The Girl With All The Gifts (17 page)

“You still dead set against cutting the kid loose?” he asks her.

“Yes.”

“Then I’m laying down some conditions.”

He goes around to the side of the Humvee. There’s another locker there, that nobody has opened yet. It turns out to be full of the highly specialised kit that Parks and his people used to use, way back in the day, when they raided the towns of Herts, Beds and Bucks for the high-functioning hungries that Caroline Caldwell was so eager to meet. Restraint harnesses, handcuffs, stun batons, telescoping poles with lasso collars at their business end; a whole chandler’s shop full of ways to bring dangerous animals in alive, with minimal risk to their handlers.

“No,” Justineau says, her throat dry.

But Melanie, when she sees this filthy arsenal, says yes just as quickly, just as firmly. She looks Parks in the eye, appraising, maybe approving. “It’s a good idea,” she says. “To make sure I can’t hurt anyone.”

“No,” Parks says. “The good idea would be something else entirely. This is just making the best of a bad job.” Justineau is in no doubt about his meaning. He’d like to put a bullet in Melanie’s head and leave her by the roadside. But given that the civilians have joined forces against him, given that both Caldwell and Justineau, for their different reasons, want Melanie to stay on as a member of their party, this is his grudging compromise.

The two soldiers cuff Melanie’s hands behind her back. They attach an adjustable leash to the chain of the cuffs, and play it out to about two metres. Then they put a mask over the lower half of the girl’s face, which looks something like a dog’s muzzle or a medieval scold’s bridle. It’s made for an adult but fully adjustable, and they lock it really tight.

When they start to attach a hobble to Melanie’s ankles, which will allow her to walk but not to run, Justineau steps in. “Forget it,” she snaps. “Do I have to keep reminding you that we’re running from junkers as well as hungries? Making sure Melanie can’t bite is one thing. Making sure she can’t run either – that’s just killing her without wasting a bullet.”

Which the sergeant clearly wouldn’t mind at all. But he thinks about it for a while and finally gives a curt nod.

“You keep talking about
killing
in relation to the test subjects, Helen,” Caldwell says, didactic by default. “I’ve told you this before. In most cases, brain function stops a few hours after infection, which meets the clinical definition of death as far as—”

Justineau turns around and punches Caldwell in the face.

It’s a hard punch, and it hurts her hand a lot more than she expects, the shock travelling up her arm all the way to the elbow.

Caldwell staggers and almost falls, her arms flailing for balance as she takes one and then two steps back. She stares at Justineau in utter astonishment. Justineau stares right back, nursing the hand she hit with. But she’s got one hand left if it turns out to be needed, and of course that’s one more than Caldwell has just then.

“Keep talking,” she suggests. “I’ll knock the teeth out of your mouth one by one.”

The two soldiers stand by, interested but impartial. Clearly, they don’t have a dog in this catfight.

Melanie also watches, big-eyed, mouth wide open. The anger drains out of Justineau, replaced by a surge of shame at her loss of self-control. She feels the blood rush into her face.

Caldwell’s blood is showing too. She licks a trickle of it from her lip. “You’re both my witnesses,” she says to Parks and Gallagher, her voice thick. “That was an unprovoked assault.”

“We saw it,” Parks confirms. His tone is dry. “I look forward to being someplace where our witnessing will make a difference. Okay, are we done? Anyone got any speeches they want to make? No? Then let’s move out.”

They walk on down the lane, due east, leaving the Humvee spavined and silent behind them. Caldwell stands alone for a few moments before joining the exodus. Clearly she’s amazed that the attack on her person has elicited so little interest. But she’s a realist. She rolls with the bad news.

Justineau wonders if they should have pushed the Humvee into one of the neighbouring fields to hide their trail a little, but she presumes that with the axle broken and the back end of the vehicle hard against the ground, it would be way too heavy to move. And burning it would be a whole lot worse, of course – like sending up a signal flare to tell the enemy exactly where they are.

Plenty of other enemies waiting out there for them without that.

Melanie builds the world around her as she goes.

