The Girl With All The Gifts 19 page

“You’re a very pretty little girl,” Gallagher tells her inanely. “What’s your name? My name’s Kieran. Kieran Gallagher.”

The rat jiggles again. The girl’s mouth opens and closes as though she’s miming eating.

This is ridiculous. He’s going to have to take the rat, or the impasse will go on for ever.

Gallagher puts down the porno mag very slowly – face down, as if this living dead kid was capable of being embarrassed or corrupted by the bare breasts on the cover. He shows her his empty hands. Moving in the gradual, strolling gait Sergeant Parks taught him, he advances on her, one step at a time. He’s careful to keep his hands in full view and the smile on his face the whole time.

He reaches out one hand, very slowly, for the rat.

The little brat hauls it back, out of his reach. Gallagher stops dead, wondering if maybe he’s misunderstood.

Pain explodes in his left leg, then his right, sudden and astonishing. He screams and falls, both legs buckling under him so that he hits the floor as heavy and ungainly as a toppled wardrobe. Diminutive figures flee away on both sides of him from the intersecting aisle where they’d been crouching hidden. He doesn’t get a good look at them because he’s in pain and he’s angry and he’s too thoroughly confused even to realise at first what it is that’s just happened.

He levers himself up on one elbow and looks down at his feet, but he can’t process what he’s seeing. There’s red everywhere. Blood. It’s blood. And it’s his. He knows that because he can feel it now as well as see it. The backs of his calves pulse and throb agonisingly. From the knees down, his trousers are already saturated.

What did they do? he wonders dazedly. What did they just do to me?

He catches a blur of movement in his peripheral vision, and he turns. Another little kid is rushing on him. His face is a bright splash of random colour, in which his eyes show out as two black pinpricks. His arm is raised high, and he’s holding a shining metal something over his head that glints blindingly in the slanting afternoon light.

Gallagher flinches away with a shriek of terror as the boy swings. For a crazy moment he thinks the weapon is a sword, but as it flashes past him he sees that it’s too fat, too solid. The metal shelf unit takes most of the force of the blow. Gallagher brings his arm up to smack the kid in the chest backhanded, and the kid weighs nothing so the blow sends him spinning head over heels. The weapon – it’s an aluminium baseball bat – flies out of his hand and clatters at Gallagher’s feet.

Which are now in an actual puddle. A puddle of his own blood.

The painted-face kid scrambles away, but there’s two more of them running in now from either side, one with a knife and the other swinging what looks like a butcher’s cleaver. Gallagher screams again at the top of his voice, and snatches up the baseball bat.

The hungry kids abort their attack runs, back-pedal right out of his reach.

But they’re everywhere now. Gallagher can’t see how many but it seems like dozens. Hundreds, maybe. Little pale faces peer at him through the gaps in the shelves, duck in and out of view. Bolder ones crowd the ends of the aisle, staring at him openly. They’re armed with everything under the sun, from knives and forks to broken branches. They’re mostly stark naked like the girl, but some are wearing weirdly assorted clothes that must have been looted from shop displays. One boy has a leopard-print bra fastened diagonally across his upper body, tied at the bottom end to a webbing belt from which a whole bunch of ornamental key rings are hanging.

The little girl he saw first is still standing there, Gallagher sees now. She’s just stepped back a little to give the ones with the weapons a bit more room. She’s chewing on the dead rat, calm and patient.

Gallagher tries to get up, but his legs won’t bear his weight. He can’t take his eyes off the kids in case they attack again, so he reaches down with his free hand to try and figure out by feel what it is that’s happened to him. There’s a broad rent in the right leg of his trousers, halfway between knee and ankle. Gingerly he reaches through it to touch the edges of the wound. It’s not wide, but it’s long and it’s straight and you have to figure it’s deep.

Same with the left leg.

The rat wasn’t a peace offering. It was bait. And it shouldn’t have worked because he doesn’t eat rat, but hey, what do you know? He’s a sucker for a pretty face. The little moppet manoeuvred him into position, and then two of her friends sliced him up from behind.

He’s been hamstrung.

He’s not walking out of here.

He may never walk again.

“Fuck!” Gallagher is surprised when the word comes out of him as a whisper. In his mind it was a shout.

