by M. R. Carey
Seven of the children died in the afternoon’s encounter. He draws off cerebrospinal fluid from each of them, inserting his sampling needle into the subarachnoid space between the third and fourth lumbar vertebrae.
He fills every vial in his kit. He will need as much CSF as he can get. He thinks that if he is going to die tonight it will be now, as he robs the dead. If any of the children are watching, they will be full of outrage and vengeful fury. But he can’t let that stop him: there is too much at stake.
Rina. Rina is at stake.
Also there is the other thing, the smaller thing, but not so small now that he is looking down at the small, curled bodies. He checks to see that the scarred girl is not here. He wants her to be still alive.
He looks at each face in turn as he works.
Not her.
Not her.
Not her.
Not her.
Not her.
Not her.
Not her.
His chest, where she kicked him back at the water-testing plant, aches a little. It’s as though they are still touching.
As soon as the last vial is full, he turns and walks away. He imagines the children watching him go: in the branches, sitting in long lines with the smallest way up high so the bigger ones further down can keep them safe if anything fierce climbs up from the forest floor. It’s nice, for a second, to imagine that phantom company. But the fact that he is still alive proves that he’s all by himself out here after all.
PART THREE
BIRTH
44
With the treads repaired and Greaves back on board (he did the job inside the three hours that Sixsmith predicted, with five minutes to spare) they continue south. Acting on the colonel’s orders, Sixsmith is aiming to pick up the main road again at Pitlochry. Once she is on tarmac, she will floor the accelerator. In the meantime, she coaxes Rosie with fretful patience over the rugged ground, giving the new tracks plenty of time to bed in. Outdistancing their pursuers will have to go on the to-do list for tomorrow. That’s the bad news.
The worse news is that the feral kids are still out there. Nobody sees them through the day, and everyone on board is starting to get their hopes up, but as soon as it starts to get dark Foss dons the night-vision goggles and dials the sensitivity up all the way. Abracadabra. The dusk is full of sprinting fairy lights. The children are behind Rosie and off to both sides of her, maintaining a wide, loose formation despite the rough terrain. Effortlessly keeping up.
The mood on board is volatile. That’s a polite word for it anyway, Foss thinks. The Robot’s little trick with the track puller has bought him a little bit of leeway from the haters. The prevailing sentiment now is that when he locked them out he was just panicking because Dr. Khan had been injured. Everyone except for McQueen seems prepared to accept that in mitigation—and even McQueen is on record as saying that the kid scores higher on a ball-count than might have been expected. He hasn’t forgotten the spiked radio, though, and he has told Foss privately that he is going to be the Robot’s shadow for the rest of the journey. Eyes on the prize all the way, until they get back to Beacon, drive in through the front gates and actually park. “There’s something going on in there,” he says, when Foss tries to joke him out of this promise. “You’ve only got to look at the kid’s face.”
Which is true enough. But then there’s something going on behind all of their faces.
In Akimwe’s case, it’s grief, simple and bottomless. Foss had always assumed that he and Phillips were just shagging out of convenience and proximity, which goes to show how little she knows. Akimwe is down fathoms deep and not coming up again soon.
Fournier is sunk about the same distance, but his medium is self-pity and—in Foss’s opinion—terror. He stiffens at loud noises, his voice breaks unexpectedly when he’s talking and his eyes seem perpetually wet with unshed tears. It’s just as well he spends most of his time in the engine room because he’s a one-man funeral.
McQueen is a ball of compacted rage.
Khan is sleepwalking and looking for a way to wake up.
The colonel is … what? Waiting, maybe. Like he sees where all the rest of them are heading and he means to step along and join them in his own good time.
Only Sixsmith seems to have her mind on her job, and given what her job is that’s just as well. The tracks won’t slip again while she is at that wheel.
