The Girl With All The Gifts 23 page

“Is there somewhere I can sit?” he asks her. He’s blinking a lot, and a red tear has leaked down out of one of his eyes.

Melanie finds a black plastic wheelie bin and tips it over. She sits Sergeant down on it. She sits herself down beside him.

“What did we do?” Sergeant’s voice is hoarse, and he looks around urgently, as though he’s lost something but he can’t remember what it is. “What did we do, kid?”

“We burned the grey stuff. We burned it all up.”

“Right,” Parks says. “Is … is Helen…?”

“You saved her,” Melanie assures him. “You brought her back inside, and she’s safe now. She didn’t get bitten or anything. You saved her, Sergeant.”

“Good,” Sergeant says. And then he’s quiet for a long time. “Listen,” he says at last. “Could you … Kid, listen. Could you do me a favour?”

“What is it?” Melanie asks.

Sergeant takes his sidearm out of its holster. He has to reach across his body to do this with his left hand. He ejects the empty magazine, and gropes around in his belt until he finds a fresh one, which he snaps home. He shows Melanie where to put her fingers, and he shows her how to take off the safety. He chambers a round.

“I’d like…” he says. And then he goes quiet again.

“What would you like?” Melanie asks him. She’s holding the big gun in her tiny hands and she knows, really, what the answer is. But he has to say it so she’s sure she’s right.

“I’ve seen enough of them to know … I don’t want that,” Sergeant says. “I mean…” He swallows noisily. “Don’t want to go out like that. No offence.”

“I’m not offended, Sergeant.”

“I can’t shoot left-handed. Sorry. It’s a lot to ask.”

“It’s all right.”

“If I could shoot left-handed…”

“Don’t worry, Sergeant. I’ll do it. I won’t leave you until it’s done.”

They sit side by side while the dawn comes up, the sky lightening by such tiny increments that you can’t tell when the night stops and the day begins.

“We burned it?” Sergeant asks.

“Yes.”

He sighs. The sound has a liquid undertow.

“Bullshit,” he groans. “This stuff in the air … it’s the fungus, right? What did we do, kid? Tell me. Or I’ll take that gun away from you and send you to bed early.”

Melanie resigns herself. She didn’t want to trouble him with this stuff when he’s dying, but she won’t lie to him after he’s asked her for the truth. “There are pods,” she says, pointing towards where the fungus wall is still burning. “In there. Pods full of seeds. Dr Caldwell said this was the fungus’s mature form, and the pods were meant to break open and spread the seeds on the wind. But the pods are very tough, and they can’t open by themselves. Dr Caldwell said they needed something to give them a push and make them open. She called it an environmental trigger. And I remembered the trees in the rainforest that need a big fire to make their seeds grow. I used to have a picture of them, on the wall of my cell back at the base.”

Parks is struck dumb with the horror of what he’s just done. Melanie strokes his hand, contrite. “That’s why I didn’t want to tell you,” she says. “I knew it would make you sad.”

“But…” Parks shakes his head. As hard as it is for her to explain, it’s a lot harder for him to understand. She can see that it’s hard for him even to frame the words. Ophiocordyceps is demolishing the parts of his mind it doesn’t need, leaving him less and less to think with. In the end he settles for, “Why?”

Because of the war, Melanie tells him. And because of the children. The children like her – the second generation. There’s no cure for the hungry plague, but in the end the plague becomes its own cure. It’s terribly, terribly sad for the people who get it first, but their children will be okay and they’ll be the ones who live and grow up and have children of their own and make a new world.

“But only if you let them grow up,” she finishes. “If you keep shooting them and cutting them into pieces and throwing them into pits, nobody will be left to make a new world. Your people and the junker people will keep killing each other, and you’ll both kill the hungries wherever you find them, and in the end the world will be empty. This way is better. Everybody turns into a hungry all at once, and that means they’ll all die, which is really sad. But then the children will grow up, and they won’t be the old kind of people but they won’t be hungries either. They’ll be different. Like me, and the rest of the kids in the class.

