The Girl With All The Gifts (23 page)

Melanie runs as if there’s a tiger behind her.

Hearing Dr Caldwell’s furious gasp. “Damn! Melanie!”

Out into the big room with the chairs around the edges. Melanie doesn’t even know if she’s being followed, because she doesn’t dare look back. Bile rises in her throat as she thinks of the lab and the table and the long-handled knife.

In her panic, she just runs through the first door she sees, not even sure if it’s the right one. It’s not. It’s the kitchen and she’s trapped. She makes a sound inside the muzzle, an animal squeal.

She runs back out into the chair room. Dr Caldwell is on the other side of it. The door to the corridor is halfway between them.

“Don’t be stupid,” Dr Caldwell says. “I won’t hurt you. I just want to examine you.”

Melanie starts to walk towards her, head down, docile.

“That’s right,” Dr Caldwell soothes. “Come on.”

When Melanie comes level with the door that leads out to the corridor, she bolts through it.

Since she doesn’t know where she’s going, it doesn’t matter what turns she takes, but she remembers them anyway. Left. Left. Right. She can’t help herself. It’s the same instinct that made her memorise the return route to the cell block, when Sergeant Parks took her to Dr Caldwell’s lab. Home keeps meaning different things, but she has to know her way back to it. It’s a need buried too deep in her to be pulled out.

The corridors all look alike, and they offer no hiding places – at least, not to someone who doesn’t have the use of their hands. She runs past door after door, all closed.

She goes to ground at last in an alcove, a slight widening of the corridor that creates an angle, a bulwark just wide enough for her body. It would only fool someone who wasn’t actually looking for her, since anyone walking by would be able to see her just by turning their head. If Dr Caldwell finds her, she’ll run again, and if Dr Caldwell catches her, she’ll shout for Miss Justineau. That’s her plan – the best she can come up with.

Her ears are straining for the sounds of distant footsteps. When she hears the singing, from much closer, she jumps like a rabbit.

“
Now fetch me … my children…
”

The voice is so hoarse, it’s almost not a voice at all. Breath forced through a crack in a wall, driven by a broken bellows. It’s like a song that was left behind here by someone who died, and now it’s gone back to the wild.

And it’s just those five words. Silence before, and silence after.

For about a minute. Melanie counts under her breath, trembling.

“
And fetch them … at speed…
”

She doesn’t jump this time, but she bites her lip. She can’t imagine the mouth that would make that sound. She’s heard of ghosts – Miss Justineau told the class some ghost stories once, but she stopped when she got too close to that whole taboo subject of death – and she wonders whether it might be a ghost of someone who died here, singing a song from when he was alive.

“
Bid them hasten … or I shall … be dead…
”

She has to know. Even if it is a ghost, that won’t be as scary as not knowing. She follows the sound, out of the alcove and around a bend in the corridor.

Light as red as blood comes through an open door, and it makes her scared for a moment. But as soon as she steps inside, she can see that it’s just the light of the sunset coming in through an open window.

Just!
She’s only ever seen it once before, and this one’s better. The sky catches fire from the ground on up, and the flames go through every colour, cooling from red-orange to violet and blue at the zenith.

It blinds her, for at least ten or twenty seconds, to the fact that she’s not alone.

Caroline Caldwell also follows the sound of the strange voice. She’s aware, of course, that it’s not test subject number one who’s singing. But equally she’s sure that whoever it is doesn’t represent a threat. Until she sees him.

The man sitting on the bed looks like the punchline to a bad joke. He’s dressed in a hospital gown that’s fallen open, exposing the nakedness beneath. Old wounds criss-cross his body. Deep troughs in the flesh of his shoulders, his arms, his face mark where he’s been bitten. Except that bitten doesn’t seem to cover it; he’s been fed on, lumps of his physical substance torn away and consumed. Scratches and tears ruck his chest and stomach, where the hungries who partially devoured him grabbed him and held on. The two middle fingers of his right hand have been bitten off at the second joint – a defence wound, Caldwell assumes, sustained when he tried to push a hungry away from him and it bit down on his hand.

