The Girl With All The Gifts 11 page

Parks raises his hand, waves the party on with a slow sweep of his arm. The movement serves both as a command and as a reminder of the unhurried pace they need to keep up. The sergeant leads the way, his rifle ready in his hands but pointed at the ground. His gaze is on the ground too for a lot of the time. He scans the visual field with quick, darting glances, his eyes the only part of him at odds with his slow, shambling stride. Caldwell recalls belatedly the hypothesis that hungries retain the rudimentary pattern recognition that all babies are born with – that they’re capable of identifying a human face, and respond to it by slipping into a slightly heightened mode of arousal and awareness. Her own researches have failed either to confirm or to refute this, but she is prepared to accept that it might be true for all but the most severely decayed.

So they avoid the eyes of the hungries as they shuffle on down the high street. They look at each other, at the gaping shop windows, at the road ahead or at the sky, letting the macabre still-life figures hover in their peripheral vision.

Except for the test subject. Melanie doesn’t seem to be able to look away from her larger counterparts even for a moment; she stares at them as though they exert a hypnotic fascination, almost tripping at one point because she’s not looking where she’s going.

That stumble causes Sergeant Parks to turn his head – slowly, measuredly – and give her a baleful glare. She understands the reprimand, and the warning. Her own nod, in return, is so gradual that it takes ten seconds to be completed. She wants him to know that she won’t make that mistake again.

They pass the first group of hungries and keep on going. More houses, terraced this time, and then another row of shops. A side street that they pass is much more densely populated. Hungries stand silently in a tight cluster, as though awaiting the start of a parade. Caldwell guesses that they converged on a kill, and then when they were done simply remained there, in the absence of a trigger that would induce them to move.

She wonders, walking on, whether the sergeant’s strategy is a sound one. They’re embedding themselves very deeply. There are now enemies behind them as well as in front and – potentially – on all sides. Parks wears a troubled expression. Probably he’s thinking the same thing.

Caldwell is about to suggest that they retrace their steps and – as the least bad of a number of unpleasant options – spend the night in one of the semi-detached houses on the outskirts of the town. They might have hungries for neighbours, but at least they’ll have a clear escape route.

But ahead of them, there’s an old-fashioned village green – or the remains of one at least. The green itself has run to jungle, but at least it’s jungle that seems to have a very sparse hungry population. There are a few of them on the strip of road that surrounds the open space, but not nearly so many as on the street they’re on.

Something else too. Private Gallagher sees it first, points – slowly, but emphatically. On the other side of the green is exactly what the sergeant told them to look for: a big detached house, two storeys, standing in its own grounds. It’s a mini-mansion of modern design, masquerading as a country house of an earlier age – but given away by its anachronistic excess. It’s a Frankenstein’s monster of a house, with a half-timbered front, Gothic arches on the ground-floor windows, pilasters framing the front door, gables adhering like barnacles to the roof ridge. The sign on the gate says wainwright house.

“Good enough,” Parks says. “Let’s go.”

Justineau is about to take the direct route, across the overgrown green, but Parks blocks her with a hand on her shoulder. “No telling what’s in there,” he mutters. “Might startle a cat, or a bird, and get all the deadheads for miles around looking in our direction. Let’s stick to the open road.”

So they skirt the edge of the weeds and couch grass, instead of going through, and that’s why Caldwell sees it.

She slows down, and then she stops. She can’t help herself; she stares. It’s such a crazy, impossible thing.

One of the hungries is walking down the centre of the road. A female – biological age when she encountered the Ophiocordyceps pathogen probably late twenties or early thirties. She seems quite well preserved, unblemished apart from bite damage to the left side of her face. Only the grey threads around her eyes and mouth indicate how long it must have been since she left the human race. She’s wearing tan trousers, a white blouse with quarter-length sleeves; stylish summer wear, but the effect is somewhat tarnished by the fact that she’s got one shoe missing. In her long, straight, blonde hair there’s a single cornrow braid.

She’s pushing a baby carriage.

Out of the two things that make this impossible, Caldwell is arrested first by the less remarkable. Why is she walking? Hungries either run, when they pursue prey, or stand still when they don’t. There’s no intermediate state of leisurely perambulation.

