The Girl With All The Gifts 7 page

Caldwell is down on one knee, picking up the fallen treasures. Justineau grips her by her collar and hauls her upright.

“Come on!” she shouts. Or she tries to shout. But she’s swallowed some of the pepper spray, so her tongue is three times its normal size. She sounds like Charles Laughton in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Doesn’t matter. She’s hauling Caldwell to the door like a mother dragging a wilful child as the hungries surge up from the floor and trample over what’s left of Dr Selkirk in their eagerness to reach this new food source.

Justineau slams the lab door in their faces. It’s not locked, but that’s a detail. Hungries are no better with locks than wild dogs would be. The door shudders from their repeated assaults, but it doesn’t open.

The women are in a short corridor, with the shower unit at the other end of it. Justineau is heading for the shower and the doors beyond, which she left wide open when she came in, but she slows and stops before she gets there. In the space between this block and the vehicle sheds, a running firefight is going on. The men she can see ducking and shooting and taking cover behind the angle of the next building are not Sergeant Parks’ men, in the khaki she’s always hated; they’re savages in motley, their hair blacked and sculpted with tar, machetes tucked into their belts.

Junkers.

While Justineau is still staring, two of the men leap into the air, back-flipping at impossible speed. The flash and roar of the grenade comes half a second later, and the peristaltic shudder of the shockwave a heartbeat after that.

Caldwell points to another door – maybe she says something too, but the wild carillon in Justineau’s ears blots out all other sounds. The door is locked. Caldwell rummages in her pockets, leaving dark red Bézier curves of blood on her white lab coat. Her hands, Justineau sees, are in a really bad state, flaps of skin hanging loose from deep incisions where she gripped the jagged glass sliver to hit out with it.

Pocket after pocket. Caldwell can’t find the key. She tears open the coat at last, tries her trouser pockets, and it’s there. She gets the door open and they’re in what turns out to be a storeroom, filled with a dozen or more identical grey steel shelf units. It’s a refuge.

It’s a trap. As soon as Caldwell locks the door from the inside, Justineau realises she can’t stay here. Melanie is wandering around somewhere outside, like Red Riding Hood in the deep, dark woods, surrounded by men who are firing automatic weapons.

Justineau has to find her. Which means she has to get outside.

Caldwell leans against the end of a shelf unit, either pulling herself together or retreating into some inner space that’s nicer than this one. Justineau ignores her, checks out the narrow room. There are no other doors, but there’s a window, high up on the wall. It will open on to the side of the building that’s closest to the perimeter fence and furthest from the fighting. From there, she could maybe make a run for it – back to the classroom block, where Melanie will have gone to ground if she was able to find her way back there.

Justineau starts to empty the nearest shelf unit, sweeping boxes and bottles, bags of surgical gauze, rolls of paper towel off the shelves on to the floor. Caldwell watches her in silence as she pulls the unit over to the window, where it can serve as a ladder.

“They’ll kill you,” Caldwell says.

“Theb fhtay hhhere,” Justineau snarls over her shoulder. But when she starts to climb, Caldwell steadies the unit with her shredded hands – then clambers up after her, emitting a little gasp of pain every time she has to grip the cold metal of the unit.

The window secures with a catch. Justineau releases it and tilts it open an inch. Outside, just a stretch of untrodden grass. The shouts and gunshots are deadened by distance.

She pushes the window fully open and climbs through, dropping down on to the grass. It’s still wet with morning dew, cold against her ankles. The ordinariness of that feeling is like a telegram from the other side of the world.

Caldwell has more trouble getting out, because she’s trying not to use her injured hands to support her weight. She falls heavily, unable to keep her balance, and sprawls full length in the grass. Justineau helps her up, none too gently.

From the corner, they can see right across the parade ground to the classroom block and the barracks proper. There are hungries everywhere, in tight groups and running hard. Justineau thinks they’re running at random, but then she sees the junker herders in their weird armour, driving them on with spear points, Tasers and good old-fashioned fire.

