The Girl With All The Gifts (36 page)

Finally, satisfied that they’ve got as much privacy as they’re going to get, she goes back to the cage and kneels beside it. She stares through the bars at the small, pale face inside.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hi, Miss Justineau.”

“Is it okay if we…” she starts to say. But then she thinks better of it. “I’m coming in,” she says.

“No!” Melanie yelps. “Don’t. Stay there!” As Justineau puts her hand on the door and slides back the bolt, the girl scrambles to the other end of the cage. She presses herself hard into the corner.

Justineau stops, with the door half open. “You said you could only smell me a little bit,” she says. “Is it enough to be uncomfortable for you?”

“Not yet.” Melanie’s voice is tight.

“Then we’re okay. If that changes, you tell me and I’ll get out. But I don’t like you being in a cage like an animal with me out there looking in. This would feel better for me. If it’s okay with you.”

But it’s clear from Melanie’s face that it’s not okay. Justineau gives up. She closes the door and locks it again. Then she sits down and leans her shoulder against the mesh, legs crossed.

“Okay,” she says. “You win. But come on over here and sit with me at least. If you’re inside and I’m outside, that should be fine, right?”

Melanie advances cautiously, but she stops halfway, evidently fearful of a situation that could spiral quickly out of her control. “If I tell you to get further back, you have to do it right away, Miss Justineau.”

“Melanie, there’s a wire-mesh screen in between us and you’ve got your muzzle on. You can’t hurt me.”

“I don’t mean that,” Melanie says quietly.

Obviously. She’s talking about changing, in front of her teacher and her friend. Ceasing to be herself. That prospect scares her a lot.

Justineau feels ashamed, not just about the thoughtless comment but about what she’s come here to do. Melanie must have lied for a reason. Breaking down the lie feels wrong. But so does the thought of some new random factor out there that Melanie wants them all to run away from. Parks is right. They have to know.

“When you went into the theatre last night…” she begins tentatively.

“Yes?”

“And saw the junkers…”

“There weren’t any junkers, Miss Justineau.”

Just like that. Justineau’s got her next few lines already prepared. She stares stupidly, mouth open. “No?” she says.

“No.”

And Melanie tells her what she really saw.

Running between the mildewed seats and across the booming stage. Naked as the day they were born. And filthy, although their skin underneath the dirt was the same bone white as her own. Their hair hanging lank and heavy, or in a few cases standing up in spikes. Some of them had sticks in their hands, and some of them had bags – old plastic bags, with words on them like
Foodfresh
and
Grocer’s Market
.

“But I wasn’t lying about the knives. They had those too. Not stabbing knives like Sergeant Parks’ and Kieran’s. Knives like you might cut bread or meat with in a kitchen.”

Fifteen of them. She counted. And when she made up the story of the junkers, she just added forty more.

But they weren’t junkers. They were children of every age from maybe four or five to about fifteen. And what they were doing was chasing rats. Some of them beating the floor and the seats with their sticks to get the rats running. Others catching them when they ran, biting off their heads and dropping the limp bodies into the bags. They were much faster than the rats, so it wasn’t hard for them. They made it into a game, laughing and taunting each other with shrieks and funny faces as they ran.

Children like her. Children who were hungries too, and alive, and animated, and enjoying the thrill of the hunt. Until they sat down, at last, and feasted on the small, blood-drenched corpses, the big ones choosing first, the little ones pushing in between them to snatch and steal. Even that was a game, and they were still laughing. There was no threat in it.

“There was a boy who seemed to be the leader. He had a big stick like a king’s sceptre, all shiny, and his face was painted in lots of different colours. It made him look sort of scary, but he wasn’t scary to the little ones: he was protecting them. When one of the other big kids showed her teeth to one of the little ones and looked like she was going to bite him, the painted-face boy put his stick on the big kid’s shoulder and she stopped. But mostly they didn’t try to hurt each other. It seemed like they were a family almost. They all knew each other, and they liked being together.”

