“Withdraw,” Carlisle orders. “Single file, on your name.”
He calls them home, and they come. All this time, he hasn’t troubled to duck his head or take cover: he just keeps a weather eye on the hungries down at the bottom of the slope, who are still feeding on the remains of the stag. But whatever risks the colonel takes with his own person, he’s chary of the rest of them. He brings them out in good order, the scientists and their hard-won prizes at the centre of a protective cordon of outward-pointing ordnance, like a delicate flower in a nest of thistles.
At the head of the rise, Elaine Penny looks back down into the valley with a puzzled expression.
“What?” Khan asks.
“That was weird,” Penny says. “I thought I saw …” she points. “There were some kids down there.”
“Hungries?”
“No. I don’t know.”
“Well, who else is going to be down there? Junkers would have more sense.”
Penny frowns, then shrugs. “I suppose.”
Khan finds herself walking beside the colonel as they return to Rosie. That puts her at the back of the column, because even when he’s using his cane the colonel’s lopsided, rolling walk is not fast. His tall, gaunt body, carved into a stick by the winds of a dozen or so assorted battlefields, towers head and shoulders over hers. His face with its right-angled jaw and boat-prow nose, bald dome framed between two sparse brackets of grey hair, is no less heraldic than the stag’s. It’s so retro it’s actually funny. He turns to look down at her, shifting his grip on his (equally timeless) spiral Derby walking stick.
And they’ve known each other a long time—much longer than the two hundred and some days of the current expedition—so he can see that Khan is not happy. But he mistakes the reason. “You’ve no need to be afraid of Dr. Fournier, Rina,” he says. And then when she doesn’t answer: “You’ve committed an infraction, and he feels as though it will send the wrong signal if he ignores it. But he can hardly stand you down from the mission, and since it’s impossible right now to refer the matter back to Beacon, he doesn’t have any other sanctions to call on.”
Khan knows these things. She’s not looking forward to that particular interview, but she’s not afraid either. She just wants it to be over. But the colonel has just broached the Forbidden Subject. Now she’s thinking about the radio silence and what it might mean, and those thoughts are a spiral you have to pull out of before you hit the ground and explode in a stinky cloud of existential angst.
They’re in among the trees now and the soldiers have closed in, tense and alert. Visibility is bad here. A hungry could come running from any direction. They can’t even rely on sound because the wind has picked up: the trees are making a noise like the crowd in a distant football stadium cheering from hoarse lungs. The smell of wild flowers comes to Khan, and underneath it the smell of rot. The world has dabbed a little perfume on its spoiling wounds.
Colonel Carlisle can see he’s missed the mark. He guesses again.
“You think that was cruel,” he says. “What I did just now. Letting the stag draw off the hungries.”
“No,” Khan protests. But she’s hiding behind semantics. She thought it was ugly, and she doesn’t associate the colonel with ugliness. “I was geared up for something else, that’s all,” she half-lies. “It took me by surprise.”
“I was thinking of waste, Rina.”
“So was I,” Khan says.
“But you mean the stag. I mean the bullets.”
“The bullets?”
“Back in Beacon there’s a whole warehouse full, scavenged from here and there. Enough to last for years. Ten years, I’d say, if you pushed me to offer an estimate. Possibly a little longer. But nobody is making any more. Not to these tolerances. Every single cartridge in these magazines, every round these soldiers fire, is an exquisite piece of engineering from a finite and diminishing stock.”
The colonel tilts his hand, miming a shifting balance. “And if you follow the logic, every shot fired changes the odds on our survival as a species. Will our children fight with pikestaffs? Bows and arrows? Sharpened sticks? It’s hard enough to bring a hungry down with a ballistic round. Half the time they don’t seem to realise that they’re dead. Pending your expert opinion, of course.”
He offers her a quick smile to let her know that this last is a joke rather than an attack on her. The Caldwell doctrine, that ego-death occurs at the moment of infection, is widely accepted in Beacon but has never been satisfactorily proved. The alternative hypothesis—terrible but not implausible—is that the hungries have some kind of locked-in syndrome. That they’re conscious but unable to command their own limbs, sidelined by the pathogen that’s set up house in their nervous system. How would that feel? A soul peeping out through stained grey curtains while the body it used to wear celebrates its freedom with acts of random carnage?
Khan maintains a stubborn belief in the future—in the fact that there is going to be one—but sometimes the present daunts and defeats her. There used to be a world in which things made some kind of sense, had some kind of permanence. But the human race put that world down somewhere, left it carelessly behind, and now nobody can find it again or reconstitute it. Entropy is increasing. In her own affairs, too.
The colonel has assured her that she’s got nothing to worry about, but as a member of the science team she reports to the civilian commander, not the military one. In any given situation it’s impossible to say which way Dr. Fournier will jump. Most of the time he doesn’t even know that himself.
They’ve reached the camp perimeter. Carlisle tells McQueen to deactivate the motion sensors. The lieutenant does using the command channel on his walkie-talkie (which is still functional, proving that Beacon’s silence can’t be explained away by mechanical failure). There are three sets of sensors, carefully hidden among the gorse and towering thistles. The leg-breaker traps and barbed wire entanglements, by contrast, are left out in the open with no attempt at concealment. When hungries run, they run in a straight line towards their prey so there’s really no point in subterfuge.