The Girl With All The Gifts (32 page)

But that makes it all the more awkward to be out on a patrol with her. He’s scared of saying or doing something really stupid in front of her. He’s scared of being in a position where he has to make a quick decision and not being able to think of one because he’s thinking too much about her. He’s scared of not being able to hide how scared he is.

It doesn’t help that they can’t even talk to each other. Okay, they exchange a terse murmur every now and then, when they’ve come to the end of a street and they have to decide where to go next. But the rest of the time they walk along in complete silence, in the slo-mo shuffle that Sergeant Parks has taught them.

It sort of feels like overkill right then. In the first hour after they leave the armoured truck with the stupid name, they only see four live hungries, and none of them close up.

Then they find the first dead one. It’s fruited like all of those others, except that it’s fallen down on its stomach and the big white stem has punched its way out of the poor bastard’s back. Helen Justineau stares down at it, all sick and sombre. Gallagher guesses she’s thinking about the little hungry kid. Like a mother before the Breakdown, thinking the world’s a big place and there’s lots of sick people in it and where’s my baby girl?

Yeah. Full of sick people, the world. He’s related to a whole lot of them. And he met a whole lot more when the base fell. A part of his unease right now – maybe the biggest part – comes from the feeling that he’s not moving in a direction that makes any sense. Sure, he’s going home. But that’s like putting your foot back in a trap after you’ve somehow got free of it. They can’t go back to the base, obviously. There isn’t any base, not any more, and the bastards who tore it down might still be chasing them. But Gallagher can’t see Beacon as a refuge. He can only see it as a mouth opening in front of him to swallow him down.

He tries to shake off the mood of despair. He tries to look and feel like a soldier. He wants Helen Justineau to be reassured by his presence.

They’ve been working their way down a long road with shops on both sides, but the shops have all been ransacked long ago. They’re way too obvious – easy targets for anyone who came this way. Probably most of them got looted during the early days of the Breakdown.

So now they turn their attention to the houses in the side streets, which are harder to get into and harder to search. You have to do a recce for hungries first of all. And you have to make as little noise as you can breaking in, because obviously noise is going to bring them if there are any of them around. Then once you’re inside, you have to do another recce. Could be a whole nest of hungries in any of these houses – former residents or uninvited guests.

It’s slow going, and it preys on your nerves.

And it’s depressing because the rain has set in solidly now. They’re getting pissed on out of a grim, grey sky.

And last of all, it’s boring, if something can be both really scary and boring at the same time. The houses all seem the same to Gallagher. Dark. Musty-smelling with squishy carpets underfoot, mouldering curtains and sprays of black mildew up interior walls. Cluttered up with millions of things that don’t do anything except get in your way and almost trip you over. It’s like before the Breakdown people used to spend their whole lives making cocoons for themselves out of furniture and ornaments and books and toys and pictures and any kind of shit they could find. As though they hoped they’d be born out of the cocoon as something else. Which some of them were, of course, but not in the way they hoped.

In most of the houses, Justineau and Gallagher stay just long enough to check the kitchen. In some, there’s a utility room or a garage that they check too. They stay resolutely away from the fridges and freezers, which they know will be filled with a riot of stinking, festering shit. It’s canned goods and packet goods that are the jackpot here.

But they don’t find any. The kitchens are bare.

They move on to the next street, with similar results. At the very end of it, there’s a lock-up garage with a bright green door, which they almost walk past. But it’s right next to a looted corner shop, and Justineau slows to a halt.

“You thinking what I’m thinking?” she asks Gallagher.

He wasn’t thinking anything until she said it, but he thinks fast now, so he has something to say besides
huh?

“The lock-up might belong to the shop,” he guesses.

“Damn straight. And it doesn’t look like anyone’s been in there. Let’s take a look, Private.”

They try the garage door, which is locked. It’s made of some light, thin metal, which is good in one way (it’s not going to be hard to break it down) and bad in another (anything they do to it is going to make a hell of a lot of noise).

