by M. R. Carey
“Good day’s work, Stephen?”
“Not too bad, Dr. Khan. Thank you.”
“You’re very welcome.”
“Did you enjoy your walk?”
“Very much. It’s a lovely day out there. You should take a stroll yourself before the sun goes in.”
She disentangles herself delicately, first from John and then from Stephen, and now she’s free and clear. The colonel is up in the cockpit. The rest of the crew have their own shit to deal with and no wish to get mixed up in hers.
Khan goes into the shower, since Phillips has already grabbed the latrine. She locks herself in and undresses quickly. Her body is slick with sweat but there is no smell apart from the slightly bitter tang of e-blocker. If there had been, of course, she would have found out about it before now.
One by one she unwraps the three packages, stowing the wrappers in her pockets. The boxes, folded down tight and small, follow. In each package is a flimsy plastic wand. The designs are slightly different, but each wand has a window halfway along its length and a thickening at one end to show where you’re supposed to grip it.
Squatting on the floor of the shower, legs slightly parted, she does what needs to be done.
The chemistry is straightforward, and close to infallible. Anti-hCG globulin is extremely reactive to certain human hormones, including the hormone gonadotrophin. Properly prepared, it will change colour in the hormone’s presence.
And the hormone is present in a woman’s urine. Sometimes.
Having peed on the business end of the three wands, she waits in silence, watching the three little windows. A negative result will tell her very little. The protein layer on the prepared strip inside the wands may have degraded too far to catalyse. A positive, on the other hand, will mean what it always meant.
Khan gets the hat trick.
Mixed emotions rise in her as she stares at these messages from her own uncharted interior, a high tide of wonder and dismay and disbelief and misery in which hope bobs like a lifeboat cut adrift.
Seven weeks into a fifteen-month mission, ten years after the world ended and a hundred miles from home, Dr. Samrina Khan is pregnant.
But this is not Bethlehem, and there will be no manger.
2
There are twelve of them, but they break neatly into two groups of six.
The science team is headed by Dr. Alan Fournier, the civilian commander with overall responsibility for the success of the mission. He is a thin, overly precise man with a habit of stopping in the middle of a sentence to get his thoughts in order. It’s an unfortunate habit to find in a leader, but to be fair nobody thinks of him as one.
The escort, comprising soldiers and officers of the Beacon Muster, is under the command of Colonel Isaac Carlisle, sometimes known as the Fireman because of his association with the offensive use of chemical incendiaries. He hates that name. He hated that mission. His feelings about this one are not on record.
In the science team, there are three men and two women:
Samrina Khan
Lucien Akimwe
John Sealey
Elaine Penny
Stephen Greaves
epidemiologist
chemist
biologist
biologist
nobody is entirely certain
In the escort, likewise, two women and three men:
Lt Daniel McQueen
Lance-Bombardier Kat Foss
Private Brendan Lutes
Private Paula Sixsmith
Private Gary Phillips
sniper and second in command
sniper
engineer
driver
quartermaster
The ruling bodies in Beacon, the civilian council called the Main Table and the Military Muster, did not choose their best or their brightest, though they made a great show of doing exactly that. What they actually did, or tried to do, was to strike a balance that gave them the most plausible shot at survival. A larger escort would have been possible simply by allocating more vehicles to the expedition, but every soldier sent out would have weakened Beacon’s own defences. McQueen and Foss, trained in the sniper corps, are elite soldiers and the hardest to spare. Their skill set is needed every day to thin out the hungries gathering at Beacon’s gates. The scientists are a different matter, but in their case too there are issues of day-to-day urgency to which their expertise could be applied. By sending them out, Beacon is making a commitment to the future. But it is a commitment filtered through a bed of pragmatism.
Twelve men and women in a great big armoured truck are not such a huge risk, when all is said and done. They carry a great many hopes and dreams with them, but if they should chance to be lost, their loss can be borne.
They know very well that they are expendable.
3
Seven weeks brought them to Luton. Seven months carry them on to Scotland.
The year is closing in on them, and so is everything else. The last of the good omens evaporated long ago. They have made no progress, no discoveries. Thousands of samples have been taken and tested, thousands more are still to come, but nobody on the science team believes any longer that there is any point. Each hides his or her resignation, cynicism or despair for the sake of the others, reduced to hoping now at second hand.
They have stayed close to the Charles Darwin’s course throughout, and they have succeeded in retrieving all but one of the specimen caches. The one they missed was on the Cairngorm plateau, close to the summit of the mountain Ben Macdhui, and it was Dr. Fournier who made the decision to leave it where it was. He claimed he was unwilling to risk Rosie on the steep slopes, but everyone translated Rosie in that sentence into my own arse. It’s a sign, either way, of imminent surrender.
The civilian and military commanders are simply not fit for purpose. They hate each other and they avoid the crew—the alternative being to force them to take sides. It falls to Lieutenant McQueen, most days, to organise the escort roster, and to Dr. Khan or Dr. Sealey to assign tasks for the sampling runs.
