The Girl With All The Gifts 4 page

“Yes, Helen,” Caldwell agrees. “But I wrote it. And I’m still writing it. Through the cultures I took from badly decayed hungries – cultures like this one – I was able to establish that the hungry pathogen is an old friend in a new suit. Ophiocordyceps unilateralis.

“We encountered it first as a parasite on ants. And its behaviour in that context made it notorious. Nature documentaries dwelled on every lurid detail.”

Caldwell proceeds to dwell on every lurid detail, but she really doesn’t need to. Back when she first identified the hungry pathogen as a mutant Cordyceps, she was so happy that she just had to share. She persuaded Beacon to approve an educational programme for all base personnel. They filed into the canteen in groups of twenty, and Caldwell started the show by playing a short extract from a David Attenborough documentary, dateline twenty years or so before Breakdown.

Attenborough’s perfectly pitched voice, honey from an English country garden, described with incongruous gentleness how Ophiocordyceps spores lie dormant on the forest floor in humid environments such as the South American rainforest. Foraging ants pick them up, without noticing, because the spores are sticky. They adhere to the underside of the ant’s thorax or abdomen. Once attached, they sprout mycelial threads which penetrate the ant’s body and attack its nervous system.

The fungus hot-wires the ant.

Images on the screen of ants convulsing, trying in vain to scrape the sticky spores off their body armour with quick, spasmodic sweeps of their legs. Doesn’t help. The spores have commenced digging in, and the ant’s nervous system is starting to flood with foreign chemicals – expert forgeries of its own neurotransmitters.

The fungus gets into the driving seat, puts its foot on the accelerator and drives the ant away. Makes it climb to the highest place it can reach – to a leaf fifty feet or more above the forest floor, where it digs in with its mandibles, locks itself immovably to the leaf’s spinal ridge.

The fungus spreads through the ant’s body and explodes out of its head – a phallic sporangium skull-fucking the dying insect from the inside. The sporangium sheds thousands of spores, and falling from that great height they spread for miles. Which of course is the point of the exercise.

Thousands of species of Cordyceps, each one a specialist, bonded uniquely with a particular species of ant.

But at some point a Cordyceps came along that was a lot less finicky. It jumped the species barrier, then the genus, family, order and class. It clawed its way to the top of the evolutionary tree, assuming for a moment that evolution is a tree and has a top. Of course, the fungus might have had a helping hand. It might have been grown in a lab, for any number of reasons; coaxed along with gene-splicing and injected RNA. Those were very big jumps.

“This,” Caldwell is saying, tapping the sealed lid of the fish tank, “is what’s inside the subjects’ heads. Inside their brains. When you walk into that classroom, you think you’re talking to children. But you’re not, Helen. You’re talking to the thing that killed the children.”

Justineau shakes her head. “I don’t believe that,” she says.

“I’m afraid it doesn’t matter what you believe.”

“They exhibit behavioural responses that have no bearing on the fungus’s survival.”

Caldwell shrugs off-handedly. “Yes, of course they do. For the moment. Waste not, want not. Ophiocordyceps doesn’t devour the entire nervous system all in one go. But if one of those things you think of as your pupils smells human flesh, human pheromones, it’s the fungus that you’ll be dealing with. The first thing it does is to consolidate its control of the motor cortex and the feeding reflex. That’s how it propagates itself – in saliva, mainly. The bite gives nourishment to the host and spreads the infection at the same time. Hence the extreme caution we take in the handling of the test subjects. And hence” – she sighed – “the need for this lecture.”

Justineau feels an intense desire to assert herself against a judgement that’s already been made. She takes hold of the lid of the fish tank and wrenches it open.

Caldwell gives a wordless yell as she recoils, hand clasped to her mouth.

Then she thinks about what she’s doing, and lowers her hand. She glares at Justineau, her cool detachment holed below the waterline.

“That was very stupid,” she says.

“But not dangerous,” Justineau points out. “You said it yourself, Caroline. No sex organs yet. No spores. No way for the fungus to spread in air. It needs blood and sweat and spit and tears. You see? You’re just as likely as anyone to make a false assessment – to see a risk where there really isn’t any.”

