The Boy on the Bridge

by M. R. Carey

  Greaves finds the prospect of his own non-existence fascinating and dizzying. While he thinks about it, he becomes abnormally preoccupied. The stream of sensory data that he is used to receiving and parsing continually goes unanalysed for whole seconds at a time.

  Movement in the middle distance pulls him out of this self-absorbed spiral with an uncomfortable jolt. He has allowed himself to be surprised, a thing that he hates even when nothing is at stake.

  They come loping up the street from the river, heading his way: the wild dogs he saw earlier, or another similar pack. In that first glimpse, Greaves thinks they must be hunting him, but he quickly sees that he’s wrong. Their heads are down, and their flanks heave with panting breaths. Some of them are limping.

  Behind them come the children. A dozen of them, then twenty, then more than he can easily count in the bad light. The youngest look to Greaves to be around three or four, the oldest no more than ten. Like the girl from this morning, they are fantastically dressed. Some are wearing adult clothes: T-shirts that hang as low as skirts, hoodies and knitted sweaters with the sleeves rolled back or ripped away. Others are naked, or else they’re dressed in things that aren’t technically clothes at all, random scraps of cloth and leather scavenged and repurposed. Their feet are bare. Their faces are painted, as the girl’s was: a horizontal line across the forehead, a vertical one down the centre of the face. Some of them carry weapons: knives, walking sticks, hammers, trowels, in one case what looks like the metal shaft from the centre of an umbrella.

  The dogs are not the hunters here: they are the prey. They are being driven. And the children don’t hunt as the hungries do, which is by running full at the thing they want to eat. They work in a coordinated way, fanning out into a broad semi-circle to keep the dogs penned in as they run, to control and corral them. Some, though, mostly the youngest, seem to have no part to play in the hunt: they run alongside the others but further out and make no movement to close the distance.

  The dogs are used to being on the other side of this equation. They’re cowed and terrified. Their gait is faltering. They stumble, cringe, duck their heads in expectation of an imminent attack. Greaves guesses that this chase has gone on for some time and is nearing its end.

  It is nearing Greaves, too, not to mention the hungries he has been watching up to now. The hungries respond to the oncoming flurry of movement, all at once waking from their torpor and running forward. And now Greaves sees that the younger children at the periphery do have a reason for being there. Most of them are carrying long sticks, branches and knobkerries and the handles of brooms, which they use to trip the hungries so that they can’t interfere with the work in progress. In some cases, when a hungry refuses to stay down, two or three of the children jump on it together, pinning it to the ground. One or other of them then draws a knife and expertly hamstrings the hungry. The children run on without a sound, leaving the hungry flailing spasmodically in the dirt.

  The children seem to be all but invisible to the hungries. Their movements can trigger a response, a running charge, but up close the hungries seem to lose track of them altogether. They’re not acknowledged either as threat or as food!

  Greaves looks for the red-haired girl from the water-testing plant, and finds her—easily identifiable by the livid scar across her face. She is in the vanguard, leading the hunt. She brings one of the dogs down herself, almost at his feet. Greaves knows from earlier experience what she is capable of but even so he is awed at the flying leap that lands her on the dog’s back. She bears it down, strong arms locking on its neck to twist its head around, and she is the first to feed on it once it falls. The dog gives a single high-pitched yip, which ends abruptly as her teeth close in its throat.

  But she’s not greedy. Some smaller children run to share the feast and she steps back at once, leaving them to it. Her chin is awash with blood. She wipes it with the back of her hand, then licks at her knuckles absently as she stares around her.

  By this time, two more dogs are down. Everyone is eating. The girl seems satisfied with this, like a hostess who has done her best and is glad to see her efforts appreciated.

