by M. R. Carey
But the enigma, the impossibility, is drawing him on like a hook tugging at his brain. The children are hungries, but they don’t respond like hungries. They can still think and feel. Higher brain functions have not been completely erased. He needs to understand them. Needs it on a level so fundamental that his nerves are screaming at him to move. To forget the risk and just do it. What does his physical safety matter? What terrors does death hold compared to having to live without answers?
He is moving forward. Out into the open where the body lies.
He is kneeling beside it. He tries to postpone investigation, analysis, but it is obvious to a cursory inspection that the boy has received two bullet wounds, either of which would most likely have been fatal. One bullet has passed directly through the throat, the other (Greaves moans aloud in dismay) has punched through the boy’s left temple and more or less obliterated that side of the brain.
Greaves is shaking, less from the perception of danger than from the sheer mental pressure of what this find might mean—the piled up weight of possibilities. He can’t think about it. If he thinks about it, that weight will fall on him and he will freeze in place.
He slides his hands underneath the boy’s shoulders and knees. There is no weight there. It’s as though he is holding a ventriloquist’s doll, a hollow replica of a boy. The ruined head falls against him. Greaves remembers lying like this in his mother’s arms, when he was so young that he couldn’t speak in full sentences. Remembers lisping the word bedtime, and his mother laughing out loud at his precociousness. “Listen to that! He knows the drill, don’t you, my love?” Under the sour tang of blood, the boy’s body smells like a forest floor, warm and damp and old.
Greaves scoops the little broken thing up in his arms and runs.
Not to the main street, but to the river. The map has activated in his mind. There is a way back to Rosie that doesn’t go past the science team and the soldiers.
It goes instead through reeds and bracken, through ribbons of sand and shallows back to the bridge. A voice shouts behind him—Lieutenant McQueen’s—but the words are impossible to make out and Greaves doesn’t think the lieutenant is calling out to him.
The boy’s head slides down into the crook of his elbow. The blood that stains Greaves’ overalls is more brown than red, although there’s certainly some red in there, too. He can see the parapets of the bridge up ahead now and he slows involuntarily, starting to see how hard a task he has set himself.
How is he going to do this? Getting back on board Rosie by himself is complicated but not impossible. Carrying the dead body of a child through the airlock is a very different proposition. He will need to vary his route so that he doesn’t go by the cockpit. But that won’t be enough. With a team in the field, it’s more than likely that either the colonel or Dr. Fournier will have taken manual control of the airlock and will be waiting there to check the crew back in when they come. If he evades them at the airlock, they will still hear him enter and come to greet or debrief him, thinking that his arrival heralds the return of the team.
Perhaps he should hide the body and come back to retrieve it later? But that opens up the possibility that the children will search for it and claim it back. In fact, if their sense of smell is as strong as that of regular hungries they won’t even need to search: they’ll just go straight to it.
Greaves has reached the bridge, and now he starts to climb the steep bank that leads up to the parapet. He picks his way one-handed, the cooling weight of the corpse pressed hard against his chest.
He has to find a way back into Rosie, before the rest of the field team arrive there. He has to stow the body where it can’t be found. And he has to make sure that no questions are asked about his own absence, because if they are asked he will have to answer them.
Right then is when the stone wall of the bridge starts to vibrate under his hand. He takes a step back and looks across the river.
He won’t need to go to Rosie. Rosie is coming to him, with her airlock and extensor wings drawn in and her guns elevated.
She roars down the narrow, overgrown road and out onto the bridge, which is barely wide enough to take her. The weeds are trampled and torn up by her treads, rise again behind her in a column of green confetti. An angle of the parapet wall, struck by the edge of her front-end ram, explodes. Chunks of stone as big as clenched fists fly over Greaves’ head as he ducks and covers.
Rosie is level with him, then she’s past him, then she’s gone. She didn’t even slow.
It seems his problem has just become part of a wider problem.