Clinically she notes that the junkers are all plastered with tar – not just their hair, but the flesh of their arms and hands, the weave of their Kevlar vests. It must do something similar to what the e-blocker spray does, masking the smell of their endocrine sweat so that the hungries don’t turn and swim up that chemical gradient all the way to their tormentors’ throats.

But mostly she thinks: hungries as bioweapons! Win or lose, the base is done for.

“I’m going to try to get across to the classroom block,” she tells Caldwell. “You should probably give it a few seconds, then head for the fence. At least some of them will be looking the other way.”

“The classroom block is underground,” Caldwell snaps. “There’s only one way in or out. You’ll be trapped.”

What a wonderful pair of scientists the two of them are. Assembling known facts into valid inferences. Forensic minds refusing to quit in the face of this utter fucking nightmare.

Justineau doesn’t bother to answer. She just runs. She’s plotted a course and she sticks to it, giving the nearest pack of hungries a wide berth as they sweep on past her, heading for the barracks. The junkers who are herding them are too busy with what they’re doing to turn aside for her.

And their comrades, coming up behind them, are taking fire from both sides: Parks’ people are using the terrain, turning the open spaces between the wooden huts into killing grounds.

Justineau has to swerve away from three soldiers who are running right towards her, rifles in their hands, and then she’s sideways on to another stampeding wedge of hungries. She tacks and weaves, and only realises she’s lost her way when she rounds another corner and what’s in front of her is about a dozen spike-haired men, their limbs black and shiny with tar that must still be liquid, firing from behind a makeshift barricade of overturned dumpsters.

The junkers turn and see her. Most of them turn right back again and keep on firing, but two immediately stand and walk towards her. One pulls a knife from a sheath at his belt and hefts it in his hand. The other just levels the gun he’s already carrying.

Justineau freezes. No point in running, turning her back to the gun, and when she tries to come up with another response, her brain floods with a cold flush of nothing at all.

The knife man kicks her legs out from under her, sends her sprawling. He grips the sleeve of her shirt, hauls her half upright, and holds her out to the other as though he’s offering her up as a gift.

“Do it,” he says.

Justineau raises her head. Usually a bad idea to make eye contact with a wild animal, but if she’s going to die anyway, she wants to die telling him to go screw himself and – if she has time – exactly how and where.

It’s the gunner whose gaze she meets. And she realises with an almost surreal jolt of surprise how young he is. Still in his teens, probably. He moves the gun from her head to point it at her chest, maybe because he doesn’t want to go home from this with the image of her exploded face hanging in the gallery of his dreams.

There’s something ritualistic about all this, the way the older man holds her still and waits for the other to dispatch her. It’s a rite of passage – a bonding moment, maybe, between a father and a son.

The youngster steels himself, visibly.

Then he’s gone. Knocked off his feet. Something dark and subliminally fast has whipped by and taken him with it. He writhes on the asphalt, struggling with an enemy that despite its tiny size spits and mewls and claws at him like an entire sackful of pissed off cats.

It’s Melanie. And she’s not taking any prisoners.

The man – boy, rather – gives a scream that tails off into a liquid gurgle as her jaws close on his throat.

The shock of that first taste of blood and warm flesh is so intense that it almost makes Melanie faint. Nothing in her life has ever been this good. Not even having her hair stroked by Miss Justineau! The rush of pleasure is bigger than she is. The part of her that can think bends in that cataract, broadsided, and clings to whatever it can to keep from being swept away.

She tries to remind herself what’s at stake. She attacked the man because he was going to hurt Miss Justineau, not because of the irresistible fresh meat smell; she didn’t catch a whiff of that until she was astride him, and she bit down before she’d even thought about doing it. Her body didn’t need her permission for this, and it wasn’t prepared to wait. Now she bites and tears and chews and swallows, the sensations filling her and battering her like the torrent of a waterfall pouring into a cup held right under it.

Something hits her hard, dislodging her from her prey, from her meal. Another man stands over her, leans down towards her, a knife raised in his hand. Miss Justineau tackles him from behind, her hands beating at his head. He has to turn to defend himself, and Melanie is able to get a solid grip on his leg. She wraps herself around him, lifts herself effortlessly off the ground with her strong arms, locks to him like a limpet.

