“Jesus wept,” Parks says, putting the report down on his desk. “You proceeded to proceed? Just tell me what happened, Gallagher. Save this bollocks for your autobiography.”
Gallagher blushes to the roots of his red hair. His freckles disappear in the general incandescence. On anyone else, that blazing face would mean a consciousness of having screwed up, but there’s a long list of things that would make Gallagher blush like a schoolgirl, including for example a dirty joke, any exertion more taxing than a parade march, or a single sip of bootleg gin. Not that you tend to see this soldier drinking all that often–he’s as skittish around alcohol as if the army he signed up with was the one that offers you salvation. Parks extends the benefit of the doubt a little bit further and a little bit thinner.
“Sir,” Gallagher says, “the hungries were right up my arse. I mean, they were close enough so I could smell them. You know that sour stink they get, when the grey threads start showing through their skin? It was strong enough so my eyes were watering.”
“Thready ones don’t normally get this far out from the cities,” Parks muses, not liking the news.
“No, sir. But I’m telling you, this bunch was ripe. Couple of them had their faces all fallen in. Clothes had mostly rotted off them. One of them had lost an arm. Don’t know whether it had been eaten off of him, back when he first got infected, or if it had fallen off since, but yeah, these weren’t newbies.
“Anyway, I was running back towards where Tap and Barlow were set up, behind that big stand of beech trees. There’s a hedgerow there, and it’s pretty solid. You’ve got to pick your spot–go through it where it’s thin enough not to slow you down too much. And you can’t see what you’re running into, obviously.”
Gallagher hesitates, seeming to wince slightly. His memories have hit a barrier a lot more solid than that hedge.
“What did you run into?” Parks prompts.
“Three blokes. Junkers. They were just walking along on the far side of the hedge, where they couldn’t be seen from the road. There are blackberry bushes all along that stretch, so maybe they were picking fruit or something. Except that one of the three–boss man, I reckoned, on account of his kit–he had a pair of binoculars. And all three of them were armed. Boss man’s got a handgun; the other two have got machetes.
“I broke out of the hedge about fifty yards away, heading right at them.” Gallagher shakes his head in unhappy wonder. “I shouted at them to run, but they didn’t take any notice. The bloke with the gun drew down on me, and he was this close to blowing my brains out.
“Then the hungries burst through the hedge right behind me, and he sort of lost his concentration. But the three of them were still blocking my way, and this nutcase still had his gun pointed right at me. So I barged him. It’s not like there was anywhere else to go. He got one shot off, but he managed to miss me. Don’t know how, at that range. Then I hit him full on with my shoulder and kept right on going.”
The soldier stops again. Parks waits, letting him get it out in his own words. It’s clear that this whole thing has freaked him out badly, and it’s part of Parks’ job, sometimes, to take confession. Gallagher is one of the greenest of the buck privates. If he was born at all when the Breakdown came, he was still sucking on his mother’s tit. You’ve got to make allowances for that.
“Ten seconds later, I’m back in the trees again,” Gallagher says. “I looked over my shoulder and didn’t see anything. But I heard a scream. One of the junkers, obviously. And he went on screaming for a hell of a long time. I stopped. I was thinking about going back, but then the hungries popped up right behind me and I had to get going again.”
Gallagher shrugs.
“We completed the mission. Tap and Barlow had set the traps up right on the finish line. Hungries ran into them, got themselves stuck in the barbed wire, and after that it was just clean-up.”
“Petrol or lime?” Parks asks. He can’t keep from asking, because he’s told Nielson no more petrol for routine bake-offs, but he knows for a fact the quartermaster is still signing off on ten-gallon drums.
“Lime, sir.” Gallagher is reproachful. “There’s a pit by the road there that we dug out back in April. We didn’t even half fill it yet. We rolled them in and shovelled three bags in on top of them, so they should render down nicely so long as it doesn’t rain.”
This purely operational stuff perks Gallagher up a little, but he becomes sombre again as he gets back to his own story. “After we were done, we went back to the hedge. The boss man and one of the other two were lying there on the ground, right where I’d seen them before. They were really badly chewed up, but they were still twitching. Then the boss man opened his eyes, and I verified––” Gallagher catches himself slipping back into report-speak, stops and starts again. “He was crying blood, the way they do sometimes when the rot’s just getting into them. It was obvious they were both infected.”
Parks is impassive. He saw that punchline coming. “Did you finish them off?” he asks–the bluntness deliberate. Call a spade a spade. Make Gallagher see that it’s all just business as usual. It won’t help him now, but it might take the edge off later.
“Barley–Private Barlow–decapitated them both with the second bloke’s machete.”
“Mask and gloves on?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you retrieved their kit?”
“Yes, sir. Handgun is well maintained, and there were forty rounds of ammo in one of the packs. Binoculars are a bit cack, to be honest, but the boss man had a walkie-talkie too. Nielson thinks it might work with our long-range sets.”
Parks nods approval. “You handled a tricky situation really well,” he tells Gallagher, and he means it. “If you’d frozen when you came through that hedge, the civilians would still have died–and most likely they’d have held you up long enough to kill you too. This is a better outcome all round.”
Gallagher says nothing.
“Think about it,” Parks persists. “These junkers were less than a mile away from our perimeter, armed and tooled up for surveillance. Whatever they were doing, they weren’t just out taking the air. I know you feel like shit right now, Private, but what happened to them isn’t down to you. Even if they were lily-white. Junkers choose to live outside the fences, so they take what comes with that.
“Go and get drunk. Maybe pick a fight with somebody or get yourself laid. Burn it off. But do not waste a bastard second of my time or yours with feeling guilty about this bullshit. Drop a penny in the poor box, move along.”
Gallagher comes to attention, seeing the dismiss looming.
“Now dismiss.”
“Yes, sir.”
The private rips off a smart salute. Mostly they don’t bother these days, but it’s his way of saying thanks.
Truth is, Gallagher may be green, but he’s far from the worst of an indifferent-to-sod-awful bunch of soldiers, and Parks can’t afford to have him join the walking wounded. If the lad had killed the junkers himself, gutted them and made balloon animals out of their colons, Parks would still have done his best to put a positive spin on it. His own people are his priority here, first and last.
But somewhere in the stack, he’s also thinking this: junkers? On his doorstep?
Like he didn’t have enough to bloody worry about.