The Girl With All The Gifts 12 page

Just! She’s only ever seen it once before, and this one’s better. The sky catches fire from the ground on up, and the flames go through every colour, cooling from red-orange to violet and blue at the zenith.

It blinds her, for at least ten or twenty seconds, to the fact that she’s not alone.

Caroline Caldwell also follows the sound of the strange voice. She’s aware, of course, that it’s not test subject number one who’s singing. But equally she’s sure that whoever it is doesn’t represent a threat. Until she sees him.

The man sitting on the bed looks like the punchline to a bad joke. He’s dressed in a hospital gown that’s fallen open, exposing the nakedness beneath. Old wounds criss-cross his body. Deep troughs in the flesh of his shoulders, his arms, his face mark where he’s been bitten. Except that bitten doesn’t seem to cover it; he’s been fed on, lumps of his physical substance torn away and consumed. Scratches and tears ruck his chest and stomach, where the hungries who partially devoured him grabbed him and held on. The two middle fingers of his right hand have been bitten off at the second joint – a defence wound, Caldwell assumes, sustained when he tried to push a hungry away from him and it bit down on his hand.

The blackly comic touch is the bandage on his elbow. This man came to Wainwright House with something trivial like bursitis and – as many people do – experienced complications while he was being treated. In this case, the complications were that hungries feasted on his flesh and made him one of them.

He’s still singing, seemingly unaware of Melanie standing directly in front of him, of Caldwell in the doorway of the room.

“The raven … croaked … as she sat … at her meal…”

It’s so apposite to her thoughts, Caldwell is thrown for a moment. But he’s not answering her, he’s only singing the last line of the quatrain. She knows the song, vaguely. It’s “The Woman Who Rode Double”, an old folk ballad as depressing and interminable as most of its type – exactly the sort of song she’d expect a hungry to sing.

Except that they don’t. Ever.

Another thing they don’t do is look at pictures, but this one is. As he sings, he holds in his lap a wallet, of the kind that has a loose-leaf insert for credit cards. This one holds not cards but photographs. The hungry is trying to flick through them, with one of the remaining fingers of his right hand.

His movements are intermittent, and the gaps, in which he sits still, are very long. Each failure to turn to the next image elicits another line of the song.

“And the old woman … knew what … he said…”

Involuntarily, Caldwell’s eyes find Melanie’s. The glance they exchange asserts no kinship, unless it’s a mark of consanguinity to be a rational and defined thing in the face of the impossible and the uncanny.

Caldwell steps into the room and circles the infected man slowly and warily. The marks of violence he bears are, she sees now, very old. The blood from the wounds has mostly dried and flaked away. Each is rimmed with an embroidery of fine grey threads, the visible sign that Ophiocordyceps has made its home within him. There’s grey fuzz on his lips, too, and in the corners of his eyes.

It’s possible, she thinks clinically, that he’s remained in this room, on this bed, ever since he was infected. In that case, some of the bites on his arms might well have been self-inflicted. The fungus needs protein, primarily, and although it can make do with very little, it can’t live on air. Autocannibalism is an eminently practical strategy for a parasite to which the host’s body is only a temporary vector.

Caldwell is utterly fascinated. But she’s also, after what happened outside, aware of the need for caution. She retreats back to the door, and beckons for the girl, the test subject, to join her there. Melanie stays exactly where she is. She’s identified Caldwell as the greater threat, which is actually far from an unreasonable assumption.

But Caldwell doesn’t have time for this bullshit.

She takes out the gun that Sergeant Parks gave her, which up until now has rested undisturbed in the pocket of her lab coat. She thumbs the safety and holds it, in both hands, out towards Melanie. Aiming at her head.

Melanie stiffens. She’s seen what guns can do at very close quarters. She stares at the barrel, sickly hypnotised by its nearness, its deadly potentiality.

Caldwell beckons again, this time with a toss of her head.

“And she … grew pale … at … the raven’s tale…”

Melanie takes a long time to decide, but at last she crosses to Caldwell. Caldwell takes one hand off the gun, steers Melanie out through the door with a hand on her shoulder.

She turns back to the male hungry.

“All kinds of sin I have rioted in,” she sings. “And now the judgment must be.”

