The airlock cycles again and the team assembles around McQueen. It would be possible to drive the lab closer to the town and reduce the risks that come with moving a large cohort overland. But the noise of the engines, even shielded, will bring any hungries in the area at a dead run. They’ll end up churning their axles in crushed and pulped corpse-meat, and any chance of an orderly sampling will disappear. This way is better, even given the amount of shepherding the scientists will require en route, like a crocodile of skipping schoolkids on a trip.
McQueen gives some orders, gets them started. They move off in good shape with Foss and Lutes up front, Sixsmith and Phillips at the rear, leaving him free to move around as needed. The scientists stay in a tight huddle, which is fine. He tried to teach them broken field movement once, and once was enough.
They’re all geared up for anything that might come along, but the road into town is as quiet as the grave. The absence of hungries is surprising, given how many they saw running loose up and down the valley. Maybe something has happened at some point to disperse them from the town. Migrating animals would have been enough to do it; hungries will run a long way in pursuit of food on the hoof. But then McQueen would expect to see some gnawed bones, maybe the odd half-eaten carcase.
No news isn’t always good news, in the lieutenant’s book. He has been in too many bad situations that blew up out of nowhere: he tends to view any invitation to let his guard down with open suspicion.
And he’s right, of course.
It’s all fine until they cross the bridge and enter the town. This was a beautiful place once. The water pouring over the falls, the old stone bridge right under it, so close the spray flecks your face like a wet kiss. You could have come here any time in the last two centuries and nothing about this scene would have looked any different, except maybe the weeds wouldn’t have been so high. McQueen likes that a lot.
What they find in the town’s main street, a hundred yards further on, enthuses him somewhat less. There are bodies on the ground. Nothing much in themselves but the blood, still sticky underfoot, makes him wary. He signals a halt and goes on alone to examine the kills up close. Without needing to be asked, Foss circles into the centre of the street to give him cover.
One good look at the fresh remains makes the lieutenant swear out loud. Just over half of them are animal carcases. Dogs. The rest are hungries, and they’re not dead. They’ve just had their tendons slashed so they can’t stand. As he approaches, they raise their heads, their hunting reflex triggered by his movement, and start to haul themselves towards him on their hands and elbows.
Has a raiding party of junkers passed through here? That’s a definite possible. The mad survivalists are more than happy to eat dog when dog is on the menu, and if they ran up against hungries who were hunting too they would have taken them down fast and kept right on moving.
But when he examines the dead dogs, the lieutenant is inclined to modify this initial diagnosis. The animals haven’t been dropped with small arms fire or arrows: they’ve been overrun and eaten on the spot. The absence of any other wounds apart from the bite marks suggests that they were eaten alive.
If junkers were here, they lost this one. The hungries—apart from the ones now feebly clawing their way across the cobbles towards him—ate their fill.
The members of the science team are drifting up behind him, as if the order to halt is a volatile spirit that gradually evaporates in air. McQueen has to resist the urge to bawl them out, which until he has figured out this little conundrum would be self-indulgent and stupid.
“What’s the score?” Foss asks, from off on his right shoulder. She looks tense but her tone is level.
“Not sure,” McQueen says. “Looks like we’ve had company. Someone sliced up these hungries with edged weapons.”
Murmurs of dismay from the scientists, who have set their little hearts on some more tissue samples, bless them. The soldiers look around, weighing up the pros and cons of this open street from a defensive point of view. They’re all thinking it. Nobody actually says it.
“Whoever it was, there’s nothing to say that they’re still here.” This from Dr. Sealey, who out of all of them is usually the most skittish when there’s a whiff of any actual risk. McQueen has always held that the least impressive kind of courage is officer courage—the courage to give filthy orders other people have to obey. On this mission he’s met tourist courage, and he has had to revise his league table.
He gives Sealey a hard stare. Sealey returns it, not knowing how close he is to getting his head smacked. “No,” McQueen agrees. “Nothing to say they left, either. That’s why we’re currently considering our options.”
He’s still thinking it over as he says this, and he’s finding a lot of things now that don’t fit in at all with the junker hypothesis. No vehicle tracks on the road into town. Weeds taller than a man, on both sides of the bridge, that were almost completely unbroken. At the edges of the street where the cobbles give way to dirt, there are a few scuff marks from (arguably) recent feet, but if you marched a whole junker cadre through a town this size you’d leave a much bigger footprint than a few dead dogs. They’re like locusts. They would have gone through the houses and thrown everything out onto the street for a game of trash-or-treasure. Plus they would have fucked and fought and had a pig roast and generally raised hell. The street would be full of their detritus. McQueen has walked through a town after junkers went through it and he knows exactly what the aftermath of their hideous diversions looks like. It’s not something he’s ever likely to forget.
So most likely this little piece of work was done by local boys, who have either moved on or else are keeping their heads down until the scary men with the big guns go away again.
It’s still an unquantifiable risk. McQueen is fairly sure it’s minimal, but his first priority has to be the safety of the team.
Everyone is looking to him for a decision. Well, everyone except for Greaves: the Robot is preoccupied, his eyes darting from side to side as though he’s expecting company. He doesn’t seem to be taking this as seriously as it deserves.
McQueen turns back to Sealey. “Do you think you can work with what you’ve got here?” he asks. “I mean, the hungries who are already down?”
Sealey looks up and down the street. At the felled and broken hungries still intent on the chase, arms scraping on the cobbles, closing with their prey one painful inch at a time. He’s doubtful at first, but as his gaze flicks around and he sees the full extent of what’s on offer he gets a little perkier.
“Well, there’s plenty to choose from,” he admits. “And a lot of these have got visible epidermal growth. We might have to mix and match a little because of the tissue damage, but yeah. I’d say we’re probably good.”
“All right,” McQueen says. “This is the plan. There’s no mileage in a full-scale cull when we don’t know if there’s anyone else in the neighbourhood. Best to keep the noise down to a minimum and make sure everyone stays together. So you take what you can get from these guys and then you call it a day.”