And then: why is she clinging to an object? Among the myriad things a human being loses when Ophiocordyceps infiltrates the brain and redecorates is the ability to use tools. The baby carriage ought to be as meaningless to this creature as the equations of general relativity would be.

Caldwell can’t help herself. She advances, crab-wise, to intersect the female hungry’s trajectory, careful at these close quarters to watch her only out of the corner of her eye. Out of the corner of her other eye, she’s aware of Parks raising his hand in a halt gesture. She ignores him. This is too important, and she can’t in conscience let it pass.

She stands full in the path of the oncoming carriage, the shambling ex-woman. It bumps against her, with minimal force, and the woman stops dead. Her shoulders slump, her head bows. Now she looks the part: the lights going out, system powering down until something happens to kick-start it again.

Parks and the others have frozen. They’re all looking Caldwell’s way, watching this play out because there’s nothing they can do now to influence it. By the same token, it’s too late for Caldwell to worry about whether her e-blockers will work at point-blank range, so she doesn’t.

Moving with glacial slowness, she comes around to the side of the carriage. From this angle, she can see that the hungry has more injuries than was immediately apparent. Her shoulder has been torn, flesh hanging there in desiccated strips. The white blouse isn’t white at all at the back – it’s black from neckline to hem with ancient, crusted blood.

Inside the pushchair there’s a row of ducks on an elasticated string, which bob and rock in a desultory dance, and a big yellow blanket, dusty and rucked up, which hides whatever else might be there.

The hungry doesn’t seem aware of Caldwell at all. That’s good. The doctor makes her movements even more gradual, even more unhurried. Reaches out her hand to the topmost edge of the blanket.

She takes a fold of the thick, stiff fabric between finger and thumb. Slow as a glacier now, she peels it back.

The baby has been dead for a long time. Two large rats, nesting in what’s left of its ribcage, start up at once and leap with shrill squeals of protest over Caldwell’s left and right shoulders.

Caldwell staggers back with a wordless shriek.

The hungry’s head snaps up and round. It stares at Caldwell, eyes widening. Its mouth gapes open on grey rot and black stumps of teeth.

Sergeant Parks fires a single shot into the back of its skull. Its mouth opens wider still, its head tilting sideways. It falls forward on to the carriage, which rolls and pitches it off on to the road’s gravelled surface.

On all sides, hungries stir to life, swivelling their heads like range-finders.

“Move,” Parks growls. “On me.”

Then he bellows:

“Run!”

They almost die in the first few seconds. Because in spite of Parks’ yell, the others freeze.

It just seems like there’s nowhere to run to. Hungries are swarming on them from every direction, the gaps between them closing as they converge.

But there’s only one direction that matters. And Parks sets to work to open it up again.

Three shots drop three of the sprinting dead in their tracks. Two shots miss. Parks gives Justineau a violent shove, gets her running. Gallagher does the same for Dr Caldwell, and the little hungry kid, Melanie, is already going flat out.

They jump over the fallen hungries, which are scrabbling like cockroaches, trying to right themselves. If Parks had the time, if the seconds that are ticking by weren’t shaping up to be the last seconds of their lives, he’d have tried for head shots. As it is, he goes for central body mass and the best odds for sending them down.

Works fine, up until Justineau goes sprawling. One of the holed hungries has grabbed her leg and is swarming up it, hand over hand.

Parks stops long enough to unload a second bullet into the hollow under the ear of the ex-human predator. It lets go. Justineau is up again in an instant, not looking back. Good. Lot’s wife should have had that kind of focus.

He’s shooting to left and right. Only taking out the closest, the ones that are about to jump or grab. Gallagher is doing the same thing, and – though his hit rate is shit – at least he’s not slowing to shoot. That’s better than having him aim like Deadeye Dick and stand still long enough to get tackled.

They’re at the gates now, and there’s no lock on them that Parks can see, but they don’t open. Used to be electric, obviously, but bygones are bygones and in the brave new post-mortem world that just means they don’t bloody work.

“Over!” he yells. “Up and over!”

