The Girl With All The Gifts 15 page

When they’re done, they slip away one by one into the guardroom to do whatever they need to do. No torches in there, so they’ve got something like privacy. Justineau realises that Melanie never needs to take a bathroom break. She vaguely remembers, somewhere in the briefing pack she was given when she arrived at the base, some notes by Caldwell on the digestive systems of the hungries. The fungus absorbs and uses everything they swallow. There’s no need for excretion, because there’s nothing to excrete.

Parks locks the door at last. The key sticks in the lock, and he has to apply a lot of force to turn it. Justineau imagines – probably they all do – what would happen to them if the shank broke off in the lock. That’s a bloody solid door.

They split up to sleep. Caldwell and Gallagher take a cell each, Melanie goes with Justineau and Parks sleeps at the foot of the stairs with his rifle ready to hand.

When the last torch clicks off, the darkness settles on them like a weight. Justineau lies awake, staring at it.

It’s like God never bothered.

Melanie thinks: when your dreams come true, your true has moved. You’ve already stopped being the person who had the dreams, so it feels more like a weird echo of something that already happened to you a long time ago.

She’s lying in a cell that’s a bit like her cell back at the base. But she’s sharing it with Miss Justineau. Miss Justineau’s shoulder is touching her back, and she can feel it moving rhythmically with Miss Justineau’s breath. On one level, that fills her with a happiness so complete that it’s stupefying.

But this isn’t anywhere they can stay, and live. It’s just a stop on the journey, which is full of uncertainties. And some of the uncertainties are inside her, not out in the world. She’s a hungry, with a driving need that will always come back no matter what she does. She has to be kept in chains, with a muzzle over her face, so she won’t eat anybody.

And they lived together, for ever after, in great peace and prosperity.

That was how the story she wrote ended, but it’s not how this real-life story will end. Beacon won’t take her. Or else it will take her and break her down in pieces. Miss Justineau’s happy ending isn’t hers.

She’ll have to leave Miss J soon, and go off into the world to seek her fortune. She’ll be like Aeneas, running away from Troy after it fell and sailing the seas until he comes to Latium and founds the new Troy, which ends up being called Rome.

But she seriously doubts now that the princes she once imagined fighting for her exist anywhere in this world, which is so beautiful but so full of old and broken things. And she already misses Miss J, even though they’re still together.

She doesn’t think she’ll ever love anyone else quite this much.

The fourth day is the day of the miracle, which falls on Caroline Caldwell out of a clear sky.

Except that it’s not clear, really. Not any more. The weather has turned. A thin rain is soaking through their clothes, there’s no food left, and everyone is in a dismal, surly mood. Parks is worried about the e-blocker, and taking it out on everybody. They’re running low on the stuff, and had to go sparingly when they anointed themselves before unlocking the door. And they’ve still got at least three days’ journey ahead of them. If they don’t manage to restock at some point, they’ll be in dead trouble.

They’re still walking south, with the whole of north London and central London and south London to get through. Even for the young private, Caldwell sees, some of the shock and awe has drained away. The only one who’s still looking at every new thing they pass with indefatigable wonder is test subject number one.

As for Caldwell, she’s thinking about lots of things. Fungal mycelia growing in a substrate of mammalian body cells. The GABA-A receptor in the human brain, whose widespread and vital operation concerns the selective conduction of chloride ions across the plasma membranes of specific neurons. And the more immediate issue of why they’re seeing so few hungries now, when yesterday morning they were seeing clusters of several hundred at a time.

Caldwell hypothesises a number of possible answers to this question: deliberate clearance by uninfected humans, competition from an animal species, the spread of a disease through the hungry population, an unknown side effect of Ophiocordyceps itself, and so on. Obviously the existence of the fallen, fruiting hungries is a factor – they’ve seen a lot more since they set out that morning, so many that new sightings arouse no comment – but it’s unlikely that this is the sole explanation. For that, there would have to be hundreds of thousands of the things, not just dozens. To Caldwell’s intense annoyance, she comes across no observational evidence that would help her to choose between the various scenarios she’s theorised.