At about 2100 hours, when they come down onto relatively level ground, Sixsmith puts the pedal down hard. This was a plan of the colonel’s: take it slow and steady until dusk and then—conditions allowing—accelerate just as the kids are slowing down. It’s too much to hope that Sixsmith will give them the slip altogether, but if she grabs some distance she can put it to good use.
About an hour later, the colonel flags up a good defensible spot on a scree slope outside of Dunkeld, where they stop and dig in. Properly. Motion sensors, razor-wire barricades, anti-personnel mines, the whole shop. They are maybe five miles from where Birnam Wood made its unexpected visit to Dunsinane castle in the play Macbeth, but there is no danger of that here. Carlisle has picked a spot with no ground cover for half a mile in any direction. Birnam Wood would need to put on a good turn of speed to get past Foss, who is up in the turret with the guns warmed up and ready. Of course, it’s not trees she’s looking to set light to.
The colonel takes the mid-section platform, despite having pulled double-duty the night before.
Tomorrow they’ll find the road again. Tonight they’ll sleep.
Or in Dr. Fournier’s case, catch up on some phone calls. He tries the brigadier’s line again and again. It seems unlikely that she will pick up on the hundredth hail after ignoring the ninety-nine that came before, but he can’t stop himself. He needs to explain to her that they’re coming in. He has done all he can, and all that anyone could expect him to do, but they are coming in. Let the Muster deal with Colonel Carlisle. It’s the Muster, after all, that has a problem with him.
The doctor falls asleep at last, with the radio clutched in his hand.
And wakes to find it whispering, vibrating in his grip.
“Yes!” he yelps, a little too loud. He winces at the sound of his own voice in the brittle silence. Pressing the radio to his lips he murmurs, “It’s me! Fournier!”
“You’ve been trying to reach me, Doctor.” The brigadier’s voice is calm and cold.
“Yes! Since yesterday. There have been some developments. Things have happened that I have to report. We’ve lost Penny and Sealey and Private Phillips in an engagement with—”
“Be quiet.”
Fry stops him dead with those two words. Fournier’s lips continue to move, but without any sound, without any breath.
“I’ll take your report later, if there’s time,” Fry says. “The situation here has become …” There is an audible pause before she continues. “ … unstable. The subversive elements in Beacon have managed to claim some territory and hold on to it. We’re fighting on several fronts, when we ought to be consolidating. Your losses are highly regrettable but I don’t have time right now to hear an itemised account.”
“I—I understand,” Fournier says. He thinks: unstable? What have they done to Beacon? What is happening back there?
Meanwhile, Fry goes on without a break. “So my question for you is this, Dr. Fournier. Can you deliver the Rosalind Franklin to a specific location in a specific time frame?”
Fournier is aghast. “No!” he exclaims. “Definitely not! Brigadier, the chain of command has broken down here. Colonel Carlisle has threatened me. Physically threatened me. He suspects I disabled the radio and he—he’s watching me all the time. He won’t entertain any suggestion from me, not for a moment.”
Silence at the other end of the line, shot through with cycling static.
“All right,” Fry says at last, with grim resignation. “Explain.”
Fournier tries, but does poorly. The events of the previous day sprawl across his mind like debris
from a landslide. He struggles to find a through-line, and clearly he doesn’t succeed. Fry seems confused about the children and absolutely uninterested in Colonel Carlisle’s threatening to murder him. She does take the point that they have encountered a new form of hungry and obtained an intact specimen. She congratulates him—perfunctorily—on that achievement, but she doesn’t seem to appreciate what it might mean.
When he tries to explain, the brigadier returns to something he told her during their last conversation.
“You said there was some kind of personal friction between Carlisle and McQueen. Is that still true?”
Fournier is nonplussed. “Well, yes,” he says. “They came close to fighting yesterday. The colonel broke McQueen back down to the ranks, after all. McQueen hasn’t forgiven that.”
“Then let me talk to McQueen.”
