The Girl With All The Gifts (42 page)

It seems to go on for ever. Its outer surface isn’t totally straight; it goes in and out a lot, throwing out salients along the narrower streets, falling back a little where there are open spaces that offer less to cling to. But there’s no sign of a break and nowhere where Melanie can glimpse anything on the further side of the barrier.

After she’s been running for more than an hour, she stops. Not to rest – she could go on for a while yet without discomfort – but to check in with Miss Justineau and Sergeant Parks.

She presses the stud on the walkie-talkie and says hello into it. For a long time it just crackles, but then Sergeant Parks’ voice answers. “How are you doing?”

“I went east,” Melanie tells him. “Quite a long way. The wall just goes on and on.”

“You’ve been walking all this time?”

“Running.”

“Where are you now? Can you see any street signs?”

Melanie can’t, but she walks on until she reaches another crossroads. “Northchurch Road,” she says. “London Borough of Hackney.”

She hears Parks breathing hard. “And it goes on further than that?”

“A lot further. As far as I can see. And I can see a long way, even in the dark.” Melanie isn’t boasting; it’s just something Sergeant Parks needs to know.

“Okay. Thanks, kid. Come on back. If you feel like taking a look to the west, too, I’d be grateful. But don’t wear yourself out. Come on back here if you’re feeling tired.”

“I’m fine,” Melanie says. “Over and out.”

She retraces her steps and goes the other way, but it’s exactly the same. If they go around the wall, they’ll have to go a very long way either to the east or to the west, and it’s not clear where they’ll be able to start going south again.

Finally Melanie finds herself standing directly in front of the wall, a few miles away from where they first met it. It’s as thick here as it is anywhere, but the angle of its fall is different. An outcrop of grey froth leans forward a long way, right over her, and she can see the moon shining down through it. The stark white glow is like a promise, an encouragement. If she pushes forward through the wall, she might be able to find the further side before she loses the light.

Miss Justineau said it was dangerous, but Melanie doesn’t see how, and she’s not afraid of it. She takes a step forward, and then another. The grey threads are up to her ankles, then up to her knees, but they offer no resistance at all. They just tickle a little as she pushes through them, parting with the smallest sigh of not-quite-sound.

The moon follows her, a moving spotlight in which everything opens itself up to her gaze. The grey threads quickly get thicker and thicker. Objects that she passes – rubbish bins, parked cars, post boxes, garden hedges and gates – are swathed in endless layers, turned into granite statues of themselves.

Twenty feet in, Melanie finds the first fallen bodies. She slows to a halt, amazed at what she’s seeing. The hungries have fallen down in the middle of the street, or slumped at the bases of walls – just like the bodies they saw when they were walking into London. But there are so many more of them here! From their split skulls and exploded heads, grey stems about six inches in diameter have sprouted like the trunks of trees. The stems grow straight upwards to incredible heights, and the threads pour out from them at all angles in endless proliferation. Some of them connect to whatever other stems are nearest, making a dense net like a million spiderwebs all woven together. Others wrap around whatever is in their path, or if there’s nothing, they shelve gently down to the ground. Wherever the threads touch the ground, another trunk appears, but these trunks are a lot thinner and shorter than the trunks that grow straight out of the bodies of the hungries.

Melanie goes closer. She can’t help herself. The sad husks at the bottom of each fungus tree don’t scare her. There’s nothing of humanity left in them, nothing to remind anyone that they were once alive. They’re more like clothes that someone has taken off and left lying on the ground.

Close up, she can see the grey fruit that hangs on these ghost trees. She reaches up to touch one of the spherical growths, which is just a little higher up on the trunk than the top of her head. Its surface is cool and leathery, and gives very slightly under the touch of her fingers. She presses hard, and makes an indentation. When she takes her hand away, the mark slowly disappears. The surface of the ball is elastic enough to spring back into shape. After a slow count of ten, it looks exactly the same as it did before she touched it.

