The Girl With All The Gifts (19 page)

Justineau is at pains to explain all this to the hungry kid, who’s calm and still throughout the whole procedure. She gets it, even if Justineau doesn’t – knows why, e-blocker or not, she has to be treated like an unexploded munition. She doesn’t complain once.

The food they liberated from the Humvee is the tough and tasteless type 3 carb-and-protein mix, labelled – you have to assume satirically –
Roast Beef and Potatoes
, washed down with water that has an aftertaste of mud, so supper is nobody’s idea of a gourmet treat.

Justineau takes an extra spoon and feeds the kid, who therefore has to be released from the muzzle for a few minutes. Parks watches her closely the whole time she’s free, his gun in his holster but with the safety off and a round already chambered – but there’s no way he could get in there in time if Melanie took it into her head to bite Justineau. He’d just have to shoot the both of them.

But the kid is good as gold, as far as that goes. She swallows the meat chunks from the food mix without even chewing them, spits out the potatoes with a great show of distaste. She’s finished inside a minute.

Then Justineau wipes her mouth clean with a corner of cloth torn from God knows what and God knows where, and Parks snaps the muzzle closed again.

“It’s looser than before,” the hungry kid says. “You should tighten it.”

Parks tests it by sliding his thumb inside the strap, up against the back of her neck. She’s right, sure enough, and he adjusts it without a word.

The floor is cold and hard, the blankets thin. Their backpacks make pretty lousy pillows. And there’s the little monster right there among them, so Parks is tensing all the time for that bang and clatter from the canteens as she reverts to type and goes for them.

He stares up into the featureless dark, thinks of the flash of Justineau’s crotch he glimpsed when she was pissing on the gravel outside.

But the future is uncertain, and he can’t get up enough enthusiasm even to masturbate.

Melanie doesn’t dream. At least, she never has before tonight. There were fantasies she indulged, like the fantasy of saving Miss Justineau from monsters, but sleep for her has always been an un-time spent in un-space. She closes her eyes, opens them again and the day recycles.

Tonight, in the garage, it’s different. Maybe it’s because she’s outside the fence, not in her cell. Or maybe it’s because the things that have happened to her today are just too vivid and too strange for her mind to let go of them.

Whatever it is, her sleep is lurid and terrifying. Hungries, soldiers and men with knives lurch at her. She bites, and is bitten – kills, and is killed. Until Miss Justineau gathers her in her arms and holds her close.

As her teeth meet in Miss Justineau’s throat, she snaps instantly awake, her mind wrenching itself away from that unthinkable prospect. But she can’t stop thinking about it. The nightmare lays its stifling folds across her thoughts, and she knows there was something inside the dream images, some hidden payload that she’ll sooner or later have to face.

There’s a sour metal taste in her mouth. It’s like the taste of blood and flesh left behind a vengeful ghost. The mulchy, textureless food that Miss Justineau gave her shifts queasily in her stomach when she moves.

The garage is dark, except for a little filtered light (moonlight, it must be) from around the edges of the door. Silent, except for the level breathing of the four grown-ups.

The red-haired soldier who’s one of Sergeant’s people murmurs in his sleep – shapeless words that sound like protest or pleading.

After a time of staring into the dark, Melanie’s eyes adjust. She can see the outline of Miss Justineau’s body, not close but closer to her than the others. She wants to crawl over to her and curl up against her, her shoulders pressed into the precisely right-shaped arc of Miss Justineau’s lower back.

But with the atmosphere of that dream on her, she can’t. She doesn’t dare. And the movement would make the bucket and the canteens clang together anyway, which would wake everyone up.

She thinks about Beacon, and about what she said to Miss Justineau that time in the classroom, after the “Charge of the Light Brigade” lesson. It stands out very clear in her mind, and it’s easy to remember the exact words, because this was the conversation that ended with Miss Justineau stroking her hair.

Will we go home to Beacon?
Melanie had asked.
When we’re grown up?
And Miss Justineau looked so sad, so stricken, that Melanie had immediately started to blurt out apologies and assurances, trying to stave off the effects of whatever terrible thing she’d inadvertently said.

