The Girl With All The Gifts 21 page

It’s not a wall at all but an avalanche, a formless sprawl of matter in slow-motion advance. It’s made from the tendrils of Ophiocordyceps, from billions of fungal mycelia interwoven more finely than any tapestry. The threads are so delicate that they’re translucent, allowing Justineau to peer into the mass to a depth of ten feet or so. Everything within is cocooned, colonised, wrapped in hundreds of thicknesses of the stuff. Outlines are softened, colours muted to a thousand shades of grey.

Justineau’s dizziness and nausea return. She sits, slowly, rests her head in her hands until the feelings stop. She’s aware of Melanie walking past her, skirting the edge of the thing and then seemingly about to walk into it.

“Don’t!” Justineau yells.

Melanie looks at her in surprise. “But it’s only like cotton, Miss Justineau. Or like a cloud that’s come down to the ground. It can’t hurt us.” She demonstrates, bending to run a hand lightly through the fluffy mass. It parts cleanly, retains a perfect image of the hand’s passage. The threads she’s touched cling to her skin like spiderwebs.

Justineau scrambles up to pull her away, gently but firmly. “I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe it can, maybe it can’t. I don’t want to find out.” She asks Melanie to brush the stuff off her hands, very carefully, on to a tuft of grass that’s sprouting up from the ruined pavement nearby. The fungal threads are wrapped around the grass stalks too, and most of it appears to be dead – much more grey than green showing.

They go back to Parks, who’s given up on trying to open the midsection door and is now sitting with his back to Rosie, leaning against one of her rear treads. He’s holding his canteen, weighing it carefully in his hands. He takes a swig as they approach, then hands it to Justineau to do likewise.

When she takes it, she realises from its weight that it must be almost empty. She gives it back. “I’m good,” she lies.

“Bullshit,” Parks says. “Drink and be merry, Helen. I’m gonna go look around these houses shortly. See if there’s anything left standing in rain buckets or gutters. God will provide.”

“You think?”

“He’s known for it.”

She drains the canteen and slumps down beside him, dropping it into his lap. She looks up at the sky, which is darkening. Sunset’s maybe half an hour away, so Parks is probably bluffing about looking for standing water – which anyway would likely be full of all kinds of bad shit.

Melanie sits cross-legged between them and facing them.

“What now?” Justineau asks.

Parks makes a non-committal gesture. “I guess we wait a while longer, and then we pick one of these houses. Secure it as far as we can before it gets dark. Try and fix up some kind of a barricade, because we’ve got to be leaving a scent trail now as well as a heat trail. Hungries will find us long before morning.”

Justineau is torn between despair and choking rage. She goes with the rage because she’s afraid the despair will paralyse her. “If I get my hands on that bitch,” she mutters, “I’ll beat her brains out, and then mount the best parts on microscope slides.” Moved by some atavistic reflex, she adds, “Sorry, Melanie.”

“It’s all right,” Melanie says. “I don’t like Dr Caldwell either.”

When the sun touches the horizon, they finally force themselves to move. The lights are on in the lab by this time, a little of their glow spilling around the edges of the baffles so that the windows look as though they’ve been drawn on Rosie’s side in luminous paint.

The rest of the world is dark, and getting darker.

Parks turns to Melanie, very abruptly, as though he’s been nerving himself up to something. “You sleepy, kid?” he asks her.

Melanie shakes her head for no.

“You scared?”

She has to think about this one, but it’s no again. “Not for me,” she qualifies. “The hungries won’t hurt me. I’m scared for Miss Justineau.”

“Then maybe you could run an errand for me.” Parks points at the lowering grey mass. “I don’t fancy our chances going through that stuff. I don’t know whether it could infect us or not, but I’m pretty sure it could choke us to death if we breathed enough of it in.”

“So?” Melanie demands.

“So I’d like to know if there’s a way around it. Maybe you could go check it out, once we’ve found a bolt-hole for ourselves. Might make a difference tomorrow if we know where we’re going.”

“I can do that,” Melanie says.

Justineau is unhappy at the thought, but she knows it makes sense. Melanie can survive out here in the dark. She and Parks definitely can’t.

“Are you sure?” she asks.

Melanie is very sure.