20
After Lutes has been gone for twenty minutes, McQueen tries to raise him on the walkie-talkie. When that fails, he calls a halt to the sampling and orders a search.
There is no question of splitting the team up. If there is an enemy out here who is picking them off one by one, the lieutenant is damned if he’s going to make their job easier for them. They search the main streets first, then the side streets. They stay clear of the buildings, where anyone so inclined could mount an ambush in the time it takes to blink. Searching the interiors will be a last resort.
The scientists have put their sampling gear away and have rifles at the ready. McQueen only hopes they remember which end of the bastard things to point with.
They don’t find either Lutes or Greaves at first, but on one of the side streets they pick up a trail. Dr. Khan sees it first. She has the sense not to shout. She touches McQueen’s shoulder and points in silence. Her face is pale. Most likely she is thinking about Greaves, who is her protégé, pampered pet and just possibly (he’s only a kid but you have to wonder) the one who knocked her up.
What Khan has seen is blood, which as far as bad news goes is the first but not the worst. There’s a broad pool of the stuff out in the middle of the street, fresh enough that it’s still tacky to the touch. A set of booted footprints leads from it into the nearest building. It looks as though Lutes hit something here, and brought it down. But maybe he didn’t hit it hard enough, because whatever it was it’s not here any more. It looks to the lieutenant as though it took off towards the river. There’s a second, fainter trail of dark red smears and spatter patterns that leads off in that direction.
“Oh my God!” Sealey mutters. And Penny, who is no shrinking violet, shakes her head violently as if she’s refusing to admit that any of this is happening.
Whatever went down and didn’t die is still a potential threat. They would be stupid to turn their backs on that. But Lutes is the priority, and he should be easier to find now they’ve got a vector. Most of all, McQueen thinks, he’s got to get this done before the civilians start to fall apart.
“Foss, on my six,” he raps out. “Phillips, Sixsmith, stay out here. Cover both ends of the street, and the river. Anything happens, even if it’s a cloud in the sky, you squawk me.”
“Yes, sir,” Phillips says.
“Can I come with you?” Khan asks. “If Stephen is in there—”
“I’ll call out if I need you,” the lieutenant says. It doesn’t mean anything but it shuts her up.
He walks into the building, with Foss stalking silent at his back. She has left her M407 in its canvas sheath-holster across her shoulders: it’s a liability in a narrow space. In its place she holds a Glock 22 (whose magazine, McQueen knows, is filled with bespoke rounds that Kat makes herself using the .40 Smith & Wesson case as a starting point) and a .357 powerhead contact shooter. Good choices. He’s bringing Sixsmith’s SCAR-H to the party, so they’ve got both ends covered—the surgical and the indiscriminate.
But they don’t need either, because the party is over. Lutes lies on his back staring one-eyed at the ceiling. The eye that looks as though it’s winking has in fact been permanently closed by a smooth grey stone that has embedded itself in the socket. The blood welling up around it has already begun to scab. The private’s throat has been slit so deeply that the top of his spine has been severed. Nubs of bone glisten in the blackness
of the wound. There are a number of other wounds distributed widely across his limbs and torso, incised and abraded and any damn flavour you can think of.
Whoever killed him brought a lot of energy to the task, and a lot of implements. One of the implements lies on the ground beside him. A knife, but not a knife that was designed to be a weapon. It has a short blade and a sculpted plastic handle. The Kitchen Devil logo adorns it.
“Where are you, you bastards?” Foss whispers. She turns a quick circle, looking for a target. She already has a round in the chamber and her finger is tight on the Glock’s finely balanced trigger, where half a foot-pound of extra energy will push the bullet down the slipway.
“Stand down,” McQueen orders her. In case that’s not enough, he grips her wrist and points it at the ground.
His own instincts are the same as hers. He was playing poker with Lutes less than twelve hours ago. He has spent a lot of the last seven months listening to the man’s bad jokes and untenable claims about how good he is at the nearly extinct game of table football. So yeah, he wants to find who did this and teach them the going rate for eyes and teeth.
