The baby kicks and wriggles, suddenly restless. His mouth gapes wide, and Khan finds herself staring at reddened gums, four tiny teeth already coming in on the lower jaw—to either side, a canine and its neighbour incisor. Tilting the baby’s head she finds the same pattern on the upper jaw.
Her child is not a hungry, no matter what corruption is churning in his blood. He is already alert, already taking an interest in his surroundings. He is not a puppet with its strings cut or a shark scenting chum, and the hungries are only ever one of those two things.
“I’ll need to do a lumbar puncture,” Stephen is saying. He wanders around the lab assembling the tools he needs.
No difference. No difference at all. It’s not as if she can be made to love this little wind-blown speck of humanity any more, or any less.
Stephen carries out his tests. When the baby cries, Khan holds him close and sings softly. The same lullaby her mother sang to her.
“Positive,” Stephen whispers. “I’m sorry, Rina. I’m so sorry.”
She goes right on singing.
Hush.
Hush little baby.
Don’t say a word.
52
They keep on rolling south as the horizon pales from pitch-black to milk-shot blue.
There have been three sightings of the children in the course of the night. Always very close, always running at the same steady pace—the same colour on the scopes as regular hungries, but easily distinguishable because they stay in that arrowhead formation, strung out across the road. That’s just the vanguard. There are other little groups sprinting through the weed-choked ground on either side of the carriageway. They seem to be keeping pace, which presumably means that the ones on the road are slowing down to let the others keep up.
But they don’t make a move. Rosie rolls on unmolested through the day, which waxes and wanes around them as though they’re in a time-lapse movie. They’re eating up the miles that on their outward journey took so many arduous months. Some weird gravity has them in its grip.
Stephen Greaves and Dr. Khan visit the lab in the middle of the morning and again in late afternoon. Each time they spend about ten minutes closeted together, unsupervised. The rest of the crew make the logical assumption, that Greaves is Khan’s physician now. Given that the only other candidate is Dr. Fournier this passes without comment.
They reach their junction at last and turn off onto what used to be an A road. A cute, cartoony sign depicting a shire horse with a smiling duck on its back welcomes them to Alconbury Weston. Twenty or thirty burned-out shells of buildings show where the town once stood. Sixsmith doesn’t feel very welcome and she doesn’t slow. She’s conscious of the kids chugging right along behind.
They are thirty miles or so by the map from base Hotel Echo. Normally the thing to do now would be to throw out some chatter and see who else is around, but they’ve been told to stay off the radio—which in any case only talks on a single frequency. All they can do is send up a couple of flares: green for friendly, white for incoming. Five minutes later they do the same thing again so that anyone actually watching from the base can take a bearing and an estimate.
Put the kettle on, in other words.
It’s the colonel who fires both sets of flares, and after the second time he orders a halt. He climbs down out of the cockpit and stands in the road for a while scoping around with a pair of field glasses. Not the infra-reds, just a regular pair. Without waiting to be invited, Sixsmith gets down behind him and unships her rifle. The mid-section door opens and Foss steps out, too. Looks like they both had the same idea: since trouble is definitely coming, they might as well meet it halfway.
Carlisle looks ahead, to where the base is meant to be. Maybe he’s hoping for an answering flare, but if so he is disappointed. Then he turns and looks back the way they’ve just come.
Sixsmith joins Foss at the mid-section door. “If Beacon’s late at the meet, those kids are going to be all over us,” she mutters.
“Yeah, but round two will be different,” Foss says.
“Will it? Why?”
“Won’t just be us. We’ll have more people and more guns. And this time we’ll see them coming.”
Sixsmith feels obliged to point out the obvious. “Same goes for them though, doesn’t it? They know what our guns can do now, and how far they can fire. I doubt they’re going to stroll out into the open again.”
“They’re just kids,” Foss says.
“Yeah,” Sixsmith says. “They are. But they nearly slaughtered us back there when you had the drop on them and you were firing from the top of a gradient.”
Foss doesn’t seem to like that version of events much. “How about if you drive,” she suggests, “and I shoot. You okay with that?”
Better off without it, frankly, Sixsmith thinks but doesn’t say.
The colonel is done with his eyeballing. They all get back inside and the magical mystery tour continues.
The road gets rougher. They’re driving through weeds that are high enough in places to obstruct the view ahead and to blur the distinction between the carriageway and what’s around it. Sixsmith has to take it slow in order to avoid nasty surprises, sudden drops or hidden obstructions that might foul their treads. The Robot did a great repair job last time, against all the sensible betting, but there’s no point in tempting providence.
The colonel navigates and tells her when to turn, but he’s going by the compass more than the map most of the time. This is ground that looks like it hasn’t been walked on since the Breakdown. Mother Nature has had plenty of time to settle in and get comfortable, effacing the road signs and the white lines on the asphalt and most of the structures that used to serve as reference points. Church with a spire? Somewhere off that way, behind the three-metre-high brambles. Or more likely in the middle of them. The day goes by in these tomfooleries.
Then a long straight stretch reveals the children dead centred in the rear-view, surprisingly close, jogging tirelessly behind them. “Sir …” Sixsmith says.
“I see them,” the colonel acknowledges. “Can we go any faster?”
“Not safely, sir, no. The surface is a mess and the weeds are hiding most of it. The ditches are easily deep enough to fuck our axle.” She hesitates. “I could go off the road.”
“I suspect that might slow us more than them,” the colonel says dryly.
So they’re between a rock and a hard place. When Sixsmith isn’t watching the road, she watches the colonel’s face, on which a pantomime of inner conflict plays out. She knows what he’s thinking. They can’t arrive at the rendezvous point bringing actual hostiles with them. But they’ve been ordered to maintain radio silence, so they can’t reschedule or relocate.
Finally he stands.
“Keep to this speed, Private,” he orders her. “Or as close to it as you can.”