That stumble causes Sergeant Parks to turn his head – slowly, measuredly – and give her a baleful glare. She understands the reprimand, and the warning. Her own nod, in return, is so gradual that it takes ten seconds to be completed. She wants him to know that she won’t make that mistake again.
They pass the first group of hungries and keep on going. More houses, terraced this time, and then another row of shops. A side street that they pass is much more densely populated. Hungries stand silently in a tight cluster, as though awaiting the start of a parade. Caldwell guesses that they converged on a kill, and then when they were done simply remained there, in the absence of a trigger that would induce them to move.
She wonders, walking on, whether the sergeant’s strategy is a sound one. They’re embedding themselves very deeply. There are now enemies behind them as well as in front and – potentially – on all sides. Parks wears a troubled expression. Probably he’s thinking the same thing.
Caldwell is about to suggest that they retrace their steps and – as the least bad of a number of unpleasant options – spend the night in one of the semi-detached houses on the outskirts of the town. They might have hungries for neighbours, but at least they’ll have a clear escape route.
But ahead of them, there’s an old-fashioned village green – or the remains of one at least. The green itself has run to jungle, but at least it’s jungle that seems to have a very sparse hungry population. There are a few of them on the strip of road that surrounds the open space, but not nearly so many as on the street they’re on.
Something else too. Private Gallagher sees it first, points – slowly, but emphatically. On the other side of the green is exactly what the sergeant told them to look for: a big detached house, two storeys, standing in its own grounds. It’s a mini-mansion of modern design, masquerading as a country house of an earlier age – but given away by its anachronistic excess. It’s a Frankenstein’s monster of a house, with a half-timbered front, Gothic arches on the ground-floor windows, pilasters framing the front door, gables adhering like barnacles to the roof ridge. The sign on the gate says wainwright house.
“Good enough,” Parks says. “Let’s go.”
Justineau is about to take the direct route, across the overgrown green, but Parks blocks her with a hand on her shoulder. “No telling what’s in there,” he mutters. “Might startle a cat, or a bird, and get all the deadheads for miles around looking in our direction. Let’s stick to the open road.”
So they skirt the edge of the weeds and couch grass, instead of going through, and that’s why Caldwell sees it.
She slows down, and then she stops. She can’t help herself; she stares. It’s such a crazy, impossible thing.
One of the hungries is walking down the centre of the road. A female – biological age when she encountered the Ophiocordyceps pathogen probably late twenties or early thirties. She seems quite well preserved, unblemished apart from bite damage to the left side of her face. Only the grey threads around her eyes and mouth indicate how long it must have been since she left the human race. She’s wearing tan trousers, a white blouse with quarter-length sleeves; stylish summer wear, but the effect is somewhat tarnished by the fact that she’s got one shoe missing. In her long, straight, blonde hair there’s a single cornrow braid.
She’s pushing a baby carriage.
Out of the two things that make this impossible, Caldwell is arrested first by the less remarkable. Why is she walking? Hungries either run, when they pursue prey, or stand still when they don’t. There’s no intermediate state of leisurely perambulation.
And then: why is she clinging to an object? Among the myriad things a human being loses when Ophiocordyceps infiltrates the brain and redecorates is the ability to use tools. The baby carriage ought to be as meaningless to this creature as the equations of general relativity would be.
Caldwell can’t help herself. She advances, crab-wise, to intersect the female hungry’s trajectory, careful at these close quarters to watch her only out of the corner of her eye. Out of the corner of her other eye, she’s aware of Parks raising his hand in a halt gesture. She ignores him. This is too important, and she can’t in conscience let it pass.
She stands full in the path of the oncoming carriage, the shambling ex-woman. It bumps against her, with minimal force, and the woman stops dead. Her shoulders slump, her head bows. Now she looks the part: the lights going out, system powering down until something happens to kick-start it again.
Parks and the others have frozen. They’re all looking Caldwell’s way, watching this play out because there’s nothing they can do now to influence it. By the same token, it’s too late for Caldwell to worry about whether her e-blockers will work at point-blank range, so she doesn’t.