This is mostly countryside, with fields on all sides. Rectangular fields, mostly, or at least with roughly squared-off edges. But they’re overgrown with weeds to the grown-ups’ shoulder height, whatever crops they were once planted with swallowed up long ago. Where the fields meet the road, there are ragged hedges or crumbling walls, and the surface they’re walking on is a faded black carpet pitted with holes, some of them big enough for her to fall into.

A landscape of decay – but still gloriously and heart-stoppingly beautiful. The sky overhead is a bright blue bowl of almost infinite size, given depth by a massive bank of pure white cloud at the limit of vision that goes up and up and up like a tower. Birds and insects are everywhere, some of them familiar to her now from the field where they stopped that morning. The sun warms her skin, pouring energy down on to the world out of that upturned bowl – it makes flowers grow on the land, Melanie knows, and algae in the sea; starts food chains all over the place.

A million smells freight the complicated air.

The few houses they see are far off, but even at this distance Melanie observes the signs of ruin. Windows broken, or boarded up. Doors hanging off their hinges. One big farmhouse has its roof all fallen in, the spine of the roof making a perfect downward-pointing parabola.

She remembers Mr Whitaker’s lesson, which feels like a very long time ago now.
The population of Birmingham is zero
… This world she’s seeing was built by people, to meet their needs, but it’s not meeting their needs any more. It’s all changed. And it’s changed because they’ve retreated from it. They’ve left it to the hungries.

Melanie realises now that she’s been told all this already. She just ignored it, ignored the self-evident logic of her world, and believed – out of the many conflicting stories she was given – only the parts she wanted to believe.

Sergeant Parks is wrestling with a logistical problem, and he still hasn’t seen a way out of it.

His initial instinct was to stay clear of the towns on their route – of any built-up area at all – and make this whole stroll strictly cross-country. The argument for doing that is obvious. The hungries mostly stay close to where they were first turned, or infected, or whatever you want to call it. It’s not a homing instinct, it’s just a side effect of the fact that when they’re not hunting, they’re mostly standing stock still, like little kids playing Grandmother’s Footsteps
.
So the cities and towns are full of them, the countryside more sparsely populated, exactly the way it used to be before the Breakdown.

But Parks has got three good points to set against that one. The first is the temperature thing – something he noticed when he was out in the field, and teaches to all the soldiers under his command, even though Caldwell says the evidence is still “far from conclusive”. The hungries’ known triggers are endocrine sweat from an unmasked human body, rapid movement and loud noises. But there’s a fourth, which mostly comes into play when the temperature drops at night. They can zero in on you by your body heat, somehow. They can pick you out in the dark like you were a neon sign saying
FINE DINING HERE
.

And that being the case, point two kicks in. They’ll need shelter. If they sleep out in the open, they’ll get hungries swarming on them from all directions. Okay, there are other places besides towns that will give you shelter, but most of them presuppose that you’ve got the time and the manpower to do proper reconnaissance.

Which brings in point three. Time. Ducking and weaving away from any built-up areas will add about twenty extra miles to their route, which doesn’t matter all that much as far as the raw numbers go. But the raw numbers aren’t worth a shit. What matters is that it will take them across the hardest, slowest terrain, and probably double their journey time. Not to mention the fact that it’s hard to run away across a field full of mature brambles with inch-long thorns, or a pasture choked with knee-high knotweed. Hungries don’t care if they rip themselves open, and they’ll happily keep running if they’ve got your scent, even as they flay themselves to the bone. Humans will slow down a lot more in that terrain, and get taken that much more easily.

So they’re walking right now along a country lane, between two weed-choked fields, and they’re about to pass through a village. Or else tack on three extra miles to the journey by slogging all the way around it.

One way or the other, Parks is going to have to make his mind up soon.

Caroline Caldwell goes through the stages of grief, in the prescribed order.

Denial is a stage she goes through very quickly indeed, because her reason strikes down the demeaning, treacherous thought as quickly as it rises. There’s no point in denying the truth when the truth is self-evident. There’s no point in denying the truth even if you have to wade through thorn thickets and minefields to get to it. The truth is the truth, the only prize worth having. If you deny it, you’re only showing that you’re unworthy of it.

So Caldwell accepts that her work – the pith and substance of the last decade of her life – is lost.

