They were interrupted. Most of them dropped their shit and ran for the hills. One of them jumped back in the car, and maybe he saved the others by that action, because it looks like a lot more than one hungry partook of him.
“You try turning the key?” Justineau asks. Parks is really pissed off to see her walking right up to the car, even though he hasn’t signalled clear yet. But the woman’s not stupid; on reflection, Parks is aware that his body language changed as he walked around the car–from total threat-readiness to his still cautious but looser business-as-usual. She was just responding to that change a little faster than the others.
“You try it,” he suggests.
Justineau leans into the car, goes suddenly still as she sees its other occupant. But if she flinches from that sight, it’s only for a heartbeat. She reaches forward, and Parks hears a muted click as the key turns. The engine doesn’t make a sound. He didn’t really expect it to.
He’s looking off to both sides of the road now. There’s scrub and bushes to their right, a length of wooden hoarding on the left. Most likely the occupants of the car ran the obvious way, towards the bushes. No telling how far they got, but they didn’t come back for their stuff, or to bury their dead. Parks revises his earlier thought, that the sacrifice of the back-seat passenger saved the rest. It’s not likely that anyone walked away from this.
The others come up and join them, Gallagher last of all because he waits on Parks’ signal. Parks tells them to check the bags and boxes, but it’s mostly the kind of precious keepsakes that only mattered to their former owners. Not even clothes, but books and DVDs, letters and ornaments. The few items of food were perishable, and they’ve perished: withered apples, a rotten loaf, a bottle of whisky that shattered when the bag it was in hit the asphalt.
Justineau opens the rucksack. “Jesus Christ!” she mutters. She dips her hand in and brings out some of the contents. Money. Bundles of fifty-pound notes, bank-fresh in paper sleeves. Completely useless. Twenty-some years after the world went down the toilet, someone still thought it was coming back–that there would come a day when money would mean something again.
“Triumph of hope over experience,” Parks observes.
“Nostalgia,” Dr Caldwell says categorically. “The psychological comfort outweighs the logical objections. Everybody needs a security blanket.”
Only idiots, Parks thinks. Personally, he tends to see security in much less abstract terms.
Gallagher looks from one of them to the other, not sure what’s going on. He’s too young to remember money. Justineau starts in on an explanation, then shakes her head and gives it up. “Why would I ruin your innocence?” she says.
“There were one hundred pence in a pound,” the hungry kid says. “But only after the fifteenth of February 1971. Before that, there were two hundred and forty pence in the pound, but they didn’t say pence. They said pennies.”
Justineau laughs. “Very good, Melanie.” She tears the sleeve from one of the bundles of money, fans out the notes and throws them into the air. “Pennies from heaven,” she says as they blow away on the hot wind. The hungry kid smiles, as though the cascade of waste paper is a firework display. She squints into the sun to follow them as they fly.
32
They make, Caroline Caldwell supposes, good progress.
It’s hard for her to tell, though, because her time sense is slightly skewed by two extraneous factors. The first factor is a fever that has been rising in her since the evening of the previous day. The second factor is that she allowed herself to become dehydrated as they walked, exacerbating the effects of the first factor.
She watches her own sickness at one remove, not because her scientific vocation conditions everything she does, but because being at one remove actually seems to help. She can observe the sick tiredness of her limbs, identify the ache in her head occasioned by the tiny but repeated jolts of her feet on the asphalt–and still keep moving without a break, because these are purely physiological things, without any bearing in the end on what her mind does.
Which is to turn old questions over and over in the light of new evidence.
She’s read many detailed accounts of the hungries’ feeding, but never observed it at first hand (the feeding of the test subjects, under artificial and controlled conditions, was an entirely different thing). She finds it striking that the hungries who fed on the man in the car continued to eat until his body was non-viable–until there was almost no flesh left on his upper torso and he had been virtually decapitated.
This is counterintuitive. Caldwell would have expected the hungry pathogen to be better adapted. She would have expected Ophiocordyceps to manipulate the cells of the host’s hypothalamus more skilfully, suppressing the hunger drive after the first few bites so that the newly infected have a robust chance of survival. That would obviously be far more efficient, since a viable new host will become a new vector in its turn, providing increased opportunities for the pathogen to multiply quickly within a given ecological range.
Perhaps it’s a side effect of that very slow maturing: the fact that this strain of Ophiocordyceps never reaches its final, sexually seeding stage, but instead reproduces neotenously by asexual budding in the favourable environment of blood or saliva. Logically, you’d expect this to impede the spread of favourable mutations.
Something to consider in the next round of dissections. Examine the cells of the hypothalamus more closely. Look for differential levels of penetration by fungal mycelia.
A mile out of Stevenage–close enough to see the roofs of the houses and the blue-slated spire of a church–Sergeant Parks gives the order to stop. He turns to them and tells them what’s going to happen next, pointing at the sky as an unimpeachable witness. “Sun’s going down inside the next two hours. Could be those junkers are still looking for us, but either way we need a place to hole up for the night, and this is it. Gallagher and I will go in and disinfect, as far as that’s needed. Then we’ll come back and get you. Okay?”
