12

If Eddie Parks knows one thing, it’s that he’s sick of this detail.

He was okay with the retrieval runs, as far as that went. The grab-bagging, the soldiers called it. Dirty work, and about as dangerous as you can get, but so what? You knew what the risks were going to be, and the rewards. You weighed them in your hands, and they made sense. You could see why you were doing it.

And that was what kept you doing it, week in and week out. Going into areas where you knew damn well there’d be hungries around every corner. The inner cities, where the population density was highest and the infection spread quicker than the fear of it.

And your life was on the line with every choice you made, every step you took, because there were all kinds of situations you could walk into and not walk out of. The hungries in the city, Christ fucking Jesus … they’re like statues, most of the time, because they don’t move unless something else moves. You’re sprayed from head to foot with e-blocker, so they can’t smell you, and you can walk right by them as long as you do it slow enough and smooth enough that you don’t flip their trigger.

You can get yourself in really deep.

Then some clumsy bastard trips over a loose paving stone, or sneezes, or just scratches his ass, and one of the hungries whips its head round, on the sound or the movement or whatever the hell, and once one of them clocks you, it’s monkey-see-monkey-do for all the rest. They go from zero to sixty in half a heartbeat, and they’re all running in the same direction. So then you’ve got three choices, two of which will reliably get you killed.

If you freeze, the hungries will roll over you like some kind of gangrenous tsunami. They’ve got your number now, and they won’t be fooled no matter what you smell like.

If you turn and run, they’ll take you down. You can build up a bit of a lead at first, and even think you’re winning, but a hungry can keep up that same loping run pretty much for ever. He’s never going to stop, he’s never going to slow down, and over the distance he will take you.

So you fight.

Broad sweeps, below the waist, full automatic. Bust their legs, and they’ve got to drag themselves on their hands to get to you. Changes the odds a little. And if you can get yourself into a narrow place, where they can only come at you one or two at a time, that helps too. But you would not believe how much damage those fuckers will take and still keep moving.

And some days you’ll stir up a different kind of opposition. Junkers. Survivalist arseholes who refused to come into Beacon when the call went out, preferring to live off the land and take their chances. Most of the junkers stay well away from the cities, like any sane person would, but their raiding parties still tend to see any built-up area for fifty miles around their camp as their very own preserve and property.

So when a Beacon grab-bagger patrol meets a troop of junker scavengers, the fur is going to fly every time. It was a junker who gave Sergeant Parks his scar, which isn’t romantic and understated like a duelling scar but a horrific, pucker-edged trench that crosses his face like a bend sinister on an old coat of arms. Parks tends to gauge the mettle of a new recruit by how long they can look him in the eye first time around, before that monstrous thing makes them take a desperate, abiding interest in their own boots.

But what makes all the aggravation of grab-bagging worthwhile is the stuff that’s still sitting around in all those houses and all those offices, waiting to be taken. Old tech, computers and machine tools and comms hardware that hasn’t been touched since the Breakdown – stuff that you can’t even make any more. They’ve got people back at Beacon, tech people, who know exactly how this stuff works, but the knowledge isn’t any good without the infrastructure. It’s like there used to be a whole factory for every frigging circuit board and every frigging piece of plastic. And the people who used to work in those factories are the ones who right now are so eager to chew their way through your Kevlar to the tender parts underneath.

So that old stuff is literally priceless. Parks gets that. They’re trying to find a way to remake the world twenty years after it fell apart, and the goodies that the grab-bag patrols bring home are … well, they’re a rope bridge over a bottomless canyon. They’re the only way of getting from this besieged here to a there where everything is back in good order.

But he feels like they lost their way somewhere. When they found the first of the weird kids, and some grunt who’d obviously never heard about curiosity and the cat called in a fucking observation report.

Nice going, soldier. Because you couldn’t keep from observing, the grab-baggers suddenly get a whole slew of new orders. Bring us one of those kids. Let’s take a good long look at him/her/it.

