The Girl With All The Gifts 13 page

They fall silent, contemplating this. The night seems wider now, and colder.

“My God,” Justineau says at last. “We might be the last. The four of us.”

“We’re not the last.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Yeah, I do. The junkers are doing fine.”

“The junkers…” Justineau’s tone is sour. She’s heard stories, and now she’s seen them for herself. Survivalists who’ve forgotten how to do anything else besides survive. Parasites and scavengers almost as inhuman in their own way as Ophiocordyceps. They don’t build, or preserve. They just stay alive. And their ruthlessly patriarchal structures reduce women to pack animals or breeding stock.

If that’s humanity’s last, best hope, then despair might actually be preferable.

“There’ve been dark ages before,” Parks says, reading her a lot better than she likes. “Things fall down, and people build them up again. There’s probably never been a time when life was just … steady state. There’s always some crisis.

“And then there’s the rest of the world, you know? Beacon was in touch with survivor communities in France, Spain, America, all kinds of places. The cities were hit worst – any place where there was a whole bunch of people crammed in together – and a lot of infrastructure fell with the cities. In less developed areas, the contagion didn’t spread so fast. There could be some places it never even reached at all.”

Parks fills her glass.

“I wanted to ask you something,” he says.

“Go on.”

“Yesterday, you said you were ready to take the kid and split up from the rest of us.”

“So?”

“Did you mean it, by the way? That’s not the question, but would you really have cut loose and tried to make it back to Beacon on your own?”

“I meant it when I said it.”

“Yeah.” He takes a sip of his brandy. “Thought so. Anyway, you called me something, just before you shoved your gun in Gallagher’s face. It didn’t make sense to me at the time. You said we were hard-wired soldier boys. What does hard-wired mean?”

Justineau is embarrassed. “It’s sort of an insult,” she says.

“Yeah, well I’d have been surprised if it was a kiss on the cheek. I was just curious. Does it mean like we’re really ruthless or something?”

“No. It’s a term from psychology. It describes a behaviour that you’re born with and can’t change. Or that’s programmed into you so you don’t even think about it. It’s just automatic.”

Parks laughs. “Like the hungries,” he suggests.

Justineau is a little abashed, but she takes it on the chin. “Yes,” she admits. “Like the hungries.”

“You give good trash talk,” Parks compliments her. “Seriously. That’s outstanding.” He tops up her glass again.

And puts his arm around her shoulder.

Justineau pulls away quickly. “What the hell is this?” she demands.

“I thought you were cold,” Parks says, sounding surprised. “You were shivering. Sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

For a long time she just stands there staring at him, in dead silence.

Then she speaks. And there’s only one thing she can think of to say.

Spits it out at him, like she wants to spit out, retrospectively, the booze, the memory, the last three years of her life.

“You ever kill a kid?”

The question hits Parks squarely between the eyes.

He was feeling pretty mellow up to this point. The brandy has soaked into him, dulling the pain from the many tiny shrapnel wounds he took in his legs and lower back when the stairs went to pieces. And here he thought the two of them were getting along, but no. The teacher’s got him clearly defined in her personal encyclopaedia. For Parks, Sergeant see bastard, bloodthirsty. He’s got a range of answers for this one, most of which would involve reminding her how she’s been able to stay off the hungries’ lunch menu for the last three years. Where her computer came from, and most of the other handy little gadgets that let her do her job. Why Beacon is still standing – if it is – for them to come home to.

But skip it. This isn’t going where he was hoping it would, and there’s nothing to be gained by telling this very attractive woman that she’s both a hypocrite and a whole lot stupider than he thought. It will only make the journey that bit harder.

So he writes it off and heads for the fire door. “I’ll leave you to enjoy the view,” he says over his shoulder.

“I mean, before the Breakdown,” Justineau says to his back. “It’s a straight question, Parks.”

Which makes him stop, and turn around again. “What the hell do you think I am?” he asks her.

“I don’t know what you are. Answer the question. Did you?”

He doesn’t need to think about the answer. He knows where his lines are. They’re not built to move, the way some people’s are.

“No. I’ve shot hungries as young as five or six. You don’t have much choice when they’re trying to eat you alive. But I never killed a kid who you could really say was still alive.”