The hungry shudders, a quick convulsion running through it. Caldwell steps hurriedly back, swivelling the gun to point it at the centre of the thing’s chest. At this range, she can’t miss.

But the hungry doesn’t charge. It just moves its head from side to side as though it’s trying to locate the source of the sound.

“So…” it rasps in that almost-not-there voice. “So. So. So.”

“Leave him alone,” Melanie whispers fiercely. “He’s not hurting you.”

“But I secured my children’s souls,” Caldwell croons. “So pray, my children, for me.”

“So,” the hungry croaks. “So…”

“Get out of the way,” Sergeant Parks says. His hand is on Caldwell’s shoulder, brusquely pushing her aside.

“… phie…” the hungry says.

Parks fires once. A neat black circle, like a caste mark, appears in the centre of the hungry’s forehead. It slips down sideways, rolling off the bed. Ancient stains, black and red and grey, mark the place where it has sat for so long.

“Why?” Caldwell wails, in spite of herself. She turns to the sergeant, her arms thrown wide. “Why do you always, always shoot them in the fucking head?”

Parks stares back at her, stony-faced. After a moment, he takes her right hand in his left and pushes it down until it’s pointing at the ground.

“You want to get demonstrative with a gun in your hand,” he says, “you make sure the safety is on.”

Considering how badly it started, their second night on the road is a lot better than their first, at least in Helen Justineau’s opinion.

For starters, they’ve got food to eat. Even more miraculously, they’ve got something to cook it with, because the range in the tiny kitchen is powered by gas cylinders. The one that’s already hooked up is empty, but there are two full ones standing in the corner of the room and they’re both still sound.

The three of them – Justineau, Parks and Gallagher – go through the treasure trove of canned goods in the kitchen cupboards, by the light of electric torches and of a nearly full moon shining in from outside, exclaiming in wonder or disgust at what’s on offer. Justineau makes the mistake of checking the best-before dates, which of course are all at least a decade in the past, but Parks insists that they’re okay. Or at least some of them will be, by the law of averages. And a can whose contents have oxidised will smell really bad when it’s opened, so they can just keep on rolling the dice until their luck is in.

Justineau weighs up the risk against the absolute certainty of protein and carbohydrate mix number 3. She picks up a can opener that she found in a drawer and starts to open the cans.

There are some horrific encounters, but Parks’ theory holds. Maybe thirty or forty cans later, they end up with a menu of beef in gravy with baby new potatoes, baked beans and mushy peas. Parks lights the range with a spark struck from a tinderbox – an honest-to-God tinderbox; that has to be centuries old – produced from his pocket with something suspiciously like a flourish, and Gallagher cooks while Justineau wipes dust off plates and cutlery and washes them clean with a dribble of water from one of the canteens.

Melanie and Dr Caldwell play no part in any of this. Caldwell sits on one of the chairs in the day room, laboriously removing and adjusting and rewinding the dressings on her hands. She wears an expression of furious intensity, and doesn’t answer when spoken to. You could almost believe she’s sulking, but in Justineau’s opinion, what they’re seeing is raw thought. The doctor is in.

Melanie is in the next room along, which evidently used to be some kind of a play space for kids to hang out in while their parents were here as visitors or inmates. She’s been quiet and subdued ever since they arrived. It’s hard to get a word out of her. Parks refused absolutely to free her hands, but at least there are posters on the walls for her to look at, and the remains of a bright red beanbag for her to sit on. Her ankle is tethered to a radiator by a short restraint chain, giving her freedom of movement within a circle about seven feet in diameter.

When the food is ready, Justineau takes some through to her. She’s sitting on the beanbag, her legs crossed, her bright blue eyes staring with fixed intensity at a poster on the wall depicting voles, shrews, badgers and other British wildlife. There’s a light yellow fuzz on the top of her head, Justineau notices. The first hint of hair starting to grow back. It puts her in mind of a newly hatched chick.

She sits with Melanie while she eats. According to Caldwell, hungries can only metabolise protein, so Justineau has washed some cubes of beef clean of the gravy they came in and put them in a bowl.

Melanie is a little freaked out that the meat is hot. Justineau has to blow on each cube before she feeds it to the girl – through the steel grille of her muzzle – on the end of a fork. Melanie doesn’t seem impressed, but she thanks Justineau very politely.