And lets herself feel the toxic anger and indignation that boils in her like heartburn at that thought. If Justineau hadn’t intervened, if she’d been allowed to make that final dissection, would it have made any difference? Of course not. But Justineau ensured that the last minutes of Caldwell’s time at the base were wasted. It would be absurd to build anything further on top of that transgression, but it’s enough as it stands. Justineau ruined her work, and her work is now gone. Justineau will pay, when they get back to Beacon, with the trashing of her career and with a court-martial that will probably see her shot.

Bargaining is another stage that Caldwell doesn’t linger over. She doesn’t believe in God, or the gods, or fate, or any higher or lower power that has dominion over her. There’s no one to bargain with. But she agrees – even in a deterministic world governed by impartial physical forces – that if the lab is found to be intact and a rescue team from Beacon returns her notes and samples to her in good order, she will light a candle to nobody at all in recognition for the universe having (en passant, by something indistinguishable from chance) been kind to her.

When she holds that thought up to the light and sees how pathetic it is, how cravenly equivocating, she sinks into black depression.

From which she is saved by this thought: there wasn’t anything in the lab worth keeping anyway. The samples, possibly, but she has a living sample with her. The notes were mostly descriptive – a very detailed and circumstantial account of the hungry pathogen’s life cycle (incomplete, since she’s yet to culture a sample to the mature, sexual stage) and the course of the infection both in the regular way of things and in the anomalous state represented by the children. She has this stuff by heart, so the loss of the notes is not crucial.

She has a chance. She’s in the field, and opportunities will come.

This could still work out well.

Private Kieran Gallagher knows all about monsters, because he comes from a family in which monsters predominate. Or maybe it’s just that his family was more given than most to letting its monsters come out and sniff the air.

The key that let them out was always the same: bootleg vodka, made in a still that his father and older brother had set up in a shed behind an abandoned house about a hundred yards from where they lived. The provisional government in Beacon was officially against unlicensed alcohol, but unofficially they didn’t really care so long as you stayed inside your house when you were shit-faced and only beat up your own people.

So Gallagher grew up in a weird microcosm of the wider world outside Beacon. His father, and his brother Steve, and his cousin Jackie looked like normal human beings and even sometimes acted like them, but most of the time they veered between two extremes: reckless violence when they were drinking, and comatose somnolence when the drink wore off.

Ricocheting off that, Gallagher has tried to live the life of the safe and solid middle ground, looking out for the things that make other people go off the rails so he can avoid them assiduously. He was the only soldier on the base who refused the solace of twenty-two per cent proof home-brew beer cooked up in a bucket or a bathtub. The only one who didn’t look out for magic mushrooms when he was on wide patrol. The only one who didn’t think it was hilarious to watch the antics of that teacher, Whitaker, as he drank himself to death.

And he’s always assumed that by steering into the middle of the channel, he was going to manage not to get wrecked. Now he knows you can get wrecked in clear waters too, and he’s thinking
oh please, don’t let me die. I haven’t even lived yet, so it’s not fair to let me die.

He’s so scared, he’s worried that he might actually piss himself. He’s never understood before how being scared could make you do that; but now, thrown into the hungries’ world with only Sergeant Parks to back him up and with all those miles to walk before they get back to Beacon, he can feel his nuts tightening and his bladder loosening with every step he takes.

The question is, which is he more afraid of? Dying out here, or going home? They’ve both got their terrors, about equally vivid in his mind.

He’s always had shit-awful luck, from the day he was born. Got the beatings at home and at school, never managed to swap smokes for gropes behind the gym like his brother (the one time he tried, his dad caught him stealing the cigarettes and took it out of him with the end of a belt), got into the army by default to escape from that madhouse, carries a stupid misspelled tattoo (
qui audet piscitur
–
“who dares, fishes”) because the tattooist was drunk and missed out three letters, caught gonorrhoea from the first girl who ever let him roll her, got the second pregnant and skipped out on her (nothing in excess, not even love), then realised too late that his feelings for her went way beyond sex. If he ever gets back to Beacon and sees her again, he’ll try to explain that to her.
I’m a coward and a worthless piece of shit, but if you give me a second chance I’ll never run out on you again.