“Well, I did.”

Now it’s her turn to turn away. She tells him the story without ever making eye contact with him, even though the rampart of a nearby chimney stack throws their faces into shadow and makes eye contact conditional in any case. In the confessional, you never see the priest’s face. But Parks is willing to bet that no priest ever had a face like his.

“I was driving home. After a party. I’d been drinking, but not that much. And I was tired. I was working on a paper, and I’d had a couple of weeks of early mornings and late nights, trying to bring it in. None of this matters. It’s just … you know, you try to make sense of it, afterwards. You look for reasons why it happened.”

The words come out of Helen Justineau in a flat monotone. Parks thinks of Gallagher’s written report, with its proceeding tos and its thereupons. But Justineau’s bowed head and the tightness of her grip on the parapet wall add their own commentary.

“I was driving along this road. In Hertfordshire, between South Mimms and Potters Bar. A few houses, every now and then, but mostly miles of hedges, then a pub, then some more hedges. I wasn’t expecting … I mean, it was late. Way after midnight. I didn’t think anyone at all would be out, still less…

“Someone ran into the road in front of me. He came through a gap in one of the hedges, I think. There wasn’t anywhere else he could have come from. He was just there, suddenly, and I hit the brakes but I was already right on top of him. It didn’t make a bit of difference. I must have been going over fifty when I hit him, and he just … he bounced off the car like a ball.

“I stopped, a long way up the road. A hundred yards or so. I got out, and came running back. I was hoping, obviously … but he was dead, no question. A boy. About eight or nine years old, maybe. I’d killed a child. Broken him in pieces, inside his skin, so his arms and legs didn’t even bend the right way.

“I think I stayed there a long time. I was shaking, and crying, and I couldn’t … I couldn’t get up. It felt like a long time. I wanted to run away, and I couldn’t even move.”

She looks at the sergeant, now, but the darkness hides her expression almost completely. Only the twisted line of her mouth shows. It reminds him, right then, of the line of his scar.

“But then I did,” she says. “I did move. I got up, and I drove away. Locked my car in the garage and went to bed. I even slept, Parks. Can you believe that?

“I never did make up my mind what to do about it. If I confessed, I’d most likely go to jail, and my career would be over. And it wouldn’t bring him back, so what would be the point? Of course, I knew damn well what the point was, and I picked up that phone about six or seven times in the next couple of days, but I never dialled. And then the world ended, so I didn’t have to. I got away with it. Got away clean.”

Parks waits a long while, until he’s absolutely certain that Justineau’s monologue is finished. The truth is, for most of the time he’s been trying to figure out what it is exactly that she’s trying to tell him. Maybe he was right the first time about where they were heading, and Justineau airing her ancient laundry is just a sort of palate-cleanser before they have sex. Probably not, but you never know. In any case, the countermove to a confession is an absolution, unless you think the sin is unforgivable. Parks doesn’t.

“It was an accident,” he tells her, pointing out the obvious. “And probably you would have ended up doing the right thing. You don’t strike me as the sort of person who just lets shit slide.” He means that, as far as it goes. One of the things he likes about Justineau is her seriousness. He frigging flat-out hates frivolous, thoughtless people who dance across the surface of the world without looking down.

“Yeah, but you don’t get it,” Justineau says. “Why do you think I’m telling you all this?”

“I don’t know,” Parks admits. “Why are you telling me?”

Justineau steps away from the parapet wall and squares off against him – range, zero metres. It could be erotic, but somehow it’s not.

“I killed that boy, Parks. If you turn my life into an equation, the number that comes out is minus one. That’s my lifetime score, you understand me? And you … you and Caldwell, and Private Ginger fucking Rogers … my God, whether it means anything or not, I will die my own self before I let you take me down to minus two.”

She says the last words right into his face. Sprays him with little flecks of spit. This close up, dark as it is, he can see her eyes. There’s something mad in them. Something deeply afraid, but it’s damn well not afraid of him.

She leaves him with the bottle. It’s not what he was hoping for, but it’s a pretty good consolation prize.

Caroline Caldwell waits until the sergeant and Justineau leave the room. Then she gets up quickly and goes through into the kitchen.

