The Boy on the Bridge

by M. R. Carey

  “You did that, Geraldine,” Carlisle says. “When you started this. Nobody forced your hand.”

  “I want Beacon to survive. That’s what forced my hand. Tell your people to get out of my copter.”

  “No.”

  “Tell them, Isaac. Now.”

  “No.”

  “Fine.” Subconsciously he expects to hear the click of the safety, but why would the safety be on in the middle of a massacre? What he hears is the ringing, echoing roar of the brigadier’s pistol discharging right beside his ear. The shot goes wide, though the range was point blank.

  Fry’s legs buckle under her and she folds backwards, her arms windmilling. Samrina Khan’s jaws are locked in her throat. They hit the ground together.

  Carlisle kneels quickly and gropes in the long grass for his pistol. Khan is on her knees too, her upper body leaning over the brigadier’s and mostly hiding it from sight. The sounds, though, signal clearly that what is being hidden is extreme and cannibalistic in nature.

  Carlisle finds the gun in the same moment that Samrina raises her head. The blood is black in the dim light, smeared across the lower half of the doctor’s face like a highwayman’s mask. Even her teeth are black, so her gaping mouth is just a tunnel.

  Sixsmith has grabbed her rifle now: she hugs it to her chest like a comforter. But Foss jumps down from the rear platform with her weapon raised and ready.

  Then she sees who it is that’s crouching on her haunches in the grass. “Oh shit!” she whispers.

  Carlisle goes down on one knee, his stiff leg protesting at the harsh usage. “Samrina,” he says. “You have to get into the copter. Do you understand me?”

  “Sir—” Foss protests.

  “Now, Samrina. Quickly.”

  “Sir, you can bloody well see she’s turned!”

  “Isaac,” Khan croaks. The word is barely audible.

  “Yes, Samrina. Into the copter. Now.”

  Khan raises her hand. The movement is jerky and effortful, stitched together out of a dozen separate acts of new will-power. She touches her extended fingertip to the centre of her forehead. “Don’t look back,” she says. Distinctly. Her eyes lose focus, as though she’s peering with difficulty through the disordered drifts of memory into another time and place.

  Her lips are still moving, but she has run out of words. It doesn’t matter. There is no mistaking her meaning.

  “Colonel, please! Get out of my way and give me a clear shot!”

  Khan exhales—a long, breathy sibilance.

  She gathers herself, her upper body ducking a little as she compacts the muscles of her legs and arms. Hands splayed wide. Jaws gaping.

  In the instant before she leaps, Carlisle places his pistol against her forehead, exactly in the spot she indicated, and pulls the trigger.

  Takes what was left of Samrina Khan and paints the grass and concrete with it.

  The aborted attack carries her into his arms. He drops the pistol again to catch her, her insubstantial weight not even making him stagger. He lowers her to the ground with excessive care.

  He is not crying. He makes no sound. The grief is wedged so deep within him that he can’t turn it into breath.

  Sixsmith is examining the brigadier’s body. After a moment of wary circling she lowers her rifle. Most of Fry’s throat and upper chest are gone, so there is nothing to be afraid of there. She turns her attention to Dr. Khan, who is even more indubitably dead.

  “What a waste,” she mutters. She struggles for words, comes up with nothing better. “What a fucking … waste!”

  “She saved us all from dying back there,” Carlisle snaps. “And everyone on Rosie, too. That’s not waste. Don’t ever call that waste.”

  Lieutenant Foss leans down to help him to his feet but he stands unaided, though the pain forces a gasp out of him.

  “Sir, we’ve got to get out of here,” Foss says.

  The words make sense and he is about to follow her, but he makes the mistake of looking over his shoulder. He stays where he is, unmoving.

  “Sir—”

  “Rosie,” the colonel exclaims. It’s the best he can manage.

  “We’ll rendezvous with Rosie at the south gate, as per plan,” Foss says. But then she follows his gaze and sees what he has seen.

  Rosie isn’t moving. And she is surrounded. Not by Captain Manolis and his detail, or by the junker warriors: the diminutive figures clustered around her front and her sides can only be the feral children. And the fact that they have come out of hiding presumably means that Fry’s people are all dead or in the wind.

