by M. R. Carey
“Third and last, if you do get a hungry after you, then you don’t run. There’s no way you’re going to beat it, and you’ve got a better chance if you’re facing it head-on. Hit it with anything. Bullets, bricks, your bare hands, harsh language. If you’re lucky, you’ll bring it down. Leg and lower body shots improve your chances of getting lucky, unless it’s right in close. In which case, you go for the head so it’s got something to chew on besides you.”
He catches the eye of the hungry kid. She’s watching him as intently as the others, a frown of concentration on her dead pale face. Another time, Parks might have laughed. It’s a little bit like a cow listening to a recipe for beef stew.
“I’m assuming there’s a different rule for junkers,” Helen Justineau says.
Parks nods. “We run into those bastards again, we’ll hear them a long time before we see them. In which case we get the fuck off the road and we wait them out, same as last time. As long as they stay in convoy like that, we should be fine.”
Nobody’s got anything else to say about these instructions. They go on up to the road and head south, and for a good couple of hours they walk in complete silence.
It’s a glorious summer day, quickly becoming uncomfortably hot as the sun climbs up the sky. A wind rises and falls fitfully, but it doesn’t do much to cool them. Worried by their profuse sweating and what it might bring down on them, Parks makes them stop and apply another layer of e-blocker to all the places that need it. Most of those places are underneath their clothes. They turn away from each other by unspoken agreement, forming the vertices of a square at whose centre the hungry kid stands silent, staring not at the grown-ups – the humans – but at the burning spotlight of the sun.
The e-blocker routine is basic but essential. Lay it on thick at crotch and armpits, elbows and the backs of knees. A little bit all over, and a quick-dissolving slimy lozenge of the stuff on your tongue. It’s not the sweat that matters; it’s mainly the pheromones. The hungries may not have enough brains left to see people as people, but they’re shit-hot when it comes to following a chemical gradient.
They move on again. Justineau and the hungry kid walk side by side, the leash slack between them. Caldwell walks behind the two of them, most of the time, with her hands either loose at her sides or crossed against her chest. Gallagher takes the rear position, while Parks himself is on point.
Around about noon, they see something on the road ahead of them. It’s just a dark blob at first – not moving, so Parks doesn’t flag it up immediately as a danger. But he gestures to them to spread out as they approach it. He’s mindful of how easy they are to see on the empty road, the only moving things in a landscape like a still photo.
It’s a car. It sits dead centre in the road, but skewed slightly, its nose tilting into what used to be the slow lane. The bonnet is up, the boot likewise, and the four doors are all open. It’s not rusted, or burned out. Chances are it hasn’t been there very long.
Parks has the others hang back, circles it by himself. It looks empty at first glance, but as he comes around the driver’s side he glimpses something in the back seat that looks vaguely human. The rest of the way he’s got his gun in his hand and he’s hair-trigger, ready to unload on anything that moves.
Nothing moves. The dark, hunched shape used to belong to the species Homo sapiens, but it’s nothing very much now. You can tell that it was a man, because of his jacket and because of his face, which is mostly intact. The rest of the flesh of his upper body has been eaten away, the head all but detached by a massive apple-coring bite that’s been taken out of his throat. In the depths of that old, dry wound, nubs of bone or cartilage show.
Nobody else in the car. Nothing in the boot, apart from a battered pair of shoes and a coil of rope. Lots of stuff scattered on the road all around, though – bags and boxes, a rucksack, and something that looks like a games console or else part of a sound system.
The car tells its own story, as though it were a diorama in a museum. Group of like-minded people share a ride, going … somewhere. Somewhere up north. The car starts coughing or banging, or else it just stops. One of the gang gets out to take a look, throws up the bonnet, pronounces the car DOA. So they all start getting their stuff out of the boot. These lackwits can’t tell trash from treasure, but there’s nothing wrong with the instinct.
They were interrupted. Most of them dropped their shit and ran for the hills. One of them jumped back in the car, and maybe he saved the others by that action, because it looks like a lot more than one hungry partook of him.
“You try turning the key?” Justineau asks. Parks is really pissed off to see her walking right up to the car, even though he hasn’t signalled clear yet. But the woman’s not stupid; on reflection, Parks is aware that his body language changed as he walked around the car – from total threat-readiness to his still cautious but looser business-as-usual. She was just responding to that change a little faster than the others.
“You try it,” he suggests.
Justineau leans into the car, goes suddenly still as she sees its other occupant. But if she flinches from that sight, it’s only for a heartbeat. She reaches forward, and Parks hears a muted click as the key turns. The engine doesn’t make a sound. He didn’t really expect it to.
He’s looking off to both sides of the road now. There’s scrub and bushes to their right, a length of wooden hoarding on the left. Most likely the occupants of the car ran the obvious way, towards the bushes. No telling how far they got, but they didn’t come back for their stuff, or to bury their dead. Parks revises his earlier thought, that the sacrifice of the back-seat passenger saved the rest. It’s not likely that anyone walked away from this.