She saw the Tupperware boxes earlier, stacked in the furthest cupboard along – ranged in order of size, so they formed a steep-sided pyramid. Nobody else spared them a second glance, because the boxes were empty. But Caldwell noted them with a small surge of pleasure. Every so often, even now, the universe gives you exactly what you need.

She takes six boxes of the smallest size and six teaspoons, dropping them one by one into the pockets of her lab coat. She brings a torch, too, but doesn’t turn it on until she reaches her destination and closes the door.

She breathes in shallow sips. The smell of the human remains, and of years of enclosed decay, freights the air so heavily it’s almost a physical presence.

With the spoons, Caldwell takes a range of samples from the hungry that was killed by Sergeant Parks. She’s only interested in brain tissue, but multiple samples mean more chance of getting at least one that’s not too badly contaminated by flora and fauna from skin, clothes or ambient air.

After sealing each container carefully, she puts them back into her pockets. She discards the soiled spoons, for which she has no further use.

She thinks as she works: I should have done this years ago. Men like the sergeant have their uses, and she knows she could never have collected the test subjects by herself. But if she’d been there with the trappers as part of the team, she wouldn’t have had to rely on their inadequate observations and unreliable memories.

So she wouldn’t have wasted so much time exploring blind alleys.

She would have known, for example, that although most hungries have only the two states – the rest state and the hunting state – some have a third state that corresponds to a degraded version of normal consciousness. They can interact with the world around them, fitfully and partially, in ways that echo their behaviour before they were infected.

The woman with the baby carriage. The singing man, with his wallet full of photos. These are trivial examples, but they represent something momentous. Caldwell is very close, she knows, to an unprecedented breakthrough. She can’t do anything with these samples until she gets back to Beacon and has access to a microscope, but an idea is forming in her mind as to what it is she should be looking for. What shape her research will take, once she’s back in a lab and has everything she needs.

Including, of course, test subject number one.

Melanie.

Justineau is roused from sleep by a hand shaking her shoulder. She panics momentarily, thinking that she’s being attacked, but it’s Parks she’s struggling against, Parks’ grip that she’s trying to slap away. And it’s not just her. He’s waking everyone, telling them to get their arses over to the window. The sun has come up on a pretty ugly and depressing state of affairs, and they need to see it.

The hungries who chased them the day before have not dispersed. They stand two or three deep along the length of the fence around Wainwright House, most of them having stopped dead when they hit that barrier.

The downstairs hall is full of those who didn’t stop – who chased their human quarry all the way inside. From the stump of the top stair, you can stand and look down on a crowd of gaunt, gaping monsters, standing shoulder to shoulder like the audience for some sell-out event.

Which would be breakfast.

Tense and scared, the four of them canvass possibilities. They can’t shoot their way out, obviously. They could waste all their ammunition and not even make a dent in those numbers. Besides, loud noise was the trigger that got them into this mess in the first place; producing more of it runs the risk of attracting more monsters from even further afield.

Justineau wonders if maybe they can use that.

“If you were to throw some hand grenades,” she suggests to Parks, “say, from the top of the roof. The hungries will target on the sound, right? We could draw them off, and then when the fence is clear we just run in the opposite direction.”

Parks spreads his empty hands. “No grenades,” he says. “I just had the ones on my belt, and I used them all when I pulled up the drawbridge last night.”

Gallagher opens his mouth, shuts it, tries again. “Could make some Molotovs?” he suggests. He nods toward the kitchen. “There’s bottles of cooking oil in there.”

“I don’t believe breaking bottles would make a particularly loud noise,” Dr Caldwell says acerbically.

“It might be loud enough,” Parks muses, but he doesn’t sound convinced. “Even if it wasn’t, we could set fire to the fuckers and clear a bit of space for ourselves that way.”

“Not the ones downstairs in the hallway,” Caldwell counters. “I don’t relish the prospect of being trapped in a burning building.”

“And there’d be smoke,” Justineau says. “Probably a lot of it. If the junkers are still looking for us, we’d be putting up a big sign telling them where we are.”

“Just empty bottles, then?” Gallagher says. “No oil. We try to draw them away with the sound.”

