The Boy on the Bridge

by M. R. Carey

  Stephen is parsing these words as he steps into the lab, and one word in particular. Voices, plural.

  Rina is standing at the work station beside the freezer. Actually she is leaning forward with both elbows on the bench. Her face is close up against the eyepiece of the TCM400 inverted phase microscope but her eyes, Greaves can see, are closed. They come open slowly as he pulls the bulkhead door across, and she turns to face him. She seems to have expected him, or at least she shows no surprise at his arrival.

  On Stephen’s side, the surprise is absolute. He has come here to be alone. To do work that nobody else must see. And for a moment he mistakes the vials and jars on the bench in front of Rina for his own samples. But they’re not. They’re the last batch of legacy cultures from the Charles Darwin, the ones that Private McQueen and Private Phillips brought down from Ben Macdhui the day before. Back when Private Phillips was still alive, along with Dr. Sealey and Dr. Penny.

  So long ago.

  Rina comes away from the bench with a wince of pain or effort, and crosses to where Greaves is standing. In this constricted space, it takes only four steps. She stares into his eyes. Normally she would know not to do that, would remember how hard it is for him to bear the searchlight beams of other people’s gaze. Her own eyes are open very wide, the full circumference of each pupil clearly visible, and her irises are bigger than he has ever seen. They don’t constrict at all, although the fluorescent tubes are very bright. Shadows like bruises underline them with savage emphasis, visible even on Rina’s olive skin.

  “What did you do to me?” she asks him. The words come out low but forceful, with a growl of exhaled breath. She smells of sickness. Her breath is freighted with bile and medicine.

  “Rina,” Stephen says. And for a moment that is all he can offer her. Her own name, like a badge, like an incantation to conjure her back into herself.

  She clutches at the lapels of his pyjamas and drags him close with surprising strength. “What did you do?” she repeats. Greaves is still struggling with the words, still not quite able to marshal them into a coherent sequence, but in any case Rina lets him go, as suddenly as she seized him. Her fingertips scrawl wavering lines down his chest as she turns away. Abruptly she sits down, in the middle of the floor. Her head sinks onto her clenched fists.

  “It wasn’t you,” she mutters. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t take it out on you. John is dead, and I feel … I don’t feel enough. It’s as though I’m a long way away from you all. From everything here. None of it is real.”

  Greaves is filled with dismay. Rina is reporting altered affect, which probably means that the inoculation’s effect is wearing off. He has to make up another batch of serum immediately, using the new tissue samples he took from the dead children after he repaired the treads.

  Also he has to answer her questions. Holding back the truth—although he has done so recently, with terrible effect—is for him like stopping a truck from rolling down a steep slope just with his hands.

  He dumps the sampling kit down on the workbench and starts to remove the individual containers from their receptacles.

  “It was,” he says. Quickly. Running across a minefield made of words. “It was me, Rina. One of the children bit you and I had to stop you from changing. I gave you medicine I made out of the dead boy’s cerebrospinal fluid. I came in here now to make some more.” He holds up two of the sampling tubes, one in each hand, to show her; but Rina isn’t looking at him. Her head is drooping at an odd angle on her neck, as though it is too heavy to hold up, and she is staring with wide-open eyes at her bandaged arm. The bandages dangle loosely: at some point she must have removed the dressing and looked inside. She must have seen the bitemarks on her forearm.

  “Yes,” she mutters at last. “I knew that, really. I just forgot.”

  Memory lapses. Another warning sign. He has to do this now, and he has to do it right.

  He tells Rina the whole story as he works, in great haste, to prepare another batch of the serum. He doesn’t really believe she’s listening. He is just throwing out the words in the hope of holding her there—her consciousness, her Rina-ness—for a few minutes longer. He throws out questions, too. Does she remember what happened after they got back inside Rosie? How he locked the door, and how he pushed Dr. Fournier back into the engine room? “You should have seen his face, Rina,” he babbles. “You would have laughed!” It’s only a guess. Not even that: it’s something people say, about strange and grotesque moments when people act out of character or something unexpected happens. You should have seen their faces!