And the techies looked, and then the scientists looked, and they got the itch to kill a few cats too. Hungries with human reactions? Human behaviours? Human-level brain functions? Hungries who can do something besides run and feed? And they’re running naked and feral through the streets of the inner cities, right alongside the regular variety? What’s the deal?

More orders. Requisition a base, a long way from anywhere. Mount a perimeter, and stand by. They’d been raiding the ragged hinterlands of Stevenage and Luton, so RAF Henlow seemed to fit the bill. It was more or less intact, it offered plenty of space both above the ground and in reinforced bunkers underneath it, and it had a functional airstrip.

They dropped in, and then they dug in. Disinfected. Decorated. Waited.

And in due course Dr Caldwell came along with her white coat and her bright red lipstick and her microscope, and a letter from Beacon with a whole lot of signatures and authorisations on it. “This is my show now, Sergeant,” she said. “I’ll take that building over there and the sheds on either side of it. Go get me some more of those kids. As many as you can find.”

Just like that. Like she was ordering fast food, back in the days when there was fast food and you could order it.

Looking back on it, that was the point where Parks’ life stopped making sense. When he stopped being a grab-bagger and became a hunter and trapper.

It’s not like he wasn’t good at it. Hey, he was shit-hot. He realised right out of the gate that you could spot the oddballs, the kids who were different, by the way they moved. Hungries toggle between two states. They’re frozen in place most of the time, just standing there like they’re never going to move again. Then they smell prey, or hear it, or catch sight of it, and they break into that terrifying dead sprint. No warm-up, no warning. Warp factor nine.

But the weird kids move even when they’re not hunting, so you can tell them apart. And they react to stuff that isn’t food, so you can get their attention – with a mirror, say, or the beam of light from a torch, or a piece of coloured plastic.

Cut them out of the pack. Not that there’s a pack exactly, because the hungries always treat other hungries like they’re part of the scenery. But get them to come out where they’re alone, and exposed. Then drop the nets.

He and his team took thirty in the space of about seven months. It wasn’t even hard once they got into the rhythm of it. Then Caldwell told them to stand down and wait for further orders. Said she had enough material to work with.

And how messed up is this? Suddenly Parks is in charge of a kindergarten. He finds himself defending a base that isn’t doing a damn thing apart from nursemaiding these little hungries. They’ve got their own rooms, the same pallet beds as the soldiers, weekly feeding (which if you ever want to eat again yourself, you don’t want to see), even a schoolroom.

Why a schoolroom?

Because Caldwell wants to know if these spooky little monsters can learn. She want to see inside their heads. Not just the hardware – she’s got her operating table for that side of things – but the squishy stuff too. Like, what are they thinking?

Here’s what Parks is thinking. The regular hungries are clean compared to these kid-shaped monstrosities. At least you can tell that the regular hungries are animals. They don’t say “Good morning, Sergeant” when you kneecap them.

There isn’t a whole lot more of that he can choke down, to be honest. The blonde one … Melanie. She’s test subject number one, for some reason, even though she was about the eleventh or the twelfth one he bagged. She scares the shit out of him, and he can’t explain why. Or maybe he can, and he doesn’t like to think about it. Certainly a part of it is that unfailing good-little-girl smarminess she’s got. An animal like that, even if it looks like a human being, should make meaningless sounds or no sounds at all. Hearing it talk just muddies the waters.

But Parks is a soldier. He knows how to shut up and do what he’s told. In fact, that’s his speciality subject. And he gets what Caldwell is doing. These kids – presumably the kids of junker families that got trapped and bitten and infected – seem to have some kind of partial immunity to the hungry pathogen. Oh, they’re still flesh-eaters. Still react in the same way to the smell of live meat, which is the sign by which ye shall frigging well know them. But the light inside their heads didn’t go out, for some reason – or not all the way out. They were living like animals when the grab-baggers found them, but they rehabilitate really nice and they can walk and talk and whistle and sing and count up to big numbers and all the rest of it.

