The Boy on the Bridge

by M. R. Carey

  Everything, she thinks. Everything is alive. I wish I’d noticed that before.

  They walk a hundred yards. Another hundred.

  “Far enough,” says a voice. A woman’s voice. Brigadier Fry’s.

  Khan has only met the brigadier once, on the day of their departure, when she told them in front of a crowd of seventy or eighty thousand that the future of Beacon rode with them. The doctor barely recognises the short, trim figure who steps forward now, in urban camo designed for a bigger frame, in black boots on which hardly any black shows through the accreted dust and mud. The brigadier looks tired. There is a droop to her mouth that reminds Khan of a line from the play Macbeth. I have supped full with horrors.

  But who hasn’t, these days?

  Fry gestures. Men and women deploy behind them, cutting them off from Rosie. More move in to either side of the brigadier, rifles raised and aimed. Around three dozen, Khan guesses, possibly more. A third of them are in military fatigues and hefting Beacon-issue rifles. The remainder wear anything, carry anything. She can see machetes and handmade bows in among the automatic weapons.

  Like oil and water, the soldiers and the junkers aren’t mixing much. The soldiers seem to be holding specific patches of ground between the strutting junker warriors, standing stock still and watching their new allies warily out of the corners of their eyes.

  The junkers whoop and catcall, nudge and lean on each other as they hold their rough positions or shift for a better look at what’s going down. One of them throws a stone in Rosie’s direction, along with a few obscene words. The soldiers stand rigid and silent. Nobody is even pretending that this is business as usual.

  Fry’s gaze scans the little party, and the corners of her mouth tug down. “There are only five of you,” she says. “Where are the others?”

  “Still on board,” Carlisle says. “With the door locked. They’re waiting on my orders, brigadier—whether to surrender Rosie or to scupper her, along with the uniquely valuable specimen we talked about earlier.”

  Fry is only a few yards from Carlisle now. The men on either side of her are tense and watchful. The colonel will die if he moves his hand towards his sidearm—probably if he moves at all. Fry seems to find his answer mildly puzzling. “To scupper Rosie?” she repeats. “How would you do that?”

  “If we reach an amicable agreement here, you’ll never have to find out.”

  Fry smiles. It’s a little bleak, a little washed out, but it’s there. This is another reason why they’re still alive, Khan realises. The brigadier has built this moment up in her mind, has promised herself the luxury of a conversation. She wants her moment and she wants Colonel Carlisle to share it.

  “I’ve already given you all the assurances I can, Isaac,” she says. “And really you have no bargaining power here. You mentioned a baby. Yet now I’m expected to believe that you—and the mother—have come up with a plan in which the baby remains behind in Rosie to be blown up or burned to death if we fail to see eye to eye. I know you better than that.”

  The colonel lets his gaze sweep across the ragged line of junker warriors. “I imagine we’ve both moved on from the opinions we expressed the last time we talked,” he says.

  And on and on, Khan thinks. Go ahead. Keep it up. While their invisible signal flare goes out into the night. They washed off their e-blocker before they stepped out of Rosie, every one of them. Even normal hungries can follow very tiny chemical gradients for miles: the feral children have shown themselves more tenacious again, and much more resourceful.

  Come on, kids. We’re right here, so let’s party!

  But the kids don’t come and Khan’s mind feels like a febrile flame, drawing up the light and heat from the searing headlights and turning them into something lighter and hotter still. She’s going. She knows she is. Her consciousness will sublime away into the air. The dull-eyed animal that’s left behind will make some purposeless movement that startles the soldiers and kicks off the slaughter.

  That’s not how this ends. It can’t be. If they die, Fry will take Rosie. Stephen will spill everything he knows about the cure—he won’t be able to stop himself—and her baby will be picked apart on an autopsy slab while he’s still alive. He will be the first of a great multitude.

  “What?” Fry says to the colonel. “You’ve finally realised that there’s a downside to democracy? I find that hard to believe.” She turns to the officer at her side. “Captain Manolis, lead a detail across to the Rosalind Franklin. Six men, including two engineers. Dismantle her treads so she is unable to move.”

