The Boy on the Bridge

by M. R. Carey

  So most likely this little piece of work was done by local boys, who have either moved on or else are keeping their heads down until the scary men with the big guns go away again.

  It’s still an unquantifiable risk. McQueen is fairly sure it’s minimal, but his first priority has to be the safety of the team.

  Everyone is looking to him for a decision. Well, everyone except for Greaves: the Robot is preoccupied, his eyes darting from side to side as though he’s expecting company. He doesn’t seem to be taking this as seriously as it deserves.

  McQueen turns back to Sealey. “Do you think you can work with what you’ve got here?” he asks. “I mean, the hungries who are already down?”

  Sealey looks up and down the street. At the felled and broken hungries still intent on the chase, arms scraping on the cobbles, closing with their prey one painful inch at a time. He’s doubtful at first, but as his gaze flicks around and he sees the full extent of what’s on offer he gets a little perkier.

  “Well, there’s plenty to choose from,” he admits. “And a lot of these have got visible epidermal growth. We might have to mix and match a little because of the tissue damage, but yeah. I’d say we’re probably good.”

  “All right,” McQueen says. “This is the plan. There’s no mileage in a full-scale cull when we don’t know if there’s anyone else in the neighbourhood. Best to keep the noise down to a minimum and make sure everyone stays together. So you take what you can get from these guys and then you call it a day.”

  They all nod their understanding. “We might even get to go home early,” Dr. Penny says.

  But McQueen has to rain on her picnic. “No,” he says, “you won’t. In fact, it’s going to take you a fair bit longer than usual because I’m putting all my men on perimeter. You’ll have to do your own pinning and skinning. Phillips, Lutes, hand over the kit.”

  The two privates set down the bags that contain the catch-can poles. Dr. Akimwe and Dr. Sealey take delivery, maybe a little too quickly: it seems they have a definite preference as to which end of this messy procedure they want to be on.

  McQueen leaves them to it, addressing his own people. “Let’s flatten the risk profile as far as we can. Phillips, Sixsmith, take the two ends of the street and lock them off. Lutes, you stay right here with the whitecoats. Make sure they can pick their flowers in peace. Foss, follow me.”

  Everyone jumps to it, absolutely happy that someone else has taken responsibility and told them what to do. Sometimes McQueen despairs of the human race.

  He and Foss need to get some elevation to be of maximal use, and ideally they need to do it without going into any of the buildings that line the street. Letting sleeping dogs lie is his default option. He stations Foss on top of a high-sided van about fifty yards away from the scientists, who are already beavering away. What does that leave? A flat roof on top of that café over there, with a drainpipe alongside. Good enough. He scales it in seconds, finds a good nest and settles himself in.

  He can’t see everything from here but he can see far enough. It’s virtually impossible for anyone with bad intentions to get close to the science team without tipping their hand to the soldiers first.

  The lieutenant is confident that he has this situation in hand. He relaxes a little, and draws some innocent amusement from watching the geeks trying to corral their first specimen. They’re all over the place, scared of their own shadows, almost catching their feet in the running loops as they dance around looking for a good angle.

  Something is wrong with this picture, though, and it takes him a moment to realise what it is. There are only four geeks in the parade. One of the science team is missing.

  McQueen experiences a momentary twinge of alarm. He does a head count and sees that it’s Greaves who is AWOL, which in most circumstances he would just live with. But if person or persons unknown are wandering around Invercrae with more machetes than inhibitions, this is not a good time for Greaves to be out there doing whatever the unfathomable fuck he does.

  The lieutenant unships his walkie-talkie and thumbs it to channel three. Down on the street, Private Lutes picks up and speaks his name.

  “You’ve lost one; Bo Peep,” McQueen says. He tries to keep the irritation out of his voice: he gave Lutes the easiest job because Lutes came onto Rosie’s roster from the royal corps of transport, primarily as an engineer. He is the under-achiever of the group. And now he has screwed up his very simple, very explicit brief.

  “It’s just the Robot,” Lutes says.

  “I know who it is. Go and get him. Out.”

  Lutes puts the walkie-talkie back on his belt with a truculence that McQueen can read from fifty metres away. He detaches himself from the group down in the street, takes a forlorn look inside the nearest of the shop frontages, then chooses one at random and wades in.

  The scientists don’t even see him leave. They’re doing their own dirty work for once and making heavy weather of it.

  It rains on the just and the unjust, McQueen reflects. Nothing you can do but turn your collar up.

  17

  Greaves was forced to wait for his moment, and it was a long time in coming. But when the soldiers went to their stations and the science team started to look around for the first specimen to work on, the opportunity was suddenly there. He stepped backwards off the street into the window display of a shop whose glass frontage had long ago been shattered.

  Faceless mannequins dressed in sun-bleached rags jostled him, but he steadied them with both hands and passed on through. In the space of a second, he had become invisible.

  He pauses now to savour that feeling. Privacy and anonymity appeal to him strongly.

