“Have I?” Fry inquires, with icy politeness. “I don’t think so.”
“But yes,” Carlisle insists, blatantly playing for time (and not very much of it, seconds at most). “All of this, this entire situation, has been of your making. You were so sure that what humankind needed most was you that you were prepared to kill them all to prove your point. Which, by the way, you haven’t. Even if you were right in the first place about Beacon needing a strong and centralised command structure, you’ve achieved precisely the opposite of what you intended. You’ve introduced chaos and randomness into a system that was barely surviving as it was. The junkers! You know what they’ve done, how they live. If Beacon survives, it will be in spite of you. I imagine that will be the kindest epitaph you’ll get.”
“I beg to differ,” the brigadier says.
It’s the conciseness of that reply, after the colonel’s intentionally drawn-out j’accuse, that tells Khan the conversation is at an end. The children have failed them. They’re out of time.
And so is she. There is nothing left to cling to. She’s going out with the tide of her own breath. She will die and her friends will die and Stephen and then her baby last of all. She looks from face to face, trying to find an anchor that will hold her fragmenting mind in this place for a few seconds longer. But every face is turned away from her.
A soggy spark of realisation flickers, fades, almost dies. Every face is turned. The Beacon soldiers and the junkers have their guns trained on Carlisle. On Foss. On McQueen. On Sixsmith. The men and women in uniform, with rifles on their backs and pistols on their belts. The clear and present dangers. They have discounted the petite Asian woman in her soiled white lab coat. She is so clearly not a concern, not a factor in any of this.
She takes a half-step forward. “Private,” she says. Her voice is a pitiful thing, hoarse and fractured, without breath to drive it.
She doesn’t say it to anyone in particular and the man who glances in her direction isn’t a soldier at all. He’s a junker, an alpha male with corded muscle in his arms, braids in his shoulder-length hair and a moustache that reminds Khan of circus strongmen. The ultimate satirical statement of masculinity. His rifle still pointed at the colonel, he reaches out a hand to push her back.
Khan takes the hand in both of hers. Turns it so the fleshy part at the base of the thumb is clearly exposed. She might be trying to read his future. But he doesn’t have one, any more than she does.
She lowers her head and bites down hard.
59
“If Beacon survives,” the colonel tells Geraldine Fry, “it will be in spite of you. I imagine that will be the kindest epitaph you’ll get.”
Fry gives him a glare of frank contempt. “I beg to differ,” she says. Something in her bearing changes. It’s not easy to define, but it’s unmistakeable. She draws back a little way. The next time she speaks, Colonel Carlisle knows beyond a doubt, it will be to tell her men to open fire.
To her left and out of her direct line of sight, Samrina Khan reaches out and takes the hand of one of the junkers guarding them. Then she bends down—as far as he can tell—to kiss it. It’s such a grotesque and unexpected sight that it makes Carlisle falter, stumbling over the temporising words he’s trying to get out.
So he says nothing. He just laughs. Long and loud, dredging up the sound from the bottom of his chest. Drawing it out. Shaking his head and wiping imaginary tears from the corner of his eye.
Just to buy a few extra seconds, as Fry watches the pantomime, stony-faced instead of giving the order.
“Would you care to share the joke, Isaac?” she demands as he subsides.
Carlisle waves a hand, as though he’s still too helpless to speak.
“Ready rifles,” the brigadier raps out.
She gets no further than that. The man Dr. Khan just kissed has flung himself violently upon the man beside him. Khan herself has progressed to the uniformed soldier on her other side, taking advantage of his momentary inattention to sink her teeth into his wrist. The man wrenches his hand away and raises his rifle to club her down. But before he completes the motion he freezes on the spot. The rifle slips from his grip and his feet shuffle as though he is trying to walk but forgetting the intricate rules. Abruptly he swivels and charges the private behind him, engulfing her in a clumsy, tight embrace. They topple together. Meanwhile both the junker Khan bit and the soldier he attacked have each found new partners and borne them down.
“Ready rifles!” Fry bellows again. But now the disturbance is spreading. That whole part of the line is involved in a complex wrestling match, the men Khan blessed with her laying on of hands—and teeth—passing the bad news along to their nearest comrades, who in their turn …
Every man and woman here has enough experience with this to know what they’re seeing. This daisy chain is what they dread more than anything else in the world. It’s what happens when people are exposed to the hungry pathogen.
Somehow, impossibly, Khan has infected them. She is the vector of this micro-epidemic, that is spreading now in waves outwards from her. There are shouts of panic. Men and women rising up from the ruck on the floor are summarily shot by those who haven’t been affected yet. They haven’t figured out that Khan is ground zero because she isn’t flinging herself at them in the way the men she touched are. She just stands and watches the chaos she has caused through heavy-lidded eyes, as though she is suddenly exhausted.
Brigadier Fry is still yelling orders. They’re good orders, too. Step back. Don’t engage. Aim low. Isolate and incapacitate. The newly transformed hungries drop one by one.
But so do the men who are firing on them. Something whines by the colonel’s ear, invisible, to smack into the skull of a junker ten yards away. A black stone, angular and highly polished. Volcanic glass, perhaps: northern Scotland, the colonel vaguely remembers, is rich in Mesolithic pitchstone. Whatever it is, it hits with enough force to remain embedded in the man’s forehead as he falls.
The feral children have arrived at last.
Geraldine Fry looks from side to side, bewildered. She doesn’t understand, in those first few moments, what this new threat is and where it is located. By the time she realises, her troops are falling like wheat.
She tries to rally them. Yells to them to fall back to the vehicles in good order. If they were used to serving in the same command, if they knew what good order was, they might be in with a chance. The junkers break in all directions. The Beacon soldiers can’t even begin to hold the line that’s left.