  With an obscene oath, Foss takes aim.

  The colonel grabs hold of the SCAR-H’s barrel and forces it down.

  The mid-section door has just slid open. Stephen Greaves emerges from the airlock and steps down into the midst of the children. He is holding Samrina Khan’s baby in his arms.

  “Listen to me, Lieutenant,” Carlisle snaps. He tells Foss what Khan told him in Rosie’s airlock. He doesn’t have to explain to her what it means. He tells her to get the survivors back to Beacon, and to spread the word to anyone they trust.

  Then he heads back across the parade ground, picking his way around the dead.

  60

  With baby Khan tucked up in Rina’s bunk, surrounded by her smell and her residual presence, Greaves watches the battle from up in the turret. He hates it, but he has to watch because he has made a promise to Rina that he means to keep. His window of opportunity, if it comes at all, will be narrow. He can’t afford to miss it.

  More distressingly, he has made a promise to Colonel Carlisle that he will ultimately break. He didn’t lie—of course he didn’t—but he knows that the colonel took a different meaning from his answer than the one that was in his own mind when he spoke.

  “If this works, Stephen,” the colonel said, “if the children come, I want you to meet us at the south gate as soon as it’s safe to move. You can drive Rosie, I assume?”

  And yes, Greaves said, he could. He had read the manual, and memorised it. He was confident that he could drive Rosie at need. While he was saying these easy, obvious things, he prepared his answer to the bigger question.

  “If you make it, Colonel … and if I make it … then I’ll meet you at the south gate.”

  He said it fiercely, forcing the words out of his mouth against the rebellion of his breath.

  The colonel mistook his intensity for alarm. “You should be fine,” he reassured Greaves. “They won’t fire on Rosie unless they absolutely have to, and our coming out will mean they don’t have to. Or so they’ll assume. We’ll keep them talking until the children arrive, and after that they should have too much on their plates to worry about us.”

  “Yes,” Greaves agreed. “They’ll have too much on their plates.”

  “Here.” The colonel gave him the tiny hand-held radio that used to be Dr. Fournier’s. “This is on the brigadier’s frequency, so you can’t use it to call us. Not yet. But once you get to the fence, if you don’t find us, just keep this on and I’ll talk you in.”

  Then the colonel left.

  And now he sits in the turret waiting and watching, knowing that he will never see the south gate. He has lied by omission. It sits in his stomach like a stone.

  A voice from inside the lab, high but hoarse, scatters his thoughts. “Colonel! McQueen! Anyone!” Dr. Fournier has woken up and he seems very angry. Perhaps that’s not surprising, given that he was rendered unconscious by means of blunt-instrument trauma and now finds himself tied to the workbench. Greaves tries not to listen, even when Dr. Fournier demands shrilly and repeatedly to be let free. Even when his shouting wakes the baby, who starts to cry.

  Dr. Fournier is the other reason why Greaves is up in the turret. He is afraid of the doctor, and seriously needs to keep a safe distance in case the doctor goes from complaining and demanding to asking questions again. Last time that happened, the only thing that kept Greaves from giving up everything he knew was Rina knocki
ng the doctor out with the heavy steel clamp stand. Rina isn’t here now so he has to be very careful.

  The fight outside has reached a crescendo. Greaves switches to the infra-red goggles, which turn the bloodletting into an abstract play of shapes and colours. He bites his lower lip hard and tries not to think about punctured and perforated flesh. Teeth and stones and bullets. Blood running out onto the cracked asphalt. He hopes fervently that Rina and the others were able to get clear before the fighting started. That they’re not out there in the middle of this killing field.

  The movement outside goes on for a long time. The screams and yells, the pleading and cursing likewise, a very long time.

  When the last of Fry’s troops have been dispatched, the children move forward out of the brambles and the trees into the relative openness of the parade ground. They inspect the bodies, finishing off those who are still moving. Only then do they kneel down and feed. Perhaps it’s Greaves’ imagination but he believes he can see the moment when the scarred girl (he has recognised her from her silhouette and from the way she moves) nods her permission. He wonders if she is looking for him among the dead as he looked for her after the fire. He wonders what the captain’s voice box told her that morning, assuming that she pulled the string and listened to the words. She wouldn’t have understood them in any case. She doesn’t speak the captain’s language.