Which is easily said. A head-high rampart of ornamental ironwork with functional spear points on top says different. They try, all the same. Parks leaves them to it, turns his back to them and goes on firing.

The up side is that now he can be indiscriminate. Set to full auto and aim low. Cut the hungries’ legs out from under them, turning the front-runners into trip hazards to slow the ones behind.

The down side is that more and more of them keep coming. The noise is like a dinner bell. Hungries are crowding into the green space from the streets on every side, at what you’d have to call a dead run. There’s no limit to their numbers, and there is a limit to his ammo.

Which he hits, suddenly. The gun stops vibrating in his hands and the noise of his shots dies away through layers of echoes. He ejects the empty magazine, gropes for another in his pocket. He’s done this so often he could go through the moves in his sleep. Slap the new mag in and give it a quick, sharp tug, pivoting it on the forward lip so it locks into place. Pull the bolt all the way back.

The bolt sticks halfway. The weapon’s just dead weight until he can clear whatever’s jamming it – the first round, most likely, elbowed in the chamber. And two hungries are on top of him now, triangulating from left and right. One of them used to be a man, the other a woman. They’re about a second away from the world’s nastiest three-way.

It’s just instinct. Faulty learning. He takes a step back, groping for his sidearm instead of swinging the rifle like a club. Wastes a second that he doesn’t have, and it’s all over.

Except that it isn’t.

In combat, Parks narrows down. It’s not even a conscious thing, so much, or a trick he’s learned. It just happens. He does the job that’s in front of him, and pretty much shunts everything else into a holding pattern.

So he’s forgotten about the hungry kid until she’s suddenly there, right in front of him. She’s inserted herself into the narrowing space between him and his attackers. She’s flailing at them with her skinny arms, an atom of defiance with a shrill, shrieking war cry.

And the hungries stop, breakneck sudden. Their eyes defocus. Their heads start to turn to left and right in short arcs, like they’re sad or disapproving. They’re not looking at Parks any more. They’re looking for him.

Parks knows the hungries don’t hunt or eat each other. Apart from the kids in the classroom, he’s never seen a hungry behave like it knows any other hungries are even there. They’re alone in a crowd, each one of them answering its own need. They’re not pack animals. They’re solitaries that cluster accidentally because they’re responding to the same triggers.

So he’s always assumed that they can’t smell each other at all. The smell of a normal man or woman drives them crazy, but other hungries don’t register. They’re just not on the radar. He realises, in that numbed second, that he was wrong. For each other, the hungries must have a nothing-to-see-here-move-along kind of smell, the very opposite of how live people smell. It turns them off, where the live smell turns them on.

The kid masked him. Her chemicals blocked his, just for a second or two, so the hungries lost the pheromone trail that ended with their teeth in his throat.

Plenty of others running in, though, that aren’t slowing at all. And the two that the kid just windjammed are getting the signal again, eyes locking on target.

But Gallagher’s hand clamps on Parks’ arm and drags him backwards through the gates, which they’ve managed to push half open.

They’re running again, the house looming ahead of them. Justineau is hauling on the door, throwing it wide. They’re through, the hungry kid snaking between his legs to get in ahead of him. Gallagher slams the door shut again, which is just so much wasted time because of the two floor-to-ceiling window panels to either side of it.

“Stairs!” Parks yells, pointing. “Get up the stairs.”

They do. To the sound of crazed church bells as the windows shatter.

Parks is bringing up the rear, throwing grenades over his back like strings of beads at a fucking Mardi Gras parade.

And the grenades are going off behind them one after another, barking concussions overlapping in hideous counterpoint. Shrapnel smacks Parks’ flak jacket and his unprotected legs.

The last half-dozen treads on the stairs sag and yaw under him like he’s stepping on to a rocking boat, but he gets to the top somehow.

And falls, first to his knees, then full-length, sobbing for breath. They all do. Except for the kid, who’s staring back down into the gulf of air, as still and quiet as if she’s just gone for an afternoon stroll. The stairs are gone, all blown to hell, and they’re safe.

No, they’re really not. No time for sitting around and swapping stories about the one you got away from. He’s got to get them on their feet again at once.