“Long day,” Justineau observes.

Melanie nods, but says nothing.

Now that the meal is out of the way, Justineau shows Melanie what else she’s found. In a few of the rooms there were clothes in the wardrobe or the drawers. One of them must have been occupied by a girl once – probably a bit younger than Melanie, but of a roughly similar size.

Melanie stares at the clothes that Justineau holds out, without comment. Sombre and withdrawn as she is, it’s obvious that they still fascinate her. Pink jeans with a unicorn embroidered on the back pocket. A pastel blue T-shirt emblazoned with the motto BORN TO DANCE. An aviator jacket, also pink, with button-up flaps at the shoulders and lots and lots of pockets. White knickers and rainbow-striped socks. Trainers with jewel-spangled laces.

“Do you like them?” Justineau asks. Melanie hasn’t spoken, but her gaze flicks backwards and forwards between the strange offerings, studying them or perhaps comparing them.

“Yes,” she says. “I think so. But…” She hesitates.

“What?”

“I don’t know how to put them on.”

Of course. Melanie has never worn clothes with buttons or zip fasteners. And then she’s got the chain and the handcuffs to contend with. “I’ll help you,” Justineau promises. “We can’t do anything until morning, but before we get moving again, I’ll ask Sergeant Parks to untie you for a few minutes. We’ll get you out of that mouldy old sweater and into your glad rags.”

“Thank you, Miss Justineau.” The little girl’s face is solemn. “We’ll need the other soldier to be there too.”

Justineau is a little thrown by this. “They don’t need to watch while you change,” she says. “I think we’ll make them wait in the next room, don’t you?”

Melanie shakes her head. “No.”

“No?”

“One to untie me, the other to point the gun at me. That’s how many it takes.”

They talk for a little while longer about the things that have happened, wrapping the violence up in careful, delicate words so it feels less horrible. Melanie finds this interesting in spite of herself – that you can use words to hide things, or not to touch them, or to pretend that they’re something different than they are. She wishes she could do that with her big secret.

It seems like Miss Justineau thinks that Melanie must be sad because all those hungries got killed, and is trying to make her feel better about it. Melanie is sad for them, a little. But she knows enough, now, to be sure that the hungries weren’t really people any more, even before they got killed. They were more like empty houses where people used to live.

Melanie tries to reassure Miss Justineau – tries to show her that she’s not so very sad about the hungries. Not even about the man who was singing the song, although it seemed to her that there was no reason at all for Sergeant Parks to shoot him. He was just sitting there on the bed, and it didn’t look like he could even get up. All he could do was sing and look at his pictures.

But the lady outside had looked harmless too, until Dr Caldwell screamed. It seemed like hungries could change very quickly, and you had to be careful all the time when you were close to them.

“I’ll keep you safe,” Miss Justineau says to Melanie now. “You know that, right? I won’t let any of them hurt you.”

Melanie nods. She knows that Miss Justineau loves her, and that Miss Justineau will try her best.

But how can anyone save her from herself?

“I found this,” Gallagher says, when Helen Justineau comes back to the table. Her own food has gone cold by this time, and the rest of them have almost finished eating, but he felt like this was something they all had to be there for. He thinks Helen Justineau has a sexy smile for an older woman, and he hopes one day she’ll use it on him.

He sets down on the table a bottle that he found in a storage cupboard while they were searching. It was on the floor, covered with a pile of mouldering J Cloths, and he wouldn’t have seen it at all except that he kicked it by accident and heard the clink and slosh as its contents were disturbed.

Glancing down, he saw a little of the label, a teasing hint of brown and gold where the sheltering mound of sky-blue cloths had slid away. Metaxa three-star brandy. Full and unopened. On his own account he recoiled from it and from the poisoned release it represented. He piled the cloths on top of it again to hide it from sight.

But he kept going back to it. He’d been fretting all day about this journey. About going back to Beacon and the narrow, walled-in world he’d been so happy to leave behind. He’d been feeling like he was walking between the rock and the hard place. Maybe, he thought, desperate situations require desperate remedies.

The others stare at the bottle now, their dangling conversation comprehensively hijacked.