  These are pointless thoughts. It’s time, he decides. He needs to go down. He assumes the children will come in any case, to complete the errand that has brought them all this far, but just in case he will meet them more than halfway. He descends from the turret.

  “Greaves!” Dr. Fournier bellows. Stephen flinches. “I can see you there. Untie me. Untie me right now, or you’ll face a courtmartial. We’re under military law! I can order you shot!”

  Steeling himself, Greaves enters the lab. He is shaking with terror, but he has a contingency plan. If Dr. Fournier asks him about the cure or starts any sentence with a question word, then Greaves will sing the theme tune from Captain Power loudly enough to drown out the words.

  Dr. Fournier sags with relief as he sees Greaves. “Thank you!” he snarls with heavy sarcasm. Then he gasps out loud as Stephen walks right on past him. “Greaves! Stop what you’re doing and loosen these straps! I’m warning you—”

  He’s the hero of the spaceways, the galactic engineer, Greaves tells himself. He doesn’t say it aloud but he’s ready to. At a moment’s notice. If a single dangerous word comes out of Dr. Fournier’s mouth. He keeps his face averted as he fills a canteen with water and loops its strap over his shoulder. As he opens freezer compartment ten and removes the dead boy. Then as he sets the cold corpse down on the work table a few inches from Fournier’s head. Fournier pulls back from it with a yelp of protest.

  “I’m warning you is tautologous,” Greaves says. He almost shouts it, his strained voice rising in pitch. This is the most dangerous moment, with the feral child actually in Dr. Fournier’s line of sight—a visual cue for the forbidden topic.

  “What?” Dr. Fournier splutters.

  “To say you’re warning somebody is to perform a self-enacting speech act. The warning is contained in the words used to announce that a warning is being given.” He’s babbling, pushing the conversation like a boulder away from the place where it mustn’t go.

  “Greaves, are you mad?” The doctor’s face has darkened to a deep red, almost purple.

  Perhaps he is. There would be no way of knowing, which of course is always the problem—not just for him but for everyone. Sanity is a suspended state, moored in nothing but itself. You test the ground an inch in front of you, move forward as though it’s solid. But the whole world is in freefall and you’re in freefall with it.

  “I don’t know,” Greaves admits. “I just don’t know.”

  He is staring at the small cadaver, guilty and desolate. The life that was here is long gone, but the dead boy’s kindred have come a very long way to reclaim the part of him that they can still see. Greaves has disrespected that part. There are incisions and excavations where he took his tissue samples, raw wounds that have never bled because the blood had already congealed before the flesh was broken.

  “Greaves.” Dr. Fournier’s tone has changed. He is staring at Stephen with a new urgency. “Put that specimen back. You hear me? It belongs to the expedition. And your findings, your discovery—all of it! The colonel will be very angry with you if you do anything to jeopardise our mission. Our—our joint mission. He’ll be angry and disappointed. Why would you put at risk everything we’ve—?”

  Stephen slams the freezer cabinet shut and flees, taking the corpse with him. “He’s the hero of the spaceways!” he yells. “The galactic engineer!”

  “What? Greaves! Come back!”

  The baby. The baby is next. Too many things, too many factors to keep straight in his head. He sets the dead boy down in the mid-section just inside the airlock door. His hands are shaking. There is no sequence here. None of the things he is doing are in the long, long list of things he has done before.

  For a moment, he is completely lost. In a panic he almost hits the airlock’s controls. No no no. Not yet. Not yet.

  Dr. Fournier’s cries follow him into the crew quarters. They echo around him as he goes to collect the baby from Rina’s bunk, but the shrilling of the crying child is louder and the pounding of his own blood seems louder still. It’s easy now to shut out any meaning in the stream of sound coming from the lab.

