The Boy on the Bridge

by M. R. Carey

  “Or perhaps it’s nothing. Perhaps, as you suggested, the cultures were dead before they were put into the jars. Contaminated in some way. We’ve decided, though, to take the chance. To assume that it’s not a mistake.”

  “We?” Fournier echoes, with just a hint of a sneer. “Your crew is gone, Colonel.”

  “I know,” Carlisle says. “But they haven’t gone far. They probably arrived at Beacon before we reached London. They’ll spread the word, as discreetly as they can, that there’s an alternative now. Another choice. Beacon is becoming a terrible place, poisoned by its own isolation. Anyone who wants to leave, and try again, is welcome to come with us.”

  “To Scotland?” Fournier is incredulous. “To the Cairngorms?”

  “Yes.”

  “You won’t last the first winter! Assuming you even get there in the first place!”

  “Possibly not. But I believe it’s worthwhile making the attempt. It gives me hope, and hope is important.”

  Carlisle points out of the window again. When Fournier turns to look, he puts the gun against the side of the doctor’s head and pulls the trigger. He is almost certain that Fournier didn’t see it coming. As much mercy as he could manage, in the circumstances. Certainly a better death than the doctor would find for himself if he were left to walk home.

  There is nowhere nearby to bury the body, and Carlisle has no tools that would serve. In any case, it seems to him, Rosie does very well as a coffin and London does tolerably well as a mausoleum.

  He inflicts as much damage on the engine as he can bear to. He doesn’t want Rosie ever to move again, ever to fight and kill again, but vandalism doesn’t come easy to him.

  He has a very long way to travel. He packs a rucksack with rations for a week or two, e-blocker for a month. If it takes longer than that then he probably won’t make it at all.

  But he will. He will make it. And Foss and Sixsmith and McQueen will join him there, presently, with anyone from Beacon who has heard their message. That the Fireman is waiting for them high up in the snows and the frigid air. That he will build a new city, with their help. Or die trying.

  He exits through the airlock, setting it to seal itself behind him.

  He sets off walking. It’s a beautiful evening. A beautiful place. He pretends as he walks that the old world never fell. That when he turns the corner he will see traffic roaring by. Foreign tourists waving selfie sticks like bishops’ crosiers, office workers walking briskly from their hectic work to their hectic leisure.

  And street upon street, the city. And city upon city, the world. Uncountable millions of people, as it was before.

  He imagines that history stretches before him as well as behind, a river so broad and deep it makes the Thames look like nothing more than a teardrop rolling down the world’s rugged cheek.

  EPILOGUE

  TWENTY YEARS LATER

  The snow is eight inches deep, but you wouldn’t want to trust to that too much. This is glacial moraine, sewn through and through with rifts and fissures into which snow has drifted until they filled to the brim. If you don’t test every step before you take it, you can sink into a hollow that’s deeper than your height, with rocks as sharp as teeth at the bottom of it.

  Nonetheless, the little group of figures down on the eastern slope is making steady progress. They tack left and right, all together, and they keep on coming. There are places on the slope that are still in shadow, the blood-tinged dawn light poking patchily through the peaks above, but the six men and women don’t slow down to probe the blank expanses ahead of them, and they don’t put a foot wrong.

  Foss is struck as she watches them come by, how young they look, the oldest barely thirty. That’s not the most striking thing about them, though. What she noticed first, and can’t keep from thinking about, is how lightly they’re dressed. Short jackets, open to the biting wind. No hats. If they were human—normal, baseline human, one-point-zero human—they’d be dead.

  So they’re what the colonel said they had to be when they were first sighted at the edge of the plateau. They’re hungries.

  And there are more of them down at the bottom of the slope, half a mile back. This is just the vanguard.

