‘The Red Child’ by Patrick Freyne

My child was born in the time when newborn babies would leap from the womb and run for higher ground. This was new then and it was shocking to us, though it seems like nothing compared to all of the things that have happened since.

Masked hospital staff, when there still were hospital staff, would try to catch them with their arms thrown wide, sliding around a floor that was often slick with blood. When caught, the babies would be sedated into slumber and put into incubators and we’d watch and fret and try to contact the mainland, back when we still hoped to contact the mainland.

But the babies were tricksy and would, given half a chance, work together to make good an escape. Oh, that was some sight I can tell you. Newborn babies clambering on top of one another to open doors and jimmy windows and, once, just once, to grievously wound a security guard who cried for his mother and who I held in my arms.

I was too heartbroken to reckon with the strangeness of it all then. My wife had just died and my new daughter wanted nothing to do with me or, in fact, any of us. I watched her from behind the glass. I could see my wife in her: in her red hair, her big blue eyes, her pointy chin, her little snub nose, her worried mouth.

‘I want to hold her,’ I said.

‘That isn’t a good idea,’ said the Counsellor.

But I pleaded and they let me try. It went as they expected. My little red child wrestled with me, her limbs longer and stronger than a baby’s should be or, should I say, than a baby’s used to be, and then, with a huge grunt, she broke free from my grasp and I cried out, worried she would hurt herself. Instead she twisted in the air and landed on her feet and hands before retreating to the corner of the room where she started to keen and hiss.

Babies didn’t cry anymore, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t want things. I could see what my daughter wanted. Her eyes, her mother’s eyes, were always drawn through the metal mesh on the window to the verdant mountain and clouded sky beyond. She wanted to be away from this place, with its monitoring machines and masked hospital staff and antiseptic smell and needy sad-eyed fathers.

And she wanted to be with her peers. The babies wanted to be together. The Counsellor initially worried they would suffer from a lack of the physical contact they eschewed but it was clear that it was just contact with us they rejected. Left to their own devices they clambered into each other’s arms, clutching and hugging one another like little hairless monkeys. It pleased me to see my child derive comfort from her companions though it also broke my heart.

In the early days, people still wondered aloud about what was happening. We had no indication of whether similar phenomena were taking place in other parts of the world. We could see that the horizon was blighted with dark clouds and electrical storms and thunderclaps and, at least once, I think, a mushroom cloud. But the internet was down and radio worked only on the island. Occasionally boats appeared but they were filled with refugees fleeing some other cataclysm. They had been at sea too long to tell us anything useful. They just wanted water and food and, having little to spare, our soldiers levelled their guns at them until they sailed away.

And the fighting began here too and the hospital began to fill up with injured and malnourished people, and the neonatal ward with its collection of strange offspring ceased to be a priority for the hospital staff. The babies became a historical problem.

And then, one by one and in groups, they found ways to escape. The bereaved families, feeling lost and in the way, drifted from the hospital, but I stayed.

And one day I went to the incubation room to find the metal mesh had been prized from the window and my little red child and the last of her companions had squeezed through the gap and escaped out into the rain. When I saw this I lost the strength in my legs and all the pain erupted from me in a single cry – the pain of losing my wife and the new pain of losing my child and of being left alone.

The Counsellor patted my shoulder. ‘Now, now,’ she said.

I hadn’t seen her there. She was smoking a cigarette, which was against the rules, and she seemed a little absent and insincere. I didn’t like her very much. Then I saw that her eyes were rimmed with red and I noticed the grey in her dirty blonde hair and the frayed sleeves of her white coat and, even in my grief, I felt sorry for her. There wasn’t much use for counsellors now that the island was at war with itself and the madness she had spent a lifetime keeping at bay was loose at last. She couldn’t set bones or stitch wounds. She could only wonder about things. I let her pat my shoulder some more as I sobbed.

