“Dr. Khan found the time. I’m not sure whether it was before she gave birth, or just after. She was surprised at what she found. None of the Cordyceps cultures from Ben Macdhui had germinated. Not one, out of twelve.”
Fournier blinks rapidly, several times. “A mistake, presumably. Inert samples.” He is thinking it through even as he speaks. “No, they would have been cultured separately. Grown in different media. But then … that would mean …”
“Exactly.” Carlisle nods. “An environmental inhibitor, for the hungry plague. Something unique about the Cairngorm plateau, at least at its higher end. Altitude? Air pressure? Electro-magnetic fields? You’d be able to come up with a better guess than me, Doctor, I’m sure.
“Or perhaps it’s nothing. Perhaps, as you suggested, the cultures were dead before they were put into the jars. Contaminated in some way. We’ve decided, though, to take the chance. To assume that it’s not a mistake.”
“We?” Fournier echoes, with just a hint of a sneer. “Your crew is gone, Colonel.”
“I know,” Carlisle says. “But they haven’t gone far. They probably arrived at Beacon before we reached London. They’ll spread the word, as discreetly as they can, that there’s an alternative now. Another choice. Beacon is becoming a terrible place, poisoned by its own isolation. Anyone who wants to leave, and try again, is welcome to come with us.”
“To Scotland?” Fournier is incredulous. “To the Cairngorms?”
“Yes.”
“You won’t last the first winter! Assuming you even get there in the first place!”
“Possibly not. But I believe it’s worthwhile making the attempt. It gives me hope, and hope is important.”
Carlisle points out of the window again. When Fournier turns to look, he puts the gun against the side of the doctor’s head and pulls the trigger. He is almost certain that Fournier didn’t see it coming. As much mercy as he could manage, in the circumstances. Certainly a better death than the doctor would find for himself if he were left to walk home.
There is nowhere nearby to bury the body, and Carlisle has no tools that would serve. In any case, it seems to him, Rosie does very well as a coffin and London does tolerably well as a mausoleum.
He inflicts as much damage on the engine as he can bear to. He doesn’t want Rosie ever to move again, ever to fight and kill again, but vandalism doesn’t come easy to him.
He has a very long way to travel. He packs a rucksack with rations for a week or two, e-blocker for a month. If it takes longer than that then he probably won’t make it at all.
But he will. He will make it. And Foss and Sixsmith and McQueen will join him there, presently, with anyone from Beacon who has heard their message. That the Fireman is waiting for them high up in the snows and the frigid air. That he will build a new city, with their help. Or die trying.
He exits through the airlock, setting it to seal itself behind him.
He sets off walking. It’s a beautiful evening. A beautiful place. He pretends as he walks that the old world never fell. That when he turns the corner he will see traffic roaring by. Foreign tourists waving selfie sticks like bishops’ crosiers, office workers walking briskly from their hectic work to their hectic leisure.
And street upon street, the city. And city upon city, the world. Uncountable millions of people, as it was before.
He imagines that history stretches before him as well as behind, a river so broad and deep it makes the Thames look like nothing more than a teardrop rolling down the world’s rugged cheek.
EPILOGUE
TWENTY YEARS LATER
The snow is eight inches deep, but you wouldn’t want to trust to that too much. This is glacial moraine, sewn through and through with rifts and fissures into which snow has drifted until they filled to the brim. If you don’t test every step before you take it, you can sink into a hollow that’s deeper than your height, with rocks as sharp as teeth at the bottom of it.
Nonetheless, the little group of figures down on the eastern slope is making steady progress. They tack left and right, all together, and they keep on coming. There are places on the slope that are still in shadow, the blood-tinged dawn light poking patchily through the peaks above, but the six men and women don’t slow down to probe the blank expanses ahead of them, and they don’t put a foot wrong.
Foss is struck as she watches them come by, how young they look, the oldest barely thirty. That’s not the most striking thing about them, though. What she noticed first, and can’t keep from thinking about, is how lightly they’re dressed. Short jackets, open to the biting wind. No hats. If they were human—normal, baseline human, one-point-zero human—they’d be dead.
So they’re what the colonel said they had to be when they were first sighted at the edge of the plateau. They’re hungries.
And there are more of them down at the bottom of the slope, half a mile back. This is just the vanguard.
Foss turns and walks back the way she came, up to the top of the slope and then north along the razor-edge of what used to be called the Lairig Ghru pass. There are three sentries stationed in the rocks above the pass: they can see Foss as she comes and they can see each other. She raises her rifle horizontally and holds it in the air for several seconds, in her left hand. It’s a pre-arranged signal that means hold your positions and do nothing unless directly attacked. The sentries, who have been straining every nerve since she went downslope, relax a little and return to their vigil. They have enough discipline not to shout questions at her as she walks on by.
Around the shoulder of the mountain, above the swollen exclamation point that is Loch Etchachan, is a settlement made of ninety tents and thirty-seven wooden huts. Sprawling, ragged and dirty, surrounded by mounds of its own rubbish that will stay on the mountain until the spring thaw makes it safe to take them down to the sink hole below the pass that is the settlement’s official waste disposal.
On an ordinary day, even this early in the morning, there would be people walking or running across the open ground between the tents. Children on their way to school, men and women coming back from a hunt or from the barns along the line of the pass with sacks of turnips or onions on their backs.
But this isn’t an ordinary day. A few more of Foss’s people stand on guard at their posts on the upslope and at the ends of the tent-avenues. Everyone else is three miles down the pass, hidden in a defile whose mouth has been painstakingly camouflaged, ready to retreat up or down the mountain depending on which signal flare they see.
Foss goes to the council hut, where the colonel sits alone, and makes her report.
Carlisle gets to his feet. It’s not a quick or easy process these days: the years have not been kind to his old injury or more generally to his hips and lower back. Foss has to resist the urge to give the frail old man a hand up, knowing that the reminder of his weakness shames him.
“We’ll go down to them,” he says.