Moving with glacial slowness, she comes around to the side of the carriage. From this angle, she can see that the hungry has more injuries than was immediately apparent. Her shoulder has been torn, flesh hanging there in desiccated strips. The white blouse isn’t white at all at the back – it’s black from neckline to hem with ancient, crusted blood.
Inside the pushchair there’s a row of ducks on an elasticated string, which bob and rock in a desultory dance, and a big yellow blanket, dusty and rucked up, which hides whatever else might be there.
The hungry doesn’t seem aware of Caldwell at all. That’s good. The doctor makes her movements even more gradual, even more unhurried. Reaches out her hand to the topmost edge of the blanket.
She takes a fold of the thick, stiff fabric between finger and thumb. Slow as a glacier now, she peels it back.
The baby has been dead for a long time. Two large rats, nesting in what’s left of its ribcage, start up at once and leap with shrill squeals of protest over Caldwell’s left and right shoulders.
Caldwell staggers back with a wordless shriek.
The hungry’s head snaps up and round. It stares at Caldwell, eyes widening. Its mouth gapes open on grey rot and black stumps of teeth.
Sergeant Parks fires a single shot into the back of its skull. Its mouth opens wider still, its head tilting sideways. It falls forward on to the carriage, which rolls and pitches it off on to the road’s gravelled surface.
On all sides, hungries stir to life, swivelling their heads like range-finders.
“Move,” Parks growls. “On me.”
Then he bellows:
“Run!”
33
They almost die in the first few seconds. Because in spite of Parks’ yell, the others freeze.
It just seems like there’s nowhere to run to. Hungries are swarming on them from every direction, the gaps between them closing as they converge.
But there’s only one direction that matters. And Parks sets to work to open it up again.
Three shots drop three of the sprinting dead in their tracks. Two shots miss. Parks gives Justineau a violent shove, gets her running. Gallagher does the same for Dr Caldwell, and the little hungry kid, Melanie, is already going flat out.
They jump over the fallen hungries, which are scrabbling like cockroaches, trying to right themselves. If Parks had the time, if the seconds that are ticking by weren’t shaping up to be the last seconds of their lives, he’d have tried for head shots. As it is, he goes for central body mass and the best odds for sending them down.
Works fine, up until Justineau goes sprawling. One of the holed hungries has grabbed her leg and is swarming up it, hand over hand.
Parks stops long enough to unload a second bullet into the hollow under the ear of the ex-human predator. It lets go. Justineau is up again in an instant, not looking back. Good. Lot’s wife should have had that kind of focus.
He’s shooting to left and right. Only taking out the closest, the ones that are about to jump or grab. Gallagher is doing the same thing, and – though his hit rate is shit – at least he’s not slowing to shoot. That’s better than having him aim like Deadeye Dick and stand still long enough to get tackled.
They’re at the gates n
ow, and there’s no lock on them that Parks can see, but they don’t open. Used to be electric, obviously, but bygones are bygones and in the brave new post-mortem world that just means they don’t bloody work.
“Over!” he yells. “Up and over!”
Which is easily said. A head-high rampart of ornamental ironwork with functional spear points on top says different. They try, all the same. Parks leaves them to it, turns his back to them and goes on firing.
The up side is that now he can be indiscriminate. Set to full auto and aim low. Cut the hungries’ legs out from under them, turning the front-runners into trip hazards to slow the ones behind.
The down side is that more and more of them keep coming. The noise is like a dinner bell. Hungries are crowding into the green space from the streets on every side, at what you’d have to call a dead run. There’s no limit to their numbers, and there is a limit to his ammo.
Which he hits, suddenly. The gun stops vibrating in his hands and the noise of his shots dies away through layers of echoes. He ejects the empty magazine, gropes for another in his pocket. He’s done this so often he could go through the moves in his sleep. Slap the new mag in and give it a quick, sharp tug, pivoting it on the forward lip so it locks into place. Pull the bolt all the way back.
