The Boy on the Bridge

by M. R. Carey

  So their pace varies, and her mileage likewise. Sometimes she sits. Sometimes she lies on a truck-bed staring at the sky, someone’s limp arm draped across her legs, harsh breathing and sobbing all around her mingling with her waking dreams. Mostly she walks, staggers, limps, shambles, hobbles along the endless road that has become their Calvary.

  There are two constants: the first is the hungries. This is several years before the advent of e-blocker gel. They have no way of disguising their scent, their sounds, their body heat, so they are an endless, ever-moving invitation to dinner. The hungries chase them down from behind, charge them from in front, assail them from both sides.

  The colonel is their rampart. The other constant, always in between. Don’t look back is his mantra. What’s done is done and here we are, still moving forward. He wields his rifle like a scythe, cutting their persecutors off at the knees with precise, horizontal sweeps of the weapon. He hands out guns to the refugees, teaches them the principles of covering fire. He rigs up flamethrowers from oxygen cylinders and insecticide sprayers. Once, he fills a Bedford van with petrol and C4 and rolls it down an incline they have just climbed so that a dip in the road becomes a lake of fire in which hundreds of hungries drown and sink.

  They are in hell, but the devil is on their side.

  He is changing, in their minds. Most of them thought of him as the Fireman before this, because of the burn runs that turned most of south-east England into a carbonised desert. Now he is the Old Man. Spoken as though you know him, whether he’s ever said a single word to you or not.

  From time to time, people join their column. They are never turned away. The gap between exposure to the infection and ego-death is so short for most people that the risk of accepting newcomers is non-existent. The few who—defying the mass of statistics—turn more slowly and gradually are killed with a single bullet to the head. Dr. Khan steps over their bodies and walks on.

  She is hallucinating from sheer fatigue. The colonel is Moses and they are his children. Don’t look back. The hungries part before him like a sea. Half-congealed blood is the ebb-tide, making the pavement suck at her feet as she walks. The air smells of sweat and blood and shit and cordite, petrol and plasticine and overcooked meat. He holds them to him. He walks them home.

  The A3 becomes impassable—one vast thousand-car pile-up strewn with the half-eaten dead. They abandon it and walk through deserted villages. In one of them, on an overpass above the road they left not long before, they find a small cadre of survivors fighting for their lives. They’ve closed off the ends of the bridge with junk and repurposed white goods and retreated to the centre, but hungries have swarmed over their barricades to assail them from both sides.

  The colonel is bringing salvation, but he brings it too late. Courageous last stands like this deconstruct from the edges into the centre. Bitten once, the brave defenders fight on—for a few seconds. Then they stiffen momentarily as the fuse of their consciousness burns to its end. A heartbeat later, they’ve turned around and joined the scrum, bearing down on their nearest neighbours and dragging them to the ground. Khan watches it happen to a woman who is swinging an aluminium baseball bat; a man with a dustbin-lid shield and a carving knife; a blonde cherub who has been entrusted with the family’s lop-eared spaniel (the dog is her first meal).

  By the time the colonel’s fighting wedge breaks through to the centre of the group, there’s no group left. The people they hoped to rescue became enemies, became targets, are all gone.

  Almost all. As the soldiers move around handing out full-metal coups de grâce, Khan’s gaze finds a small boy—maybe five or six years old—lying in between two adults. Their bodies are bowed outwards, shielding him from attack on either side. They are like a pair of brackets around him, cordoning him off from the world. The couple bear so many wounds—bite marks, incisions and lacerations, in the man’s case a gunshot wound to the head—that it is impossible to piece together how they died. Certainly they were trying to protect the child.

  Who has no visible wounds or injuries at all.

  A soldier touches the stock of his rifle to the boy’s temple.

  “Wait!” Khan shouts.

  Just in time. The boy lets out a breath. Someone says, “This one’s alive,” and someone else swears. The soldier steps back, a look of shock and fear replacing the stolid frown on his face. When Khan steps in and claims the boy, scoops him up in her arms, nobody says a word.

  Until Carlisle nods and tells them to move.

  Replay ends here. The ordeal wasn’t over—they didn’t reach Beacon for another three days—but it had entered another phase, for Khan at least. She had acquired a role, a function. Keeping the silent, wide-eyed little boy alive. It kept her alive too, she was and is convinced.

  Stillness was Stephen’s natural modality even then. Perhaps it was the last thing his mother or father said to him: lie still and they might not notice you. Don’t make a sound. But over the hours and days that followed, as they slogged on towards Codename Beacon, that stillness never left him. Khan believes he had it long before his parents were killed and partially eaten while he watched. It’s a wonderful and scary thing. When there’s nothing to run or reach for, Stephen doesn’t run or reach. He can fold himself down, his volition, his emotions, until—seen from any angle except straight on, through any eyes except hers—they’re invisible. For a scientist, that’s an amazing asset.

  But it’s more than that. The stillness took a different tincture on the day she met him, the day his parents died.

