The Girl With All The Gifts 20 page

None of this is perfect. It’s not as though she wants to commit what more or less amounts to murder. But her hypothesis is so huge in its implications that to shrink from murder would be a crime against humanity. She has a duty, and she has an interval of time in which she can still work. That interval is most likely measurable not in days, but in hours.

Caldwell has pulled back the baffles from the window in the lab so that she can peer out into the street and see the rescue party when it returns. But the pain in her hands and arms has exhausted her. Despite her best efforts, she dozes. She drifts in and out of consciousness. Every time she forces her eyelids open, they lower themselves again by subliminal increments.

After one of these times, Caldwell finds herself meeting – at a distance, through the window – the gaze of a small child, who is standing in a doorway almost directly opposite her.

A hungry, obviously. Age at time of primary infection, no more than five. Naked, scrawny and indescribably filthy, like a disaster victim in a charity appeal broadcast before the Breakdown, in those innocent days when a few thousand dead felt like a disaster.

The little boy is watching Caldwell avidly and unblinkingly. And he’s not alone. It’s late afternoon now, and the long shadows provide a lot of natural cover. But like the details in a puzzle picture, the other hungries emerge from the background one by one. An older, red-haired girl behind the rusting hulk of a parked car. A black-haired boy, older still, crouched in the remains of a shop window display with an aluminium baseball bat clutched in his hands. Two more behind him, in the shop itself, on hands and knees underneath a rack of sun-bleached and mouldering dresses.

A whole pack of them! Caldwell is enthralled. She’d always known, when Parks and his people said the supply of test subjects in the wild had dried up, that it could mean many things. One possibility – at the time she thought it implausible, but she’s not so certain now – was that the feral infected children had been intelligent enough to perceive the sergeant and his trappers as a threat and to move on to new hunting grounds.

Now Caldwell watches as the black-haired boy signals to the two behind him with a toss of the head, and they come up level with him to see what he’s seeing. He’s the leader, obviously. He’s also one of the very few who are not completely naked. He wears a camouflage jacket on his narrow, bony shoulders. At some point, he’s brought down a soldier and taken a fancy to his hide as well as his flesh. His face is a riot of smudged colour – a tribal display of status and potency.

Caldwell sees how the hungry children operate as a pack. How they signal using silent gestures and facial expressions. How they coordinate their efforts against this unfamiliar thing in their midst.

Perhaps it’s the sound that has brought them, the steady hum of the generator. Or perhaps they’ve been watching Rosie for a while now, having followed Justineau or Gallagher back here after one of their excursions. But whatever it was that attracted their attention, now they’ve seen her.

And having seen her, they’re stalking her.

Even though she’s immured behind unbreakable glass in an oversized battle tank whose armaments could blast the buildings all around into rubble and powder. Even though there’s no obvious way to reach her, and no way of quantifying the risk she poses. Even though, crucially, they can’t smell her through steel and glass and polymer and airtight seals.

They recognise her as prey, and they’re responding accordingly.

Caldwell is not immediately conscious of having made the decision as she rises to her feet and walks softly out of the lab towards the midsection door. But it’s a good decision. She can justify it on any number of grounds.

She returns the door-control functions to the panel beside the airlock itself. Then she slides the outer door open and closed again, several times over, testing its operation at various speed settings. She watches the hydraulic valves, as thick as her forearms, sliding smoothly backwards and forwards at the top and bottom of the door. Even at the third speed setting – there are seven that are faster – she estimates that the valves are exerting in excess of five hundred foot-pounds of pressure. The inner door, by contrast, is operated by simpler mechanical servos. It was never anticipated that the airlock would have to function as a second restraint cage.

Caldwell takes into account a number of highly pertinent factors. There’s no telling whether test subject one will even return from the expedition. If she does, it’s far from certain that the ambush Caldwell has already mounted will work. Or if it works, how any survivors would respond to the deaths of those caught in the airlock.

But the truth – or at least part of it – is that she can’t resist. These monsters are hunting her. She wants to hunt them in return and to enfold their efforts effortlessly in her wider stratagem.