Moreover – and this distresses her even more – she’s finding it hard to concentrate. The pain from her damaged hands is now a persistent and agonising throbbing, as though she had an extra heart beating in each of her palms in very imperfect synchrony. The ache in her head tries to keep pace with both at once. Her legs feel so weak, so insubstantial, she can hardly believe that they’re carrying her weight. It’s more like her body is a helium balloon, bobbing along above them.

Helen Justineau says something to her, the rising inflection suggesting a question. Caldwell doesn’t hear, but nods her head in order to prevent any further repetition.

Perhaps Ophiocordyceps induces different behaviours in the mature stage than in its neotenous, asexual form. Migratory behaviours or sessile ones. Morbid photosensitivity or some parallel to the height-seeking reflex of infected ants. If she knew where the hungries had gone, she could begin to construct a model of the mechanism, and that might lead her to an understanding of how the fungus–neuron interface ultimately functions.

The day has a drifting, dreamlike feel. It seems to come to Caldwell from a great distance, only reporting in occasionally. They find a cluster of fallen hungries, who have fruited in the same way as the others – but in this case, they’ve lain down so close together that the trunks or stems that grow out of their chests are now joined together by rafts of mycelial threads.

While the others stare at the fungal glade in sick fascination, Caldwell kneels and picks up one of the fallen sporangia. It looks and feels solid enough, but weighs very little. There’s a pleasing smoothness to its integument. Nobody sees as she slips it, very carefully, into the pocket of her lab coat. The next time Sergeant Parks glances around at her, she’s fidgeting with her bandages again and looks as though she’s been doing it the whole time.

They walk on endlessly. Time elongates, fractures, rewinds and replays in stuttering moments that – while they have no coherent internal logic – all seem drearily familiar and inevitable.

The GABA-A receptor. The hyperpolarisation of the nerve cell, occurring after the peak of its firing and determining the lag time before it’s ready to reach action potential again. So precariously balanced a mechanism, and yet so much depends on it!

“Approach with caution,” Sergeant Parks is saying now. “Don’t assume it’s empty.”

In her lab at the base, Caldwell has a voltage clamp of the SEVC-d variety, which can be used to measure very small changes in ion currents across the surface membranes of living nerve cells. She never trained herself to use it properly, but she knows that the Cordyceps-infected display both different levels of excitation from healthy subjects and different rates of change in electrical activity. Variation within the infected community is large, though, and unpredictable. Now she’s wondering whether it correlates with another variable that she’s failed to detect.

A hand touches her shoulder. “Not yet, Caroline,” Helen Justineau says. “They’re still checking it out.”

Caldwell looks on down the road. Sees what’s standing there, a hundred yards ahead of them.

She’s afraid at first that she might be hallucinating. She knows she’s suffering from extreme fatigue and mild disorientation, arising either from the infection contracted when she injured her hands at the base or (less likely) from the untreated water they’ve been drinking.

Ignoring Justineau, she walks forward. In any case, the sergeant rounds the side of the thing now, and gives the all-clear. There’s no reason to hang back.

She raises her hand and touches the cool metal. In curlicues of raised chrome, from under its mantle of dust and filth, it speaks to her. Speaks its name.

Which is Rosalind. Rosalind Franklin.

Caroline Caldwell was brought up to believe in the second law of thermodynamics. In a closed system, entropy must increase. No ifs or ands or buts. No time off for good behaviour, since time’s arrow always points in the same direction. Through the gift shop to the exit, with no stamp on your hand, nothing that would let you come round and have another ride.

It’s twenty years now since Charlie and Rosie went off the grid. Twenty years since they launched – without her – and lost their way in a disintegrating world. And now here’s Rosie staring Caroline Caldwell in the eye, as demure as you please.

Rosie is a refutation of entropy just by being here. So long as she’s still virgo intacta, not looted or torched.

“Door’s locked,” Sergeant Parks says. “And nobody’s answering.”

“Look at the dust,” Justineau offers. “This thing hasn’t moved in a long, long time.”

“Okay, I think we should take a look inside.”

“No!” Caldwell yelps. “Don’t! Don’t force the door!”

They all turn to look at her, surprised by her vehemence. Even test subject number one stares, her blue-grey eyes solemn and unblinking. “It’s a laboratory!” Caldwell says. “A mobile research facility. If we break the seals, we could compromise whatever’s inside. Samples. Experiments in progress. Anything.”

