The Girl With All The Gifts 16 page

Justineau winces at that cold-hearted calculation. “We’d be looking in the same places the original crew looked,” she points out. Parks turns to stare at her, and she shrugs. “I mean, it’s safe to assume they took a good look around before they abandoned this super-fortress and went out on the open road. If there was food that was lying there waiting to be found, they would have found it.”

“Can’t argue with that,” Parks says. “So the supply problem might be a serious one. Serious whether we move on or not, of course, but certainly more of a problem if we stay put here, for a day or two days or whatever, while I mess with that generator. So it’s a big decision, maybe life-or-death, and it affects all of us equally. I’d be happy to make the call, but as you were keen to remind me a couple of days back, Miss Justineau, you’re not under my command. No more is the Doc. So I’m happy, just this once, to put it to a vote.

“Should we stay or should we go? Show of hands for trying to fix the generator and ride home in style?”

Caldwell’s hand is up in a moment, Gallagher’s slightly slower. Justineau is in a minority of one.

“Okay with that?” Parks asks her.

“I don’t have much choice, do I?” Justineau says. But the truth is she was already on the fence. Her wariness about Rosie has a lot more to do with Melanie’s visible tension and the events of the last day at the base than with any rational objection. She can certainly see the attraction of making the rest of the journey in the safety and comfort of a humongous tank. No more ambushes. No more exposure. No more starting at every sound or movement, and looking over your shoulder every couple of seconds to see what’s coming up behind you.

On the other hand, Caldwell is still wearing her cat-that’s-anticipating-the-cream expression. Justineau’s mind and stomach rebel against the thought of being stuck in an enclosed space with the doctor for any longer than she has to. “I’d like to be on scavenger duty,” she tells Parks. “I mean, assuming you don’t need me to help with the generator. I’ll go with Gallagher and look for food.”

“I had you both down for that,” Parks agrees. “Can’t start on the generator until I know what I’m doing, so right now I’m mainly reading through the manuals so I can identify all the bits and pieces I need. Still got three hours of daylight left, so if you’re up for it, I think the two of you should go ahead and use it. Keep in touch via the walkie-talkies. If you run into any trouble, I’ll get to you as quick as I can. Dr Caldwell, I’m letting you off that duty because your hands are still in a bad way and you probably won’t be able to carry very much. Plus, we’ve only got the two packs.”

Justineau is surprised that the sergeant bothered to justify himself. He’s looking at Caldwell thoughtfully, like maybe there’s something else on his mind.

“Well, there are plenty of things I can do here,” Caldwell says. “I’ll start with the water filtration system. In theory, Rosie was able to condense water from ambient air. Once the generator’s working, we might be able to get that up and running again.”

“Good enough,” Parks says, and turns back to Justineau. “You better hit the road if you want to be back before dark.”

But she’s not ready to head out just yet. She’s worried about Melanie, and she wants the truth. “Can I speak to you,” she asks Parks, conscious of the echo, “in private?”

Parks shrugs. “Okay. If it’s quick.”

They go back into the engine room. She starts to speak, but Parks forestalls her by handing her his own walkie-talkie. “In case you and Gallagher get split up,” he explains. “Rosie’s cockpit has a full comms rig, and it’s a lot more powerful than these portables, so you can take one each.”

Justineau pockets the unit without even looking at it. She doesn’t want to be derailed by a discussion of logistics. “I’d like to know what Melanie said to you,” she tells Park. “And where she’s gone.”

Parks scratches his neck. “Really? Even when she told me not to say?”

She holds his gaze. “You let her go out there on her own. I already know damn well that you don’t see a risk to Melanie as worth taking into account. But I do. And I want to know why you thought it was okay to send her out there.”

“You’re wrong,” Parks says.

“Am I? About what?”

“About me.” He plants his butt against the opened cowling of the generator, folds his arms. “Okay, not that wrong. A couple of days ago, I said we should cut the kid loose. She pulled our irons out of the fire twice since then, and on top of that she’s turned into a really good scout. I’d be sorry to lose her.”

Justineau opens her mouth to speak, but Parks isn’t finished. “Also, since she can lead people back to us, letting her wander around on her own out there is not a decision that comes without consequences. But after what she told me, it seemed like the least worst option.”