  The interior of the shop has a rich smell of damp and rot. Sodden cloth, mulched down two or three inches thick, sucks at his feet as he walks. He gropes his way through interior doors, passageways, storerooms, back out onto an alley so narrow that he has to keep his body flat to the wall as he walks. The sound of the river is loud in his ears. It must be close at hand, probably on the other side of the rough-cast wall that faces him.

  He comes out onto a side street, finds it deserted. Picking another shop, he dives in through the gaping, dislocated doorway and keeps on going.

  Greaves moves quickly, even though he has no idea where he is going. He is painfully aware of how little time he has. On previous excursions when he has struck out from Rosie on his own, he has chosen a time when nobody had any expectations of him or any reason to look for him. This time is different. This time he is on the mission roster and his absence is bound to raise alarms as soon as it gets noticed.

  And normally Greaves has a plan, but this time no. He was lured astray by the urgency of his desire. His strongest passion, sometimes his only passion, is for explanations. When he encounters something that runs so contrary to his understanding of the world, he needs to interrogate it until it yields to his intellect.

  This time, though, it’s more than just a quirk of his nature. Understanding the children may lead him to a cure for Cordyceps, a medicine for all the world’s ills.

  Somewhere in this town, the children are hiding. And the town is so small it seems that he must inevitably run into them, but that feeling is an illusion mostly attributable to his having grown up in Beacon. Beacon began life as a camp. Its structures are mostly single-storey. Thousands of people live in tents, or in temporary shelters that have insidiously become permanent.

  By contrast, a town from before the Breakdown, even a town as small as this one, is an upside-down rabbit warren in which spaces proliferate vertically upwards. Every building is made of many rooms, with more rooms piled on top of them and more above those, and so on. Not quite ad infinitum, but in London Greaves sometimes met his own limits halfway up a glass and stone tower that reared itself so high above the ground his stomach seized and cramped with nausea whenever he looked out of a window.

  Greaves knows his way here, is confident that he will not get lost. He has memorised the ordnance surv
ey map of Invercrae, and he has perfect recall of his journey of the previous night. Even so, it’s hard to align these vivid, fractal spaces with the idealised abstract presented by the map. Uncertainties proliferate. A room he passes through is full of shoes piled as high as the ceiling—wellington boots and high heels, slippers and sandals and baby shoes. Across walls and windows in the next street is a mural painted in a rust-brown colour that reminds Greaves of dried blood: a man, a woman and a child, arm in arm, smiling. Memorial? Magic charm? Mere insanity?

  The river is his guide of last resort, but it betrays him. Following its sound, he traps himself in a dead end bounded on three sides by high, windowless walls. This does not correspond to anything on the ordnance survey map, and almost certainly postdates it. Greaves is starting to panic a little. He steps through a doorway into a fetid corridor whose carpet has become an indoor garden of weeds and lichen. He has neither claustrophobia nor agoraphobia, but any unfamiliar place has the potential to become an enemy. It would be a comfort right now to lie down and cover his face in his hands. He has to force himself to keep moving.

  He tries to retrace his steps, but rising adrenalin assails and confuses him. His memory, normally indelible, begins to blur at the edges. He is in a dark room, walking into walls, tripping over indeterminate objects. Another room. A third.

  Filtered daylight beckons to him.

  He blunders out into a large, enclosed yard: a vehicle bay, for cars that died long ago. One is up on blocks, another missing its doors and windscreen. He can see the sky at last, and a gate through which he can exit to the street.

  He bolts.

  Gets to the gate. Through the gate.

  Then stops dead in his tracks.

  The sound of weapons firing bounces off his skin and off the walls around him. What makes Greaves freeze and look around, bewildered, is not the volume. The soldiers always use suppressors, because where all animals bolt away from loud, sudden noises, hungries run straight towards them. So this is not a boom of thunder; it’s just the hawk-and-spit sound he has become used to.

  But it’s full auto, and it’s close. So who is firing?

  And what have they hit?

  18

  Private Lutes is an engineer first and a soldier second. Although actually the gap between the two roles is bigger than that suggests. He never wanted to join the army, but after three years on the dole he did very much want a proper apprenticeship that he could turn into a proper job. A four-year army contract, he reasoned, would see him at age twenty-five walking into a sweet deal at Swain’s or Eddie Stobart’s with a good chance of having his own garage somewhere down the line.

  Then the Breakdown happened. The hungry plague. And here he is, more than a decade later, still stuck in his fatigues in a world where even engineers who never enlisted belong to the army by default. To be fair, he loves his job—or at least, the part of his job that consists of taking broken machines and making them sing and dance by the application of his skilled hands. That gig is magic. It’s Zen. It’s the perfect peace of the unclouded mind, so completely engaged that it’s somehow completely free.

  But he hates all the rest of this shit. Hates being taken away from his real work to do things that don’t mean anything, for people who aren’t grateful. Particularly hates being outside the Beacon perimeter fence (at the moment, four hundred miles outside) and at risk. If he’s happiest with a spanner in his hand, a rifle fills him with a kind of disgust. Spanners take things apart, yes, but they put them together again, too. With a rifle all you can do is dismantle.

