Where are all these clichés coming from?
He disentangles himself from Rina’s sprawled body—rests his hand, for a second or two, against the indiscreet bump that is their burgeoning son or daughter—and levers himself back up through the gap in the bed frame. He does this with reluctance. Every time he removes the slats and visits her, he feels like one of the soldiers in The Great Escape, digging a tunnel to freedom.
Which prompts a further reflection. Maybe it wasn’t leaving Beacon, after all, that got him so drunkenly and irresponsibly joyous.
Maybe it was her. Maybe it was Rina all the time.
13
Dr. Khan is not actually asleep. There is a state midway between sleep and waking in which she falls back into the past and relives it. Relives it in full HD with surround sound, all of her senses chipping in. She thinks of this state as replay, but as a scientist she knows it has another name. It’s a PTS, a post-trauma symptom. It comes over her two or three nights a week, and there’s no point in struggling against it. If she tries to block the images, they impinge on her waking life, which is exponentially worse.
Replay isn’t like dreaming. Dreams have a logic and a structure that prevents you, while you’re dreaming, from reflecting on the events you’re wrapped up in. You take it all for granted because consciously questioning any one element would wake you up.
But in her replays, Khan is aware of herself now as well as herself back then. She is her current self, sitting like a passenger in her former body. (It troubles her to think that this might be how the hungries experience the world. If there is any trace of their consciousness, their identity, behind the ramparts that the fungus has erected in their brains, then all they can do is watch. Their bodies now answer to a new master.)
She’s walking. Through Guildford and Godalming and places with even more innocuous names. Milford. Haslemere. Hawkley. Heading south to Beacon in a column of about eight hundred desperate people shepherded—harassed, it sometimes seems—by soldiers in urban camouflage colours.
Their journey makes as much sense to her as the crazy careering of clown cars at the start of a circus act. Sometimes they’re in trucks, buses, white vans and ambulances. Sometimes they’re on foot. Then-Rina, sleep-deprived and starving, has no sense of why they keep getting out of the safe, warm cars and walking along the man-made valley of the A3. Now-Rina understands that when the road is blocked—by the crashed, burned-out remains of cars and trucks that ferried earlier waves of fleeing people—they don’t have the time or the resources to clear it. The colonel gives the order, each time, to abandon the vehicles and trek to the next stretch of clear road. He sends his soldiers on ahead to find and requisition a new set of viable wheels.
So their pace varies, and her mileage likewise. Sometimes she sits. Sometimes she lies on a truck-bed staring at the sky, someone’s limp arm draped across her legs, harsh breathing and sobbing all around her mingling with her waking dreams. Mostly she walks, staggers, limps, shambles, hobbles along the endless road that has become their Calvary.
There are two constants: the first is the hungries. This is several years before the advent of e-blocker gel. They have no way of disguising their scent, their sounds, their body heat, so they are an endless, ever-moving invitation to dinner. The hungries chase them down from behind, charge them from in front, assail them from both sides.
The colonel is their rampart. The other constant, always in between. Don’t look back is his mantra. What’s done is done and here we are, still moving forward. He wields his rifle like a scythe, cutting their persecutors off at the knees with precise, horizontal sweeps of the weapon. He hands out guns to the refugees, teaches them the principles of covering fire. He rigs up flamethrowers from oxygen cylinders and insecticide sprayers. Once, he fills a Bedford van with petrol and C4 and rolls it down an incline they have just climbed so that a dip in the road becomes a lake of fire in which hundreds of hungries drown and sink.
They are in hell, but the devil is on their side.
He is changing, in their minds. Most of them thought of him as the Fireman before this, because of the burn runs that turned most of south-east England into a carbonised desert. Now he is the Old Man. Spoken as though you know him, whether he’s ever said a single word to you or not.
From time to time, people join their column. They are never turned away. The gap between exposure to the infection and ego-death is so short for most people that the risk of accepting newcomers is non-existent. The few who—defying the mass of statistics—turn more slowly and gradually are killed with a single bullet to the head. Dr. Khan steps over their bodies and walks on.
She is hallucinating from sheer fatigue. The colonel is Moses and they are his children. Don’t look back. The hungries part before him like a sea. Half-congealed blood is the ebb-tide, making the pavement suck at her feet as she walks. The air smells of sweat and blood and shit and cordite, petrol and plasticine and overcooked meat. He holds them to him. He walks them home.
The A3 becomes impassable—one vast thousand-car pile-up strewn with the half-eaten dead. They abandon it and walk through deserted villages. In one of them, on an overpass above the road they left not long before, they find a small cadre of survivors fighting for their lives. They’ve closed off the ends of the bridge with junk and repurposed white goods and retreated to the centre, but hungries have swarmed over their barricades to assail them from both sides.
The colonel is bringing salvation, but he brings it too late. Courageous last stands like this deconstruct from the edges into the centre. Bitten once, the brave defenders fight on—for a few seconds. Then they stiffen momentarily as the fuse of their consciousness burns to its end. A heartbeat later, they’ve turned around and joined the scrum, bearing down on their nearest neighbours and dragging them to the ground. Khan watches it happen to a woman who is swinging an aluminium baseball bat; a man with a dustbin-lid shield and a carving knife; a blonde cherub who has been entrusted with the family’s lop-eared spaniel (the dog is her first meal).