But his first shot breaks the tableau into blurs of untrackable turbulence. The goblins are everywhere and then they’re nowhere, faster than he would have imagined possible. In their wake, Penny and Khan are down. Penny is self-evidently dead before she falls, blood gouting from her open throat. Khan is clutching her arm, which is red from shoulder to elbow.
John Sealey gives a yell of formless horror and rage and he’s off down the slope, cutting straight across McQueen’s line of sight but that doesn’t even matter. There is nothing to aim at. Literally nothing. Foss is running too, quartering back towards Rosie, and she’s firing into the air which is a sound idea. Throw the little bastards a scare at least, and maybe hide the noise of her own booted feet as she sprints downhill.
The enemy is still right there, he knows, despite what his eyes are telling him. The only way they could disappear so fast is by dropping down into the long grass. With the wind coming out of the east the grass should be leaning to his left, so wherever it does anything else something is moving. And to his amazement the movement is in his direction. The goblins aren’t running away, they’re coming on strong.
He squeezes off three more shots in quick succession, aiming at those suspect movements in the grass, and each one does some good. But Phillips falls too, cut down right beside him by means not yet clear. A downhill charge won’t help. It certainly hasn’t helped Sealey, who has vanished from sight, plucked down into the hungry undergrowth.
The time for precision is past. McQueen lets it go with maybe the faintest twinge of regret. Now is the time for violent excess.
He drops to one knee, sets down the M407 and picks up Phillips’ SCAR-H. He notes in passing that what killed Phillips was a thrown knife that ended its trajectory in his jugular. That was an impressive throw across a barely credible distance. He salutes a fellow professional.
He hefts the SCAR and stands, pressing down firmly on the trigger. The rifle speaks a spiked and rolling polysyllable as he turns it slowly, from left to right and back again. The long grass writhes and thrashes.
36
Khan is the still centre of a world of turbulence. The stillness is not through choice, she just can’t react fast enough.
The boy goes down.
The other children scatter—but scatter is the wrong word. They rise up like a wave. They flow over and past and through anything and everything that’s in their path.
One of them, in passing, smacks down Khan’s arm which is still raised as part of her diplomatic pantomime. Another cuts Elaine Penny’s throat. Then they drop into the long grass and vanish from her sight.
Penny flinches away from the attack, but only after it has already happened. Flailing, helpless, she puts up both hands to clasp the ragged wound, from which blood has started to spill in the gulp-gulp-pause rhythm of water being poured out of a jug. She opens her mouth, fights very briefly to speak, but it turns out that’s all she has to say.
Gulp. Gulp. Pause.
She staggers. Khan reaches out to steady her, to hold her. The blood, she thinks. The first thing is to stop the blood. But one look tells her it’s futile. That slashing cut left nothing intact to build on.
Penny crumples from the knees and falls.
Khan is left staring at her own right arm. Some of that blood isn’t Penny’s, it’s hers. It wasn’t a slap she felt, it was a stab. The gash is shockingly wide and deep. Blood is lying in it like a pool, overflowing like a waterfall.
She presses the arm to her body, wincing from the contact and from the throbbing pain that is only now making itself felt.
More shots ring out from up the slope. High-pitched shrieks indicate that they found their targets, or at least something that was alive. Khan is stupefied. She knows she needs to find cover but she can’t turn that thought into action. Stephen is keening beside her, his clenched fists in front of his face like a boxer on the ropes.
She catches her first glimpse of the people who are shooting. McQueen striding slowly down the slope, Foss running away from them at a steep angle with her rifle pointed at the sky. Where is she going?
And John. John is sprinting downhill to join her, his face flushed red with effort. Then he trips and falls headlong, disappearing into the long grass.
Khan runs towards him. He’s not alone down there, and he didn’t just fall. Invisible in the undergrowth, the children are moving. Three of them swarm across John as he sprawls and flails. A small girl hugs his arm, bends it backwards with fierce concentration. A boy of the same age claws at his face, blinds him. Another, older, punches him again and again in the stomach with a blade no longer than a pizza-cutter.
Khan grabs the older boy by the shoulders and drags him away. His face is a painted-on skull, the real teeth extended above and below his jaws into a terrifying, unreal rictus. The boy squirms in her arms, impossible to contain, and bites deep into her already wounded arm. When he raises his head again, there is a gobbet of her flesh between his teeth. She feels no pain, but the shock of it drops her to her hands and knees.
Which is just as well. Bullets scythe the grass at what would have been her chest height. They pluck the boy apart.
Khan tries to stand. Tries to think. Freezing fog is pouring into her brain, filling the orbits of her eyes. She’s wounded, but that’s nothing. She’s infected. If these children are hungries, she’s infected. She has to do something, but there isn’t anything. If she had a knife. If she cut off her arm right now …
But she doesn’t carry a knife, and in any case it’s probably already too late. That’s not a race anyone has ever won.
Hands are hauling at her waist, lifting her up. Someone is trying to carry her, and whoever it is they’re finding her weight hard to manage. She struggles, thinking it must be the children come back to take her. To finish the job. The hands shift, clamp down hard around her middle and she’s lifted into the air, dumped down heavily over someone’s back.
She lets the fog swallow her. It’s a relief not to have to be conscious while Cordyceps remakes her in its image.
37
Foss makes her call and sticks to it.
McQueen may or may not have the edge on her, very slightly, as a shooter. But the logistics of firing downhill into a crowd that includes her own people don’t thrill her.
So she runs for Rosie, picks a spot halfway down the near side where the airlock housing gives her some cover and drops into a shooting stance. She would have preferred to have her M407 in her hands, but the SCAR on semi-auto will deal out the damage a lot faster and this feels like a situation where more is more.
“On me!” she shouts. “Back this way! Now!”
The colonel gets it at once, but he’s not going to be the first to come. He has his sidearm unholstered and he’s firing up the slope, where the tall weeds are crawling with quick, darting shapes. Between the two of them they’re making a corridor down which the science team can retreat.