Sergeant Parks doesn’t look impressed. “You really think that’s an issue right now, Doctor?”

“I don’t know!” Caldwell says, anguished. “But I don’t want to take the chance. Sergeant, this vehicle was sent here to research the pathogen, and it was crewed by some of the finest scientific minds in the world. There’s no telling what they found or what they learned. If you smash your way in, you could do untold damage!”

She physically interposes herself between Parks and the vehicle. But she doesn’t need to. He’s not making any move towards the door.

“Yeah,” he says dourly. “Well, I don’t think it’s going to be an issue. That’s some serious plate on that thing. We’re not getting in there any time soon. Maybe if we found a crowbar, but even then…”

Caldwell thinks hard for a moment, sieving her memory. “You don’t need a crowbar,” she says.

She shows him where the emergency external access crank is hidden, cradled in two brackets underneath Rosie’s left flank, right beside the midsection door. Then, with the crank held awkwardly in her bandaged left hand, she goes down on her knees and gropes under the body of the vehicle, close to the forward wheel arch. She remembers – she thinks she remembers – the position of the socket into which the crank will fit, but it’s not where she expects it to be. After a few minutes of blind rummaging, watched in bemused silence by the others, she finally locates the slot and is able to insert the end of the crank into it. There’s an override control, but it was only meant to be engaged in conditions of actual siege. The vehicle’s designers anticipated a range of situations in which it would be necessary to enter Rosie from the outside without compromising her interior spaces by blasting or forcing a way in.

“How do you know about all this?” Justineau asks her.

“I was attached to the project,” Caldwell reminds her tersely. She’s lying by omission, but she doesn’t blush. The pain of these memories runs much deeper than the embarrassment, and nothing would induce her to explain further.

To reveal that she came out twenty-seventh on the list of possible crew members for Charlie and Rosie. Trained for five months in the operation of the on-board systems, only to be told that she wouldn’t, after all, be required. Twenty-six other biologists and epidemiologists had placed higher up the list – had seemed, to the mission’s managers and overseers, to possess more desirable skills and experience than those Caldwell had to offer. Since the full complement of scientists for both labs was twelve, that didn’t even put her on the list of first alternatives. Charlie and Rosie sailed without her.

Until now, she’d assumed that they’d gone down with all hands – lost in some inner-city fastness, unable to advance or retreat, overwhelmed by hungries or ambushed by junker scavengers. That thought had consoled her a little – not to think that those who’d beaten her had then died for their lèse majesté, but because her placing so low on the list had kept her alive.

Of course, that’s only a conceptual stone’s throw from the thought that her survival is a side effect of mediocrity.

Which is nonsense, and will be seen to be nonsense, when she finds the cure. The story of her failing to gain a berth on Charlie or Rosie will be an ironic footnote to history, like Einstein’s alleged bad grades in high-school maths exams.

Only now, the footnote gains an added piquancy. They made this lab for her all along, and they didn’t know it. They sent it here to intercept her journey.

Parks and Gallagher are working the crank, which was too stiff and unyielding to move when Caldwell tried it. The door is sliding back, a half-inch at a time. Stale air leaks out, making Caldwell’s heart beat fast in her chest. The seal is good. Whatever happened here, whatever may have become of Rosie’s crew, her interior environment appears to be sound.

As soon as the gap is wide enough for her to get through, Caldwell steps forward.

Right into Sergeant Parks, who refuses to stand out of her way. “I’m going in first,” he tells her. “Sorry, Doc. I know you’re keen to take a look at this thing, and you will. Just as soon as I check if anyone’s home.”

Caldwell starts to state her reasons for believing that Rosie will be empty, but the sergeant isn’t listening. He’s already gone inside. Private Gallagher stands by the door and watches her warily, clearly afraid that she’ll try to barge past him.

But she doesn’t. If she’s right, there’s no risk, but for the same reason no real need for hurry. And if she’s wrong, if the vehicle has been breached somehow, then the sergeant will certainly deal more effectively with anything that’s inside than she could hope to do. Common sense dictates that she wait for him to complete his search.

