by M. R. Carey
And that being the case, point two kicks in. They’ll need shelter. If they sleep out in the open, they’ll get hungries swarming on them from all directions. Okay, there are other places besides towns that will give you shelter, but most of them presuppose that you’ve got the time and the manpower to do proper reconnaissance.
Which brings in point three. Time. Ducking and weaving away from any built-up areas will add about twenty extra miles to their route, which doesn’t matter all that much as far as the raw numbers go. But the raw numbers aren’t worth a shit. What matters is that it will take them across the hardest, slowest terrain, and probably double their journey time. Not to mention the fact that it’s hard to run away across a field full of mature brambles with inch-long thorns, or a pasture choked with knee-high knotweed. Hungries don’t care if they rip themselves open, and they’ll happily keep running if they’ve got your scent, even as they flay themselves to the bone. Humans will slow down a lot more in that terrain, and get taken that much more easily.
So they’re walking right now along a country lane, between two weed-choked fields, and they’re about to pass through a village. Or else tack on three extra miles to the journey by slogging all the way around it.
One way or the other, Parks is going to have to make his mind up soon.
Caroline Caldwell goes through the stages of grief, in the prescribed order.
Denial is a stage she goes through very quickly indeed, because her reason strikes down the demeaning, treacherous thought as quickly as it rises. There’s no point in denying the truth when the truth is self-evident. There’s no point in denying the truth even if you have to wade through thorn thickets and minefields to get to it. The truth is the truth, the only prize worth having. If you deny it, you’re only showing that you’re unworthy of it.
So Caldwell accepts that her work – the pith and substance of the last decade of her life – is lost.
And lets herself feel the toxic anger and indignation that boils in her like heartburn at that thought. If Justineau hadn’t intervened, if she’d been allowed to make that final dissection, would it have made any difference? Of course not. But Justineau ensured that the last minutes of Caldwell’s time at the base were wasted. It would be absurd to build anything further on top of that transgression, but it’s enough as it stands. Justineau ruined her work, and her work is now gone. Justineau will pay, when they get back to Beacon, with the trashing of her career and with a court-martial that will probably see her shot.
Bargaining is another stage that Caldwell doesn’t linger over. She doesn’t believe in God, or the gods, or fate, or any higher or lower power that has dominion over her. There’s no one to bargain with. But she agrees – even in a deterministic world governed by impartial physical forces – that if the lab is found to be intact and a rescue team from Beacon returns her notes and samples to her in good order, she will light a candle to nobody at all in recognition for the universe having (en passant, by something indistinguishable from chance) been kind to her.
When she holds that thought up to the light and sees how pathetic it is, how cravenly equivocating, she sinks into black depression.
From which she is saved by this thought: there wasn’t anything in the lab worth keeping anyway. The samples, possibly, but she has a living sample with her. The notes were mostly descriptive – a very detailed and circumstantial account of the hungry pathogen’s life cycle (incomplete, since she’s yet to culture a sample to the mature, sexual stage) and the course of the infection both in the regular way of things and in the anomalous state represented by the children. She has this stuff by heart, so the loss of the notes is not crucial.
She has a chance. She’s in the field, and opportunities will come.
This could still work out well.
Private Kieran Gallagher knows all about monsters, because he comes from a family in which monsters predominate. Or maybe it’s just that his family was more given than most to letting its monsters come out and sniff the air.
The key that let them out was always the same: bootleg vodka, made in a still that his father and older brother had set up in a shed behind an abandoned house about a hundred yards from where they lived. The provisional government in Beacon was officially against unlicensed alcohol, but unofficially they didn’t really care so long as you stayed inside your house when you were shit-faced and only beat up your own people.
So Gallagher grew up in a weird microcosm of the wider world outside Beacon. His father, and his brother Steve, and his cousin Jackie looked like normal human beings and even sometimes acted like them, but most of the time they veered between two extremes: reckless violence when they were drinking, and comatose somnolence when the drink wore off.
Ricocheting off that, Gallagher has tried to live the life of the safe and solid middle ground, looking out for the things that make other people go off the rails so he can avoid them assiduously. He was the only soldier on the base who refused the solace of twenty-two per cent proof home-brew beer cooked up in a bucket or a bathtub. The only one who didn’t look out for magic mushrooms when he was on wide patrol. The only one who didn’t think it was hilarious to watch the antics of that teacher, Whitaker, as he drank himself to death.
And he’s always assumed that by steering into the middle of the channel, he was going to manage not to get wrecked. Now he knows you can get wrecked in clear waters too, and he’s thinking oh please, don’t let me die. I haven’t even lived yet, so it’s not fair to let me die.
He’s so scared, he’s worried that he might actually piss himself. He’s never understood before how being scared could make you do that; but now, thrown into the hungries’ world with only Sergeant Parks to back him up and with all those miles to walk before they get back to Beacon, he can feel his nuts tightening and his bladder loosening with every step he takes.
The question is, which is he more afraid of? Dying out here, or going home? They’ve both got their terrors, about equally vivid in his mind.
