64
Caroline Caldwell gets out of Rosie using the cockpit door rather than the midsection door. The midsection door still has the airlock attached and her hungry specimen jammed into it.
She walks twenty paces forward. That’s as far as she can go, more or less.
She stares at the grey wall for a long time. For whole minutes, probably, although she doesn’t really trust her time sense any more. Her wounded mouth throbs in time with her heartbeat, but her nervous system is like a flooded carburettor; the engine doesn’t catch, the confused signals don’t coalesce into pain.
Caldwell registers the wall’s construction, its height and width and depth–the depth is just an estimate–and the time it must have taken to form. She knows exactly what she’s looking at. But knowing doesn’t help. She’s going to die soon, and she’ll die with this… thing in front of her. This gauntlet, flung down by a bullying, contemptuous universe that allowed human beings to grope their way to sentience just so it could put them in their place that bit more painfully.
Caldwell makes herself move, eventually. She does the only thing she can think of to do. She picks up the gauntlet.
Returning to Rosie, she lets herself back in through the cockpit door, which she closes and locks. She goes through the crew quarters and the lab to the midsection. She stops briefly in the lab to replace her face mask, which was ripped when the slingshot stone smacked into it. She scrubs up and dons surgical gloves, takes a bone-saw from a rack and a plastic tray from a shelf. A bucket would be better, but she has no bucket.
The hungry she caught is still moving sluggishly, despite the horrific damage the door mechanism has done to the muscles and tendons of its upper body. Seen from this close, the size of the head in relation to the body suggests that it may have been even younger at the time of initial infection than Caldwell had previously estimated.
But then she’s about to test that hypothesis, isn’t she?
The hungry’s right arm is jammed behind it, inside the airlock space. Caldwell secures the left arm by catching it in a noose of plasticated twine and tying the free end of the twine to a bracket on the wall. She wraps the twine around her own forearm three or four times and uses her body weight to pull it tight against the hungry’s struggles. The loops of twine bite deep into her arm, where the flesh has gone from angry red to sullen purple. She feels very little pain, which is a bad sign in itself. Nerve damage in necrotised flesh is irreversible and progressive.
As quickly as she can, but carefully, she saws off the hungry’s head. It grunts and snaps its jaws at her throughout the whole of this process. Both of its arms flail violently, the left one within a tight circular arc defined by the free play of the twine. Neither arm can reach her.
The fragile upper vertebrae yield to the saw almost instantly. It’s the muscle, on which the blade alternately sticks and slides, that’s hardest. When Caldwell is through the vertebrae, the hungry’s head sags suddenly, opening the incision wide to show the severed nubs of bone, shockingly white. By contrast, the liquor that drips down from the wound on to the tray and the floor all around is mostly grey, shot with rivulets of red.
The last thin ribbon of flesh tears under the head’s own weight, and the head abruptly falls. It hits the edge of the tray, flipping it over, and rolls away across the floor.
The hungry’s body is still moving very much as it did when the head was still attached. Its arms windmill uselessly, its legs step-slide on the airlock’s grooved metal floor. Colonies of Cordyceps anchored to the spine are still trying to commandeer the dead child and make it work for the greater good of its fungal passenger. The movements slow while Caldwell bends to retrieve the head, but they haven’t entirely stopped when she straightens again and takes the head through into the lab.
Safety first. She leaves the head on the work surface for a moment or two while she returns to clear the airlock, flinging the still-twitching headless corpse out on to the road. It lies there like a reproach not just to Caldwell but to scientific endeavour in general.
Caldwell turns her back on it and slams the door. If the road to knowledge was paved with dead children–which at some times and in some places it has been–she’d still walk it and absolve herself afterwards. What other choice would she have? Everything she values is at the end of that road.
She closes the doors, returns to the lab and sets to work.
65
Melanie is waiting when Justineau and Parks finally turn into the long road that has Euston station at the other end of it. Wordlessly she points, and Justineau looks. Breathless, lathered in sweat, her legs and chest knotting in agony, it’s all she can do.
Halfway along the broad avenue, Rosie has slewed to a halt on a steep diagonal, practically touching the kerb on both sides. Directly in front of the vehicle a huge barricade blocks the street. It rises to a height of forty feet or so, which puts it higher than the houses on either side. In the low, slanting sunlight, Justineau can see that it continues over the houses, into them and beyond them. It looks like a sheer vertical, at first, but then its subtle tones resolve themselves and she can see that it’s a slope like the side of a mountain. It’s as though a million tons of dirty snow has fallen in this one spot.
Parks joins her and they continue to boggle in unison.
“Any idea?” the sergeant asks at last.
Justineau shakes her head. “You?”
“I prefer to look at all the evidence first. Then I get someone smarter than I am to explain it to me.”
They go forward slowly, alert for any hostile movement. Rosie has been in the wars, and they can see the aftermath. The dents and scrapes on the armour plating. The blood and tissue plastered around the midsection door. The small, crumpled body lying in the street, right beside the vehicle.
The body is a hungry. A child. Male, no older than four or five. His head is gone–no sign of it anywhere nearby–and his upper body is crushed almost flat, as though someone put his narrow chest in a vice and tightened it. Melanie kneels to examine him more closely, her expression solemn and thoughtful. Justineau stands over her, searching for words and not finding any. She can see that the boy wears a bracelet of hair, perhaps his own, on his right wrist. As a badge of identity, it couldn’t be clearer. He was like Melanie, not like the regular hungries.
“I’m sorry,” Justineau says.
Melanie says nothing.