  He can’t look at her face, as he mixes and filters the live vaccine. He draws off seven millilitres, which leaves about twenty-five in the retort. It’s a slightly bigger dose than before, but with the ingredients in exactly the same ratio. What he did before worked: he can’t afford the luxury of experimentation.

  Remembering the traumatic wrestling match that happened last time Greaves stays away from Rina’s neck and injects instead into the median cubital vein, inside her left elbow. Rina helps, tapping the vein to make it dilate and protrude. That reassures him, but only for a moment. Does it mean she understands what he’s doing, or is it only a muscle memory stimulated by the sight of the hypo?

  He kneels beside her and waits in a nightmare of anxiety for her to respond. To say or do something that will tell him whether she’s still there with him or gone for good. His interior clock keeps time: he can’t turn it off. For seventeen desolate, drawn-out seconds there is nothing.

  Then she reaches out and touches the back of his hand. With the tip of her index finger.

  He lets out a held breath, trembling all over with relief.

  “Hey,” Rina whispers weakly. “Stephen. When did you get here?”

  “Hey,” Greaves answers. His voice thickens and he can get no further.

  Dr. Khan’s head comes up, slowly. Their eyes meet. Only for a moment this time. She knows to look away at the moment when he starts to tense. But her fingertip presses harder against his skin. “I need a drink,” she croaks.

  They can’t go through to the crew quarters without passing under Sixsmith’s gaze, and neither of them is ready to do that. Also, it would be impossible for them to talk in there. Rina has some instant coffee hidden away at the back of a shelf, a precious store that John found on one of the forays they made when they were heading north. She draws off water from one of the stowed drums into a beaker and heats it with a Bunsen burner. They sit side by side on the workbench, their legs dangling, and take alternate sips. It’s too bitter and too hot: the only comfort it brings is from the fact of their sharing it.

  They talk in low voices.

  “So how did Alan react when you told him?” Rina asks.

  “When I told him what?”

  “Duh! What do you think? About what you’ve made here, Stephen. About the—”

  “I haven’t told him.” He steps in quickly. If she doesn’t say it, doesn’t use the word cure, he doesn’t have to unsay it.

  “Great. I want to be there when you do. You know, I can’t quite believe it. I can’t believe it was this easy. My God, if John—if he had just lived a day longer …” She runs out of words, completes the thought with the smallest flexing of her hand.

  Greaves shakes his head. He’s walking a tightrope over the abyss of an outright lie. “It will take more than a day,” he mumbles.

  “You know what I mean,” Rina says. She touches the back of his hand again for a moment, her emotions overflowing in a way that scares him. “You succeeded where everyone else failed. I’m proud of you.”

  It’s more than Greaves can bear. “No, Rina, no,” he says. It sounds as though he’s pleading. Perhaps he is. He pushes his clenched fist against his mouth to slow the words coming out, but he can’t stop them.

  “What do you mean, no?”

  He is helpless in the grip of his compulsion.

  “I didn’t cure you,” he whispers. “And I won’t. I can’t.”

/>   46

  With the first hint of light, when the air is still chill enough to use the enhanced mode on the glasses, Sixsmith takes a reading and declares that they’re alone. McQueen doesn’t really believe that, but he keeps up the pretence as they pack away the sensors and the traps, expecting at every moment to be caught in a cloudburst of slingshot stones and baby-faced monsters.

  The aim is to move out quick and quiet, to be on the road and up to speed before the feral kids know they’re gone. That timetable hits a slight snag when Foss does a head count and discovers that Dr. Akimwe is no longer on board. McQueen is not in the least surprised. If he has ever seen a dead man walking it was Akimwe, from the very moment he was told that Gary Phillips hadn’t made it.

  None of the doctor’s possessions are missing, but he has opened up the gun locker (Phillips must have given him the code) and removed one of the handguns. “The doss fucker hasn’t taken any ammo though,” McQueen reports after a thorough check. “The magazine ought to have been full, but after that he’s on his own.”