The man bellows incoherent curses and hammers at her frantically. The blows hurt, but they don’t matter. Melanie finds the point where leg joins body, driven by some instinct so deep she can’t even tell where it comes from. She fastens her teeth on to the man and bites through the leg of his pants until the blood wells thick and spurting into her mouth. She knew it would. She sensed the artery singing to her through folds of flesh and fabric.

The man’s scream is a scary sound, shrill and wobbly. Melanie doesn’t like it at all. But oh, she likes the taste! Likes the way his opened thigh becomes a fountain, as though raw meat was a magic garden, a hidden landscape that she never glimpsed until now.

It’s too much, finally. Her stomach and her mind aren’t big enough. The whole world isn’t big enough. Numbed with delight, with repletion that melts her muscles and her thoughts, she doesn’t resist this time when hands pluck her loose and lift her up.

From under the reek of chemicals comes the Miss Justineau smell, familiar and welcome and wonderful. Pressed to Miss Justineau’s chest, she emits a satiated purr. She wants to curl to sleep there, like an animal in its burrow.

But she can’t sleep, because Miss Justineau is moving, running fast. Each footfall jars Melanie. And the full feeling doesn’t last. Her torpid hunger rallies quickly, prods at the edges of her mind with eager intimations. Already the smell means something different, is urging her to feed again. She turns and wriggles in a grip too weak to contain her, butts with her head against the underside of Miss J’s arm, mouth open to bite again.

But she can’t she mustn’t she can’t! This is Miss Justineau, who loves her. Who saved her from the table and the thin, scary knife. Melanie can’t stop her jaws from closing but she jerks her head back, at the last moment, so they close on air instead of flesh.

A growl wells up from inside her, from the same place that mewled like a kitten only a few moments ago.

has to

mustn’t

has to

She wrestles with a wild animal, and the animal is her.

So she knows she’s going to lose.

Justineau is running again. But now she has no idea where she’s running to. The familiar geography of the base has been rendered arcane by the smoke of explosions, the din of gunfire and running feet.

Melanie makes it even harder to focus, squirming and thrashing in her grip. Justineau remembers lifting her from the body of the young junker boy, like plucking a blood-gorged tick from a dog’s belly, and has to fight the urge to drop her.

Why fight it? Not because Melanie saved her. But then, in a sense, yes. Because she’s turned her back on something inside herself, and Melanie is the sign of that – the anti-Isaac she snatched from the fire to prove to God that he doesn’t always get to call the shots.

Fuck you, Caroline.

Melanie is making noises a human throat isn’t properly configured for, and her head is levering backwards and forwards, butting at Justineau’s arm. There’s astonishing strength in the little girl. She’s going to break free. She’s going to bring the both of them down.

Justineau glimpses the steel door of the classroom block, unexpectedly close by, and swerves towards it.

Realises immediately that it’s no use to her. The door is closed, and the locks engage automatically when it’s in that position. There’s no possible way she can get inside.

Hungries loom on her right, a dozen or so, coming from the direction of the lab. Maybe they’re the same ones she originally fled from, still following her scent. Either way, they can smell her now and they want her. They’re coming towards her, legs rising and falling in tireless, mechanical syncopation.

Nothing for it but to turn tail. To run away from them as fast as she can, and pray that she gets somewhere before they catch her.

She does. She gets to the fence. It’s suddenly right there in front of her, blocking her way like a wire-mesh Everest. She’s finished.

She turns, at bay. The hungries are coming on at that same merciless, metronomic sprint. To right and left, there’s nothing. Nowhere to hide, or to run to. She lets go of Melanie, sees her fall like a cat falls, righting herself in the air to land on starfish-spread hands and feet.

Justineau balls her fists, braces herself, but an enormous exhaustion hits her and darkness rushes in from the corners of her vision as the adrenalin wave deserts her. She doesn’t even throw a punch as the first hungry gapes his jaws and reaches out to pull her down.

With a wet crunch, he’s slammed to the ground and ploughed under.

A wall slides smoothly across Justineau’s field of vision. It’s metallic, painted in dull green and there’s a window in it. From the window, a monster’s face stares out at her. Sergeant Parks’ face.

