27
They skirt the edge of Shefford and drive across open fields to Sergeant Parks’ stream, which is actually a shallow stretch of the river Flit. They fill a dozen ten-gallon plastic drums with water and load them into the lockers on the Humvee that are designed to hold them.
While they’re there, Justineau takes off her sweater and washes it in the quick-flowing water, squeezes it out against a rock, washes it some more. The blood gradually detaches itself from the fibres, rust-brown clouds swirling and dissipating in the turbulence. She ties it to the Humvee’s radio antenna to dry. It’s heavy enough to bend the antenna almost horizontal.
Melanie uses water from the river to wash the blue gel off her body. Its smell reminds her of the lab, she tells Justineau, and it makes her look really silly besides.
From the river, they go to a set of coordinates that Parks reads off from a file on his mobile phone. They’re looking for one of the supply caches that were set up when they first took over the base, intended to provision a retreat to Beacon in the event of an emergency like the one that just happened. The cache would have contained food, guns and ammunition, medical supplies, tubes of e-blocker gel, water purification tablets, maps, comms gear, ultra-light blankets–everything they could possibly need. But it’s academic now, because there’s just a hole in the ground where the cache should be. Junkers have found it, or someone else has. Best-case scenario: they weren’t the only ones who escaped from the base, and some other group has beaten them to it. But Sergeant Parks doesn’t think so, because there wouldn’t have been time to dig all the way down to the cache and then get clear before they arrived. This was probably done long before.
So they’re limited to what they’ve got in the vehicle. They go and take inventory now, throwing open all the lockers inside and out to see which are full and which are empty. According to regs, Parks explains, they should all be full. He leaves the other half of that thought unspoken; after this many years in the field, regs don’t count for much.
There’s good news and there’s bad. The Humvee boasts a well-stocked first aid kit and an intact weapons locker. The rations locker, though, is three-quarters empty. Between the five of them, they’ve got enough food sachets for a couple of days at best. There are also two backpacks, five water canteens and a flare gun that carries seven pre-loaded slugs.
Maybe the most worrying thing is that they’ve got only three tubes of e-blocker gel between them, one of which is already started.
Justineau wrestles against a humanitarian impulse, and loses. She takes out the first aid kit and indicates Caldwell’s hands with a nod of her head. “We might as well get some bandages on those,” she says. “Unless you’ve got something else you should be doing.”
The injuries to Caldwell’s hands are very severe. The cuts go all the way to the bone. The flesh of her palms hangs in ragged flaps, partially sliced away, as though she was a Sunday roast that someone took a clumsy pass at. The skin around these areas is swollen and red. The blood that’s dried on them is black.
Justineau washes the wounds as best she can with water from a canteen. Caldwell doesn’t cry out, but she’s trembling and pale as Justineau carefully wipes away the dried blood with cotton wool swabs. This makes the wounds bleed again, but Justineau suspects that’s a good thing. Infection is a real possibility out here, and blood plays its part in flushing germs out from the surface of a wound.
Then she disinfects. Caldwell moans for the first time as the astringent liquid bites into her newly opened flesh. Sweat stands out on her forehead, and she bites her lower lip to keep from crying out.
Justineau puts field dressings on both of the doctor’s hands, leaving the fingers free to move as far as she can, but making sure that all the injured areas are well covered. She took a first aid course once, a couple of years back, so she knows what she’s doing. It’s a good, workmanlike job.
“Thank you,” Caldwell says when she’s finished.
Justineau shrugs. The last thing she wants is civilities from this woman. And Caldwell seems to recognise this, because she doesn’t take the civilities any further.
“All aboard,” Parks says, as Gallagher slams the boot shut. “We should get moving.”
“Give me a minute,” Justineau says. She takes the sweater down from the radio antenna and inspects it. There are still a few stains on it, but it’s mostly dry. She helps Melanie to wriggle into it.
“Is it too scratchy?” she asks.
Melanie shakes her head, and gives a smile–weak, but sincere. “It’s really soft,” she says. “And warm. Thank you, Miss Justineau.”
“You’re welcome, Melanie. Does it… smell okay?”
“It doesn’t smell of blood. Or of you. It doesn’t smell of anything very much.”
“Then I guess it will do for now,” Justineau says. “Until we can find something better.”