“Listen,” he says, aloud. “Listen to me. This is not … you’re not going to do this to me. You understand? You can’t…”

The faces he’s seeing don’t change. The same expression on all of them. Wild, aching need, somehow reined in, somehow not acted on.

They’re waiting for him to die, so they can eat him.

He takes out his sidearm and points it. At the girl. Then at the kid who dropped the baseball bat. He looks to be one of the oldest. He’s got incongruously red, full lips, where most of them barely have lips at all. You don’t notice that at first because of the paint all over his face, which Gallagher realises is not abstract. It’s another face, kind of a monster’s face painted over his own, the open mouth encompassing everything from his nose to his chin. The work is smudgy enough and wobbly enough to suggest that he did it himself, probably in marker pen. His lank, black hair hangs straight down over his eyes, giving him a louche, rock-star look. He’s so skinny, Gallagher can count every rib.

And the gun doesn’t bother him at all. He stares right past it, unblinking, into Gallagher’s eyes.

Gallagher waves the gun at the other kids, one by one. They don’t even seem to see it. They don’t know what a gun is or why they should be afraid of one. He’s going to have to shoot at least one of them to make them get it.

Better do it quick too. His hand is trembling and there’s a sort of fuzzy static behind his eyes. The world’s starting to jump a little, like a car on a bumpy road. He tries to focus through the shakes.

Painted-face boy. The one who dropped the baseball bat. He’s right at the front of the crowd, and he’s probably the one in charge of Operation Eat-Kieran-Gallagher, so fuck him, he’s duly nominated.

But he keeps moving. They all keep moving. Might hit the little girl if he’s not careful. For some reason, Gallagher doesn’t want to do that, even though she set him up. She’s too small. It would feel too much like murder.

There he is, the little bastard. Target acquired. The gun feels like it weighs a couple of hundredweight but Gallagher only needs to hold it on the right line for a couple of seconds. Just time enough to squeeze, squeeze, and…

The trigger doesn’t move.

The clip’s empty.

Gallagher used it up on the second day when they were running through the crowd of hungries to get into that hospital place. Wainwright House. Then he switched to the rifle, and it’s the rifle he’s had in his hands ever since whenever it seemed like they might have to fight. He’s never reloaded.

He almost laughs. The kids haven’t even reacted because the gun doesn’t mean a damn thing to them. It’s the baseball bat that’s keeping them at bay.

Except it’s not. Not any more. They’re advancing slowly from both ends of the aisle, creeping in closer to him a step or two at a time, like they’re on a dare. Painted-face boy is leading the pack, even though he doesn’t have a weapon any more. His bony fingers flex and contract.

Numbness is creeping over Gallagher now, seeping up through his body from his wounded legs. But the terror effervescing in his mind keeps it back, and brings a sudden inspiration. Quickly he shifts on to his left side, so he can feel in the pockets of his fatigues for…

Yes! There it is. His hand closes on the cold metal. Hail Mary, he thinks incredulously, full of grace.

The kids are really close. Gallagher pulls the grenade from his pocket and holds it out for them to see.

“Look!” he yells. “Look at this!” The inexorable advance slows and stops, but he knows it’s the shout and not the danger that has made the kids hesitate. They’re gauging how much fight he has left in him.

“Boooooom!” Gallagher mimes an explosion, throwing his arms out wildly. Silence for a moment. Then painted-face boy barks back at him. He thinks it’s just a threat display. A pissing contest.

And the kids are moving again. Closing in for the kill.

“It’s a bomb!” Gallagher shouts desperately. “It’s a fucking grenade. It will rip you apart. Go and eat a stray dog or something. I’ll do it. I mean it. I’ll really do it.”

No reaction. He takes the pin between thumb and forefinger.

He doesn’t want to kill them. Just to make sure his own exit is a white light and a sudden shock, rather than something drawn out and horrible, beyond his capacity to endure. It’s not like they’ve left him a choice. He doesn’t have any choice at all.

“Please,” he says.

Nothing.

And when it comes to it, he can’t do it. If he could make them understand what it was he was threatening them with, maybe it would be different.

He drops the baseball bat, and the feral children take him like a wave. The grenade is knocked out of his hand and rolls away.

