“She’s naming the baby, dickhead. After its dad.”
But she’s not. Nor is she forgetting that John is dead. She just wants to invoke him now, to have him be here for this in some way. She aches to have him touch her and say her name. More than that, she aches to have him see what they have made between the two of them. The miraculous solidity and presence of it. This is the other side of the equation. Thesis: John died. Antithesis: the baby is alive.
He finds her nipple, but does nothing with it. Just breathes, lips parted around the swollen teat.
50
On the A1(M), a little way north of Leeds, they hit a roadblock that they can’t get around or roll over. Sheets of corrugated tin shored up with stacks of tyres into which concrete has been poured. Someone’s idea of a border control, maybe. Keep the hungries way down south with the city bankers and the landed gentry, or alternatively push them up north with the chavs and the oiks. The occasional scatter of wind-bleached bones suggests that the barricade may not have been fit for purpose, either way. Hungries are stateless, their allegiance only to the next square meal.
The soldiers have to get out and clear a path. The whitecoats too, except for Dr. Khan who has a baby to look after, which everyone has to admit is a pretty solid excuse. Fournier pitches in with the rest of them, Sixsmith observes with grim approval. She would have dragged the treacherous little bastard out of the engine room by the back of his neck if he had tried to hide in there.
“How did we miss this mess coming up?” McQueen complains. He is massively hungover after a late-night session with a bottle of single malt he found in Dr. Akimwe’s personal effects.
“We made a side-trip into Wakefield,” Sixsmith grunts, rolling a concrete-filled tyre off the road. “We didn’t come up this stretch at all.” Her arms and back are aching and she’s got to get back into the driving seat after they’re finished here. She’s in a foul mood and it’s not getting better.
Colonel Carlisle suggests tersely that they save the conversation for later. It’s a cold, clear day and the sound will carry. Better for all of them if it doesn’t carry too far.
But Foss doesn’t seem to have got the memo. She is looking back up the road, first of all shading her eyes and then sighting through the scope of her gun. “We’ve got incoming,” she shouts. “Guys, you’ve got to see this.”
Everyone turns to look. The cluster of moving dots more than a mile back along the road could be anything. Sheep. Stray dogs. Or hungries, always the odds-on favourite. But they’re moving in a kind of loose formation, strung out across the road, and their pace is a steady, indefatigable jog rather than a hungry’s swallow-dive sprint.
“No bloody way,” Sixsmith says, lodging a protest with reality.
“Oh my God!” Dr. Fournier whispers.
It’s the feral kids, still on the trail. And still keeping pace with them after more than a hundred and fifty miles.
The colonel raps out orders, but it’s only the blindingly obvious. Get the last few bits and pieces off the road, get back into Rosie—stat!—and get moving.
Everybody jumps to it. Except for McQueen, who stands out in the road with his M407 in his hands and a contemplative look on his face. A mile is a long trip even for a gun like that, but the word is going around that McQueen has decided to roll his own ammunition for once. He’s got to be tempted to try out his bespoke rounds on these obligingly available targets. Slowly he raises the rifle to the ready position.
“Mr. McQueen,” the colonel calls. “We need you here.”
McQueen gooses the scope, reads off distance and wind speed. His finger touches the trigger, starts to pull back with soft, even pressure. But then he turns, the rifle still in position. He’s pointing it right at the Old Man now, his hand rock-steady, the trigger still drawn halfway back.
“Sorry, sir,” he says. “What was that again?”
The colonel looks at McQueen down the barrel of the rifle, absolutely impassive. “We need another pair of hands,” he says. “Now. You can display your virtuosity another time, when it will actually do some good.”
Sixsmith braces herself for the big bang. It feels to her as though it has to happen. Because how could McQueen make a threat like that and then back down from it? They’ve all seen this. That alone should force the issue.
But McQueen doesn’t fire. He just glares at the colonel over the rifle’s sights, from which he has finally taken his eye.
“You’re not nearly as fucking clever as you think you are,” he says. There’s a bleakness in his voice, as though he is announcing the time of the patient’s death.
Carlisle seems to consider this. “Are any of us?” he asks at last. “Move those stones, and that sheet.” And he turns away, as though the menace of the sniper rifle isn’t something he needs to worry about or even acknowledge.
It could still happen, Sixsmith thinks. She takes a step forward, not knowing what she means to do but wanting to be close enough that doing it might be an option.
But there is no need. McQueen lets out a heavy, dissatisfied breath. Then he slings the M407 and gets to work. They’re done in a minute, back inside Rosie in ninety seconds, battened down with the mid-section sealed.
“Go,” the colonel tells Sixsmith.
She bolts for the cockpit, fires up and goes. The wild things eat their exhaust.
For the next fifty miles or so, she is marvelling at two things, alternating so they both get a fair share of her attention.
The kids are keeping up, somehow. This is personal for them, it must be. They don’t just want a meal, they want that specimen back. Or more likely they want blood.
And McQueen, in that long drawn-out moment, didn’t.
What he wanted wasn’t clear at all.
51
Dr. Khan is back in her own bunk. Stephen has changed the sheets and the mattress. With the gaps in the roster, there were plenty of spares lying ready at hand. She believes she is lying now on what was John’s mattress, and the thought pleases her.
The baby sleeps, wakes, rests upon her. After that first coming-into-the-world cry, he hasn’t uttered a sound. He also hasn’t fed. From time to time, he mumbles and kneads at Khan’s breast as though he’s picking a fight with it, but he doesn’t make any attempt to drink, no matter how much she coaxes.
She expresses milk with her fingers, wets the baby’s lips with it. He wrinkles up his face in something like frustration. His mouth opens and closes but he doesn’t lick his lips, doesn’t swallow.
Khan is aware when Rosie stops, and when she starts again. The question why does not occur to her. Her mind is engaged with another question, which looms a whole lot bigger.
A short while after their motion resumes, a shadow falls across the bunk’s closed curtains.
“Rina,” Stephen whispers.
She sits up. “Now?”