Then she guided me up to the roof where the rain was torrential and we stood there, the heavy raindrops hitting us like spit. As our clothes became soaked, I saw that she had been using the place as an observation point. There was a table and fold out chair and a large waterproof poncho that the Counsellor was now pulling around herself. There were also a pair of military grade binoculars which she focused on the tree-lined mountain for a moment, then took from her eyes and handed to me. I looked to where she pointed, an area where the line of trees began, and I could see rows of tiny babies moving up the hill.

Some were on the paths, some in the foliage. They came from different parts of the island but then joined together on this route up to the summit. I cast the binoculars up and down trying to see if I could see my daughter among them. My breath caught in my chest when I spotted a little red head.

I ran for the door, but the Counsellor was ahead of me and caught me again by the shoulders and turned me around and brought me down the stairs to the basement car park. ‘I’ve been preparing for this,’ she said when we got there, slapping the roof of an old decommissioned military jeep. Within there were two ancient hunting rifles, some nets, some packets of army rations, several pairs of walking boots and some unused rucksacks. ‘We’re going on a baby hunt,’ she said, but catching the expression on my face, she stopped herself from laughing.

The Counsellor had a lot on her mind. We drove in silence at first, in deference to my grief and suffering, but after a few miles her excitement got the better of her and she couldn’t stop herself from talking. She talked about twelve-month incubation periods, excessive musculature, maternal death rates, limb length, peer socialisation. She wondered why these developments were occurring in a time of great world turmoil. She wondered if mammals could be born with a pre-programmed culture. She wondered if a generation could just collectively decide to abandon their species. She went through the whole sequence of events over and over again until I smashed my hand down on the dashboard with such violence I cut myself and then, in my quietest voice, asked her to stop. She laughed but she stopped talking. And I thought about my little red child and my dead wife and the sort of life I could hope for now.

The roads coming into the city were busy but they cleared the further we drove. We passed refugees and then the empty towns they had left behind. We passed military checkpoints at which we had guns pointed at us but were, ultimately, waved through. I suspected that it would be more difficult for us if we chose to go back.

As we reached smaller country roads we began to see small hand and foot prints in the mud and makeshift shelters of branch and leaves in the trees. ‘Interesting,’ said the Counsellor and she scribbled something in her notebook. We saw dead rabbits and goats and dogs who had, on close inspection, died of tiny little wounds.

‘They’re born with teeth, you know,’ said the Counsellor. I did know.

Once, we came upon the body of one of the babies laid out on the verge, wet with rain and ringed, curiously, with stones. I couldn’t breathe until I saw that it wasn’t my daughter. It was a little boy.

‘Well, what do you make of that?’ asked the Counsellor, standing over the body, but I was so overwrought with adrenaline and relief and sadness that I couldn’t answer her.

This was where the roadway ended. The Counsellor went to get the gear from the back of the jeep and when I saw there was a shovel in there I started to dig a small grave. The Counsellor laughed and looked puzzled. ‘That might not be their way,’ she said. In retrospect, I should have killed her there and then. Instead, I waited a few weeks.

We loaded our gear into rucksacks and put on rain ponchos and walking boots. The Counsellor handed me a rifle. I resisted but she held it out until I took it. I had never fired a gun, but I said nothing. Its weight was comforting.

We began walking up the narrow rocky path that wound its way further up the huge mountain. The Counsellor occasionally stopped to look back at the villages and the city below. I didn’t look back. At one point she gasped at something she saw and put her hand over her mouth. Even then, I didn’t look back.

We had made good time. I could see the trees ahead rustling and as I raced up the road I could soon see them – small infant shapes running on all fours like hares, only marginally bigger than they had been at birth. They were soon all along the sides of the path and, in some instances, clambering up trees.

I raced after them for hours, until my heart almost burst in my chest and my lungs felt like they were going to explode, but the children seemed to get no closer. I was not a fit man. When I eventually collapsed in the mud and the rain, I noticed that their pace slowed down too. They weren’t running away from us, it seemed; they were just keeping their distance.