  The baby is lying on his back, screaming, his mouth an O of hysterical misery. He has kicked his blanket away. Greaves picks him up and swaddles him again with ginger care. Miraculously and very suddenly the baby stops crying at this point, as though human contact was all it wanted. As though all its sorrows came down to being alone. Perhaps that’s true of everyone.

  “Soon,” Stephen whispers, staring into the baby’s solemn, inscrutable eyes.

  The blanket is green, like all the blankets in Rosie. Army issue. Greaves takes another, from his own bunk, tugging it free one-handed with the baby cradled in his other arm. Dr. Fournier continues to yell through all of this, but baby Khan stays quiet. Nonetheless he gapes his tiny mouth and tastes the air, which is no doubt rich with scents of possible food. Greaves notices that all the baby’s teeth are now fully grown in.

  He goes back out into the mid-section, carrying the baby in one hand and the spare blanket draped across his arm. Will it be enough? It’s all he can do. He sets the baby down on the deck plates, making a nest out of the folded blanket to protect him a little against the cold metal. “I won’t be long,” he whispers.

  On the other side of the airlock doors, the night is impenetrably black. But through the infra-reds, once he slips them on again, he sees a forest of bright blue lozenges converging on Rosie from all sides. Blue indicates a temperature between 10 and 14 degrees Celsius, barely higher than background ambient. The children are coming to meet him.

  “Greaves, I demand that you untie me! This is your last warning!”

  Stephen hesitates for a long time. Finally he goes back into the lab, opens one of the instrument drawers and finds a scalpel. He turns to face Dr. Fournier.

  The doctor tenses. He shrinks away as Stephen approaches, emitting a sound that’s halfway between a whimper and a sigh.

  Stephen slips the scalpel carefully between Dr. Fournier’s clenched fists. The doctor opens his hands and lets the scalpel drop. But then on the second try, when he realises that Stephen is not trying to murder him, he accepts it. “You can cut yourself free,” Stephen tells him. “Probably. But you’d better not follow me, Dr. Fournier. It’s not safe for you where I’m going.”

  Fournier’s eyes implore him. “Greaves, wait. Tell me—”

  “He’s the hero of the spaceways, the galactic engineer! He brings the Terran Code to all the planets far and near!”

  “For God’s sake! Greaves!”

  But he’s gone, still singing. Captain Power’s ship was called Cope
rnicus. He was a scientist as well as a hero, and knowledge was his greatest weapon. He would have hated Dr. Fournier, who tries to turn knowledge into things he wants.

  On the mid-section platform, Stephen kneels and makes ready. He finds the scarred girl’s totem, her gift to him, and slips his little finger through the ring. The smiling man in the red hat and blue overalls dangles between his fingers.

  He presses the airlock control. As the door slides open he steps out.

  Into a mob. The children are everywhere, crowding dozens deep. So many! Have they brought reinforcements this time or were they always an army rather than a family?

  But they are a family. The youngest press against the oldest or hide behind them, peeping out from cover. They grip onto the elbows of the bigger kids or swing from them, kicking their heels, as human children have always done. They are loved and protected, their place absolutely acknowledged.

  They make no move towards Greaves. Perhaps having the door just slide open in front of them when they were gearing up for a siege throws them a little off their stride.

  He holds up the key ring for them to see, and waits. He has no idea whether the little man with the M on his hat will make a difference, but once again it’s all he’s got. A ripple of interest goes through the children like a breeze through grass. They know whose sigil this is.

  Then something else goes through them. The scarred girl herself, striding confidently along a corridor that opens ahead of her and closes again in her wake. The children step out of her path quickly enough that she is able to maintain a steady pace, never having to slow or stop.

  She walks right to him.

  She extends her hand and touches the key ring with the tip of one finger, as though she is acknowledging a kinship or a debt. They exchanged gifts. She remembers. Stephen looks down at her waist, expecting to see Captain Power’s voice box among the baubles hanging there, but it’s not. When he looks up again it’s in her hand.

  He releases a held breath. He still has far to go, but he feels as though he is on the right road.

  Without shifting his ground, he half-turns and points—raising his hand slowly and carefully—behind him, towards the airlock. Actually towards the mid-section platform. He has left the lights on there, so they can see. More gifts …