The Boy on the Bridge

by M. R. Carey

  The civilian commander shakes his head. “Stephen, there are no outliers. No anomalies. If there were we would have found them by now.”

  “I think …” Greaves tries. “I’m not sure. Some of my recent findings …”

  Left to himself, he would blunder into a full confession. Fortunately Dr. Fournier breaks in before that happens. “We’re only going to have two or three more sampling runs at most,” he says. “Invercrae. Then Lairg. Then Thurso. By all means come along today if you want to help. But if you come, I’ll require you to stick to the agenda we’ve already worked out. No wandering off on your own. Understood?”

  Greaves is frowning in concentration. He has been sieving the doctor’s speech, breaking it up into grammatical and semantic and intentional units, hoping to find some room for manoeuvre. He is close to despair until the last word—which is functionally a question—saves him.

  “Yes!” he blurts, fists clenched to hold back whatever other words might rise in his throat. “I understand, Dr. Fournier.”

  Fournier gives him a pained and worried stare. “All right then,” he says. “I’m going to deliver a final mission briefing in thirty minutes. Dr. Sealey will give you your sample kit and tell you what to collect. Please do exactly as you’re told, even if you can’t always see the reason for it. There’s no time for debate out in the field. You just have to accept that the soldiers and the rest of the team know what they’re doing and that there’s a reason for everything that happens.”

  Greaves can find no answer to this. He can see that determinism might be very comforting as a philosophical position, but he doesn’t feel that it maps very well onto individual human actions. If everyone always knows what they’re doing and acts in a perfectly rational way, how did most of world history happen? As an alternative to saying anything at all, he nods—which is really just saying “I understand” again—and retreats quickly.

  The other members of the science team are assembling equipment and conducting a big, rowdy conversation with lots of interruptions—the kind of unfocused discussion that Greaves hates, because it’s hard to know which thread to follow through the babble of competing voices. At the best of times, that’s hard for him to deal with. Now, having come so close to telling an outright lie to Dr. Fournier, he is in far too delicate a state to bear the slings and arrows of light conversation.

  He goes out onto the mid-section platform instead and, finding the turret free, climbs up there to be out of sight and alone. He feels safe now to tell the empty air what he should have said to Dr. Fournier. “I want to go into the town because there are children there who I need to study,” he whispers. “Infected children, almost certainly, because they hunt and eat like hungries. But in other ways their actions are closer to the normal human repertoire. They seem to still be able to think. If it’s possible to be infected and retain some degree of consciousness and self-awareness …”

  He doesn’t finish the sentence. The possibilities proliferate and make him mute. The prospect of a cure for the hungry pathogen has become remote. Cordyceps grows into and through nerve tissue so quickly that there is no way of eradicating it without destroying the host’s nervous system. A “cure” like that might get you a clean bill of health but you’d be a quadriplegic vegetable. But if Greaves is right about the children—and if he gets some samples to work with—he might be able to produce a vaccine that mediates or even negates the pathogen’s effects.

  There’s more, though. And as with his notebook, Greaves is aware of the currents of thought riding above and below the main signal.

  Above:

  The girl. She saved his life, stopped the skull-faced boy from splitting him with the hammer. Now the science team is doing a cull, right where she lives. Where the children live. What happens if they meet? What good are hammers and sharpened sticks against hollow-point ammunition?

  Below:

  Everyone? Everyone always knows what they’re doing, except for him? No. That’s simply not true. He sees more than anyone thinks. More than anyone else does, because he knows how to interpolate and extrapolate and he never stops looking or listening even if they think he does.

  He knows that Dr. Fournier has a radio that’s all his own and that nobody else has been told about. He has heard Fournier talking late in the night when the rest of the crew are asleep, and afterwards he searched for and found the fake panel in the engine room where the radio is kept.

  He knows that Dr. Fournier and Colonel Carlisle are not friends or allies. On both sides there’s wariness and mistrust, a split that has prevented the mission team from ever really becoming a team in more than name.