  A small detail catches her attention. She pulls an older boy away from one of the three kills to allow a skeletally thin girl half his age a space at the dinner table. The boy glares at her, utters a long and inflected growl, but doesn’t press the point. He is an outlandish figure, even in this company. His blond hair has been hacked away from the sides of his head leaving a soft, unruly mohawk stripe down the centre. Splashes of black paint around his eyes make their whites stand out with the vividness of shattered porcelain, and he has drawn vertical white lines like the teeth of a skull around his real mouth, turning it into a perpetual grimace even when it’s closed.

  Greaves is enthralled by all this, so excited it’s all he can do to make himself breathe. The children shift in his mind, semiotically adrift. They are hungries, but not hungries. They have the feeding urge that defines the condition, the preternatural strength and speed, but they are social beings with some degree of intelligence. Cordyceps wipes the mind like a slate and then writes on it the single word: FEED. As a hungry, your mental landscape is blindingly simple. In the presence of food, you eat. When it’s absent, you shut down and wait.

  So the children, as he thought when he first saw the girl, as he has been hoping ever since, are something new. Something unprecedented. They have found a middle ground that was never there before. He needs (oh, he needs so very badly) to find out what that middle ground is.

  The meal is short. The metabolism of a hungry is highly efficient, needing only a small and occasional intake of live protein to survive. One by one, the children eat their fill and then relinquish their place. The scarred girl kneels and eats a second time, from a different carcase, perhaps to reinforce her status. Around her the children gesture and murmur. Greaves has no doubt whatsoever that this is language: after-dinner conversation is flowing, and the mood is mellow.

  He is so rapt in his observations he has forgotten that he wasn’t invited to this feast. But he is reminded of the fact, forcibly, when he sees that one of the children—the blond boy who was displaced when the girl thought he had had his fair share—is staring at him. Has been staring for some time, but his hooded eyes have become lost in the broad black smear of his war paint so that Greaves isn’t conscious of the gaze until the boy turns his head to face him directly.

  Greaves feels an urge to freeze on the spot, but he has already been frozen all this time. He has honed his stillness, with long practice, to perfection. The suit holds in his heat and his smell. He can’t think of any signal he has let slip that might have given him away.

  But then again, he realises as the boy takes a step towards him, that logic only applies to hungries. It wouldn’t hold with a human child of any age. In the heat-control suit, he is an outlandish sight, and part of the basic equipment of human beings is curiosity—the desire to test out the immediate environment and come to an understanding of it.

  He has assumed that the children will react like hungries rather than like people. He has underestimated them, and he is about to die for it.

  The boy advances, pauses, advances again. He is about ten feet away now. He tilts his head on one side as he studies Greaves in his strange get-up, his face hidden by a featureless mask, his kit bag dangling from his shoulder like an ornament on a Christmas tree.

  (A stray memory intrudes: brightly wrapped parcels under the tree at home in Witley, before home became a complex abstraction best represented by the face of Dr. Khan. It was the best Christmas ever, because one of those parcels held Captain Power. Greaves suppresses the chain of ideas. He wants to live, and that will take full concentration.)

  The boy takes another step. Other children are following him, but cautiously and at a distance. They have no idea what Greaves might be. He doesn’t smell like food, clearly. He might be taken for a hungry but then he didn’t come running when the dogs passed by. The odd paraph
ernalia hung about him invite exploration.

  He wonders how far he would get if he ran. Not far at all, he thinks. Even without the encumbrance of the suit he would be slower than the children. If running served any purpose at all, it would probably be to end any ambiguity about what he is. The dogs ran, and the dogs were food. It’s a short chain of reasoning with a warm meal at the end of it.

  The boy raises his hand and reaches out.

  The scarred girl is suddenly in his way, crossing in front of him to examine Greaves from right up close. Then from closer still. She takes two steps and thrusts her face up against his, standing on tiptoe.

  Through the micro-pore mesh she stares into Greaves’ eyes.

  Greaves experiences a curious dislocation. If anyone from Rosie’s crew, anyone from Beacon were doing this he would flinch away violently from the imposed intimacy. He would hate it. A child’s gaze would be less unsettling than an adult’s, but only fractionally.

