by M. R. Carey
“I’ll need to do a lumbar puncture,” Stephen is saying. He wanders around the lab assembling the tools he needs.
No difference. No difference at all. It’s not as if she can be made to love this little wind-blown speck of humanity any more, or any less.
Stephen carries out his tests. When the baby cries, Khan holds him close and sings softly. The same lullaby her mother sang to her.
“Positive,” Stephen whispers. “I’m sorry, Rina. I’m so sorry.”
She goes right on singing.
Hush.
Hush little baby.
Don’t say a word.
52
They keep on rolling south as the horizon pales from pitch-black to milk-shot blue.
There have been three sightings of the children in the course of the night. Always very close, always running at the same steady pace—the same colour on the scopes as regular hungries, but easily distinguishable because they stay in that arrowhead formation, strung out across the road. That’s just the vanguard. There are other little groups sprinting through the weed-choked ground on either side of the carriageway. They seem to be keeping pace, which presumably means that the ones on the road are slowing down to let the others keep up.
But they don’t make a move. Rosie rolls on unmolested through the day, which waxes and wanes around them as though they’re in a time-lapse movie. They’re eating up the miles that on their outward journey took so many arduous months. Some weird gravity has them in its grip.
Stephen Greaves and Dr. Khan visit the lab in the middle of the morning and again in late afternoon. Each time they spend about ten minutes closeted together, unsupervised. The rest of the crew make the logical assumption, that Greaves is Khan’s physician now. Given that the only other candidate is Dr. Fournier this passes without comment.
They reach their junction at last and turn off onto what used to be an A road. A cute, cartoony sign depicting a shire horse with a smiling duck on its back welcomes them to Alconbury Weston. Twenty or thirty burned-out shells of buildings show where the town once stood. Sixsmith doesn’t feel very welcome and she doesn’t slow. She’s conscious of the kids chugging right along behind.
They are thirty miles or so by the map from base Hotel Echo. Normally the thing to do now would be to throw out some chatter and see who else is around, but they’ve been told to stay off the radio—which in any case only talks on a single frequency. All they can do is send up a couple of flares: green for friendly, white for incoming. Five minutes later they do the same thing again so that anyone actually watching from the base can take a bearing and an estimate.
Put the kettle on, in other words.
It’s the colonel who fires both sets of flares, and after the second time he orders a halt. He climbs down out of the cockpit and stands in the road for a while scoping around with a pair of field glasses. Not the infra-reds, just a regular pair. Without waiting to be invited, Sixsmith gets down behind him and unships her rifle. The mid-section door opens and Foss steps out, too. Looks like they both had the same idea: since trouble is definitely coming, they might as well meet it halfway.
Carlisle looks ahead, to where the base is meant to be. Maybe he’s hoping for an answering flare, but if so he is disappointed. Then he turns and looks back the way they’ve just come.
Sixsmith joins Foss at the mid-section door. “If Beacon’s late at the meet, those kids are going to be all over us,” she mutters.
“Yeah, but round two will be different,” Foss says.
“Will it? Why?”
“Won’t just be us. We’ll have more people and more guns. And this time we’ll see them coming.”
Sixsmith feels obliged to point out the obvious. “Same goes for them though, doesn’t it? They know what our guns can do now, and how far they can fire. I doubt they’re going to stroll out into the open again.”
“They’re just kids,” Foss says.
“Yeah,” Sixsmith says. “They are. But they nearly slaughtered us back there when you had the drop on them and you were firing from the top of a gradient.”
Foss doesn’t seem to like that version of events much. “How about if you drive,” she suggests, “and I shoot. You okay with that?”
Better off without it, frankly, Sixsmith thinks but doesn’t say.
The colonel is done with his eyeballing. They all get back inside and the magical mystery tour continues.
