by M. R. Carey
He hefts the SCAR and stands, pressing down firmly on the trigger. The rifle speaks a spiked and rolling polysyllable as he turns it slowly, from left to right and back again. The long grass writhes and thrashes.
36
Khan is the still centre of a world of turbulence. The stillness is not through choice, she just can’t react fast enough.
The boy goes down.
The other children scatter—but scatter is the wrong word. They rise up like a wave. They flow over and past and through anything and everything that’s in their path.
One of them, in passing, smacks down Khan’s arm which is still raised as part of her diplomatic pantomime. Another cuts Elaine Penny’s throat. Then they drop into the long grass and vanish from her sight.
Penny flinches away from the attack, but only after it has already happened. Flailing, helpless, she puts up both hands to clasp the ragged wound, from which blood has started to spill in the gulp-gulp-pause rhythm of water being poured out of a jug. She opens her mouth, fights very briefly to speak, but it turns out that’s all she has to say.
Gulp. Gulp. Pause.
She staggers. Khan reaches out to steady her, to hold her. The blood, she thinks. The first thing is to stop the blood. But one look tells her it’s futile. That slashing cut left nothing intact to build on.
Penny crumples from the knees and falls.
Khan is left staring at her own right arm. Some of that blood isn’t Penny’s, it’s hers. It wasn’t a slap she felt, it was a stab. The gash is shockingly wide and deep. Blood is lying in it like a pool, overflowing like a waterfall.
She presses the arm to her body, wincing from the contact and from the throbbing pain that is only now making itself felt.
More shots ring out from up the slope. High-pitched shrieks indicate that they found their targets, or at least something that was alive. Khan is stupefied. She knows she needs to find cover but she can’t turn that thought into action. Stephen is keening beside her, his clenched fists in front of his face like a boxer on the ropes.
She catches her first glimpse of the people who are shooting. McQueen striding slowly down the slope, Foss running away from them at a steep angle with her rifle pointed at the sky. Where is she going?
And John. John is sprinting downhill to join her, his face flushed red with effort. Then he trips and falls headlong, disappearing into the long grass.
Khan runs towards him. He’s not alone down there, and he didn’t just fall. Invisible in the undergrowth, the children are moving. Three of them swarm across John as he sprawls and flails. A small girl hugs his arm, bends it backwards with fierce concentration. A boy of the same age claws at his face, blinds him. Another, older, punches him again and again in the stomach with a blade no longer than a pizza-cutter.
Khan grabs the older boy by the shoulders and drags him away. His face is a painted-on skull, the real teeth extended above and below his jaws into a terrifying, unreal rictus. The boy squirms in her arms, impossible to contain, and bites deep into her already wounded arm. When he raises his head again, there is a gobbet of her flesh between his teeth. She feels no pain, but the shock of it drops her to her hands and knees.
Which is just as well. Bullets scythe the grass at what would have been her chest height. They pluck the boy apart.
Khan tries to stand. Tries to think. Freezing fog is pouring into her brain, filling the orbits of her eyes. She’s wounded, but that’s nothing. She’s infected. If these children are hungries, she’s infected. She has to do something, but there isn’t anything. If she had a knife. If she cut off her arm right now …
But she doesn’t carry a knife, and in any case it’s probably already too late. That’s not a race anyone has ever won.
Hands are hauling at her waist, lifting her up. Someone is trying to carry her, and whoever it is they’re finding her weight hard to manage. She struggles, thinking it must be the children come back to take her. To finish the job. The hands shift, clamp down hard around her middle and she’s lifted into the air, dumped down heavily over someone’s back.
She lets the fog swallow her. It’s a relief not to have to be conscious while Cordyceps remakes her in its image.
37
Foss makes her call and sticks to it.
McQueen may or may not have the edge on her, very slightly, as a shooter. But the logistics of firing downhill into a crowd that includes her own people don’t thrill her.