He’s always had shit-awful luck, from the day he was born. Got the beatings at home and at school, never managed to swap smokes for gropes behind the gym like his brother (the one time he tried, his dad caught him stealing the cigarettes and took it out of him with the end of a belt), got into the army by default to escape from that madhouse, carries a stupid misspelled tattoo (qui audet piscitur – “who dares, fishes”) because the tattooist was drunk and missed out three letters, caught gonorrhoea from the first girl who ever let him roll her, got the second pregnant and skipped out on her (nothing in excess, not even love), then realised too late that his feelings for her went way beyond sex. If he ever gets back to Beacon and sees her again, he’ll try to explain that to her. I’m a coward and a worthless piece of shit, but if you give me a second chance I’ll never run out on you again.
Not going to happen, is it?
This is what’s going to happen. Somewhere between here and Beacon, a hungry will take a bite out of him. Because that’s the way his life is set up to work.
He’s comforted by something in the thigh pocket of his fatigues. It’s a grenade – one that rolled into a corner when Parks was clipping the others into his belt. Gallagher picked it up, intending to hand it to the Sarge, but then on an impulse he swiped it and stowed it instead. He’s keeping it for a Hail Mary manoeuvre.
There are so many things in the world that he’s scared shitless about. The hungries might eat him. The junkers might torture or murder him. They might run out of food and water somewhere between here and Beacon and die by inches.
If it comes to it, Gallagher is going to pull the pin on his own life. And to hell with the middle of the road.
Helen Justineau is thinking about dead children.
She can’t narrow it down, or doesn’t want to. She thinks about all the children in the world who ever died without growing up. There must have been billions of them. Hecatombs of children, apocalypses, genocides of them. In every war, every famine, thrown to the wall. Too s
mall to protect themselves, too innocent to get out of the way. Killed by madmen, perverts, judges, soldiers, random passers-by, friends and neighbours, their own parents. By stupid chance or ruthless edict.
Every adult grew from a kid who beat the odds. But at different times, in different places, the odds have been appallingly steep.
And the dead kids drag at every living soul. A weight of guilt you haul around with you like the moon hauls the ocean, too massive to lift and too much a part of you to ever let it go.
If she hadn’t talked to the kids about death that day. If she hadn’t read them “The Charge of the Light Brigade”, and if they hadn’t asked what being dead was like, then she wouldn’t have stroked Melanie’s hair and none of this would have happened. She wouldn’t have made a promise she couldn’t keep and couldn’t walk away from.
She could be as selfish as she’s always been, and forgive herself the way everybody else does, and wake up every day as clean as if she’d just been born.
29
Sergeant Parks has made his call. He’s heading into Stotfold.
It’s a nothing little place on the way to the A1, and he doesn’t have any high hopes for it. They won’t be able to replenish their supplies there, or find another transport. Anything that was worth having will have been found and taken long before. It’s got this one thing going for it, though: that it lies on their route, and with the afternoon wearing down into evening, they’re beggars rather than choosers. He wants to be under cover before nightfall.
But they’re still two miles out from the town – not even close enough yet to see the chimney of the watermill rising over the trees – when they pass a church.
It’s a stupid place to put a church, in Parks’ opinion, because it’s close to nothing very much. Even before the Breakdown, they couldn’t have got any passing trade. And it’s useless as a bivouac. Too many big windows, most of them smashed, and the massive arched doorway at the front gaping like a toothless mouth (no telling what happened to the doors).
But there’s a breezeblock garage right next to the bigger structure, and Parks likes the look of that. When he goes to check it out up close, telling the others to wait, he likes it even more. The wide, up-and-over door is made of sturdy metal. It won’t yield to pushing or clawing, which is mostly what the hungries do when they come up against a door, and is probably rusted into its jamb for added immobility. The other way in, at the side, is a wooden door with a Yale lock. A lot less secure, but the upside is that Parks can knock out the cylinder to open the door from the outside without damaging the wood, and then – if their luck is in – patch it up again or find some other kind of barricade once they’re inside.
He waves to Gallagher to come and join him. The two of them go over the church while the women wait out in the road. A first pass shows up no hungries, which is a good sign. Some bones on the floor, near the rood screen, but they look like animal bones. Left there by a fox or a weasel probably, or else by some passing Satanist.
Above the altar, in green spray paint, the words HE’S NOT LISTENING, MORONS. Parks takes that as a given. He’s never prayed in his life.
Someone else prayed here, though. In a pew, forgotten, Parks finds a woman’s handbag. It contains some loose change, a lipstick, a tiny hymnal, a set of car keys with a built-in locator and a single Xtra-Thin condom. Such blameless everyday objects that they dazzle him a little, raising the spectre of a time when the worst things anyone had to worry about were unsafe sex and forgetting where they parked their car.
Gallagher peers into a side room, a vestry or something, shines his torch around a bit, then slams the door to again. “All clear, Sarge,” he calls out.
It might be the door slamming, but more likely it’s the words. Something rushes out of the darkness at the back of the church. It hits Gallagher at a flat run, slams him right off his feet, and he goes down with a crash on to the wooden floor.