But it’s a luxury he can’t afford. He doesn’t know the ground, and he is heading up a force that balances three actual soldiers against four armed liabilities. You can’t churn butter with a toothpick, no matter how much you might want to.
Go to ground, then, and get their licks in later. But as a fortress, this place doesn’t thrill him. Too wide. Too open. Too many doors. Walls too thin to stop a sneeze. Lines of sight fuck-awful in every direction.
He throws Foss the signal to retreat in good order, and she knows better than to argue. They back out the way they came, leaving Lutes’ thoroughly tenderised remains where they lie. It hurts like hell but it’s the only thing to do.
Out on the street McQueen rounds up the geeks, who predictably are full of questions he doesn’t have time to answer.
“Lutes is dead?” Sealey keeps repeating, as if he can scrape the unpalatable fact away by abrasive repetition.
Dr. Khan grabs McQueen’s arm, which he doesn’t like overmuch. “What about Stephen?” she demands. “Did you find him?”
“There’s no sign of him,” he tells her. “Probably means he’s lying low somewhere. We’ll get to him when we can.”
“When we can?” Khan spits the words out as though they’re poison. “We’ve got to find him now, before we do anything else.”
McQueen wants to grab her by the throat and shout in her face that Greaves caused this by wandering off in the first place. Greaves bought Lutes this hideous, unseemly death. But he doesn’t say that, because it’s the part of the truth that matters least. The senior officer takes the decisions, and the rap. Everything that’s happened here is down to him, first and last.
So he just pulls his arm sharply away from her grasp and gives the order again. “Follow the leader. Single file, ten yards apart. Start and stop on my mark. If any of you steps out of line, I’m going to handcuff them and frog-march them, which will be bad news for everybody.”
Khan looks like she’s inclined to argue again, but then she thinks better of it. The fact of Lutes’ death is sinking in. Her face twists in surprise and pain as though something sharp just dug into somewhere soft. Well, it’s tough all over. Every one of them can see that they’re playing a bad hand in a bad place.
“Single file,” he repeats. “Don’t close up.”
McQueen leads them away from the killing ground, sticking to the shadows and the angles of walls, spacing them out along a skirmish line, making them as difficult a target as he can.
They’re being followed. Something is fucking pacing them. The enemy don’t let themselves be seen, not clearly, but there are flicks of movement from the buildings on either side, skitters of sound. Again McQueen is tempted to cut loose, but the middle of the street is no place to make a stand. Dig in first, then see what comes, unless the bastards force the issue.
They don’t. The lieutenant gets the science team into cover in what used to be the Corn Exchange. He manages to find a place he can actually fortify, a first-floor room with a wide view of the street and a flat roof at the back that will make a good line of retreat. He establishes a perimeter, about twenty feet across.
He calls Rosie. Tells the colonel they’re in a hole they can’t climb out of and if he can find time in his busy schedule to stop by, the field team will be delighted to see him. Informal dress, guns prepped and armour up.
Carlisle doesn’t bother asking questions he doesn’t need the answers to. “Wait there,” he orders McQueen. And McQueen does. Meanwhile, he finds a nice place to sit by the window with his rifle resting in his hands. Come on, you bastards. Let’s see you. But there’s nothing to see now. Nothing moving. The only sound is a pigeon cooing from up on the roof.
The radio is silent for three minutes, which is the time it takes to retract the airlock and the extension blisters. When the colonel pings them back McQueen can hear the sound of Rosie’s engines in the background, already warming up. Evidently he succeeded in conveying a suitable sense of urgency.
Foss and Sixsmith have got the windows; Phillips is at the door, which he’s cracked open seven eighths of an inch with the barrel of his rifle right up against the gap. The whitecoats are sitting in a tight circle on the floor, facing outwards. They’ve got their guns at the ready but McQueen has told them to keep the safeties on. He is not going to put his own or his people’s skins in between a terrified amateur and a moving target.