  He knows that Lieutenant McQueen dislikes the colonel. A lot.

  He knows that Beacon, when they left, was changing—shifting from one state to another, like milk when the bacteria suspended in it processes its molecules into lactic acid. Beacon was souring into something new and frightening.

  He knows that John Sealey is the father of Rina’s baby, and that he is scared of it being born.

  They think he doesn’t understand. That he can’t see.

  They can’t see him.

  16

  The civilian commander’s briefing is a waste of time, but that’s fine. Everybody knows what to expect and nobody is listening. Fournier has taken over the lab, though, so actual preparation for the sampling run has had to stop. Bureaucracy must have its way.

  Dr. Khan is performing a mental sum involving times and distances and dates. She feels the taut fullness of her lower body very acutely, where even a month ago she could pretend there was nothing there. Her back just twinged as she sat down. In many different ways, the baby is announcing itself. Starting the drumroll that will end when Khan screams and sends it out to meet the world.

  “Urban environments present unique threat profiles,” Dr. Fournier is saying, as though this is the first town they’ve encountered rather than the twentieth. He’s right, of course, but they don’t need to be told. Or if they do, it ought to be one of the soldiers who does the telling. They’re the ones who take the weight of those extra risks. Especially the snipers, who in a stampede situation will have to rely on the grunts with their automatic rifles to pull their irons out of the fire. Dropping one hungry at a time doesn’t count for much when there are two or three hundred running at you.

  “Lines of sight become problematic in a heavily built-up area,” Fournier is saying now, “and exit strategies even more so. Lieutenant McQueen is responsible for your safety in the field, but he can only keep you safe if you do what he tells you to do in all circumstances. You should already have memorised the street maps he has provided, but keep them with you nonetheless. Anything else, Lieutenant?”

  McQueen has been leaning against one of the work surfaces, his elbow resting on the main centrifuge. He comes erect now, with something of languor in his movements. You can lead him to water, he seems to say, but he’ll drink in his own good time.

  “Only the obvious,” he says. “If you’re separated from the main party, you go to ground. Find some height if you can. There’s always more hungry activity at street level. Radio in and we’ll come and get you. Don’t strike out on your own because that’s the best way to get killed.

  “Everyone should refresh their e-blocker before stepping out of the airlock, and again at one-hour intervals. If you break into a sweat, give yourself a top-up right there and then. Don’t wait until the hungries start to compliment you on your rich bouquet.

  “As far as the firing goes, usual drill pertains: you choose; we shoot. Once we start to shoot, you stay absolutely still. I don’t want anyone ambling into our sights and messing up the clearance. You don’t want that either. Any questions?”

  There are no questions.

  “Very well,” Fournier says. “Dr. Sealey has assigned each of you a specific sampling brief. He’ll go over those with you now. I’ll be in the engine room if I’m needed. The lieutenant will lead out from the mid-section airlock in ten minutes
.”

  The scientists scatter. Everyone has already assembled their kit, but now they check everything again in case they’ve left some crucial piece of equipment on their bunks or out in the workspace. John does not repeat their individual shopping lists: he knows he doesn’t have to.

  Khan glances across at Stephen, who is prepping an additional specimen box. She watches as he slips this second box into his rucksack. In spite of the briefing, he seems very much inclined to further some project of his own.

  She was surprised when she learned that Stephen had asked to come with the team today. Normally he works with the samples they bring back but will do anything to avoid going out in their company. She understands, or thinks she does. Company, for Stephen, is equivalent to unresolved tension. His interactions with other people are awkward, and their interactions with each other are a distraction he finds hard to cope with.

  So what’s different about today? Khan could ask him, of course, but hitting Stephen with a direct question feels like rolling him for his spare change. He has no defence against questions.

  So she says nothing, and returns to checking her own sample kit for the third or fourth time.

  John Sealey is watching Khan as she watches Greaves. He feels, not for the first time, a twinge of jealousy at her solicitude for the boy. It seems sometimes as though the two of them have an intimacy he can’t break into.

