By the time the colonel’s fighting wedge breaks through to the centre of the group, there’s no group left. The people they hoped to rescue became enemies, became targets, are all gone.
Almost all. As the soldiers move around handing out full-metal coups de grace, Khan’s gaze finds a small boy—maybe five or six years old—lying in between two adults. Their bodies are bowed outwards, shielding him from attack on either side. They are like a pair of brackets around him, cordoning him off from the world. The couple bear so many wounds—bite marks, incisions and lacerations, in the man’s case a gunshot wound to the head—that it is impossible to piece together how they died. Certainly they were trying to protect the child.
Who has no visible wounds or injuries at all.
A soldier touches the stock of his rifle to the boy’s temple.
“Wait!” Khan shouts.
Just in time. The boy lets out a breath. Someone says, “This one’s alive,” and someone else swears. The soldier steps back, a look of shock and fear replacing the stolid frown on his face. When Khan steps in and claims the boy, scoops him up in her arms, nobody says a word.
Until Carlisle nods and tells them to move.
Replay ends here. The ordeal wasn’t over—they didn’t reach Beacon for another three days—but it had entered another phase, for Khan at least. She had acquired a role, a function. Keeping the silent, wide-eyed little boy alive. It kept her alive too, she was and is convinced.
Stillness was Stephen’s natural modality even then. Perhaps it was the last thing his mother or father said to him: lie still and they might not notice you. Don’t make a sound. But over the hours and days that followed, as they slogged on towards Codename Beacon, that stillness never left him. Khan believes he had it long before his parents were killed and partially eaten while he watched. It’s a wonderful and scary thing. When there’s nothing to run or reach for, Stephen doesn’t run or reach. He can fold himself down, his volition, his emotions, until—seen from any angle except straight on, through any eyes except hers—they’re invisible. For a scientist, that’s an amazing asset.
But it’s more than that. The stillness took a different tincture on the day she met him, the day his parents died.
Khan knows better than anyone how far Stephen has come, how much he has achieved. He was only twelve when he synthesised the e-blocker gel that saves their lives on a daily basis, though everybody credits her with that discovery. He was one of the first to suggest Ophiocordyceps unilateralis as the fungus that was responsible for the hungry plague (and then his name was mysteriously omitted from the paper Caroline Caldwell ultimately submitted). He has proved that the pathogen grows directly into the nervous system of its hosts and controls them by means of myco-transmitters—long-chain fungal proteins that mimic and hijack the signalling apparatus of the mammalian brain. In the whole of Beacon, there is nobody who has a fuller understanding of what the human race is up against.
But it seems to Khan that a part of Stephen is still lying on the damp asphalt of a Surrey street. In parenthesis. Waiting for an all-clear that will never come.
14
Ten years after the Breakdown, the night is a foreign country, and not a friendly one. Its borders begin at your door. Unless you want to mount a major expedition, an armed incursion, you do not trespass.
Nonetheless, Stephen Greaves is walking through the dark.
There are field glasses that turn dark into light, but he doesn’t have those. A single pair of them sits in the gun locker on board the Rosalind Franklin, squirrelled away for the exclusive use of the snipers. Greaves could have retrieved them from the locker by breaking the access code, but he could not have erased all the traces that he had done so. There would have been unpleasant conversations.
So he relies on starlight and a quarter moon, on a pocket torch that he uses very sparingly, and on his very clear recollection of walking this route by day. The last of these three is the most reliable. Greaves carries a map in his mind and charts his progress on the map by means of an imagined red dot moving along a fractally plotted course. Where the stars and that slender rind of moon cease to be a help, as when he is walking between high trees which shut out their light completely, he expands the detail of his map so that it warns him of ditches, potholes, boulders and barbed wire. He can do this almost indefinitely, the limit being his eyes’ ability to resolve detail. Whatever he has seen, even once, he can remember.
He has come well equipped for this short but perilous journey. A bulky kit bag slung across his shoulder carries spare batteries for the torch, his notebook, a bottle of water and an emergency signal flare. Also a knife, although he can’t justify its presence. If he is attacked, he will not use it. He has a deft hand with a scalpel and has dissected dozens of cadavers with no qualms at all, but the thought of cutting into a living body, human or animal or hungry, is nauseating. Impossible. Like telling a lie or initiating touch, it is simply not in his behavioural repertoire.
But so far he has not been attacked. He is pleased and reassured by this fact. He would not, however, wish to extrapolate from it. It might be an accident of geography and distance that has saved him up to this point. The nearest hungries may be so far away from his current position that even though they have caught his trail, they have yet to reach him. But he believes it is more likely to be because of his camouflage suit.
At a turn in the road he is given the chance to test this theory. Rounding the bend, stepping from darkness into light, he is suddenly in the presence of a hungry. It is, or used to be, a woman. In the livid moonlight she is an unnerving spectre, a bleached-out effigy like a ghost unexpectedly showing up on a photographic negative. She sways like a tree, arms hanging at her sides. A dark stain down the front of her blouse is probably blood, whether her own or that of someone or something she has fed on. One of her arms has been eaten almost to the bone, from elbow to wrist. The moon shines down on her like a spotlight, and Stephen thinks the satellite and the woman carry their history in much the same way, both scarred by ancient impacts.
As he comes into view, the woman lurches towards him—then stops. He takes another step and the same thing happens again. She twists and shuffles as he approaches her, but she can’t seem to find her mark. Her feet march in place, her upper body writhes and rocks.
Greaves walks on by, skirting widely around the hungry and taking care to keep his movements slow and steady. She keeps making sallies in his direction, or almost in his direction, keeps fetching up short and turning again, to the left and then the right. Her jaw works with a dry-leather creak. Her one functional hand clenches and unclenches, claws the air with futile yearning.