The Girl With All The Gifts 14 page

Melanie pushes her way out through the left-hand window. More hungries are standing out on the driveway, but they’re not so tightly clustered and it’s easier for her to make her way through.

To the gates, and then out on to the street.

She walks past more hungries. They don’t turn as she goes by or seem to notice her at all. She crosses to the overgrown green and walks in among the trees and tall grass.

Melanie likes it here. If she were free, if she had lots of time and nothing that she needed to do, she’d like to stay here for a long time and pretend that she’s in the Amazon rainforest, which she knows about from a lesson with Miss Mailer, a long time ago, and from the picture on the wall of her cell.

But she’s not free, and time is pressing. If she takes too long, Miss Justineau might think she’s run away and left her, and she’d rather die than let Miss Justineau think that even for a second.

She’s hoping for a rat like the one that scared Dr Caldwell, but there are no rats. No birds, even, but in any case a bird probably wouldn’t do for what she needs.

So she looks further afield, walking up and down the streets, through the open doors of houses, through the jumbled, desecrated remains of vanished lives, trying not to be distracted by the ornaments, the photos, the hundreds and thousands of inscrutable objects.

In a room silted up a foot deep with old brown leaves, she startles a fox. It leaps for a broken window, but Melanie is on it so quickly that she catches it in mid-air. She’s thrilled at her own speed.

And at her strength. Though the fox is as big as she is, when it squirms and thrashes in her arms she just tightens her grip, closing down its range of movement, until it stills, quivering, whining, and lets her take it where she wants.

Back up the street to the green. Across the green to the fence where the hungries are clustered, every face turned away from her, every body still.

Melanie screams. It’s the loudest sound she can make. Not as loud as Miss Justineau’s personal alarm would be, but both her hands are full of fox and she doesn’t want to let it go until all the hungries are looking at her.

When the heads turn, she opens her arms. The fox is away like an arrow flying out of Ulysses’ bow.

Primed by the sound, awake and alert for prey, the hungries obey their programming. They start into violent motion, run after the fox as though they’re joined to it by taut strings. Melanie backs out of the way quickly, into a doorway, as the first wave goes by her.

There are so many of them, crowded in so tightly together, that some of them get knocked down and trampled on. Melanie sees them trying again and again to get up, only to be trodden underfoot each time. It’s almost funny, but the grey-brown froth that’s forced out of their mouths, like wine from grapes, makes it sort of sad and horrible too. When the rest of the horde have run on down the road, almost out of sight, some of these fallen struggle to their feet and limp and crawl after them. Others stay where they fell, twitching and scrabbling but too badly broken to get up off the ground.

Melanie skirts around them carefully. She feels bad for them. She wishes that there was something she could do to help them, but there isn’t anything. She goes back in through the gates and walks up to the house. She enters the hall, which is completely deserted now, and calls up to Sergeant Parks, who is exactly where he was when she left. “It worked. They’ve gone now.”

“Stay there,” Sergeant Parks calls down. “We’ll join you.”

And then, after looking at her hard for a few moments longer:

“Good job, kid.”

Getting everyone down to street level is easy enough, with the ropes. Sergeant Parks decides the order: Gallagher first, so there’s someone on the ground who knows how to use a gun, then Helen Justineau, then Dr Caldwell, with himself bringing up the rear. Dr Caldwell is the only one who presents any kind of a problem, since her bandaged hands won’t allow her to grip the rope. Parks makes a running knot, which he ties around her waist, and lowers her down.

They could retrace their steps, but it’s easier to keep going through the town. There are any number of places where they can pick up the A1 again, and they’ll actually get out from among the buildings more quickly if they steer east of south, past a region of desolate industrial estates. Not many people ever lived out here, and after the Breakdown the pickings were thin for uninfected survivors, whose needs ran more to food than to heavy plant, so they don’t see many hungries at all. Of course, they’re also following roughly the same line that the fox took, at least to start with. That irresistible moving target cleared the way for them very effectively.

So that’s twice now that the hungry kid has saved their bacon. If she makes the hat-trick, maybe Parks will even start to relax a little around her. Hasn’t happened yet though.