“Get inside!” he bellows.

The thing in front of her resolves itself, like a puzzle picture. It’s one of the base’s Humvees. Justineau grabs the door handle and tries all the wrong ways to make it open, twisting and pulling before she finally pops it with a single squeeze of the catch release on the handle’s inner face.

She throws the door open as the hungries round the back of the vehicle and start towards her. One of Parks’ boy soldiers, a kid half her age with a mass of red hair like an autumn bonfire, is up on the roof manning the Humvee’s pedestal gun. He swings it wildly, stitching the air with stinging metal. It’s not clear what he’s aiming at, but on one of the down-swings he intersects the nearest hungries and knocks them right off their feet.

Justineau holds the door, but doesn’t move – because Melanie doesn’t move. Crouched on the ground, the little girl stares into the vehicle’s dark interior with animal mistrust.

“It’s fine!” Justineau yells. “Melanie, come on. Get inside. Now!”

Melanie makes up her mind – makes a standing jump past Justineau and in through the door. Justineau clambers in after her, slams the door tight shut.

Turns to see Caroline Caldwell’s pale, sweating face staring right at her. Her hands are folded under her armpits and she’s lying on the floor of the Humvee like a bolt of firewood. Melanie cowers away from her, presses against Justineau again, and mechanically Justineau embraces her.

The Humvee wheels around. Through the window, they can briefly see a kaleidoscope of smoke and ruin and running figures.

They drive through the fence without slowing, but almost don’t make it across the ditch beyond. The Humvee belly-flops on the far side, shudders for a few seconds like a washing machine on spin before it gets enough traction to drag its rear end up over the rim.

For the next few miles, it’s chased by five yards of chain-link and a concrete post, bounding along behind it the way a wedding car trails tin cans.

Parks would prefer to drive straight across country – the Humvee doesn’t need roads all that much – but the scrape and grind from behind him tells him that all isn’t well with the rear axle. So he shifts down to get a bit more push out of the engine, floors the gas and drives with reckless speed down the empty B roads around the base, swerving left and right at random. He figures that the best way for them not to be found is – for the time being – to be lost themselves.

At least there’s no pursuit that he can see. That’s something to be profoundly grateful for.

He finally brings the Humvee to a halt about ten miles from the base, pulling off the road on to a rutted, overgrown field. He turns off the ignition and gets his breath back, leaning over the wheel as the engine cools. The sounds it’s making are not happy sounds. He grabbed the vehicle from the workshop, the only place he could get to without crossing a parade ground full of hungries, and he wonders – now that it’s too late – what it was in there for.

Gallagher climbs down from the pedestal, folds the gun down after him and locks the hatch. He’s shaking like he’s got a fever, so these simple actions take him quite a while. When he’s finally sitting in the shotgun seat he gives the sergeant a terrified stare, looking for orders or explanations or anything that will help him to keep it together.

“Good work,” Parks tells him. “Check on the civilians. I’m going to do a quick recce.”

He opens the door, but he doesn’t get any further than that. Glancing over into the back seat, Gallagher gives a short, pained yell. “Sarge! Sergeant Parks!”

“What is it, son?” Parks asks wearily. He turns to look into the back with a sinking feeling, expecting to see that one of the two women has sustained a gut wound or something similar – that they’re going to have to watch her die.

But it’s not that. Dr Caldwell’s coat is saturated with blood, but most of it seems to be from her hands. And Helen Justineau looks pretty much fine, apart from her red, puffed-up face.

No, what made the boy shout out is their third passenger. It’s one of the little hungry kids – the monsters from the containment block. Parks recognises her, with a palpable shock, as the one he just took over to the meat market, to Dr Caldwell’s lab. She’s changed since then. She’s crouching on the floor of the Humvee, buck naked, shaved bald, and painted like a savage, her vivid blue eyes flicking backwards and forwards between the women. The curve of her back speaks both tension and the imminence of movement.

Awkwardly, because of the angle, Parks grabs his sidearm and takes aim, thrusting it between the seat backs so that it points directly at the little girl’s head. A head shot is his best chance of putting her down, at this sort of range.