With the outer door opened fully, she slides the inner airlock door open halfway. She stands up against the opening and waits.

Her body is still sticky with sweat from her earlier exertions. Her pheromones, she knows, are now spreading outward from her body on the turbulent gradients of the cooling afternoon air. With every breath, the hungry children are inhaling her. Sentient they may be, and cooperative, and sly. But their nature being what it is, it’s only a matter of time before they respond.

It’s the red-haired girl who moves first. She comes out from behind the car, walks straight into the open and advances towards Rosie’s inviting doorway.

The boy in the camouflage jacket makes a sound like a bark. The red-haired girl slows, reluctantly, and turns to face him.

The younger boy from the shop doorway shoots past her at a dead run and flings himself directly at the door. It’s so sudden and so fast that Caldwell – even though this is exactly what she’s been waiting for – barely has time to react.

Her thumb closes on a switch.

The hungry boy leaps the sill of the outer door and throws himself at Caldwell like a missile, arms outstretched to catch and clutch.

Before he can reach her, the inner door slams shut.

Caldwell has underestimated the power of the servos. The door closes on the hungry’s upper body like a nutcracker, crushing its ribs. The hungry opens its mouth to scream, but its lungs are terminally and irreversibly deflated. Screaming is no longer an option. It’s been trapped with one arm behind its torso, inside the airlock, the other thrust forward. It’s still straining futilely to reach Caldwell, its slender fingers stretched out. One of them actually flicks the sleeve of her lab coat, but the infection can’t be contracted from a scratch, only from blood or saliva. With her goggles and face mask in place, she’s not at risk.

The creature’s head, Caldwell notes, is completely undamaged. She feels a dizzying surge of elation, and she laughs aloud.

She half laughs. The rest of the sound is choked off as something streaks in from the street and smacks into her jaw, ripping right through the wire and paper of the face mask. The agony is astonishing. Caldwell’s mouth fills up with blood in which broken-off pieces of tooth grate against each other with a dull, shipwrecked sound.

The stone clatters along the floor, dark red with her spilled blood. The red-haired girl is already loading another into the strip of faded cloth or leather she’s using as a sling.

The boy’s crushed body is wedging the door open about three inches, the outer door is still gaping wide, and the hungries outside, its cohort, its friends, are racing into the breach with their makeshift weapons raised.

Caldwell’s hand lashes out by pure reflex, hitting the controls for the outer door. It starts to close, but she’s forgotten to raise the speed from level three to level ten. At the last moment, the tip of the baseball bat is thrust into the narrowing gap, where it wedges tight. The hydraulics whine, and the edge of the door bites deep into the metal of the bat, starts to slice it in two. But now, little hands come groping around the edges of the door, some of them reaching for Caldwell, most of them wrestling with the door to keep it from closing.

They can’t get to her. But they’re pulling at the door determinedly, shifting their position to allow more hands to get a grip, to add their efforts. Caldwell knows how strong that door is, so when she sees it start to open again, the sudden shock makes her body rebel against her will. She staggers back, fists coming up to her mouth as though she could hide behind them.

The painted face of the black-haired boy appears in the gap of the outer door. He fixes her with baleful, bloodshot eyes, telling her in wordless grimaces that this is personal now.

Which means he thinks of himself as a person. Amazing.

Caldwell sprints for the cockpit, where she slams down two more levers, engaging wheels and weapons. She can’t operate both at once, of course. She’ll be lucky if she can remember how to drive this thing, on a few days’ training received two decades ago. For a terrifying moment, the entire console seems suddenly alien and meaningless. She has to drag her brain out of the adrenalin flood and back under her conscious control.

The button marked E. That comes first, and it’s right there, in the centre of the steering column. It stands for ELEVATE. Rosie’s chassis lifts itself eight inches higher off the road, hissing like a snake as the hydraulics kick in. Caldwell sees some of the hungries scatter, but the booming and banging from the midsection tells her that some of them are still at work there.

Panic twists her innards. She has to get out of here. She knows she might be bringing the enemy with her, but if she stays, she’s dog meat. They’ll get the outer door open eventually, and then the inner door will hold them for a few seconds at most.