Justineau’s mouth has gone a little drier than it already was. “What did she tell you?” she demands.

“She said our e-blocker isn’t worth fuck any more, Helen. We put it on way too thin this morning, because we’ve only got half a tube left between the four of us. I thought this rig would have some, but it doesn’t. It’s got the blue goop that Dr Caldwell uses in the lab, but that’s just a disinfectant. It’s not going to kill scent in the same way.

“So the kid’s been smelling us all day, and she’s been going half crazy with the hunger all that time. She was scared shitless she was going to get loose and bite one of us. You particularly. And that was why she didn’t want me to tell you any of this. She doesn’t want you to think of her like that, as a dangerous animal. She wants you to think of her as a kid in your class.”

Justineau feels dizzy all of a sudden. She leans back against the cold metal of the wall, waits for her head to stop spinning.

“That…” she says. “That is how I think of her.”

“Which is what I told her. But it didn’t make her any less hungry. So I cut her loose.”

“You…?”

“Took her outside. Took off the cuffs, and off she went. Got them right here, ready for when she comes back.” He opens one of the lockers and there they are, laid down all neat and tidy next to the coiled leash. “I showed her how to take the muzzle off for herself, like she didn’t figure that out already. It’s just a couple of leather straps. She’s going to stay out until she finds something to eat. Something big. The plan is for her to gorge herself to bursting. Not come back until her belly’s full. Maybe that will keep the feeding reflex at bay for a while.”

Justineau thinks back to the way Melanie was behaving before she left – the violent starts and the general unease. She gets it now. Understands what she must have been suffering. What she doesn’t get is Parks changing his mind about the muzzle and the cuffs. She’s both bewildered and a little resentful. It seems, in some way, to threaten the bond she’s developed with Melanie to have the other members of the party – especially Parks! – extending the same trust to her.

“You weren’t worried she’d bite you?” she asks him. She hears the snide insinuation in her own voice and it suddenly sickens her. “I mean … you think we can keep her with us, even if she’s hungry?”

“Well, no,” Parks says, deadpan. “That’s why I let her leave. Or do you mean was I afraid when I took the cuffs off? No, because I kept my gun on her. The kid’s unusual – unique’s maybe a better word – but she is what she is. What makes her unique is that she knows it. She doesn’t cut herself any slack. Lot of people could take an example from that.”

He hands her his pack, which he’s emptied.

“You mean me?” Justineau demands. “You think I’m not pulling my weight?”

It would feel good to have a stand-up argument with Parks right then, but he doesn’t seem keen to play. “No, I didn’t mean you. I meant in general.”

“People in general? You were being philosophical?”

“I was being a grumpy bastard. It’s what I wear to the office most days. I guess you probably noticed that.”

She hesitates, wrong-footed. She didn’t think Parks was capable of self-deprecation. But then she didn’t think he was capable of changing his mind.

“Any more rules of engagement?” she asks him, still hurting in some obscure way, still not mollified. “How to survive when shopping? Top tips for modern urban living?”

Parks gives the question more consideration than she was expecting.

“Use up the last of that e-blocker,” he suggests. “And don’t die.”

Gallagher wishes he was on his own.

It’s not that he doesn’t like Helen Justineau. If anything, it’s the opposite. He likes her a lot. He thinks she’s really beautiful. She’s had star or co-star billing in a number of his sexual fantasies, mostly playing the role of the highly experienced and wildly perverted older woman picking up a boy young enough to be her son and showing him the ropes. A lot of times, the ropes weren’t even metaphorical.

But that makes it all the more awkward to be out on a patrol with her. He’s scared of saying or doing something really stupid in front of her. He’s scared of being in a position where he has to make a quick decision and not being able to think of one because he’s thinking too much about her. He’s scared of not being able to hide how scared he is.

It doesn’t help that they can’t even talk to each other. Okay, they exchange a terse murmur every now and then, when they’ve come to the end of a street and they have to decide where to go next. But the rest of the time they walk along in complete silence, in the slo-mo shuffle that Sergeant Parks has taught them.

