The Girl With All The Gifts (22 page)

Except that it isn’t.

In combat, Parks narrows down. It’s not even a conscious thing, so much, or a trick he’s learned. It just happens. He does the job that’s in front of him, and pretty much shunts everything else into a holding pattern.

So he’s forgotten about the hungry kid until she’s suddenly there, right in front of him. She’s inserted herself into the narrowing space between him and his attackers. She’s flailing at them with her skinny arms, an atom of defiance with a shrill, shrieking war cry.

And the hungries stop, breakneck sudden. Their eyes defocus. Their heads start to turn to left and right in short arcs, like they’re sad or disapproving. They’re not looking at Parks any more. They’re looking
for
him.

Parks knows the hungries don’t hunt or eat each other. Apart from the kids in the classroom, he’s never seen a hungry behave like it knows any other hungries are even there. They’re alone in a crowd, each one of them answering its own need. They’re not pack animals. They’re solitaries that cluster accidentally because they’re responding to the same triggers.

So he’s always assumed that they can’t smell each other at all. The smell of a normal man or woman drives them crazy, but other hungries don’t register. They’re just not on the radar. He realises, in that numbed second, that he was wrong. For each other, the hungries must have a
nothing-to-see-here-move-along
kind of smell, the very opposite of how live people smell. It turns them off, where the live smell turns them on.

The kid masked him. Her chemicals blocked his, just for a second or two, so the hungries lost the pheromone trail that ended with their teeth in his throat.

Plenty of others running in, though, that aren’t slowing at all. And the two that the kid just windjammed are getting the signal again, eyes locking on target.

But Gallagher’s hand clamps on Parks’ arm and drags him backwards through the gates, which they’ve managed to push half open.

They’re running again, the house looming ahead of them. Justineau is hauling on the door, throwing it wide. They’re through, the hungry kid snaking between his legs to get in ahead of him. Gallagher slams the door shut again, which is just so much wasted time because of the two floor-to-ceiling window panels to either side of it.

“Stairs!” Parks yells, pointing. “Get up the stairs.”

They do. To the sound of crazed church bells as the windows shatter.

Parks is bringing up the rear, throwing grenades over his back like strings of beads at a fucking Mardi Gras parade.

And the grenades are going off behind them one after another, barking concussions overlapping in hideous counterpoint. Shrapnel smacks Parks’ flak jacket and his unprotected legs.

The last half-dozen treads on the stairs sag and yaw under him like he’s stepping on to a rocking boat, but he gets to the top somehow.

And falls, first to his knees, then full-length, sobbing for breath. They all do. Except for the kid, who’s staring back down into the gulf of air, as still and quiet
as if she’s just gone for an afternoon stroll. The stairs are gone, all blown to hell, and they’re safe.

No, they’re really not. No time for sitting around and swapping stories about the one you got away from. He’s got to get them on their feet again at once.

Sure, they found the main gates of this place closed, and the doors not broken in, but there could easily be a back door off its hinges. A window smashed in. A stretch of fence that went down last week or last year. A nest of hungries sitting in one of the rooms up here, perking up at the sound of their approaching footsteps.

So they’ve got to make themselves a safe base of operations.

And then they’ve got to search. Make sure there are no hostiles inside their perimeter.

The place looks completely undisturbed, Parks has to admit. But just counting the doors that he can see, he knows there must a shit-load of rooms. He’s not prepared to let his guard down until he’s made sure that each and every one of them is secure.

They advance up the corridor, trying each door in turn. Most don’t open, which is fine with Parks. Whatever’s on the other side of a locked door can stay there.

The few that do open lead to tiny bedrooms. The beds are hospital beds with adjustable steel frames and emergency cords at the head end. Tray tables with melamine tops. Tubular steel chairs with faded burgundy seats. En suite bathrooms so small that the shower cubicle is bigger than the floor space outside it. Wainwright House was some kind of private hospital, not a place where people actually lived.

These one-berth wards are way too claustrophobic even for two of them to share, and Parks doesn’t think it’s a great idea to split up. So they keep looking.