  Rosie’s electronic log indicates that the passenger-side cockpit door opened and closed again at 2.17 a.m. Sixsmith was still on watch in the turret, and saw and heard nothing.

  There is yet another yack-athon in the crew quarters, and they all get into a pointless shouting match over the odds of finding Akimwe if they turn around. They just won’t, it’s as simple as that. Not unless he sticks to the road, and if he intended to do that there wouldn’t be much point in sneaking away like a ninja in the first place.

  “He’s gone to bury Phillips,” Sixsmith says. “That’s where we’ll find him.”

  “Yeah, but no,” McQueen observes. “He’s not going to get that far.”

  “For fuck’s sake!” Sixsmith is on her feet, glaring at him. “Four KIAs aren’t enough for you? If we go slowly, we can pick him up with the infra-reds. He can’t have got far.”

  But they would be driving back towards the children, and that’s a bridge too far for all of them. When the colonel gives the order to keep on going south, nobody raises a squeak. Not even Sixsmith. McQueen guesses that she’s just feeling bad because she let the doctor sneak out past her. Like it’s on her somehow that Akimwe decided to kill himself. If they did manage to catch up with him, McQueen thinks, the first thing he personally would do is smack Akimwe in the head with a rifle butt for stealing the handgun. The handgun is actually useful.

  They get moving at last. The atmosphere on board is as tense as hell. It feels to McQueen as though they’re all counting odds. All except for him, anyway. What he is doing is brooding over an imaginary Venn diagram entitled “my enemy’s enemy is my friend.” Brigadier Fry has promised to give him back his commission if he will help her with a little problem, the problem in question being Colonel Isaac Carlisle.

  There is absolutely no downside to dropping the colonel in a bathtub full of broken glass. But conspiracies, cabals, other people’s agendas, it all sticks in McQueen’s throat a little and makes him want to balk. He’d rather just go round and round with the colonel on a little patch of grass somewhere. Hand him a split lip, a few broken ribs, maybe the odd tooth. Shepherd him to a few conclusions about human dignity.

  But that’s not going to happen. And if Beacon is going all to pieces, with the brigadier doing the carving, he will to need to find a place to stand. Might as well pick the one that comes with the fringe benefit of the colonel getting his ticket punched. They’re all as bad as each other, in his opinion, but the colonel is the only one McQueen ever had some respect for, and therefore the only one who has ever disappointed him. He has this coming.

  He goes to Carlisle, in the cockpit, and asks for permission to speak in private—with a pointed sideways glance at Sixsmith in the driving seat. They go astern, all the way to the lab. Nobody is working there. The colonel closes the door and waits for McQueen to speak.

  McQueen puts Fournier’s little radio down on the workbench. Carlisle stares at it, a slow frown descending over his face. “Whose?” he says. He knows what he’s looking at, and probably he has guessed right away what it means.

  “Fournier’s. It’s a one-to-one. Permanently welded to a single freq. In case you’re wondering who’s on the other end, it’s Brigadier Fry.”

  Carlisle nods, accepting the explanation without question. Because why not? It makes so much sense. “And how did you come by it?” he asks McQueen.

  “Heard him talking, walked in on him. He spilled it all without me even asking. Fry wanted someone to keep an eye on us out here. Playing the political game, some such fuckery. I suppose she picked Fournier because she knew he’d roll over when he was told to. He wasn’t ever going to say no.”

  Carlisle picks the radio up at last. “It’s still functional?”

  McQueen nods. “I didn’t talk to Fry, but I could hear an adjutant repeating a call sign for a couple of minutes after I took it away from Fournier.” This is looking good. The old sod is buying the whole prospectus. It’s not as though he has a lot of choice, at this point. The radio is a big deal no matter how you look at it. A lifeline. They were lost, and now they’re found. Carlisle can’t do anything but take it and use it.

  McQueen waits. The colonel says nothing.

  “Might have bruised the doctor a little bit in passing,” McQueen offers. “I hope I’m not on a charge or anything. He really didn’t want to let go.”