  That’s crazy talk, of course. You can’t get intimate with Greaves; with the Robot, as the soldiers call him. When it comes to the muddled give-and-take of human relationships, Stephen doesn’t have a functional interface. Which means Sealey is jealous of a mirage.

  Do we always fret about our partners’ exes? he wonders. And do we extend that to everyone they knew before they met us? Is it their whole past we’re jealous of, as though we want them to be born again when we walk into their lives? It’s a depressing thought. He has believed himself to be bigger than that, and a whole lot more rational.

  All the same, it hurts him just a little when Rina is so worried about Stephen Greaves that she forgets that anyone else—including himself—is even in the room.

  He touches her shoulder, bringing her back. “All tooled up?” he asks her unnecessarily. She shows him her sample kit, like a schoolkid brandishing her lunchbox. “Ready to rock,” she says, with about a half of a smile.

  “Then let’s go,” John suggests. “Last one in the airlock is a smelly cheese.”

  Lieutenant McQueen doesn’t greatly appreciate babysitting duties, but he does like getting out of the big tin can. He likes being in charge, which he always is on these expeditions (the colonel remains in the vehicle on account of his bad leg; Dr. Fournier stays behind too, just because). And he likes using his expertise.

  Dr. Khan accused him once, on some occasion when a bottle or two of hard spirits had eroded the usual demarcation between the scientists and the soldiers, of having a relaxed attitude to killing. He didn’t take any offence at that. In fact, he laughed. She was so far off the mark that he couldn’t even feel insulted.

  He is no more casual about killing than she is about science. It’s a discipline, that’s the truth of it, and some men (some women too, with Lance-Bombardier Foss pre-eminent among them) are better fitted for it than others. It doesn’t mean they don’t care about life. Quite the opposite. You shouldn’t kill a man without being aware of the possibilities, the futures, you’re snuffing out. The younger the target, the more of those possible futures there are. Killing a child is like killing a vast multitude.

  And conversely, killing a hungry is like swatting a fly. There’s nothing there, no future possibility left. It’s only a shell, a cast skin that a man or a woman or a child shucked off. What Dr. Khan thinks of as his indifference to death is really a by-product of how well he understands it.

  He thinks, briefly, as he cycles the airlock and lets her out, about the possibility of killing her. Not because he wants to. He dislikes her but not nearly enough for that. It’s just that the complexity of the equation in her case makes the thought-experiment interesting: killing a pregnant woman carries a greater freight of consequences than any other killing. However contemptible the doctor is (and she is contemptible, sneering at things she doesn’t understand, endangering the mission in order to get laid, talking down to decent men while she treats the Robot like an overgrown baby), the life inside her has its own potentiality that isn’t related to hers in any way. He would pause before shooting her, if it came to it. Pause for the kind of reflection that she thinks him incapable of.

  Then he would do the job because it needed to be done and he doesn’t flinch from something just because it’s hard or dangerous or ugly. Not that Khan does either, he has to admit. This is why he can’t bring himself to despise her all the way down to the ground, the way he despises Fournier and Sealey. Whatever else you can say about her, she does the job that’s in front of her.

  The airlock cycles again and the team assembles around McQueen. It would be possible to drive the lab closer to the town and reduce the risks that come with moving a large cohort overland. But the noise of the engines, even shielded, will bring any hungries in the area at a dead run. They’ll end up churning their axles in crushed and pulped corpse-meat, and any chance of an orderly sampling will disappear. This way is better, even given the amount of shepherding the scientists will require en route, like a crocodile of skipping schoolkids on a trip.

  McQueen gives some orders, gets them started. They move off in good shape with Foss and Lutes up front, Sixsmith and Phillips at the rear, leaving him free to move around as needed. The scientists stay in a tight huddle, which is fine. He tried to teach them broken field movement once, and once was enough.