It was a midnight picnic. Watching it, Melanie felt like she was looking at her own life through the wrong end of a telescope. This was what she would have been if she hadn’t been taken away to the base. This was what she was supposed to be. And the way she felt about that kept changing as she thought about it. She was sad that she couldn’t join the picnic. But if she hadn’t gone to the base, she would never have learned so many things and she would never have met Miss Justineau.

“I started to cry,” Melanie says. “Not because I was sad, but because I didn’t know if I was sad or not. It was like I was missing all those kids down there, even though I’d never even met them. Even though I didn’t know their names. They probably didn’t
have
names. It didn’t seem like they could talk, because they just made these squeaking and growling sounds at each other.”

The emotions that cross the little girl’s face are painfully intense. Justineau puts her hand up against the side of the cage, slides her fingers through the mesh.

Melanie leans forward, letting her forehead touch the tips of Justineau’s fingers.

“So … why didn’t you tell us all this?” It’s the first thing Justineau can think of to ask. She skirts around Melanie’s existential crisis with instinctive caution, afraid to confront it head on. She knows Melanie won’t let her go into the cage and hug her, not with that fear of losing herself, so all she has is words, and words feel inadequate for the job.

“I don’t mind telling you,” Melanie says simply. “But it has to be our secret. I don’t want Dr Caldwell to know. Or Sergeant Parks. Or even Kieran.”

“Why not, Melanie?” Justineau coaxes. And gets it as soon as she’s asked. She holds up her hand to stop Melanie from saying it. But Melanie says it anyway.

“They’d catch them and put them in cells under the ground,” she says. “And Dr Caldwell would cut them up. So I made up something that I thought would make Sergeant Parks want to go away really fast, before anyone finds out they’re here. Please say you won’t tell, Miss Justineau. Please promise me.”

“I promise,” Justineau whispers. And she means it. Whatever comes of it, she won’t let Caroline Caldwell know that she’s sitting right next door to a new batch of test subjects. There’ll be no culling of these feral children.

Which means she’ll have to go back to Parks and maintain the lie. Or bring him in on it. Or come up with a better one.

The two of them are silent for a moment, both presumably thinking about how this changes things between them. Back when they first left the base, she’d offered Melanie the choice between staying with them and going into one of the nearby towns. “To be with your own kind,” she’d almost said, and stopped herself because she realised even as she was saying it that Melanie didn’t
have
a kind.

But now she does.

While she’s still thinking through the implications of what Melanie has just told her, Justineau starts to shake. For a surreal and terrifying moment she thinks it’s just her – that it’s some sort of seizure. But the vibration settles into a throbbing rhythm that she recognises, and there’s a low rumble in her ears that crests and then dies. The throbbing dies with it as quickly as it came.

“My God!” Justineau gasps.

She scrambles up off the floor and runs, heading aft.

Parks stands over the generator, his oily hands hovering as though he’s just performed a blessing. Or an exorcism. “Got it,” he says, giving Justineau a fierce grin as she comes into the room.

“But it died again,” she says.

Caldwell follows her into the room. The generator’s magical resurrection has brought her running too.

“No, it didn’t. I cut it off. Don’t want the noise to carry until we’re ready to drive out. You never know who’s listening, after all.”

“So we can leave!” Justineau says. “Keep going south. Let’s roll, Parks. To hell with anything else.”

He gives her a wry look. “Yeah,” he says. “Don’t want to have to tangle with those junkers. We might have to…” He stops and looks past the two women, his face serious all of a sudden.

“Where’s Gallagher?” he demands.

Gallagher is in the wind. He’s bolted. The pressure that had been building in him exploded outwards, all at once, and carried him out of there before he even registered what he was doing.

It’s not that he’s a coward. It’s more like a law of motion. Because the pressure, for him, was coming from in front as well as from behind – from the thought of what he was going back to. He just got squeezed sideways.

Yeah, but it’s also the thought of locking the door, turning out the lights and waiting for the junkers to find them. Like anyone could possibly miss them, just standing out there in the street.