“I don’t want to hurt you!” Gallagher shrieks. And it’s the truth, so he tries not to fight back as they clutch and bite and tear at him. They’re just kids, and their childhood has probably been as big a load of shit as his was.

In a perfect world, he would have been one of them.

Parks is determined to search even though he knows the chance of finding Gallagher is close to zero. They can’t shout and they can’t throw up any kind of a grid, because it’s just the three of them – himself, Helen Justineau and the kid. Dr Caldwell claimed she was too weak to walk very far, and since she looks as though a harsh word would break her in two, he didn’t argue the point.

But they don’t need a grid. Melanie turns herself around like a weathercock, sniffs the wind a couple of times. She ends up facing a little bit west of south.

“That way.”

“You’re sure?” Parks asks her.

A nod. No wasted words. She leads the way.

But the trail goes all over the place, up one road and down another, mostly keeping southerly at first, but then not even that. Gallagher seems to have doubled back on himself, when he was only a mile or so out from Rosie. Parks wonders if the kid might be stringing them along for some reason – to look important, maybe, and to have the grown-ups’ attention. But that’s bullshit. Maybe a ten-year-old with a pulse would pull a trick like that, but Melanie’s more grounded. If she didn’t know where Gallagher went, she’d just say so.

There’s something else going on though, and it’s between Melanie and Justineau – a dialogue of scared glances that reaches a crescendo at the point where the trail crosses a street into a back alley.

The kid stops and looks at him. “Get out your gun, Sergeant,” she says quietly. She’s gone way solemn.

“Hungries?” He doesn’t care how she knows. He just wants to be clear about what he’s walking into.

“Yes.”

“Where?”

The kid hesitates. They’re in a sort of parking apron behind some shops. Lots of doorways on three sides of them, mostly broken open or broken down. A rusting car off on one side that’s up on bricks, probably already immobile long before the Breakdown silenced the roads. Wheelie bins laid out in a long line for a collection that never came.

“There,” Melanie says at last. The doorway she nods towards is at first glance no different from any of the others. Second glance takes in the trodden-down weeds right in front of it, one of them a monster thistle that’s still wet with sap where it was broken.

Parks goes to silent running. Better late than never, he figures. He taps Justineau’s hand, indicates that she should take out her handgun. The two of them approach the door like cops in a pre-Breakdown TV drama, exaggeratedly furtive despite the crunch and grind of their footsteps on the broken ground.

Melanie steps in between and turns to face them.

“Cut me loose,” she says to Parks.

He looks her in the eye. “Hands?”

“Hands and mouth.”

“Not that long ago, you asked me to tie you up,” he reminds her.

“I know. I’ll be careful.”

She doesn’t need to say the rest out loud. If they’re walking into an enclosed space full of hungries, they’ll probably need her. Can’t argue with that. Parks unlocks the cuffs, slides them into his belt. Melanie undoes the muzzle for herself and hands it to him.

“Will you look after this for me, please?” she asks.

He pockets it, and Melanie walks before them into the darkness.

But they’re coming late to the party. Whatever happened here, it’s already over. A broad smeared trail of blood leads from the centre of an aisle into a corner out of the sun, which is where the hungries took Gallagher so they could eat him. He stares straight at the ceiling with a look of patient suffering on his face, like the more mannerly depictions of Christ on the cross. Unlike Christ, he’s been chewed down to the bone in most places. His jacket is gone. No sign of it anywhere. His shirt, ripped wide open, frames the hollow chasm of his torso. His dog tags have fallen among exposed vertebrae. The hungries appear somehow to have eaten his throat without breaking the steel chain – like that party trick where you whip out the tablecloth without disturbing the crockery.

Justineau turns away, tears squeezed out from her closed eyes, but she makes no sound. Neither does Parks, for a moment or two. All he can think of is that he had a command of one and he let the boy die alone. That’s the sort of sin you go to hell for.

“We should bury him,” Melanie says.

For a moment his anger turns on her. “Fuck’s the point?” he growls, glaring at her. “They didn’t leave enough to bury. You could scoop him up and drop him in a frigging litter bin.”

Melanie meets him more than halfway. Teeth bared, she snarls right back at him. “We have to bury him. Or dogs and other hungries will get him and eat even more of him. And there won’t be anywhere to show where he died. You should honour a fallen soldier, Sergeant!”