Parks turns around, sees the two bodies writhing together. He doesn’t even have to think about it. He draws his gun, tracks the dark blob of the hungry’s head as it lowers into the angle of Gallagher’s throat, and squeezes off a shot. The sound is less of a bang, more like the solid chunk you get when you bring an axe down on a block of wood.
His aim is spot on. The bullet smacks into the back of the hungry’s skull. An ordinary bullet would go right on through. Would hit Gallagher too, or at the very least spray his face and upper body with hungry cerebral tissue – with predictable and depressing consequences an hour or a day or a week down the line. But this is a soft-nosed, steel-aluminium round, designed for minimal penetration. It slows down, spreads out and pulps the hungry’s brain to pink milkshake.
Gallagher pushes the limp body to the side and gets out from under it. “Shit!” he pants. “I … I didn’t see it until it was on top of me. Thanks, Sarge.”
Parks verifies the kill. The hungry is completely inert, grey matter oozing from its eyes, nose, ears, pretty much everywhere. In life, it was male, dark-haired, a fair bit younger than Parks himself. It’s wearing the mouldering remains of a priest’s surplice, so it was probably infected right here. Maybe it’s been here ever since, waiting in the dark for a meal to wander by. Or maybe it comes back here after a kill. That does happen, weird as it sounds. Instead of just freezing in place like most of them do, some hungries have a homing instinct for a particular place. Parks wonders if Dr Caldwell knows about this, and if she does, how she squares it with that idea about the host mind dying as soon as the parasite shows up.
Gallagher inspects himself for cuts, bites, and stray hungry bodily fluids. Parks examines him too – minutely. Despite the close encounter, Gallagher checks out clean. He’s still thanking Parks, with a post-traumatic shake in his voice. Parks has had so many close calls like this back in his grab-bagging days, he doesn’t see it as anything much. He just tells Gallagher not to talk in a threat situation. Hand signals are every bit as good, and a damn sight safer.
They go back outside where the civilians – waiting fifty yards away, at the bottom of the gravel drive – seem to be completely unaware that anything has happened. They must have put the sounds from the church down to a vigorous search.
“Everything okay?” Justineau asks.
“Everything is fine,” Parks says. “We’re almost done. Just keep an eye on the road and shout if anything comes.”
He turns his attention to the garage, which on closer inspection is even better than he thought. He was ready to break the lock with his rifle butt, but he doesn’t have to. When he tries the handle of the door, it opens. Whoever was here last left it on the latch.
They go in slowly and carefully, covering each other. Parks drops down on one knee, rifle set to full auto, ready to do a kneecapping sweep. Gallagher gets out his torch and shines it into the corners of the room.
Which is empty. Clean. Nothing for anyone to hide behind, and no scope at all for nasty surprises.
“All good,” Parks mutters. “Okay, this will do just fine. Go get them.”
Gallagher shepherds the civilians inside and Parks shuts the door, the lock now fully engaged so it closes with a solid click. The civilians are less enthusiastic than Parks was when they see the confined space and inhale its stale, spent air, but they’re not inclined to mount much of an argument. Truth is, the two women aren’t used to keeping up a quick march, and none of them – including Parks himself, unless you go back a while – are used to being outside of a fence as night comes on. They’re freaked and exhausted and starting at shadows. So is he, except that he does his freaking and starting mostly inside, so it doesn’t notice as much.
The only sticking point is the girl, which comes as no surprise. Parks suggests that she sleep in the church, and Justineau countersuggests that Parks go fuck himself. “Same point as before,” she tells him, getting all pissed off again, which he’s thinking now is pretty much Justineau’s default setting. And truth to tell, he likes it a lot. If you’re going to let yourself feel anythin
g at all, anger’s better than most of the alternatives. “Even if hungries were the only threat here,” she’s saying now, “all of this – all of it – is as strange to Melanie as it is to us. And as scary. We can’t leave her tied up in an empty building by herself all night.”
“Then stay out there with her,” Parks says.
Which has the desired effect of shutting Justineau up for a few seconds. Into that silence he states his manifesto. “We’ve got a long way to go, so we may as well lay down some ground rules now. You do what I say, when I say it, and you might reach Beacon with your arse still attached. If you keep behaving like you’ve got a right to an opinion, we’ll be dead before this time tomorrow.”
Justineau stares at him, speechless. He waits for the apology and the submission.
She holds out her hand. “Keys.”
Parks is perplexed. “Which keys? We don’t have any keys. The door was—”
“The keys to Melanie’s handcuffs,” Justineau says. “We’re leaving.”
“No,” Parks says, “you’re not.”
“What – you think we’re all your soldiers now, Sergeant Parks? Seriously?” All of a sudden she doesn’t even sound angry any more. She just sounds sourly amused. “We’re not. None of us are under your command, except for Private Parts over there. So that ‘come with me if you want to live’ bullshit doesn’t wash. I’d rather take my chances outside than fall in and trust my life to two hard-wired little soldier boys and a certifiable psychopath. Keys. Please. Let’s do this. You just said we’re a liability, so cut us loose.”
“Absolutely not!” Caldwell raps out. “I’ve already told you, Sergeant. The girl is part of my research. She belongs to me.”