Sure, they found the main gates of this place closed, and the doors not broken in, but there could easily be a back door off its hinges. A window smashed in. A stretch of fence that went down last week or last year. A nest of hungries sitting in one of the rooms up here, perking up at the sound of their approaching footsteps.

So they’ve got to make themselves a safe base of operations.

And then they’ve got to search. Make sure there are no hostiles inside their perimeter.

The place looks completely undisturbed, Parks has to admit. But just counting the doors that he can see, he knows there must a shit-load of rooms. He’s not prepared to let his guard down until he’s made sure that each and every one of them is secure.

They advance up the corridor, trying each door in turn. Most don’t open, which is fine with Parks. Whatever’s on the other side of a locked door can stay there.

The few that do open lead to tiny bedrooms. The beds are hospital beds with adjustable steel frames and emergency cords at the head end. Tray tables with melamine tops. Tubular steel chairs with faded burgundy seats. En suite bathrooms so small that the shower cubicle is bigger than the floor space outside it. Wainwright House was some kind of private hospital, not a place where people actually lived.

These one-berth wards are way too claustrophobic even for two of them to share, and Parks doesn’t think it’s a great idea to split up. So they keep looking.

And he’s wondering, all this while: did the kid know what she was doing? Was she aware that she could deflect the hungries just by stepping into their path?

It’s a troubling thought, because he’s not sure what the significance of either a yes or a no would be. He was screwed, and the kid unscrewed him. He turns that around in his mind, but it doesn’t look any better no matter which angle he comes at it from. Thinking about it just makes him angry.

They hang a right off the main corridor, then a left, and eventually they find a day room that’s big enough for their needs. Straight-backed chairs line the walls, which are decorated with cheap framed prints of anonymous English pastoral scenes. Haywains predominate. Parks is indifferent to the haywains, and the room’s got a few too many doors for his liking, but he’s pretty sure by this time that it’s the best they’re going to find.

“We’ll sleep here,” he tells the civilians. “But first we’ve got to check the rest of this floor. Make sure there are no surprises.”

The last we means himself and Gallagher, mostly, but the quicker the better for this, so he decides to rope Justineau in too. “You said you wanted to help,” he reminds her. “Help with this.”

Justineau hesitates – looking straight at Dr Caldwell, so it isn’t hard to see what’s going through her mind. She’s worried about leaving Caldwell alone with the kid. But Caldwell was hit worse than anyone by the fight and flight. She’s pale and sweating, breath still coming in quick pants long after the rest of them have got their second wind.

“We’ll be five minutes,” Parks says. “What do you think is going to happen to her in five minutes?” His own voice surprises him; the anger and the tension in it. Justineau stares at him. Maybe Gallagher flashes him a quick look too.

So he explains himself. “Easier to stay in line of sight if there are three of us. Kid’s no use because she won’t know what to look for. We go out, we come back, and they stay here so we know where to find them. Okay?”

“Okay,” Justineau says, but she’s still looking at him hard. Like, where’s that other shoe, and who’s it likely to hit when it drops?

She kneels and puts a hand on Melanie’s shoulder. “We’re going to take a quick look around,” she says. “We’ll be right back.”

“Be careful,” Melanie says.

Justineau nods.

Yeah.

Alone with Dr Caldwell, the first thing Melanie does is to walk away to the further end of the room and put her back to the wall. She watches every move that Dr Caldwell makes, scared and wary, ready to bolt through the open door after Miss Justineau.

But Dr Caldwell sinks into one of the chairs, either too exhausted or too lost in her own thoughts to pay any attention to Melanie. She doesn’t even look at her.

Any other time, Melanie would explore. All day she’s been seeing new and amazing things, but Sergeant has set a brisk, steady pace and she’s never had time to stop and investigate any of the wonders that went by on both sides of the road: trees and lakes, latticework fences, road signs pointing to places whose names she knows from her lessons, hoardings whose mostly obliterated posters have become mosaics of abstract colour. Living things too – birds in the air, rats and mice and hedgehogs in the weeds alongside the road. A world too big to take in all at once, too new to have names.