  Khan knows better than anyone how far Stephen has come, how much he has achieved. He was only twelve when he synthesised the e-blocker gel that saves their lives on a daily basis, though everybody credits her with that discovery. He was one of the first to suggest Ophiocordyceps unilateralis as the fungus that was responsible for the hungry plague (and then his name was mysteriously omitted from the paper Caroline Caldwell ultimately submitted). He has proved that the pathogen grows directly into the nervous system of its hosts and controls them by means of myco-transmitters—long-chain fungal proteins that mimic and hijack the signalling apparatus of the mammalian brain. In the whole of Beacon, there is nobody who has a fuller understanding of what the human race is up against.

  But it seems to Khan that a part of Stephen is still lying on the damp asphalt of a Surrey street. In parenthesis. Waiting for an all-clear that will never come.

  14

  Ten years after the Breakdown, the night is a foreign country, and not a friendly one. Its borders begin at your door. Unless you want to mount a major expedition, an armed incursion, you do not trespass.

  Nonetheless, Stephen Greaves is walking through the dark.

  There are field glasses that turn dark into light, but he doesn’t have those. A single pair of them sits in the gun locker on board the Rosalind Franklin, squirrelled away for the exclusive use of the snipers. Greaves could have retrieved them from the locker by breaking the access code, but he could not have erased all the traces that he had done so. There would have been unpleasant conversations.

  So he relies on starlight and a quarter moon, on a pocket torch that he uses very sparingly, and on his very clear recollection of walking this route by day. The last of these three is the most reliable. Greaves carries a map in his mind and charts his progress on the map by means of an imagined red dot moving along a fractally plotted course. Where the stars and that slender rind of moon cease to be a help, as when he is walking between high trees which shut out their light completely, he expands the detail of his map so that it warns him of ditches, potholes, boulders and barbed wire. He can do this almost indefinitely, the limit being his eyes’ ability to resolve detail. Whatever he has seen, even once, he can remember.

  He has come well equipped for this short but perilous journey. A bulky kit bag slung across his shoulder carries spare batteries for the torch, his notebook, a bottle of water and an emergency signal flare. Also a knife, although he can’t justify its presence. If
he is attacked, he will not use it. He has a deft hand with a scalpel and has dissected dozens of cadavers with no qualms at all, but the thought of cutting into a living body, human or animal or hungry, is nauseating. Impossible. Like telling a lie or initiating touch, it is simply not in his behavioural repertoire.

  But so far he has not been attacked. He is pleased and reassured by this fact. He would not, however, wish to extrapolate from it. It might be an accident of geography and distance that has saved him up to this point. The nearest hungries may be so far away from his current position that even though they have caught his trail, they have yet to reach him. But he believes it is more likely to be because of his camouflage suit.

  At a turn in the road he is given the chance to test this theory. Rounding the bend, stepping from darkness into light, he is suddenly in the presence of a hungry. It is, or used to be, a woman. In the livid moonlight she is an unnerving spectre, a bleached-out effigy like a ghost unexpectedly showing up on a photographic negative. She sways like a tree, arms hanging at her sides. A dark stain down the front of her blouse is probably blood, whether her own or that of someone or something she has fed on. One of her arms has been eaten almost to the bone, from elbow to wrist. The moon shines down on her like a spotlight, and Stephen thinks the satellite and the woman carry their history in much the same way, both scarred by ancient impacts.

  As he comes into view, the woman lurches towards him—then stops. He takes another step and the same thing happens again. She twists and shuffles as he approaches her, but she can’t seem to find her mark. Her feet march in place, her upper body writhes and rocks.

  Greaves walks on by, skirting widely around the hungry and taking care to keep his movements slow and steady. She keeps making sallies in his direction, or almost in his direction, keeps fetching up short and turning again, to the left and then the right. Her jaw works with a dry-leather creak. Her one functional hand clenches and unclenches, claws the air with futile yearning.

  She staggers after him a little way, but stops again. She is losing the signal. When he is thirty yards away, she slides once more into her dormant state.

  All of this is good news. It is consistent with how the camouflage suit is meant to work.

  As soon as the hungries’ heat-seeking ability became verified fact, Greaves began to study it. He tried in dissections to identify the organs or structures involved, but there is no single front-runner. He has established that the visual cortex of a human brain undergoes extensive changes shortly after the onset of infection, which suggests that the pathogen may heighten visual acuity in the infra-red range. It’s equally plausible, though, that the passive thermoreceptor cells at the base of the tongue have been co-opted for this purpose (which would explain why hungries gape their mouths when they hunt).

  At a certain point, he put this question on the back burner and switched his attention to counter-measures. Whatever the precise mechanism of heat detection may be, in order to confuse it all you need to do is to smear or block your heat emissions in some way. Blocking is problematic. It leaves you the problem of what to do with stored heat, which if it can’t be vented will kill you as surely as the hungries will. So he decided to go with camouflage.

  Before the Breakdown, the Israeli army were trialling a heat-signature camouflage system which they christened Adaptiv. Even in its prototype form it was able to make a tank look like a car or a flat-bed truck to thermal scanning systems, or to make it invisible against background ambient temperature. The secret was a layer of flat tiles on the vehicle’s surface which could be separately heated and cooled, effectively providing a coat of many colours in the infra-red.