Not okay, very obviously. Caldwell can see from Justineau’s face that it’s not okay for her either, but she chooses to make the point herself because she knows she’ll make it more clearly and succinctly.
“This isn’t going to work,” she tells Parks.
“It is if you do as you’re told.”
Caldwell gestures, cupping the fingers of her hand as though she’s holding the man’s words up for inspection. The tips of her fingers tingle unpleasantly. “That’s exactly why it isn’t going to work,” she says. “Because you’re seeing us purely as civilians, with yourself and Private Gallagher as our military escort. In trying to take all the risk on to yourself, you’re actually increasing the risk to all of us.”
Parks gives her a cold look. “Assessing risk is part of what I do,” he tells her.
She’s about to explain to him why his assessment is flawed, but Helen Justineau breaks in now, pre-empting her reply. “She’s right, Sergeant. We’re about to move into a built-up area, where we can expect to find a lot more hungries, at every stage of infection. It’s dangerous ground–we won’t know how dangerous until we’re in it. So what kind of sense does it make for you to cross it three times? You have to go out and do your reconnaissance, then come back here to collect us, then go in again. And what happens to us if those junkers turn up again while you’re gone? We wouldn’t last a second out here in the open. It’s got to be better if we go in with you.”
Parks chews on this for a good few seconds. But Caldwell knows him well enough to be confident of his answer. It’s not in his repertoire to say no to something just because somebody else thought of it. She and Justineau are right, and that’s all there is to it.
“Okay,” he says at last. “But the two of you have never done this before, so you’d damn well better follow my lead. Come to think of it,” he glances across at the private, “did you ever do a Hitchin run, Gallagher?”
The private shakes his head.
Parks puffs out his breath like a man about to bend down and lift a heavy load. “Okay. Road rules still apply–especially the one about keeping your mouths shut–but this is going to be different. We’re almost bound to see hungries, and to be in their line of sight. What you want to do is not trigger them. Move slowly and smoothly. Don’t look them directly in the eye. Don’t make any loud or sudden noises. As far as you can, you blend into the landscape. If in doubt, look at me and take your cue from me.”
Once he’s said his piece, he walks on. He doesn’t waste any more words or any more time. Caldwell approves of that.
Twenty minutes later, they’re coming level with the first buildings. Nobody has sighted any hungries yet, but it’s early days. Parks issues whispered commands, and they all stop. The four uninfected humans anoint themselves with e-blocker again.
They head on into town, staying in a tight cluster so that none of them presents a clear and unambiguous human silhouette. These are residential streets, upmarket once, now gone to semi-ruin through a hectic month or so of looting and urban warfare followed by two decades of neglect. The gardens are small pockets of jungle that have broken their borders to colonise parts of the street. Waist-high weeds have smashed and grabbed their way up between tilted flagstones, mature brambles throwing up fist-thick stalks like the tentacles of subterranean monsters. But the shallowness of the soil underneath the pavement has stopped them from uniting their forces and throwing down the houses once and for all. There’s a precarious balance of power.
Parks has already told them what he’s looking for. Not a house on a street like this, with neighbours on all sides. That would be too difficult to secure. He wants a detached structure standing in its own grounds, with reasonable lines of sight at least out of the upstairs windows, and ideally with the doors intact. He has realistic expectations, though, and he’ll take anything that’s broadly okay if it means not going too deeply into the town.
But there’s nothing he likes here, so they move on.
Five minutes later, keeping up their intent and silent stroll, they come into a wider road into which several streets feed. There’s an arcade of shops here. The road surface is crunchy with shattered glass, all the shopfronts broken into and ransacked by looters of a bygone era. Empty tin cans on the ground, rusted to the thinness and delicacy of shells, roll and rattle when the wind comes up a little.
And there are hungries.
Perhaps a dozen of them, widely scattered.
The party of living humans comes to a halt when they see them, only Parks remembering to slow his steps gradually rather than going straight from motion into stillness.
Caldwell is fascinated. She turns her head slowly to examine each of the hungries in turn.
They’re a mix of old and new. The older ones can be identified very easily both by their mouldering clothing and by their extreme gauntness. When a hungry feeds, it also feeds the pathogen within it. But if prey can’t be found, Ophiocordyceps will draw its nutrients directly from the flesh of the host.
Closer to, she can also see the mottled colouring on the older ones. Grey threads have broken the leathery surface of their skin in a network of fine lines, crossing and re-crossing like veins. The whites of the eyes are grey too, and if the hungry’s mouth is open you can see a fuzz of grey on the tongue.
The newer hungries are dressed more nattily–or at least their clothes have had less time to rot–and they still have a broadly human appearance. Paradoxically, that makes them a lot more unpleasant to look at, because the wounds and torn flesh through which they contracted the infection in the first place are clearly visible. On an older hungry, the general bleaching and weathering of the skin surface and clothing, along with the overlay of grey mycelia, softens and disguises the wounds; makes something more architectural out of them.