“They’ll be the next people. The ones who make everything okay again.”

She doesn’t know how much of this Sergeant has even heard. His movements are changing. His face slackens and then twists by turns, his hands jerking suddenly like the hands of badly animated puppets. He mutters “Okay” a few times, and Melanie thinks that might mean he gets what she said. That he accepts it. Or it might just mean that he’s remembered she was talking to him and wants to reassure her that he’s still listening.

“She was blonde,” he says suddenly.

“What?”

“Marie. She was … blonde. Like you. So if we’d had a kid…”

His hands circle each other, searching for a meaning that evades them. After a while he goes very still, until the sound of a bird singing on a wire between the houses makes him sit bolt upright and swivel his head, left and then right, to locate the source of the sound. His jaw starts to open and close, the hunger reflex kicking in sudden and strong.

Melanie pulls the trigger. The soft bullet goes into Sergeant’s head and doesn’t come out again.

Helen Justineau comes back to consciousness like someone trudging home after a twenty-mile hike. It’s exhausting, and it’s slow. She keeps seeing familiar landmarks, and thinking that she must be almost there, but then she’ll get lost again and have to keep slogging on through her own shattered thoughts – reliving the events of the night in a hundred random re-sequencings.

Finally she realises where she is. Back inside Rosie, sitting on a steel grating by the midsection door, in a puddle of her own sick.

She struggles to her feet, throwing up a little more in the process. She goes through Rosie’s various spaces, looking for Parks and Caldwell and Melanie. She scores one out of three. The doctor’s body, stiff and cold, lies on the floor of the lab, curled up into a post-mortem question mark. There’s a little dried blood on her face, from a recent injury, but it doesn’t seem likely that that could have killed her. Then again, from what Parks said, she was already dying of blood poisoning from the infected wounds on her hands.

On one of the lab’s work surfaces sits a child’s head from which the top of the skull has been removed. There are chunks of bone and bloody tissue in a bowl beside the head, along with a discarded pair of surgical gloves crusted with dried blood.

No sign of Melanie, or of Parks.

Looking out of the window, Justineau can see that it’s snowing. Grey snow. Tiny flakes of it, more like a sifting of dust really, but coming down endlessly out of the sky.

When she realises what it is she’s seeing, she starts to cry.

Hours pass. The sun climbs in the sky. Justineau imagines that its light is dimmed a little, as though the grey seeds are making a curtain in the upper air.

Melanie comes walking back to Rosie, through the tidal flurries of the end of the world. She waves to Justineau through the window, then points to the door. She’s going to come inside.

The airlock cycles very slowly, while Melanie carefully sprays her already disinfectant-covered body with a layer of liquid fungicide.

I’m coming back. I’ll take care of you.

Justineau understands what that means now. How she’ll live, and what she’ll be. And she laughs through choking tears at the rightness of it. Nothing is forgotten and everything is paid.

Even if she could, she wouldn’t haggle about the price.

The airlock’s inner door opens. Melanie runs to her and embraces her. Gives her love without hesitation or limit, whether it’s earned or not – and at the same time pronounces sentence on her.

“Get dressed,” she says happily. “Come and meet them.”

The children. Sullen and awkward, sitting cross-legged on the ground, cowed into silence by Melanie’s fierce warning glares. Justineau has only the haziest memories of the night before, but she can see the awe in their eyes as Melanie walks among them, shushing sternly.

Justineau fights a queasy wave of claustrophobia. It’s quite hot inside the sealed-environment suit, and she’s already thirsty, even though she just drank about half her own weight in water from Rosie’s filtration tank.

She sits down on the sill of the midsection door. She has a marker pen in her hand. Rosie herself will be her whiteboard.

“Good morning, Miss Justineau,” Melanie says.

A murmur rises and falls as some of the other children – more than half – try to imitate her.

“Good morning, Melanie,” Justineau replies. And then, “Good morning, class.”

She draws on the side of the tank a capital A and a lower-case a. Greek myths and quadratic equations will come later.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 525