  The officer salutes and vanishes into the dark.

  “I strongly advise you not to do that,” the colonel says. “My men on board will interpret it as a hostile act.”

  Fry all but smirks. “Your men on board? I believe you’re talking about the autistic boy, Stephen Greaves. And Dr. Fournier, who answers to me and in any case is too much of a coward to contemplate killing himself.” The brigadier shakes her head. She has seen through all of Colonel Carlisle’s subterfuges and she is expansive in her victory—but not too expansive. “We can still do this without any unnecessary loss of life,” she says. “Tell them to come out. Do it now. Otherwise I’ll have to order the captain to block the air vents. Once they’re all dead we can burn our way in through the airlock doing no damage to the hull at all.”

  Carlisle takes a deep breath, and holds it. He tenses, and the soldiers all around them gather themselves visibly, interpreting his involuntary movement as a sign that he is about to attack the brigadier. But he doesn’t. He only looks back across the distance that separates them from Rosie (it seems immense to Khan, an unbridgeable gulf) before settling his gaze on Fry again. “May I remind you of the baby?” he says in a tone that is still very close to calm.

  “Certainly, Isaac. May I remind you that I’m giving you the choice?”

  There is a moment’s silence. Fry raises her radio, watching Carlisle for a decision. Khan feels another wave of weakness, of fuzzed focus, of absence rush through her. She finds a thought and keeps it in the forefront of her mind. If Fry starts to speak into the radio, she will stop her. Whatever it costs her, that order isn’t going to be spoken.

  “Geraldine,” Carlisle says. “You’ve made a terrible mistake.”

  “Have I?” Fry inquires, with icy politeness. “I don’t think so.”

  “But yes,” Carlisle insists, blatantly playing for time (and not very much of it, seconds at most). “All of this, this entire situation, has been of your making. You were so sure that what humankind needed most was you that you were prepared to kill them all to prove your point. Which, by the way, you haven’t. Even if you were right in the first place about Beacon needing a strong and centralised command structure, you’ve achieved precisely the opposite of what you intended. You’ve introduced chaos and randomness into a system that was barely surviving as it was. The junkers! You know what they’ve done, how they live. If Beacon survives, it will be in spite of you. I imagine that will be the kindest epitaph you’ll get.”

  “I beg to differ,” the brigadier says.

  It’s the conciseness of that reply, after the colonel’s intentionally drawn-out j’accuse, that tells Khan the conversation is at an end. The children have failed them. They’re out of time.

  And so is she. There is nothing left to cling to. She’s going out with the tide of her own breath. She will die and her friends will die and Stephen and then her baby last of all. She looks from face to face, trying to find an anchor that will hold her fragmenting mind in this place for a few seconds longer. But every face is turned away from her.

  A soggy spark of realisation flickers, fades, almost dies. Every face is turned. The Beacon soldiers and the junkers have their guns trained on Carlisle. On Foss. On McQueen. On Sixsmith. The men and women in uniform, with rifles on their backs and pistols on their belts. The clear and present dangers. They have discounted the petite Asian woman in her soiled white lab coat. She is so clearly not a con
cern, not a factor in any of this.

  She takes a half-step forward. “Private,” she says. Her voice is a pitiful thing, hoarse and fractured, without breath to drive it.

  She doesn’t say it to anyone in particular and the man who glances in her direction isn’t a soldier at all. He’s a junker, an alpha male with corded muscle in his arms, braids in his shoulder-length hair and a moustache that reminds Khan of circus strongmen. The ultimate satirical statement of masculinity. His rifle still pointed at the colonel, he reaches out a hand to push her back.

  Khan takes the hand in both of hers. Turns it so the fleshy part at the base of the thumb is clearly exposed. She might be trying to read his future. But he doesn’t have one, any more than she does.

  She lowers her head and bites down hard.

  59

  “If Beacon survives,” the colonel tells Geraldine Fry, “it will be in spite of you. I imagine that will be the kindest epitaph you’ll get.”