“It’s a poor analogy,” Caldwell says. There’s an edge in her voice you could part a hair on. “And overestimating risk isn’t even an issue here. The danger – all the danger – lies in ignoring it.”

“Caroline.” Justineau tries one last time. “I’m not arguing that we should stop the programme. Just that we should switch to other methods.”

Caldwell smiles, brittle, precise. “I’m open to other methods,” she tells Justineau. “That’s why I asked for a developmental psychologist to join the team in the first place.” The smile fades out, an inevitable ebb tide. “My team. Your methods are adjuncts to mine, called on when I need them. You don’t dictate our approach, and you don’t talk to Beacon over my head. Has it occurred to you, Helen, that we’re here under military rather than civilian jurisdiction? Do you ever think about that?”

“Not much,” Justineau admits.

“Well, you should. It makes a difference. If I do decide that you’re compromising my programme, and if I inform Sergeant Parks of that fact, you won’t be sent home.”

She fixes Justineau with a stare that’s incongruously gentle and concerned.

“You’ll be shot.”

Silence falls between them.

“I am interested in what’s going on inside their heads,” Caldwell says at last. “Mostly I find I can determine that by examining physical structures under a microscope. When I can’t, I look at your reports. And what I expect to find there is clear, rational assessment building to an occasional well-justified conjecture. Do you understand that?”

A long pause. “Yes,” Justineau says.

“Good. In that case, and as a starting point, I’d like you to list the subjects in order of their importance to your assessments – as of now. Tell me which ones you still need to observe, and how much you need them. I’ll try to take your priorities into account when I’m choosing the next subjects to be brought over here and dissected. We need masses of comparative measurements. We’re stonewalled, and the only thing I can think of that might bring us any new insights is bulk data. I want to process half the cohort in the next three weeks.”

Justineau can’t take that blow without flinching. “Half the class?” she repeats faintly. “But that’s … Caroline! Jesus…!”

“Half the cohort,” Caldwell insists. “Half of our remaining supply of test subjects. The class is a maze you’ve built for them to run through. Don’t reify it into something that merits consideration on its own account. I need the list by Sunday, but earlier is better. We’ll begin processing on Monday morning. Thanks for your time, Helen. If there’s anything that I or Dr Selkirk can do to help, just let us know. But the final decision is yours, of course. We won’t encroach on that.”

Justineau finds herself in the open air, walking in some random direction. Sunlight hits her face, and she swerves away from it. Her face is hot enough already.

Half of our remaining…

Her mind collides with the words, sends them careening out of reach.

Another time she might admire Caldwell’s brutal honesty about her own failings. We’re stonewalled. She identifies with the project so completely that vanity on her own account is impossible.

On the other hand: the final decision is yours. That’s pure sadism. Serve at my altar, Helen. You even get to choose the sacrifices, so how cool is that?

Half of…

Things will fall apart, and the centre won’t hold. Perforated with fears and insecurities, the class will tear along every fold. They’ll finally ask the questions Justineau can’t answer. She’ll have to choose between confession and evasion, and either one will probably kick her right over the edge of the catastrophe curve.

Which is maybe where she deserves to be. Child-killer. Facilitator of mass murder, smiling a Judas smile as she ticks the boxes. The thought of Parks putting a gun to her head has its own peculiar appeal at that moment.

Then she walks right into him, hard enough that they both stagger. He recovers first, grips her shoulders lightly to steady her.

“Hey,” he says. “You all right, Miss Justineau?”

His broad, flat face, made asymmetrical and inconceivably ugly by the scar, radiates friendly solicitude.

Justineau pulls out of his grasp, her own face twisting as her anger finds its level. Parks blinks, seeing the visceral emotion, uncertain where it came from or where it might be going.

“I’m fine,” Justineau says. “Get out of my way, please.”

The sergeant gestures over his shoulder, towards the fence at his back. “Sentry clocked some movement in the woods over there,” he says. “We don’t know if it’s hungries or what it is. Either way, perimeter’s off-limits for now. Sorry. That was why I tried to head you off.”

Movement in the middle distance, in the direction where he’s pointing, distracts her for a second so that she has to wrench her attention back.