It sort of feels like overkill right then. In the first hour after they leave the armoured truck with the stupid name, they only see four live hungries, and none of them close up.

Then they find the first dead one. It’s fruited like all of those others, except that it’s fallen down on its stomach and the big white stem has punched its way out of the poor bastard’s back. Helen Justineau stares down at it, all sick and sombre. Gallagher guesses she’s thinking about the little hungry kid. Like a mother before the Breakdown, thinking the world’s a big place and there’s lots of sick people in it and where’s my baby girl?

Yeah. Full of sick people, the world. He’s related to a whole lot of them. And he met a whole lot more when the base fell. A part of his unease right now – maybe the biggest part – comes from the feeling that he’s not moving in a direction that makes any sense. Sure, he’s going home. But that’s like putting your foot back in a trap after you’ve somehow got free of it. They can’t go back to the base, obviously. There isn’t any base, not any more, and the bastards who tore it down might still be chasing them. But Gallagher can’t see Beacon as a refuge. He can only see it as a mouth opening in front of him to swallow him down.

He tries to shake off the mood of despair. He tries to look and feel like a soldier. He wants Helen Justineau to be reassured by his presence.

They’ve been working their way down a long road with shops on both sides, but the shops have all been ransacked long ago. They’re way too obvious – easy targets for anyone who came this way. Probably most of them got looted during the early days of the Breakdown.

So now they turn their attention to the houses in the side streets, which are harder to get into and harder to search. You have to do a recce for hungries first of all. And you have to make as little noise as you can breaking in, because obviously noise is going to bring them if there are any of them around. Then once you’re inside, you have to do another recce. Could be a whole nest of hungries in any of these houses – former residents or uninvited guests.

It’s slow going, and it preys on your nerves.

And it’s depressing because the rain has set in solidly now. They’re getting pissed on out of a grim, grey sky.

And last of all, it’s boring, if something can be both really scary and boring at the same time. The houses all seem the same to Gallagher. Dark. Musty-smelling with squishy carpets underfoot, mouldering curtains and sprays of black mildew up interior walls. Cluttered up with millions of things that don’t do anything except get in your way and almost trip you over. It’s like before the Breakdown people used to spend their whole lives making cocoons for themselves out of furniture and ornaments and books and toys and pictures and any kind of shit they could find. As though they hoped they’d be born out of the cocoon as something else. Which some of them were, of course, but not in the way they hoped.

In most of the houses, Justineau and Gallagher stay just long enough to check the kitchen. In some, there’s a utility room or a garage that they check too. They stay resolutely away from the fridges and freezers, which they know will be filled with a riot of stinking, festering shit. It’s canned goods and packet goods that are the jackpot here.

But they don’t find any. The kitchens are bare.

They move on to the next street, with similar results. At the very end of it, there’s a lock-up garage with a bright green door, which they almost walk past. But it’s right next to a looted corner shop, and Justineau slows to a halt.

“You thinking what I’m thinking?” she asks Gallagher.

He wasn’t thinking anything until she said it, but he thinks fast now, so he has something to say besides huh?

“The lock-up might belong to the shop,” he guesses.

“Damn straight. And it doesn’t look like anyone’s been in there. Let’s take a look, Private.”

They try the garage door, which is locked. It’s made of some light, thin metal, which is good in one way (it’s not going to be hard to break it down) and bad in another (anything they do to it is going to make a hell of a lot of noise).

Gallagher gets his bayonet wedged in under one corner of the door and pulls back on it. With a loud, shrill squeal, the metal folds. When it’s far enough away from the frame, they get their fingers around the edge of it and pull, slowly and steadily. It’s still making that same grinding noise, but there’s nothing they can do about that.

They bend back a triangular flap about three feet on its longest side. Then they look in all directions and listen, tense as hell. No sign or sound of anything coming, from either end of the street.

They go down on hands and knees and crawl inside. Gallagher clicks his torch on and plays it around.

The garage is full of boxes.

Most of them are empty. Out of the ones that have stuff in them, most turn out to be not food but papers and magazines, kids’ toys, stationery. The rest … well, there is food, but it’s snack food mostly. Packets of crisps, peanuts, pork scratchings. Chocolate bars and biscuits. Boiled sweets in tubes about the length of a rifle bullet. Individually wrapped Swiss rolls.