  Foss turns and walks back the way she came, up to the top of the slope and then north along the razor-edge of what used to be called the Lairig Ghru pass. There are three sentries stationed in the rocks above the pass: they can see Foss as she comes and they can see each other. She raises her rifle horizontally and holds it in the air for several seconds, in her left hand. It’s a pre-arranged signal that means hold your positions and do nothing unless directly attacked. The sentries, who have been straining every nerve since she went downslope, relax a little and return to their vigil. They have enough discipline not to shout questions at her as she walks on by.

  Around the shoulder of the mountain, above the swollen exclamation point that is Loch Etchachan, is a settlement made of ninety tents and thirty-seven wooden huts. Sprawling, ragged and dirty, surrounded by mounds of its own rubbish that will stay on the mountain until the spring thaw makes it safe to take them down to the sink hole below the pass that is the settlement’s official waste disposal.

  On an ordinary day, even this early in the morning, there would be people walking or running across the open ground between the tents. Children on their way to school, men and women coming back from a hunt or from the barns along the line of the pass with sacks of turnips or onions on their backs.

  But this isn’t an ordinary day. A few more of Foss’s people stand on guard at their posts on the upslope and at the ends of the tent-avenues. Everyone else is three miles down the pass, hidden in a defile whose mouth has been painstakingly camouflaged, ready to retreat up or down the mountain depending on which signal flare they see.

  Foss goes to the council hut, where the colonel sits alone, and makes her report.

  Carlisle gets to his feet. It’s not a quick or easy process these days: the years have not been kind to his old injury or more generally to his hips and lower back. Foss has to resist the urge to give the frail old man a hand up, knowing that the reminder of his weakness shames him.

  “We’ll go down to them,” he says.

  “Okay,” Foss agrees. “But I’ll lead, Isaac. You don’t have to come.”

  “Yes,” he tells her. “I do.”

  So it takes a good long time for them to get out onto the moraine, and after that they slow down more than somewhat. Foss could wish that the colonel had left this in her hands, though she knows why he hasn’t. The people who left Beacon to found this precarious community put their trust in his name and reputation. He carries that responsibility like a physical weight.

  All the same, she would have preferred for them to make their stand further down the plateau—if only because it will give the rest of the good citizens of Rosie’s Town more of a head start if the balloon goes up.

  A hundred yards down from the north-eastern edge of the moraine, there is a rock shaped a little bit like a squatting rabbit. A small burn cuts in front of its base. McQueen is waiting for them there, and he gives them a nod of greeting as they come up.

  “They’re almost here,” he says, with a sidelong flick of his gaze. “I’ve wired the rock with C4 in a couple of places, so we can throw them a decent party if we have to. This is a good enough place to wait.”

  Foss agrees. The sentries above will be able to see them clearly, so she doesn’t have to worry about getting the signal out.

  They space themselves out to either side of the colonel, rifles at parade rest, while their visitors climb the last few hundred yards up the slope. When McQueen judges that they’re close enough, he waves them to a halt. They understand his gesture and they obey it, which has to count as a good start. Nobody’s ripping anybody’s throat out, or at least not yet a while.

  So young, Foss thinks again: and, weirdly, so beautiful. The whites of their eyes are Cordyceps-grey, but their skin is perfect—not dried out and broken with fros
t, scaly from vitamin B deficiency or ridged with keloid scars. They even look a little tanned, which suggests they may have started their journey a long way further south.

  That’s not true of their leader, though. She’s white-blonde and albino-pale, her skin utterly without pigment. Her age is difficult to guess but she’s certainly not the oldest here. She carries herself with an unselfconscious grace, without arrogance, almost without emphasis. Her short-sleeved shirt (it must be twenty below!) is a plain lemon yellow and her trousers—muddy, threadbare—are tucked into battered, well-worn boots. She wears no badge of office. But when she stands forward, the others drop back, deferential, attentive, completely silent.

  “I’m Melanie,” she says. “Good morning to you all.”

  In polished English, beautifully enunciated. Foss’s scalp prickles. What she has expected, up to now, is a sort of pantomime of grimaces and gesticulations. It never occurred to her that the second-gen hungries would have learned a language, or that if they did it would be this one.