Fournier thinks he must have misheard, so he ignores the order and goes back to his main theme. “The specimen is a child. It may have been born to an infected mother, and its brain tissue—”
“Later,” Fry interrupts. “Your salient point is that you have new and pertinent data to bring home. That’s excellent news, and you’ll be rewarded in due course. But it’s for others to examine and interpret. Right now I need you to bring McQueen into the engine room and let me speak to him.”
So he did hear correctly. But after all these months of complete secrecy he finds this shift in operating parameters hard to process. “But then … if McQueen finds out I’ve been reporting to you …”
“As ordered,” the brigadier reminds him. “You’ve done nothing wrong. This is about Beacon’s survival, and there is only one right side in that struggle. Bring him, Dr. Fournier, please. I assume he’s still awake?”
“I think they’re all awake. I can hear them talking. They’re in the crew quarters, most likely playing poker.”
“Then go and fetch him.”
It’s not as easy as it sounds. For once, the colonel is in the mid-section rather than in the cockpit, keeping watch along with Foss, so Fournier has to walk past him on his way to the crew quarters—eyes on the ground, unable to meet his gaze—and will have to walk past him again on his way back.
He needs a plausible cover for a private conversation with the former lieutenant, and he can’t think of anything that will not look suspicious. McQueen is not under his direct command. There just isn’t any reason why he would need to talk to the man about anything that wouldn’t normally route through Carlisle. And they’re all so intent on their endless poker game that McQueen probably won’t even listen to him.
Inspiration strikes in the moment when he walks in on them. A diminished game, with just McQueen, Sixsmith and Akimwe at the table (and Akimwe there in body only, like a propped-up dummy). They don’t look up.
Until Fournier gathers the cards up from the table and holds out his hand for the ones they’re holding.
“What the fuck?” Sixsmith demands, bemused.
“I’m confiscating this deck of cards,” Fournier says. “It’s bad for morale.” And since they’re still keeping tight hold of the cards in their hands he turns and walks away with the bulk of the deck as his prize.
“Goodnight, Colonel,” he mutters as he walks through the mid-section. “I hope we see no activity out there.” He moves on quickly. If there’s a reply, he doesn’t hear it.
He shuts himself in the engine room again and waits there in an agony of anticipation. Has he misjudged? He thought he knew McQueen well enough to be sure he wouldn’t sit still for such a high-handed intervention, but they are all so beaten down in the wake of the attack that for once it might pass without comment.
There is a knock on the door. A single, peremptory thud. Then it opens and McQueen is standing in the gap. “I’m going to need those cards,” he says. His tone is grim, his face set in a warning scowl.
“Of course,” Fournier says quickly. “But come in, and close the door.”
McQueen has come prepared to argue. He is not expecting instant surrender and he doesn’t seem enthused by it. He beckons impatiently for the cards.
“Please,” Fournier says. “This is a really important matter … Lieutenant.”
His deliberate pause loads the last word with emphasis. And it does the job. McQueen steps inside, kicking the door shut with his heel. He tries for indifference, but with indifferent success.
“What?” he says truculently.
Fournier holds up the radio. “Brigadier Fry,” he says, omitting what would have to be a lengthy and complicated explanation. “She’s calling from Beacon. She wants to talk to you.”
Surprise makes McQueen’s normally forbidding face, for a moment or two, a perfect blank. He takes the radio, but stares at it as though he is not certain what to do with it. When he puts it to his ear, he does so warily, with visible mistrust.
“McQueen,” he says. “Over.”
He listens in silence for a long time. Fournier listens too, but though he strains to hear he gets no hint of what Brigadier Fry is saying. He is physically trembling with frustration and impatience when McQueen finally turns to him, covering the tiny radio with his big hand as though it’s the mouthpiece of a phone.
“She says to tell you this is private,” he says, shrugging with his eyebrows as if to convey a shared exasperation with the vagaries of high-ranking officers. “Sorry. You’ll have to step out.”
45
Stephen Greaves dreams about the scarred girl.