And bottles. All kinds of bottles. Lemonade and orangeade and limeade, cola and blackcurrant juice and ginger beer. Not water, but pretty much everything else you could imagine, as long as your imagination restricts itself to saccharine and carbon dioxide.

“You think any of this is still good?” Gallagher whispers.

“Only one way to find out,” Justineau whispers back.

They carry out a blind-taste challenge, ripping open plastic packets and nibbling cautiously on what’s inside. The crisps are foul, soft and crumbly, with a sour, sweaty tang to them. They spit them out hastily. The biscuits are okay, though. “Hydrogenated oils,” Justineau says, spraying crumbs. “Probably last until the heat death of the fucking universe.” The peanuts are best of all. Gallagher can’t believe their taste, as salty and intense as meat. He eats three packets before he can stop himself.

When he looks up, Justineau is grinning at him – but it’s a friendly grin, not a mean one. He laughs out loud, pleased that the two of them have shared this ridiculous feast – and that in the twilight of the garage she can’t see him blushing.

He shouts out to the Sarge on the walkie-talkie and tells him they’re bringing home the bacon. Or at least some stuff that’s got bacon flavouring in it. Parks says to load up and come back in, with his heartiest congratulations.

They fill up the backpacks and their pockets, and each of them takes a couple of boxes besides. When they emerge cautiously into the street again, ten minutes later, they’ve still got it to themselves.

They head for home in a mood of euphoria. They’ve done the hunter-gatherer thing, and they’ve done it well. Now they’re bringing the mammoth back to the cave. A campfire will be lit against the dark, and there’ll be carousing and stories.

Well, maybe not that. But a locked door, a decent meal and Fleetwood Mac if their luck is in.

Dr Caldwell unpacks the six Tupperware containers containing brain tissue from the male hungry at Wainwright House and lays them side by side on the newly disinfected surface in front of her. The lab worktops are made of a synthetic marble substitute which mixes marble dust with bauxite and polyester. It’s not as cold as real stone. When she momentarily lays her hot, throbbing hands on it, it offers her little relief.

She prepares slides from each of the samples. She doesn’t call the ATLUM into play for this, because Rosie still has no functional power source – and also because the material has been scooped out of the hungry’s skull with a spoon. It doesn’t lie in its natural layers, and little would be gained by slicing it so very finely.

She’ll need the ATLUM later, but not for these samples.

For now, she spreads tiny amounts of the brain tissue across the slides as thinly as she can, adds a single drop of staining agent to each, and drops the covers on with gingerly care. The bandages impede her movements, so this takes longer than it should.

Six tissue samples. Five available staining agents, which are cerium sulphate, ninhydrin, D282, bromocresol and panisaldehyde. Caldwell has the highest hopes of the D282, a fluorescent lipophilic carbocyanine with proven efficacy in throwing fine neuron structures into high relief. But she’s not going to ignore the other stains, since she has them to hand. Any of them has the potential to yield valuable data.

The natural thing to do now would be to power up the transmission electron microscope, which sits in the corner of the lab like the bastard offspring of a road drill and an Imperial Stormtrooper from the Star Wars trilogy – all white ceramic and smooth, sculpted curves.

But there’s that whole absence-of-power thing again. The microscope is not going to wake up and serve her until Sergeant Parks feeds it.

In the meantime, she turns her attention to the sporangium. The lab boasts a number of manipulator tanks, with two circular holes along one side. The holes are sphinctered. Elbow-length rubber gloves can be inserted through them and rendered airtight by a mixture of sealant gel and mechanical adjustments.

Once the sporangium is safely sequestered from the rest of the lab inside one of these tanks, Caldwell begins to examine it. She tries to open it with her gloved fingers and fails. Its outer shell is tough and elastic and very thick. Even with a scalpel it’s not easy going.

Inside, endlessly infolded, is a fine, fractal froth of spores like grey soap bubbles that spills out through the opening she’s made. Curious, she dips her finger in. There’s no resistance. Even as densely packed together as this, the spores seem to have no mass at all.

