 99.9 per cent attrition counts as success.

  And apparently it absolves that abject bastard of everything he did before the evacuation. It’s like the burn runs never happened. It’s like he didn’t preside over the biggest peacetime massacre in British military history and lead decent, serving soldiers into a bloodletting that would stain their souls for ever.

  This is what McQueen thinks, about himself, his job and the colonel:

  Britain had an army once that prized and rewarded blind obedience. Sometimes that led to monumental screw-ups like the Charge of the Light Brigade, but more often than not it worked. It worked because of the context: a world where people fought against other people, century after century, in the same theatres and with the same rules of engagement.

  That was what it was like when McQueen himself enlisted—and he went along with it without much thought. Did well out of it, all things considered. Tours of duty in Syria and then in Lebanon got him commended four times and fast-tracked for promotion.

  Then the context changed, overnight. But some people didn’t manage to change with it. Most of the people at the Main Table in Beacon are just the same old arseholes playing by the same old rules. Throwing down the ace of clubs as though it still means something when the game has switched to Russian roulette.

  Why does McQueen hate the colonel? Because the colonel had the chance to turn it around. He was one of the highest-ranking officers to survive the global clusterfuck that happened when the hungry plague first broke out, and one of the most respected. He could have taken charge, and people would have rallied behind him. McQueen would have, just for one.

  And instead he kept on obeying orders, even when the orders plainly made no sense. Fire-bomb the south of England! When there were people down there barricaded in their houses waiting for help to come. When there were civilian aircraft on the ground that could have been reclaimed and put into use. When your own damn troops were going to need that infrastructure if they were ever going to take one step outside the fences and the ditches and the minefields you had them hiding behind.

  Yeah, McQueen thinks, actually his metaphor doesn’t hold. Russian roulette is exactly what the authorities in Beacon were playing. Only they cheated by putting a bullet in every chamber. And then they gave the gun to Colonel Isaac Carlisle to fire.

  No, he and Sixsmith will have to disagree on the matter of the Fireman. But she makes a good point about the game. Four of them is below critical mass. You don’t get proper poker without five or six around the table.

  He considers. Sentry duty is some more of the Old Man’s play-it-by-the-book bullshit. They don’t need a sentry. The movement sensors will trip if the hungries come, and in any case the hungries don’t. Not while Rosie is on silent running. And how is it that only the grunts draw night duties? As if divisions of rank matter a flying toss when they’re sitting out in nowhere’s armpit with nothing coming in on the radio and no way of knowing if Beacon’s even there any more. It’s time to strike a blow for the common man, and maybe goad the colonel into finally facing him head on.

  He goes through to the mid-section platform, where Phillips is standing by the airlock. Rifle at parade rest. Face at back in five minutes.

  “Anything?” McQueen asks sympathetically.

  Phillips nods towards the airlock. There’s a light on in there, at about knee height. It takes McQueen a moment to realise that it’s Stephen Greaves, writing by the light of a clip-on reading lamp with a 50-watt LED.

  “Just the Robot,” Phillips says.

  Privately McQueen has a few nicknames of his own for Greaves that are less family-friendly. He shakes his head as he stares, then taps his brow with the tip of his trigger finger. “Wonder what goes on in there,” he says, although he really doesn’t. He actually prefers to see Greaves as a kind of black box—like the hungries. There may or may not be a person in there, but either way it’s not his problem. He only has to deal with the output.

  “Listen,” he says to Phillips, “I don’t see any point in you staying out here. The perimeter is up. Nothing can get close to us without tripping an alarm. And the kid will raise a squawk if it comes to that. You might as well join the game.”

  Phillips considers. McQueen watches him doing it, knows more or less what’s going through his mind and politely gives the other man as long as he needs. McQueen isn’t his commanding officer; Colonel Carlisle is. And Carlisle’s authority has to punch it out with Dr. Fournier’s. But in Rosie’s narrow spaces, rank and influence aren’t the same thing. There is no question who looms largest in the private’s mental landscape, false modesty aside.