Whereas their mummies and daddies are in the wind. If they all got taken and fed on as a family unit, the adults just went the same way as everyone else who gets bitten. They turned into full-on brain-dead monsters.

The kids got stuck halfway. So maybe they’re the best hope of finding an actual cure.

See? Parks is no fool. He knows what’s being done here, and he’s served that purpose silently and uncomplainingly. He’s served it for the best part of four years now.

Rotation was meant to happen after eighteen months.

There are other people in the same boat, and it’s fair to say that Parks is more worried about them than he is about himself. That’s not bleeding-heart bullshit; it’s just that he knows his own limits better than he knows theirs. There are twenty-eight men and women under his command (he doesn’t count Caldwell’s people, who mostly don’t know what an order is), and with that small a number, base security needs all of them to be combat-fit and ready to respond if a situation develops.

Parks has doubts about half his muster, at this point.

Doubts about himself too, insofar as he’s a non-commissioned officer effectively acting as a field commander for a unit maintaining a fixed post with civilian liaison. The minimum rank for that billet, if you go by regs, is lieutenant.

Parks has his own scripture, which doesn’t meet regs at many points. But he knows when his centre of gravity is compromised. And just recently that’s how he feels more days than not.

That’s how he feels today, when he takes Gallagher’s report.

“Jesus wept,” Parks says, putting the report down on his desk. “You proceeded to proceed? Just tell me what happened, Gallagher. Save this bollocks for your autobiography.”

Gallagher blushes to the roots of his red hair. His freckles disappear in the general incandescence. On anyone else, that blazing face would mean a consciousness of having screwed up, but there’s a long list of things that would make Gallagher blush like a schoolgirl, including for example a dirty joke, any exertion more taxing than a parade march, or a single sip of bootleg gin. Not that you tend to see this soldier drinking all that often – he’s as skittish around alcohol as if the army he signed up with was the one that offers you salvation. Parks extends the benefit of the doubt a little bit further and a little bit thinner.

“Sir,” Gallagher says, “the hungries were right up my arse. I mean, they were close enough so I could smell them. You know that sour stink they get, when the grey threads start showing through their skin? It was strong enough so my eyes were watering.”

“Thready ones don’t normally get this far out from the cities,” Parks muses, not liking the news.

“No, sir. But I’m telling you, this bunch was ripe. Couple of them had their faces all fallen in. Clothes had mostly rotted off them. One of them had lost an arm. Don’t know whether it had been eaten off of him, back when he first got infected, or if it had fallen off since, but yeah, these weren’t newbies.

“Anyway, I was running back towards where Tap and Barlow were set up, behind that big stand of beech trees. There’s a hedgerow there, and it’s pretty solid. You’ve got to pick your spot – go through it where it’s thin enough not to slow you down too much. And you can’t see what you’re running into, obviously.”

Gallagher hesitates, seeming to wince slightly. His memories have hit a barrier a lot more solid than that hedge.

“What did you run into?” Parks prompts.

“Three blokes. Junkers. They were just walking along on the far side of the hedge, where they couldn’t be seen from the road. There are blackberry bushes all along that stretch, so maybe they were picking fruit or something. Except that one of the three – boss man, I reckoned, on account of his kit – he had a pair of binoculars. And all three of them were armed. Boss man’s got a handgun; the other two have got machetes.

“I broke out of the hedge about fifty yards away, heading right at them.” Gallagher shakes his head in unhappy wonder. “I shouted at them to run, but they didn’t take any notice. The bloke with the gun drew down on me, and he was this close to blowing my brains out.

“Then the hungries burst through the hedge right behind me, and he sort of lost his concentration. But the three of them were still blocking my way, and this nutcase still had his gun pointed right at me. So I barged him. It’s not like there was anywhere else to go. He got one shot off, but he managed to miss me. Don’t know how, at that range. Then I hit him full on with my shoulder and kept right on going.”