They discuss logistics as they walk, in low, measured voices that won’t carry too far. Parks feels they should stick to Plan A, despite the clusterfuck they just experienced.

His reasons are the same as they were. The direct route through London will save them at least two days’ travel, and they still need shelter when they stop and sleep.

“Even given that the shelter can turn into a trap?” Dr Caldwell asks tartly.

“Well, that’s an issue,” Parks allows. “But on the other hand, if we’d been out in the open when those hungries came for us last night, we wouldn’t have lasted ten fucking heartbeats. Just a thought.”

Caldwell doesn’t attempt a comeback, so he doesn’t have to remind her that it was her striking up an acquaintance with a female hungry out on the street that got them into trouble in the first place. And nobody else seems inclined to argue. They continue on their way, the conversation dying out into wary silence.

Over the course of the morning, their line stretches out unacceptably. Gallagher takes point, as Parks ordered him to do. Helen Justineau sticks with the kid, who manages a reasonable pace despite her shorter legs, but keeps being distracted and slowed by the things they pass. Dr Caldwell is slowest of all, the gap between her and the others gradually but steadily increasing. She quickens her stride whenever Parks asks her to, but always slows again after a minute or two. That desperate fatigue, so early in the day, worries him.

They’re moving now through a burn shadow, another artefact of the Breakdown. Before the government fell apart entirely, it passed a whole series of badly thought-out emergency orders, one of which involved chemical incendiaries sprayed from helicopter gunships to create cauterised zones that were guaranteed free from hungries. Uninfected civilians were warned in advance by sirens and looped messages, but a lot of them died anyway because they weren’t free to move when the choppers flew in.

The hungries, though, they ran ahead of the flame-throwers like roaches when the light goes on. All the incendiaries could do was to move them on a few miles in one direction or another, and in some cases to destroy infrastructure that might have saved a lot of lives. Luton Airport, for instance. That got torched with about forty planes still on the ground, so when the next memo came round – about evacuating the uninfected to the Channel Islands using commercial carrier fleets – all the army could do was shrug its collective shoulders and say, “Yeah, we wish.”

The buildings on this part of their route are foreshortened stumps, not so much burned down as rendered into tallow. The monstrous heat of the incendiaries melted not just metal but brick and stone. The ground they’re walking on carries a thin black crust of grease and charcoal, the residue of organic materials that burned and sublimed, took to the air and settled again wherever the hot winds of combustion took them.

The air has a sour, acid tang to it. After ten minutes or so, your breath is rasping in your throat and there’s an itchy feeling in your chest that you can’t scratch because it’s inside you.

It’s more than twenty years on and still nothing grows here, not even the hardiest and most bad-ass of weeds. Nature’s way of saying she’s not stupid enough to be caught like that twice over.

Parks hears the kid asking Justineau what happened here. Justineau makes heavy weather of the question, even though it’s an easy one. We couldn’t kill the hungries, so we killed ourselves. That was always our favourite party trick.

The burn shadow goes on for mile after mile, oppressing their spirits and draining their stamina. It’s past time they stopped, grabbed some rest and rations, but nobody’s keen to sit down on this tainted ground. By unspoken consensus, they press on.

It’s really sudden, when they reach the edge of it, but the shadow’s got one more miracle to show them. Over the space of a hundred steps they go from black to green, from death to hectic life, from dry-baked limbo to a field of massive thistles and dense hollyhocks.

But there was a house here on the borderland that burned but didn’t fall. And against its rear wall there are heat shadows, where something living collapsed against the hot brick and burned with different colours, different breakdown products. Two of them, one large and one small, painted in deep black against the grey-black of their surroundings.

An adult and a child, arms thrown up as though they were caught in the middle of an aerobics workout.

Fascinated, the hungry kid measures herself against the smaller shape. It fits her pretty well.

What she thinks is: this could have been me. Why not? A real girl, in a real house, with a mother and a father and a brother and a sister and an aunt and an uncle and a nephew and a niece and a cousin and all those other words for the map of people who love each other and stay together. The map called family.