But she almost convulses with impatience. This gift is intended for her, and for no one else. There’s nobody else who can use what’s in there. What might be in there, she corrects herself. After so many years, there’s no telling what could have happened to the precious equipment in Rosie’s labs. After all, what conceivable disaster would have taken out the crew without harming anything around them? The most likely explanation for the sealed door and undamaged exterior is that one or more of the crew became infected while on board. She imagines them running amok through the lab, in a feeding frenzy, toppling delicate imaging frames and centrifuges, trampling on Petri dishes full of carefully incubated samples.

Sergeant Parks emerges, shaking his head. Caldwell is so wrapped up in these disaster scenarios that she takes that for a verdict. She cries out and runs for the door, where Parks steadies her with a hand on her shoulder. “It’s fine, Doc. All clear. Only body is in the driving seat, and he seems to have shot himself. But before we go in there, tell me something – because this thing is way outside of my experience. Is there anything in there I should know about? Anything that could be dangerous?”

“Nothing,” Caldwell says, but then – the punctilious scientist – she amends that. “Nothing I’m aware of. Let me look around, and I’ll give you a definitive answer.”

Parks steps aside and she goes in, feeling herself trembling, trying to hide it.

The lab has everything. Everything.

At the far end, facing her, is something she’s only ever seen in photographs, but she knows what it is, and what it does, and how it does it.

It’s an ATLUM. An automated lathe ultramicrotome.

It’s the holy grail.

Rosalind Franklin seems to thrill Dr Caldwell and Sergeant Parks, no doubt for different reasons, but Helen Justineau’s first impressions are negative. It’s cold as hell, it echoes like a tomb, and it smells like embalming fluid. And she can see from Melanie’s face that Melanie is even less enthusiastic.

Of course, they’ve both got recent and unhappy memories of laboratories, especially laboratories with Caroline Caldwell in them. And that’s what Rosie, as Caldwell calls this thing, really is – a lab on wheels. Only it’s got sleeping berths and a kitchen, so it’s also a gigantic motor home. And it’s got flame-throwers and turret guns, so it’s also a tank. There’s something for everyone.

In fact, it’s almost big enough to cross time zones. The lab is amidships and takes up nearly half the available space. In front of it and behind it there are weapons stations where two gunners can stand back to back and look out to either side of the vehicle through slit windows like the embrasures in a medieval castle. Each of these stations can be sealed off from the lab by a bulkhead door. Further aft, there’s something like an engine room. Forward, there are crew quarters, with a dozen wall-mounted cot beds and two chemical toilets, the kitchen space, and then the cockpit, which has a pedestal gun of the same calibre as the Humvee’s and about as many controls as a passenger jet.

Justineau and Melanie stand in the forward weapons station and watch the activity around them, momentarily disconnected from it.

Caldwell is checking equipment in the lab space. She’s got a manifest in her hand – it was on the wall of the lab, closest to the door – and she’s using it to find specific pieces of equipment, which she then checks for damage. Her expression is rapt, furiously intense. She seems completely oblivious of everyone else’s presence.

Parks and Gallagher have gone forward, past the crew quarters, into the cockpit. They’re wrestling with something there – presumably the body Parks mentioned. After a while, they carry it through, wrapped in a blanket. It trails a complex raft of unpleasant smells, but they’re mercifully old and faint.

“Forward doors are locked,” Parks grunts. “Can’t open them without power, it looks like. And power’s what we haven’t got.”

They take it out through the midsection door, which is the one they came in through. Justineau notes that there’s a complicated arrangement of steel armatures and plastic sheets on the inside of the door. She suspects that what she’s looking at is a foldaway airlock. In a cupboard right next to it she finds six sealed environment suits, the helmets huge and cylindrical with a narrow visor, like the heads of robots in a 1950s movie. The people who designed this thing really did think of everything.

But apparently that didn’t help the people who rode in it.

Justineau puts a hand on Melanie’s arm, and Melanie jumps almost a foot into the air. The extreme reaction makes Justineau start back in her turn.

“Sorry,” she says.

“It’s all right,” Melanie mutters, looking up at her. The girl’s blue eyes are wide and fathomless. Normally her emotions are all on the surface, but now, underneath the nerves and the general unhappiness, there are depths that Justineau doesn’t know how to interpret.