So she runs for Rosie, picks a spot halfway down the near side where the airlock housing gives her some cover and drops into a shooting stance. She would have preferred to have her M407 in her hands, but the SCAR on semi-auto will deal out the damage a lot faster and this feels like a situation where more is more.
“On me!” she shouts. “Back this way! Now!”
The colonel gets it at once, but he’s not going to be the first to come. He has his sidearm unholstered and he’s firing up the slope, where the tall weeds are crawling with quick, darting shapes. Between the two of them they’re making a corridor down which the science team can retreat.
Dr. Akimwe takes the invitation, arms and legs pumping. Foss sights on him then ranges left because that’s where the undergrowth is thickest. She sees the movement and gooses the trigger. One. Two. Three.
She thinks she hit what she was aiming for, and she sure as hell didn’t hit Akimwe. Whatever takes him down takes him at foot level and trips him hard. He’s winded but still conscious, still moving, so why the hell doesn’t he get up?
Because there is something knotted around his ankles. They got him with a bolas of some kind.
But the colonel is on it. He backs towards her, towards Akimwe, firing as he goes. McQueen is out of sight, which Foss hopes means he’s found a good hide somewhere up on the hillside. She can see Sealey and Penny but they’re not moving.
Nothing is moving now. There isn’t a sound and the grass is finally in some kind of consensus with the wind. Maybe it’s over.
The stone that whips past her face comes from above, rings against Rosie’s armoured flank like a dinner gong. That’s what the lull meant. While she was watching the weeds the kids have taken the high ground. More stones slash and punctuate the air, punch the ground and the trees all around her.
Could this get any more fucked up?
Foss switches her aim to the leaves overhead and lets off a long, meandering volley. Sorry, squirrels. Anything off the ground is fair game.
And here’s some good news at last. The turret rotates and the flamethrower kicks in, drenching the canopy overhead with yellow-white flames. When they get out of this she’s going to have to kiss Sixsmith on the mouth, even if people will talk. The fire catches and the rain of stones drops off sharply, presumably as the kids find some vantage point where they won’t be roasted.
Something big and shapeless comes blundering towards her down the slope and she almost cuts it down before she realises what it is. It’s the Robot, weaving like a drunk, carrying Dr. Khan over his shoulder. She looks like she’s already dead but you do what you can.
The pelting rain of stones resumes as Greaves lurches past her towards the airlock. Foss locks the SCAR-H on full auto and gives him a 51 mm umbrella.
Greaves makes it to the airlock, but then he has to put Khan down so he can cycle the door. Further up the slope McQueen is on the move again, taking the same route she did. He’s walking at a steady, deliberate pace, turning the rifle in a bendy figure-of-eight to take in the grass and the trees from his nine o’clock to his three.
Now Colonel Carlisle is coming in too, on Foss’s right-hand side. He stops long enough to get Akimwe upright, although the scientist isn’t walking properly.
Two dead, maybe three. The science team fucking decimated. The colonel was right about staying indoors and she should have backed his call. None of this had to happen.
Greaves has got the door open, thank God. He stoops to gather up his burden.
Foss fights the urge to run straight for the door. Sh
e still needs to give the others some cover as they come. She backs towards Rosie’s mid-section one step at a time, while the colonel and Akimwe converge with McQueen to form a ragged but effective skirmish line. The kids may be wicked little wizards with their stones and their penknives but that doesn’t mean shit if they can’t pop their heads up without getting them blown off.
She reaches the airlock, steps up onto the plate.
And the door slams shut in her face. She hears the scrape and smack of the latches sliding into their grooves, the hiss of the cycling air.
Greaves has locked them out.
38
Every second counts, so Greaves has been counting them. He is up to seventy. He has set a metronome ticking in his mind. He trusts its accuracy, has no need to check a watch. And no time. No time at all.
Seventy seconds from the moment when Rina was bitten, and two minutes is the average time—not the shortest, only the arithmetic mean—that the Cordyceps pathogen takes to cross the meningeal barrier and set up house in the brain.