“Shit!” Sergeant Parks mutters, with something of reverence in his tone.

“This is the good stuff, right?” Gallagher asks, feeling himself blush.

“No.” Sergeant Parks shakes his head slowly. “No, this isn’t so great, all things considered, but it’s real. Not tin-bucket rotgut.” He turns the bottle over in his hands, examines the seal both by eye and by sniffing at it. “Promises well,” he comments. “Normally I wouldn’t get out of bed for anything less than French cognac, but fuck it. Get some glasses, Private.”

Gallagher does.

He doesn’t get that smile from Justineau. She’s almost as switched off as Dr Caldwell, like all the piled-up crises of the day have strung out her nerves too far and thin for normal stuff.

But what’s even cooler than a smile would have been is that the Sarge pours for him first. “Founder of the feast, Private,” he says, when he’s filled all their glasses. “You get to give the toast.”

Gallagher’s already hot face gets a bit hotter. He raises the glass. “One bottle for the four of us, thank fuck there are no more of us!” he recites. One of his father’s, heard in a roar that carried through thin floorboards to where a pre-teen Kieran Gallagher lay under a single blanket and listened to the grown-ups carouse.

Then call each other cunts.

Then fight.

The toast is accepted, the glasses chinked together. They drink. The raw, sweet booze sears its way down Gallagher’s throat. He tries his best to keep his mouth closed on it, but he explodes into coughing. Not as bad as Dr Caldwell, though. She claps her hand to her mouth and – as the cough rises despite her best efforts – sprays brandy and spit out between her fingers.

They all laugh out loud, including the doctor. In fact, she laughs the longest. The laughing takes up each time the coughing stops, and then gives way to it again. It’s like alcohol is magic, and they’ve all suddenly relaxed with each other even though they’ve only taken a single mouthful of it. Gallagher remembers enough of those family drinking sessions to be sceptical of that particular miracle.

“Your turn,” the Sarge says to Justineau, pouring again.

“For a toast? Shit.” Justineau shakes her head, but she lifts the brimming glass. “May we live as long as we want. How about that?” She tips it back, drinks the glass empty in one go. The Sarge matches her. Gallagher and Dr Caldwell sip more cautiously.

“It’s may we live as long as we want, and never want as long as we live,” Gallagher corrects Justineau. He knows this stuff like holy writ.

Justineau sets the glass back down. “Yeah, well,” she says. “No point in asking for the moon and the stars, is there?”

The Sarge refills their glasses, tops up Gallagher’s and Caldwell’s. “Doc?” he asks. Caldwell shrugs. She’s not interested in offering any heart-warming exhortations.

Parks taps each of their glasses with his own, three times round.

“To the wind that blows, the ship that goes and the lass that loves a sailor.”

“You know any sailors?” Justineau asks sardonically, after they’ve both emptied their glasses again and Gallagher has sipped politely. They’re already making serious inroads into the bottle.

“Every man’s a sailor,” Parks says. “Every woman’s an ocean.”

“Horseshit,” Justineau exclaims.

The Sarge shrugs. “Maybe, but you’d be amazed how often it works.”

More laughter, with a slightly wild edge to it. Gallagher stands. This is no good for him, and he was stupid to try it. He’s starting to remember things that he steers clear of most of the time, for good and sufficient reasons. Ghosts are rising in his sight, and he doesn’t want to have to look them in the eye. He knows them too well already. “Sarge,” he says. “I’ll swing round one more time, make sure everything’s secure.”

“Good for you, son,” Parks says.

They don’t even look at him as he leaves.

He wanders round the corridors of the first-floor level, finding nothing that they didn’t find the time before. He covers his mouth and nose as he walks past the room with the dead hungry in it; the stink is really bad.

But it’s worse when he gets to the top of the staircase that the Sarge blew out. It’s like the breath of hell, right there. There’s no sound, no movement. Gallagher stands at the brink and peers down into impenetrable shadow. Eventually he gets up the courage to take the torch from his belt, aim it straight down and click it on.

In the perfect circle of the torchlight, he sees six or seven hungries crammed shoulder to shoulder. The light makes them squirm and surge, but they’re too tightly packed to move very far.