“We probably won’t stay here long,” she reassures the girl.

But she hears the hollowness in the words. She doesn’t know.

When Parks and Gallagher come back, they talk with Dr Caldwell in hushed, quick tones. Then Gallagher goes into the crew quarters, while Parks walks all the way through to the back of the vehicle.

Curious, Justineau follows him to the engine room.

Where Parks is taking the inspection plate off what looks like a sizeable electrical generator. He prods around inside it for a while, looking thoughtful. Then he starts opening the lockers on the walls, one at a time, and inspecting their contents. The first one has got about a thousand tools in it, neatly mounted in racks. The next contains spools of wire, metal components wrapped in greased muslin, boxes of various sizes bearing long index numbers. The third has manuals, which Parks flicks through with frowning concentration.

“You thinking you can get this working again?” Justineau asks him.

“Maybe,” Parks says. “It’s not like I’m an expert, but I can probably make shift. They’ve written these fix-it books for idiots. I can read idiot well enough.”

“Might take a while.”

“Probably. But Christ, this thing’s got more firepower than most armies. Hundred-and-fifty-five-millimetre field guns. Flame-throwers. It’s got to be worth trying, right?”

Justineau turns, intending to tell Melanie that they might be staying here longer than expected – but Melanie is already there, standing right behind her.

“I need to talk to Sergeant Parks,” she says.

Parks looks up from the manuals, his face impassive. “We got something to talk about?” he demands.

“Yes,” Melanie says. She turns to Justineau again. “In private.”

It takes a moment for Justineau to realise that she’s been dismissed. “Okay,” she says, trying to sound indifferent. “I’ll go help Gallagher do whatever he’s doing.”

She leaves them to it. She can’t imagine what Melanie might have to say to Parks that she doesn’t want an audience for, and that uncertainty translates very readily into unease. Parks may have become relaxed about the leash, but Justineau knows he still sees Melanie essentially as a smart but dangerous animal – all the more dangerous for being smart. She needs to watch what she says around him, as much as what she does. She needs Justineau watching her back, constantly.

Gallagher is doing more or less the same thing that Dr Caldwell is doing, which is inventorying supplies – but he’s doing it in the crew quarters, and he’s already finishing up when Justineau gets there. He shows her the last cupboard he opened. It contains a CD player and two racks of music CDs. Justineau feels memories prickle into stereophonic life as she scans the titles, which are – to say the least – an eclectic mix. Simon and Garfunkel. The Beatles. Pink Floyd. Frank Zappa. Fairport Convention. The Spinners. Fleetwood Mac. 10CC. Eurythmics. Madness. Queen. The Strokes. Snoop Dogg. The Spice Girls.

“You ever hear any of this stuff?” Justineau asks Gallagher.

“A little bit here and there,” he tells her, wistfulness in his voice. The only sound system on the base was the one hooked up to the cell block, that played wall-to-wall classical. One or two of the base personnel had digital music players and hand-operated chargers that worked by turning a wheel, but these priceless heirlooms were obsessively guarded by their owners.

“You think there’s any way we can play them?” Gallagher asks now.

Justineau has no idea. “If Parks gets the generator going, this thing will probably go live at the same time everything else does. It’s been shielded from the weather in here – apart from temperature changes. There certainly isn’t any damp, which would have been the worst thing. If the fuse didn’t blow and the circuit boards are sound, there’s no reason why it wouldn’t play. Don’t get your hopes up too high, Private, but you might get dinner and a show tonight.”

Gallagher looks suddenly cast down. “I don’t think so,” he says glumly.

“How come?”

He opens his empty hands in a wide shrug, indicating all the cupboards he’s already opened and searched.

“No dinner.”

Parks calls a meeting in the crew quarters, but it only has four attendees.

“Where’s Melanie?” Justineau demands, instantly alarmed, instantly suspicious.

“She left,” Parks says. And then, in the face of Justineau’s ferocious scepticism, “She’s coming back. She just had to go outside for a while.”

“She ‘had to go outside’?” Justineau repeats. “She doesn’t get calls of nature, Parks, so if you’re saying—”

“She did not,” Sergeant Parks says, “go out for a bathroom break. I’ll explain later if you insist, but she was actually pretty keen that I didn’t tell you about it, so it’s your call. In the meantime, we’ve got some other stuff that we need to discuss, and we need to discuss it now.”