  Fry gives him a glare of frank contempt. “I beg to differ,” she says. Something in her bearing changes. It’s not easy to define, but it’s unmistakeable. She draws back a little way. The next time she speaks, Colonel Carlisle knows beyond a doubt, it will be to tell her men to open fire.

  To her left and out of her direct line of sight, Samrina Khan reaches out and takes the hand of one of the junkers guarding them. Then she bends down—as far as he can tell—to kiss it. It’s such a grotesque and unexpected sight that it makes Carlisle falter, stumbling over the temporising words he’s trying to get out.

  So he says nothing. He just laughs. Long and loud, dredging up the sound from the bottom of his chest. Drawing it out. Shaking his head and wiping imaginary tears from the corner of his eye.

  Just to buy a few extra seconds, as Fry watches the pantomime, stony-faced instead of giving the order.

  “Would you care to share the joke, Isaac?” she demands as he subsides.

  Carlisle waves a hand, as though he’s still too helpless to speak.

  “Ready rifles,” the brigadier raps out.

  She gets no further than that. The man Dr. Khan just kissed has flung himself violently upon the man beside him. Khan herself has progressed to the uniformed soldier on her other side, taking advantage of his momentary inattention to sink her teeth into his wrist. The man wrenches his hand away and raises his rifle to club her down. But before he completes the motion he freezes on the spot. The rifle slips from his grip and his feet shuffle as though he is trying to walk but forgetting the intricate rules. Abruptly he swivels and charges the private behind him, engulfing her in a clumsy, tight embrace. They topple together. Meanwhile both the junker Khan bit and the soldier he attacked have each found new partners and borne them down.

  “Ready rifles!” Fry bellows again. But now the disturbance is spreading. That whole part of the line is involved in a complex wrestling match, the men Khan blessed with her laying on of hands—and teeth—passing the bad news along to their nearest comrades, who in their turn …

  Every man and woman here has enough experience with this to know what they’re seeing. This daisy chain is what they dread more than anything else in the world. It’s what happens when people are exposed to the hungry pathogen.

  Somehow, impossibly, Khan has infected them. She is the vector of this micro-epidemic, that is spreading now in waves outwards from her. There are shouts of panic. Men and women rising up from the ruck on the floor are summarily shot by those who haven’t been affected yet. They haven’t figured out that Khan is ground zero because she isn’t flinging herself at them in the way the men she touched are. She just stands and watches the chaos she has caused through heavy-lidded eyes, as though she is suddenly exhausted.

  Brigadier Fry is still yelling orders. They’re good orders, too. Step back. Don’t engage. Aim low. Isolate and incapacitate. The newly transformed hungries drop one by one.

  But so do the men who are firing on them. Something whines by the colonel’s ear, invisible, to smack into the skull of a junker ten yards away. A black stone, angular and highly polished. Volcanic glass, perhaps: northern Scotland, the colonel vaguely remembers, is rich in Mesolithic pitchstone. Whatever it is, it hits with enough force to remain embedded in the man’s forehead as he falls.

  The feral children have arrived at last.

  Geraldine Fry looks from side to side, bewildered. She doesn’t understand, in those first few moments, what this new threat is and where it is located. By the time she realises, her troops are falling like wheat.

  She tries to rally them. Yells to them to fall back to the vehicles in good order. If they were used to serving in the same command, if they knew what good order was, they might be in with a chance. The junkers break in all directions. The Beacon soldiers can’t even begin to hold the line that’s left.

  An adjutant over by the Challenger turns to relay the brigadier’s orders. He dies with his mouth wide open and a spear through his neck cutting off the words he was about to say.

  By this time, McQueen and Foss and Sixsmith have shrugged their rifles off their shoulders. Have brought them around and up to the ready. They’re taking aim, as far as they need to. At this distance, the SCAR-H is not a discriminating weapon.