“Honour a … Where the fuck did that come from?”

“The Trojan War, most likely,” Justineau mutters. She wipes her eyes with the heel of her hand. “Melanie, we can’t … there isn’t anywhere. And we don’t have the time. We’d just be making ourselves into targets. We’re going to have to leave him.”

“If we can’t bury him,” Melanie says, “then we have to burn him.”

“With what?” Justineau demands.

“With the stuff in the big barrels,” Melanie says impatiently. “From the room with the generator in it. It says Inflammable on it, and that means it burns.”

Justineau says something else. Trying to explain, maybe, why dragging twenty-gallon drums of aviation fuel through the streets is another activity that they won’t be engaging in.

But Parks is thinking, with a sort of dull wonder: as far as the kid is concerned, the world never ended. They taught her all these old, old things, filled her head with all this unserviceable shit, and they thought it didn’t matter because she was never going to leave her cell except to be dismantled and smeared on microscope slides.

His stomach lurches. He has a sense, for the first time in his soldiering career, of what a war crime might look like from the inside. And it’s not him who’s the criminal, or even Caldwell. It’s Justineau. And Mailer. And that drunken bastard Whitaker, and all the rest of them. Caldwell, she’s just a butcher. She’s Sweeney Todd, with a barber’s chair and a straight razor. She didn’t spend years twisting kids’ brains into pretzels.

“We can say a prayer for him,” Justineau is saying now. “But we can’t drag one of those fuel drums all the way here, Melanie. And even if we could—”

“Okay,” Parks says. “Let’s do it.”

Justineau looks at him like he’s gone mad. “This isn’t a joke,” she tells him grimly.

“Do I look like I’m joking? Hey, she’s right. She’s making more sense than either of us.”

“We can’t—” Justineau says again.

Parks loses it.

“Why the hell not?” he roars. “If she wants to honour the fucking dead, let her do it! School’s out, teacher. School’s been out for days now. Maybe you missed that.”

Justineau stares at him in bewilderment. Her face is a little pale. “You shouldn’t shout,” she mutters, making shushing motions with her hands.

“Did I get moved to your class?” Parks asks her. “Are you my teacher now?”

“The hungries that did this are probably still close enough to hear you. You’re giving away our position.”

Parks raises his rifle and squeezes off a round, making Justineau flinch and yelp. The shot punches a hole in the ceiling. Clods of damp plaster thud down, one of them bouncing off Parks’ shoulder and leaving a white streak where it hit. “I would welcome a word or two with them,” he says.

He turns to Melanie, who’s watching all this with wide eyes. It must be like seeing Mummy and Daddy quarrel. “What do you say, kid? Shall we give Kieran a Viking funeral?”

She doesn’t answer. She’s caught between a rock and a hard place, because if she says yes, then she’s siding with him against Justineau – and there’s no way that crush is subsiding any time soon.

Parks takes silence for consent. He goes around behind the counter, where he’s already seen a box of disposable lighters. They’re still full of fluid – only a few ccs in each one, but there are about a hundred of them. He brings them back to the pathetic remains.

Being a man of a practical turn of mind, he takes the walkie-talkie from Gallagher’s belt and transfers it to his own before breaking open the little plastic tubes one at a time and emptying the lighter fluid out on to Gallagher’s corpse. Justineau watches, shaking her head. “What about the smoke?” she asks him.

“What about it?” Parks grunts.

Melanie turns her back on the two of them and walks down the aisle, all the way to the front of the shop. She comes back a moment later carrying a bright yellow cagoule in a plastic wrapper.

She kneels and puts it under Gallagher’s head. She’s kneeling in his blood, which isn’t even dry yet. When she stands again, red-black streaks adorn her knees and calves.

Parks gets to the last lighter. He could use it to light the pyre, but he doesn’t. He pours it on, like the rest, then strikes a spark with his tinderbox to start the blaze.

“God bless, Private,” he mutters, as the flames consume what little is left of Kieran Gallagher.

Melanie is saying something too, but it’s under her breath – to the dead body, not to the rest of them – and Parks can’t hear. Justineau, to do her justice, waits in silence until they’re done, which is basically when the greasy, stinking flames force them back.