The blackly comic touch is the bandage on his elbow. This man came to Wainwright House with something trivial like bursitis and – as many people do – experienced complications while he was being treated. In this case, the complications were that hungries feasted on his flesh and made him one of them.

He’s still singing, seemingly unaware of Melanie standing directly in front of him, of Caldwell in the doorway of the room.

“
The raven … croaked … as she sat … at her meal…
”

It’s so apposite to her thoughts, Caldwell is thrown for a moment. But he’s not answering her, he’s only singing the last line of the quatrain. She knows the song, vaguely. It’s “The Woman Who Rode Double”, an old folk ballad as depressing and interminable as most of its type – exactly the sort of song she’d expect a hungry to sing.

Except that they don’t. Ever.

Another thing they don’t do is look at pictures, but this one is. As he sings, he holds in his lap a wallet, of the kind that has a loose-leaf insert for credit cards. This one holds not cards but photographs. The hungry is trying to flick through them, with one of the remaining fingers of his right hand.

His movements are intermittent, and the gaps, in which he sits still, are very long. Each failure to turn to the next image elicits another line of the song.

“
And the old woman … knew what … he said…
”

Involuntarily, Caldwell’s eyes find Melanie’s. The glance they exchange asserts no kinship, unless it’s a mark of consanguinity to be a rational and defined thing in the face of the impossible and the uncanny.

Caldwell steps into the room and circles the infected man slowly and warily. The marks of violence he bears are, she sees now, very old. The blood from the wounds has mostly dried and flaked away. Each is rimmed with an embroidery of fine grey threads, the visible sign that
Ophiocordyceps
has made its home within him. There’s grey fuzz on his lips, too, and in the corners of his eyes.

It’s possible, she thinks clinically, that he’s remained in this room, on this bed, ever since he was infected. In that case, some of the bites on his arms might well have been self-inflicted. The fungus needs protein, primarily, and although it can make do with very little, it can’t live on air. Autocannibalism is an eminently practical strategy for a parasite to which the host’s body is only a temporary vector.

Caldwell is utterly fascinated. But she’s also, after what happened outside, aware of the need for caution. She retreats back to the door, and beckons for the girl, the test subject, to join her there. Melanie stays exactly where she is. She’s identified Caldwell as the greater threat, which is actually far from an unreasonable assumption.

But Caldwell doesn’t have time for this bullshit.

She takes out the gun that Sergeant Parks gave her, which up until now has rested undisturbed in the pocket of her lab coat. She thumbs the safety and holds it, in both hands, out towards Melanie. Aiming at her head.

Melanie stiffens. She’s seen what guns can do at very close quarters. She stares at the barrel, sickly hypnotised by its nearness, its deadly potentiality.

Caldwell beckons again, this time with a toss of her head.

“
And she … grew pale … at … the raven’s tale…
”

Melanie takes a long time to decide, but at last she crosses to Caldwell. Caldwell takes one hand off the gun, steers Melanie out through the door with a hand on her shoulder.

She turns back to the male hungry.

“
All kinds of sin I have rioted in
,” she sings. “
And now the judgment must be.
”

The hungry shudders, a quick convulsion running through it. Caldwell steps hurriedly back, swivelling the gun to point it at the centre of the thing’s chest. At this range, she can’t miss.

But the hungry doesn’t charge. It just moves its head from side to side as though it’s trying to locate the source of the sound.

“So…” it rasps in that almost-not-there voice. “So. So. So.”

“Leave him alone,” Melanie whispers fiercely. “He’s not hurting you.”

“
But I secured my children’s souls
,” Caldwell croons. “
So pray, my children, for me
.”

“So,” the hungry croaks. “So…”

“Get out of the way,” Sergeant Parks says. His hand is on Caldwell’s shoulder, brusquely pushing her aside.

“… phie…” the hungry says.

Parks fires once. A neat black circle, like a caste mark, appears in the centre of the hungry’s forehead. It slips down sideways, rolling off the bed. Ancient stains, black and red and grey, mark the place where it has sat for so long.

“Why?” Caldwell wails, in spite of herself. She turns to the sergeant, her arms thrown wide. “Why do you always, always shoot them in the fucking
head
?”