She faces him, trying to take a breath that’s long and level, trying to pull all the slopping emotions back inside so he won’t see them in her face. She doesn’t want to be understood by this man, even on such a superficial level.

And thinking about what he’s already seen, what he might know or think he knows of her, makes her suddenly see the timing of her humiliation in a new perspective. When Parks saw her breaking the no-contact rule, he threatened to put her on a charge. But then nothing happened. Until now.

Parks went and told tales about her to Caroline Caldwell. She’s sure of it. The four-month gap between the Melanie incident and this dressing-down doesn’t dent that conviction. Things percolate slowly through bureaucracies, take their own sweet time.

She has to fight the urge to punch Parks full in his ruin of a face. Maybe find the flaw, the pressure point that will make him crumble into pieces and be gone out of her life.

“I’m still here, Sergeant,” she tells him, stung into defiance. “You took your best shot, and all she did was smack my hand and set me extra homework.”

Parks’ forehead creases, in the areas where it still can – where the scar tissue doesn’t render it permanently creased. “Sorry?” he says.

“Don’t be.” She starts to walk around him, remembers that she can’t keep going in this direction and turns, so she’s broadside on to him for a moment.

“I didn’t take any shot at all,” the sergeant says quickly. “I don’t report to Dr Caldwell, if that’s what you think.”

He sounds like he means it. He sounds like he really wants her to believe him.

“Well you should,” Justineau says. “It’s an excellent way of pissing me off. Don’t mess up your perfect score, Sergeant.”

Something like distress shows in Parks’ face now. “Look,” he says, “I’m trying to help you. Seriously.”

“To help me?”

“Exactly. I’ve clocked up a lot of years in the field. And I’ve survived more grab-bagger sweeps than almost anyone. I mean hard-core shit. Inner city.”

“So?”

Parks shrugs massively, is silent for a second as though he’s hit the limits of his vocabulary – which doesn’t strike her as too unlikely. “So I know what I’m talking about,” he says at last. “I know the hungries. You don’t live that long outside the fence unless you work out the moves. What you can get away with, and what’s going to get you killed.”

Justineau lets her utter indifference show in her face. She knows somehow that it will get deeper into him than any show of anger could. His agitation shows her the way to a high ground of cold disdain. “I’m not outside the fence.”

“But you’re handling them. You’re dealing with them every day. And you’re not keeping your guard up. Shit, you had your hands on that thing. You touched it.” He falters on the words.

“Yes,” Justineau agrees. “I did. Shocking, isn’t it?”

“It’s stupid.” Parks shakes his head as if to dislodge a fly that’s landed on him. “Miss Justineau … Helen … the regs are there for a reason. If you take them seriously, they’ll save you. From your own instincts, as much as anything.”

She doesn’t bother to answer. She just stares him down.

“Okay,” Parks says. “Then I’ll have to take this into my own hands.”

“You’ll have to what?”

“It’s my responsibility.”

“Into your own hands?”

“This base’s security is my—”

“You want to lay hands on me, Sergeant?”

“I won’t touch a hair on your head,” he says, exasperated. “I can keep order in my own damn house.” And she reads it, suddenly, in his face. She can see that he’s talking around something. Something that’s fresh in his mind.

“What have you done?” she demands.

“Nothing.”

“What have you done?”

“Nothing that concerns you.”

He’s still talking when she walks away, but it’s not hard to shut the words out. They’re just words.

By the time she gets to the classroom block, she’s running.

When there’s nothing to do, and you can’t even move, time goes a lot more slowly.

Melanie’s legs and her left arm, still strapped into the chair, have cramped agonisingly, but that happened a long time ago and now the pain of the cramp has faded and it’s like her body has stopped bothering to tell her how it feels, so she doesn’t even have the pain to distract her.

She sits and thinks about Sergeant’s anger and what it means. It could mean a lot of things, but the starting point is the same in every case. It was only when she talked about Miss Justineau that Sergeant got angry – when she said that Miss Justineau loved her.

Melanie understands jealousy. She’s jealous, a little bit, every time Miss Justineau talks to another boy or girl in class. She wants Miss Justineau’s time to belong to her, and the reminders that it doesn’t sting a little, make her heart do a gentle drop and thud in her chest.