She becomes aware, while she’s doing this, that she’s no longer alone in the lab. Sergeant Parks has entered and is watching her in silence. He has his gun – not the rifle, but the sidearm – in his hand, as casually as such a thing can be carried in a civilised space such as a lab, where it has no conceivable place.

Caldwell ignores him for a while as she continues to cut carefully into the grey gourd to examine its interior structure.

“The good news,” she observes, her eyes and her attention staying on the contents of the tank, “is that the sporangium’s integument appears to be extremely resilient. None of the ones we saw on the ground had broken open, and it’s impossible to tear them open with your bare hands. They appear to require an external environmental trigger in order to germinate, and so far that trigger hasn’t materialised.”

Parks doesn’t answer. He still hasn’t moved.

“Did you ever consider a scientific career, Sergeant?” Caldwell asks him, still with her back to him.

“Not really,” Parks says.

“Good. You’re really far too stupid.”

The sergeant looms at her side. “You think I’m missing something?” he demands. Caldwell is very conscious of the gun. When she glances down, it’s there, directly in her line of sight. The sergeant is holding it in both hands, ready to fire.

“Yes.”

“What am I missing?”

She puts down the scalpel and withdraws her hands, very slowly, from the gloves and from the tank. Then she turns to look him in the eyes. “You see that I’m pale and sweating. You see that my eyes are red. You see that I’m slowing down, as I walk.”

“Yeah, I see that.”

“And you’re ready with your diagnosis.”

“Doc, I know what I know.”

“Ah, but you don’t, Sergeant. Not really.” She’s begun to undo the bandages on her left hand. She holds it up for him to see. As the white linen falls away, her flesh is laid bare. The hand itself is fish-belly white and a little puckered. Red lines begin at the wrist and climb her arm – climb downwards, since her hand is raised, but gravity’s no guide here. The poison is finding its way to her heart, and it pays no mind to the vagaries of local topography.

“Blood poisoning,” Caldwell says. “Severe inflammatory sepsis. The first thing I did when we arrived here was to give myself a massive dose of amoxicillin, but it’s almost certainly far too late. I’m not turning into a hungry, Sergeant. I’m only dying. So please leave me alone to get on with my work.”

But Parks stays where he is for a few moments longer. Caldwell understands. He’s a man with a strong preference for the sorts of problem that have a simple, unitary solution. He thought Caldwell was such a problem, but now he realises she isn’t. It’s hard for him to cope with the shift in perspective.

She understands, but she can’t really help. And she doesn’t really care. What matters now is her research, which – after so long a period of stagnation – is finally starting to look promising.

“You’re saying these fruit things aren’t dangerous?” he asks her.

Caldwell laughs. She can’t help herself. “Not at all, Sergeant,” she assures him. “Unless the prospect of a planet-wide extinction event troubles you.”

His face, as open as a book, announces relief, then confusion, finally suspicion. “What?”

Caldwell is almost sorry to have to burst the precious bubble of his ignorance. “I already told you that the sporangia contained the spores of the hungry pathogen. But you don’t seem to have taken in what that means. In its immature, asexual form, Ophiocordyceps toppled our global civilisation in the space of three years. The only reason it didn’t achieve global pandemic status at once, the only reason any pockets of uninfected humans were able to survive, was because the immature organism can only propagate – neotenously – in biofluid.”

“Doc,” the sergeant says, looking pained, “if you’re gonna talk like a fucking encyclopaedia…”

“Blood and spit, Sergeant. It lives in blood and spit. It doesn’t like to venture out into the open air, and it doesn’t thrive there. But the adult form…” She waves a hand over the innocuous white globe nestling at the bottom of the tank. “Well, the adult form will take no prisoners. Each sporangium contains, at a rough estimate, from one to ten million spores. They will be airborne and light enough to travel tens or hundreds of miles from their place of origin. If they float into the upper atmosphere, as some of them will, they could easily cross continents. They will be robust enough to survive for weeks, months, perhaps years. And if you breathe them in, you’ll be infected. You can see a hungry coming, but you’ll have a harder time with an organism less than a millimetre across. A harder time seeing it, and a harder time keeping it out. I estimate that what’s left of Humanity 1.0 will close up shop within a month of one of these pods opening.”