  “Aye,” Phillips says at last. “All right, then.”

  McQueen slaps him on the shoulder. “Good man. If the colonel comes your way, tell him you were obeying a direct order.”

  They go back into the crew quarters.

  Greaves watches them go, and gives them a minute or two to change their minds. When they don’t return, he stands and strips.

  The top layer only. Underneath he is wearing something else entirely. A matt-black suit set with small glassy studs very much like the cats’ eyes you find on road surfaces. In fact the retro-reflectors in cats’ eyes were one of Greaves’ starting points when he designed the suit, but more because of their simplicity and durability than because of what happens at the business end of them. It’s not light he’s hoping to diffract, but his own body heat.

  He has been working on the suit, off and on, for four months. The idea of it came to him even earlier than that, but it wasn’t until they left Beacon that he had time to implement his design. He brought most of the raw materials with him, trusted to serendipity to provide the rest. The journey north offered uninterrupted stretches of whole weeks with no official lab work to be done. Sometimes he worked through the night, appreciating the opportunity to progress on the suit without stopping every half-hour or so to answer questions.

  Now it’s done, as far as possible given the constraints under which he has been working. He has confidence in the principle, and in the overall design. Some of the components are work-arounds and make-dos, and the tolerances are not what he would have liked, but now it’s way past time for a field test. And he believes, all things considered, that it will work. In an ideal world, of course, he wouldn’t risk his life on it.

  But the world is the way it is and that’s just what he’s going to do.

  12

  Samrina Khan has retired to bed early. The curtains are drawn across her bunk, which signals that—awake or asleep—she is not to be disturbed. There are very few social niceties that have survived their seven-month voyage, but this one is accorded universal respect. Only a full-on emergency would cause any of the crew to pull those curtains aside. So it’s unlikely that anyone will find out she’s not alone in there.

  Getting three tiers of bunks into a seven-foot space meant cutting everything back to basics. Each set of bunks is really just a single recess separated into three by two rows of wooden slats lying across steel supports. John Sealey, whose bunk is above Dr. Khan’s, has rolled back his mattress (which is easy enough as it’s barely an inch thick) and removed five of the slats, opening his own bunk space up to hers. He is leaning down through this gap at an oblique angle so their upper bodies can meet up in a tight embrace. Any other kind of embrace would be impossible, all things considered.

  This is a risky enterprise and they don’t do it often. Tonight, Sealey has come to visit Rina in order to lift her mood after her official interrogation by Dr. Fournier. As the father of the child she’s carrying, he feels this is the least he can do.

  But he finds Rina’s mood surprisi
ngly resistant to lifting. Surprisingly, that is, until she tells him what it is that’s weighing on her mind. It’s not the mission commander and his flaccid third degree. It’s Greaves, her surrogate son.

  “He’s going to get himself killed,” she whispers, sounding choked. “He’s out there, with no camouflage and no backup. Watching them. Not with binoculars. Watching them from a few feet away. John, all it would take would be for him to trip, or sneeze, and … They’ll eat him alive!”

  “We’re all taking that chance, every day we’re out here,” Sealey offers. “Greaves isn’t stupid. Or reckless.”

  Rina seems not to have heard him. “I think Fournier knows,” she says, raising her voice a little more than is safe. Only the infield chatter of the poker players a few feet astern gives them any cover at all. “He’s just decided it doesn’t matter. Stephen was forced on him at the last moment, and he’s never treated him as a full member of the crew.” Her churning mind hits on another explanation. “Or perhaps he sees it as an acceptable risk. He knows by now we’re not going to find any environmental inhibitors. If Stephen comes up with a new idea, we might have something to show for all this.”

  “Maybe it is, at that,” Sealey murmurs. An acceptable risk, he means. If Greaves can bottle the same lightning twice—grab another genius insight out of the ether the way he allegedly did with the e-blocker gel—then humankind might not die collectively in a ditch after all. As a fully paid-up member of said club, Sealey would see that as a win.