Parks looks out of the window. He doesn’t even need to say it. The distance from the roof and windows of the house to the pavement outside the fence is about thirty yards. You could throw a bottle that far, but you’d need to put your shoulder into it, and you’d want luck and the wind to both be with you. If the thrown bottles fall short, they’ll just entice the hungries who stopped at the gates to come on inside.

Same thing would have gone for grenades too, of course. They probably would have done more harm than good.

They go back and forth, but nobody can suggest an easy or obvious way out. They’ve let themselves get cornered, by predators who won’t lose interest or wander away. Waiting this out isn’t an option, and all the other options look bad.

Justineau goes to check on Melanie. The girl is already on her feet, looking out of the window, but she turns at the sound of footsteps. Probably she’s heard their conversation in the next room. Justineau tries to reassure her. “We’ll think of something,” she says. “There’s a way out of this.”

Melanie nods calmly.

“I know,” she says.

Parks doesn’t like the idea, which doesn’t surprise Justineau at all. And Caldwell likes it even less.

Only Gallagher seems to approve, and he doesn’t do more than nod – seeming reluctant to say anything that directly contradicts his sergeant.

They’re sitting in the day room, on four chairs that they’ve pulled up into a small circle. It provides the illusion that they’re actually talking to each other, although Caldwell is off in her own world, Gallagher won’t speak until he’s spoken to, and Parks listens to nobody but himself.

“I don’t like the idea of letting her off the leash,” he says, for about the third time.

“Why the hell not?” Justineau demands. “You were happy enough to cut her loose two days ago. The leash and the handcuffs were so she could stay with us. Your idea of a compromise. So from your point of view, there’s nothing to lose here. Nothing at all. If she does what she says she’ll do, we’re out of this mess. If she runs away, we’re no worse off than we are now.”

Caldwell ignores this speech and makes her appeal directly to the sergeant. “Melanie belongs to me,” she reminds him. “To my programme. If we lose her, it will be your responsibility.”

It’s the wrong thing to say. Parks doesn’t seem to like being threatened. “I spent four years servicing your programme, Doc,” he reminds her. “Today is my day off.”

Caldwell starts to say something else, but Parks talks over her – to Justineau. “If we let her go, why would she come back?”

“I wish I could answer that,” Justineau says. “Frankly, it’s a complete mystery to me. But she says she will, and I believe her. Maybe because we’re all she knows.”

Maybe because she’s got a crush on me, and all love is as blind as it needs to be.

“I want to talk to her,” Parks says. “Bring her in.”

On the leash still, with her hands behind her back and the muzzle over her mouth, she faces Parks like the chieftain of a savage tribe, on her dignity, and Justineau is suddenly aware of the changes in her. She’s out in the world now, her education accelerating from a standing start to some dangerous, unguessable velocity. She thinks of an old painting. And When Did You Last See Your Father? Because Melanie’s stance is exactly the same as the way the kid stands in that picture. For Melanie, though, that would be a completely meaningless question.

“You think you can do this?” Parks asks her instead. “What you said to Miss Justineau. You think you’re up to it?”

“Yes,” Melanie says.

“It means I’d have to trust you. Set you free, right here in the room with us.” He’s been holding something in his right hand, shaking it as though it’s a dice he was going to throw. He shows it to her now: the key to her handcuffs.

“I don’t think it means that, Sergeant Parks,” Melanie says.

“No?”

“No. You have to set me free, but you don’t have to trust me. You should put the chemical stuff all over your skin first, to make really sure I don’t smell you. And you should make Kieran unlock the handcuffs while you aim your gun at me. And you don’t have to take the cage thing off my mouth. I just need to be able to use my hands.”

Parks stares at her for a moment, like she’s something written in a language he doesn’t speak.

“Got it all figured out,” he acknowledges.

“Yes.”

He leans forward to look her in the eye. “And you’re not scared?”

Melanie hesitates. “Of what?” she asks him. Justineau is amazed at that momentary pause. Yes or no would be equally easy to say, whether they were true or not. The pause means that Melanie is scrupulous, is weighing her words. It means she’s trying to be honest with them.

As if they’ve done a single thing, ever, to deserve that.