The bolt sticks halfway. The weapon’s just dead weight until he can clear whatever’s jamming it – the first round, most likely, elbowed in the chamber. And two hungries are on top of him now, triangulating from left and right. One of them used to be a man, the other a woman. They’re about a second away from the world’s nastiest three-way.
It’s just instinct. Faulty learning. He takes a step back, groping for his sidearm instead of swinging the rifle like a club. Wastes a second that he doesn’t have, and it’s all over.
Except that it isn’t.
In combat, Parks narrows down. It’s not even a conscious thing, so much, or a trick he’s learned. It just happens. He does the job that’s in front of him, and pretty much shunts everything else into a holding pattern.
So he’s forgotten about the hungry kid until she’s suddenly there, right in front of him. She’s inserted herself into the narrowing space between him and his attackers. She’s flailing at them with her skinny arms, an atom of defiance with a shrill, shrieking war cry.
And the hungries stop, breakneck sudden. Their eyes defocus. Their heads start to turn to left and right in short arcs, like they’re sad or disapproving. They’re not looking at Parks any more. They’re looking for him.
Parks knows the hungries don’t hunt or eat each other. Apart from the kids in the classroom, he’s never seen a hungry behave like it knows any other hungries are even there. They’re alone in a crowd, each one of them answering its own need. They’re not pack animals. They’re solitaries that cluster accidentally because they’re responding to the same triggers.
So he’s always assumed that they can’t smell each other at all. The smell of a normal man or woman drives them crazy, but other hungries don’t register. They’re just not on the radar. He realises, in that numbed second, that he was wrong. For each other, the hungries must have a nothing-to-see-here-move-along kind of smell, the very opposite of how live people smell. It turns them off, where the live smell turns them on.
The kid masked him. Her chemicals blocked his, just for a second or two, so the hungries lost the pheromone trail that ended with their teeth in his throat.
Plenty of others running in, though, that aren’t slowing at all. And the two that the kid just windjammed are getting the signal again, eyes locking on target.
But Gallagher’s hand clamps on Parks’ arm and drags him backwards through the gates, which they’ve managed to push half open.
They’re running again, the house looming ahead of them. Justineau is hauling on the door, throwing it wide. They’re through, the hungry kid snaking between his legs to get in ahead of him. Gallagher slams the door shut again, which is just so much wasted time because of the two floor-to-ceiling window panels to either side of it.
“Stairs!” Parks yells, pointing. “Get up the stairs.”
They do. To the sound of crazed church bells as the windows shatter.
Parks is bringing up the rear, throwing grenades over his back like strings of beads at a fucking Mardi Gras parade.
And the grenades are going off behind them one after another, barking concussions overlapping in hideous counterpoint. Shrapnel smacks Parks’ flak jacket and his unprotected legs.
The last half-dozen treads on the stairs sag and yaw under him like he’s stepping on to a rocking boat, but he gets to the top somehow.
And falls, first to his knees, then full-length, sobbing for breath. They all do. Except for the kid, who’s staring back down into the gulf of air, as still and quiet as if she’s just gone for an afternoon stroll. The stairs are gone, all blown to hell, and they’re safe.
No, they’re really not. No time for sitting around and swapping stories about the one you got away from. He’s got to get them on their feet again at once.
Sure, they found the main gates of this place closed, and the doors not broken in, but there could easily be a back door off its hinges. A window smashed in. A stretch of fence that went down last week or last year. A nest of hungries sitting in one of the rooms up here, perking up at the sound of their approaching footsteps.
So they’ve got to make themselves a safe base of operations.
And then they’ve got to search. Make sure there are no hostiles inside their perimeter.
The place looks completely undisturbed, Parks has to admit. But just counting the doors that he can see, he knows there must a shit-load of rooms. He’s not prepared to let his guard down until he’s made sure that each and every one of them is secure.
