by M. R. Carey
Then, just as Foss is teasing out her third ace, Doctor Khan’s waters go like Niagara fucking Falls, dripping through her inch-thick mattress to rain down on the bottom bunk (which is Dr. Fournier’s, so no harm done).
“Looks like we’re on, sugar lump,” Foss says lightly.
When you’re a mile outside the limits of your competence, there is some comfort to be had in sounding like you know what you’re doing.
49
I’m still me, Khan thinks.
Checking. Making sure it’s true. It should be true by definition—she thinks therefore she is—but maybe the voice in your mind goes stumbling on after the lights go out, just doing its own thing because that’s all it knows.
So she forces herself to remember. Making love with John, the viva exam she gave when she delivered her doctoral thesis, fragments of her childhood. She reviews them in her mind and she goes over their meanings. Because if they have meanings then she is still human.
But she has to do these things in the gaps between the contractions, and the gaps are getting shorter. Every ten minutes, then every five, then every three, her body closes like a vice and the horizon rushes right in. There is nothing beyond the pain.
At the edges of it, something. The cold metal of the dissecting table under her back and her bum and the soles of her feet. The tang of disinfectant, her profession’s holy incense, in the air. She’s in the lab. They’ve brought her to the lab, because it’s her time.
She is sailing the ship out of the bottle, pushing another human being out of her body. A tiny, imperfect replica of herself, or it might be of John, whipped up out of whatever pieces of them were available, milled and ground and mixed and left to rise in the oven of her abdomen. And at the last moment, the extra, top-secret ingredient: Cordyceps.
She moans aloud.
“You’re doing fine, Doctor.” That’s Foss. Foss is here. And Stephen too, his touch taboo forgotten. Or not. His eyes are wide as he squeezes her hand, giving her the time signature for her breathing in a Morse code of pressure and release.
“Oh shit!” Foss says. “I can see the head. I can see the baby’s head!”
“You have to hold back,” Stephen murmurs urgently, leaning low over her with his eyes averted. “Use the breathing to get through it. Relax, Rina. Try to relax.”
When she was six, her father put her on her brand-new bike and rolled it down a hill. That’s how you learn, he said. The bike went faster and faster and she just held on to the handlebars for grim death, too terrified to brake or steer, until the bike strayed into a garden wall and she fell right off it, going full tilt. Her arm was broken. Her mother called her father a brainless bastard and he said again, stubbornly, That’s how you learn.
Quae nocent saepe docent. Pain is the great teacher.
“Okay, now push! Bear down, Doctor Khan!”
“Bear down, Rina!”
Pain has no agenda at all. It teaches us nothing, except what hurts. And if you can’t avoid the things that hurt then what use is the lesson?
Pain clenches in her, moves through her in drenching waves, until finally it finds an outlet.
Her baby cries.
“Holy fuck,” Lieutenant Foss shouts jubilantly. And then again, “Holy fuck, the eagle has landed!”
There is concerted movement in the space between Khan’s tented legs. Something parts from her. A fullness becomes a yawning absence. Cold air strums her sweat-soaked thighs.
“It’s a boy. And he looks healthy. Nice work, Doctor Khan.” Then, in a different tone, “He’s covered in this gunk. Is that normal?”
“Yes,” Greaves says. “It’s normal. Let her hold him.”
The baby is placed in her arms. He smells of blood and of her. Of sweetness and the slaughterhouse. He has fought his furious way into the world and now he lies exhausted on her breast. Red-brown smears mark where his tiny fist slides against her skin.
“John,” she whispers.
“No,” Greaves says. “It’s me. It’s Stephen.”
“She’s naming the baby, dickhead. After its dad.”
But she’s not. Nor is she forgetting that John is dead. She just wants to invoke him now, to have him be here for this in some way. She aches to have him touch her and say her name. More than that, she aches to have him see what they have made between the two of them. The miraculous solidity and presence of it. This is the other side of the equation. Thesis: John died. Antithesis: the baby is alive.