They make the return trip to Rosie a lot more widely spaced than on the outward journey, and with a lot less to say to each other. The shop blazes behind them, sending up a thick pillar of smoke that spreads, far over their heads, into a black umbrella.

Justineau is treating Parks like a dog that’s showing a little foam around the gums, which he feels is probably more than fair right then. Melanie walks ahead of them both, shoulders hunched and head lowered. She hasn’t asked for her cuffs and muzzle to be replaced, and Parks hasn’t offered.

When they’re most of the way back, the kid stops. Her head snaps up, suddenly alert.

“What’s that?” she whispers.

Parks is about to say he can’t hear anything, but there is a vibration in the air and now it assembles itself into a sound. Something stirring into wakefulness, sullen and dangerous, asserting its readiness to pick a fight and win it.

Rosie’s engines.

Parks breaks into a run, turning the corner of the Finchley High Road in time to see the distant speck grow in seconds into a behemoth.

Rosie weaves a little, both because there’s debris in the road and because Dr Caldwell is driving with her thumbs hooked into the bottom of the steering wheel. Every twitch of her arm translates into a yawing roll of the long vehicle.

Without even thinking about it, Parks steps into the road. He has no idea what Caldwell is doing, what she might be fleeing from, but he knows he has to stop her. Rosie lurches like a drunk to miss him, smashing into a parked car, which is dragged along with it for a few yards before breaking apart in a shower of rust and glass.

Then it’s gone by. They’re staring at the mobile lab’s tail lights as it accelerates away from them.

“What the fuck?” Justineau exclaims in a bewildered tone.

Parks seconds that emotion.

As soon as Parks and Justineau go off in search of Private Gallagher, taking test subject number one with them, Caroline Caldwell crosses to Rosie’s midsection door, opens up a compartment beside it at about head-height and pulls a lever from the vertical position to the horizontal. This is the override control for the external emergency access. Nobody can now enter the vehicle unless Caldwell lets them in herself.

That done, she goes to the cockpit and powers up one of three panels. The generator, twenty yards behind her in the rear of the vehicle, starts to hum – but not to roar, because Caldwell isn’t sending the power to the engine. She needs it in the lab, which is where she goes next. Since she’ll be working directly with infected tissue, she puts on gloves, goggles and face mask.

She boots up the scanning electron microscope, works her way patiently and punctiliously through the setting and display option screens, and mounts the first of her prepared slides.

With a pleasant tingle of anticipation, she puts her eyes to the output rig. The central nervous system of the Wainwright House hungry is instantly there, laid out before her avid gaze. Having chosen green as the key colour, she finds herself strolling under a canopy of neuronal dendrites, a tropical brainforest.

The resolution is so perfect, it takes Dr Caldwell’s breath away. Gross and fine structures are rendered in pin-sharp detail, like an illustration in a textbook. The fact that the brain tissue was so badly damaged before she was able to take her sample mainly shows itself by the presence, as she shifts the slide minutely under the turret, of foreign matter – dust motes, human hair and bacterial cells as well as the expected fungal mycelia – among the neurons. The nerve cells themselves are completely and thrillingly laid out to her gaze.

She sees what other commentators have seen, but what she has never been able to verify with the inadequate and jury-rigged equipment available to her at the base. She sees exactly how the cuckoo Ophiocordyceps builds its nests in the thickets of the brain – how its mycelia wrap themselves, thread-thin, around neuronal dendrites, like ivy around an oak. Except that ivy doesn’t whisper siren songs to the oak and steal it from itself.

Cuckoos? Ivy? Sirens? Focus, Caroline, she tells herself fiercely. Look at what’s in front of you, and draw appropriate inferences where the evidence exists to support them.

The evidence exists. Now she sees what other eyes have missed – the cracks in the fortress (focus!), the places where the massively parallel structures of the human brain have regrouped, forlorn and outnumbered, around and between the fungus-choked nerve cells. Some uninfected clusters of neurons have actually grown denser, although the newer cells are bloated and threadbare, ruptured from within by jagged sheets of amyloid plaque.

Caldwell’s scalp prickles as she realises the significance of what she’s seeing.

