He reloads as he runs, and fires again. Full auto this time. There’s nothing to fire at, but fuck it. These guys thought they could wait in the dark for him and trip him as he passed by. Cut his tendons and leave him crawling in the dust the way they did the hungries. Well, let them try a taste of that and see how it goes down.
Out the back door, into a closed courtyard where eviscerated black bags bleed ancient, unidentifiable rubbish. Then into the street. Now he can see the fleeing shapes ahead of him, heads down and bodies low to the ground as they run flat-out. They look too small. Perspective, probably. He gets off another burst, and one of them falls. One of them is down. He’s actually made a kill.
He jumps right over the prone body and keeps on going, processing what he saw slowly and piecemeal in the seconds that follow. He’s got his mind on the chase, lunging into another building, an office of some kind, through cubicle farms now empty of all livestock, inspirational posters exhorting him from the walls. Just hang in there!
But then the penny drops, and echoes round his skull. A kid? It was a kid?
They’re all kids. And they’ve stopped running now. Lutes stops too, stares at them in utter wonderment. He can’t imagine what they’re doing here, where their parents are, where they got their ridiculous trick-or-treat costumes from. No, they’re not dressed for Halloween, although one of them has turned his face into a stylised skull. The rest seem to be playing dress-like-mummy-and-daddy-do, with about the same hit rate that kids normally average.
Dear Christ, he just killed a kid!
He opens his mouth to apologise, to explain, to reassure, but right at that moment one of the children—the skull-faced boy—whips his arm around like a jockey urging his horse towards the last fence.
There’s a sensation in Lutes’ left eye like a door slamming shut. A big steel door with a lot of weight and heft to it.
A second, bigger impact turns out to be the ground, standing on its end to smack him hard. Now he is lying on fouled carpet tiles and his thoughts have slowed to a syrupy crawl. The children’s feet appear in his monocular field of vision (his left eye is welded shut), stepping softly and cautiously around and over him as though he might still have some fight left in him.
“Don’t be … Don’t be scared,” he slurs. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”
But they’re not. And it isn’t.
19
Greaves sees the body as soon as he rounds the corner.
He looks to left and right, quickly. His first reaction is simple confusion. Why would the children leave one of their number to lie where he has fallen like one more bag of spilled rubbish in a street that seems to offer nothing else? Bodies are not rubbish. Bodies in the field—bodies of hungries—are specimens. Bodies in Beacon are important for other reasons. Ceremonies. Memories. Regrets. One way or another, it seems, this body should be tended to.
Noises reach Greaves’ ears, muffled by a wall or two but very close. Running feet, the crash of something falling. Something is in the middle of happening, which (it’s not an unreasonable inference) might have forced the children to defer the decision of what to do with this corpse.
In the space between two breaths, Greaves feels a decision swell to ripeness inside him. He scans the street again, quick and tremulous, to make sure he is not observed. He is keenly aware of the danger here. The children are much faster and stronger than he is. There is no way he could either fight them or outrun them.
But the enigma, the impossibility, is drawing him on like a hook tugging at his brain. The children are hungries, but they don’t respond like hungries. They can still think and feel. Higher brain functions have not been completely erased. He needs to understand them. Needs it on a level so fundamental that his nerves are screaming at him to move. To forget the risk and just do it. What does his physical safety matter? What terrors does death hold compared to having to live without answers?
He is moving forward. Out into the open where the body lies.
He is kneeling beside it. He tries to postpone investigation, analysis, but it is obvious to a cursory inspection that the boy has received two bullet wounds, either of which would most likely have been fatal. One bullet has passed directly through the throat, the other (Greaves moans aloud in dismay) has punched through the boy’s left temple and more or less obliterated that side of the brain.
Greaves is shaking, less from the perception of danger than from the sheer mental pressure of what this find might mean—the piled up weight of possibilities. He can’t think about it. If he thinks about it, that weight will fall on him and he will freeze in place.
He slides his hands underneath the boy’s shoulders and knees. There is no weight there. It’s as though he is holding a ventriloquist’s doll, a hollow replica of a boy. The ruined head falls against him. Greaves remembers lying like this in his mother’s arms, when he was so young that he couldn’t speak in full sentences. Remembers lisping the word bedtime, and his mother laughing out loud at his precociousness. “Listen to that! He knows the drill, don’t you, my love?” Under the sour tang of blood, the boy’s body smells like a forest floor, warm and damp and old.
Greaves scoops the little broken thing up in his arms and runs.
Not to the main street, but to the river. The map has activated in his mind. There is a way back to Rosie that doesn’t go past the science team and the soldiers.
It goes instead through reeds and bracken, through ribbons of sand and shallows back to the bridge. A voice shouts behind him—Lieutenant McQueen’s—but the words are impossible to make out and Greaves doesn’t think the lieutenant is calling out to him.
The boy’s head slides down into the crook of his elbow. The blood that stains Greaves’ overalls is more brown than red, although there’s certainly some red in there, too. He can see the parapets of the bridge up ahead now and he slows involuntarily, starting to see how hard a task he has set himself.
How is he going to do this? Getting back on board Rosie by himself is complicated but not impossible. Carrying the dead body of a child through the airlock is a very different proposition. He will need to vary his route so that he doesn’t go by the cockpit. But that won’t be enough. With a team in the field, it’s more than likely that either the colonel or Dr. Fournier will have taken manual control of the airlock and will be waiting there to check the crew back in when they come. If he evades them at the airlock, they will still hear him enter and come to greet or debrief him, thinking that his arrival heralds the return of the team.
Perhaps he should hide the body and come back to retrieve it later? But that opens up the possibility that the children will search for it and claim it back. In fact, if their sense of smell is as strong as that of regular hungries they won’t even need to search: they’ll just go straight to it.