By contrast, a town from before the Breakdown, even a town as small as this one, is an upside-down rabbit warren in which spaces proliferate vertically upwards. Every building is made of many rooms, with more rooms piled on top of them and more above those, and so on. Not quite ad infinitum, but in London Greaves sometimes met his own limits halfway up a glass and stone tower that reared itself so high above the ground his stomach seized and cramped with nausea whenever he looked out of a window.
Greaves knows his way here, is confident that he will not get lost. He has memorised the ordnance survey map of Invercrae, and he has perfect recall of his journey of the previous night. Even so, it’s hard to align these vivid, fractal spaces with the idealised abstract presented by the map. Uncertainties proliferate. A room he passes through is full of shoes piled as high as the ceiling—wellington boots and high heels, slippers and sandals and baby shoes. Across walls and windows in the next street is a mural painted in a rust-brown colour that reminds Greaves of dried blood: a man, a woman and a child, arm in arm, smiling. Memorial? Magic charm? Mere insanity?
The river is his guide of last resort, but it betrays him. Following its sound, he traps himself in a dead end bounded on three sides by high, windowless walls. This does not correspond to anything on the ordnance survey map, and almost certainly postdates it. Greaves is starting to panic a little. He steps through a doorway into a fetid corridor whose carpet has become an indoor garden of weeds and lichen. He has neither claustrophobia nor agoraphobia, but any unfamiliar place has the potential to become an enemy. It would be a comfort right now to lie down and cover his face in his hands. He has to force himself to keep moving.
He tries to retrace his steps, but rising adrenalin assails and confuses him. His memory, normally indelible, begins to blur at the edges. He is in a dark room, walking into walls, tripping over indeterminate objects. Another room. A third.
Filtered daylight beckons to him.
He blunders out into a large, enclosed yard: a vehicle bay, for cars that died long ago. One is up on blocks, another missing its doors and windscreen. He can see the sky at last, and a gate through which he can exit to the street.
He bolts.
Gets to the gate. Through the gate.
Then stops dead in his tracks.
The sound of weapons firing bounces off his skin and off the walls around him. What makes Greaves freeze and look around, bewildered, is not the volume. The soldiers always use suppressors, because where all animals bolt away from loud, sudden noises, hungries run straight towards them. So this is not a boom of thunder; it’s just the hawk-and-spit sound he has become used to.
But it’s full auto, and it’s close. So who is firing?
And what have they hit?
18
Private Lutes is an engineer first and a soldier second. Although actually the gap between the two roles is bigger than that suggests. He never wanted to join the army, but after three years on the dole he did very much want a proper apprenticeship that he could turn into a proper job. A four-year army contract, he reasoned, would see him at age twenty-five walking into a sweet deal at Swain’s or Eddie Stobart’s with a good chance of having his own garage somewhere down the line.
Then the Breakdown happened. The hungry plague. And here he is, more than a decade later, still stuck in his fatigues in a world where even engineers who never enlisted belong to the army by default. To be fair, he loves his job—or at least, the part of his job that consists of taking broken machines and making them sing and dance by the application of his skilled hands. That gig is magic. It’s Zen. It’s the perfect peace of the unclouded mind, so completely engaged that it’s somehow completely free.
But he hates all the rest of this shit. Hates being taken away from his real work to do things that don’t mean anything, for people who aren’t grateful. Particularly hates being outside the Beacon perimeter fence (at the moment, four hundred miles outside) and at risk. If he’s happiest with a spanner in his hand, a rifle fills him with a kind of disgust. Spanners take things apart, yes, but they put them together again, too. With a rifle all you can do is dismantle.
Feeling hard done by, he trudges through the streets of Invercrae looking for Stephen Greaves. And wouldn’t he like to open that one up with a spanner! Lots of fascinating things to be discovered inside Greaves’ cranium, no doubt, although the Robot is the very definition of NSK—non-standard kit. If you wanted to fix him you’d need to make your spare parts from scratch, by hand.
The sun comes out for a minute or so, and Lutes’ spirits lift. He walks on the sunny side of the street for as long as it lasts. Then the cloud closes in again and the sky is all watery porridge. That seems to be the normal state of affairs in this miserable bit of the world.
The private is so lost in his thoughts that he loses a second in responding when he hears the sound. Just the clink of metal or stone on glass, but an intentional sound is different from what the wind or the rain does. It has its own profile that is hard to mistake.
Something is moving in the building on his right-hand side. Moving quietly, but the deserted town provides no cover, no distractions. After the clink, a shuffle. Perhaps the hiss of a barely voiced command.
These things add up to ambush. Lutes saw the hungries hacked and felled like trees, and has no wish to end up the same way. He has been moving with his safety on, as per regs, but now he flicks it free and—he doesn’t even have to think about it—fires.
The rifle is on semi-auto, stepped down, but Lutes has the trigger in a death grip. He empties his magazine in three seconds, remembering to fan diagonally downwards and to the left for maximum coverage.
The shop front explodes as the bullets rip through glass and brickwork. Hollow-point, yes, but maximally configured for shallow penetration. These mixed-alloy, mosquito-nosed rounds will bite three inches deep into anything, then repent and weep molten metal when they get there. The sound is deceptively soft, like papers being incautiously toppled from a desk and scattering across the floor.
Immediately followed by shrill yips of pain or shock and the sudden, concerted movement of many bodies.
It was a trap and he triggered it. Too bad for the trappers.
In the exhilaration of that moment—of ducking the blow and turning the tables—Lutes loses all perspective. He does the last thing in the world he should do.
He charges into the shop, where drifts of brick and plaster dust make the air into a cocktail whose main ingredient is wall, and on through an open doorway into the depths of the building in pursuit of his fleeing enemies.