It would have happened quite slowly, she reminds herself. The earlier researchers didn’t chart this progression because, immediately post-Breakdown, it hadn’t yet reached a point where it could be visually verified. The only way anyone could have found it would have been by guessing it might be there and testing for it.

Caldwell lifts her head and steps back from the imaging rig. It’s hard, but necessary. She could stare into that green world for hours, for whole days, and keep on finding new wonders there.

Later, perhaps. But later is starting to be a word that has no referent for her. Later is another day or two of rising fever and loss of function, followed by a painful, undignified death. She has the first half of a working hypothesis. Now she has to finish this project, while she still can.

In Caldwell’s lab back at the base there are – or were – dozens of slides taken from the brain tissue of test subject sixteen (Marcia) and test subject twenty-two (Liam). If these were still available to her now, she’d use them. She’s not profligate with resources, despite the comment she once made in desperation to Justineau about amassing as many observations as she could in the hope that some pattern might finally emerge. Now she has her pattern – has, at least, a hypothesis that can be tested – but all her existing samples from the test subjects at the base, the children who seem to have a partial immunity to the effects of Ophiocordyceps, have been taken from her.

She needs new samples. From test subject number one.

But she knows that Helen Justineau will resist any attempt she makes to dissect Melanie, or even to take a biopsy from her brain. And both Sergeant Parks and Private Gallagher have, as Caldwell feared from the start, developed unacceptably close relationships with the test subject through repeated interaction in a partially normalised social context. There’s no guarantee, now, that if she announced an intention to obtain brain tissue samples from Melanie, she would be supported by anyone in the group.

So she makes her plans on the assumption that she has already issued that announcement and been refused.

She unfolds and assembles the collapsible airlock around the midsection door. Its ingenious multi-hinged construction makes this relatively straightforward, despite the clumsiness of her hands. It’s not just the bandages now; the earlier tenderness of the inflamed tissue has given way to a general loss of sensation and response. She tells her fingers to do something, and they react late, move fitfully, like a car starting in winter.

But she perseveres. Fully extended, the airlock bolts into eight grooved channels, four in the ceiling of the vehicle and four in its floor. Each bolt needs to be shot home and then anchored with a sleeve bracket that tightens by the turning of a wheel. Caldwell has to use both hands and a wrench. Eight times. Long before she’s finished, feeling has returned to her hands in the form of intense and unremitting pain. The agony makes her whimper aloud in spite of herself.

The sides and front of the airlock are made of an ultra-flexible but extremely strong plastic. Its top and bottom now need to be sealed with a quick-hardening solution shot from a hand-held applicator. Caldwell has to hold it in the crook of her left elbow, using the thumb of her right hand to depress the trigger.

The result is a mess, but she verifies that the seal is perfect by pumping the air out of the airlock and watching the pressure gauge drop smoothly to zero.

Very good.

She pumps fresh air in, bringing the airlock to normal pressure. She takes manual control of the doors and routes it to her own computer in the lab. She leaves both doors closed, but only the inner door locked. Then she manhandles a cylinder of compressed phosgene gas into the airlock’s reserve chamber. She had already noted the cylinder’s presence during her initial search of the lab’s contents, and assumed that it was there to assist in the synthesis of organic polymers. But it has other uses, of course, including the rapid and effective suffocation of large lab animals without widespread tissue damage.

Now she waits. And while she waits, she examines her own feelings about what she’s about to do. She’s reluctant to dwell on the effects of the gas on her human companions. Phosgene is more humane than its close relative, chlorine, but that’s not saying very much. Caldwell is hoping that Melanie will enter the airlock first, and that it will be possible to lock the outer door before anyone else follows her in.

She’s aware, though, that this is unlikely. It’s far more probable that Helen Justineau will either enter alongside Melanie or else precede her into the vehicle. This prospect doesn’t trouble Caldwell too much. There’s even a certain rightness to it. Justineau’s many interventions have contributed very substantially to the present absurd situation – in which Caldwell has to plot to recover control of her own specimen.

But she hopes, at least, that it won’t be necessary to kill Parks or Gallagher. The two soldiers will probably bring up the rear, covering Justineau and Melanie until they’re inside Rosie. By which time, the door can be locked against them.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 596