Their eyes meet. She doesn’t move. Like she’s asking him to do it.

It’s Helen Justineau who stops him, interposing her body between them. In the narrow confines of the Humvee, she makes a pretty unanswerable barricade.

“Move aside,” Parks tells her.

“Then put the gun down,” Justineau says. “You’re not killing her.”

“She’s already dead,” Dr Caldwell points out from the floor, her voice uneven. “Technically speaking.”

Justineau shoots a sidelong glance at the doctor, but doesn’t bother to answer her. Her gaze comes back immediately to Parks. “She’s not a danger,” she says. “Not right now. You can see that. Let her out of the car, let her get some distance from you – from all of us – and take it from there. Okay?”

What Parks can see is that the nightmare-that-walks-like-a-girl is wide-eyed and trembling, barely in control of itself. Everyone in the car is chemmed up, e-blocker from hairline to socks, but there’s enough blood kicking around – on Caldwell’s hands and arms and clothes, on the kid herself – to be pushing her triggers anyway. He’s never seen a hungry in a meat frenzy and not acting on it. It’s a novelty, but he’s not going to bet his life on it being a long-term trend.

He either shoots her now, or he does what Justineau says. And if he shoots her, he takes the risk of killing one or both of the civilians.

“Do it,” he says. “Quickly.”

Justineau throws the door open. “Melanie…” she says, but the kid doesn’t need to be told. She’s out of there like a bullet, running away from the Humvee and across the field, her spindly legs a blur.

She goes upwind, Parks can’t help but notice. She gets away from the smell of them. From the smell of the blood. Then she crouches down in the long grass, almost lost to view, and hugs her knees. She turns her face away.

“Good enough?” Justineau demands.

“No!” Caldwell says quickly. “She’s got to be restrained and brought with us. We have no idea what happened to the rest of the subjects. If the base is lost, and my records along with it, she’s all we’ve got to show for a four-year programme.”

“Which says a lot for your programme,” Justineau says. Caldwell glares. The air between them is thick with bad vibes.

Parks gestures to Gallagher – a jerk of the head – and gets out of the vehicle, leaving the womenfolk to it. He’s worried about the Humvee’s rear axle and he wants to look at it right away. No telling when they might have to move again.

Melanie is coming down.

At first she can’t think at all. Then, when thoughts come back, she shrinks away from them, like Mr Whitaker when his bottle is almost empty. Her mouth is haunted by memories that want to be real again. Her mind is reeling from what she’s done.

And her body is wracked with a million tics and shakes – each cell reporting in unfit for duty, demanding what it can’t have.

She’s always been a good girl. But she ate pieces of two men, and very probably killed them both. Killed them with her teeth.

She was hungry, and they were her bread.

So what is she now?

These conundrums come and go as the residual hunger allows her to focus on them. Sometimes they’re very big and very clear, sometimes far away and seen through skeins of fuzz and smoke.

Something else that comes and goes: a memory. When she was lying on the table, tied down, and sawing at the plastic band that held her left wrist – left hand twisted round, the scalpel held awkwardly between the very tips of her fingers – one of the hungries loomed over her.

She froze at once. Stared up, breathless, into that savage, vacant face. There was nothing she could do, not even scream. Not even close her eyes. Free will fled away along the vectors of her fear.

For a strained second which then broke, abruptly, into pieces. The hungry gaped, slack-jawed, head hanging down and shoulders hunched up like a vulture. Its gaze slid away from Melanie’s, to the left and then to the right. It put out its tongue to taste the air, and then it stumbled on around the table, heading for a writhing mass of motion on the lab’s floor, almost out of Melanie’s field of vision.

It had only met her stare for that one second by blind chance.

After that it didn’t even seem to know she was there.

What with the withdrawal effects and with worrying at this puzzle, it’s a long while before Melanie notices the world she’s sitting in.

Wild flowers surround her. A couple of them – daffodils and campion – are familiar from Miss Justineau’s lesson on the day of the vernal equinox. The rest are completely new, and there are dozens of them. She turns her head, very slowly, staring at one after another.