Khan is showing. There was a time when her pregnancy was ambiguous and deniable, should anyone have pressed her. That time is over now, and she will be pressed very soon.
And then there’s Greaves, though people wonder why. Who thought bringing a kid along on a mission like this was a good idea? When will Dr. Fournier formally remove him from the roster instead of working around his inadequacies?
When will they give up, and turn around?
When will this ever end?
That rhetorical question is still hanging in the air when their comms fail. The radio still seems to be operational but Beacon, their home and source, rationale and reference point, stops answering.
They’re on their own.
PART TWO
GESTATION
4
They deploy in three waves.
The grunts go first. That’s Lieutenant McQueen’s term, nobody else’s, a heavy-handed joke. The three privates pretend to think it’s funny but Dr. Khan is offended on their behalf. Lutes is the best engineer in Beacon. Sixsmith was a commercial pilot before the Breakdown and is as comfortable with wings as she is with wheels. Phillips has the perfect physique of a classical statue and can perform card tricks that still dazzle you after he explains how they’re done. There is nothing grunt-like about any of them.
They trot over the brow of the hill in a quick, broken stride. Fifty metres down, they dig in behind some gorse, which offers no protection at all but might diffuse their outlines a little from a distance. Something as small as that could make the difference between life and death.
“Clear,” Private Phillips says quietly. Sound carries a long way out here. There’s no need to shout and a lot of good reasons not to.
In the absence of Colonel Carlisle, McQueen is in command. He gestures—a circular wave of his arm, which is bent at the elbow, the hand pointing upwards. To Khan, maybe because Dr. Fournier’s three-wise-men analogy lodged deep
er in her brain than she would have liked, it looks as though he’s bearing witness to heaven.
But in fact the gesture is for the science team, and they go over next. Or rather two thirds of them do, comprising Dr. Khan, Elaine Penny, Lucien Akimwe and John Sealey. The remaining two members of the team are absent, recused from this day’s work: Alan Fournier, as the leader of the science team and the mission’s civilian commander, is above it. And he has left Stephen Greaves out of the day’s roster, not trusting him to play his part in a coordinated group action and knowing that the rest of the team (apart from Khan) don’t trust him either.
Khan feels that insult to Stephen more deeply than he feels it himself, but for the most part she is grateful for his absence. He’s still her boy, if not by blood then by something just as thick and just as binding. A part of her has never been able to relinquish the self-imposed responsibility of looking out for him. Also, although she wouldn’t admit it even to John Sealey, she’s keen to keep Stephen away from these culls because they’re such degrading and brutalising spectacles. The hungries may not be human any more but they still look like real people. To see them being mown like wheat turns her stomach, no matter what her brain asserts.
She tops the hill and scuffles down it on feet, hands and bum (leaving her dignity way behind her, but she’s not going to risk a fall at this point). Her passenger kicks a couple of times anyway, maybe to register a protest. Just before she gets in among the bushes she catches sight—out of the corner of her eye—of a cluster of hungries standing further down the slope. Sidelong is how you’re supposed to see them. The safest way. If you meet their gaze, they attack. If you move too fast, they attack. If you sweat through your e-blocker or God forbid break a fart while you’re out in the field, they follow the chemical gradient and attack.
But she’s safe at home plate now, with Phillips to one side of her and Sixsmith on the other, their rifles promising a refuge. Akimwe slides down right behind her, barely in control of his speed. His leg bumps her side and he is instantly appalled. “I’m sorry, Rina,” he mutters. “Please forgive me.”
Khan shakes her head to show it’s fine, she’s not bone china after all. But she wishes he would remember to take it more slowly. That descent might easily have been fast enough to register on the hungries’ perceptions, and if they start moving they won’t stop. They could be heading up here right now, heads down and arms dangling in the ugly swallow-dive run that puts their gaping jaws front and centre. But she tells herself that’s just her hind-brain talking. If there were any sign of a massed charge, Phillips and Sixsmith and Lutes would be firing and the whole team would be retreating back up the slope and all hell would be breaking loose.
It’s fine. It has to be fine.
Because here come the snipers, walking with no particular haste, their muscular grace making Khan feel ashamed to be so dusty and dishevelled and afraid. They come over the hill side by side as though they’re on a country ramble, just the two of them, their over-long M407s slung casually across their shoulders. The three privates always carry their rifles at the ready, but Lieutenant McQueen and Lance-Bombardier Foss flaunt their unreadiness, make a show of empty hands. And Kat Foss is almost as tall as the lieutenant, an elegant, long-limbed predator with cropped white hair like exhaled smoke—the only woman who has ever made Khan feel that her five feet and two inches might be less than adequate.
Once he’s level with them, McQueen whips them on to the task with a single word. “Targets.” The members of the science team, well conditioned, stick up their heads above the gorse flowers’ yellow exuberance. They must look like so many rabbits.
Triage. This is where they get to weigh souls against feathers, assuming there are any souls left in this valley besides their own. That’s a burning question, not a philosophical exercise: it keeps Khan awake at night.