The Counsellor eventually caught up with me. Her head loomed over where I was lying in the dirt. ‘Maybe we should make camp here.’ She was out of breath and using her rifle as a stick. I said nothing. She made camp. She set a fire. I was too exhausted to move. I lay on the ground and turned my head towards my little red child and her strange tribe.

They had formed a camp too, in a way. They had no fire but they huddled together in groups of four or five, nestling their heads together and stroking one another under canopies made of branches and leaves. I could see my child among them, but she, like all the others, showed no interest in me. I wanted to hold her. I wanted to bathe her and dress her and put her somewhere warm.

At one point in the night they all began to sit in a circle and keen together. They formed strange harmonies. They were singing.

In the morning they left before we had managed to pack our stuff away and, in a panic, I raced after them again. I soon learned not to worry. They were eager to go onward but they were in no huge rush.

‘Well, thanks for helping,’ said the Counsellor when she caught up with me, laden down with the contents of our camp. There was still sarcasm in the world.

We followed them for days. They preferred to move at night, so we adjusted our own schedule to accommodate them. They seemed to be growing accustomed to us and they allowed us to camp closer and closer to them. As the Counsellor scribbled in her notebook I would crawl as close as I could to the edge of their territory while they rested. I sometimes brought food from our rations and laid it out there. Some of the smaller ones would take the bait and come closer and I used the opportunity to observe them, their sinewy limbs, their rough, sometimes scarred skin, their wise old eyes. But my little red child never came closer. She preferred fresh kills.

‘I knew this would happen,’ said the Counsellor once, as she broke stale biscuits into her last packet of soup. Our fire was burning but gave off little heat and I could hear the children singing in the distance. I wanted to be with them. ‘I knew our children would eventually reject us,’ she continued. ‘I warned my colleagues, but they thought I was mad. I suppose I did sound mad.’ She laughed. She was thin, and her eyes were too bright. ‘People always say, “The children are different now.” And this time it really was true. But I had no evidence. I could just feel it.’ She thumped her stomach. ‘I could feel it here. And other people felt it. On the mainland they were talking about it long before we were and long before we stopped hearing from them. And then we saw it ourselves.’

She talked about evolutionary mutations and Gaia theory and environmental disaster and war, occasionally stopping to write something in her notebook. I let her talk, but I stopped listening. I turned my face towards the wordless singing. I tried to hear my daughter’s voice among them, though I didn’t know what it sounded like.

The gap between our camp and the children’s narrowed as we ascended. They had decided I wasn’t a threat. While the Counsellor paced the frontier of the encampment muttering and scribbling, I sat in silence and stillness just observing. There was a loose hierarchy. I could see it now. There were the hunters, my little red child among them, who disappeared in groups into the trees and came back with animal carcasses – rabbits, dogs and other things. There were the runts who stayed on the edge of the camp and were often injured and weak and sometimes died or were too slow and were left behind. There were the soothers who tended to the hunters’ wounds and led the singing. I found myself mildly disappointed my child was not one of these. I had always hoped she would be musical. My wife had played the oboe.

Our food was running out and the Counsellor talked about returning to the city. I was less worried. The children I had fed started leaving me little parcels of meat, which I hid from the Counsellor because, well, I was tired of her and I wanted her to go. My little red child still kept her distance but on occasion I saw her stare in my direction with my wife’s round blue eyes, as though trying to remember who I was.

But the Counsellor did not leave. Instead she became manic with malnourishment and shouted and raved so that the children became alarmed and moved further away from us. We were very high up now and there was no way she was in any shape to return to whatever awaited us below. I had miscalculated. So I humoured her.

‘What are we doing here?’ she would ask me, her eyes wild, her hair thinning.

‘Are we not doing research?’ I asked.

She looked at her notebook. The scribbles and diagrams and drawings. ‘I thought so,’ she said. ‘But why? Why are we doing this research?’

‘To bring it back. To bring it back to the people.’

‘To what people? The city is gone.’