Caldwell takes the steering column in her unresponsive hands, pushes hard forward and prays. The brakes disengage without being asked to. Rosie shakes herself like a dog and lurches into motion, so fast and so sudden that Caldwell is thrown backwards into the driving seat. Her hands slip partway off the grips and the behemoth slews across the road, punching into a lamp post and ripping it right out of the ground with a clang like the bell that signals the start of a boxing match.

Caldwell has to grip more tightly and pull hard to bring Rosie straight again. The pain makes her scream aloud, but she can barely hear the sound over the full-throated roar of the engines. She has no idea what’s happening at the midsection door, because the engine noise hides those sounds too. So she pushes harder, takes the column all the way to the top of its grooved channel. The street becomes a grey blur.

There’s another impact, then a third, but Caldwell is aware of them only as vibrations. Rosie has so much momentum now that she parts the world like water.

Figures in the street, briefly in front of her, then beside her, then gone. More hungries? One of them looked like Parks, but there’s no way of finding out without stopping, and she doesn’t want to do that. In fact, for the moment she doesn’t even remember how.

Some parts of the console, though, are starting to look a lot more familiar now. Caldwell realises that she doesn’t have to be blind. Rosie has cameras mounted along her entire length, most of which can be swivelled to look in any direction. She flicks them all on, and scans the left-hand feeds. One of them is dead-centred on the midsection door, where two hungries have managed to keep their grip on the moving juggernaut. One is the leader, his jacket whipping in Rosie’s slipstream like a flag. The other is the red-haired girl.

Caldwell swerves right, up a steep incline where a road sign points towards Highgate and Kentish Town. She leaves the turn to the last moment, then yanks the steering column as hard as she can so that Rosie lists sharply, but the incline slows her and the effect isn’t as spectacular as she was hoping. The hungries are still hanging on, still wrestling with the partly opened door.

Caldwell has been here before, a long time ago. Pre-Breakdown. Memories stir, filling her mind with surreal juxtapositions. Houses she once aspired to live in flick past her, squat and dark like widows in a Spanish cemetery waiting patiently for the resurrection.

At the top of the hill, she turns again. She misjudges the angle, punches out part of the wall of a pub that stands on the corner. Rosie isn’t perturbed, though the rear-view cameras show the building slumping into ruin behind her.

There’s a narrow elbow of road, then a long, wide sweep down towards central London. Caldwell piles on the acceleration again, and leans hard over, deliberately scraping Rosie’s left flank against the long exterior wall of what looks like a school building. The sign above the gate reads La Sainte Union. Pulverised brick powders the windscreen, and there’s a shriek of tortured metal even louder than the engine roar. Rosie endures and Caldwell is rewarded by the sight of at least one of the hungries flung loose in the hard rain.

She yells at the top of her voice – a banshee shriek of triumph and defiance. Blood from her wounded mouth flecks the windscreen in front of her.

She veers back out into the centre of the road, glancing at the cameras again. No sign of the hungries now. She has to stop so that she can examine her prize and make sure it’s still intact. But the hungries she’s just shaken off might still be alive. She remembers the look on the painted face of the black-haired boy. He’ll follow her for as long as his legs still work.

So she drives on, more or less due south, through Camden Town. Euston lies beyond, and after that she’ll be approaching the river. The streets remain empty, but Caldwell is wary. Eleven million people used to live in this city. Behind these blind windows and closed doors some of them must still be waiting, stuck halfway between life and death.

She’s figured out the brakes by this time, and she slows, intimidated by the echoing bellow of Rosie’s engines in these desolate landscapes. She feels for a sickening moment that she might be the last human being left alive on the face of a necrotic planet. And that it might not matter after all. To have the race that built these mausoleums lie in them finally, quiet and resigned, and crumble into dust.

Who’d miss us?

It’s the comedown after the adrenalin high of taking her specimen and shaking off her enemies. That and the fever. Caldwell shudders, and her vision swims. The road ahead of her seems to dissolve all at once into a grey smear. The dysfunction is sudden and spectacular. Is she going blind? That can’t happen. Not yet. She needs another day. A few hours, at least.