And he’s wondering, all this while: did the kid know what she was doing? Was she aware that she could deflect the hungries just by stepping into their path?

It’s a troubling thought, because he’s not sure what the significance of either a yes or a no would be. He was screwed, and the kid unscrewed him. He turns that around in his mind, but it doesn’t look any better no matter which angle he comes at it from. Thinking about it just makes him angry.

They hang a right off the main corridor, then a left, and eventually they find a day room that’s big enough for their needs. Straight-backed chairs line the walls, which are decorated with cheap framed prints of anonymous English pastoral scenes. Haywains predominate. Parks is indifferent to the haywains, and the room’s got a few too many doors for his liking, but he’s pretty sure by this time that it’s the best they’re going to find.

“We’ll sleep here,” he tells the civilians. “But first we’ve got to check the rest of this floor. Make sure there are no surprises.”

The last
we
means himself and Gallagher, mostly, but the quicker the better for this, so he decides to rope Justineau in too. “You said you wanted to help,” he reminds her. “Help with this.”

Justineau hesitates – looking straight at Dr Caldwell, so it isn’t hard to see what’s going through her mind. She’s worried about leaving Caldwell alone with the kid. But Caldwell was hit worse than anyone by the fight and flight. She’s pale and sweating, breath still coming in quick pants long after the rest of them have got their second wind.

“We’ll be five minutes,” Parks says. “What do you think is going to happen to her in five minutes?” His own voice surprises him; the anger and the tension in it. Justineau stares at him. Maybe Gallagher flashes him a quick look too.

So he explains himself. “Easier to stay in line of sight if there are three of us. Kid’s no use because she won’t know what to look for. We go out, we come back, and they stay here so we know where to find them. Okay?”

“Okay,” Justineau says, but she’s still looking at him hard. Like, where’s that other shoe, and who’s it likely to hit when it drops?

She kneels and puts a hand on Melanie’s shoulder. “We’re going to take a quick look around,” she says. “We’ll be right back.”

“Be careful,” Melanie says.

Justineau nods.

Yeah.

Alone with Dr Caldwell, the first thing Melanie does is to walk away to the further end of the room and put her back to the wall. She watches every move that Dr Caldwell makes, scared and wary, ready to bolt through the open door after Miss Justineau.

But Dr Caldwell sinks into one of the chairs, either too exhausted or too lost in her own thoughts to pay any attention to Melanie. She doesn’t even look at her.

Any other time, Melanie would explore. All day she’s been seeing new and amazing things, but Sergeant has set a brisk, steady pace and she’s never had time to stop and investigate any of the wonders that went by on both sides of the road: trees and lakes, latticework fences, road signs pointing to places whose names she knows from her lessons, hoardings whose mostly obliterated posters have become mosaics of abstract colour. Living things too – birds in the air, rats and mice and hedgehogs in the weeds alongside the road. A world too big to take in all at once, too new to have names.

And now here she is, in this house that’s so different from the base. There must be so many things to discover. This room alone is filled with mysteries both large and small. Why are the chairs only at the edges of the room, when the room is so enormous? Why is there a little wire cradle on the wall next to the door, with a plastic bottle in it and a sign that says
CROSS-INFECTION COSTS LIVES
? Why is there a faded picture on one of the tables (wild horses galloping across a field) that’s been cut up into hundreds and hundreds of wiggly-shaped pieces and then stuck back together again?

But right now, all Melanie wants to do is to go somewhere quiet and be by herself, so she can think about the terrible thing that just happened. The terrible secret she just found out.

Apart from the door that they came in by, there are two more doors out of the room. Melanie goes to the nearest one, keeping Dr Caldwell (who still hasn’t moved) always in the corner of her eye. She finds another room, very small and mostly white. There are white cupboards and white shelves, with black and white tiles on the walls. One of the cupboards has a window in it and lots of dials and switches at the top. It smells of old grease. Melanie knows just about enough to guess that the cupboard with a window in it is a cooker. She’s seen pictures in books. This must be a kitchen of some kind – a place where you make nice things to eat. But it’s too small for her to hide in. If Dr Caldwell came after her, she’d be trapped.