Gallagher gets his bayonet wedged in under one corner of the door and pulls back on it. With a loud, shrill squeal, the metal folds. When it’s far enough away from the frame, they get their fingers around the edge of it and pull, slowly and steadily. It’s still making that same grinding noise, but there’s nothing they can do about that.

They bend back a triangular flap about three feet on its longest side. Then they look in all directions and listen, tense as hell. No sign or sound of anything coming, from either end of the street.

They go down on hands and knees and crawl inside. Gallagher clicks his torch on and plays it around.

The garage is full of boxes.

Most of them are empty. Out of the ones that have stuff in them, most turn out to be not food but papers and magazines, kids’ toys, stationery. The rest … well, there is food, but it’s snack food mostly. Packets of crisps, peanuts, pork scratchings. Chocolate bars and biscuits. Boiled sweets in tubes about the length of a rifle bullet. Individually wrapped Swiss rolls.

And bottles. All kinds of bottles. Lemonade and orangeade and limeade, cola and blackcurrant juice and ginger beer. Not water, but pretty much everything else you could imagine, as long as your imagination restricts itself to saccharine and carbon dioxide.

“You think any of this is still good?” Gallagher whispers.

“Only one way to find out,” Justineau whispers back.

They carry out a blind-taste challenge, ripping open plastic packets and nibbling cautiously on what’s inside. The crisps are foul, soft and crumbly, with a sour, sweaty tang to them. They spit them out hastily. The biscuits are okay, though. “Hydrogenated oils,” Justineau says, spraying crumbs. “Probably last until the heat death of the fucking universe.” The peanuts are best of all. Gallagher can’t believe their taste, as salty and intense as meat. He eats three packets before he can stop himself.

When he looks up, Justineau is grinning at him – but it’s a friendly grin, not a mean one. He laughs out loud, pleased that the two of them have shared this ridiculous feast – and that in the twilight of the garage she can’t see him blushing.

He shouts out to the Sarge on the walkie-talkie and tells him they’re bringing home the bacon. Or at least some stuff that’s got bacon flavouring in it. Parks says to load up and come back in, with his heartiest congratulations.

They fill up the backpacks and their pockets, and each of them takes a couple of boxes besides. When they emerge cautiously into the street again, ten minutes later, they’ve still got it to themselves.

They head for home in a mood of euphoria. They’ve done the hunter-gatherer thing, and they’ve done it well. Now they’re bringing the mammoth back to the cave. A campfire will be lit against the dark, and there’ll be carousing and stories.

Well, maybe not that. But a locked door, a decent meal and Fleetwood Mac if their luck is in.

Dr Caldwell unpacks the six Tupperware containers containing brain tissue from the male hungry at Wainwright House and lays them side by side on the newly disinfected surface in front of her. The lab worktops are made of a synthetic marble substitute which mixes marble dust with bauxite and polyester. It’s not as cold as real stone. When she momentarily lays her hot, throbbing hands on it, it offers her little relief.

She prepares slides from each of the samples. She doesn’t call the ATLUM into play for this, because Rosie still has no functional power source – and also because the material has been scooped out of the hungry’s skull with a spoon. It doesn’t lie in its natural layers, and little would be gained by slicing it so very finely.

She’ll need the ATLUM later, but not for these samples.

For now, she spreads tiny amounts of the brain tissue across the slides as thinly as she can, adds a single drop of staining agent to each, and drops the covers on with gingerly care. The bandages impede her movements, so this takes longer than it should.

Six tissue samples. Five available staining agents, which are cerium sulphate, ninhydrin, D282, bromocresol and
p
anisaldehyde. Caldwell has the highest hopes of the D282, a fluorescent lipophilic carbocyanine with proven efficacy in throwing fine neuron structures into high relief. But she’s not going to ignore the other stains, since she has them to hand. Any of them has the potential to yield valuable data.

The natural thing to do now would be to power up the transmission electron microscope, which sits in the corner of the lab like the bastard offspring of a road drill and an Imperial Stormtrooper from the
Star Wars
trilogy – all white ceramic and smooth, sculpted curves.

But there’s that whole absence-of-power thing again. The microscope is not going to wake up and serve her until Sergeant Parks feeds it.