  Carlisle looks at him hard. Really searches his face. McQueen endures the scrutiny, deadpan to a fault.

  “Yeah, you’re very welcome,” he says at last, to break the heavy silence.

  Carlisle doesn’t even say “dismissed.” He just pockets the radio and walks back to the cockpit. Turns his back on McQueen like McQueen isn’t even there.

  Oh shit, does he have this coming.

  On his way through the crew quarters, Carlisle has time to notice how quiet things are. Not a good quiet, an enervated one. Foss is lying in her bunk with an arm thrown across her eyes, too exhausted even to sleep. Stephen Greaves sits at the table with his arms in his lap, staring at nothing. Samrina Khan is in the galley area gripping the counter top on either side of the sink, head down as though she is about to throw up or else just has.

  The colonel is perturbed about the radio, and even more so about McQueen. He has always been reasonably skilled in the assessment of character but there is something in McQueen that is opaque to him. Perhaps he has allowed some mistrust to take root in his mind for that reason alone, quite apart from his doubts about the man’s fitness as a soldier. But finding the radio was a good thing, and handing it over was a better one.

  The radio. It’s a godsend, but Carlisle strongly dislikes what it implies. When he takes his seat next to Sixsmith, when he sets the small device down on the cockpit’s console, he feels as though he has picked up a great weight rather than shedding an insignificant one.

  Sixsmith is staring at the radio in wonder. “Where the bloody hell did that come from?” she demands.

  “A contribution from Dr. Fournier,” the colonel observes, keeping his tone carefully neutral. There is no point in letting his anger show. No point in feeling it, although that ship has already sailed. There has never been trust between himself and the brigadier. When he tried to resign his commission—the most passive of protests—she read it as open rebellion and argued him out of it. She has been afraid ever since that he will attack her again from a different direction. And he has felt close, recently, to doing it. That was why Fry sent him away. But clearly sending him away wasn’t enough.

  “Dr. Fournier,” Sixsmith repeats, making the name sound like a swearword.

  “Apparently this was issued to him when we left Beacon, as a fallback in case of emergency. I think our current circumstances qualify.” There’s no more to be said on that topic; no more, at least, that Carlisle can trust himself to say. “I’m going to call Beacon, Private,” he tells Sixsmith. “If I get through, I may need your help in maintaining the contact. This is a very sm
all and very directional device. If we start to lose signal strength, please slow the vehicle and be prepared to stop if I tell you to.”

  Sixsmith shoots him a look freighted with unspoken questions. “Yes, sir.”

  Carlisle switches on the radio and waits. There is almost no static, just a low hum of electronics. After a while a male voice speaks. “Brigadier Fry’s field line.”

  “This is Colonel Carlisle,” the colonel says. “I’d like to speak with the brigadier if she’s available.”

  There is no pause at all, and no surprise in the man’s tone. “Yes, Colonel. One moment.” They were expecting me, Carlisle thinks. Most likely the doctor missed a scheduled call-in and they drew their own conclusions.

  “Isaac.” Fry’s voice this time, and although she sounds weary and stressed she makes more of a performance out of being caught unawares. “How did you find this frequency? I don’t recall giving it to you.”

  “I’m calling you on Dr. Fournier’s radio, Brigadier.” He doesn’t offer an explanation, but moves straight to the substance of his report. “We’re now heading south towards the northern end of the M1, and making good speed. But there have been developments of the utmost significance of which you and the whole of the Main Table need to be apprised.”

  “Go ahead,” Fry says.

  He doesn’t waste words. First he details Greaves’ find, because that’s the nub of the matter. They are carrying a specimen that is absolutely unique and whose scientific importance cannot be overstated. A child who seems to have a partial immunity to the hungry pathogen! A child whose remains might hold the key to a cure.

  Only after that does he fill in the details about the botched search party and the deaths. He states, formally and for the record, that he is taking full responsibility for these things. Finally he makes it clear that Rosie is running for home, non-negotiably, and that she might not be alone when she arrives.