Growing up and growing old. Playing. Exploring. Like Pooh and Piglet. And then like the Famous Five. And then like Heidi and Anne of Green Gables. And then like Pandora, opening the great big box of the world and not being afraid, not even caring whether what’s inside is good or bad. Because it’s both. Everything is always both.

But you have to open it to find that out.

They stop and eat, setting their faces against the dead zone they’ve just crossed.

Sergeant Parks has brought some of the tins from the kitchen in Wainwright House with him in his pack. Miss Justineau and Dr Caldwell and the soldiers eat cold sausage and beans and cold Scotch broth. Melanie eats something called Spam, which is a bit like the meat she had the night before, but not so nice.

They face south, away from the thing that Miss Justineau called a burn shadow – but Melanie keeps turning her head to look back the way they’ve come. They’re on a rise in the ground, so she can see a long way to the north, all the way back to the town where they slept last night and where she loosed the fox. Mile after mile of gentle rise and fall, baked and blackened to charcoal. She catechises Miss Justineau again to make sure she understands, the two of them talking in low voices that don’t carry.

“Was it green before?” Melanie asks, pointing.

“Yes. Just like the countryside we passed through right after we left the base.”

“Why did they burn it?”

“They were trying to keep the hungries contained, in the first few weeks after the infection appeared.”

“But it didn’t work?”

“No. They were scared, and they panicked. A lot of the people who should have been making the important decisions were infected themselves, or else they ran away and hid. The ones who were left didn’t really know what they were doing. But I’m not sure there was anything better they could have done. It was too late, by then. All the evil shit they were afraid of had already happened, pretty much.”

“The evil shit?” Melanie queries.

“The hungries.”

Melanie contemplates this equation. It may be true, but she doesn’t like it. She doesn’t like it at all. “I’m not evil, Miss Justineau.”

Miss J is penitent. She touches Melanie on the arm, gives her a brief but reassuring squeeze. It’s not as nice as a hug, but also not so dangerous. “I know you’re not, sweetheart. I wasn’t saying that.”

“But I am a hungry.”

A pause. “You’re infected,” Miss J says. “But you’re not a hungry, because you can still think, and they can’t.”

That distinction hasn’t struck Melanie until now, or at least hasn’t weighed much against the planetary mass of her realisation. But it is a real difference. Does it make other differences possible? Does it make her not be a monster after all?

These ontological questions come first, and loom largest. Another, more practical one peeps out from behind them.

“Is that why I’m a crucially important specimen?”

Miss J makes a hurting face, then an angry one. “That’s why you’re important to Dr Caldwell’s research project. She believes she can find something inside you that will help her to make medicine for everyone else. An antidote. So they can’t ever be turned into hungries, or if they’re turned, they can be changed back again.”

Melanie nods. She knows that’s really important. She also knows that not all the evils that struck this land had the same cause and origin. The infection was bad. So were the things that the important-decision people did to control the infection. And so is catching little children and cutting them into pieces, even if you’re doing it to try to make medicine that stops people being hungries.

It’s not just Pandora who had that inescapable flaw. It seems like everyone has been built in a way that sometimes makes them do wrong and stupid things. Or almost everyone. Not Miss Justineau, of course.

Sergeant Parks is signalling to them to stand and start walking again. Melanie walks ahead of Miss Justineau, letting the leash run taut as she revolves all these dizzying things in her mind. For the first time she doesn’t wish that she was back in her cell. She’s starting to see that the cell was a tiny piece of something much bigger, of which everyone who’s with her here used to be a part.

She’s starting to make connections that build outwards from her own existence in some surprising and scary directions.

London swallows them very slowly, a piece at a time.

It’s not like Stevenage, where you basically walk in from open fields and open roads and find yourself suddenly in the heart of the town. For Kieran Gallagher, who found Stevenage pretty big and impressive, this is an experience at once so intense and so drawn out that it’s hard to process.

They walk, and they walk, and they walk, and they’re still coming into the city – whose heart, Sergeant Parks tells him, is at least another ten miles south of them at this point.