The road gets rougher. They’re driving through weeds that are high enough in places to obstruct the view ahead and to blur the distinction between the carriageway and what’s around it. Sixsmith has to take it slow in order to avoid nasty surprises, sudden drops or hidden obstructions that might foul their treads. The Robot did a great repair job last time, against all the sensible betting, but there’s no point in tempting providence.
The colonel navigates and tells her when to turn, but he’s going by the compass more than the map most of the time. This is ground that looks like it hasn’t been walked on since the Breakdown. Mother Nature has had plenty of time to settle in and get comfortable, effacing the road signs and the white lines on the asphalt and most of the structures that used to serve as reference points. Church with a spire? Somewhere off that way, behind the three-metre-high brambles. Or more likely in the middle of them. The day goes by in these tomfooleries.
Then a long straight stretch reveals the children dead centred in the rear-view, surprisingly close, jogging tirelessly behind them. “Sir …” Sixsmith says.
“I see them,” the colonel acknowledges. “Can we go any faster?”
“Not safely, sir, no. The surface is a mess and the weeds are hiding most of it. The ditches are easily deep enough to fuck our axle.” She hesitates. “I could go off the road.”
“I suspect that might slow us more than them,” the colonel says dryly.
So they’re between a rock and a hard place. When Sixsmith isn’t watching the road, she watches the colonel’s face, on which a pantomime of inner conflict plays out. She knows what he’s thinking. They can’t arrive at the rendezvous point bringing actual hostiles with them. But they’ve been ordered to maintain radio silence, so they can’t reschedule or relocate.
Finally he stands.
“Keep to this speed, Private,” he orders her. “Or as close to it as you can.”
Without another word, he goes astern. Sixsmith concentrates on her driving, until movement in the mid-section catches her eye. She glances in the mirror and gapes in open-mouthed astonishment. After that lecture up in Scotland, after McQueen losing his commission, she doesn’t expect to see what she’s seeing now.
The flamethrower extends and elevates. The primer puffs a few fat balls of flame.
And the forest is alight. Behind them and then on both sides as the spray of fire and black smoke vomits out in thick, greasy saccades. The turret turns and the flamethrower weaves an oxbow river of fire. It spreads away from them, quickly becoming a sea.
Sixsmith’s first thought is: he’s gone mad. We are bloody well going to burn.
Her second: but so clever! The colonel’s craziness belongs to the fox or some related species. The children can’t run through the fire and it’s going to be a long trip around the edge of it. When they find the road again, Rosie will be long gone. Not only that, but the cues that hungries usually rely on—smell and body heat—will be monumentally messed up by the stench and residual heat of the burning.
They don’t catch fire. The colonel’s hand on the flamethrower is deft and precise. He keeps it pointing backwards, rotating the turret within sixty degrees of arc. They outrun the destruction, leaving the feral kids to deal with it.
When Carlisle comes back to the cockpit, Sixsmith shoots him a grin. “Good thinking, sir.”
But the colonel is sombre. Of course he is. You don’t forget something like the burn runs. Not if you flew in them, and still less if you ordered them.
There are no further sightings. They seem to have thrown the kids at last.
> And they get to Hotel Echo in plenty of time. But things go downhill from there because Hotel Echo is just a fence around some more of the same terrain they’ve been traversing.
There is no trace of activity here at all. No clearance, even: weeds right the way up to the fence. They roll halfway around the perimeter until they find what used to be the main gate, and in all that time they see no sign of life inside.
The gate is almost lost in the weeds. It wears a thick padlock that has rendered down into a red rosette of bristling rust. “Sir,” Sixsmith says, “is there any chance the brigadier meant somewhere else? This doesn’t look like a forward base to me.”
Carlisle just points. To the left of the gate, almost lost in the overgrowth, is a sign that reads RAF HENLOW. Smaller signs on the same post announce that this is the home of the RAF CENTRE OF AVIATION MEDICINE and the TACTICAL PROVOST SQUADRON. Yeah, well, that was then. Now it’s about 200 acres of bugger all.
