Without another word, he goes astern. Sixsmith concentrates on her driving, until movement in the mid-section catches her eye. She glances in the mirror and gapes in open-mouthed astonishment. After that lecture up in Scotland, after McQueen losing his commission, she doesn’t expect to see what she’s seeing now.
The flamethrower extends and elevates. The primer puffs a few fat balls of flame.
And the forest is alight. Behind them and then on both sides as the spray of fire and black smoke vomits out in thick, greasy saccades. The turret turns and the flamethrower weaves an oxbow river of fire. It spreads away from them, quickly becoming a sea.
Sixsmith’s first thought is: he’s gone mad. We are bloody well going to burn.
Her second: but so clever! The colonel’s craziness belongs to the fox or some related species. The children can’t run through the fire and it’s going to be a long trip around the edge of it. When they find the road again, Rosie will be long gone. Not only that, but the cues that hungries usually rely on—smell and body heat—will be monumentally messed up by the stench and residual heat of the burning.
They don’t catch fire. The colonel’s hand on the flamethrower is deft and precise. He keeps it pointing backwards, rotating the turret within sixty degrees of arc. They outrun the destruction, leaving the feral kids to deal with it.
When Carlisle comes back to the cockpit, Sixsmith shoots him a grin. “Good thinking, sir.”
But the colonel is sombre. Of course he is. You don’t forget something like the burn runs. Not if you flew in them, and still less if you ordered them.
There are no further sightings. They seem to have thrown the kids at last.
And they get to Hotel Echo in plenty of time. But things go downhill from there because Hotel Echo is just a fence around some more of the same terrain they’ve been traversing.
There is no trace of activity here at all. No clearance, even: weeds right the way up to the fence. They roll halfway around the perimeter until they find what used to be the main gate, and in all that time they see no sign of life inside.
The gate is almost lost in the weeds. It wears a thick padlock that has rendered down into a red rosette of bristling rust. “Sir,” Sixsmith says, “is there any chance the brigadier meant somewhere else? This doesn’t look like a forward base to me.”
Carlisle just points. To the left of the gate, almost lost in the overgrowth, is a sign that reads RAF HENLOW. Smaller signs on the same post announce that this is the home of the RAF CENTRE OF AVIATION MEDICINE and the TACTICAL PROVOST SQUADRON. Yeah, well, that was then. Now it’s about 200 acres of bugger all.
“The coordinates are right,” Carlisle says. “This is definitely the rendezvous the brigadier had in mind. She only said that it had been selected as a possible forward base. She didn’t indicate that it had been cleared or fortified.”
“But then where do we go?” Sixsmith demands, her exasperation getting the better of her. “If it’s like this all the way, we’ll be playing hide and seek in a sodding jungle.”
“The rendezvous point is the main parade ground. That at least ought to be partially clear, even if no work has been done on it. Proceed as ordered, Private.”
Sixsmith proceeds as ordered. She goes out with the bolt cutters and takes the padlock off, the skin on the back of her neck prickling the whole time like a bad sunburn. There is no way of getting the gates open by hand. The mass of vegetable growth is too high and too deep. Back in the cockpit, she nudges Rosie through, the forward ram clearing the way for them.
Then she reverses into the gates to close them again. One excursion outside Rosie’s hull feels like plenty just now.
They find a road, or something that used to be a road, and follow it around the inside of the perimeter. Some sort of major ordnance must have been stored here once, because the concrete bunkers they’re driving past look like they were built to withstand the smackdowns of Biblical proportions. Brambles pour out of their blind windows like barbed-wire tears.
They find the remains of a runway and turn onto it. It takes them west, towards the setting sun, and finally they reach a parade ground. There is nobody waiting for them. There is nothing moving on the face of the whole ruined Earth apart from Rosie, and when the engine stops the silence swallows them whole.
“Orders, sir?” Sixsmith inquires glumly.
The colonel folds the map and sets it down on top of the console.
“We wait,” he says. “Until they come.”
Sixsmith doesn’t ask which they he means.
53
Dr. Fournier is sensitive to moods, and the mood inside Rosie has soured to the point where he can no longer bear it. He is hiding from the crew, from the colonel and from his duties.
Of course, this isn’t entirely a new thing. Hiding has been an important part of his repertoire ever since they left Beacon. That was why he colonised the engine room in the first place, and it has served him well. Now, though, he has added some layers to his concealment. He is hiding from new and unfamiliar things. From McQueen, for example, who has taken his radio and seems by doing so to have taken his place as Brigadier Fry’s agent on board the Rosalind Franklin.
More significantly, he is hiding from the hateful revelation that he has placed himself on the wrong side of a crucial argument. The brigadier’s coup in Beacon was reckless and badly thought out. It has led to civil war, which is something the rump of humanity can ill afford. Whether she wins or loses, Fry will have done terrible damage and dragged the whole population of the embattled enclave to the ragged and crumbling edge.
If she loses, that’s the story that will be told. Fournier’s name will be in it, among the misguided and the contemptible. Not prominent. Not up in the headlines. A grubby, derided footnote. Other people are coming back from this expedition with something of honour and something of success. He is coming back as an addendum.
He has tried to blunt the awareness of this in the time-honoured fashion, which is to say with strong spirits. But he has discovered again what he should have remembered, that whiskey even in moderate amounts doesn’t agree with his constitution. Swigged from the bottle, it unmans and dismantles him.
Now he sits in the engine room with his shoulders against the engine cowling, his head tilted back so the crown of it rests directly on the cold metal. Rosie stopped moving some hours ago, but there is a yawing in his head and stomach that makes him terrified to stand up. He is at the stage of wanting very, very much not to vomit but finding that every movement brings it closer.