“All the places we’ve passed through today,” Helen Justineau tells Gallagher, taking pity on his awe and unease, “they used to be separate towns. But the developers just kept building outwards from London, as more and more people came to live there, and eventually all those other towns just got absorbed into the mass.”

“How many people?” Gallagher knows he sounds like a ten-year-old, but he still has to ask.

“Millions. A lot more people than there are in the whole of England now. Unless…”

She doesn’t finish the sentence, but Gallagher knows what she means. Unless you count the hungries. But you can’t. They’re not people any more. Well, except for this weird little kid, who’s like…

He’s not sure what she’s like. A live girl, maybe, dressed up as a hungry. But not even that. An adult, dressed as a kid, dressed as a hungry. Weirdly, probing his feelings the way you stick your tongue into the place where a tooth fell out, Gallagher finds himself liking her. And one of the reasons why he likes her is because she’s so different from him. She’s as big as four-fifths of five-eighths of fuck all, but she takes no bullshit from anyone. She even talks back to the Sarge, which is like watching a mouse bark at a pitbull. Frigging amazing!

But he and the kid have got this much in common: they both walk into London with their mouths hanging open, barely able to process what they’re seeing. How could there ever have been enough people to live in all these houses? How could they ever have built their towers so high? And how could anything in the whole world ever have conquered them?

As the fields beside the road give way to streets, and then more streets, and then a hell of a lot more streets on top of that, they sight more and more hungries. The Sarge has already told him about the density law. The more living people there once were in any place, the more hungries will probably be there now, unless it’s a place where burn patrols have been through or bombs have been dropped. And that’s just what they find.

But the thing about the hungries is that they cluster, just like they did in Stevenage, and with that near-disaster fresh in his memory, the Sarge isn’t taking any chances. They go slowly, doing recce along parallel streets and choosing the ones where the hungries aren’t. If you’re prepared to fake and double a little bit, you can stay clear of the mouldy bastards for long stretches. He and Parks take point on this at first, but increasingly they use the kid because (a) she runs no risk and (b) they know after Stevenage that she’ll come back. She’s the perfect advance scout.

The first few times, Sergeant Parks undoes the leash each time and then ties her up again when she comes back. Then one time he forgets to tie her up, or decides not to, and after that the leash just stays tucked in his belt. She’s still got the muzzle on, and her hands cuffed behind her, but she walks along with the rest of them, free to stride ahead or dawdle along behind.

The density of hungries holds high but steady through most of that afternoon. And then, weirdly, it starts to come down again. It’s after they’ve passed through a place called Barnet, and they’re walking down a long straight road strewn with abandoned vehicles. It’s the sort of terrain that the Sarge hates, and he’s watchful, keeping them in a tight group as they thread their way through the saloon car Sargasso.

But they barely see a single hungry, all the way down the road. Even though this area is all built up and ought to be crawling. And when they do get a sighting, mostly the deadbeats are a long way off, sprinting across the street north of them in pursuit of a stray cat, or just loitering at corners like streetwalkers from some apocalyptic nightmare.

The kid – Melanie – is walking beside Gallagher, for part of the way. She catches his gaze and then points, with her eyes, up and right. When he looks, he sees another marvel. It’s like a cross between a car and a house. Bright red, with two rows of windows, and – he can see them very clearly – a flight of stairs inside it. But it’s on wheels. The whole thing is on wheels. Insane!

The two of them, Gallagher and the kid, go up and examine it together. This takes the kid further away from Helen Justineau than she’s been at any time since they left Stevenage, but Justineau is looking at something else and talking with the Sarge and the doctor. They’re free, for a moment, to follow their shared curiosity.

The two-storey car has crashed into the front of a shop. It’s canted over on its side, just a little, and all of its windows are shattered. The perished tyres have fallen away in curved strips like the grey-black rinds of some weird fruit. There’s no blood, no bodies, nothing to indicate what happened to this awkward, towering chariot. It just reached the end of its journey here, probably a very long time ago, and it’s stood here ever since.

“It’s called a bus,” Melanie tells him.