  Inspired by Adaptiv, Greaves has produced an actual coat of no colours at all. He used whatever was available—scraps he had scavenged up from Rina’s lab and brought with him, materials laid in for Rosie’s repair and maintenance, serendipitous finds from stops along their journey—and stored the work-in-progress in one of the freezer compartments intended for whole cadavers. There are ten of these compartments and only seven of them have been filled.

  The heat-suit covers his body like a second skin. Its exterior surface is dotted here and there with modified cats’ eye studs—like the Adaptiv tiles but three-dimensional—which focus and channel heat rather than light. The visual effect is grotesque in the extreme, like a diving suit designed by a sexual fetishist, but in theory the suit will broaden and flatten his heat signature and even create hotspots in the air around him. It’s like throwing your voice, but what you’re throwing is your energy, the exhaust from your ever-working metabolism. Instead of a single source of heat from which the hungries can take a range and a direction, he’s the centre of an ever-changing thermal disturbance. The effect he is hoping for is confusion: if the hungries can’t track him consistently from one moment to the next, perhaps their tropism—their heat-seeking mechanism—will fail to engage. Based on the available evidence so far, the theory is holding.

  There’s a downside, though. The suit does, after all, store heat. The radiant vents work reasonably well when he is still, but now that he is walking he can feel his core temperature climbing up. It’s a serious problem. He wishes he had installed a temperature read-out of some kind, an LED thermometer in one of the suit’s sleeves. It would be useful to know whether he is actually in danger of heat prostration, or close to it. Subjectively, he feels uncomfortable but not weak or dizzy or sick. He judges that he will reach Invercrae before any critical thresholds are passed.

  He crosses the Telford bridge over the River Moriston, a tourist attraction in former times. The roar of the falls above the town makes him pause for a second, afraid for no definable reason. He steels himself, annoyed at the irrational response, and walks on into the town.

  Although to call it that seems like comical exaggeration. It’s a main avenue and a square, with a few short, blunt side streets, most of which end at the river. Even before the Breakdown, it could never have had more than five hundred inhabitants. Now a few hungries stand at street corners as though they’re waiting for someone to come and lead them back into the lives they lost.

  They will stand like this until their body’s systems fail, barring occasional headlong sprints in pursuit of local fauna. It’s an afterlife that not even the grimmest and least user-friendly of the old world’s religions ever imagined.

  Greaves walks along the main street, his pace a controlled and inconspicuous amble. He is careful to keep his distance from the hungries. The scatter effect of his heat-suit will be aided and abetted at wider distances by the inverse square rule, and ought to be enough to protect him. At close quarters, he may still become a focus. Again and again, the nearest hungries react like the woman on the road did. They jerk into life as Greaves goes by, dance on the spot for a few moments but fail to translate their agitation into forward motion.

  But the heat and discomfort are becoming more acute. He has to stop exerting himself and allow his body to cool down naturally as his metabolism slows. This will take more time than it would if any part of his skin were open to the air. But he has sweated heavily inside the suit, almost certainly undoing the masking effect of the e-blocker gel. Taking any part of the suit off now is impossible.

  He finds a café whose windows have been folded back, years before, to open its frontage entirely to the street. It stands at the top of a steep rise, a vantage point from which most of the town is visible. Back before the world ended, this must have been an attractive spot to sit and watch some tiny fraction of it go by. Greaves steps in off the street and finds a place to stand, in shadow and—he hopes—safe from detection. He doesn’t try to sit: the suit is too rigid to allow him to do that in comfort, and once down he would not be able to get up again quickly.

  His immediate problems aside, the primary goal of this sortie remains unchanged. From here he can see nine hungries, four males and five females. He will observe them for as long as he can, and take mental notes on their nocturnal behaviours.

 
And the girl? He has no idea, no clue as to where she might be. Unless she walks across his field of vision he will be forced to seek her out. Slowly. Very slowly. If the suit fails, his situation will become untenable.

  He stands still for a few minutes, letting his breathing return to normal and hoping that his body temperature will follow.

  In the meantime, there is a great deal for him to observe and think about. The hungries do behave differently at night, as he had surmised. The visual and aural environment is richer, of course, since a great many small mammals are nocturnal. The scents must be richer, too. As a result, the hungries stir from their dormant state much more frequently. Almost immediately, Greaves sees a badger brought down. A few minutes later, more impressively, a male hungry standing out in the middle of the road snaps into sudden, staccato life and snatches a bat out of the air. Greaves hears the crunch of bones as the animal—most likely a noctule, Nyctalus noctula—is devoured. It troubles him momentarily to think that the bat is screaming its pain in a supersonic register that his ears (especially hampered by the suit) cannot access. The world is information. An endless torrent. Whatever escapes you becomes something you will never completely understand.

  Other things trouble him, too. He is still much too hot. The suit is not working. If his temperature doesn’t stabilise, he will die from heatstroke. He may be able to find a safe place in which he can barricade himself and remove the suit, but he will still be trapped. The science team may find him when they arrive for their sampling run tomorrow. Alternatively the hungries may find him a lot sooner than that: he will be filling the air with the scent that they follow most fervently and urgently of all, the scent of human flesh and pheromones.