This was news to me. Since setting out on our journey I hadn’t looked back once. Now we were high above the clouds and nothing could be seen below anyway. I found, to my surprise, that I didn’t care what was happening down there but I heard despair in the Counsellor’s voice and it worried me.

I tried another approach. ‘Perhaps we’re doing it so that we can know more. Perhaps we’re doing it just for ourselves. For knowledge. Isn’t that enough?’

She nodded vaguely, then scribbled something in her notebook. As she did so, wild children walked on all fours around the edges of our camp and there was more singing, the singing they did when a hunting party caught a rabbit. I felt happy there listening to them. But I was complacent.

One morning I woke with a start to a deafening silence – the kind that follows a huge noise. And then there was another huge noise. When I breathlessly reached the camp I could see the Counsellor holding her gun and, nearby, two dead or wounded babies in the grass. One of them was one of the small strange children who had fed me. The Counsellor had her back right up to a cliff edge and the children were circling her and they were singing. It was a discordant tune I hadn’t heard before. It made my teeth hurt.

I ran over and she aimed her gun at me. ‘Stay back,’ she shouted. ‘I have decided I need to end this.’

‘Why?’ I said. I was crying.

‘It’s no longer interesting.’

‘Why?’ I said again. Even in my distressed state it seemed very interesting. The children were beating the ground and circling her, their faces dark and their teeth bared. As they circled some of them were keening and licking the babies that had been felled. Time passed.

And then, without any warning, one of the hunters ran at the Counsellor and she shot him. And then my little red child ran at her too, and she turned to shoot at her and I stopped thinking and threw myself at the Counsellor.

She fired her gun just as I hit her, just as I knocked us both over the cliff edge and into the air.

Everything seemed to slow down then. Someone was screaming. I felt a certain relief that it was all going to be over and I could see that the Counsellor was looking at me with surprise and disappointment. It felt like we were falling for a long time. It felt like we had time for a conversation and I wondered vaguely why we didn’t have one. She could have asked me why I had done what I did, why I had sided with them against her. I could have asked her why her intellectual curiosity had turned murderous, had turned genocidal.

And then it all stopped with a sickening crunch of pain as we landed on a ledge maybe forty feet below. The Counsellor was beneath me, a mess of splintered bone and wet flesh. Her eyes looked in different directions and I had broken her nose with my head. It flapped on her face.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, but the words were mangled and came out with some of my teeth. She couldn’t hear me anyway.

It felt obscene to be on top of her like that so I tried to push myself away. As I did so, I realised that one of my arms was broken. I screamed as I fell over and onto my back. Something sharp poked through my chest and cut me when I reached down to see if my legs were there. I couldn’t feel them.

I went in and out of consciousness for some time.

Darkness

I could see the Counsellor’s dead, lopsided stare.

Darkness

I saw the pages of her notebook, which had fallen from her pocket, fluttering open in the wind. I could see drawings of children on all fours and lots of question marks in dark pencil. The pages were now covered in blood.

Darkness

I could see the children themselves clambering down the cliff side to look at me and to look at her. They seemed perplexed.

Darkness

I could see that the Counsellor’s body was no longer beside me, just earth and stones covered in blood, and I could hear singing coming from higher on the mountain. It was the song they sang when someone brought back a rabbit.

Darkness

I could see my daughter coming slowly towards me, staring at me beneath her furrowed brow with my wife’s blue eyes. There was a wound on her shoulder as though she had been grazed by a bullet, but she looked strong. She offered me some meat, which I tried to eat but couldn’t hold down. Then she touched my face with her tiny hands and started to lick the blood away. I don’t know if she did it because she recognised me, or if she did it just to be kind, but I felt very proud of her. I looked out over the old world, but I couldn’t see it for clouds. A new world was beginning. A new world just for her, my little red child.

From issue 8: spring/summer 2019

About the Author
Patrick Freyne is a journalist with The Irish Times. He is the author of the essay collection OK, Let’s Do Your Stupid Idea (2020) and the novel Experts in a Dying Field (2026).