“Yeah, I knew that,” Gallagher lies. He’s heard the word, but he’s never seen one. “Of course it’s a bus.”

“Anyone could ride on them, if they had a ticket. Or a card. There was a card that you could put into a machine, and the machine would read it and let you on to the bus. They’d stop and start all the time, to let people get on and off. And there were special parts of the road that only buses could go on. They were a lot better for the environment than everyone driving their own cars.”

Gallagher nods slowly, like none of this is news to him. But the truth is, this vanished world is something he’s profoundly ignorant of, and barely ever thinks about. A child of the Breakdown, he was a lot less interested in tales of the glorious past than in how he could cadge a bit of someone else’s bread ration. He uses the artefacts of the past all the time, obviously. His gun and knife were made back then. So were the base’s buildings, and the fence, and most of the furniture. The Humvee. The radio. The fridge in the rec room. Gallagher is a squatter in the ruins of empire, but he doesn’t interrogate the ruins any more than you’d interrogate the meat you eat to try to guess what animal it came from. Most of the time it’s better not to know.

In fact, the ancient relic that most excited his curiosity was a porno mag that Private Si Brooks had under the mattress of his bunk. Leafing reverently through its pages, for the standard price of one and a half ciggies, Gallagher had wondered at length whether the women of the pre-Breakdown world really had bodies with those colours and those textures. None of the women he’s ever seen look like that. He blushes to remember this now, with the little girl beside him, and he glances down to make sure that his thoughts haven’t surfaced in some readable way on his face.

Melanie is still looking at the bus, fascinated by its construction.

Gallagher decides enough is enough. They should go back to the others. Almost unconsciously, he reaches out a hand to take hers. He freezes in the middle of the gesture. Melanie hasn’t noticed, and she couldn’t take his hand in any case because her own are cuffed behind her back, but what a stupid, stupid thing to do. If the Sarge had seen…

But the Sarge is still in deep and earnest conversation with Justineau and Dr Caldwell, and hasn’t seen a thing. Relieved, shaken, sheepish, Gallagher joins them.

Then he sees what it is that the other three are looking at, and these thoughts slip from his mind. It’s a hungry, lying full length on the ground, in an alcove formed by the entrance of a shop.

Sometimes they fall down and can’t get up, when the rot inside them fucks up their nervous system to the point where it doesn’t really work any more. He’s seen them sprawled on their sides, random shudders passing through them like jolts of electricity, their grey-on-grey eyes staring at the sun. Maybe that’s what happened to this one.

But something else has happened to it too. Its chest has broken wide open, forced open from within by … Gallagher has no idea what that thing is. A white column, at least six feet high, flaring at the top into a sort of flat round pillow thing with fluted edges – and with bulbous growths on its sides like blisters. The texture of the column is rough and uneven, but the blisters are shiny. If you tilt your head when you look at them, they’ve got an oil-on-water sheen to them.

“Jesus Christ!” Helen Justineau says, in a kind of a whisper.

“Fascinating,” Dr Caldwell murmurs. “Absolutely fascinating.”

“If you say so, Doc,” the Sarge says. “But I’m thinking we should keep the hell away from it, right?”

Fearless or foolhardy, Caldwell reaches out to touch one of the growths. Its surface indents a little under the pressure of her finger, but fills out quickly to its original shape once she draws her hand back.

“I don’t think it’s dangerous,” she says. “Not yet. When these fruits ripen, that may be a very different matter.”

“Fruits?” Justineau echoes. She says it in exactly the same tone that Gallagher would have used. Fruits out of a dead man’s rotten, broken-open body? Where would you have to go to get sicker than that?

Melanie squeezes in beside Gallagher, peers around his leg at the fallen hungry. He feels bad for her, that she has to see this. It’s not right for a little kid to be made to think about death.

Even if she’s, you know, dead. Kind of.

“Fruits,” Caldwell repeats, firmly and with satisfaction. “This, Sergeant, is the fruiting body of the hungry pathogen. And these pods are its sporangia. Each one is a spore factory, full of seeds.”

“They’re its ball-sacks,” the Sarge translates.