He finds her nipple, but does nothing with it. Just breathes, lips parted around the swollen teat.
50
On the A1(M), a little way north of Leeds, they hit a roadblock that they can’t get around or roll over. Sheets of corrugated tin shored up with stacks of tyres into which concrete has been poured. Someone’s idea of a border control, maybe. Keep the hungries way down south with the city bankers and the landed gentry, or alternatively push them up north with the chavs and the oiks. The occasional scatter of wind-bleached bones suggests that the barricade may not have been fit for purpose, either way. Hungries are stateless, their allegiance only to the next square meal.
The soldiers have to get out and clear a path. The whitecoats too, except for Dr. Khan who has a baby to look after, which everyone has to admit is a pretty solid excuse. Fournier pitches in with the rest of them, Sixsmith observes with grim approval. She would have dragged the treacherous little bastard out of the engine room by the back of his neck if he had tried to hide in there.
“How did we miss this mess coming up?” McQueen complains. He is massively hungover after a late-night session with a bottle of single malt he found in Dr. Akimwe’s personal effects.
“We made a side-trip into Wakefield,” Sixsmith grunts, rolling a concrete-filled tyre off the road. “We didn’t come up this stretch at all.” Her arms and back are aching and she’s got to get back into the driving seat after they’re finished here. She’s in a foul mood and it’s not getting better.
Colonel Carlisle suggests tersely that they save the conversation for later. It’s a cold, clear day and the sound will carry. Better for all of them if it doesn’t carry too far.
But Foss doesn’t seem to have got the memo. She is looking back up the road, first of all shading her eyes and then sighting through the scope of her gun. “We’ve got incoming,” she shouts. “Guys, you’ve got to see this.”
Everyone turns to look. The cluster of moving dots more than a mile back along the road could be anything. Sheep. Stray dogs. Or hungries, always the odds-on favourite. But they’re moving in a kind of loose formation, strung out across the road, and their pace is a steady, indefatigable jog rather than a hungry’s swallow-dive sprint.
“No bloody way,” Sixsmith says, lodging a protest with reality.
“Oh my God!” Dr. Fournier whispers.
It’s the feral kids, still on the trail. And still keeping pace with them after more than a hundred and fifty miles.
The colonel raps out orders, but it’s only the blindingly obvious. Get the last few bits and pieces off the road, get back into Rosie—stat!—and get moving.
Everybody jumps to it. Except for McQueen, who stands out in the road with his M407 in his hands and a contemplative look on his face. A mile is a long trip even for a gun like that, but the word is going around that McQueen has decided to roll his own ammunition for once. He’s got to be tempted to try out his bespoke rounds on these obligingly available targets. Slowly he raises the rifle to the ready position.
“Mr. McQueen,” the colonel calls. “We need you here.”
McQueen gooses the scope, reads off distance and wind speed. His finger touches the trigger, starts to pull back with soft, even pressure. But then he turns, the rifle still in position. He’s pointing it right at the Old Man now, his hand rock-steady, the trigger still drawn halfway back.
“Sorry, sir,” he says. “What was that again?”
The colonel looks at McQueen down the barrel of the rifle, absolutely impassive. “We n
eed another pair of hands,” he says. “Now. You can display your virtuosity another time, when it will actually do some good.”
Sixsmith braces herself for the big bang. It feels to her as though it has to happen. Because how could McQueen make a threat like that and then back down from it? They’ve all seen this. That alone should force the issue.
But McQueen doesn’t fire. He just glares at the colonel over the rifle’s sights, from which he has finally taken his eye.
“You’re not nearly as fucking clever as you think you are,” he says. There’s a bleakness in his voice, as though he is announcing the time of the patient’s death.
Carlisle seems to consider this. “Are any of us?” he asks at last. “Move those stones, and that sheet.” And he turns away, as though the menace of the sniper rifle isn’t something he needs to worry about or even acknowledge.