  Feeling hard done by, he trudges through the streets of Invercrae looking for Stephen Greaves. And wouldn’t he like to open that one up with a spanner! Lots of fascinating things to be discovered inside Greaves’ cranium, no doubt, although the Robot is the very definition of NSK—non-standard kit. If you wanted to fix him you’d need to make your spare parts from scratch, by hand.

  The sun comes out for a minute or so, and Lutes’ spirits lift. He walks on the sunny side of the street for as long as it lasts. Then the cloud closes in again and the sky is all watery porridge. That seems to be the normal state of affairs in this miserable bit of the world.

  The private is so lost in his thoughts that he loses a second in responding when he hears the sound. Just the clink of metal or stone on glass, but an intentional sound is different from what the wind or the rain does. It has its own profile that is hard to mistake.

  Something is moving in the building on his right-hand side. Moving quietly, but the deserted town provides no cover, no distractions. After the clink, a shuffle. Perhaps the hiss of a barely voiced command.

  These things add up to ambush. Lutes saw the hungries hacked and felled like trees, and has no wish to end up the same way. He has been moving with his safety on, as per regs, but now he flicks it free and—he doesn’t even have to think about it—fires.

  The rifle is on semi-auto, stepped down, but Lutes has the trigger in a death grip. He empties his magazine in three seconds, remembering to fan diagonally downwards and to the left for maximum coverage.

  The shop front explodes as the bullets rip through glass and brickwork. Hollow-point, yes, but maximally configured for shallow penetration. These mixed-alloy, mosquito-nosed rounds will bite three inches deep into anything, then repent and weep molten metal when they get there. The sound is deceptively soft, like papers being incautiously toppled from a desk and scattering across the floor.

  Immediately followed by shrill yips of pain or shock and the sudden, concerted movement of many bodies.

  It was a trap and he triggered it. Too bad for the trappers.

  In the exhilaration of that moment—of ducking the blow and turning the tables—Lutes loses all perspective. He does the last thing in the world he should do.

  He charges into the shop, where drifts of brick and plaster dust make the air into a cocktail whose main ingredient is wall, and on through an open doorway into the depths of the building in pursuit of his fleeing enemies.

  He reloads as he runs, and fires again. Full auto this time. There’s nothing to fire at, but fuck it. These guys thought they could wait in the dark for him and trip him as he passed by. Cut his tendons and leave him crawling in the dust the way they did the hungries. Well, let them try a taste of that and see how it goes down.

  Out the back door, into a closed courtyard where eviscerated black bags bleed ancient, unidentifiable rubbish. Then into the street. Now he can see the fleeing shapes ahead of him, heads down and bodies low to the ground as they run flat-out. They look too small. Perspective, probably. He gets off another burst, and one of them falls. One of them is down. He’s actually made a kill.

  He jumps right over the prone body and keeps on going, processing what he saw slowly and piecemeal in the seconds that follow. He’s got his mind on the chase, lunging into another building, an office of some kind, through cubicle farms now empty of all livestock, inspirational posters exhorting him from the walls. Just hang in there!

  But then the penny drops, and echoes round his skull. A kid? It was a kid?

  They’re all kids. And they’ve stopped running now. Lutes stops too, stares at them in utter wonderment. He can’t imagine what they’re doing here, where their parents are, where they got their ridiculous trick-or-treat costumes from. No, they’re not dressed for Halloween, although one of them has turned his face into a stylised skull. The rest seem to be playing dress-like-mummy-and-daddy-do, with about the same hit rate that kids normally average.

  Dear Christ, he just killed a kid!

  He opens his mouth to apologise, to explain, to reassure, but right at that moment one of the children—the skull-faced boy—whips his arm around like a jockey urging his horse towards the last fence.

  There’s a sensation in Lutes’ left eye like a door slamming shut. A big steel door with a lot of weight and heft to it.

  A second, bigger impact turns out to be the ground, standing on its end to smack him hard. Now he is lying o
n fouled carpet tiles and his thoughts have slowed to a syrupy crawl. The children’s feet appear in his monocular field of vision (his left eye is welded shut), stepping softly and cautiously around and over him as though he might still have some fight left in him.

  “Don’t be … Don’t be scared,” he slurs. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

  But they’re not. And it isn’t.

  19

  Greaves sees the body as soon as he rounds the corner.

  He looks to left and right, quickly. His first reaction is simple confusion. Why would the children leave one of their number to lie where he has fallen like one more bag of spilled rubbish in a street that seems to offer nothing else? Bodies are not rubbish. Bodies in the field—bodies of hungries—are specimens. Bodies in Beacon are important for other reasons. Ceremonies. Memories. Regrets. One way or another, it seems, this body should be tended to.

  Noises reach Greaves’ ears, muffled by a wall or two but very close. Running feet, the crash of something falling. Something is in the middle of happening, which (it’s not an unreasonable inference) might have forced the children to defer the decision of what to do with this corpse.

  In the space between two breaths, Greaves feels a decision swell to ripeness inside him. He scans the street again, quick and tremulous, to make sure he is not observed. He is keenly aware of the danger here. The children are much faster and stronger than he is. There is no way he could either fight them or outrun them.