She’s even keen to do it, because she’s restless and unhappy about everything that’s happened today. Kieran dying – dying because her story, her lie, frightened him away. And then Dr Caldwell driving off and leaving Miss Justineau with nowhere safe to sleep. And then the finding of the little corpse, the body of a child much younger than her, with his head cut off.

She thinks maybe Dr Caldwell cut his head off, because that’s the sort of thing that Dr Caldwell does. Underneath the unhappiness, she finds a pure, white anger. Dr Caldwell has to be made to stop doing these things. Someone has to teach her a lesson.

The wild children are just the same as she is, except that they never got to have lessons with Miss Justineau. Nobody ever taught them how to think for themselves, or even how to be people, but they’re learning without that help. They’ve already learned how to be a family. And then Dr Caldwell comes and kills them as though they’re just animals. Maybe they tried to kill her first, but they don’t know any better and Dr Caldwell does.

It fills Melanie with a rage so strong it’s almost like the hungry feeling. And discovering that she can feel like that makes her afraid.

So she doesn’t mind at all going out to explore the grey stuff. She thinks moving will be a lot better for her than staying still.

Sergeant Parks and Miss Justineau find a loft in one of the houses of a three-storey Victorian terrace a few streets away from where Rosie stopped. There’s a ladder that leads up there, but once Sergeant Parks and Miss Justineau have climbed up, Melanie takes the bottom of it while the two grown-ups take the top and they manage between the three of them to rip it out of the metal brackets that hold it in place. Melanie catches it as it falls and lowers it carefully to the floor so that it doesn’t make too much noise.

“I’ll see you later,” she calls up to them softly. She takes the walkie-talkie from her belt and waves it to show that she hasn’t forgotten about it. She’ll be able to talk to them, even if she goes far away.

Miss Justineau whispers a reply. Goodbye, or good luck, or something like that. Melanie is already running lightly back down the stairs, her bare feet silent on the rotten, moss-covered carpet.

She picks a starting point at random and follows the edge of the grey mass. She starts off at a walk, but she’s still filled with a sense of restlessness and urgency, so after a while she breaks into a trot and then into a run. She goes a long way, detouring wherever she has to and then finding the wall again as soon as she can.

It seems to go on for ever. Its outer surface isn’t totally straight; it goes in and out a lot, throwing out salients along the narrower streets, falling back a little where there are open spaces that offer less to cling to. But there’s no sign of a break and nowhere where Melanie can glimpse anything on the further side of the barrier.

After she’s been running for more than an hour, she stops. Not to rest – she could go on for a while yet without discomfort – but to check in with Miss Justineau and Sergeant Parks.

She presses the stud on the walkie-talkie and says hello into it. For a long time it just crackles, but then Sergeant Parks’ voice answers. “How are you doing?”

“I went east,” Melanie tells him. “Quite a long way. The wall just goes on and on.”

“You’ve been walking all this time?”

“Running.”

“Where are you now? Can you see any street signs?”

Melanie can’t, but she walks on until she reaches another crossroads. “Northchurch Road,” she says. “London Borough of Hackney.”

She hears Parks breathing hard. “And it goes on further than that?”

“A lot further. As far as I can see. And I can see a long way, even in the dark.” Melanie isn’t boasting; it’s just something Sergeant Parks needs to know.

“Okay. Thanks, kid. Come on back. If you feel like taking a look to the west, too, I’d be grateful. But don’t wear yourself out. Come on back here if you’re feeling tired.”

“I’m fine,” Melanie says. “Over and out.”

She retraces her steps and goes the other way, but it’s exactly the same. If they go around the wall, they’ll have to go a very long way either to the east or to the west, and it’s not clear where they’ll be able to start going south again.

Finally Melanie finds herself standing directly in front of the wall, a few miles away from where they first met it. It’s as thick here as it is anywhere, but the angle of its fall is different. An outcrop of grey froth leans forward a long way, right over her, and she can see the moon shining down through it. The stark white glow is like a promise, an encouragement. If she pushes forward through the wall, she might be able to find the further side before she loses the light.