A movement in Justineau’s peripheral vision makes her turn her head. Sergeant Parks is looking the same way, towards Rosie’s central section. Caroline Caldwell has stripped the duct tape away from the lab window and slid back the light baffles. She’s staring out at them, her expression hard and impassive.
Justineau goes over to the window and mouths: What are you doing?
Caldwell shrugs. She makes no move to let them in.
Justineau hammers on the window, gestures to the midsection door. Caldwell goes away for a few moments, then comes back with an A5 notepad. She holds it up to show Justineau what she’s written on the top sheet. I have to work. Very close to a breakthrough. I think you might try to stop me. Sorry.
Justineau throws out her arms, indicating the empty street, the long shadows of late afternoon. She doesn’t have to say or mime anything. The message is clear. We’re going to die.
Caldwell watches her for a moment longer, then once again closes the baffles right across the window.
Parks is on his knees now, a few feet to Justineau’s left. He’s working the crank to open the door. But it’s not opening, even though he’s encouraging it with a continuous stream of bad language. Caldwell must have disabled the emergency access.
Melanie is still kneeling beside the beheaded body, either grieving or else so lost in thought that she’s not aware right now of what’s going on around her. Justineau’s stomach is churning and she feels sick. From the hard running, and now from this lethal smack in the face. She walks on a little, trying to outdistance the nausea, until she comes to the outermost reaches of the wall.
It’s not a wall at all but an avalanche, a formless sprawl of matter in slow-motion advance. It’s made from the tendrils of Ophiocordyceps, from billions of fungal mycelia interwoven more finely than any tapestry. The threads are so delicate that they’re translucent, allowing Justineau to peer into the mass to a depth of ten feet or so. Everything within is cocooned, colonised, wrapped in hundreds of thicknesses of the stuff. Outlines are softened, colours muted to a thousand shades of grey.
Justineau’s dizziness and nausea return. She sits, slowly, rests her head in her hands until the feelings stop. She’s aware of Melanie walking past her, skirting the edge of the thing and then seemingly about to walk into it.
“Don’t!” Justineau yells.
Melanie looks at her in surprise. “But it’s only like cotton, Miss Justineau. Or like a cloud that’s come down to the ground. It can’t hurt us.” She demonstrates, bending to run a hand lightly through the fluffy mass. It parts cleanly, retains a perfect image of the hand’s passage. The threads she’s touched cling to her skin like spiderwebs.
Justineau scrambles up to pull her away, gently but firmly. “I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe it can, maybe it can’t. I don’t want to find out.” She asks Melanie to brush the stuff off her hands, very carefully, on to a tuft of grass that’s sprouting up from the ruined pavement nearby. The fungal threads are wrapped around the grass stalks too, and most of it appears to be dead–much more grey than green showing.
They go back to Parks, who’s given up on trying to open the midsection door and is now sitting with his back to Rosie, leaning against one of her rear treads. He’s holding his canteen, weighing it carefully in his hands. He takes a swig as they approach, then hands it to Justineau to do likewise.
When she takes it, she realises from its weight that it must be almost empty. She gives it back. “I’m good,” she lies.
“Bullshit,” Parks says. “Drink and be merry, Helen. I’m gonna go look around these houses shortly. See if there’s anything left standing in rain buckets or gutters. God will provide.”
“You think?”
“He’s known for it.”
She drains the canteen and slumps down beside him, dropping it into his lap. She looks up at the sky, which is darkening. Sunset’s maybe half an hour away, so Parks is probably bluffing about looking for standing water–which anyway would likely be full of all kinds of bad shit.
Melanie sits cross-legged between them and facing them.
“What now?” Justineau asks.
Parks makes a non-committal gesture. “I guess we wait a while longer, and then we pick one of these houses. Secure it as far as we can before it gets dark. Try and fix up some kind of a barricade, because we’ve got to be leaving a scent trail now as well as a heat trail. Hungries will find us long before morning.”
Justineau is torn between despair and choking rage. She goes with the rage because she’s afraid the despair will paralyse her. “If I get my hands on that bitch,” she mutters, “I’ll beat her brains out, and then mount the best parts on microscope slides.” Moved by some atavistic reflex, she adds, “Sorry, Melanie.”
“It’s all right,” Melanie says. “I don’t like Dr Caldwell either.”
When the sun touches the horizon, they finally force themselves to move. The lights are on in the lab by this time, a little of their glow spilling around the edges of the baffles so that the windows look as though they’ve been drawn on Rosie’s side in luminous paint.
The rest of the world is dark, and getting darker.
Parks turns to Melanie, very abruptly, as though he’s been nerving himself up to something. “You sleepy, kid?” he asks her.
Melanie shakes her head for no.
“You scared?”
She has to think about this one, but it’s no again. “Not for me,” she qualifies. “The hungries won’t hurt me. I’m scared for Miss Justineau.”
“Then maybe you could run an errand for me.” Parks points at the lowering grey mass. “I don’t fancy our chances going through that stuff. I don’t know whether it could infect us or not, but I’m pretty sure it could choke us to death if we breathed enough of it in.”
“So?” Melanie demands.
“So I’d like to know if there’s a way around it. Maybe you could go check it out, once we’ve found a bolt-hole for ourselves. Might make a difference tomorrow if we know where we’re going.”
“I can do that,” Melanie says.
Justineau is unhappy at the thought, but she knows it makes sense. Melanie can survive out here in the dark. She and Parks definitely can’t.
“Are you sure?” she asks.
Melanie is very sure.