The others come up and join them, Gallagher last of all because he waits on Parks’ signal. Parks tells them to check the bags and boxes, but it’s mostly the kind of precious keepsakes that only mattered to their former owners. Not even clothes, but books and DVDs, letters and ornaments. The few items of food were perishable, and they’ve perished: withered apples, a rotten loaf, a bottle of whisky that shattered when the bag it was in hit the asphalt.
Justineau opens the rucksack. “Jesus Christ!” she mutters. She dips her hand in and brings out some of the contents. Money. Bundles of fifty-pound notes, bank-fresh in paper sleeves. Completely useless. Twenty-some years after the world went down the toilet, someone still thought it was coming back – that there would come a day when money would mean something again.
“Triumph of hope over experience,” Parks observes.
“Nostalgia,” Dr Caldwell says categorically. “The psychological comfort outweighs the logical objections. Everybody needs a security blanket.”
Only idiots, Parks thinks. Personally, he tends to see security in much less abstract terms.
Gallagher looks from one of them to the other, not sure what’s going on. He’s too young to remember money. Justineau starts in on an explanation, then shakes her head and gives it up. “Why would I ruin your innocence?” she says.
“There were one hundred pence in a pound,” the hungry kid says. “But only after the fifteenth of February 1971. Before that, there were two hundred and forty pence in the pound, but they didn’t say pence. They said pennies.”
Justineau laughs. “Very good, Melanie.” She tears the sleeve from one of the bundles of money, fans out the notes and throws them into the air. “Pennies from heaven,” she says as they blow away on the hot wind. The hungry kid smiles, as though the cascade of waste paper is a firework display. She squints into the sun to follow them as they fly.
32
They make, Caroline Caldwell supposes, good progress.
It’s hard for her to tell, though, because her time sense is slightly skewed by two extraneous factors. The first factor is a fever that has been rising in her since the evening of the previous day. The second factor is that she allowed herself to become dehydrated as they walked, exacerbating the effects of the first factor.
She watche
s her own sickness at one remove, not because her scientific vocation conditions everything she does, but because being at one remove actually seems to help. She can observe the sick tiredness of her limbs, identify the ache in her head occasioned by the tiny but repeated jolts of her feet on the asphalt – and still keep moving without a break, because these are purely physiological things, without any bearing in the end on what her mind does.
Which is to turn old questions over and over in the light of new evidence.
She’s read many detailed accounts of the hungries’ feeding, but never observed it at first hand (the feeding of the test subjects, under artificial and controlled conditions, was an entirely different thing). She finds it striking that the hungries who fed on the man in the car continued to eat until his body was non-viable – until there was almost no flesh left on his upper torso and he had been virtually decapitated.
This is counterintuitive. Caldwell would have expected the hungry pathogen to be better adapted. She would have expected Ophiocordyceps to manipulate the cells of the host’s hypothalamus more skilfully, suppressing the hunger drive after the first few bites so that the newly infected have a robust chance of survival. That would obviously be far more efficient, since a viable new host will become a new vector in its turn, providing increased opportunities for the pathogen to multiply quickly within a given ecological range.
Perhaps it’s a side effect of that very slow maturing: the fact that this strain of Ophiocordyceps never reaches its final, sexually seeding stage, but instead reproduces neotenously by asexual budding in the favourable environment of blood or saliva. Logically, you’d expect this to impede the spread of favourable mutations.
Something to consider in the next round of dissections. Examine the cells of the hypothalamus more closely. Look for differential levels of penetration by fungal mycelia.
A mile out of Stevenage – close enough to see the roofs of the houses and the blue-slated spire of a church – Sergeant Parks gives the order to stop. He turns to them and tells them what’s going to happen next, pointing at the sky as an unimpeachable witness. “Sun’s going down inside the next two hours. Could be those junkers are still looking for us, but either way we need a place to hole up for the night, and this is it. Gallagher and I will go in and disinfect, as far as that’s needed. Then we’ll come back and get you. Okay?”
Not okay, very obviously. Caldwell can see from Justineau’s face that it’s not okay for her either, but she chooses to make the point herself because she knows she’ll make it more clearly and succinctly.
“This isn’t going to work,” she tells Parks.
“It is if you do as you’re told.”
Caldwell gestures, cupping the fingers of her hand as though she’s holding the man’s words up for inspection. The tips of her fingers tingle unpleasantly. “That’s exactly why it isn’t going to work,” she says. “Because you’re seeing us purely as civilians, with yourself and Private Gallagher as our military escort. In trying to take all the risk on to yourself, you’re actually increasing the risk to all of us.”
Parks gives her a cold look. “Assessing risk is part of what I do,” he tells her.
She’s about to explain to him why his assessment is flawed, but Helen Justineau breaks in now, pre-empting her reply. “She’s right, Sergeant. We’re about to move into a built-up area, where we can expect to find a lot more hungries, at every stage of infection. It’s dangerous ground – we won’t know how dangerous until we’re in it. So what kind of sense does it make for you to cross it three times? You have to go out and do your reconnaissance, then come back here to collect us, then go in again. And what happens to us if those junkers turn up again while you’re gone? We wouldn’t last a second out here in the open. It’s got to be better if we go in with you.”