  But the odds are pretty long. Greaves might be the genius Rina says he is, or then again it might be that he just got lucky that one time. And Rina isn’t even thinking about that right now. She knew Greaves when he was just a mostly broken little kid. She was there when his parents died, and through the queasy aftermath when he was an elective mute. When everyone thought he was mentally handicapped rather than a weird little alien wunderkind with no human emotions.

  Is it possible to slide through those judgements without them sticking to you? Sealey seriously wonders. The general feeling now is that Greaves is on the autistic spectrum, but how much of his weirdness is down to his brain’s basic wiring and how much of it is a trauma artefact?

  It’s an academic question, but it’s got real-world consequences. Rina more or less twisted the arm of everyone back in Beacon to get Greaves onto the mission roster. She knew how much he depended on her, feared how quickly he might fall apart without her.

  The supervisory group took a contrary point of view. They saw Greaves as a child first and foremost, and as a gifted hobbyist rather than a serious practitioner. Then they looked at his psych assessments and saw something worse: a maladapted obsessive, damaged goods, and (e-blocker notwithstanding) a potential liability out in the field. Rina won her point in the end by making it a two-for-one deal: you want me, you take him, too.

  To be fair, she didn’t do that just to protect him. She genuinely thinks that Greaves can pull off a miracle here—a cure, a vaccine, a weapon, a better mousetrap. But all of that is predicated on the idea of his being different. As though his intellect cuts across the world at an angle nobody else is even aware of.

  Rina wouldn’t admit to any of this—to thinking of Greaves as a Hail Mary play—but Sealey knows full well she’s watching the boy. Waiting for the clouds to part and a dove to descend from heaven.

  It could be a long wait, in Sealey’s humble opinion. He’s no psychologist, but he doesn’t see Greaves as being on the spectrum. He sees him as a luckless kid who started out normal—pretty bright, no doubt about it, but normal—only to get bent all out of shape by horrendous tragedy. Then found himself trapped in Rina’s hopes for him. At the orphanage in Beacon, where the teachers had given up on him because they were just volunteers making it up as they went along, she took Greaves in hand. Fed him books the way you’d feed a baby bird worms and broken up bits of bread. Turned him into what he is now.

  Which is what? An eccentric genius, or just an ill-equipped explorer swaying on the rickety rope bridge between sanity and madness? The way Greaves acts, the things he does … it is extraordinary. But that’s just another way of saying he’s got his own coping mechanisms. It’s not proof of anything. And yes, there’s that one astonishing breakthrough, but Sealey doesn’t know anyone who accepts Khan’s version of that story. A child genius finds an enzyme that leaches the sharp-smelling acids out of apocrine sweat and breaks them down into water and carbon dioxide, cooks it up in a saucepan and brings it to his best friend, biologist and epidemiological expert Dr. Samrina Khan, to help him test it out. Occam’s razor suggests a different sequence of events.

  No matter. Rina has her perspective and she won’t be shifted from it. Possibly she’s the only person on Rosie’s roster who actually worries about Greaves. Sealey has tried many times to have this conversation with her, but it never takes.

  Gamely, but without much hope, he tries again. “He’s a member of the crew, Rina. Your co-worker, not your son. You’ve got to let him make his own choices.”

  She looks at him as though he’s just stuck out his hand to catch a ball that’s already on the ground. “Thank you, John,” she says. “That’s an admirable summary of the blindingly obvious.”

  But she doesn’t say it with biting sarcasm. She says it with a catch in her voice. Her lips are twisting as she tries to hold in a flood of tears. So instead of bristling or snapping back he wraps his arms around her. She gives way to her misery in absolute silence, her head buried in the angle of his neck and his shoulder. She’s pulling him forward through the gap in the slats so he feels like he’s going to lose his purchase and fall headlong on top of her, then probably roll out sideways and give the whole game away. His T-shirt (which doubles as pyjamas) is slowly but surely getting saturated with her tears.