Miss Justineau said it was dangerous, but Melanie doesn’t see how, and she’s not afraid of it. She takes a step forward, and then another. The grey threads are up to her ankles, then up to her knees, but they offer no resistance at all. They just tickle a little as she pushes through them, parting with the smallest sigh of not-quite-sound.

The moon follows her, a moving spotlight in which everything opens itself up to her gaze. The grey threads quickly get thicker and thicker. Objects that she passes – rubbish bins, parked cars, post boxes, garden hedges and gates – are swathed in endless layers, turned into granite statues of themselves.

Twenty feet in, Melanie finds the first fallen bodies. She slows to a halt, amazed at what she’s seeing. The hungries have fallen down in the middle of the street, or slumped at the bases of walls – just like the bodies they saw when they were walking into London. But there are so many more of them here! From their split skulls and exploded heads, grey stems about six inches in diameter have sprouted like the trunks of trees. The stems grow straight upwards to incredible heights, and the threads pour out from them at all angles in endless proliferation. Some of them connect to whatever other stems are nearest, making a dense net like a million spiderwebs all woven together. Others wrap around whatever is in their path, or if there’s nothing, they shelve gently down to the ground. Wherever the threads touch the ground, another trunk appears, but these trunks are a lot thinner and shorter than the trunks that grow straight out of the bodies of the hungries.

Melanie goes closer. She can’t help herself. The sad husks at the bottom of each fungus tree don’t scare her. There’s nothing of humanity left in them, nothing to remind anyone that they were once alive. They’re more like clothes that someone has taken off and left lying on the ground.

Close up, she can see the grey fruit that hangs on these ghost trees. She reaches up to touch one of the spherical growths, which is just a little higher up on the trunk than the top of her head. Its surface is cool and leathery, and gives very slightly under the touch of her fingers. She presses hard, and makes an indentation. When she takes her hand away, the mark slowly disappears. The surface of the ball is elastic enough to spring back into shape. After a slow count of ten, it looks exactly the same as it did before she touched it.

Melanie wanders on through the grey wilderness. It doesn’t seem to have a further side; it just keeps going. And it keeps getting thicker. After a while, there’s only just enough space between the trunks for her to slide her skinny body through, and the moonlight is dripping down like dirty water through a raft of threads so tightly intertwined they’re almost like a solid mass.

Melanie’s shoulder bumps into one of the grey balls and it falls to the ground with a muffled plop. She stoops to pick it up. There’s a puckered ring where it was attached to the trunk, but the rest of the surface is smooth and unbroken. She squeezes it in her hand, and once again it returns quickly to the shape it had before she touched it.

If she goes any further, she’ll be bumping into the trunks. She touches one and finds that it feels unpleasantly clammy. She recoils a little. She was expecting the trunks to be smooth and dry like the fruit they bear, which in Melanie’s opinion would have been a lot less disgusting.

Something moves off to her left and she starts violently. She thought she had this twilit world to herself. A strange figure stumbles towards her, silhouetted in the dull moonlight. From the neck downwards it looks like a man – but it has no shoulders or neck or head. Its upper body is just an undifferentiated lump.

She backs away from the thing, scared more than anything by its utter strangeness. But it’s not attacking her. It doesn’t even seem to know she’s there.

As it passes her, she recognises it for what it is. It’s a hungry whose torso has started to split open. The first foot or so of one of the upright trunks is thrusting upwards from its chest, splintered spars of rib protruding outwards from its point of origin. Threads have blossomed profusely from the trunk, disguising what’s left of the hungry’s head, which has been forced sideways at a steep angle by the relentless upward growth.

Melanie stares at the apparition, both relieved – because the horror of the unknown is more frightening than any horror you can understand – and revolted at this strange violation of human flesh.

The hungry shambles on past her, its zigzag course dictated by the trunks it bumps into and bounces off. It’s almost more ridiculous than it is horrible. It will fall down soon, Melanie imagines – and then the trunk will be pointing sideways. It will have to find some way to right itself.

This whole forest grew from the ruined dead. This is where the hungries end up after all their faithful service to the infection that made them what they are.

Melanie sees her future, and accepts it. But she’s not ready to die with so many important things still to be done.

She turns and walks back the way she came, following the tunnel of her own cleared path through the crowding grey filaments.