Melanie wanders on through the grey wilderness. It doesn’t seem to have a further side; it just keeps going. And it keeps getting thicker. After a while, there’s only just enough space between the trunks for her to slide her skinny body through, and the moonlight is dripping down like dirty water through a raft of threads so tightly intertwined they’re almost like a solid mass.

Melanie’s shoulder bumps into one of the grey balls and it falls to the ground with a muffled plop. She stoops to pick it up. There’s a puckered ring where it was attached to the trunk, but the rest of the surface is smooth and unbroken. She squeezes it in her hand, and once again it returns quickly to the shape it had before she touched it.

If she goes any further, she’ll be bumping into the trunks. She touches one and finds that it feels unpleasantly clammy. She recoils a little. She was expecting the trunks to be smooth and dry like the fruit they bear, which in Melanie’s opinion would have been a lot less disgusting.

Something moves off to her left and she starts violently. She thought she had this twilit world to herself. A strange figure stumbles towards her, silhouetted in the dull moonlight. From the neck downwards it looks like a man – but it has no shoulders or neck or head. Its upper body is just an undifferentiated lump.

She backs away from the thing, scared more than anything by its utter strangeness. But it’s not attacking her. It doesn’t even seem to know she’s there.

As it passes her, she recognises it for what it is. It’s a hungry whose torso has started to split open. The first foot or so of one of the upright trunks is thrusting upwards from its chest, splintered spars of rib protruding outwards from its point of origin. Threads have blossomed profusely from the trunk, disguising what’s left of the hungry’s head, which has been forced sideways at a steep angle by the relentless upward growth.

Melanie stares at the apparition, both relieved – because the horror of the unknown is more frightening than any horror you can understand – and revolted at this strange violation of human flesh.

The hungry shambles on past her, its zigzag course dictated by the trunks it bumps into and bounces off. It’s almost more ridiculous than it is horrible. It will fall down soon, Melanie imagines – and then the trunk will be pointing sideways. It will have to find some way to right itself.

This whole forest grew from the ruined dead. This is where the hungries end up after all their faithful service to the infection that made them what they are.

Melanie sees her future, and accepts it. But she’s not ready to die with so many important things still to be done.

She turns and walks back the way she came, following the tunnel of her own cleared path through the crowding grey filaments.

Dr Caldwell works on through the night, feverishly busy. The fever is literal, and it’s currently running at 103 degrees.

Extracting the hungry boy’s brain takes a lot longer without Dr Selkirk to help – and Dr Caldwell’s hands are so clumsy that it’s virtually impossible to take it out without damaging it. She does the best she can, removing most of the skull in inch-wide jigsaw pieces before she finally screws up her courage and severs the brain stem.

When she lifts it out, although her hands tremble violently, it comes clean.

She powers up the microtome and takes slices from the brain, choosing cross-sections that will allow her to examine most major structures. She mounts her slides, awed at how perfectly the microtome has done its job. The slices are exquisite, with no crush damage or smearing despite their ethereal thinness.

Caldwell labels each slide, and then examines them in sequence – a virtual tour of the hungry boy’s brain beginning at its base and proceeding upwards and forwards.

She finds what she expected to find. The null hypothesis is shot to pieces. She knows what the children are, and where they came from, their past and their future, the nature of their partial immunity, and the extent (close to a hundred per cent) to which her own labours over these past seven years have been a waste of time.

She feels a moment of pure happiness. If she’d died yesterday, she would have died blind. This discovery redeems everything, even if what she’s found is so bleak and absolute.

A sound from close by dynamites her train of thought and brings her instantly to her feet. It’s an innocuous enough sound – just a few clicks and whispers – but it’s coming from inside Rosie!

Dr Caldwell is not given to excessive flights of imagination. She knows that Rosie’s doors are sealed, and that anything powerful enough to open them would have been loud and protracted, alerting her long before this. But she’s still trembling a little as she follows the sound forwards, through the crew quarters to the cockpit.

There’s a lit-up section of the console, off to the right-hand side, and that’s where the sound is coming from. From the radio. She slips into the seat and leans her head forward to listen.