  The only thing that makes this bearable is that the girl is still uncategorised in his mind. There is no defined place in his highly organised mental landscape where he can set her down and feel that she fits. She might be nobody, devoid of meaning or value. But it doesn’t feel like that. If anything, it feels like the opposite. She is supercharged with potential meanings, none of which can be subtracted until he knows her better.

  The skull-faced boy is carrying a carpenter’s claw hammer with a black rubber grip and a head that still shines in places through a thick crusting of old blood. He tilts it to the vertical, pressing the spread fingers of his left hand lightly against the upper end of the shaft as though he is bringing some finely tuned piece of equipment into perfect alignment.

  Greaves improvises. He raises his hands (bringing a grunt of astonishment from all the children) and performs the pass and re-pass from his magic trick. The girl’s eyes widen, then narrow.

  There is nothing in his hands. Nothing up his sleeve. Nothing between him and death except the hope that she might remember.

  “We need to go to light speed,” he says, imitating the captain’s inflection exactly. But his voice is muffled by the material of the suit and he is not, at the end of the day, the hero of the spaceways, the galactic engineer.

  The boy raises the hammer. He grimaces, not with effort but with the anticipation of effort. He steps up level with the girl.

  She thrusts him aside, without ceremony. Over his squeal of reproach and outrage, she speaks a single syllable. There are no consonants in the sound she makes, but there is plenty of authority. She is still staring at Greaves, barely acknowledging the skull-faced boy. The boy accepts the command or the rebuke, whatever it was. He steps back, ducking his head in abasement. There is a grimace on his face, as though his submission is something sour that he can taste.

  The girl speaks again. She turns from Greaves, but gives him one final, sidelong glance. Her hands move, imitating the pass and re-pass. Then she steps away from him, very deliberately, and signals to the other children to follow her.

  Nothing to see here. Let’s go.

  They move away quickly, walking between or over the still-twitching bodies of the hungries they felled in the hunt.

  The street is like a battlefield. And Greaves is a casualty, though he hasn’t been touched. The girl’s gaze bored a hole in him, through armour much older and much, much thicker than the heat dispersal suit. Her mercy twisted the knife. He stands in some relation to her, and he doesn’t know what it is.

  Also he is going to die, even without the children’s intervention. His body is burning up in the suit. He won’t get back to Rosie or even out of the town before he collapses. He has a few minutes at best.

  The solution comes to him—as solutions often do—in the form of a memory. Bath night. His mother testing the water in his yellow plastic baby bath with her elbow, to make sure he won’t be scalded. She wears her own face this time, not Dr. Khan’s. She murmurs something to him that he can no longer reconstruct. His verbal memory is only accurate for memories after he reached the age of seven months, when he first began to extract actual meanings from the soundscape around him.

  But the words don’t matter here. The water does.

  Greaves staggers across the street and into one of the side alleys that lead down to the river’s edge.

  A minute later, he is on his hands and knees in the shallows of the swift-flowing Moriston, his upper body bowed so that the flood breaks over his shoulders. The ice-cold water cools him and then chills him. Saves him from his own bad design.

  But the girl saved him first.

  15

  By the time Greaves gets back to Rosie, it is almost morning. Private Sixsmith, standing guard inside the airlock, is astonished and more than a little alarmed to see him looming out of the pre-dawn shadows to stand on the threshold like bad news.

  But at least she recognises him. Greaves has removed the suit for his final approach, presenting himself in his regulation olive-drab uniform. He’s hoping that will be enough to shield him from comment, but he is saturated with sweat, shivering, exhausted. Sixsmith gives him a hard, quizzical stare as she opens the airlock doors and lets him in.

  “What the fuck have you been up to?” she demands.

  Checking the motion sensors, Greaves thinks. It might be a serviceable lie if he could say it aloud, but he can’t because it isn’t true. He only shrugs.