In the dream she can talk, and she tells him about the life she lives with the other children. It’s really nice, she says. We don’t remember our mums and dads at all, ever, and we don’t need them. We’ve got each other.
This sounds good to Greaves, but he is disconcerted to be having the conversation in the kitchen of the old house, where he lived with his mother and father until the day the hungries came. It reminds him of what he has lost, when the girl is denying the reality of loss.
Conflicting symbolism, some part of his mind comments. You want to believe, but you’re telling yourself not to. Greaves leaves the thought parked in a storage bay somewhere behind or below the level of the dream. He thinks: behind? And then: below. He needs to be clear about spatial relationships even in dreams, where space is purely abstract and notional.
The kitchen is very fully realised, not abstract at all. His school bag stands on the table with Captain Power guarding it. His mother’s last ever THINGS TO DO list is pinned to the fridge with magnet Homer and magnet Marge. It says:
EVACUATION 12.00 NOON LIBRARY!!!
I think you’re all second generation, Greaves tells the scarred girl. Children of the infected. So your mother had the pathogen in her system before you were born. You would never have known her as a human being.
A human being is a very hard thing to be, the girl says gravely.
Greaves agrees.
But seriously, she tells him. Come and live with us. Bring Dr. Khan.
I can’t do that. Greaves is sad to have to say it, but he knows it’s true. I can’t be like you, and neither can Rina. I’m absolutely sure you need to be exposed to the infection in utero in order to form the symbiotic attachment to the Cordyceps fungus that you and the other children have.
You’re very clever, Stephen, the scarred girl says admiringly.
Thank you.
But then, what’s going to happen to Dr. Khan?
As she says it, she points. Behind him. Greaves is meant to turn, and see what she is pointing at. That’s the way the dream is meant to work. When he resists it, when he refuses to move his head, something clamps down on his shoulder. A hand.
Rina’s hand.
She is there, at his back. Already changed. Already gone from herself for ever, sequestrated or erased by the infection.
I don’t want to see, he pleads.
The girl nods. She understands. She gives him dispensation. You don’t have to look if you don’t want to. But you have to decide. You have to know what you’re going to do.
Rina’s grip tightens on his shoulder. She can’t think any more, but clearly she agrees just the same.
And then it comes to him that it’s not Rina’s hand that’s gripping him; it’s Rina’s teeth. In an access of pure panic, he tries to pull away. If she infects him, if he becomes a hungry, there won’t be anybody who can save her. Losing him, she will lose herself.
As his muscle tears between her tightening jaws, he wakes. His face is drenched with tears, and his body with rank sweat. He is noxious and appalling to himself. If he went outside now, hungries would flock to him like bees to a flower. Like crows to the newly dead.
He sits up. The crew quarters are absolutely silent. Without even opening his curtain, Greaves slides out and down. His bare feet touch the metal of the floor and he almost gasps at the shocking cold. He hates that he doesn’t have any shoes on but he is not prepared to take the risk of opening his locker. The less noise he makes, the less chance there is that he will be challenged, and pressed with questions that he can’t answer.
By the light that filters in from the mid-section platform, he retrieves the sampling kit from his bag. Then he moves on tiptoe to the door, clutching the plastic vials protectively against his chest.
The platform seems to be empty, but as he moves across it he sees the colonel sitting against the airlock door, his head bowed onto his chest. Greaves is about to say hello when someone hails him from above with an urgent, repeated click of the tongue. He looks up. It’s Sixsmith, manning the turret. Foss’s watch is over, evidently, and she has taken the next stint.
She points to the colonel. “Let him sleep,” she whispers. “He was on his feet for forty hours straight.”
Greaves nods to show that he understands.
“What’s going on in there that couldn’t wait until morning?” Sixsmith demands in the same sotto voce. “Never mind, don’t tell me. But keep your voices down, and close the bulkhead door. We’re meant to be going dark.”