She registers the tiny buzzing things that fly between them and guesses that they’re bees, because of what they’re doing – visiting one flower after another, bullying their way into the core of each one with a shrugging, rocking gait, and then backing out again and taking off for the next.

Something much bigger flies across the field in front of her. A black bird that might be a crow or a jackdaw, its song a hoarse, thrilling war cry. Sweeter and softer songs weave around it, but she can’t see the birds – if they are birds – that make those sounds.

The air is heavy with scents. Melanie knows that some of them are the scents of the flowers, but even the air seems to have a smell – earthy and rich and complicated, made out of things living and things dying and things long dead. The smell of a world where nothing stops moving, nothing stays the same.

Suddenly she’s an ant all scrunched up on the floor of that world. A static atom in a sea of change. The immensity of earth envelops her, and enters into her. She sips it, with each gulp of heady, supercharged atmosphere.

And even in this dazed, strung-out state, even with those memories of meat and monstrous violence lying thwart across her mind, she really, really likes it.

The smells, especially. They affect her very differently from the smell of people, but they still excite her – wake something in her mind that must have been asleep until then.

They help her to push the meat hunger and the memories away into a middle distance where they don’t hurt and shame her so very much.

By degrees, she comes back to herself. Which is when she realises that Miss Justineau is standing a little way away from her, watching her in silence. Miss Justineau’s face is wary, full of questions.

Melanie chooses to answer the most important one. “I won’t bite, Miss Justineau.

“But you’d better not get any closer than that,” she adds quickly, scrambling back as Miss J takes a step towards her. “You smell all … and there’s blood on you. I don’t know what I’ll do.”

“Okay.” Miss Justineau stops where she is, and nods. “We’ll find a place to wash, and then we’ll freshen up the e-blocker. Are you okay, Melanie? It must have been really frightening for you.” Her face is full of concern, along with something else. Fear, maybe.

And she should be afraid. They’re outside the fence, in region 6, and they must be miles and miles away from the base. They’re out among the monsters, the hungries, with no refuge close to hand.

“Are you okay?” Miss Justineau asks again.

Melanie nods, but it’s a lie. She’s not okay, not yet. She doesn’t know if she’ll ever be okay again. Being strapped down on the table with Dr Caldwell’s knife in front of her eyes was the scariest thing that ever happened to her. Until she saw Miss J about to be killed, and then that became the scariest thing. And now, it’s the thought of biting and eating pieces of those two men.

However you look at it, it hasn’t been a good day at all. She wants to ask the question that’s burning a hole through her heart. Because Miss Justineau will know. Of course she will. Miss Justineau knows everything. But she can’t ask, because she can’t make the words come out. She doesn’t want to admit that there’s a doubt, a question there.

What am I?

So she says nothing. She waits for Miss Justineau to speak. And after a long time, Miss Justineau does. “You were very brave. If you hadn’t come along when you did, and if you hadn’t fought those men, they would have killed me.”

“And Dr Caldwell was going to kill me and chop me up into pieces and put me in jars,” Melanie reminds her. “You saved me first, Miss Justineau.”

“Helen,” Miss J says. “My name is Helen.”

Melanie considers this statement.

“Not to me,” she says.

When he gets down under the Humvee and takes a good look at the rear axle, Parks swears.

Bitterly.

He’s only a middling mechanic, but he can tell that it’s pretty much screwed. It’s taken a good whack just off centre, presumably when they leapt the security ditch, and it’s all bent into a shallow V, with a small but visible crack in the metal at the impact point. They’re lucky to have got this far without it breaking in two. They sure as hell won’t make it much further. Not on their own, anyway. And Parks has done enough shout-outs by this time, on normal and emergency frequencies, to know that there’s no help coming from the base.

He debates with himself whether it’s worth looking at the engine. There’s something wrong there, too, that he might have a better chance of fixing, but the axle’s probably going to give long before that becomes an issue.

Probably. But not certainly.

With a sigh, he crawls out from under the Humvee and goes around to the front. Private Gallagher trails after him like a lost puppy, still begging for orders.

“Is it okay, Sarge?” he asks, anxiously.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 608