But the idea of Sergeant being jealous is dizzying. If Sergeant can be jealous, there are limits to his power – and she herself stands at one of those limits, looking back at him.

That thought sustains her, for a while. But nobody comes, and the hours drag on – and though she’s good at waiting, at doing nothing, the time is hanging heavy on her. She tries to tell herself stories, but they fall apart in her mind. She sets herself simultaneous equation puzzles and solves them, but it’s too easy when you’ve made the problems up yourself. You’re halfway to the answer before you’ve started to think about it properly. She’s tired now, but her enforced position in the chair doesn’t allow her to rest.

Then, after a long, long time, she hears the key turning in the lock, the bolts drawn back. Heavy steel door clanging. Footsteps running on concrete, raising a whisper farm of echoes. Is it Sergeant? Has he come back to dismantle her?

Someone unlocks Melanie’s door and pushes it open.

Miss Justineau stands in the doorway. “It’s okay,” she says. “I’m here, Melanie. I’m here for you.”

Miss Justineau steps forward. She wrestles with the chair, like Hercules wrestling with a lion or a snake. The arm strap is partway undone, and it opens up really easily. Then Miss J goes down on her knees and she’s working on the leg straps. Right. Then left. She mutters and curses as she works. “He’s frigging insane! Why? Why would anyone do this?” Melanie feels the constriction lessen, and sensation returns to her legs in a tingling rush.

She surges to her feet, her heart almost bursting with happiness and relief. Miss Justineau has saved her! She raises her arms in an instinct too strong to resist. She wants Miss Justineau to lift her up. She wants to hold her and be held by her and be touching her not just with her hair but with her hands and her face and her whole body.

Then she freezes like a statue. Her jaw muscles stiffen, and a moan comes out of her mouth.

Miss Justineau is alarmed. “Melanie?” She stands, and her hand reaches out.

“Don’t!” Melanie screams. “Don’t touch me!”

Miss Justineau stops moving, but she’s so close! So close! Melanie whimpers. Her whole mind is exploding. She staggers back, but her stiff legs don’t work properly and she falls full length on the floor. The smell, the wonderful, terrible smell, fills the room and her mind and her thoughts, and all she wants to do is…

“Go away!” she moans. “Go away go away go away!”

Miss Justineau doesn’t move.

“Go away, or I’ll fucking dismantle you!” Melanie wails. She’s desperate. Her mouth is filled with thick saliva like mud from a mudslide. Her jaws start to churn of their own accord. Her head feels light, and the room sort of goes away and then comes back again without moving.

Melanie is dangling on the end of the thinnest, thinnest piece of string. She’s going to fall and there’s only one direction to fall in.

“Oh God!” Miss Justineau sobs. She gets it at last. She takes a step back. “I’m sorry, Melanie. I didn’t even think!”

About the showers. Among the sounds that Melanie heard, one big absence: no hiss of chemical spray falling from the ceiling to settle on Miss Justineau and layer on its own smell to hide the Miss Justineau smell underneath.

What Melanie feels right then is what Kenny felt when Sergeant wiped the chemicals off his arm and put it right up close to Kenny’s face. But she only just caught the edge of it that time, and she didn’t really understand it.

Something opens inside her, like a mouth opening wider and wider and wider and screaming all the time – not from fear, but from need. Melanie thinks she has a word for it now, although it still isn’t anything she’s felt before. It’s hunger. When the children eat, hunger doesn’t factor into it. The grubs are poured into your bowl, and you shovel them into your mouth. But in stories that she’s heard, it’s different. The people in the stories want and need to eat, and then when they do eat they feel themselves fill up with something. It gives them a satisfaction nothing else can give them. Melanie thinks of a song the children learned and sang one time: You’re my bread when I’m hungry. Hunger is bending Melanie’s spine like Achilles bending his bow. And Miss Justineau will be her bread.

“You have to go,” she says. She thinks she says. She can’t be sure, because of the heart sounds and breath sounds and blood sounds that are crashing in her ears. She makes a gesture. Go! But Miss Justineau is just standing there, trapped between wanting to run and wanting to help.