  They’re all geared up for anything that might come along, but the road into town is as quiet as the grave. The absence of hungries is surprising, given how many they saw running loose up and down the valley. Maybe something has happened at some point to disperse them from the town. Migrating animals would have been enough to do it; hungries will run a long way in pursuit of food on the hoof. But then McQueen would expect to see some gnawed bones, maybe the odd half-eaten carcase.

  No news isn’t always good news, in the lieutenant’s book. He has been in too many bad situations that blew up out of nowhere: he tends to view any invitation to let his guard down with open suspicion.

  And he’s right, of course.

  It’s all fine until they cross the bridge and enter the town. This was a beautiful place once. The water pouring over the falls, the old stone bridge right under it, so close the spray flecks your face like a wet kiss. You could have come here any time in the last two centuries and nothing about this scene would have looked any different, except maybe the weeds wouldn’t have been so high. McQueen likes that a lot.

  What they find in the town’s main street, a hundred yards further on, enthuses him somewhat less. There are bodies on the ground. Nothing much in themselves but the blood, still sticky underfoot, makes him wary. He signals a halt and goes on alone to examine the kills up close. Without needing to be asked, Foss circles into the centre of the street to give him cover.

  One good look at the fresh remains makes the lieutenant swear out loud. Just over half of them are animal carcases. Dogs. The rest are hungries, and they’re not dead. They’ve just had their tendons slashed so they can’t stand. As he approaches, they raise their heads, their hunting reflex triggered by his movement, and start to haul themselves towards him on their hands and elbows.

  Has a raiding party of junkers passed through here? That’s a definite possible. The mad survivalists are more than happy to eat dog when dog is on the menu, and if they ran up against hungries who were hunting too they would have taken them down fast and kept right on moving.

  But when he examines the dead dogs, the lieutenant is inclined to modify this initial diagnosis. The animals haven’t been dropped with small arms fire or arrows: they’ve been overrun and eaten on the spot. The absence of any other woun
ds apart from the bite marks suggests that they were eaten alive.

  If junkers were here, they lost this one. The hungries—apart from the ones now feebly clawing their way across the cobbles towards him—ate their fill.

  The members of the science team are drifting up behind him, as if the order to halt is a volatile spirit that gradually evaporates in air. McQueen has to resist the urge to bawl them out, which until he has figured out this little conundrum would be self-indulgent and stupid.

  “What’s the score?” Foss asks, from off on his right shoulder. She looks tense but her tone is level.

  “Not sure,” McQueen says. “Looks like we’ve had company. Someone sliced up these hungries with edged weapons.”

  Murmurs of dismay from the scientists, who have set their little hearts on some more tissue samples, bless them. The soldiers look around, weighing up the pros and cons of this open street from a defensive point of view. They’re all thinking it. Nobody actually says it.

  “Whoever it was, there’s nothing to say that they’re still here.” This from Dr. Sealey, who out of all of them is usually the most skittish when there’s a whiff of any actual risk. McQueen has always held that the least impressive kind of courage is officer courage—the courage to give filthy orders other people have to obey. On this mission he’s met tourist courage, and he has had to revise his league table.

  He gives Sealey a hard stare. Sealey returns it, not knowing how close he is to getting his head smacked. “No,” McQueen agrees. “Nothing to say they left, either. That’s why we’re currently considering our options.”

  He’s still thinking it over as he says this, and he’s finding a lot of things now that don’t fit in at all with the junker hypothesis. No vehicle tracks on the road into town. Weeds taller than a man, on both sides of the bridge, that were almost completely unbroken. At the edges of the street where the cobbles give way to dirt, there are a few scuff marks from (arguably) recent feet, but if you marched a whole junker cadre through a town this size you’d leave a much bigger footprint than a few dead dogs. They’re like locusts. They would have gone through the houses and thrown everything out onto the street for a game of trash-or-treasure. Plus they would have fucked and fought and had a pig roast and generally raised hell. The street would be full of their detritus. McQueen has walked through a town after junkers went through it and he knows exactly what the aftermath of their hideous diversions looks like. It’s not something he’s ever likely to forget.