Parks has been waiting all this time, not even trying to look patient. Justineau climbs into the Humvee, giving Melanie a final wave. As soon as the door is closed, Melanie swarms up the outside of the vehicle and finds herself a comfortable place, wedged in behind the cover of the pedestal gun. She holds on tight as the Humvee starts to roll.
Now they’re doubling back on their own tracks, eastwards, to the ancient north–south slash of the A1. They take it slow, to avoid giving the rear axle any further shocks. And they’re careful to skirt around the towns. That’s where you always get the heaviest concentrations of hungries, Parks says, and the noise of the Humvee would bring them running. But all the same, they’re making good time.
For about five miles.
Then the Humvee rocks and yaws like a dinghy on a wild sea, pitching them out of their seats on to the floor. Caldwell gives an anguished howl as she steadies herself, unthinking, with her injured hands. She goes into a tight crouch around them, hugging them against her chest.
There’s a single, jolting crash, after which the Humvee starts up a different kind of shuddering, intense and agonising. A shriek like an air-raid siren splits the air. The axle’s gone, and they’re dragging their backside across the tarmac.
Parks slams on the brakes and brings them to a dead stop. They slew over, settle onto the road with a hydraulic sigh, more like an animal lying down than anything mechanical.
Parks sighs too. Braces himself.
Justineau has never felt anything for the sergeant up to now apart from resentment and suspicion–spiking into real hatred when he delivered Melanie into Caldwell’s hands–but in this moment she admires him. The loss of the Humvee is a crushing blow, and he doesn’t even take the time to curse about it.
He gets them moving. Gets them out of their dead transport. First thing Justineau does is to check on Melanie, who’s managed to hold on through all the bucking and shaking. She takes the girl’s hand briefly and squeezes it. “Change of plan,” she says. Melanie nods. She gets it. Without being asked, she climbs down again and grabs some distance, just as she did at the cache site.
Sergeant Parks throws open the boot, takes a backpack for himself and gives the other one to Gallagher. They’ll need as much water as they can take with them, but there’s no way they can carry those big drums. Everyone gets a canteen, fills it from one of the drums. Parks takes the fifth canteen himself (the possibility of him giving it to Melanie is never raised). Everyone except Melanie has a good, long swig from the half-empty drum, until their stomachs are uncomfortably full. When it’s mostly empty, Parks offers it to Melanie to finish, but she’s never drunk water in her life. The little moisture her body needs, she’s used to taking from live meat. The thought of pouring water into her mouth makes her wrinkle up her face and back away.
Everyone gets a knife and a handgun, the sheath and holster clipping right on to their belts. The soldiers take rifles too, and Parks scoops up a double handful of grenades like strange black fruit. The grenades are smooth-sided, not sculpted into lozenges like the ones Justineau has seen in old war movies. Parks also helps himself–after a moment’s thought–to the flare gun, which he slips into the backpack, and to a pair of walkie-talkies from under the Humvee’s dash. He gives one of these to Gallagher and hooks the other into his belt.
Into the backpacks too go the meagre food supplies, divided evenly between them. Justineau adds the first aid kit, despite its awkward bulk. Chances are pretty good that they’ll need it.
They work with feverish haste, even though the country road they’re on is silent except for birdsong. They take their cue from Parks, who is grim-faced and urgent, speaking in monosyllables, chivvying them along.
“Okay,” he says at last. “We’re good to go. Everybody ready to move out?”
One by one they nod. It’s starting to sink in that a journey you could do in half a day on good roads has just become a four-or five-day trek through terra completely incognita, and Justineau presumes that that’s as hard for the rest of them to come to terms with as it is for her. She was brought to the base by helicopter, directly from Beacon–and she lived in Beacon for long enough that it became her status quo. Thoughts from before that time, from the Breakdown, when the world filled with monsters who looked like people you knew and loved, and every living soul went scrambling and skittering for cover like mice when the cat wakes up, have been so deeply suppressed, for so long, that they’re not memories at all–they’re memories of memories.
And that’s the world they’re going to walk through now. Home is seventy-odd miles away. Seventy miles of England’s green and pleasant land, all gone to the hungries and as safe to wander in as it would be to dance a mazurka in a minefield. A bewildering prospect, even if that were all.
And Sergeant Parks’ face tells her, even before he speaks, that that’s not all.
“You still dead set against cutting the kid loose?” he asks her.
“Yes.”
“Then I’m laying down some conditions.”