Gallagher plays the torch’s beam forward and back. The whole length of the hall, they’re packed in like sardines. The hungries they were running from a few hours ago, and their friends, and their friends’ friends. They move peristaltically as the light passes over them. Their jaws open and close.

The sound of gunshots brought them, from wherever they happened to be. Something loud means something living. Now they’re here, and they’ll stay here until they score a meal or until the next big thing winds up their fungus-fucked clockwork and sets them moving.

Gallagher retreats, sickened and scared. He’s lost his enthusiasm for being nightwatchman.

He goes back to the day room. Parks and Justineau are still working their way through the bottle, while Dr Caldwell is stretched out asleep across three chairs.

He thinks maybe he should check in on the hungry kid. Should at least make sure the tether tying her to the radiator is still secure.

He goes through to the room with the toys in it. The kid is sitting on the beanbag, really still and quiet, head down and staring at the floor. Gallagher stifles a shiver; she looks, for a moment, exactly like the monsters filling the downstairs hall.

He props the door open with a chair. He’s buggered if he’s going to be alone with this thing in the near dark. He walks across to her, making a fair amount of noise so she knows he’s coming. She looks up, and it’s a relief to him when she does. It’s not that rangefinder thing that the hungries do, when they look past you on both sides before zeroing in on you. It’s more like what a human being would do.

“What’ve you got there?” Gallagher asks her. The floor is littered with books, so presumably that’s what she was looking at. With her hands cuffed behind her back, looking is all she can do. He picks up the nearest book. The Water-Babies, by Charles Kingsley. It looks really old, with a faded dust jacket on the cover, torn at one corner. The picture shows a bunch of cute little fairies rising into the air over the rooftops of a city. London, maybe, but Gallagher has never seen London and doesn’t have any way of knowing.

The hungry kid is watching him and not saying a word. It’s not an unfriendly look, but it’s really intent. Like she doesn’t know what he’s there for and she’s ready for the surprise not to be a nice one.

All she knows of him is that he’s one of the people who used to tie her up in that chair all the time, and wheel her in and out of the classroom. Gallagher can’t remember now if he’s ever spoken to her before this. Consequently, the words come out a little skewed, a little self-conscious. He’s not even all that sure why he says it.

“You want me to read this to you?”

A moment’s silence. A moment more of that big-eyed stare.

“No,” the kid says.

“Oh.” That’s his entire conversational strategy, shot to shit. He doesn’t have a Plan B. He heads for the door again, and the lighted room beyond. He’s swung the chair out of the way and he’s about to close the door behind him when she blurts it out.

“Can you look on the shelves?”

He turns and steps back inside, replacing the chair. “What?”

There’s a long silence. Like she’s sorry she spoke, and she’s not sure she wants to say it again. He waits her out.

“Can you look on the shelves? Miss Justineau gave me a book, but I had to leave it behind. If the same book is here…”

“Yeah?”

“Then … you could read me that.”

Gallagher hadn’t noticed the bookcase before. He follows the girl’s gaze now, sees it against the wall next to the door. “Okay,” he says. “What was the book called?”

“Tales the Muses Told.” There’s a quickening of excitement in the girl’s voice. “By Roger Lancelyn Green. It’s Greek myths.”

Gallagher goes over to the bookcase, clicks on his torch and plays it over the shelves. Most of these are picture books for little kids, with stapled spines rather than square ones, so he has to pull them out to see what they’re called. There are a few real books, though, and he works his way through them painstakingly.

No Greek myths.

“Sorry,” he says. “It’s not here. You don’t want to try something new?”

“No.”

“There’s Postman Pat here. And his black and white cat.” He holds up a book to show her. The hungry kid gives it a cold stare, then looks away.

Gallagher rejoins her, pulls up a chair at what he considers a safe distance. “My name’s Kieran,” he tells her. This elicits no response at all. “Is there one story in particular that’s your favourite?”

But she doesn’t want to talk to him, and he can understand that. Why the hell would she?

“I’m gonna read this one,” he says. He holds up a book called I Wish I Could Show You. It’s got the same kind of pictures in it as The Cat in the Hat, which is why he chose it. He used to love that story about the cat and the fish and the kids and the two Things called 1 and 2. He liked to imagine his own house getting trashed like that, and then getting put right again just a second before his dad walked in. For Gallagher, aged about seven, that was a huge, illicit thrill.