Dr Caldwell works on through the night, feverishly busy. The fever is literal, and it’s currently running at 103 degrees.

Extracting the hungry boy’s brain takes a lot longer without Dr Selkirk to help – and Dr Caldwell’s hands are so clumsy that it’s virtually impossible to take it out without damaging it. She does the best she can, removing most of the skull in inch-wide jigsaw pieces before she finally screws up her courage and severs the brain stem.

When she lifts it out, although her hands tremble violently, it comes clean.

She powers up the microtome and takes slices from the brain, choosing cross-sections that will allow her to examine most major structures. She mounts her slides, awed at how perfectly the microtome has done its job. The slices are exquisite, with no crush damage or smearing despite their ethereal thinness.

Caldwell labels each slide, and then examines them in sequence – a virtual tour of the hungry boy’s brain beginning at its base and proceeding upwards and forwards.

She finds what she expected to find. The null hypothesis is shot to pieces. She knows what the children are, and where they came from, their past and their future, the nature of their partial immunity, and the extent (close to a hundred per cent) to which her own labours over these past seven years have been a waste of time.

She feels a moment of pure happiness. If she’d died yesterday, she would have died blind. This discovery redeems everything, even if what she’s found is so bleak and absolute.

A sound from close by dynamites her train of thought and brings her instantly to her feet. It’s an innocuous enough sound – just a few clicks and whispers – but it’s coming from inside Rosie!

Dr Caldwell is not given to excessive flights of imagination. She knows that Rosie’s doors are sealed, and that anything powerful enough to open them would have been loud and protracted, alerting her long before this. But she’s still trembling a little as she follows the sound forwards, through the crew quarters to the cockpit.

There’s a lit-up section of the console, off to the right-hand side, and that’s where the sound is coming from. From the radio. She slips into the seat and leans her head forward to listen.

There’s not much to hear. Mostly static, pops and hisses and whoops of sound, like the chaos between stations on an ancient analogue wireless set. But a few words stand clear of the aural swamp. “… days out from Beacon … saw your … identify…” The voice is hollow, inhuman, warped by echo and distortion.

The beam of an electric torch moves quickly across the cockpit’s forward shield, and then it’s gone again. No sounds penetrate from outside, but she sees movement. Just a shadow, thrown down momentarily by the torch’s moving beam. A figure moving briskly down Rosie’s left flank.

“… just a wreck … think there’s any…”

Caldwell heads quickly for the midsection door. Halfway there, she realises she could have gone out through the cockpit. She stops, turns around. But she knows the midsection door’s mechanism better. The sounds from the cockpit radio fizzle and die. With a yelp of alarm, Caldwell runs back to the console and replies on the same channel on which the voice came through.

“Hello?” she cries. “Who’s there? This is Caroline Caldwell of base Hotel Echo, in region 6. Who’s there?”

Just static.

She tries the other channels in turn, and gets the same response.

She runs through to the midsection again. But when she gets there, she’s irresolute. She hasn’t applied any e-blocker since the day before, and she can smell her own sweat. If she opens that door, she might bring the hungries down on herself and her would-be rescuers.

The cupboard next to the airlock contains six biohazard suits. Caldwell was trained in their use back when she was still on the expedition list, and although it takes her ten minutes to put one on, she’s confident that she’s done it correctly. Her scent is completely masked, and her body heat at least temporarily contained.

When she pushes the door open, she sees nothing moving outside. “Hello?” she calls. She steps out into the street. Nobody. But the light is at Rosie’s aft end now, and it’s still moving, flicking to left and right.

“Hello?” Caldwell says again. Perhaps the suit’s helmet is muffling her voice. She walks on shaky legs down the flank of the vehicle, the skin of her neck prickling. She rounds the aft end. The light is in her eyes for a moment. She speaks to whoever is behind it. “My name is Caroline Caldwell. I’m a scientist attached to base Hotel Echo in region 6. I’m here with…”

The light turns away from her, and Caldwell runs out of words. Nobody is carrying the torch. It’s just been attached by its strap to a metal rail on Rosie’s rear. It’s moving in the wind, not in someone’s hands.