Dr Caldwell laughs delightedly. She was looking really beaten up and exhausted the last time Gallagher glanced at her, but this has brought her to life. “Yes. Exactly. They’re its ball-sacks. Break open one of these pods, and you’ll be having an intimate encounter with Ophiocordyceps.”

“Then let’s not,” Parks suggests, pulling her back as she goes to touch the thing again. She looks up at him, surprised and seeming ready to argue the point, but the Sarge has already turned his attention to Justineau and Gallagher. “You heard the Doc,” he says, like it was her idea. “This thing, and any more of them we see, they’re off-limits. You don’t touch them, and you don’t go near them. No exceptions.”

“I’d like to take some samples—” Caldwell starts to say.

“No exceptions,” Parks repeats. “Come on, people, we’re wasting daylight. Let’s move out.”

Which they do. But the interlude has left them all in a weird mood. Melanie goes back to Justineau and walks right at her side, as though she was back on the leash again. Dr Caldwell blathers on about life cycles and sexual reproduction until it almost sounds like she’s coming on to the Sarge, who lengthens his stride to get away from her. And Gallagher can’t keep from looking back, every now and again, at the ruined thing that’s become so weirdly pregnant.

They see a dozen more of these fallen, fruiting hungries in the next couple of hours, some of them a lot further gone than the first one. The tallest of the white columns tower way over their heads, anchored at the base by a froth of grey threads that spills over the hungries’ bodies and almost hides them from sight. The central stems get thicker as they get taller, widening the gap in the hungry’s ribs or throat or abdomen or wherever they first broke through. There’s something kind of obscene about it, and Gallagher wishes to Christ they’d gone some other way so they didn’t have to know about this.

He’s a little freaked out too, by what seems to be happening to the round growths on the fungal stems. They start out as just bumps or protuberances on the main vertical shaft. Then they get bigger, and fill out into shiny pearly-white spheroids that hang like Christmas tree ornaments. Then they fall off. Beside the tallest and thickest stems, there are thin scatterings of them around which they step over with gingerly care.

Gallagher is happy when the sun drops below the horizon and he doesn’t have to look at the bastard things any more.

The third night, for Helen Justineau, is the strangest of all.

They spend it in the cells of a police station on the Whetstone High Road, after Sergeant Parks has ordered a short detour to explore it. He’s hoping that the station will have an intact weapons locker. Their ammunition has been depleted by the skirmish in Stevenage, and every little helps.

There’s no weapons locker, intact or otherwise. But there’s a board with keys hanging on it, and some of the keys turn out to be for the remand cells in the basement. Four cells, strung out in a row along a short corridor with a guardroom at the further end of it. The door that opens on to the stairwell is a two-inch thickness of wood, with a steel panel riveted on to the inside.

“Room at the inn,” Parks says.

Justineau thinks he’s joking, but then she sees that he’s not and she’s appalled. “Why would we lock ourselves in here?” she demands. “It’s a trap. There’s only one exit, and once we lock this door we’re blind. We wouldn’t have any way of keeping track of what’s going on above us.”

“All true,” Parks admits. “But we know those junkers followed us from the base. And now we’re getting into an area that had the densest population out of anywhere in the country. Wherever we stop, we’re going to want to maintain some kind of a perimeter. Locked steel door is the most discreet perimeter I can think of. Our lights won’t show, and any sound we make probably won’t reach the surface. We stay safe, but we don’t draw any attention to ourselves. Hard to imagine anything better, on that score.”

There’s no vote, but people start putting their packs down. Caldwell slumps against the wall, then slides down it into a squatting position. It might not even be that she agrees with Parks’ argument. She’s just too tired to walk any further. Private Gallagher is unpacking the last few cans of food from Wainwright House, and then he’s opening them.

It’s carried on the nod, and there’s no point in arguing.

They close the door so they can put their torches on, but they don’t lock it at first; claustrophobia is already setting in, for most of them, and turning the key seems like too irrevocable a step. As they eat, the desultory conversation winds down into silence. Parks is probably right about their voices not carrying, but they still sound way too loud in this echoing vault.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 575