“I’m gonna sit here and read this one,” he tells the girl again.

She shrugs like that’s his business, not hers.

Gallagher opens the book. The pages are damp, so they stick to each other a little, but he’s able to pull them apart without tearing them.

“When I was out walking one day in the street,” he recites, “I met a young man with red boots on his feet. His belt had a buckle, his hat had a feather. His shirt was of silk and his pants were of leather, and he could not stand still for two seconds together.”

The kid pretends not to listen, but Gallagher isn’t taken in. It’s pretty obvious that she’s tilting her head so she can see the pictures.

Parks shares out some more of the brandy. It’s going fast. Justineau drinks, although she’s just reached the stage where she knows it’s a bad idea. She’ll wake up feeling like shit.

She fans her face, which is uncomfortably hot. Booze always does this to her, even in medicinal amounts. “Jesus,” she says. “I’ve got to get some air.”

But there isn’t much air to be had. The window is safety-locked and opens all of five inches. “We could go up to the roof,” Parks suggests. “There’s a fire door at the end of the corridor that leads up there.”

“Anything to say the roof is safe?” Justineau asks, and the sergeant nods. Yeah, of course, he would have checked it. Love him or hate him, he’s the kind of man who’s built his identity around the blessed sacrament of getting the job done. She saw that out on the green, when he saved all their lives by reacting pretty nearly as fast as the hungries did.

“Okay,” she says. “Let’s see what the roof is like.”

And the roof is just fine. About ten degrees cooler than the day room, with a good, stiff wind blowing in their faces. Well, good is maybe overstating it, because the wind smells of rot – like there’s a big mountain of spoiled meat right next to them, invisible in the dark, and they’re inhaling its taint. Justineau clamps her glass over the lower half of her face like an oxygen mask and breathes brandy breath instead.

“Any idea what that is?” she asks Parks, her voice muffled and distorted by the glass.

“Nope, but it’s stronger over here,” Parks says, “so I suggest we go over there.”

He leads the way to the south-east corner of the building. They’re facing London and distant Beacon – the home that flung them out and is now reeling them back in. Justineau lets absence work its usual magic, even though she knows damn well that Beacon is a shit-hole. A big refugee camp governed by real terror and artificially pumped-up optimism – like the bastard child of Butlins and Colditz. It was already well on the way to totalitarianism when she lucked her way out of there, and she’s not looking forward to finding out what it’s become in the three years that have passed since.

But where else is there?

“The Doc’s a real character, isn’t she?” Parks muses, leaning over the parapet wall and staring out into the darkness. Moonlight paints the town in woodcut black and white like a picture from a book. Black predominates, turning the streets into unfathomable riverbeds of rushing air.

“That’s one word for what she is,” Justineau says.

Parks laughs, jokingly raises the glass – like they’re toasting their shared opinion of Caroline Caldwell. “Truth is,” he says, “in a way I’m glad the whole thing is over. The base, I mean, and the mission. Not glad we’re on the run, obviously, and I’m praying we’re not the only ones who got away. But I’m glad I don’t have to do that any more.”

“Do what?”

Parks makes a gesture. In the near dark, Justineau can’t see what gesture it is. “Keep a lid on the madhouse. Keep the whole place ticking over, month after month, on string and good intentions. Christ, it’s amazing we lasted as long as we did. Not enough men, not enough supplies, no fucking communications, no proper chain of command…”

He seems to stop very suddenly, which makes Justineau go back over his words to figure out which ones he wishes he hadn’t said. “When did communications stop?” she asks him.

He doesn’t answer. So she asks again.

“Last message from Beacon was about five months back,” Parks admits. “Normal signalling wavelengths have been empty ever since.”

“Shit!” Justineau is deeply shaken. “So we don’t even know if … Shit!”

“Most likely it just means they relocated the tower,” Parks says. “Wouldn’t even have to be far. The goosed-together crap we’re using for radios, they don’t work unless they’re pointed right at the signal source. It’s like trying to shoot a basketball into a hoop across sixty bloody miles.”

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 547