“The coordinates are right,” Carlisle says. “This is definitely the rendezvous the brigadier had in mind. She only said that it had been selected as a possible forward base. She didn’t indicate that it had been cleared or fortified.”
“But then where do we go?” Sixsmith demands, her exasperation getting the better of her. “If it’s like this all the way, we’ll be playing hide and seek in a sodding jungle.”
“The rendezvous point is the main parade ground. That at least ought to be partially clear, even if no work has been done on it. Proceed as ordered, Private.”
Sixsmith proceeds as ordered. She goes out with the bolt cutters and takes the padlock off, the skin on the back of her neck prickling the whole time like a bad sunburn. There is no way of getting the gates open by hand. The mass of vegetable growth is too high and too deep. Back in the cockpit, she nudges Rosie through, the forward ram clearing the way for them.
Then she reverses into the gates to close them again. One excursion outside Rosie’s hull feels like plenty just now.
They find a road, or something that used to be a road, and follow it around the inside of the perimeter. Some sort of major ordnance must have been stored here once, because the concrete bunkers they’re driving past look like they were built to withstand the smackdowns of Biblical proportions. Brambles pour out of their blind windows like barbed-wire tears.
They find the remains of a runway and turn onto it. It takes them west, towards the setting sun, and finally they reach a parade ground. There is nobody waiting for them. There is nothing moving on the face of the whole ruined Earth apart from Rosie, and when the engine stops the silence swallows them whole.
“Orders, sir?” Sixsmith inquires glumly.
The colonel folds the map and sets it down on top of the console.
“We wait,” he says. “Until they come.”
Sixsmith doesn’t ask which they he means.
53
Dr. Fournier is sensitive to moods, and the mood inside Rosie has soured to the point where he can no longer bear it. He is hiding from the crew, from the colonel and from his duties.
Of course, this isn’t entirely a new thing. Hiding has been an important part of his repertoire ever since they left Beacon. That was why he colonised the engine room in the first place, and it has served him well. Now, though, he has added some layers to his concealment. He is hiding from new and unfamiliar things. From McQueen, for example, who has taken his radio and seems by doing so to have taken his place as Brigadier Fry’s agent on board the Rosalind Franklin.
More significantly, he is hiding from the hateful revelation that he has placed himself on the wrong side of a crucial argument. The brigadier’s coup in Beacon was reckless and badly thought out. It has led to civil war, which is something the rump of humanity can ill afford. Whether she wins or loses, Fry will have done terrible damage and dragged the whole population of the embattled enclave to the ragged and crumbling edge.
If she loses, that’s the story that will be told. Fournier’s name will be in it, among the misguided and the contemptible. Not prominent. Not up in the headlines. A grubby, derided footnote. Other people are coming back from this expedition with something of honour and something of success. He is coming back as an addendum.
He has tried to blunt the awareness of this in the time-honoured fashion, which is to say with strong spirits. But he has discovered again what he should have remembered, that whiskey even in moderate amounts doesn’t agree with his constitution. Swigged from the bottle, it unmans and dismantles him.
Now he sits in the engine room with his shoulders against the engine cowling, his head tilted back so the crown of it rests directly on the cold metal. Rosie stopped moving some hours ago, but there is a yawing in his head and stomach that makes him terrified to stand up. He is at the stage of wanting very, very much not to vomit but finding that every movement brings it closer.
The door of the engine room sits ajar. On the other side of it, in the lab, Stephen Greaves is moving around. With the lights off, invisible in the dark, Fournier watches him through the gap between door and frame. Greaves is working diligently with the contents of several containers taken from his sample kit. When he was in there earlier, he was with Samrina Khan. Fournier almost spoke to them, but speaking is one of the things he thinks might cause him to throw up. So he only sat and watched as Greaves mixed up some kind of home-made medicine and injected Khan with it.