  “Isaac Carlisle,” the colonel says.

  “Colonel Isaac Carlisle,” Foss corrects.

  “And that is Kat Foss, while to my right is Daniel McQueen.”

  The woman looks at each of them in turn, takes time to assess them. It’s a close enough examination that Foss tenses a little and starts to measure distances and angles. If Snow White here wants to start something, they’ll meet her halfway.

  “We’ve been looking for you for a long time, Colonel Carlisle,” the woman says.

  Carlisle says nothing, but McQueen rises to the bait and Foss is not surprised. “Really?” he says. “And why’s that?”

  The woman—Melanie—holds her arms out from her sides, palms open. “We didn’t think there were any of you left,” she says. “It seemed too much to hope for. But we didn’t want to give up the search while there was still a chance.”

  Is it Foss’s imagination, or did one of the guys further back just lick his lips? “There are plenty of us left,” she says. “Up here, and in lots of other places besides.”

  “No.” The word is flat, unemphatic. Melanie shakes her head. “The world is poison to you now. Apart from this one place, apparently. Beacon and the junker tribes died out at the same time, and then there was just us. Or so we thought.”

  “That’s a cute little euphemism,” McQueen observes. “Died out. You mean they were eaten, right?”

  “No.” Melanie looks cast down for a moment. Guilty, almost. “The Cordyceps pathogen became airborne. All humans everywhere became hungries, all at once. Except for you.”

  Foss is stunned by the words. Not because they come as a surprise. Nobody who has left the mountain has ever come back, in more than a decade, or else they came back changed, rabid, whether they had bite marks on them or not. It’s been plain for a long time that the plateau is an island in an invisible but toxic ocean. But still, to hear it said fills her, in a few moments, with a decade’s worth of fear and grieving. It’s one thing to be an exile and another thing to know it. She hadn’t even realised she was lying to herself until she feels the tears freezing on her cheeks.

  “Then how did you know to look for us?” Carlisle demands. Mild, not confrontational, not acknowledging the hopelessness of their position.

  Melanie’s face creases with earnestness. “We didn’t,” she says. “I told you. It was just that we wanted to do everything we could before we finally, officially gave up the search. Some friends of mine looked at old records from before the Breakdown, and drew up a list of places where extreme weather patterns or unusual microclimates might offer some …” she chooses the word with care “ … protection for you. I’ve had teams searching those areas for years now, whenever they could be spared from other work. And finally, last year, they found you. Everyone was really excited when they brought the news back.”

  “Yeah,” McQueen says, deadpan. “I bet. Nothing like varying the menu.”

  Melanie’s five companions bridle at this. They try to keep up their expressions of disciplined impassivity, but anger shows itself momentarily, here and there, in the twitch of a mouth or the narrowing of an eye—like small sparks struck off grey stone. One of the five clenches his fists, then slowly relaxes them again as Melanie goes on in the same even tone.

  “We didn’t announce ourselves at once, because we wanted to be sure we understood your situation. We’ve been watching from a distance, as discreetly as we could. Building up a picture.”

  “And do you?” Carlisle asks. “Understand our situation?”

  “I think so,” Melanie says. “Yes.” Once again she looks at all three of them in turn, as though she’s aware these words might hurt and is solicitous of their feelings. “You’re weak. Barely surviving. This is hard land to live in and even harder land to farm. Your harvest a few weeks ago was the worst since you arrived here. You don’t have enough food left to see more than half of you through to next spring. Plus I’d imagine you’re starting to see cases of scurvy and rickets because there isn’t enough fruit or calcium in your diet. So even if you survive the winter, you’re going to be in an even worse position going forward. Probably your colony has two or maybe three years left. Maybe not so long.”

  She stops speaking, and dead silence follows. Foss exchanges a glance with McQueen, and she’s happy to read in his face that they’re on the same page. They’ll let the colonel take the lead on this one, and they know exactly what he’s going to say. He draws in a long breath and lets it out again, steadying himself, finding words that are equal to the moment.