They advance up the corridor, trying each door in turn. Most don’t open, which is fine with Parks. Whatever’s on the other side of a locked door can stay there.
The few that do open lead to tiny bedrooms. The beds are hospital beds with adjustable steel frames and emergency cords at the head end. Tray tables with melamine tops. Tubular steel chairs with faded burgundy seats. En suite bathrooms so small that the shower cubicle is bigger than the floor space outside it. Wainwright House was some kind of private hospital, not a place where people actually lived.
These one-berth wards are way too claustrophobic even for two of them to share, and Parks doesn’t think it’s a great idea to split up. So they keep looking.
And he’s wondering, all this while: did the kid know what she was doing? Was she aware that she could deflect the hungries just by stepping into their path?
It’s a troubling thought, because he’s not sure what the significance of either a yes or a no would be. He was screwed, and the kid unscrewed him. He turns that around in his mind, but it doesn’t look any better no matter which angle he comes at it from. Thinking about it just makes him angry.
They hang a right off the main corridor, then a left, and eventually they find a day room that’s big enough for their needs. Straight-backed chairs line the walls, which are decorated with cheap framed prints of anonymous English pastoral scenes. Haywains predominate. Parks is indifferent to the haywains, and the room’s got a few too many doors for his liking, but he’s pretty sure by this time that it’s the best they’re going to find.
“We’ll sleep here,” he tells the civilians. “But first we’ve got to check the rest of this floor. Make sure there are no surprises.”
The last we means himself and Gallagher, mostly, but the quicker the better for this, so he decides to rope Justineau in too. “You said you wanted to help,” he reminds her. “Help with this.”
Justineau hesitates – looking straight at Dr Caldwell, so it isn’t hard to see what’s going through her mind. She’s worried about leaving Caldwell alone with the kid. But Caldwell was hit worse than anyone by the fight and flight. She’s pale and sweating, breath still coming in quick pants long after the rest of them have got their second wind.<
br />
“We’ll be five minutes,” Parks says. “What do you think is going to happen to her in five minutes?” His own voice surprises him; the anger and the tension in it. Justineau stares at him. Maybe Gallagher flashes him a quick look too.
So he explains himself. “Easier to stay in line of sight if there are three of us. Kid’s no use because she won’t know what to look for. We go out, we come back, and they stay here so we know where to find them. Okay?”
“Okay,” Justineau says, but she’s still looking at him hard. Like, where’s that other shoe, and who’s it likely to hit when it drops?
She kneels and puts a hand on Melanie’s shoulder. “We’re going to take a quick look around,” she says. “We’ll be right back.”
“Be careful,” Melanie says.
Justineau nods.
Yeah.
34
Alone with Dr Caldwell, the first thing Melanie does is to walk away to the further end of the room and put her back to the wall. She watches every move that Dr Caldwell makes, scared and wary, ready to bolt through the open door after Miss Justineau.
But Dr Caldwell sinks into one of the chairs, either too exhausted or too lost in her own thoughts to pay any attention to Melanie. She doesn’t even look at her.
Any other time, Melanie would explore. All day she’s been seeing new and amazing things, but Sergeant has set a brisk, steady pace and she’s never had time to stop and investigate any of the wonders that went by on both sides of the road: trees and lakes, latticework fences, road signs pointing to places whose names she knows from her lessons, hoardings whose mostly obliterated posters have become mosaics of abstract colour. Living things too – birds in the air, rats and mice and hedgehogs in the weeds alongside the road. A world too big to take in all at once, too new to have names.
And now here she is, in this house that’s so different from the base. There must be so many things to discover. This room alone is filled with mysteries both large and small. Why are the chairs only at the edges of the room, when the room is so enormous? Why is there a little wire cradle on the wall next to the door, with a plastic bottle in it and a sign that says CROSS-INFECTION COSTS LIVES? Why is there a faded picture on one of the tables (wild horses galloping across a field) that’s been cut up into hundreds and hundreds of wiggly-shaped pieces and then stuck back together again?