And now here she is, in this house that’s so different from the base. There must be so many things to discover. This room alone is filled with mysteries both large and small. Why are the chairs only at the edges of the room, when the room is so enormous? Why is there a little wire cradle on the wall next to the door, with a plastic bottle in it and a sign that says CROSS-INFECTION COSTS LIVES? Why is there a faded picture on one of the tables (wild horses galloping across a field) that’s been cut up into hundreds and hundreds of wiggly-shaped pieces and then stuck back together again?

But right now, all Melanie wants to do is to go somewhere quiet and be by herself, so she can think about the terrible thing that just happened. The terrible secret she just found out.

Apart from the door that they came in by, there are two more doors out of the room. Melanie goes to the nearest one, keeping Dr Caldwell (who still hasn’t moved) always in the corner of her eye. She finds another room, very small and mostly white. There are white cupboards and white shelves, with black and white tiles on the walls. One of the cupboards has a window in it and lots of dials and switches at the top. It smells of old grease. Melanie knows just about enough to guess that the cupboard with a window in it is a cooker. She’s seen pictures in books. This must be a kitchen of some kind – a place where you make nice things to eat. But it’s too small for her to hide in. If Dr Caldwell came after her, she’d be trapped.

She goes out again. Dr Caldwell hasn’t moved, so she walks right past her, giving her a wide berth, and goes to the other door. The next room is very different from the kitchen. Its walls are painted in bright colours, and there are posters, too. One shows ANIMALS OF THE BRITISH HEDGEROWS, and another has words starting with each letter of the alphabet. Apple. Boat. Cat. Digger. Elephant. The pictures are cheerful and simple. The boat and the digger have smiling faces at their front ends, which Melanie is almost certain is unrealistic.

There are chairs in here too, but they’re smaller and they’re all over the place in little clusters, not arranged neatly around the edges of the room. On the floor are toys, strewn as casually as if they were put down a moment before. Girl dolls in dresses and soldier dolls in uniform. Cars and trucks. Plastic building blocks stuck together in the shape of cars or houses or people. Animals made of plush in colours washed out almost to grey.

And books. Lots of them thrown down on chairs, tables, the floor. Hundreds more on a big bookcase to one side of the door. Melanie is in no mood right then to pick them up and read them; the secret weighs heavily on her mind. In any case, even if she wanted to, her hands are stuck behind her back by the handcuffs, and her feet, though they’re bare, aren’t nearly flexible enough to turn the pages. She scans their titles instead.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar

Fox in Socks

Peepo!

The Cops and the Robbers

What Do You Do With a Kangaroo?

Where the Wild Things Are

The Man Whose Mother Was a Pirate

Pass the Jam, Jim

The titles are like stories in themselves. Some of the books have fallen apart or else been torn, their pages scattered across the floor. It would make her sad, if her heart wasn’t full already with a dizzying cargo of emotions.

She’s not a little girl. She’s a hungry.

It’s too crazy, too terrible to be true. But too obvious now to be ignored. The hungry that turned from her at the base, when it could have eaten her … that could have been anything. Or nothing. It could have smelled Dr Selkirk’s blood and been distracted by that, or it could have been looking for someone bigger to eat, or the blue disinfectant gel could have disguised Melanie’s smell the way the shower chemicals always disguised the smell of the grown-ups.

But outside, just now, when she stepped in front of Sergeant Parks – impulsive, without thinking, wanting to fight the monsters the same way he did, instead of hiding from them like a big scaredy-cat – they didn’t even seem to see her. They certainly didn’t hunger for her, the way they did for everyone else. It was like she was invisible. Like there was a bubble of pure nothing where Melanie was.

That’s not the big proof, though. That’s the little proof that pushes her up against the big proof, which is so very big that she wonders how she could have failed to see it right away. It’s the word itself. The name. Hungries.

The monsters are named for the feeling that filled her when she smelled Miss Justineau in the cell, or the junker men outside the block. The hungries smell you, and then they chase you until they eat you. They can’t stop themselves.

Melanie knows exactly how that feels. Which means she’s a monster.

It makes sense now why Dr Caldwell thinks it was okay to cut her up on a table and put pieces of her in jars.

