She lets her eye travel the length of the valley. It’s breathtaking. A salt-and-pepper day where the sun breaks from cover and runs a little way before being swallowed up again in curdling banks of cumulus. A day where the threat of rain makes you revel in the dazzle when it comes. Cloud shadow drifts across the forested upper slopes, making it seem as though the whole vista is under water. Further down, light green meadows shelve towards the loch, which is as smooth as a mirror despite the bustle in the upper air.
Here and there in the broad valley, at every elevation and regardless of the terrain, human figures stand; their arms hanging at their sides, their heads mostly bowed at an angle on their necks. They stand up to their calves or knees in thistles, mud, bracken, water. They wear faded and ragged clothes made piebald by the rust of old bloodstains. They look for all the world like sleepwalkers about to wake up.
And that’s what they are, Khan thinks. Except that they won’t wake, ever. The human minds that once inhabited these carcases will slumber on for always. If they open their eyes, something else entirely will be looking out.
“Two over there,” Elaine says. “At the foot of the big rock. Lots of grey on both of them.”
“And another.” Sealey raises his hand—slowly, carefully—to point. “Same vector. Downslope. Good field of fire.”
Khan almost smiles. Vectors. Fields of fire. That’s how McQueen and Foss talk. John wants so much to play with the cool kids, but whatever he does or says he’ll always be a nerd rather than a lethal weapon. Her heart stirs a little, asserts itself inside her for his gentleness and for his trying too hard.
“I’m good with all three of those,” she says, and Akimwe nods. “Lots to work with,” he concurs.
The snipers kneel and set up their weapons. They don’t say a word, or waste a movement. Nobody else speaks either. This is their mystery and everybody knows not to step across its rituals and observances. For all she knows, Khan might be the only one in the whole team to feel any ambivalence about their free and easy attitude to killing. Possibly she’s an outlier when it comes to the practice of shedding blood.
Certainly she’s a hypocrite. When Foss and McQueen are done, she’ll go in and cut a slice or two from the chosen sacrifices. Different instruments, same agenda. She’s got no business mistaking this verdant hillside for the moral high ground. Particularly when she thinks about what’s waiting for her back at base once this expedition is over.
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. Which is faulty learning because it always comes.
“Why are there so many of them way out here?” Penny murmurs. “It’s so remote.” Her freckled face scrunches up, perplexity changing its topology as all emotions instantly do. She wears her heart most visibly of anyone in the crew except for Stephen, who of course has no disguises or defences at all.
“Look at their overalls,” Akimwe tells her. “Most of them were working at the water-testing station, up at the head of the loch. They were probably infected in a single incident.”
Khan tries not to think about how that might have gone down. One hungry finding its way into the big cement bunker. Biting the first man or woman it saw, passing on the infection. The two of them, all at once on the same team, wandering on through the corridors following the rich scents that led to fresh prey. Biting, infecting, recruiting. A lethal chain reaction that didn’t end until there was no one left in the building. No one without the pathogen in their system. No one still human and self-aware.
“From the water’s edge,” McQueen says. “Lead off.”
Foss is lying full length on the grass now, her neck pressed against the 407’s padded stock, her eye up against its sight. If she were standing up, it would look like the opening position of a hot tango.
She pulls back on the trigger. It’s a beckoning motion, not quick or sudden. The gun—wearing a phase-cancellation sound suppressor that would give a yearling stallion penis envy—makes a noise like a man spitting out a pip.
Down in the valley, half a second later, one of the standing figures—one of the chosen three—leans sideways, thrown off balance by having its right leg shattered at the knee. Then it topples headlong into the waters of the loch. Red-brown spray hangs in the air where it fell.
The sound of the splash reaches them a heartbeat later, a discreet whisper in the air. The hungries closest to the one that fell turn towards the sound and the movement, but neither of these stimuli is quite enough to push them from passive to active state.
McQueen goes next. His shooting stance is up on one knee, spurning the extra stability of the rifle’s bipod support. He fires, and the second target is punched backwards off its feet. The bullet has gone through the centre of its pelvis, effectively immobilising it. It lies where it fell, not even twitching. Only its head moves, its eyes roving as if to seek the source of the shot that dropped it.
Foss takes out the third and last of the chosen ones, then the two snipers switch out their magazines to clear the area around the fallen.
The aim, first and foremost, is to avoid a stampede. If the hungries run—and when one runs, they all will—they will trample the ones already down, who have been chosen for sampling. There would be no use in trying to take tissue samples from the resulting slurry of flesh and bone. So radically invasive hollow-point—RIH for short—is the order of the day. These are flechette bullets, breaking up inside the body to pulp everything in their path. Every shot is a kill. As though he’s forgotten this, McQueen goes for the head shot every time. And every time he makes it.
The man and the woman work to a rapid rhythm, each of them pulling back the bolt to eject the spent cartridge and slamming it home again while the other aims and fires. When in due course they empty their magazines (limited to five bullets so as not to throw off the rifles’ exquisite balance), the reloading barely creates a pause in the syncopated carnage.
Within two minutes, a space has been cleared around the three chosen hungries. This is what the team has come to call fine clearance. What comes next is mass clearance: it’s done by the grunts using SCAR-H heavy assault rifles on full automatic. The three privates heft their weapons and take aim, insofar as aim is needed.
“Safeties off,” McQueen says to the grunts. “On my mark.” He holds up his hand. Wait for it. Why does he do that? Khan wonders. Is he testing the air or something? But that makes no sense. They’re wearing e-blocker gel to mask their bodies’ natural smorgasbord of scents, and in spite of that they’re standing downwind of the hungries, taking no chances. Either the drawn-out pause is some aspect of kill-craft that the laity can’t be expected to understand or else it’s pure melodrama.
The moment stretches. “Okay,” the lieutenant says at last. “Let’s—” But another voice, loud and clear, cuts him off.
“Hold your fire.”
It’s Carlisle. The colonel. He’s standing right on the shoulder of the slope, in full view from all directions. He has come up behind them while they were focused on what was going on down below and he has been watching all this.
To McQueen’s strong disapproval, evidently. The sniper pushes out his cheek as though there’s some half-chewed mass in there that he wants to eject.