Parks stares back at her, stony-faced. After a moment, he takes her right hand in his left and pushes it down until it’s pointing at the ground.

“You want to get demonstrative with a gun in your hand,” he says, “you make sure the safety is on.”

Considering how badly it started, their second night on the road is a lot better than their first, at least in Helen Justineau’s opinion.

For starters, they’ve got food to eat. Even more miraculously, they’ve got something to cook it with, because the range in the tiny kitchen is powered by gas cylinders. The one that’s already hooked up is empty, but there are two full ones standing in the corner of the room and they’re both still sound.

The three of them – Justineau, Parks and Gallagher – go through the treasure trove of canned goods in the kitchen cupboards, by the light of electric torches and of a nearly full moon shining in from outside, exclaiming in wonder or disgust at what’s on offer. Justineau makes the mistake of checking the best-before dates, which of course are all at least a decade in the past, but Parks insists that they’re okay. Or at least some of them will be, by the law of averages. And a can whose contents have oxidised will smell really bad when it’s opened, so they can just keep on rolling the dice until their luck is in.

Justineau weighs up the risk against the absolute certainty of protein and carbohydrate mix number 3. She picks up a can opener that she found in a drawer and starts to open the cans.

There are some horrific encounters, but Parks’ theory holds. Maybe thirty or forty cans later, they end up with a menu of beef in gravy with baby new potatoes, baked beans and mushy peas. Parks lights the range with a spark struck from a tinderbox – an honest-to-God tinderbox; that has to be centuries old – produced from his pocket with something suspiciously like a flourish, and Gallagher cooks while Justineau wipes dust off plates and cutlery and washes them clean with a dribble of water from one of the canteens.

Melanie and Dr Caldwell play no part in any of this. Caldwell sits on one of the chairs in the day room, laboriously removing and adjusting and rewinding the dressings on her hands. She wears an expression of furious intensity, and doesn’t answer when spoken to. You could almost believe she’s sulking, but in Justineau’s opinion, what they’re seeing is raw thought. The doctor is in.

Melanie is in the next room along, which evidently used to be some kind of a play space for kids to hang out in while their parents were here as visitors or inmates. She’s been quiet and subdued ever since they arrived. It’s hard to get a word out of her. Parks refused absolutely to free her hands, but at least there are posters on the walls for her to look at, and the remains of a bright red beanbag for her to sit on. Her ankle is tethered to a radiator by a short restraint chain, giving her freedom of movement within a circle about seven feet in diameter.

When the food is ready, Justineau takes some through to her. She’s sitting on the beanbag, her legs crossed, her bright blue eyes staring with fixed intensity at a poster on the wall depicting voles, shrews, badgers and other British wildlife. There’s a light yellow fuzz on the top of her head, Justineau notices. The first hint of hair starting to grow back. It puts her in mind of a newly hatched chick.

She sits with Melanie while she eats. According to Caldwell, hungries can only metabolise protein, so Justineau has washed some cubes of beef clean of the gravy they came in and put them in a bowl.

Melanie is a little freaked out that the meat is hot. Justineau has to blow on each cube before she feeds it to the girl – through the steel grille of her muzzle – on the end of a fork. Melanie doesn’t seem impressed, but she thanks Justineau very politely.

“Long day,” Justineau observes.

Melanie nods, but says nothing.

Now that the meal is out of the way, Justineau shows Melanie what else she’s found. In a few of the rooms there were clothes in the wardrobe or the drawers. One of them must have been occupied by a girl once – probably a bit younger than Melanie, but of a roughly similar size.

Melanie stares at the clothes that Justineau holds out, without comment. Sombre and withdrawn as she is, it’s obvious that they still fascinate her. Pink jeans with a unicorn embroidered on the back pocket. A pastel blue T-shirt emblazoned with the motto
BORN TO DANCE
. An aviator jacket, also pink, with button-up flaps at the shoulders and lots and lots of pockets. White knickers and rainbow-striped socks. Trainers with jewel-spangled laces.

“Do you like them?” Justineau asks. Melanie hasn’t spoken, but her gaze flicks backwards and forwards between the strange offerings, studying them or perhaps comparing them.