Fury at the childish trick gives way to the pure terror of realisation. This is an ambush. And since nobody is attacking her, the target must be Rosie. The doctor takes to her heels and runs back the way she came, sprinting for the midsection door, expecting a cadre of junkers, or perhaps Sergeant Parks, to burst out from hiding (except where would they hide?) and race her for the prize.

Nothing moves. She gets inside and slams the door, engages the lock and the failsafes. Then the airlock, for good measure. And then the bulkhead door that seals off the weapons station.

Finally she stops shaking. There’s no sound, no sign of anyone. She’s safe. Whoever was outside went away and just left the torch. Perhaps it really was a search-and-rescue team from Beacon. Perhaps they got eaten. Caldwell has no idea, but whatever happens, she’s not leaving Rosie again. Not for the siren song of a voice on the radio, not for actual humans showing their actual faces, not for marching bands and ticker-tape parades. She walks through into the lab, loosening the seals on the environment suit’s helmet as she goes.

Melanie is sitting in her chair, in front of the microscope, reading her notes. She looks up. “Hello, Dr Caldwell,” she says politely.

Caldwell has stopped dead in the doorway. Her first thought is: Is she alone, or did the others arrive with her? Her second: What can I use as a weapon? The cylinder of phosgene gas is still screwed into place in the airlock’s feed chamber. Since she’s still wearing the environment suit, she’d be immune to its effects. If she could get to that…

“I’ll stop you,” Melanie says, in the same courteous and level tone, “if you move. I’ll stop you if you pick up a gun or anything that’s sharp, or if you try to run away, or if you try to shut me in the cage again. Or if you do anything else that I think might be meant to hurt me.”

“That … that was you?” Caldwell asks her. “On the radio?”

Melanie indicates with a nod the walkie-talkie sitting beside her on the work surface. “I kept trying all the different channels. It took a long time before you answered.”

“And then … then you…?”

“I lay down underneath the door. You stepped out over me. As soon as you went past me, I came inside.”

Caldwell takes off the helmet and sets it down, very gently, on a work surface. A few feet away is the squat bulk of the microtome lathe, an exquisitely engineered guillotine. If she could trick Melanie into walking close to it, and topple her on to its cutting bed, this could be over in an instant.

Melanie frowns and shakes her head, seeming to guess her intentions. “I don’t want to bite you, Dr Caldwell, but I’ve got this.” She holds up a scalpel, one of the ones that Caldwell used in the dissection of the hungry specimen and hasn’t yet found time to disinfect. “And you know how fast I can move.”

Caldwell considers. “You’re a good girl, Melanie,” she essays. “I don’t think you’d really hurt me.”

“You tied me to a table so you could cut me up,” Melanie reminds her. “And you cut up Marcia and Liam. You probably cut up lots of children. The only reason I ever had for not hurting you was that Miss Justineau and Sergeant Parks probably wouldn’t have liked it. But they’re not here. And I don’t think they’d mind so much now, even if they were.”

Caldwell is inclined to believe this. “What do you want from me?” she asks. It’s clear from Melanie’s agitated manner that she wants something, has something on her mind.

“The truth,” Melanie says.

“About what?”

“About everything. About me, and the other children. And why we’re different.”

“Can I take off this suit?” Caldwell temporises.

Melanie gestures for her to go ahead.

“I have to do it in the airlock,” Caldwell says.

“Then keep it on,” Melanie says.

Caldwell gives up on the idea of retrieving the phosgene. She sits down on one of the lab chairs. As soon as she does so, she realises how exhausted she is. Only willpower and bloody-mindedness have kept her going this long. She’s close to crashing now – too weak to resist this hectoring monster child. She has to gather her strength and choose her time.

She’s expecting Melanie to interrogate her, but Melanie continues to read the notes: the observations Caldwell has jotted down about her two sets of brain tissue samples, and about the sporangium. She seems particularly fascinated by the sporangium notes, lingering over Caldwell’s labelled diagrams.

“What’s an environmental trigger?” she demands.

“It defines any factor external to the sporing body that causes or predisposes towards the onset of sporing,” Caldwell says coldly. It’s the tone she uses to put Sergeant Parks in his place, but Melanie takes it very much in her stride.

“Anything outside?” she paraphrases. “Anything outside the pod that makes the seeds come out of the pod?”