“But … you said they won’t open,” Parks says, stricken.

“I said they won’t open by themselves. This species is a sport, a mutant form, and its development is haphazard. But sooner or later, the trigger event – whatever it is – will happen. It’s only a matter of time, with the probability rising gradually towards a hundred per cent.”

Parks doesn’t seem to have anything to say to that. He withdraws at last, and leaves her to it. And although she didn’t let his presence slow her down too much, she’s a lot happier to be alone.

Helen Justineau enjoyed the foraging expedition more than she thought she was going to. Found that time spent in the company of Kieran Gallagher was surprisingly bearable.

But when they get back to Rosie, with only ten minutes of daylight to spare, and they find Melanie hasn’t returned yet, the worry drops on her like a ten-ton weight in an old Monty Python sketch. Where the hell could she be all this time? How hard would it have been for her to rustle up something to eat?

Justineau remembers the fox, back in Stevenage. She hadn’t seen Melanie catch it, but she’d seen her walking along with the animal squirming in her arms, shifting its weight as it struggled so that she wouldn’t lose her balance. If you can catch a fox, then a rat or a stray dog or a cat or a bird ought to be no trouble at all.

There’s no telling what Melanie might have run into out there. Justineau should have tried to find her, instead of staying with Private Function and looking for food.

She’s instantly contrite about that instinctive surge of contempt for Gallagher. His only faults, really, are that he’s young, green as grass, and flat-out idolatrous when it comes to Sergeant Parks.

Who is somewhat taciturn and withdrawn, Justineau realises now. He took the barest glance at what they’d found, commended them with a nod and a grunt, and then went back into the engine room.

She follows him there. “What do we do if she doesn’t come back?” she demands.

The sergeant has his head down in the guts of the generator, which he’s started to dismantle. His voice comes back muffled. “What do you think?”

“I’m going to go and look for her,” Justineau says.

That gets Parks right way up again pretty quick, which is why she said it. She’s not seriously contemplating going out into the dark. There’d be no point. She wouldn’t be able to use the torch without announcing her presence and location to anyone and everything else on the streets. Without the torch she’d be blind – and with it only marginally less so. The hungries would home in on the moving light, or on her scent, or on her body heat, and it would all be over in a minute.

So when Parks tells her these things, in slightly cruder and more emphatic terms, she doesn’t even bother to listen. She waits him out and then says again, “Then what do we do?”

“There isn’t anything we can do,” Parks says. “She’s a lot safer out there than you or I would be, and she’s a smart kid. With the night coming on, she knows enough to go to ground and wait for daylight.”

“What if she can’t find her way back? What if she gets turned around in the dark, or just forgets the way? We have no idea how far she went, and these streets probably all look alike to her. Even in daylight, she might not be able to locate us again.”

Parks is looking at her hard. “I’m not sending up a flare,” he says. “If that’s what you’re thinking about, forget it.”

“What do we lose?” Justineau demands. “We’re in a frigging tank, Parks. Nothing can touch us.”

He throws down the manual he’s been clutching all this time and picks up a wrench. For a moment she thinks he’s going to hit her with it. She realises, with sharp surprise, that he’s as tense as she is. “They wouldn’t have to touch us,” he points out grimly. “They’d just have to camp out on the doorstep for a day or so. We’re not well placed to stand up to a siege, Helen. Not with salted peanuts and Jaffa Cakes.”

She knows he’s right, as far as that goes. It doesn’t matter, since she’s already swiped the flare pistol from the mess of stuff Parks dumped on the floor when he gave her the pack. She’s tucked it into the back of her jeans, where it barely makes a bulge. So long as she stays out of the light, she’s fine.

But whatever is eating Parks, it’s different from what’s eating her. Not knowing makes her uneasy. “What’s the matter?” she demands. “Did something happen while we were out?”

“Nothing happened,” Parks says too quickly. “But we’ve got no e-blockers left, and nothing here we can use instead. From now on, any time we step outside, we’re leaving a scent trail that leads right back to our front door. And if the kid does come back, we’ll need a lot more than a muzzle and a leash to keep her under control. She’s going to be smelling us all the time. What do you think that’s going to do to her?”

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 588