He stands still for a few minutes, letting his breathing return to normal and hoping that his body temperature will follow.
In the meantime, there is a great deal for him to observe and think about. The hungries do behave differently at night, as he had surmised. The visual and aural environment is richer, of course, since a great many small mammals are nocturnal. The scents must be richer, too. As a result, the hungries stir from their dormant state much more frequently. Almost immediately, Greaves sees a badger brought down. A few minutes later, more impressively, a male hungry standing out in the middle of the road snaps into sudden, staccato life and snatches a bat out of the air. Greaves hears the crunch of bones as the animal—most likely a noctule, Nyctalus noctula—is devoured. It troubles him momentarily to think that the bat is screaming its pain in a supersonic register that his ears (especially hampered by the suit) cannot access. The world is information. An endless torrent. Whatever escapes you becomes something you will never completely understand.
Other things trouble him, too. He is still much too hot. The suit is not working. If his temperature doesn’t stabilise, he will die from heatstroke. He may be able to find a safe place in which he can barricade himself and remove the suit, but he will still be trapped. The science team may find him when they arrive for their sampling run tomorrow. Alternatively the hungries may find him a lot sooner than that: he will be filling the air with the scent that they follow most fervently and urgently of all, the scent of human flesh and pheromones.
Greaves finds the prospect of his own non-existence fascinating and dizzying. While he thinks about it, he becomes abnormally preoccupied. The stream of sensory data that he is used to receiving and parsing continually goes unanalysed for whole seconds at a time.
Movement in the middle distance pulls him out of this self-absorbed spiral with an uncomfortable jolt. He has allowed himself to be surprised, a thing that he hates even when nothing is at stake.
They come loping up the street from the river, heading his way: the wild dogs he saw earlier, or another similar pack. In that first glimpse, Greaves thinks they must be hunting him, but he quickly sees that he’s wrong. Their heads are down, and their flanks heave with panting breaths. Some of them are limping.
Behind them come the children. A dozen of them, then twenty, then more than he can easily count in the bad light. The youngest look to Greaves to be around three or four, the oldest no more than ten. Like the girl from this morning, they are fantastically dressed. Some are wearing adult clothes: T-shirts that hang as low as skirts, hoodies and knitted sweaters with the sleeves rolled back or ripped away. Others are naked, or else they’re dressed in things that aren’t technically clothes at all, random scraps of cloth and leather scavenged and repurposed. Their feet are bare. Their faces are painted, as the girl’s was: a horizontal line across the forehead, a vertical one down the centre of the face. Some of them carry weapons: knives, walking sticks, hammers, trowels, in one case what looks like the metal shaft from the centre of an umbrella.
The dogs are not the hunters here: they are the prey. They are being driven. And the children don’t hunt as the hungries do, which is by running full at the thing they want to eat. They work in a coordinated way, fanning out into a broad semi-circle to keep the dogs penned in as they run, to control and corral them. Some, though, mostly the youngest, seem to have no part to play in the hunt: they run alongside the others but further out and make no movement to close the distance.
The dogs are used to being on the other side of this equation. They’re cowed and terrified. Their gait is faltering. They stumble, cringe, duck their heads in expectation of an imminent attack. Greaves guesses that this chase has gone on for some time and is nearing its end.
It is nearing Greaves, too, not to mention the hungries he has been watching up to now. The hungries respond to the oncoming flurry of movement, all at once waking from their torpor and running forward. And now Greaves sees that the younger children at the periphery do have a reason for being there. Most of them are carrying long sticks, branches and knobkerries and the handles of brooms, which they use to trip the hungries so that they can’t interfere with the work in progress. In some cases, when a hungry refuses to stay down, two or three of the children jump on it together, pinning it to the ground. One or other of them then draws a knife and expertly hamstrings the hungry. The children run on without a sound, leaving the hungry flailing spasmodically in the dirt.
The children seem to be all but invisible to the hungries. Their movements can trigger a response, a running charge, but up close the hungries seem to lose track of them altogether. They’re not acknowledged either as threat or as food!
Greaves looks for the red-haired girl from the water-testing plant, and finds her—easily identifiable by the livid scar across her face. She is in the vanguard, leading the hunt. She brings one of the dogs down herself, almost at his feet. Greaves knows from earlier experience what she is capable of but even so he is awed at the flying leap that lands her on the dog’s back. She bears it down, strong arms locking on its neck to twist its head around, and she is the first to feed on it once it falls. The dog gives a single high-pitched yip, which ends abruptly as her teeth close in its throat.
But she’s not greedy. Some smaller children run to share the feast and she steps back at once, leaving them to it. Her chin is awash with blood. She wipes it with the back of her hand, then licks at her knuckles absently as she stares around her.
By this time, two more dogs are down. Everyone is eating. The girl seems satisfied with this, like a hostess who has done her best and is glad to see her efforts appreciated.