Fifty seconds, then, before Rina is gone.
Set her down. Close and secure the airlock door. Forty-nine. He can’t let anybody see this. Forty-eight. Nobody. Forty-seven. The lock is still set to respond to the day code if it is correctly keyed in from outside. Reset the day code. Forty-six. Forty-five. He has to choose a number he will remember, so he can let the rest of the team back in once he has done what needs to be done. He chooses pi to ten places. Too obvious? He cheats and rounds the final five down instead of up.
Forty-four. Forty-three. Forty-two. He kneels and picks Rina up again. She is convulsing, twisting in his grip. He staggers, almost loses his balance, but manages to right himself again.
Forty-one. Forty. Sixsmith is in the turret, directly above his head. Busy. Greaves walks on by without even looking up.
The lab can be secured from the mid-section by a sliding bulkhead of interlocking plates. But he has to put Rina down again, on the workbench this time, scattering racks and retorts and equipment trays, pushing everything else aside to make room for her. Thirty-nine. Thirty-eight. And then before he can deal with the bulkhead Dr. Fournier comes striding out of the engine room, full of panic and righteous fury.
“What’s all the noise? Greaves, what are the soldiers firing at? Why—?”
Thirty-seven.
Greaves charges him full on. Before Fournier knows what’s happening Greaves’ lowered head has slammed into his face and Greaves’ forward momentum has pushed him back into the engine room where he falls and sprawls.
Thirty … six? Allow one for a skipped beat, lost in that painful impact. Thirty-four.
Fournier is looking up at him in dazed horror, his face smeared with his own blood. He is mouthing Greaves’ name in a slurred and bewildered tone, interrogating the impossible thing that just happened.
The engine room isn’t really a room, fortunately. It bolts and locks from the outside. Greaves steps back quickly into the lab, slams the door and slides the bolt. Thirty-three. Thirty-two.
Footsteps on the mid-section platform. He races across the lab and closes the bulkhead door across, just in time, as Sixsmith comes down the turret ladder, dropping the last few feet onto the platform.
Thirty-one. Thirty. Twenty-nine. The metal reverberates to her pounding. “Greaves, are you fucking insane? What have you done to the door?”
No time. No time. He shuts out the noise, concentrates on the tick of the metronome.
Twenty-eight draw Rina’s blood
Twenty-seven try to
Twenty-six try to draw Rina’s blood but she’s
Twenty-five struggling, fighting him doesn’t
Twenty-four recognise him so he has to
Twenty-three lean his weight on her
Twenty-two pin her down as her hands
Twenty-one find his face. Push. Claw at his face.
Twenty Draw Rina’s blood. Twenty cc.
Nineteen With one hand uncap the test tube
Eighteen the wrong test tube, he needs
Seventeen the latest batch, unlabelled, this one. Here.
Sixteen Insert the hypo, still one-handed.
Fifteen Drop the plunger. Rina’s blood mixing
Fourteen so slowly
Thirteen with the dead boy’s cerebrospinal fluid
Twelve and the T-cells of unnamed patient 13631
Eleven whose resistance to Cordyceps was promising
Ten but who knows? Who knows, really?
Nine Draw it back up again
Eight all of it
Seven Rina’s hands force his head back
Six so he’s blind and in his panic the metronome breaks. The ticking stops. His fingers grope and slide and don’t find a purchase. He needs a dispersal point in the muscle of her upper shoulder close—very close—to her neck. Intra-muscular injection will take advantage of the massive blood flow through that part of the body. Take-up should be instantaneous, and it will have to be.
Because he’s out of time.
He stabs down, hits the plunger, drops the untested medicine into a part of Rina’s body that he can’t even see.
Then gives up the fight, loses his balance and falls.
Rina falling off the table along with him, landing right beside him, face up.
She’s not moving.
Until she opens her eyes, opens her mouth, and screams.