  Rina slips straight from crying into exhausted sleep. Sealey realises then how hard this day has been on her. Her concern for Stephen is wholly real, of course, but it comes on top of a whole set of other concerns. She might catch a reprimand for her unauthorised pregnancy that will stop her career in its tracks. Or the baby might do that all by itself, reprimand or not. She might have to give birth out here in the middle of nowhere. She might lose the baby.

  He wishes he was better at this stuff. He’s in his thirties but he can still count the relationships he’s been in on one hand without running out of fingers. And none of them lasted. Maybe this one wouldn’t have either if it hadn’t been for a lack of condoms and self-control.

  It was leaving Beacon that caused that one fateful lapse. After being cooped up behind the fences and minefields for so long, getting out on the road—even inside an armour-plated sardine tin—felt like freedom. He and Rina found the only way to celebrate that didn’t need to be applied for, signed off on, rubber-stamped, rationed or reported.

  Now they’re stuck with the consequences. And with each other.

  Sealey backs away from that thought in alarm. Rina is amazing and he loves her more than he’s ever loved anyone. He is in awe of her courage—the way she decides on a course of action and sticks to it, no matter what the world throws in her way. He admires her honesty, which turns white lies into red roadkill. Most of all, he loves her optimism, which is something he himself is really bad at. Rina never considers the possibility that the world might already have ended. She talks about the future without irony, and even plans for it. As part of that, she has decided to keep their baby. She told him this in a way that left no room for argument.

  Sealey thinks about what Beacon has become and is inclined, sometimes, to question the wisdom of that decision. But he has kept his doubts locked down. The last thing he wants to do is to leave her in any uncertainty, ever, that he’s on her side. Has got her back. Will be there for her, when the time comes. Will stand up and be …

  Where are all these clichés coming from?

  He disentangles himself from Rina’s sprawled body—rests his hand, for a second or two, against the indiscreet bump that is their burgeon
ing son or daughter—and levers himself back up through the gap in the bed frame. He does this with reluctance. Every time he removes the slats and visits her, he feels like one of the soldiers in The Great Escape, digging a tunnel to freedom.

  Which prompts a further reflection. Maybe it wasn’t leaving Beacon, after all, that got him so drunkenly and irresponsibly joyous.

  Maybe it was her. Maybe it was Rina all the time.

  13

  Dr. Khan is not actually asleep. There is a state midway between sleep and waking in which she falls back into the past and relives it. Relives it in full HD with surround sound, all of her senses chipping in. She thinks of this state as replay, but as a scientist she knows it has another name. It’s a PTS, a post-trauma symptom. It comes over her two or three nights a week, and there’s no point in struggling against it. If she tries to block the images, they impinge on her waking life, which is exponentially worse.

  Replay isn’t like dreaming. Dreams have a logic and a structure that prevents you, while you’re dreaming, from reflecting on the events you’re wrapped up in. You take it all for granted because consciously questioning any one element would wake you up.

  But in her replays, Khan is aware of herself now as well as herself back then. She is her current self, sitting like a passenger in her former body. (It troubles her to think that this might be how the hungries experience the world. If there is any trace of their consciousness, their identity, behind the ramparts that the fungus has erected in their brains, then all they can do is watch. Their bodies now answer to a new master.)

  She’s walking. Through Guildford and Godalming and places with even more innocuous names. Milford. Haslemere. Hawkley. Heading south to Beacon in a column of about eight hundred desperate people shepherded—harassed, it sometimes seems—by soldiers in urban camouflage colours.

  Their journey makes as much sense to her as the crazy careering of clown cars at the start of a circus act. Sometimes they’re in trucks, buses, white vans and ambulances. Sometimes they’re on foot. Then-Rina, sleep-deprived and starving, has no sense of why they keep getting out of the safe, warm cars and walking along the man-made valley of the A3. Now-Rina understands that when the road is blocked—by the crashed, burned-out remains of cars and trucks that ferried earlier waves of fleeing people—they don’t have the time or the resources to clear it. The colonel gives the order, each time, to abandon the vehicles and trek to the next stretch of clear road. He sends his soldiers on ahead to find and requisition a new set of viable wheels.