Khan is as pale as a sheet and her hands are shaking. Funny, he would have thought she would be one of the last to lose her nerve. But she’s sweating it for the Robot, of course.
The radio squawks again. Carlisle, asking for a GPS. McQueen gives him both that and his take on the situation. “It’s quiet right now but they’re close and I think they’ll make a move before you get here.”
“I’ll bring Rosie right to you,” Carlisle says. “ETA two minutes. Use the time to locate enemy positions if you can. Anything you spot, I’ll light up from the street before I retrieve you.”
“Copy,” McQueen says tersely. And he doesn’t bother with “Out.”
Khan is practically gnawing her fist off. Her eyes show darker than ever in her bleached-out face. “Can we try to send Stephen some kind of message?” she asks McQueen. “So he can find us?”
“Like what?” Foss snaps, reaching the end of her tether. “A fucking smoke signal?”
“We don’t want him to find us,” Private Sixsmith says, with less of an edge. “It wouldn’t be a good idea for him to come into the open right now. He’s better off keeping his head down until we come.”
She glances across at McQueen as though McQueen might have an opinion on this. The lieutenant doesn’t say a word, and prominent among the words he doesn’t say are, “Small loss.” He is much more concerned with the silence and stillness out in the street. The enemy were practically treading on their heels and now they’ve disappeared. It doesn’t make any sense.
“How long will we have to wait here?” Akimwe demands.
There is no answer to that question that will do justice to the lieutenant’s feelings, but he’s about to give it a shot when something he has been noticing subconsciously makes it into the forefront of his mind.
That sound he just heard was wings. Birds taking off from the roof.
He looks up. Listens. When Akimwe starts to speak again, he grunts a terse “Shut up.”
A loosed pebble chatters and chuckles its way down the roof ridge.
McQueen aims at the ceiling. The next thing that moves is going to get a bullet, just to make a point.
But the next thing that moves is Penny. She screams as the window shatters, showering her with broken glass. She goes down into a crouch, clutching her face.
That was no gunshot. It came in on a curved trajectory and it lost height too fast. McQueen guesses what it was even before he sees the pebble lying on the naked floorboards at his fe
et. A stone out of a slingshot. He snaps his fingers to get the whitecoats’ attention. “Take off your coats,” he says quickly. “Now. Wad them up and cover your faces. A headshot is the only thing that can actually kill you.” They scramble to do it, all except for Penny who is still praying to Mecca. Akimwe asks if she’s hit but she’s not answering.
A slingshot is a low-tech weapon even by junker standards, but it’s effective. Much more worrying are the scraping and wrenching sounds from right over their heads. The bogeys are ripping the slates off. They’re going to come in through the roof.
Needs must. McQueen strafes the ceiling with a short, wide burst, doing more damage than their unseen assailants but at least he’s breaking up their party. As he does this the rest of the windows blow out. Small chunks of stone punch the plaster on the far wall with impacts as crisp and clean as bullets. One of them hits him in the back but his pack absorbs most of the force.
“Lie down,” he orders the science team, and they do. The soldiers are down too, on their knees and peering at an oblique angle around the edges of the broken windows, trying to get a glimpse of the enemy without swallowing a piece of ballistic geology.
“Foss,” McQueen snaps. “Phillips.” He points at the ceiling, where the sounds of digging and scrambling are suddenly louder. The enemy made short work of the slates and now they’re going through whatever else is up there. With luck that will be wooden beams. Otherwise it’s just lath and plaster. They’ve probably got a couple of seconds before they have to deal with vertical incoming.
But Rosie comes first and she comes like thunder, the sweetest sound McQueen has ever heard. The bogeys up on the roof are hearing her too, and no doubt seeing her as she rolls up the steep incline of the main street towards them. Good. Rosie with her guns up is a terrifying sight. They must be shitting breezeblocks right now.