Parks chews on this for a good few seconds. But Caldwell knows him well enough to be confident of his answer. It’s not in his repertoire to say no to something just because somebody else thought of it. She and Justineau are right, and that’s all there is to it.
“Okay,” he says at last. “But the two of you have never done this before, so you’d damn well better follow my lead. Come to think of it,” he glances across at the private, “did you ever do a Hitchin run, Gallagher?”
The private shakes his head.
Parks puffs out his breath like a man about to bend down and lift a heavy load. “Okay. Road rules still apply – especially the one about keeping your mouths shut – but this is going to be different. We’re almost bound to see hungries, and to be in their line of sight. What you want to do is not trigger them. Move slowly and smoothly. Don’t look them directly in the eye. Don’t make any loud or sudden noises. As far as you can, you blend into the landscape. If in doubt, look at me and take your cue from me.”
Once he’s said his piece, he walks on. He doesn’t waste any more words or any more time. Caldwell approves of that.
Twenty minutes later, they’re coming level with the first buildings. Nobody has sighted any hungries yet, but it’s early days. Parks issues whispered commands, and they all stop. The four uninfected humans anoint themselves with e-blocker again.
They head on into town, staying in a tight cluster so that none of them presents a clear and unambiguous human silhouette. These are residential streets, upmarket once, now gone to semi-ruin through a hectic month or so of looting and urban warfare followed by two decades of neglect. The gardens are small pockets of jungle that have broken their borders to colonise parts of the street. Waist-high weeds have smashed and grabbed their way up between tilted flagstones, mature brambles throwing up fist-thick stalks like the tentacles of subterranean monsters. But the shallowness of the soil underneath the pavement has stopped them from uniting their forces and throwing down the houses once and for all. There’s a precarious balance of power.
Parks has already told them what he’s looking for. Not a house on a street like this, with neighbours on all sides. That would be too difficult to secure. He wants a detached structure standing in its own grounds, with reasonable lines of sight at least out of the upstairs windows, and ideally with the doors intact. He has realistic expectations, though, and he’ll take anything that’s broadly okay if it means not going too deeply into the town.
But there’s nothing he likes here, so they move on.
Five minutes later, keeping up their intent and silent stroll, they come into a wider road into which several streets feed. There’s an arcade of shops here. The road surface is crunchy with shattered glass, all the shopfronts broken into and ransacked by looters of a bygone era. Empty tin cans on the ground, rusted to the thinness and delicacy of shells, roll and rattle when the wind comes up a little.
And there are hungries.
Perhaps a dozen of them, widely scattered.
The party of living humans comes to a halt when they see them, only Parks remembering to slow his steps gradually rather than going straight from motion into stillness.
Caldwell is fascinated. She turns her head slowly to examine each of the hungries in turn.
They’re a mix of old and new. The older ones can be identified very easily both by their mouldering clothing and by their extreme gauntness. When a hungry feeds, it also feeds the pathogen within it. But if prey can’t be found, Ophiocordyceps will draw its nutrients directly from the flesh of the host.
Closer to, she can also see the mottled colouring on the older ones. Grey threads have broken the leathery surface of their skin in a network of fine lines, crossing and re-crossing like veins. The whites of the eyes are grey too, and if the hungry’s mouth is open you can see a fuzz of grey on the tongue.
The newer hungries are dressed more nattily – or at least their clothes have had less time to rot – and they still have a broadly human appearance. Paradoxically, that makes them a lot more unpleasant to look at, because the wounds and torn flesh through which they contracted the infection in the first place are clearly visible. On an older hungry, the general
bleaching and weathering of the skin surface and clothing, along with the overlay of grey mycelia, softens and disguises the wounds; makes something more architectural out of them.
The hungries are in their stationary mode, which is why Caldwell can get away with this unhurried inspection. They stand or sit or kneel at random points along the length of the road, completely motionless, their eyes on nothing and their arms mostly dangling at their sides or – if they’re sitting – folded in their laps.
They look like they’re posing for paintings, or sunk into such deep introspection that they’ve forgotten what it was they were meant to be doing. Not like they’re waiting; not like a single sound or movement out of place would wake them and launch them into instant motion.
Parks raises his hand, waves the party on with a slow sweep of his arm. The movement serves both as a command and as a reminder of the unhurried pace they need to keep up. The sergeant leads the way, his rifle ready in his hands but pointed at the ground. His gaze is on the ground too for a lot of the time. He scans the visual field with quick, darting glances, his eyes the only part of him at odds with his slow, shambling stride. Caldwell recalls belatedly the hypothesis that hungries retain the rudimentary pattern recognition that all babies are born with – that they’re capable of identifying a human face, and respond to it by slipping into a slightly heightened mode of arousal and awareness. Her own researches have failed either to confirm or to refute this, but she is prepared to accept that it might be true for all but the most severely decayed.
So they avoid the eyes of the hungries as they shuffle on down the high street. They look at each other, at the gaping shop windows, at the road ahead or at the sky, letting the macabre still-life figures hover in their peripheral vision.
Except for the test subject. Melanie doesn’t seem to be able to look away from her larger counterparts even for a moment; she stares at them as though they exert a hypnotic fascination, almost tripping at one point because she’s not looking where she’s going.