Which she understands now. From this angle, it’s obvious. What she’d said, about going home to Beacon, was impossible, like hot snow or dark sunshine. Beacon was never home to her, and never could be.

That was what made Miss Justineau sad. That there never could be a going-home for her that meant being with other boys and girls and grown-ups and doing the things she used to hear about in stories. Still less a going-home that had Miss Justineau in it. She was meant to end up in jars in Dr Caldwell’s lab.

This time she’s living in now was never foreseen or intended. Not by anyone. That’s why they keep arguing about what they’re going to do.

Nobody knows. Nobody knows any better than she does where they’re really going.

Sergeant Parks had planned to let them sleep until the sun’s well up, because he knows how hard the next day is going to be, but as things turn out, they wake up early. What rouses them is the sound of engines. A long way off at first, and rising and falling a lot, but it’s obvious that whatever the hell it is, it’s coming closer.

Under Parks’ terse directions they grab their stuff and get the hell out of there. He lets the hungry kid off the running rope and puts her back on the leash, trying hard not to make the buckets clank together. No telling how far the sound will carry in the pre-dawn stillness.

They run out into the luminous half-dark, past the church and into a field behind it, go a good hundred yards or more before Parks signals to them to kneel down among the towering weeds. They could – maybe should – go further but he wants to see what’s coming. From here he can get a good view of the road without being seen, and their trampled passage will heal over inside of a minute as the resilient grasses stand up straight again.

They sit and kneel like that for a long time, as the sun slowly separates from the horizon and low light soaks into the field like water into a rag. They don’t speak. They don’t move. Justineau opens her mouth at one point, maybe ten minutes in, but Parks gestures her to stay quiet and she does. She can see the urgency in his face.

When the wind shifts, they can hear the shouted voices of people as well as the drone of machines.

It’s a strange cavalcade when it finally comes. In the lead, one of the bulldozers Parks saw the day before. As it rolls down the road and turns a bend towards them, he gets a good view of its broad blade, which has been decorated with a flamboyant death’s head in metallic spray paint. He hears someone – he thinks it’s Gallagher – make a mewling sound of pure fear beside him. But it’s low enough that it won’t carry, so there’s no harm in him voicing what everyone is feeling.

Behind the bulldozer is a Humvee identical to the one they commandeered, and behind that a jeep. All three vehicles are packed with junker men in holiday mood, shouting out to each other and waving a wide variety of offensive weapons. They’re chanting something with a strong, repetitive rhythm, but Parks can’t make out the words.

The convoy stops at the church, where a couple of the junkers jump down and go inside. There’s a shout, and they come out again, looking a little more animated. They’ve found the dead hungry, Parks guesses. But they don’t have any way of telling how long it’s been there. Hungry blood doesn’t flow much and it’s the colour of mud to start with, so drying out doesn’t change it. You’d have to look close even to guess how the hungry was taken down, because the entry wound from Parks’ pistol was small and discreet and there wasn’t any exit wound.

The junkers check the garage too, and Parks tenses because this is where it could all go south. If they’ve left any trace of their presence there … But there are no alarums, and there’s no search. After a few minutes the junkers get back on the bulldozer and set off again. The convoy turns another corner and disappears from sight, although they can still hear it for a long time after that.

When everything’s gone quiet again, Justineau speaks. “They’re looking for us.”

“We can’t know that,” Dr Caldwell objects. “They could be foraging for food.”

“Base had plenty of supplies,” Parks says, pointing out the obvious. “And they only took it yesterday. I’d have expected them to get the fence back up again and make themselves at home. If they’re out here instead, it makes sense to me that they’d be looking for survivors.” Which means they’ve made it personal. He doesn’t say it, but he thinks now that the ones Gallagher accidentally got killed might have been important, or popular. The attack on the base could have been totally opportunistic, but this wild hunt was whipped up to settle scores.

But he doesn’t say any of this, because he doesn’t want Gallagher to feel like he’s got all those deaths on his conscience. The boy’s sensitive enough that he might go down under the weight of that. Hell, Parks would buckle more than a little himself.

They’re all looking scared and shaken, Gallagher most of all, but there’s no time for hand-holding. The good news is that the junkers headed north, which means they’ve got a window for their run to the south and they’d better use it. “Ten minutes,” Parks says. “We eat and run.”