In the meantime, she turns her attention to the sporangium. The lab boasts a number of manipulator tanks, with two circular holes along one side. The holes are sphinctered. Elbow-length rubber gloves can be inserted through them and rendered airtight by a mixture of sealant gel and mechanical adjustments.

Once the sporangium is safely sequestered from the rest of the lab inside one of these tanks, Caldwell begins to examine it. She tries to open it with her gloved fingers and fails. Its outer shell is tough and elastic and very thick. Even with a scalpel it’s not easy going.

Inside, endlessly infolded, is a fine, fractal froth of spores like grey soap bubbles that spills out through the opening she’s made. Curious, she dips her finger in. There’s no resistance. Even as densely packed together as this, the spores seem to have no mass at all.

She becomes aware, while she’s doing this, that she’s no longer alone in the lab. Sergeant Parks has entered and is watching her in silence. He has his gun – not the rifle, but the sidearm – in his hand, as casually as such a thing can be carried in a civilised space such as a lab, where it has no conceivable place.

Caldwell ignores him for a while as she continues to cut carefully into the grey gourd to examine its interior structure.

“The good news,” she observes, her eyes and her attention staying on the contents of the tank, “is that the sporangium’s integument appears to be extremely resilient. None of the ones we saw on the ground had broken open, and it’s impossible to tear them open with your bare hands. They appear to require an external environmental trigger in order to germinate, and so far that trigger hasn’t materialised.”

Parks doesn’t answer. He still hasn’t moved.

“Did you ever consider a scientific career, Sergeant?” Caldwell asks him, still with her back to him.

“Not really,” Parks says.

“Good. You’re really far too stupid.”

The sergeant looms at her side. “You think I’m missing something?” he demands. Caldwell is very conscious of the gun. When she glances down, it’s there, directly in her line of sight. The sergeant is holding it in both hands, ready to fire.

“Yes.”

“What am I missing?”

She puts down the scalpel and withdraws her hands, very slowly, from the gloves and from the tank. Then she turns to look him in the eyes. “You see that I’m pale and sweating. You see that my eyes are red. You see that I’m slowing down, as I walk.”

“Yeah, I see that.”

“And you’re ready with your diagnosis.”

“Doc, I know what I know.”

“Ah, but you don’t, Sergeant. Not really.” She’s begun to undo the bandages on her left hand. She holds it up for him to see. As the white linen falls away, her flesh is laid bare. The hand itself is fish-belly white and a little puckered. Red lines begin at the wrist and climb her arm – climb downwards, since her hand is raised, but gravity’s no guide here. The poison is finding its way to her heart, and it pays no mind to the vagaries of local topography.

“Blood poisoning,” Caldwell says. “Severe inflammatory sepsis. The first thing I did when we arrived here was to give myself a massive dose of amoxicillin, but it’s almost certainly far too late. I’m not turning into a hungry, Sergeant. I’m only dying. So please leave me alone to get on with my work.”

But Parks stays where he is for a few moments longer. Caldwell understands. He’s a man with a strong preference for the sorts of problem that have a simple, unitary solution. He thought Caldwell was such a problem, but now he realises she isn’t. It’s hard for him to cope with the shift in perspective.

She understands, but she can’t really help. And she doesn’t really care. What matters now is her research, which – after so long a period of stagnation – is finally starting to look promising.

“You’re saying these fruit things aren’t dangerous?” he asks her.

Caldwell laughs. She can’t help herself. “Not at all, Sergeant,” she assures him. “Unless the prospect of a planet-wide extinction event troubles you.”

His face, as open as a book, announces relief, then confusion, finally suspicion. “What?”

Caldwell is almost sorry to have to burst the precious bubble of his ignorance. “I already told you that the sporangia contained the spores of the hungry pathogen. But you don’t seem to have taken in what that means. In its immature, asexual form,
Ophiocordyceps
toppled our global civilisation in the space of three years. The only reason it didn’t achieve global pandemic status at once, the only reason any pockets of uninfected humans were able to survive, was because the immature organism can only propagate – neotenously – in biofluid.”