There’s not much to hear. Mostly static, pops and hisses and whoops of sound, like the chaos between stations on an ancient analogue wireless set. But a few words stand clear of the aural swamp. “… days out from Beacon … saw your … identify…” The voice is hollow, inhuman, warped by echo and distortion.

The beam of an electric torch moves quickly across the cockpit’s forward shield, and then it’s gone again. No sounds penetrate from outside, but she sees movement. Just a shadow, thrown down momentarily by the torch’s moving beam. A figure moving briskly down Rosie’s left flank.

“… just a wreck … think there’s any…”

Caldwell heads quickly for the midsection door. Halfway there, she realises she could have gone out through the cockpit. She stops, turns around. But she knows the midsection door’s mechanism better. The sounds from the cockpit radio fizzle and die. With a yelp of alarm, Caldwell runs back to the console and replies on the same channel on which the voice came through.

“Hello?” she cries. “Who’s there? This is Caroline Caldwell of base Hotel Echo, in region 6. Who’s there?”

Just static.

She tries the other channels in turn, and gets the same response.

She runs through to the midsection again. But when she gets there, she’s irresolute. She hasn’t applied any e-blocker since the day before, and she can smell her own sweat. If she opens that door, she might bring the hungries down on herself and her would-be rescuers.

The cupboard next to the airlock contains six biohazard suits. Caldwell was trained in their use back when she was still on the expedition list, and although it takes her ten minutes to put one on, she’s confident that she’s done it correctly. Her scent is completely masked, and her body heat at least temporarily contained.

When she pushes the door open, she sees nothing moving outside. “Hello?” she calls. She steps out into the street. Nobody. But the light is at Rosie’s aft end now, and it’s still moving, flicking to left and right.

“Hello?” Caldwell says again. Perhaps the suit’s helmet is muffling her voice. She walks on shaky legs down the flank of the vehicle, the skin of her neck prickling. She rounds the aft end. The light is in her eyes for a moment. She speaks to whoever is behind it. “My name is Caroline Caldwell. I’m a scientist attached to base Hotel Echo in region 6. I’m here with…”

The light turns away from her, and Caldwell runs out of words. Nobody is carrying the torch. It’s just been attached by its strap to a metal rail on Rosie’s rear. It’s moving in the wind, not in someone’s hands.

Fury at the childish trick gives way to the pure terror of realisation. This is an ambush. And since nobody is attacking her, the target must be Rosie. The doctor takes to her heels and runs back the way she came, sprinting for the midsection door, expecting a cadre of junkers, or perhaps Sergeant Parks, to burst out from hiding (except where would they hide?) and race her for the prize.

Nothing moves. She gets inside and slams the door, engages the lock and the failsafes. Then the airlock, for good measure. And then the bulkhead door that seals off the weapons station.

Finally she stops shaking. There’s no sound, no sign of anyone. She’s safe. Whoever was outside went away and just left the torch. Perhaps it really was a search-and-rescue team from Beacon. Perhaps they got eaten. Caldwell has no idea, but whatever happens, she’s not leaving Rosie again. Not for the siren song of a voice on the radio, not for actual humans showing their actual faces, not for marching bands and ticker-tape parades. She walks through into the lab, loosening the seals on the environment suit’s helmet as she goes.

Melanie is sitting in her chair, in front of the microscope, reading her notes. She looks up. “Hello, Dr Caldwell,” she says politely.

Caldwell has stopped dead in the doorway. Her first thought is:
Is she alone, or did the others arrive with her?
Her second:
What can I use as a weapon?
The cylinder of phosgene gas is still screwed into place in the airlock’s feed chamber. Since she’s still wearing the environment suit, she’d be immune to its effects. If she could get to that…

“I’ll stop you,” Melanie says, in the same courteous and level tone, “if you move. I’ll stop you if you pick up a gun or anything that’s sharp, or if you try to run away, or if you try to shut me in the cage again. Or if you do anything else that I think might be meant to hurt me.”

“That … that was you?” Caldwell asks her. “On the radio?”

Melanie indicates with a nod the walkie-talkie sitting beside her on the work surface. “I kept trying all the different channels. It took a long time before you answered.”