  “You won’t take us easily,” he says, “or without great cost to yourselves.” Melanie tries to break in but he goes on, speaking over her. “I won’t bother to deny what you’ve seen with your own eyes. Yes, we’re weak. Our bodies are. But trust me when I tell you that the people who came here were the strongest Beacon had to offer. They walked four hundred miles for the bare chance of a new life. They’ll do more for the chance to keep it.”

  Melanie seems flustered, dismayed. “But …” she says. “Colonel—”

  “So come when you’re ready,” Carlisle invites her. “You’ll find us ready, too.”

  “Colonel, we came here to help you.”

  Carlisle is already turning away as she speaks. He’s caught there, on the cusp of the movement. Melanie laughs—in pure embarrassment, as if she can’t believe they were coming at this conversation from such different angles. That things she took as given still needed to be said.

  Someone has to play straight man. Foss finds it’s her. “What are you talking about?” she inquires.

  Melanie points off down the slope. The rest of her underdressed entourage have advanced a little, and now they’re setting down boxes and crates in a rough and ready cairn. “Food,” she says, “and medicines. The plastic coolers are full of rabbits, freshly caught as we came up. The wooden crates are apples and greengages. You can eat those, yes?”

  “Greengages?” McQueen says. It’s hard to read his tone, but Foss’s mouth has filled with saliva just on hearing the word.

  “We thought fresh fruit and protein would be your most pressing needs,” Melanie says. “The rest is negotiable. We don’t cultivate grain for ourselves, obviously, but we can grow it for you. You’ll tell us what you need. What we don’t have, we’ll find or make.”

  They’re speechless for a moment or two. Then the colonel, who is still standing half-turned away from the girl, asks her the question that’s uppermost in all their minds.

  “Why?”

  Melanie doesn’t seem to understand, so he asks again. “Why would you do this?”

  “Because we can,” she says. She seems genuinely puzzled by the question. “Because we thought you were all gone and we’re so happy that we were wrong. That your people and my people can meet, and talk, and learn from each other. You’d just have been legends to us, otherwise.” She smiles, as though that thought strikes her as funny. “I know how legends work. In a few generations, there�
�d be a thousand wild stories about you, and the truth … well, the truth would just be a story a little less interesting than the rest. Now that we’ve found you, we’ll keep looking. Not just up here in Scotland, but elsewhere in the world. We’ve already started to equip an expedition to France and Switzerland. I mean, to the places that used to be France and Switzerland. You might not be the only ones after all.”

  The crates and boxes are still piling up at the bottom of the slope. It’s starting to look as though there might even be enough to make a difference.

  “Thank you,” the colonel says, with awkward formality. “We appreciate your offer of assistance.”

  “You’re very welcome, Colonel Carlisle. But we need to ask a favour in return.”

  Here it comes, Foss thinks. The catch. There was bound to be one. Your old? Your sick? Your criminally insane? Who do they think we’ll be prepared to throw into the lunchbasket?

  “We’re bringing you something else,” Melanie says, and this time her smile is wider. There’s definitely a joke they’re not getting. “Someone else, I should say. And we want you to make her at home. We want that very much. She’s been on her own for a long time.”

  The sound of an engine reaches them on the thin, clear air. It’s coming from the road below the ridge, still hidden from sight by a frozen tide of drifted snow, and it’s been twenty years but Foss would know that basso roar anywhere.

  “Oh my sweet Jesus!” she exclaims. “Oh no fucking way!”

  Rosie crests the ridge like a ship cresting the horizon, with a stranger at the wheel. A dark-skinned woman in torn and faded fatigues, grimacing with effort as she urges the vehicle’s unwieldy mass slantwise up the sliding scree.

  It seems to Foss in the lightness and strangeness of that moment as though the past has swung open in front of her like a door. She never stopped being a part of that crew. Rosie is coming to collect her for another tour of duty, one last mission in-country. And something like relief floods through her at the sight of it. Something like joy.