“Of the hungries,” Parks says, like it’s obvious.

Melanie shakes her head.

“How come?”

“They won’t hurt me.”

“No? Why not?”

“Enough,” Justineau snaps, but Melanie answers anyway. Slowly. Ponderously. As though the words are stones she’s using to build a wall.

“They don’t bite each other.”

“And?”

“I’m the same as them. Almost. Close enough so they don’t get hungry when they smell me.”

Parks nods slowly. This is where the catechism has been leading all this time. He wants to know how much Melanie has already guessed. Where her head is. He’s working his way through the logistics.

“The same as them, or almost the same? Which is it?”

Melanie’s face is unreadable, but some powerful emotion flits across it, doesn’t settle. “I’m different because I don’t want to eat anyone.”

“No? Then what was that red stuff all over you when you jumped on board the Humvee, day before yesterday? Looked like blood to me.”

“Sometimes I need to eat people. I never want to.”

“That’s all you’ve got, kid? Shit happens?”

Another pause. Longer, this time. “It hasn’t happened to you.”

“Very true,” Parks admits. “Still feels like we’re splitting hairs, though. You’re offering to help us against those things down there, when it seems to me that you’d want to be down there with them, looking up at us, waiting for the dinner bell to ring. So I guess that’s what I’m asking you. Why would you come back, and why would I believe you’d come back?”

For the first time, Melanie lets her impatience show. “I’d come back because I want to. Because I’m with you, not with them. And there isn’t any way to be with them, even if I wanted to. They’re…” Whatever concept she’s reaching for, it eludes her for a moment. “They’re not with each other. Not ever.”

Nobody answers her, but Parks looks happy with this. Like she got the secret password. She’s in the club. The hopelessly-outnumbered-and-surrounded-by-monsters club.

“I’m with you,” Melanie says again. And then, as if it needed saying, “Not you, really. I’m with Miss Justineau.”

Surprisingly, Parks seems satisfied with this too. He stands, with a decisive air. “I get that,” he says. “Okay, kid. We’re going to trust you to get this job done. Let’s go.”

Melanie stays where she is.

“What?” Parks demands. “Something else you need?”

“Yes,” Melanie tells him. “I want to wear my new clothes, please.”

They take her to the top of the stairs. To where the top of the stairs was, before Sergeant Parks exploded them. Melanie peers over the edge.

There are lots and lots of hungries down there. Maybe a hundred or more, all standing together in the hallway. They look up as the two men and two women come into view, their heads all moving together like flowers following the sun.

Sergeant Parks doesn’t get his gun out, but he makes Melanie turn away as he unlocks the cuffs, and he tells her not to move. She feels them fall away, and she wants to wiggle her fingers to make sure they still work okay, but she doesn’t.

Sergeant Parks unties the leash from around her neck, too, and she turns to Miss J, who’s ready with the little bundle of clothes.

It’s unpleasant to have the sweater – Miss Justineau’s sweater, which she’s worn all this time – lifted off over her head. To be momentarily naked again. It’s not the scrutiny of the adults she dislikes, it’s the feel of air directly on her body. The sensation of being so exposed.

But as Miss J dresses her in her new finery, that feeling goes away. She likes the jeans and the T-shirt very much – and the jacket, which is a little like Sergeant Parks’ jacket. It’s only the trainers that feel strange. She’s never worn shoes before, and the loss of the stream of information her feet receive from the ground is disturbing. It’s possible that she and the trainers might not be a long-term thing. But they’re so beautiful!

“Done?” Parks says.

“You look great, Melanie,” Miss Justineau tells her.

She nods thanks, and agreement. She knows she does.

But they’re not done. Not yet. Miss Justineau takes something out of her pocket and holds it out for Melanie to take. It’s a tiny thing, made out of grey plastic. Rectangular, with a single round button on it. Around the edge of the button, in red letters are the words SAFE and GUARD. And then underneath, DANGER 150 DECIBELS.

“When you get to the part where you have to make a big noise,” Miss Justineau tells her, “this might help.”

“What is it?” Melanie asks. She’s trying to look casual and calm, like getting a present from Miss Justineau is no big deal.