Melanie scrambles up and lunges, arms stretched out. And it’s almost like that other gesture, a moment ago, when she asked to be picked up, but now she presses her hands against Miss Justineau’s stomach

touching touching touching her

and pushes her violently away. She’s stronger than she ever guessed. Miss Justineau staggers back, almost trips. If she trips, she’ll be dead. Be bread.

Melanie’s muscles are tensing, knotting, coiling inside her. Gathering themselves for some massive effort.

She diverts them into a bellowing roar.

Miss Justineau scrambles, stumbles, is out through the door and wrenching it closed.

Melanie is moving forward and pulling backward at the same time. A man with a big dog on a leash and she’s both of them, straining against the tether of her own will.

The first bolt slides home exactly as she hits the door. The smell, the need, fill her from toe to crown, but Miss Justineau is safe on the other side of the door. Melanie claws at it, wondering at her own stupid, hopeful fingers. The door won’t open now, but some animal inside her still thinks it might.

It’s a long time before the animal gives up. And then, exhausted, the little girl sinks to her knees next to the door, rests her forehead against cold, unyielding concrete.

From above her, Miss Justineau’s voice. “I’m sorry, Melanie. I’m so sorry.”

She looks up groggily, sees Miss J’s face at the mesh window.

“It’s all right,” she says, weakly. “I won’t bite.”

It’s meant to be a joke. On the other side of the door, Miss Justineau starts to cry.

For a great many reasons, the events of that day will eventually become a soggy, undifferentiated mass in Helen Justineau’s mind. But three things will stand out clear for her until the day she dies.

The first is that Sergeant Parks was right all along. Right about her, and about the risks that her behaviour has exposed her to. Seeing the child turn into the monster, right before her eyes, has made her understand at last that both are real. There is no future in which she can set Melanie free, or save her, or remove that cell door from between them.

The second is that some things become true simply by being spoken. When she said to the little girl “I’m here for you”, the architecture of her mind, her definition of herself, shifted and reconfigured around that statement. She became committed, or maybe just acknowledged a commitment. It has nothing to do with guilt for earlier crimes (although she has a pretty fair understanding of what she deserves), or any hope of redemption. It’s just the outermost point on an arc. She’s risen as far as she can, and now she’s falling again, no longer in control (if she ever was to start with) of her own movements.

The deadline that was set for her is coming on at a rush. She’s expected to choose which of the class will be disassembled on Caroline Caldwell’s table. She has no idea what she’ll do now. All her options seem to be barred in one way or another.

The third thing is almost banal, in comparison. It’s just that the movement she saw over Parks’ shoulder, when he was warning her away from the perimeter, was on the wrong side of the fence. That was what had distracted her, thrown her off her stride for a moment, after the two of them ricocheted off one another and recoiled.

A human figure had been watching the fence from the edge of the woods, almost out of sight among the trees and the waist-high undergrowth.

Not a hungry. A hungry wouldn’t hold a branch aside with his hand to maintain a clear line of sight.

A junker, then. A wild man, who never came inside.

And therefore, she reasons, not a threat.

Because all the threats she’s concerned about right now relate to friendly fire.

If Eddie Parks knows one thing, it’s that he’s sick of this detail.

He was okay with the retrieval runs, as far as that went. The grab-bagging, the soldiers called it. Dirty work, and about as dangerous as you can get, but so what? You knew what the risks were going to be, and the rewards. You weighed them in your hands, and they made sense. You could see why you were doing it.

And that was what kept you doing it, week in and week out. Going into areas where you knew damn well there’d be hungries around every corner. The inner cities, where the population density was highest and the infection spread quicker than the fear of it.

And your life was on the line with every choice you made, every step you took, because there were all kinds of situations you could walk into and not walk out of. The hungries in the city, Christ fucking Jesus … they’re like statues, most of the time, because they don’t move unless something else moves. You’re sprayed from head to foot with e-blocker, so they can’t smell you, and you can walk right by them as long as you do it slow enough and smooth enough that you don’t flip their trigger.

You can get yourself in really deep.