“That’s right,” Caldwell says grudgingly.

“Like the Amazon rainforest.”

“I’m sorry?”

“There are trees in the Amazon rainforest that only shed their seeds after a bushfire. The redwood and the jack pine do that too.”

“Do they?” Caldwell’s tone is brittle. It’s actually a perfectly good example.

“Yes.” Melanie sets the notes down. She’s looked at each page exactly once, stopped when she got to the front of the stack again. “Miss Mailer told me, back at the base.”

She holds Caldwell’s gaze with her unblinking, bright blue eyes.

“Why am I different?” she asks.

“Narrow down the question,” Caldwell mutters.

“Most of the hungries are more like animals than people. They can’t think or talk. I can. Why are there two kinds of hungries?”

“Brain structures,” Caldwell says.

But she’s at war with herself. Part of her wants to guard the secret, to give away no more than she’s asked, to force Melanie to dive deep for every pearl. The other part is desperate to share. Caldwell longs for an auditorium of geniuses, sages both living and dead. She gets a child who’s neither, or both. But the world is winding down, and you take what you’re given.

“The hungries,” she says, “including you, are infected with a fungus named Ophiocordyceps.” She assumes no prior knowledge, because there’s no telling what Melanie has understood, or failed to understand, from those notes. So she begins by describing the family of hot-wiring parasites – organisms that fool the host’s nervous system with forged neurotransmitters, hijacking the host’s living brain and making it do what the parasite needs it to do.

Melanie’s questions are infrequent, but right on topic. She’s a smart kid. Of course she is.

“But why am I different?” she presses again. “What was special about the children you brought to the base?”

“I’m coming to that,” Caldwell says testily. “You’ve never studied biology or organic chemistry. It’s hard to put this stuff in words you can understand.”

“Put it in words you understand,” Melanie suggests, in much the same tone. “If it’s too hard for me, I’ll ask you to explain it again.”

So Caldwell delivers her lecture. Not to Elizabeth Blackburn, Günter Blobel or Carol Greider, but to a ten-year-old girl. That’s humbling, in a way. But only in a way. Caldwell is still the one who made all the connections and found what was there to be found. Who entered the jungle and brought the hungry pathogen back alive. Ophiocordyceps caldwellia. That’s what they’ll call it, now and for ever.

As the sky pales outside, she talks on and on. Melanie stops her every so often with pertinent and focused questions. She’s a receptive audience, despite her lack of a Nobel prize.

To the newly infected, Caldwell says, Ophiocordyceps is utterly without mercy. It batters down the door, breaks and enters, devours and controls. Then finally it turns what’s left of the host into a bag of fertiliser from which the fruiting body grows.

“But we were wrong about how quickly the human substrate is destroyed. The fungus targets different brain areas with differing speed and severity. It shuts down higher-order thought. It enhances hunger and the triggers for hunger. But we’d assumed that all drives outside of that – all behaviours that didn’t serve the parasite’s agenda – were embargoed at the same time.

“When I saw that woman in the street in Stevenage, and the man in the care home, I could see that wasn’t the case. Both of them were still making connections, haphazardly, to their former lives. They were engaging in behaviours – pushing a pram, singing, looking at old photographs – that were completely without function as far as the parasite was concerned.”

Caldwell looks up at Melanie. Her mouth is unpleasantly dry, despite the sweat that’s running freely down her face. “Can I have a glass of water?” she asks.

“When you’ve finished,” Melanie promises. “Not yet.”

Caldwell accepts the verdict. She reads nothing in Melanie’s face that would give her room for negotiation. “Well,” she says, her voice faltering a little, “that made me think. About you, and the other children. Perhaps we’d missed the obvious explanation for why you’re so different.”

“Go on,” Melanie says. Her voice is level, but her eyes betray her fear and excitement. It comforts Caldwell a little – in the absence of the physical control she used to enjoy – to have at least this degree of power over her.

“I realised that you might have been born with the infection. That your parents might already have been infected when you were conceived. We thought that was impossible – that hungries couldn’t have a sex drive. But once I’d seen the survival of other human drives and emotions – mother love, and loneliness – it didn’t seem impossible at all.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 559