They talked about the feral children, and about Dr. Khan’s baby. They talked about a cure. Most of it rolled over Dr. Fournier unheeded, but now he finds that some of what they said has lodged in his mind after all.
They were talking about a cure as something that could actually happen. Or … had happened? Fournier wonders belatedly what that medicine was, and what Greaves is working on so assiduously now. The supposed savant (Fournier has seen no compelling evidence of that!) mutters to himself as he works—two different voices, two sides of a conversation. Fournier can’t hear everything, but he gets the gist. Greaves is addressing someone as “Captain” and then answering his own questions in a deeper, exaggeratedly masculine tone.
“But it’s not going to be enough,” he says as himself. “It’s going to run out!”
“You work with what you’ve got, kid,” he answers in the other voice. “Can’t squeeze orange juice out of a stone.”
“I’ve got to save her!” Greaves’ usual voice again, trembling and petulant. “I’ve got to!”
“Fine. But you better count the cost before you get into paying it. There are lives at stake here. Not just hers, but the children’s, too. How far are you prepared to go?”
“But I’ve still got some spinal fluid here. That might be enough to … to make something that works. Not a suppressant. Something that works properly!”
Fournier has raised the whiskey bottle to his lips for another sip, a long time before, and it has stayed there ever since. He sets it down again now, carefully and quietly.
“It isn’t.” The deeper voice. “It isn’t enough.”
“It might be.”
“No.”
“You don’t know!” Greaves’ voice rises to a squeak of protest. “You don’t know, Captain.”
“Kid, I know the cells you’re working with are dead, and I know you need live ones. I know prion contamination has reached 14 per cent. How many batches would you be looking to grow? That pipette is probably enough for ten at best, so you’ve got a maximum of ten configurations that you can test for. And since that would use up all the spinal fluid you’ve got left, you wouldn’t be able to dose her up again—which means you’ve got to get positive results in the next three hours, before her current dose wears off. How is anything supposed to grow in three hours?”
Greaves has stopped dead in the course of this speech. His hands are frozen in the air, a pipette in one of them so he looks like a conductor about to give the orchestra their cue to start the symphony.
“You don’t know,” he says again, his voice barely a whisper.
He
seems to collapse in slow motion, going down on one knee and then on both. His head bows down into his lap.
“I’ll have to tell,” he moans. “I’ll have to tell if they ask.”
That’s good to hear, Dr. Fournier thinks. Because he intends to ask.
54
The christening party is Foss’s idea, and she surprises herself.
She finds powdered egg and sugar, flour and a thin scraping of lard, and bakes up a kind of a sponge, with coffee and gelatin and a lot more sugar for icing. And she drags everyone into the crew quarters, whether they like it or not, to wet the baby’s head with the liquor of their choice. As long as that’s water or single malt, or single malt cut with a little water.
“What the hell is this about?” McQueen demands truculently when she hauls him down out of the turret.
Since he blew her off the day before, she hasn’t felt like she owes McQueen anything very much, and certainly not an explanation. But maybe she’s really explaining to herself.
“This time tomorrow we’re going to be back in Beacon,” she says. “And we’re going to go our separate ways. Some of us will bump into each other again, but we’ll never be this again. This crew.”
“Thank Christ for that,” McQueen mutters.
“Yeah, but it matters. We were part of something, and I hate to see that just fade away without … you know.”
“No. I don’t.”
“Without doing something. All of us together, one last time. And after that, fuck it. We let it pass. But it’s wrong to let it pass without a proper goodbye. Call it superstition, if you want to. But where’s the harm in it? Come and have one last drink. Meet the rug-rat. Make your peace with the colonel.”
That last was a mistake. McQueen was looking half-persuaded but now he bridles and fixes her with a glare. “You don’t know fuck all about me and the colonel,” he says.
“No,” Foss admits. “And I don’t need to. It’s over, mate. That’s all I’m saying. It’s over and this is a good way to wave goodbye to it.”