“It’s a personal alarm. From a long time ago. People used to carry them in case they got attacked.”

“By hungries?”

“No, by other people. It makes a noise like the end-of-the-day klaxon back at the base, but much, much louder – loud enough to make people panic, so they want to run away. But hungries wouldn’t run away, they’d run towards the sound. It might not work at all, after all this time, but you never know.”

Melanie hesitates. “You should keep it,” she says. “In case you get attacked.”

Miss Justineau closes Melanie’s fingers over the object, which is still warm from being in her pocket. It’s like a little piece of Miss Justineau that she can take out into the world with her. The weight of her new knowledge is still pressing her down, but her heart swells with joy as she puts the alarm into the pocket of her brand-new unicorn jeans.

“Done,” she confirms to Sergeant Parks. Sergeant’s face says about time. He ties the leash up again around Melanie’s waist with a different knot.

“Once you’re down on the ground,” he tells her, “you pull on this end here, and the rope will come away.”

“Okay,” she says.

“I’m not taking your muzzle off,” Sergeant says. “But with your hands free, you could easily release the strap yourself and get it off. You’re a smart kid, and I bet you thought of that already.”

Melanie shrugs. Of course she has, and there doesn’t seem to be any point in trying to explain to him all over again why she won’t do that.

“Just so you know,” Sergeant Parks says, “if you want to stay with us, you’re going to need to keep the muzzle on. Or put it back on when you’re done. I don’t have any more of them, and as far as I’m concerned, your teeth are a loaded gun. So keep that thing safe, because that’s what gets you back in the door. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Okay then. Gallagher, give me a hand here.”

The two men move into position at the top of the stairs and get ready to pay out the rope, but at the last moment Miss Justineau kneels beside Melanie again and holds out her arms.

Melanie steps into the embrace, shivers deliciously as Miss Justineau’s arms close around her.

But she pulls away after no more than a moment. There’s just a tiny trace of the human smell, the Miss Justineau smell, underneath the bitterness of the chemicals. Enough to turn the pure pleasure of their proximity into something else entirely; something that threatens to escalate out of her control. “Not safe,” she mutters urgently. “Not safe.”

“Your e-blockers,” Sergeant Parks translates unnecessarily. “You need another layer.”

“I’m sorry,” Miss Justineau murmurs – not to Sergeant Parks, but to Melanie.

Melanie nods. She was scared for a moment there, but it’s okay. It was a very faint scent, and now that it’s gone, the hungry feeling is back under her control.

Sergeant Parks tells her to sit down on the top step, and then to push herself away. He and Kieran lower her down into the waiting crowd of hungries.

Who don’t react at all. Some of them follow the movement as she comes down, but Sergeant Parks makes sure that her descent is really slow and gradual, so it doesn’t get the hungries too excited. Their gaze sweeps over her without lingering. Or else they stare right through her, not registering her presence at all.

As soon as her feet are on the ground, she loosens the rope with a tug. Sergeant Parks draws it up again, just as slowly and gradually as he let it down.

Melanie glances up. Sees Sergeant Parks and Miss Justineau peering down at her. Miss Justineau waves; a slow opening and closing of her hand. Melanie waves back.

She threads her way carefully through the hungries, un-noticed, unmolested.

But she was lying when she said she wasn’t afraid. To be right here in the middle of them – to look up at their bowed heads and half-open mouths, their off-white eyes – is very frightening indeed. Yesterday she thought that the hungries were like houses that people used to live in. Now she thinks that every one of those houses is haunted. She’s not just surrounded by the hungries. She’s surrounded by the ghosts of the men and women they used to be. She has to fight a sudden urge to break into a run, to get out of here into the open air as quickly as she can.

She makes it to the door, pushing between the packed-together bodies. But the doorway itself is completely impassable. Too many hungries have squeezed themselves into the narrow space between the doorposts, and she’s not strong enough to break up that logjam. But the floor-to-ceiling windows to either side of the door have been shattered, every last sliver of glass forced out of their frames by the hungries charging through. Some of those closest to Melanie bear the slash marks from that difficult passage on their arms and bodies. From the new wounds a sluggish brown liquid has oozed. It doesn’t look much like blood.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 585