The hungries were just there. Everywhere at once. Wherever you tried to draw the line they were already inside it.
But Khan had always imagined that London would be the last redoubt. When you retreated, you retreated from the bailey to the motte, into the innermost sanctum. So the order to evacuate the city took her by surprise. Apparently the innermost sanctum was Codename Beacon, a fortified camp on the south coast between Dover and Brighton. All remaining government offices were relocating there, effective immediately. Presumably a fortified camp was easier to defend than a city that covered six hundred square miles and had nine major motorways by way of a front door.
By this time, all the surviving doctors and biologists were government employees, their private contracts annulled or bought up, so “all remaining government offices” included Khan. She was given an assembly point and a time to arrive there with one suitcase and one piece of hand luggage.
She went right on working. Her model was almost done and there was no guarantee whatsoever that she would be able to get computer time at Codename Middle of Fucking Nowhere. As the desks around her emptied, she just threw herself with more determination into her work. The peace and quiet were even welcome in a way. No distractions. She had already been sleeping on the couch in her office for three weeks, so she didn’t have to venture out into the hazardous and eerily silent streets. She lived on tins of Heinz lentil soup and family-sized packets of crisps.
Until the colonel came and forced her out at gunpoint.
Well, “gunpoint” was something of an exaggeration, but he had a gun. He had soldiers. He was in a state of barely contained rage and he told her that if she didn’t come of her own free will she would be handcuffed and taken away under arrest.
Khan told him to drop dead and kept on entering data.
Carlisle wasn’t kidding. The cuffs were forthcoming. Two burly soldiers took Khan away from her desk, from her data, and despite her screams of protest they didn’t give her time to record a back-up. The internet had long since gone from being patchy to not being a thing, so her months of work stayed where they were and she was taken south.
She was honest enough to admit to herself—eventually—that nothing much was lost by this. The research was worthless. The worst-case scenarios had already become realities. She had been clinging to her spreadsheets and models the way a child clings to a security blanket. But being kidnapped for her own good still pissed her off.
She didn’t register the colonel’s name right away, but she had heard of the Fireman. Everybody had. The man who burned half of Hertfordshire, who rained more napalm down on the home counties than America rained on Vietnam without causing the hungries even to miss a meal. He looked the part. And she had reason enough to hate him, even if he hadn’t just erased a year of her life with a wave of his hand.
The hate was tempered, though, as they tacked across London. Picking up Khan and two other Imperial College staff had taken the colonel two miles out of his way. He had missed his transport. The four of them had to trek along the Westway to Hammersmith to join another refugee column. They met hungries three times, the third time en masse. The colonel stood his ground alongside his men, aiming low in kneecapping sweeps so the attackers in the forefront of the charge fell and became a barricade against those coming on behind.
They never found the column they were meant to meet. It had disappeared, hundreds of men and dozens of vehicles just swallowed up and gone. Lost in a city, a world, that had burned up all its history and gone back to being pure jungle. Colonel Carlisle assembled his own column of scavenged and repurposed cars and trucks, and led them south. “Five weeks on the march,” one of the privates said, with a mixture of awe and exasperation. “He doesn’t stop. He just keeps saying we’ll sleep when we’re dead.”
Which was probably a little over-optimistic, these days.
They were the last ones to make it out of London. On the evidence of their own nightmare journey to the coast, there was nobody left in there to save.
Later, Khan learned that Carlisle had made the burn runs in Hertfordshire under protest—a protest that he had taken all the way to the chiefs of staff. They told him to carry out his orders and he did. Then he resigned his commission, although the top brass twisted his arm until he took it up again—and then punished him for his presumption by putting him in charge of the evacuation while they sat in the war room in Codename Beacon moving counters around on situation charts.
That was where the colonel’s anger came from: the disconnect between the orders he was being given and the situation on the ground. The endless missed opportunities and avoidable screw-ups. The burn runs did nothing but kill innocents and destroy essential roads. London should have been evacuated by air, but the army wouldn’t release the helicopters because they were technically assigned to combat units. Most of the decisions were coming days or weeks too late.
But Carlisle still followed the orders he was given, the bad ones included. Khan wondered even then what it would take for him to break that habit, given that the end of the world hadn’t been enough to do it.
She’s wondering the same thing now as she follows him into the engine room. As he punctiliously salutes the worthless man sitting in the room’s only chair. Alan Fournier. A wandering arse cut loose from Beacon’s large intestine. A man whose shortcomings as a scientist and as a human being are balanced by a limitless capacity for …
The word she is heading towards is obedience, but she doesn’t want to concede any point of comparison between Fournier and the colonel. She settles for time-serving, amends it to licking boots. Yes, it’s true that both men do what they’re told. But the colonel has a moral compass. Dr. Fournier just has an eagerness to please.
The engine room isn’t really a room, any more than the turret is a room. It’s an inspection space, just wide enough for an engineer to work in. It’s so small that the cowling that covers Rosie’s engine is divided into panels, allowing it to be removed in stages. If you took it off in one piece, there would be nowhere to put it and no way of getting it out of the room into the lab beyond.
But there is space, just about, for Dr. Fournier to have squeezed in a folding table, which he makes believe is a desk. He is sitting behind it now. Khan has to stand. The colonel doesn’t, because Fournier dismisses him with a curt nod of thanks.