They go deeper into the long grass, one by one, to relieve themselves and wash and whatever else they need to do, and then they eat a quick, joyless breakfast of carb-and-protein mix 3. The hungry kid is a silent, passive observer to all of this. She doesn’t piss and this time she doesn’t eat, either. Parks ties her leash to a tree when he goes off to perform his own ablutions.

When he comes back, he finds that Justineau has untied the leash from the tree and is holding it herself. That’s fine by Parks. He’d rather keep his hands free. With a minimum of discussion – a minimum of interaction of any kind – they hit the road. Every face Parks looks at is drawn and scared. They fled from a nightmare, and fuck if it isn’t right here again, bumping along behind them. What he knows and doesn’t say is that they’re heading into worse.

They go east at first, towards Stotfold, but there’s no need to stop there now so they detour south, hit the road that used to be the A507 and keep right on going.

This is wild country, for a lot of reasons. In the first days and weeks of the Breakdown, the UK government, like a whole lot of others, thought they could contain the infection by locking down the civilian population. Not surprisingly, this didn’t stop people running like rats when they saw what was happening. Thousands, maybe millions, tried to get out of London along the north–south arteries, the A1 and M1. The authorities responded ruthlessly, first with military roadblocks and then with targeted airstrikes.

There are clean stretches still, and some of them are extensive. For miles at a time, though, the two great roads are cratered like First World War battlefields and strewn with rusted hulks like a mechanical version of the elephants’ graveyard. You could still walk the road, in between the ruined cars, if you chose to – but only a madman would do it. With visibility down to almost nothing, a hungry could jump out at you from any direction and you wouldn’t have more than a heartbeat’s warning.

Parks’ plan is to join the A1 at junction 10, just north of Baldock. He knows from his grab-bagging days that there’s a nice, open corridor there, going south a good ten or fifteen miles. They can do it easily in a day if the weather holds: leave the junkers way behind them. They’ll make Stevenage before dark, and hopefully find a good place to sleep without venturing too deep into the urban hinterlands.

For the first few years after the Breakdown, and even after the retreat from London, Beacon used to maintain an armed presence on the main north–south roads. The idea was to allow the grab-baggers a safe passage, both on their outward journey and – more importantly – when they went home again laden down with good things from the land of how-it-used-to-be. But they found out the hard way that there was a down side to those sweet, clear lines of sight. Hungries could spot you from a long way off, and home in on your movements. After a few costly clusterfucks, the permanent posts were dismantled and the grab-baggers took their chances. In recent years they’ve gone in and out by chopper, when they’ve gone at all. The roads have been given up for lost.

All of which means that Parks is very watchful as they approach the wide stretch of blacktop, marching in single file up the gentle curve of the old approach road. A sign where they join it points to Baldock services, making a number of unsubstantiated promises: food, petrol, a picnic area, even a bed for the night. From the top of the rise they can see the roofless ruin that used to be the service station, burned out long before. Parks remembers stopping there once, when he was a child, on the way back from a family holiday in the Peak District. Remembers a few highlights anyway: lukewarm hot chocolate with thick sludge at the bottom where it wasn’t stirred properly, and a weird man in the gents’ toilet, with bulging Marty Feldman eyes, who was singing Bruce Springsteen’s “The River” in a scary monotone.

From where Parks is standing, Baldock services was no great loss.

The A1, though, is the same as it ever was. A little weed-choked and pitted, maybe, but as straight as a ruler at this point and pointed due south towards home sweet home. There’s a whole lifeless metropolis between here and there, of course, but the sergeant can count his blessings and get as high as two. Right now they’ve got a good elevation. They can see for miles.

And the sun comes out, like a kiss on the cheek from God.

“Okay, listen to me,” he says, looking at each of them in turn. Even Gallagher needs to hear this, although most of it’s general issue for when you’re outside the fence. “Road protocols. Let’s get them straight before we go out there. First is, you don’t talk. Not out loud. Sound carries, and the hungries home in on it. It’s not as strong a trigger for them as smell, but you’d be amazed how good their hearing is.