Then some clumsy bastard trips over a loose paving stone, or sneezes, or just scratches his ass, and one of the hungries whips its head round, on the sound or the movement or whatever the hell, and once one of them clocks you, it’s monkey-see-monkey-do for all the rest. They go from zero to sixty in half a heartbeat, and they’re all running in the same direction. So then you’ve got three choices, two of which will reliably get you killed.

If you freeze, the hungries will roll over you like some kind of gangrenous tsunami. They’ve got your number now, and they won’t be fooled no matter what you smell like.

If you turn and run, they’ll take you down. You can build up a bit of a lead at first, and even think you’re winning, but a hungry can keep up that same loping run pretty much for ever. He’s never going to stop, he’s never going to slow down, and over the distance he will take you.

So you fight.

Broad sweeps, below the waist, full automatic. Bust their legs, and they’ve got to drag themselves on their hands to get to you. Changes the odds a little. And if you can get yourself into a narrow place, where they can only come at you one or two at a time, that helps too. But you would not believe how much damage those fuckers will take and still keep moving.

And some days you’ll stir up a different kind of opposition. Junkers. Survivalist arseholes who refused to come into Beacon when the call went out, preferring to live off the land and take their chances. Most of the junkers stay well away from the cities, like any sane person would, but their raiding parties still tend to see any built-up area for fifty miles around their camp as their very own preserve and property.

So when a Beacon grab-bagger patrol meets a troop of junker scavengers, the fur is going to fly every time. It was a junker who gave Sergeant Parks his scar, which isn’t romantic and understated like a duelling scar but a horrific, pucker-edged trench that crosses his face like a bend sinister on an old coat of arms. Parks tends to gauge the mettle of a new recruit by how long they can look him in the eye first time around, before that monstrous thing makes them take a desperate, abiding interest in their own boots.

But what makes all the aggravation of grab-bagging worthwhile is the stuff that’s still sitting around in all those houses and all those offices, waiting to be taken. Old tech, computers and machine tools and comms hardware that hasn’t been touched since the Breakdown – stuff that you can’t even make any more. They’ve got people back at Beacon, tech people, who know exactly how this stuff works, but the knowledge isn’t any good without the infrastructure. It’s like there used to be a whole factory for every frigging circuit board and every frigging piece of plastic. And the people who used to work in those factories are the ones who right now are so eager to chew their way through your Kevlar to the tender parts underneath.

So that old stuff is literally priceless. Parks gets that. They’re trying to find a way to remake the world twenty years after it fell apart, and the goodies that the grab-bag patrols bring home are … well, they’re a rope bridge over a bottomless canyon. They’re the only way of getting from this besieged here to a there where everything is back in good order.

But he feels like they lost their way somewhere. When they found the first of the weird kids, and some grunt who’d obviously never heard about curiosity and the cat called in a fucking observation report.

Nice going, soldier. Because you couldn’t keep from observing, the grab-baggers suddenly get a whole slew of new orders. Bring us one of those kids. Let’s take a good long look at him/her/it.

And the techies looked, and then the scientists looked, and they got the itch to kill a few cats too. Hungries with human reactions? Human behaviours? Human-level brain functions? Hungries who can do something besides run and feed? And they’re running naked and feral through the streets of the inner cities, right alongside the regular variety? What’s the deal?

More orders. Requisition a base, a long way from anywhere. Mount a perimeter, and stand by. They’d been raiding the ragged hinterlands of Stevenage and Luton, so RAF Henlow seemed to fit the bill. It was more or less intact, it offered plenty of space both above the ground and in reinforced bunkers underneath it, and it had a functional airstrip.

They dropped in, and then they dug in. Disinfected. Decorated. Waited.

And in due course Dr Caldwell came along with her white coat and her bright red lipstick and her microscope, and a letter from Beacon with a whole lot of signatures and authorisations on it. “This is my show now, Sergeant,” she said. “I’ll take that building over there and the sheds on either side of it. Go get me some more of those kids. As many as you can find.”

Just like that. Like she was ordering fast food, back in the days when there was fast food and you could order it.

Looking back on it, that was the point where Parks’ life stopped making sense. When he stopped being a grab-bagger and became a hunter and trapper.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 692