The Boy on the Bridge
M. R. Carey
To Camille Gatin and Colm McCarthy, with thanks and love
PART ONE
IN COUNTRY
1
The bucks have all been passed and the arguments thrashed out until they don’t even bleed any more. Finally, after a hundred false starts, the Rosalind Franklin begins her northward journey—from Beacon on the south coast of England all the way to the wilds of the Scottish Highlands. There aren’t many who think she’ll make it that far, but they wave her off with bands and garlands all the same. They cheer the bare possibility.
Rosie is an awesome thing to behold, a land leviathan, but she’s not by any means the biggest thing that ever rolled. In the years before the Breakdown, the most luxurious motor homes, the class A diesel-pushers, were a good sixteen or seventeen metres long. Rosie is smaller than that: she has to be because her armour plating is extremely thick and there’s a limit to the weight her treads will carry. In order to accommodate a crew of twelve, certain luxuries have had to be sacrificed. There’s a single shower and a single latrine, with a rota that’s rigorously maintained. The only private space is in the bunks, which are tiered three-high like a Tokyo coffin hotel.
The going is slow, a pilgrimage through a world that turned its back on humankind the best part of a decade ago. Dr. Fournier, in an inspirational speech, likens the crew to the wise men in the Bible who followed a star. Nobody else in the crew finds the analogy plausible or appealing. There are twelve of them, for one thing—more like the apostles than the wise men, if they were in the Jesus business in the first place, and they are not in any sense following a star. They’re following the trail blazed a year before by another team in an armoured vehicle exactly like their own—a trail planned out by a panel of fractious experts, through every terrain that mainland Britain has to offer. Fields and meadows, woodland and hills, the peat bogs of Norfolk and the Yorkshire moors.
All these things look, at least to Dr. Samrina Khan, very much as she remembers them looking in former times. Recent events—the collapse of global civilisation and the near-extinction of the human species—have left no mark on them that she can see. Khan is not surprised. The time of human dominion on Earth is barely a drop in the ocean of geological time, and it takes a lot to make a ripple in that ocean.
But the cities and the towns are changed beyond measure. They were built for people, and without people they have no identity or purpose. They have lost their memory. Vegetation is everywhere, softening the man-made megaliths into new and unrecognisable shapes. Office blocks have absent-mindedly become mesas, public squares morphed into copses or lakes. Emptied of the past that defined them, they have surrendered without protest, no longer even haunted by human meanings.
There are still plenty of ghosts around, though, if that’s what you’re looking for. The members of the science team avoid the hungries where possible, engage when strictly necessary (which mostly means when the schedule calls for tissue samples). The military escort, by virtue of their weapons, have a third option which they pursue with vigour.
Nobody enjoys these forays, but the schedule is specific. It takes them into every place where pertinent data could lurk.
Seven weeks out from Beacon, it takes them into Luton. Private Sixsmith parks and locks down in the middle of a roundabout on the A505, which combines a highly defensible position with excellent lines of sight. The sampling team walks into the town centre from there, a journey of about half a mile.
This is one of the places where the crew of the Charles Darwin, their dead predecessors, left a cache of specimen cultures to grow in organic material drawn from the immediate area. The team’s brief is to retrieve these legacy specimens, which calls for only a single scientist with an escort of two soldiers. Dr. Khan is the scientist (she made damn sure she would be by swapping duties with Lucien Akimwe for three days running). The escort consists of Lieutenant McQueen and Private Phillips.
Khan has her own private reasons for wanting to visit Luton, and they have become steadily more pressing with each day’s forward progress. She is afraid, and she is uncertain. She needs an answer to a question, and she hopes that Luton might give it to her.
They move slowly for all the usual reasons—thick undergrowth, ad hoc barricades of tumbledown masonry, alarms and diversions whenever anything moves or makes a sound. The soldiers have no call to use their weapons, but they see several groups of hungries at a distance and they change their route each time to minimise the chance of a close encounter. They keep their gait to a halting dead march, because even with blocker gel slathered on every inch of exposed skin to deaden their scent, it’s possible that the hungries will lock onto rapid movement and see potential prey.
Khan considers how strange they must look, although there’s almost certainly no one around to see them. The two men each comfortably topping six feet in height, and the small, slight woman in between. She doesn’t even come up to their shoulders, and her thighs are thinner than their forearms. They could carry her, with all her gear, and not slacken stride. It’s past noon before they reach Park Square, where the Darwin’s logs have directed them. And then it takes a long while to locate the specimen cache. The Darwin’s scientists cleared a ten-foot area before setting it down, as per standing orders, but a whole year’s growth has happened since then. The cache’s bright orange casing is invisible in snarls of brambles so dense and thick they look like tank traps. When they finally locate it, they have to use machetes to get to it.
Khan kneels down in pulped bramble and oozing bramble-sap to verify the seals on the specimen containers. There are ten of them, all battleship grey rather than transparent because the fungus inside them has grown to fill the interior space to bursting. That probably means the specimens are useless, offering no information beyond the obvious—that the enemy is robust and versatile and not picky at all about pH, temperature, moisture or any damn thing else.
But hope springs as high as it can, and the mission statement is not negotiable. Khan transfers the containers to her belt pouches. McQueen and Phillips stand close on either side of her, sweeping the silent square with a wary 360-degree gaze.
Khan climbs to her feet, but she stands her ground when McQueen brusquely gestures for her and Phillips to move out.