She goes out again. Dr Caldwell hasn’t moved, so she walks right past her, giving her a wide berth, and goes to the other door. The next room is very different from the kitchen. Its walls are painted in bright colours, and there are posters, too. One shows
ANIMALS OF THE BRITISH HEDGEROWS
, and another has words starting with each letter of the alphabet.
Apple. Boat. Cat. Digger. Elephant.
The pictures are cheerful and simple. The boat and the digger have smiling faces at their front ends, which Melanie is almost certain is unrealistic.

There are chairs in here too, but they’re smaller and they’re all over the place in little clusters, not arranged neatly around the edges of the room. On the floor are toys, strewn as casually as if they were put down a moment before. Girl dolls in dresses and soldier dolls in uniform. Cars and trucks. Plastic building blocks stuck together in the shape of cars or houses or people. Animals made of plush in colours washed out almost to grey.

And books. Lots of them thrown down on chairs, tables, the floor. Hundreds more on a big bookcase to one side of the door. Melanie is in no mood right then to pick them up and read them; the secret weighs heavily on her mind. In any case, even if she wanted to, her hands are stuck behind her back by the handcuffs, and her feet, though they’re bare, aren’t nearly flexible enough to turn the pages. She scans their titles instead.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar

Fox in Socks

Peepo!

The Cops and the Robbers

What Do You Do With a Kangaroo?

Where the Wild Things Are

The Man Whose Mother Was a Pirate

Pass the Jam, Jim

The titles are like stories in themselves. Some of the books have fallen apart or else been torn, their pages scattered across the floor. It would make her sad, if her heart wasn’t full already with a dizzying cargo of emotions.

She’s not a little girl. She’s a hungry.

It’s too crazy, too terrible to be true. But too obvious now to be ignored. The hungry that turned from her at the base, when it could have eaten her … that could have been anything. Or nothing. It could have smelled Dr Selkirk’s blood and been distracted by that, or it could have been looking for someone bigger to eat, or the blue disinfectant gel could have disguised Melanie’s smell the way the shower chemicals always disguised the smell of the grown-ups.

But outside, just now, when she stepped in front of Sergeant Parks – impulsive, without thinking, wanting to fight the monsters the same way he did, instead of hiding from them like a big scaredy-cat – they didn’t even seem to see her. They certainly didn’t hunger for her, the way they did for everyone else. It was like she was invisible. Like there was a bubble of pure nothing where Melanie was.

That’s not the big proof, though. That’s the little proof that pushes her up against the big proof, which is so very big that she wonders how she could have failed to see it right away. It’s the word itself. The name. Hungries.

The monsters are named for the feeling that filled her when she smelled Miss Justineau in the cell, or the junker men outside the block. The hungries smell you, and then they chase you until they eat you. They can’t stop themselves.

Melanie knows exactly how that feels. Which means she’s a monster.

It makes sense now why Dr Caldwell thinks it was okay to cut her up on a table and put pieces of her in jars.

The door behind her opens, making almost no sound.

She turns to see Dr Caldwell standing in the doorway, staring down at her. The expression on Dr Caldwell’s face is complicated and confusing. Melanie flinches back from it.

“Whatever the pertinent factor is,” Dr Caldwell says, her voice a quick, low murmur, “you’re its apogee. Do you know that? Genius-level mind and all that grey muck growing through your brain doesn’t affect it one bit.
Ophiocordyceps
should have eaten out your cortex until all that’s left is motor nerves and random backfires. But here you are.” She takes a step forward, and Melanie locksteps back away from her.

“I’m not going to harm you,” Dr Caldwell says. “There’s nothing I can do out here anyway. No lab. No scopes. I just want to look at gross structures. The root of your tongue. Your tear ducts. Your oesophagus. See how far the infection has progressed. It’s something. Something to be going on with. The rest will wait. But you’re a crucially important specimen, and I can’t just—”

When Dr Caldwell reaches for her, Melanie ducks under her grip and sprints for the door. Dr Caldwell spins and lunges, almost fast enough. The tips of her fingers slide across Melanie’s shoulder, but the bandages make her clumsy and she doesn’t manage to catch a hold.