It could still happen, Sixsmith thinks. She takes a step forward, not knowing what she means to do but wanting to be close enough that doing it might be an option.
But there is no need. McQueen lets out a heavy, dissatisfied breath. Then he slings the M407 and gets to work. They’re done in a minute, back inside Rosie in ninety seconds, battened down with the mid-section sealed.
“Go,” the colonel tells Sixsmith.
She bolts for the cockpit, fires up and goes. The wild things eat their exhaust.
For the next fifty miles or so, she is marvelling at two things, alternating so they both get a fair share of her attention.
The kids are keeping up, somehow. This is personal for them, it must be. They don’t just want a meal, they want that specimen back. Or more likely they want blood.
And McQueen, in that long drawn-out moment, didn’t.
What he wanted wasn’t clear at all.
51
Dr. Khan is back in her own bunk. Stephen has changed the sheets and the mattress. With the gaps in the roster, there were plenty of spares lying ready at hand. She believes she is lying now on what was John’s mattress, and the thought pleases her.
The baby sleeps, wakes, rests upon her. After that first coming-into-the-world cry, he hasn’t uttered a sound. He also hasn’t fed. From time to time, he mumbles and kneads at Khan’s breast as though he’s picking a fight with it, but he doesn’t make any attempt to drink, no matter how much she coaxes.
She expresses milk with her fingers, wets the baby’s lips with it. He wrinkles up his face in something like frustration. His mouth opens and closes but he doesn’t lick his lips, doesn’t swallow.
Khan is aware when Rosie stops, and when she starts again. The question why does not occur to her. Her mind is engaged with another question, which looms a whole lot bigger.
A short while after their motion resumes, a shadow falls across the bunk’s closed curtains.
“Rina,” Stephen whispers.
She sits up. “Now?”
“I think so. It’s better not to cut it too close.”
He withdraws again. Khan wraps the towelling robe—Akimwe’s, opulently thick and fleecy, scavenged by Stephen from the doctor’s locker—around herself and climbs awkwardly and gingerly out of the bunk. The baby is asleep again and she considers leaving him behind, well tucked in and bracketed by pillows so he can’t fall out of the bunk. But it’s too soon for them to be away from each other, her and this little separated part of her. She lifts him up, cradling his head, and posts him through the collar of the robe, holding him in there against the well-stoked furnace of her body, out of the world’s cold airs.
There is nobody in sight. Presumably Fournier is asleep in his bunk, or in the engine room, and the soldiers are at their stations. Stephen is already walking astern and she follows him, padding softly on bare feet. The floor vibrates and rocks under her with Rosie’s forward movement. She uses one hand to anchor herself, the other to hug the baby to her. If she falls, she will do her best to roll and land on her back, protecting him with her body.
Someone is up in the turret but Khan only sees boots in the gun-platform stirrups. Whoever is up there doesn’t hear them, or at least doesn’t look down.
The lab is a dark cave. It stinks of preserving chemicals and (a soft undercurrent) of the things they have failed to preserve. Stephen doesn’t turn on the lights at first. He draws the door across very slowly, avoiding any noise that might be heard over the sounds of the engine, the road and the wind.
Khan waits in the dark until the fluorescents shudder on. Then she waits in the light. Stephen prepares a hypo, taking minute care. Measuring, filtering, measuring again. Finally he turns.
“Roll up your sleeve,” he mutters.
But she can’t. That would mean using both hands; would mean letting go of the baby.
“How long do I have?” she asks instead.
Stephen stands rigidly still. The hypo points at the ceiling and both his hands are clasped around its base. He looks like a knight in a pre-Raphaelite painting, pledging his sword to the service of God or some other random cause.
“How long?” she says again.
“There are two more doses after this. About the same size or a little smaller. They might last six or seven hours each. Maybe even eight, but that would be pushing it. I don’t think they’re … I don’t see them lasting that long.”
A day then, at the outside. She looks at her watch, finds that it’s a little after three in the morning. She will still be human when the sun comes up. She should even see it go down again. After that, all bets are off.