She brings Rosie to a jerking, screaming stop.

Locks the column.

And runs a hand over her face, massaging her eyes with thumb and forefinger to clear them. They feel like hot marbles nestling in her skull. But when she ventures to open them and look out through the cockpit’s windshield, there’s nothing wrong with how they work.

There really is a grey wall, forty feet high, that’s been thrown across the road ahead of her. And finally, after a minute or more of baffled awe, she knows it for what it is.

It’s her nemesis, her mighty opposite.

It’s Ophiocordyceps.

Miss Justineau is furious, so Melanie does her best to be furious too. But it’s hard, for lots of reasons.

She’s still sad about Kieran being killed, and the being sad seems to stop the being angry from getting started. And Dr Caldwell driving away in the big truck means that Melanie won’t have to see either one of them again, which makes her want to jump up and down and punch the air with her hands.

So while Sergeant Parks is using all the bad words he knows, it seems like, and Miss Justineau is sitting by the side of the road with a sad, dazed face, Melanie is thinking Goodbye, Dr Caldwell. Drive far, far away, and don’t come back.

But then Miss Justineau says, “That’s it. We’re dead.”

And that changes everything. Melanie thinks about what’s going to happen now, instead of just about how she feels, and her stomach goes all cold suddenly.

Because Miss Justineau is right.

They’ve used up the last of the e-blocker. The food smell is really strong on them, and Melanie is amazed that she’s able to be this close without wanting to bite them. She’s become used to it somehow. It’s like the part of her that just wants to eat and eat and eat is locked up in a little box, and she doesn’t have to open the box if she doesn’t want to.

But that’s not going to help Miss Justineau and Sergeant Parks very much. They’ve got to keep walking through this city, smelling like food, and they won’t walk far before they meet something that wants to eat them.

“We have to follow her,” Melanie says, full of urgency now that she sees what’s at stake. “We have to get back inside.”

Sergeant Parks gives her a searching look. “Can you do it?” he asks her. “The way you did with Gallagher? Is there a trail?”

Melanie hasn’t even thought of it until then, but now she breathes in deep – and finds it at once. There’s a trail so strong it’s like a river running through the air. It’s got a bit of Dr Caldwell in it, and a bit of something else that might be a hungry or more than one hungry. But mostly it’s the stinky chemical smell of Rosie’s engine. She could follow it blindfolded. She could follow it in her sleep.

Parks sees it in her face. “Okay,” he says. “Let’s get going.”

Justineau stares at him, wild-eyed. “She was pushing sixty miles an hour!” she says, her mouth twisted in a snarl. “She’s gone. There’s no way in God’s green earth we’re going to catch up with her.”

“Won’t know unless we try,” Parks counters. “Want to lie down and die, Helen, or give it a shot?”

“It’s going to come to the same thing either way.”

“Then die on your feet.”

“Please, Miss Justineau!” Melanie begs. “Let’s go a little way, at least. We can stop when it gets dark, and find somewhere to hide.” What she’s thinking is: they have to get out of these streets, where the hungry children who are just like her live and hunt. She thinks she might be able to protect Miss J against ordinary hungries, but not against the painted-face boy and his fierce tribe.

Sergeant Parks holds out a hand. Miss Justineau just stares at it, but he keeps it there in front of her, and in the end she takes it. She lets him haul her to her feet.

“How many hours of daylight have we got left?” she asks.

“Maybe two.”

“We can’t move in the dark, Parks. And Caroline can. She’s got headlights.”

Parks concedes the point with a curt nod. “We follow until it’s too dark to see. Then we hole up. In the morning, if there’s still a strong trail, we carry on. If not, we look for some tar or creosote or some other shit like that to mask our scent, the way the junkers do, and we keep on heading south.”

He turns to Melanie. “Go ahead, Lassie,” he says. “Do your stuff.”

Melanie hesitates. “I think…” she says.

“Yeah? What is it?”

“I think maybe I’ll be able to run a lot faster than the two of you, Sergeant Parks.”