  Firing at will, they move forward, away from Rosie and from the attacking children, through the ragged line of Beacon troops and the milling junkers who are in no formation at all. Nothing stands in their way, or at least not for long: they lay down a corridor in the chaos and walk on through it. Carlisle follows them, slower in his gait because of his limp and more deliberate in choosing targets. He shoots junkers, wherever he can, avoids the few uniforms he can see. His sympathies here are for the men and women—surely there must have been some—who thought they were fighting for something real.

  Breaking through the line is much easier than he had feared. The junkers have scattered, which is a quick and easy suicide. The Beacon soldiers are doing what their training tells them to do, kneeling or throwing themselves prone to make a smaller target, using the towering weeds for cover. The enemy out in the night, seeing them by their body heat, kills them just the same.

  The remnants of Rosie’s military escort break out on the far side of the cordon and leave them to it. Predators and prey can sort it out among themselves. The little group sprints into the denser undergrowth at the edge of the concrete field, Carlisle still bringing up the rear. McQueen staggers, emitting a grunt of pain and surprise. He has taken a hit to the upper body, though it’s impossible in the dark to say exactly where. His rifle clatters from his grip. He draws his pistol clumsily with his left hand and keeps on moving.

  Finally they put the two staff cars and the Challenger between themselves and the worst of the gunfire.

  The plan now is to carry on in as straight a line as they can manage until they reach the perimeter fence, and then follow it widdershins to the base’s south gate, where Rosie will meet them. It’s a terrible plan, built on the optimistic premise that their two enemies will obligingly break against each other and leave nobody standing to pursue them. It also assumes that they will not lose each other in the dark.

  Unfortunately they already have. The colonel slows, realising suddenly that Dr. Khan is no longer with them. He turns and looks back the way they’ve just come, but the headlights of the parked vehicles are the only illumination and they are all pointing at Rosie on the far side of the parade ground. Small, fleet figures race in and out of the beams. Like bats, they’re almost too quick to see at all. When a burst of machine-gun fire rips apart the brambles a few feet away from Carlisle, he is forced to move forward again.

  For another fifty yards. This time it’s Sixsmith who stumbles to a halt. She points wordlessly off to the left.

  “No way!” Foss exclaims incredulously. “No fucking way!”

  The brigadier would surely have left at least a token guard on the copter, but there is no sign of them now. Perhaps they went to join the fight. Perhaps, seeing the way things were going, they scatt
ered and took cover. Whichever decision they went with, it will probably make no difference to their eventual fate.

  The copter is a crude, functional thing: a bulbous egg at the end of a fuselage that’s no more than a single steel strut. “What is this piece of shit?” McQueen grunts in disgust. He is bent over like an old man, his right arm folded against his chest. Wherever he was hit, Carlisle does not believe it’s a flesh wound.

  “MH-6,” Sixsmith mutters tersely, running past him and vaulting into the pilot seat. “Little Bird. I can fly this. I can fly it all the way to Beacon.”

  “Yeah, but we can’t ride it,” Foss protests. “There’s no room.”

  “It will take four.”

  “There are fucking eight of us!”

  “Four on the gun platform, I mean. Plus pilot and co-pilot. Khan can hold her baby and the civilian commander can fucking walk home.”

  “Works for me,” McQueen says. He moves forward, but he doesn’t seem able to raise his foot high enough to climb into the copter’s rear. Foss has to lift and manhandle him in, which is a struggle. Then she clambers in after him.

  Carlisle hesitates, looking back once more towards the parade ground where bursts of gunfire and screams of despair can still be heard, but at lengthening intervals.

  He leaves it too long. And he lets his guard down, like a fool, thinking that the danger has stayed where it was put. Something cold touches his temple.

  “You bastard,” Fry hisses into his ear. “This was about our future. You’ve stolen our future!” Her fingers feel down his arm, find his pistol and tug it from his hand. He hears the heavy thud as it falls into the weeds. McQueen and Foss are inside the copter’s passenger space and haven’t realised what’s happening. Sixsmith sees, but she has set her rifle down in the co-pilot seat to get to grips with the copter’s controls. She glances across at it now, but there is no way she can get anywhere near it before Fry fires.