Private Lutes is an engineer first and a soldier second. Although actually the gap between the two roles is bigger than that suggests. He never wanted to join the army, but after three years on the dole he did very much want a proper apprenticeship that he could turn into a proper job. A four-year army contract, he reasoned, would see him at age twenty-five walking into a sweet deal at Swain’s or Eddie Stobart’s with a good chance of having his own garage somewhere down the line.
Then the Breakdown happened. The hungry plague. And here he is, more than a decade later, still stuck in his fatigues in a world where even engineers who never enlisted belong to the army by default. To be fair, he loves his job—or at least, the part of his job that consists of taking broken machines and making them sing and dance by the application of his skilled hands. That gig is magic. It’s Zen. It’s the perfect peace of the unclouded mind, so completely engaged that it’s somehow completely free.
But he hates all the rest of this shit. Hates being taken away from his real work to do things that don’t mean anything, for people who aren’t grateful. Particularly hates being outside the Beacon perimeter fence (at the moment, four hundred miles outside) and at risk. If he’s happiest with a spanner in his hand, a rifle fills him with a kind of disgust. Spanners take things apart, yes, but they put them together again, too. With a rifle all you can do is dismantle.
Feeling hard done by, he trudges through the streets of Invercrae looking for Stephen Greaves. And wouldn’t he like to open that one up with a spanner! Lots of fascinating things to be discovered inside Greaves’ cranium, no doubt, although the Robot is the very definition of NSK—non-standard kit. If you wanted to fix him you’d need to make your spare parts from scratch, by hand.
The sun comes out for a minute or so, and Lutes’ spirits lift. He walks on the sunny side of the street for as long as it lasts. Then the cloud closes in again and the sky is all watery porridge. That seems to be the normal state of affairs in this miserable bit of the world.
The private is so lost in his thoughts that he loses a second in responding when he hears the sound. Just the clink of metal or stone on glass, but an intentional sound is different from what the wind or the rain does. It has its own profile that is hard to mistake.
Something is moving in the building on his right-hand side. Moving quietly, but the deserted town provides no cover, no distractions. After the clink, a shuffle. Perhaps the hiss of a barely voiced command.
These things add up to ambush. Lutes saw the hungries hacked and felled like trees, and has no wish to end up the same way. He has been moving with his safety on, as per regs, but now he flicks it free and—he doesn’t even have to think about it—fires.
The rifle is on semi-auto, stepped down, but Lutes has the trigger in a death grip. He empties his magazine in three seconds, remembering to fan diagonally downwards and to the left for maximum coverage.
The shop front explodes as the bullets rip through glass and brickwork. Hollow-point, yes, but maximally configured for shallow penetration. These mixed-alloy, mosquito-nosed rounds will bite three inches deep into anything, then repent and weep molten metal when they get there. The sound is deceptively soft, like papers being incautiously toppled from a desk and scattering across the floor.
Immediately followed by shrill yips of pain or shock and the sudden, concerted movement of many bodies.
It was a trap and he triggered it. Too bad for the trappers.
In the exhilaration of that moment—of ducking the blow and turning the tables—Lutes loses all perspective. He does the last thing in the world he should do.
He charges into the shop, where drifts of brick and plaster dust make the air into a cocktail whose main ingredient is wall, and on through an open doorway into the depths of the building in pursuit of his fleeing enemies.
He reloads as he runs, and fires again. Full auto this time. There’s nothing to fire at, but fuck it. These guys thought they could wait in the dark for him and trip him as he passed by. Cut his tendons and leave him crawling in the dust the way they did the hungries. Well, let them try a taste of that and see how it goes down.
Out the back door, into a closed courtyard where eviscerated black bags bleed ancient, unidentifiable rubbish. Then into the street. Now he can see the fleeing shapes ahead of him, heads down and bodies low to the ground as they run flat-out. They look too small. Perspective, probably. He gets off another burst, and one of them falls. One of them is down. He’s actually made a kill.
He jumps right over the prone body and keeps on going, processing what he saw slowly and piecemeal in the seconds that follow. He’s got his mind on the chase, lunging into another building, an office of some kind, through cubicle farms now empty of all livestock, inspirational posters exhorting him from the walls. Just hang in there!
But then the penny drops, and echoes round his skull. A kid? It was a kid?
They’re all kids. And they’ve stopped running now. Lutes stops too, stares at them in utter wonderment. He can’t imagine what they’re doing here, where their parents are, where they got their ridiculous trick-or-treat costumes from. No, they’re not dressed for Halloween, although one of them has turned his face into a stylised skull. The rest seem to be playing dress-like-mummy-and-daddy-do, with about the same hit rate that kids normally average.
Dear Christ, he just killed a kid!
He opens his mouth to apologise, to explain, to reassure, but right at that moment one of the children—the skull-faced boy—whips his arm around like a jockey urging his horse towards the last fence.
There’s a sensation in Lutes’ left eye like a door slamming shut. A big steel door with a lot of weight and heft to it.
A second, bigger impact turns out to be the ground, standing on its end to smack him hard. Now he is lying on fouled carpet tiles and his thoughts have slowed to a syrupy crawl. The children’s feet appear in his monocular field of vision (his left eye is welded shut), stepping softly and cautiously around and over him as though he might still have some fight left in him.
“Don’t be … Don’t be scared,” he slurs. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”
But they’re not. And it isn’t.