  Sixsmith shakes her head, as though his idiocy and waywardness make her sad, but she doesn’t press the point. “Well, nobody else is up,” she mutters. “You’ve bloody well got away with it again, you mad bastard.” Greaves nods and says thank you. He wonders if Sixsmith knows that he waited in the dark for an hour to emerge as soon as her turn on watch began, preferring her over the much more uncertain quantity of Private Phillips.

  Maybe she’s figured that out, because she doesn’t take the thanks kindly. “Just get inside,” she says. “And take a shower. You stink.”

  And he takes her advice, recognising that she is right. Greaves is fastidious about his own body odour, thinking of smell as a kind of long-distance touch, unsolicited but unavoidable. He rubs the carbolic acid soap over his body until he is covered from neck to toe in stinging, prickling lather. When he washes it off, his skin is furious red, but that’s a guarantee that he is clean.

  By the time he is finished in the shower, the rest of the science team are awake and queuing for their own turn, along with Privates Lutes and Phillips and Lance-Bombardier Foss. The rainfall has been high since they came north into Scotland so showers aren’t rationed quite as strictly as they used to be. The crew are making hay while the sun fails to shine.

  Greaves goes about the rest of his waking-up ritual, in spite of the fact that he hasn’t been asleep. It’s not just to forestall questions. He needs to do it because each day has a shape and the waking-up ritual is one of its load-bearing components.

  He brushes his teeth and shaves at the fold-out sink in the crew quarters, then goes back to his bunk to dress behind closed curtains. Though they are all routinely naked in each other’s presence, dressing is for Greaves a very private thing. The most private part of it is when he puts on the watch that Rina gave him when he won his place on Rosie’s roster. It belonged to Rina’s younger brother, Simon, who was in America when the Breakdown happened and never made it home. Greaves wears the watch every day, the strap’s loose grip augmented with an elastic band because Simon had a considerably thicker wrist than his own.

  The captain’s voice box is a part of the ritual, too. Greaves pulls the string and listens to what Captain Power has to say to him. Nobody knows that he does this, not even Rina. He would feel foolish explaining it, because it is far from being a rational act. The captain’s words have no bearing on the events that will take place as the day goes on. Greaves doesn’t take them as advice, or prophecy. It’s just part of dressing. When he was younger, he would sometimes ask the captain what to do in a difficult situation, playing both sides of the conversatio
n, giving the advice as the captain and listening to it as himself. He hasn’t done that since he was thirteen, hasn’t needed to. But hearing the captain’s voice is like putting on a little of the captain’s strength, the captain’s courage.

  Today the scratchy, rumbling voice declares, “We’ve broken through into another universe!”

  You’re right, Captain. We have.

  Greaves goes to Dr. Fournier and tells him that he wants to be included in today’s work party. The science team is going into Invercrae and he wants to be with them. He hopes that Dr. Fournier will not ask him why. There are so many reasons, and none of them have anything to do with the day’s scheduled work.

  Dr. Fournier is reluctant. “I thought you were happier pursuing your own research, Stephen,” he says. “With the rest of the team in the field, you’ll have access to the lab for once. Besides, today’s cull will be in a built-up area, which makes it a great deal more dangerous.”

  “And I’ll just be one more thing to worry about,” Greaves supplies. “Yes, I know. I’m sorry, Dr. Fournier. I am very happy doing my own thing, and I know the rest of the team will be more comfortable if I’m not there.” That’s even true of Rina, he thinks: when he’s there she worries about him. He steels himself for the next sentence. He’s going to tell the truth, of course, but because of what he is omitting he will be skirting the black hole of a lie. “But today I need to take some observations of my own.”

  “Observations of what?” Dr. Fournier demands.

  Greaves swallows. Braces himself. Gets it out with some difficulty. “Of outlying activity. I’m looking for … hungries who don’t entirely fit the behaviour profiles we’ve seen so far. Anomalous patterns.”