They’re sitting on the edges of the ground-floor bunks, precariously balanced. The sleeping berths are in vertical stacks of three, so the four of them have to lean forward to avoid bumping their heads on the middle cots, whose steel frames are at exactly the height best calculated to smack someone’s brains out. There would have been more room in the lab, but apart from Caldwell, they all seem to prefer not to spend too much time in a space where the potpourri is formaldehyde.

Parks indicates Caldwell with a nod. “From what the Doc says, this thing we’re sitting in was some kind of research station, designed to move around freely in inner-city areas and to be secure against attack from hungries or anything else it came up against.

“Which was a great idea, and I’m not knocking it. Only at some point, a couple of things happened – can’t be sure in what order. The generator blew. Or something in the power feed blew, maybe, since the generator mostly looks okay to my admittedly shit-ignorant eye.”

“Maybe they ran out of fuel,” Gallagher hazards.

“Nope. They didn’t. The fuel is a high-octane naphtha–kerosene mix, like jet fuel, and they’ve got about seven hundred gallons of it. And the tanks for the flame-throwers are full too – at a pinch, they would have been able to jury-rig something out of that. So most likely it was a mechanical failure of some kind. They should have been able to fix it, because they’ve got multiple spares for every damn part, but … well, for some reason they didn’t. Maybe they’d already taken some casualties, and the people they lost were the ones who were the best mechanics. Anyway, when we get that generator stripped down, we’ll see what’s what.”

“And we are definitely going to do that?” Justineau demands.

“Unless you can think of a good reason not to. This thing is built like a tank. It’s everything the Humvee was, and a whole lot more. If we can ride it all the way to Beacon, it could save us a world of heartache.”

Justineau can’t help noticing that Dr Caldwell’s face is wearing a sly, smug little smirk. That makes her push against the idea, even though it’s obvious good sense. “We won’t exactly be inconspicuous.”

“No,” Parks agrees. “We won’t. People will hear us coming a mile off. And it’ll be up to them to get the fuck out of our way, because once we start, we won’t be stopping. Hungries, junkers, roadblocks: we just put our foot down and keep rolling. We won’t even need to stick to the streets. We could drive right through a house and come out the other side. Only thing that will stop big fat Rosie is rivers, and they’ve got maps in the equipment locker that show which bridges can take her weight. I think we’d be remiss if we didn’t at least try. Worst that can happen is one of those bridges will be down, and we have to drive a bit out of our way. Or she slips a tread or blows a gasket or something, and then we’re no worse off than when we started. In the meantime, we get a respite from forced marching, which was taking its toll on all of us and the Doc most of all.”

“Thank you for your solicitude,” Caldwell says.

“I don’t know what that is, but you’re very welcome.”

“Two things,” Justineau says.

“Sorry?”

“You said two things went wrong. The generator was one. What was the other?”

“Yeah,” Parks says. “I was coming to that. They ran out of food. The cupboards are completely bare. As in, not one damn crumb. So my disaster scenario goes like this. They lose the generator, and they can’t fix it. They sit here for a few days or weeks, waiting to be rescued. But the Breakdown’s still raging, and nobody comes. Finally one of them says, ‘Screw this,’ and they pack their bags and hit the road. One of them stays back, presumably on guard duty. The rest walk off into the sunset. Maybe they make it somewhere, maybe they don’t. Most likely they don’t, because the stay-behind kills himself and nobody comes back for the salvage. Which is our good fortune.”

He looks from face to face. “Except that we run the risk of going the same way,” he concludes. “I don’t know how long it will take to fix that generator, if we can fix it at all. But until we can do it, or until we give up, we’re staying right here. So we need food, just like the original crew did. We used up the last of the tins we took from that house in Stevenage, and we didn’t pass any place coming down here that hadn’t been looted, torched or flattened. Still got a fair amount of water, but we have to drink it sparingly because there’s no place to stock up between here and the Thames. So we need to forage, and we need a quick score. Ideally, a supermarket that no grab-bagger teams or junkers ever found, or a house where the homeowners stocked up big-time for the apocalypse and then got taken out early.”

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 580