“I think …” Greaves tries. “I’m not sure. Some of my recent findings …”
Left to himself, he would blunder into a full confession. Fortunately Dr. Fournier breaks in before that happens. “We’re only going to have two or three more sampling runs at most,” he says. “Invercrae. Then Lairg. Then Thurso. By all means come along today if you want to help. But if you come, I’ll require you to stick to the agenda we’ve already worked out. No wandering off on your own. Understood?”
Greaves is frowning in concentration. He has been sieving the doctor’s speech, breaking it up into grammatical and semantic and intentional units, hoping to find some room for manoeuvre. He is close to despair until the last word—which is functionally a question—saves him.
“Yes!” he blurts, fists clenched to hold back whatever other words might rise in his throat. “I understand, Dr. Fournier.”
Fournier gives him a pained and worried stare. “All right then,” he says. “I’m going to deliver a final mission briefing in thirty minutes. Dr. Sealey will give you your sample kit and tell you what to collect. Please do exactly as you’re told, even if you can’t always see the reason for it. There’s no time for debate out in the field. You just have to accept that the soldiers and the rest of the team know what they’re doing and that there’s a reason for everything that happens.”
Greaves can find no answer to this. He can see that determinism might be very comforting as a philosophical position, but he doesn’t feel that it maps very well onto individual human actions. If everyone always knows what they’re doing and acts in a perfectly rational way, how did most of world history happen? As an alternative to saying anything at all, he nods—which is really just saying “I understand” again—and retreats quickly.
The other members of the science team are assembling equipment and conducting a big, rowdy conversation with lots of interruptions—the kind of unfocused discussion that Greaves hates, because it’s hard to know which thread to follow through the babble of competing voices. At the best of times, that’s hard for him to deal with. Now, having come so close to telling an outright lie to Dr. Fournier, he is in far too delicate a state to bear the slings and arrows of light conversation.
He goes out onto the mid-section platform instead and, finding the turret free, climbs up there to be out of sight and alone. He feels safe now to tell the empty air what he should have said to Dr. Fournier. “I want to go into the town because there are children there who I need to study,” he whispers. “Infected children, almost certainly, because they hunt and eat like hungries. But in other ways their actions are closer to the normal human repertoire. They seem to still be able to think. If it’s possible to be infected and retain some degree of consciousness and self-awareness …”
He doesn’t finish the sentence. The possibilities proliferate and make him mute. The prospect of a cure for the hungry pathogen has become remote. Cordyceps grows into and through nerve tissue so quickly that there is no way of eradicating it without destroying the host’s nervous system. A “cure” like that might get you a clean bill of health but you’d be a quadriplegic vegetable. But if Greaves is right about the children—and if he gets some samples to work with—he might be able to produce a vaccine that mediates or even negates the pathogen’s effects.
There’s more, though. And as with his notebook, Greaves is aware of the currents of thought riding above and below the main signal.
Above:
The girl. She saved his life, stopped the skull-faced boy from splitting him with the hammer. Now the science team is doing a cull, right where she lives. Where the children live. What happens if they meet? What good are hammers and sharpened sticks against hollow-point ammunition?
Below:
Everyone? Everyone always knows what they’re doing, except for him? No. That’s simply not true. He sees more than anyone thinks. More than anyone else does, because he knows how to interpolate and extrapolate and he never stops looking or listening even if they think he does.
He knows that Dr. Fournier has a radio that’s all his own and that nobody else has been told about. He has heard Fournier talking late in the night when the rest of the crew are asleep, and afterwards he searched for and found the fake panel in the engine room where the radio is kept.
He knows that Dr. Fournier and Colonel Carlisle are not friends or allies. On both sides there’s wariness and mistrust, a split that has prevented the mission team from ever really becoming a team in more than name.
He knows that Lieutenant McQueen dislikes the colonel. A lot.
He knows that Beacon, when they left, was changing—shifting from one state to another, like milk when the bacteria suspended in it processes its molecules into lactic acid. Beacon was souring into something new and frightening.
He knows that John Sealey is the father of Rina’s baby, and that he is scared of it being born.
They think he doesn’t understand. That he can’t see.
They can’t see him.
16
The civilian commander’s briefing is a waste of time, but that’s fine. Everybody knows what to expect and nobody is listening. Fournier has taken over the lab, though, so actual preparation for the sampling run has had to stop. Bureaucracy must have its way.
Dr. Khan is performing a mental sum involving times and distances and dates. She feels the taut fullness of her lower body very acutely, where even a month ago she could pretend there was nothing there. Her back just twinged as she sat down. In many different ways, the baby is announcing itself. Starting the drumroll that will end when Khan screams and sends it out to meet the world.
“Urban environments present unique threat profiles,” Dr. Fournier is saying, as though this is the first town they’ve encountered rather than the twentieth. He’s right, of course, but they don’t need to be told. Or if they do, it ought to be one of the soldiers who does the telling. They’re the ones who take the weight of those extra risks. Especially the snipers, who in a stampede situation will have to rely on the grunts with their automatic rifles to pull their irons out of the fire. Dropping one hungry at a time doesn’t count for much when there are two or three hundred running at you.
“Lines of sight become problematic in a heavily built-up area,” Fournier is saying now, “and exit strategies even more so. Lieutenant McQueen is responsible for your safety in the field, but he can only keep you safe if you do what he tells you to do in all circumstances. You should already have memorised the street maps he has provided, but keep them with you nonetheless. Anything else, Lieutenant?”