Parks laughs – a short, harsh sound. “Yeah, I think so too,” he says. “We’ll do the best we can. Keep us in sight, that’s all.” Then he has a better idea, and turns to Justineau. “Let her have the walkie-talkie,” he tells her. “If we lose her, she can call us and talk us in.”

Justineau hands the rig to Melanie, and Sergeant Parks shows her how to send and receive with it. It’s simple enough, but designed for much bigger fingers than hers. She practises until she gets it right. Then Parks shows her how to hook it on to the waistband of her pink unicorn jeans, where it looks ridiculously large and cumbersome.

Miss Justineau gives her a smile of encouragement. Underneath it Melanie can see all her fears, her grief and exhaustion. How close she is to empty.

She goes up to Miss J and gives her a short, intense hug. “It’ll be all right,” she says. “I won’t let anything hurt you.”

It’s the first time they’ve hugged like this – with Melanie giving comfort rather than receiving it. And she remembers Miss Justineau making the same promise to her, although she couldn’t say exactly when. She feels a pang of nostalgia for that time, whenever it was. But she knows that you can’t be a child for ever, even if you want to be.

She sets off at a run, and slowly accelerates. But she holds herself to a speed that the two grown-ups can just about keep up with. At each junction she waits until they jog into sight before setting off again. Walkie-talkie or not, she’s not going to leave them to their own devices with the night coming on – a night that she knows contains so many terrible things.

Caroline Caldwell gets out of Rosie using the cockpit door rather than the midsection door. The midsection door still has the airlock attached and her hungry specimen jammed into it.

She walks twenty paces forward. That’s as far as she can go, more or less.

She stares at the grey wall for a long time. For whole minutes, probably, although she doesn’t really trust her time sense any more. Her wounded mouth throbs in time with her heartbeat, but her nervous system is like a flooded carburettor; the engine doesn’t catch, the confused signals don’t coalesce into pain.

Caldwell registers the wall’s construction, its height and width and depth – the depth is just an estimate – and the time it must have taken to form. She knows exactly what she’s looking at. But knowing doesn’t help. She’s going to die soon, and she’ll die with this … thing in front of her. This gauntlet, flung down by a bullying, contemptuous universe that allowed human beings to grope their way to sentience just so it could put them in their place that bit more painfully.

Caldwell makes herself move, eventually. She does the only thing she can think of to do. She picks up the gauntlet.

Returning to Rosie, she lets herself back in through the cockpit door, which she closes and locks. She goes through the crew quarters and the lab to the midsection. She stops briefly in the lab to replace her face mask, which was ripped when the slingshot stone smacked into it. She scrubs up and dons surgical gloves, takes a bone-saw from a rack and a plastic tray from a shelf. A bucket would be better, but she has no bucket.

The hungry she caught is still moving sluggishly, despite the horrific damage the door mechanism has done to the muscles and tendons of its upper body. Seen from this close, the size of the head in relation to the body suggests that it may have been even younger at the time of initial infection than Caldwell had previously estimated.

But then she’s about to test that hypothesis, isn’t she?

The hungry’s right arm is jammed behind it, inside the airlock space. Caldwell secures the left arm by catching it in a noose of plasticated twine and tying the free end of the twine to a bracket on the wall. She wraps the twine around her own forearm three or four times and uses her body weight to pull it tight against the hungry’s struggles. The loops of twine bite deep into her arm, where the flesh has gone from angry red to sullen purple. She feels very little pain, which is a bad sign in itself. Nerve damage in necrotised flesh is irreversible and progressive.

As quickly as she can, but carefully, she saws off the hungry’s head. It grunts and snaps its jaws at her throughout the whole of this process. Both of its arms flail violently, the left one within a tight circular arc defined by the free play of the twine. Neither arm can reach her.

The fragile upper vertebrae yield to the saw almost instantly. It’s the muscle, on which the blade alternately sticks and slides, that’s hardest. When Caldwell is through the vertebrae, the hungry’s head sags suddenly, opening the incision wide to show the severed nubs of bone, shockingly white. By contrast, the liquor that drips down from the wound on to the tray and the floor all around is mostly grey, shot with rivulets of red.