The door behind her opens, making almost no sound.

She turns to see Dr Caldwell standing in the doorway, staring down at her. The expression on Dr Caldwell’s face is complicated and confusing. Melanie flinches back from it.

“Whatever the pertinent factor is,” Dr Caldwell says, her voice a quick, low murmur, “you’re its apogee. Do you know that? Genius-level mind and all that grey muck growing through your brain doesn’t affect it one bit. Ophiocordyceps should have eaten out your cortex until all that’s left is motor nerves and random backfires. But here you are.” She takes a step forward, and Melanie locksteps back away from her.

“I’m not going to harm you,” Dr Caldwell says. “There’s nothing I can do out here anyway. No lab. No scopes. I just want to look at gross structures. The root of your tongue. Your tear ducts. Your oesophagus. See how far the infection has progressed. It’s something. Something to be going on with. The rest will wait. But you’re a crucially important specimen, and I can’t just—”

When Dr Caldwell reaches for her, Melanie ducks under her grip and sprints for the door. Dr Caldwell spins and lunges, almost fast enough. The tips of her fingers slide across Melanie’s shoulder, but the bandages make her clumsy and she doesn’t manage to catch a hold.

Melanie runs as if there’s a tiger behind her.

Hearing Dr Caldwell’s furious gasp. “Damn! Melanie!”

Out into the big room with the chairs around the edges. Melanie doesn’t even know if she’s being followed, because she doesn’t dare look back. Bile rises in her throat as she thinks of the lab and the table and the long-handled knife.

In her panic, she just runs through the first door she sees, not even sure if it’s the right one. It’s not. It’s the kitchen and she’s trapped. She makes a sound inside the muzzle, an animal squeal.

She runs back out into the chair room. Dr Caldwell is on the other side of it. The door to the corridor is halfway between them.

“Don’t be stupid,” Dr Caldwell says. “I won’t hurt you. I just want to examine you.”

Melanie starts to walk towards her, head down, docile.

“That’s right,” Dr Caldwell soothes. “Come on.”

When Melanie comes level with the door that leads out to the corridor, she bolts through it.

Since she doesn’t know where she’s going, it doesn’t matter what turns she takes, but she remembers them anyway. Left. Left. Right. She can’t help herself. It’s the same instinct that made her memorise the return route to the cell block, when Sergeant Parks took her to Dr Caldwell’s lab. Home keeps meaning different things, but she has to know her way back to it. It’s a need buried too deep in her to be pulled out.

The corridors all look alike, and they offer no hiding places – at least, not to someone who doesn’t have the use of their hands. She runs past door after door, all closed.

She goes to ground at last in an alcove, a slight widening of the corridor that creates an angle, a bulwark just wide enough for her body. It would only fool someone who wasn’t actually looking for her, since anyone walking by would be able to see her just by turning their head. If Dr Caldwell finds her, she’ll run again, and if Dr Caldwell catches her, she’ll shout for Miss Justineau. That’s her plan – the best she can come up with.

Her ears are straining for the sounds of distant footsteps. When she hears the singing, from much closer, she jumps like a rabbit.

“Now fetch me … my children…”

The voice is so hoarse, it’s almost not a voice at all. Breath forced through a crack in a wall, driven by a broken bellows. It’s like a song that was left behind here by someone who died, and now it’s gone back to the wild.

And it’s just those five words. Silence before, and silence after.

For about a minute. Melanie counts under her breath, trembling.

“And fetch them … at speed…”

She doesn’t jump this time, but she bites her lip. She can’t imagine the mouth that would make that sound. She’s heard of ghosts – Miss Justineau told the class some ghost stories once, but she stopped when she got too close to that whole taboo subject of death – and she wonders whether it might be a ghost of someone who died here, singing a song from when he was alive.

“Bid them hasten … or I shall … be dead…”

She has to know. Even if it is a ghost, that won’t be as scary as not knowing. She follows the sound, out of the alcove and around a bend in the corridor.

Light as red as blood comes through an open door, and it makes her scared for a moment. But as soon as she steps inside, she can see that it’s just the light of the sunset coming in through an open window.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 605