“Permission to speak, sir,” he says.
The colonel doesn’t give it. He doesn’t not give it either: he just doesn’t acknowledge the request. “Guns down,” he says to the three soldiers on their knees in the gorse. “Watch and wait.”
McQueen tries again. “Sir, operational guidelines call for a complete clearance of—”
He stops because he’s just seen what everyone else has seen. Topping the rise a quarter of a mile away, standing for a moment on the summit in full, heraldic glory, is a stag the size of the wrath of God. It’s the most beautiful thing Khan has ever seen, or she thinks it is at that moment. They all gawp at it, reduced to tourists by the monarch of the glen as he makes time on his busy schedule to stop by and remind them of how small they are.
Then he starts down the slope. Khan registers what’s about to happen. But she can’t look away.
The stag is unaware of any danger. Nothing is moving. There are no loud noises. A few tattered clothes are drifting in a skittish wind, and the waves are lapping around a few recently deposited corpses. Nothing to see here, nothing to get alarmed about.
The animal is in among the hungries before the ones closest to it start to stir. Their heads come upright on their necks, swivel around to take in range and distance. And then they’re on the move.
The stag finds itself, with no warning, at the centre of a vast convergence.
It breaks into a gallop, but that’s not going to help because there’s nowhere to run to that isn’t already crowded. The hungries may have looked sparse spread out across the valley, but Jesus, do they rally to the sound of the dinner bell! They come sprinting in from every quarter, backs bent and heads thrust forward. Now there are sounds: the working of their jaws, the pounding of their feet, the occasional brute, blunt impact as one runs up against another in its haste and they both go sprawling down the hill.
The first hungry to reach the stag sinks its teeth into its flank. The second into its throat. Then it’s impossible to count, impossible to see. The stag disappears under a living wave of human bodies (or post-human, Khan corrects herself reflexively). The sound of its fall is a dull thud, muffled by distance.
The hungries feed. Dipping their heads, locking their jaws, tearing away whatever they can get in quick, convulsive jerks. The movement is like a collective peristalsis, a wave that goes through them all in sequence.
Khan understands now why the colonel said not to fire. The hungries—all but the ones already felled—are gone from the nearer slope. There’s nothing to stop the science team from strolling right on down and reaping what the snipers sowed.
5
The snipers stay high up on the slope, providing cover as the scientists go in. The grunts go in with them, rifles slung, catch-cans in hand. Time is still of the essence, and everyone has their job to do.
Which is why Khan carries a sampling kit even though her role on the mission roster is as an epidemiologist. The only line that matters here is between the people with rifles and the people with doctorates.
Three hungries. Three subjects, each with a brain, a spinal column, a skin surface and numerous organs. Four scientists, each with a field kit that accommodates a maximum of twenty-four separate samples. Fun for all.
The soldiers wield their catch-cans with practised skill. It’s a tool that was designed for animal handling, an extensible metal pole that locks at any length and has a running loop at the business end. The loop is made out of parachute silk, with braided steel ribbon woven through it. You slip it around the neck—or any available limb—of a hungry and use it as a pinion point. Usually the drill is to loop and lock down the head and both arms of the chosen target, completely immobilising the upper body. The hungry still flails and squirms, but unless you actually put your hand in its mouth you’re not going to get bitten.
It’s not always easy to remember that. These hungries were infected years before. The Cordyceps pathogen has been growing through their bodies for all that time, and by now there is a rich carpet of fungal threads on the surface of their skin. It’s not dangerous: the only vector of infection is via bodily fluids, through blood and saliva. But some deep-seated instinct always makes Khan want to avoid the touch of that bleached, blotchy flesh with its coat of grey fur.
She can’t. Every second matters here. With a specimen secured, each of the scientists becomes a different kind of butcher. John Sealey wields the bone saw, with absolute and unblinking concentration. Akimwe is Mister Spinal Fluid, punching in with a hypo at the L5 vertebra without knocking. Penny goes for epidermal growth, a brief that has her ducking in and out between the two men with her little plastic scraper like the shuttle on a loom.
And Khan?
Khan cuts out the brains.
In this context, the brain is the prime cut, although it certainly doesn’t look like it. It looks like mouldering cheese, dried out and shrunk to about a third of its normal volume, swathed in fungal matter like clotted cobwebs. She doesn’t take it all. What she wants is a snapshot of penetration and mycelial density, which she can get from a biopsy.
So as soon as John levers off the top of each skull, Khan dips in with the eight-centimetre punch, driving it diagonally through the corpus callosum into the desiccated, unhealthy tissue beneath.
There’s a series of steel canisters hooked onto her belt. The filled punches slot into them so perfectly it’s practically a vacuum seal even before she screws on the lids.
“All good here,” she says.
“I’m done,” Akimwe answers.
“Give me a second,” Penny mutters. She’s running her scraper repeatedly around the curve of a shoulder as though the still-twitching hungry is a pat of butter straight out of the fridge. “Okay,” she says at last, spooning the grey froth carefully into her last empty sample jar. “Ready.”
John Sealey gives McQueen the okay sign, forefinger and thumb joined at the tips. Once again he’s trying to speak the lieutenant’s language, which is touching in a way but also futile. McQueen barely looks at him.
And in any case, now that Carlisle is here it’s him rather than McQueen who’s the ranking officer. “All finished, colonel,” Khan says, not wanting to correct John’s solecism but also quite keen not to let it stand. She feels respect for the colonel—respect deepened by her personal debt to him into something a lot harder to define. For McQueen, although he keeps her alive on a daily basis, she mainly feels a sort of uneasy mixture of awe and mild distaste. He’s very, very good at what he does. But what he does is not something to which she can entirely reconcile herself.