The last thin ribbon of flesh tears under the head’s own weight, and the head abruptly falls. It hits the edge of the tray, flipping it over, and rolls away across the floor.

The hungry’s body is still moving very much as it did when the head was still attached. Its arms windmill uselessly, its legs step-slide on the airlock’s grooved metal floor. Colonies of Cordyceps anchored to the spine are still trying to commandeer the dead child and make it work for the greater good of its fungal passenger. The movements slow while Caldwell bends to retrieve the head, but they haven’t entirely stopped when she straightens again and takes the head through into the lab.

Safety first. She leaves the head on the work surface for a moment or two while she returns to clear the airlock, flinging the still-twitching headless corpse out on to the road. It lies there like a reproach not just to Caldwell but to scientific endeavour in general.

Caldwell turns her back on it and slams the door. If the road to knowledge was paved with dead children – which at some times and in some places it has been – she’d still walk it and absolve herself afterwards. What other choice would she have? Everything she values is at the end of that road.

She closes the doors, returns to the lab and sets to work.

Melanie is waiting when Justineau and Parks finally turn into the long road that has Euston station at the other end of it. Wordlessly she points, and Justineau looks. Breathless, lathered in sweat, her legs and chest knotting in agony, it’s all she can do.

Halfway along the broad avenue, Rosie has slewed to a halt on a steep diagonal, practically touching the kerb on both sides. Directly in front of the vehicle a huge barricade blocks the street. It rises to a height of forty feet or so, which puts it higher than the houses on either side. In the low, slanting sunlight, Justineau can see that it continues over the houses, into them and beyond them. It looks like a sheer vertical, at first, but then its subtle tones resolve themselves and she can see that it’s a slope like the side of a mountain. It’s as though a million tons of dirty snow has fallen in this one spot.

Parks joins her and they continue to boggle in unison.

“Any idea?” the sergeant asks at last.

Justineau shakes her head. “You?”

“I prefer to look at all the evidence first. Then I get someone smarter than I am to explain it to me.”

They go forward slowly, alert for any hostile movement. Rosie has been in the wars, and they can see the aftermath. The dents and scrapes on the armour plating. The blood and tissue plastered around the midsection door. The small, crumpled body lying in the street, right beside the vehicle.

The body is a hungry. A child. Male, no older than four or five. His head is gone – no sign of it anywhere nearby – and his upper body is crushed almost flat, as though someone put his narrow chest in a vice and tightened it. Melanie kneels to examine him more closely, her expression solemn and thoughtful. Justineau stands over her, searching for words and not finding any. She can see that the boy wears a bracelet of hair, perhaps his own, on his right wrist. As a badge of identity, it couldn’t be clearer. He was like Melanie, not like the regular hungries.

“I’m sorry,” Justineau says.

Melanie says nothing.

A movement in Justineau’s peripheral vision makes her turn her head. Sergeant Parks is looking the same way, towards Rosie’s central section. Caroline Caldwell has stripped the duct tape away from the lab window and slid back the light baffles. She’s staring out at them, her expression hard and impassive.

Justineau goes over to the window and mouths: What are you doing?

Caldwell shrugs. She makes no move to let them in.

Justineau hammers on the window, gestures to the midsection door. Caldwell goes away for a few moments, then comes back with an A5 notepad. She holds it up to show Justineau what she’s written on the top sheet. I have to work. Very close to a breakthrough. I think you might try to stop me. Sorry.

Justineau throws out her arms, indicating the empty street, the long shadows of late afternoon. She doesn’t have to say or mime anything. The message is clear. We’re going to die.

Caldwell watches her for a moment longer, then once again closes the baffles right across the window.

Parks is on his knees now, a few feet to Justineau’s left. He’s working the crank to open the door. But it’s not opening, even though he’s encouraging it with a continuous stream of bad language. Caldwell must have disabled the emergency access.

Melanie is still kneeling beside the beheaded body, either grieving or else so lost in thought that she’s not aware right now of what’s going on around her. Justineau’s stomach is churning and she feels sick. From the hard running, and now from this lethal smack in the face. She walks on a little, trying to outdistance the nausea, until she comes to the outermost reaches of the wall.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 596