When the base fell, Gallagher saw Si Brooks – the man who rented out his precious vintage porno mag to the whole barracks, and was privately in love with the girl on page twenty-three – get his face split open with the butt of a rifle. And Lauren Green, one of the few female privates he could talk to without getting tongue-tied, was stabbed in the stomach with a bayonet. And he would have got a helping of that too, if Sergeant Parks hadn’t grabbed him by the shoulder and hauled him away from the corner of the mess hall, where he was hiding, with a terse “I need a gunner.”

Gallagher has no illusions about how long he would have lasted otherwise. He was nailed to the spot with pure terror. But nailed was the wrong word, because what he was actually feeling right then was more like vertigo – as though if he moved, he was going to fall in some random direction, slantwise across the tilting world.

So he’s ashamed, now, to be running out on the Sarge, his saviour. But this is how you square the circle. Can’t go back. Can’t go forward. Can’t stay put. So you pick another direction and you get out from under.

The river is going to save him. There’ll be boats there, left over from the old days before the Breakdown. He can row or sail away and find an island somewhere, with a house on it but no hungries, and live on what he can grow or hunt or trap. He knows that Britain is an island, and that there are others close to it. He’s seen maps, although he doesn’t remember the fine detail. How hard can it be? Explorers and pirates used to do it all the time.

He’s heading south, with the aid of the compass from his belt. Or rather he’s trying to, but the streets don’t always help. He’s left the main drag, where he felt way too exposed, and is zigzagging his way through back streets. The compass tells him which way to go, and he follows its advice whenever the maze of avenues, crescents and cul-de-sacs allows him to. They’re mercifully empty. He hasn’t seen a live hungry since he flung open Rosie’s door and fled. Just a couple more of the dead ones with the trees growing out of them.

He’ll get to the river, which can only be another five miles or so, and then he’ll take stock. As he walks, the rain clouds roll on past and the sun comes out again. Gallagher is surprised, in a dislocated kind of way, to see it again. The warmth and the light seem to have nothing in common with the world he’s journeying through. It even makes him a little uneasy – dangerously exposed, as though the sun is a spotlight focused on him, keeping pace with him as he walks.

Something else too. He sees movement in the street ahead of him that makes him jump like a hare and all but piss himself. But then he realises it’s not in the street at all. There’s nothing there. It was the shadow of something moving behind and above him, up on one of the rooftops. A junker? Didn’t look big enough for that, and he’s pretty sure he would have been shot in the back already if they were on him. More likely a cat or something, but shit, that was a bad moment.

He’s still shaking, and his stomach feels like it’s going to do something that might be slightly projectile. Gallagher finds a place where the rusting remains of a car screen him from the street, and sits down for a moment. He takes a drink from his canteen.

Which is almost empty.

He’s aware suddenly that there are a whole lot of things he could really do with right now, and flat-out doesn’t have.

Like food. He didn’t feel like he could steal one of the backpacks when he left, so he’s got nothing. Not even the packet of peanuts he’d slipped under the pillow of his bunk for later.

Or his rifle.

Or the empty tube of e-blocker he was going to peel open so he could rub the last nubs of gel over his underarms and crotch.

He’s got his sidearm and six clips of ammunition. He’s got a little water left. He’s got the compass. And he’s got the grenade, which is still in the pocket of his fatigues where it’s sat ever since they abandoned the Humvee. That’s it. That’s the whole inventory.

What kind of idiot goes for a hike through enemy territory with just the clothes he’s standing up in? He’s got to resupply, and he’s got to do it fast.

The lock-up garage where he and Justineau found the snack foods is a couple of miles behind him now. He hates to double back and lose time. But he’d hate starving to death a whole lot more, and there’s no guarantee that he’ll find another mother lode like that between here and the Thames.

Gallagher stands up and gets himself moving again. It’s not easy, but he immediately feels better, just to be doing something. He’s got a defined goal, and he’s got a plan. He’s going backwards, but only so he can go forwards again and get further this time.

After five or six turns, compass or not, he’s totally lost.

And he’s pretty much certain now that he’s not alone. He doesn’t see any more moving shadows, but he can hear shuffling and skittering sounds coming from somewhere really close by. Whenever he pauses to listen, there’s nothing, but it’s right there behind the sound of his own footsteps when he starts walking again. Someone is moving when he moves, stopping when he stops.