“Someone has to look after the baby,” she says. That’s the most urgent thing. The only urgent thing. Slipping away from herself will be the easiest proposition in the world. It’s staying here that’s hard. But how can she die and leave her newborn son unprotected? The world is a threshing machine and she would just be letting him fall into the blades.
“I wanted,” Stephen mutters, “to run some tests. On … John. After I’ve injected you.”
Khan steps back, both hands enfolding the tiny form. He moves, and he makes a sound; a soft, half-vocalised breath. But he doesn’t wake. “No,” she says. “His name isn’t John, and no.”
“Just to see,” Stephen insists.
“To see what?”
He hesitates, chooses his words. But he chooses very badly. “What he is. To make sure.”
“He’s human,” Khan snaps. “As human as I am.”
Stephen doesn’t pick up the warning in her tone. “I think being human means something different now.”
Which is basically what he said already.
I didn’t cure you. And I won’t. Because the main ingredient of the cure would be the children, and I can’t do that to them.
Can you imagine, Rina? Half a million people in Beacon. Half a million doses of vaccine, just to start with. If I bring this home, if I tell them … We’ll scour the whole country, from one end to the other. Probably we’ll have to send some raiding parties across the Channel, too. And then when that isn’t enough—not nearly enough—we’ll start a breeding programme. Capture female hungries alive and impregnate them. Take the babies, and …
Mulch them down. Liquidise and synthesise and mass produce.
Build massive battery farms full of insentient brood mares. Fill them and empty them again and again.
Perhaps if it were just hungries they were talking about it would be bearable. But Khan remembers the potlatch in the forest. The scarred girl accepting the plastic voice box, then taking the keychain from her belt and handing it to Stephen. She looks down at his waist, sees that it’s still there: the little plastic man saluting her with his expression of arch amusement.
Marco? Mario? Something like that. A child’s toy, manufactured by the billions in an age when everything—life, food, comfort, safety—came without effort.
The children are human in every way that counts. Growing up in the wild, with no adult role models except the hungries, figuring it out for themselves. It’s a miracle they have come so far so fast. That they have formed a fam
ily instead of beating each other’s skulls in and eating the best parts. Clubs and knives and slings and stones notwithstanding, Lutes and John and Phillips and Penny notwithstanding, they’re nobody’s monsters.
What would be monstrous would be pulping their brains and spines to make medicine. Khan understands why Stephen can’t bring himself to do that, even for her.
“I never thought I’d be sorry you had too much empathy,” she says. She tries to smile, to take the sting out of her words. If the smile looks from the outside as bad as it feels on her face then it must be a pretty awful counterfeit. “Pretend I didn’t say that,” she says, “I get it. You’re not into genocide. I just … I wish …” She runs out of words and finishes the sentence with a shrug.
When her hand falls back onto the counter, Stephen rolls up her sleeve and injects her. For a moment she thinks about stopping him. If her life is over, why shouldn’t it be over now? But this grubby miracle gives her a few more hours with her newborn son. A few hours to get to know him, and—if there’s a way, if there’s any way at all—to save him.
“I want to run some tests,” Stephen says again.
Khan bends her head to touch the baby’s forehead with her lips and nose. He gurgles breathily, stretches out his tiny hands to touch her cheeks. “Forget it,” Khan mutters.
“Rina, we have to know.”
“Why?”
“Because it will make a difference.”
She almost hates him for that circumlocution. “Not to me,” she says, between her teeth.
The baby kicks and wriggles, suddenly restless. His mouth gapes wide, and Khan finds herself staring at reddened gums, four tiny teeth already coming in on the lower jaw—to either side, a canine and its neighbour incisor. Tilting the baby’s head she finds the same pattern on the upper jaw.
Her child is not a hungry, no matter what corruption is churning in his blood. He is already alert, already taking an interest in his surroundings. He is not a puppet with its strings cut or a shark scenting chum, and the hungries are only ever one of those two things.