Greaves holds her as she shakes. It’s not easy for him to be so close to another human body, to feel its alien movement against his own skin, but in her convulsions she might injure herself or kill the baby she’s carrying.
Eventually she quiets.
“Please,” he whispers into her ear, in case she can hear him. “Please. Please. Please. Don’t tell them, Rina.”
They can’t know—nobody can, not anybody, not ever—what he has just done.
39
Sixsmith is nobody’s idea of an engineer but she is far from stupid. With the mid-section door out of action, the cockpit will have to stand in. The main problem is that it opens like the door of a truck’s cab, occulting about half the visual field as it swings out.
Weighing against that, there are doors on both sides.
She fires up the engine and brings Rosie around in a half-circle, driving a steel wedge between the beleaguered crew and the little fuckers who appear to be trying (with some success) to kill them all.
She throws the nearside door open and yells out something that more or less boils down to “come and get it.” And one by one they come. Akimwe, limping and sobbing, as pale as a whitewashed wall. Then Foss and McQueen, still firing up into the blazing canopy even though there is no response from up there now. And finally the colonel, who doesn’t even make a move until everyone else is inside.
They don’t stay in the cab—it’s barely big enough for a driver and a shotgun. One by one they clamber through the gloryhole into the crew quarters. Slamming the door shut, Sixsmith guns the engine and relocates at maximum warp. The fire is catching. The whole damn forest is burning down, and the flames will go where the wind carries them. The only sane place to be is way out in front of that.
She gets about two miles—not even that far, not two—when she blows a track.
40
By the time Foss makes her way through to the mid-section, Greaves has unlocked both the bulkhead door and the engine room. Dr. Fournier is screaming into Greaves’ face, his own forehead bearing a bright-dark smear of blood, while Dr. Khan, on the floor, lies sobbing and wheezing for breath. Her long dark hair trails into the pool of vomit she has just deposited there. Her wounded arm has been newly but not neatly dressed.
They only just got out of that with their lives and maybe they should be counting their blessings, but Foss has a sense that things are still coming apart. McQueen strides past her, past the colonel, pushes Fournier out of the way one-handed and grabs Greaves’ lapels to lift him off the ground and slam him hard against the wall.
Then he hauls h
im back and slams him again, even harder.
“Mr. McQueen,” Carlisle says. “That’s enough.”
McQueen evidently doesn’t agree because he goes for the hattrick. The Robot hits the wall so hard that Foss can feel the vibrations through the steel plates under her feet.
Which seems to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. The colonel’s handgun is suddenly up against McQueen’s ear. McQueen lets go and Greaves slumps, sliding down the wall until he is sitting on the floor.
“Discipline is a habit of mind,” Carlisle says, with deadly calm. “Acquire it. Right now.”
McQueen stares down at the Robot. His teeth are bared and his eyes show very wide. “I want this bastard off the bus,” he says hoarsely. “He almost killed us all!”
Carlisle doesn’t look too impressed with this argument. His brow furrows a little and his face flushes red with the effort of self-control. “Actually I believe that honour belongs to you,” he says. “Dr. Khan was talking to the children. Negotiating with them. They didn’t attack until you shot at them.”
McQueen turns. He makes a big show of being under the gun, of only holding back because the gun is there, so Carlisle holsters it and holds him with a glare.
“There will be a full inquiry,” the colonel says, “when we get back to Beacon. Until that time, we are all members of the same crew and we will behave as though that means something.”
“Try telling that to this little shit,” McQueen says, prodding Greaves with the toe of his boot.
“He trapped me in the engine room,” Fournier pipes up plaintively. “He assaulted me and locked me inside. Now I can’t get any sense out of him. I demand to know what happened out there and where the rest of my crew is.”
“They’re dead,” Foss says shortly. She’s had about enough of the civilian commander. They’ve just lost three people, for Christ’s sake, and on top of that Greaves panicked and almost killed them all, and here’s Fournier bleating on about his own little bit of lost dignity like that’s the salient point.