The soldier stops again. Parks waits, letting him get it out in his own words. It’s clear that this whole thing has freaked him out badly, and it’s part of Parks’ job, sometimes, to take confession. Gallagher is one of the greenest of the buck privates. If he was born at all when the Breakdown came, he was still sucking on his mother’s tit. You’ve got to make allowances for that.

“Ten seconds later, I’m back in the trees again,” Gallagher says. “I looked over my shoulder and didn’t see anything. But I heard a scream. One of the junkers, obviously. And he went on screaming for a hell of a long time. I stopped. I was thinking about going back, but then the hungries popped up right behind me and I had to get going again.”

Gallagher shrugs.

“We completed the mission. Tap and Barlow had set the traps up right on the finish line. Hungries ran into them, got themselves stuck in the barbed wire, and after that it was just clean-up.”

“Petrol or lime?” Parks asks. He can’t keep from asking, because he’s told Nielson no more petrol for routine bake-offs, but he knows for a fact the quartermaster is still signing off on ten-gallon drums.

“Lime, sir.” Gallagher is reproachful. “There’s a pit by the road there that we dug out back in April. We didn’t even half fill it yet. We rolled them in and shovelled three bags in on top of them, so they should render down nicely so long as it doesn’t rain.”

This purely operational stuff perks Gallagher up a little, but he becomes sombre again as he gets back to his own story. “After we were done, we went back to the hedge. The boss man and one of the other two were lying there on the ground, right where I’d seen them before. They were really badly chewed up, but they were still twitching. Then the boss man opened his eyes, and I verified—” Gallagher catches himself slipping back into report-speak, stops and starts again. “He was crying blood, the way they do sometimes when the rot’s just getting into them. It was obvious they were both infected.”

Parks is impassive. He saw that punchline coming. “Did you finish them off?” he asks – the bluntness deliberate. Call a spade a spade. Make Gallagher see that it’s all just business as usual. It won’t help him now, but it might take the edge off later.

“Barley – Private Barlow – decapitated them both with the second bloke’s machete.”

“Mask and gloves on?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you retrieved their kit?”

“Yes, sir. Handgun is well maintained, and there were forty rounds of ammo in one of the packs. Binoculars are a bit cack, to be honest, but the boss man had a walkie-talkie too. Nielson thinks it might work with our long-range sets.”

Parks nods approval. “You handled a tricky situation really well,” he tells Gallagher, and he means it. “If you’d frozen when you came through that hedge, the civilians would still have died – and most likely they’d have held you up long enough to kill you too. This is a better outcome all round.”

Gallagher says nothing.

“Think about it,” Parks persists. “These junkers were less than a mile away from our perimeter, armed and tooled up for surveillance. Whatever they were doing, they weren’t just out taking the air. I know you feel like shit right now, Private, but what happened to them isn’t down to you. Even if they were lily-white. Junkers choose to live outside the fences, so they take what comes with that.

“Go and get drunk. Maybe pick a fight with somebody or get yourself laid. Burn it off. But do not waste a bastard second of my time or yours with feeling guilty about this bullshit. Drop a penny in the poor box, move along.”

Gallagher comes to attention, seeing the dismiss looming.

“Now dismiss.”

“Yes, sir.”

The private rips off a smart salute. Mostly they don’t bother these days, but it’s his way of saying thanks.

Truth is, Gallagher may be green, but he’s far from the worst of an indifferent-to-sod-awful bunch of soldiers, and Parks can’t afford to have him join the walking wounded. If the lad had killed the junkers himself, gutted them and made balloon animals out of their colons, Parks would still have done his best to put a positive spin on it. His own people are his priority here, first and last.

But somewhere in the stack, he’s also thinking this: junkers? On his doorstep?

Like he didn’t have enough to bloody worry about.