She lets her eye travel the length of the valley. It’s breathtaking. A salt-and-pepper day where the sun breaks from cover and runs a little way before being swallowed up again in curdling banks of cumulus. A day where the threat of rain makes you revel in the dazzle when it comes. Cloud shadow drifts across the forested upper slopes, making it seem as though the whole vista is under water. Further down, light green meadows shelve towards the loch, which is as smooth as a mirror despite the bustle in the upper air.
Here and there in the broad valley, at every elevation and regardless of the terrain, human figures stand; their arms hanging at their sides, their heads mostly bowed at an angle on their necks. They stand up to their calves or knees in thistles, mud, bracken, water. They wear faded and ragged clothes made piebald by the rust of old bloodstains. They look for all the world like sleepwalkers about to wake up.
And that’s what they are, Khan thinks. Except that they won’t wake, ever. The human minds that once inhabited these carcases will slumber on for always. If they open their eyes, something else entirely will be looking out.
“Two over there,” Elaine says. “At the foot of the big rock. Lots of grey on both of them.”
“And another.” Sealey raises his hand—slowly, carefully—to point. “Same vector. Downslope. Good field of fire.”
Khan almost smiles. Vectors. Fields of fire. That’s how McQueen and Foss talk. John wants so much to play with the cool kids, but whatever he does or says he’ll always be a nerd rather than a lethal weapon. Her heart stirs a little, asserts itself inside her for his gentleness and for his trying too hard.
“I’m good with all three of those,” she says, and Akimwe nods. “Lots to work with,” he concurs.
The snipers kneel and set up their weapons. They don’t say a word, or waste a movement. Nobody else speaks either. This is their mystery and everybody knows not to step across its rituals and observances. For all she knows, Khan might be the only one in the whole team to feel any ambivalence about their free and easy attitude to killing. Possibly she’s an outlier when it comes to the practice of shedding blood.
Certainly she’s a hypocrite. When Foss and McQueen are done, she’ll go in and cut a slice or two from the chosen sacrifices. Different instruments, same agenda. She’s got no business mistaking this verdant hillside for the moral high ground. Particularly when she thinks about what’s waiting for her back at base once this expedition is over.
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. Which is faulty learning because it always comes.
“Why are there so many of them way out here?” Penny murmurs. “It’s so remote.” Her freckled face scrunches up, perplexity changing its topology as all emotions instantly do. She wears her heart most visibly of anyone in the crew except for Stephen, who of course has no disguises or defences at all.
“Look at their overalls,” Akimwe tells her. “Most of them were working at the water-testing station, up at the head of the loch. They were probably infected in a single incident.”
Khan tries not to think about how that might have gone down. One hungry finding its way into the big cement bunker. Biting the first man or woman it saw, passing on the infection. The two of them, all at once on the same team, wandering on through the corridors following the rich scents that led to fresh prey. Biting, infecting, recruiting. A lethal chain reaction that didn’t end until there was no one left in the building. No one without the pathogen in their system. No one still human and self-aware.
“From the water’s edge,” McQueen says. “Lead off.”
Foss is lying full length on the grass now, her neck pressed against the 407’s padded stock, her eye up against its sight. If she were standing up, it would look like the opening position of a hot tango.
She pulls back on the trigger. It’s a beckoning motion, not quick or sudden. The gun—wearing a phase-cancellation sound suppressor that would give a yearling stallion penis envy—makes a noise like a man spitting out a pip.
Down in the valley, half a second later, one of the standing figures—one of the chosen three—leans sideways, thrown off balance by having its right leg shattered at the knee. Th
en it topples headlong into the waters of the loch. Red-brown spray hangs in the air where it fell.
The sound of the splash reaches them a heartbeat later, a discreet whisper in the air. The hungries closest to the one that fell turn towards the sound and the movement, but neither of these stimuli is quite enough to push them from passive to active state.
McQueen goes next. His shooting stance is up on one knee, spurning the extra stability of the rifle’s bipod support. He fires, and the second target is punched backwards off its feet. The bullet has gone through the centre of its pelvis, effectively immobilising it. It lies where it fell, not even twitching. Only its head moves, its eyes roving as if to seek the source of the shot that dropped it.
Foss takes out the third and last of the chosen ones, then the two snipers switch out their magazines to clear the area around the fallen.
The aim, first and foremost, is to avoid a stampede. If the hungries run—and when one runs, they all will—they will trample the ones already down, who have been chosen for sampling. There would be no use in trying to take tissue samples from the resulting slurry of flesh and bone. So radically invasive hollow-point—RIH for short—is the order of the day. These are flechette bullets, breaking up inside the body to pulp everything in their path. Every shot is a kill. As though he’s forgotten this, McQueen goes for the head shot every time. And every time he makes it.
The man and the woman work to a rapid rhythm, each of them pulling back the bolt to eject the spent cartridge and slamming it home again while the other aims and fires. When in due course they empty their magazines (limited to five bullets so as not to throw off the rifles’ exquisite balance), the reloading barely creates a pause in the syncopated carnage.