The Girl With All The Gifts (26 page)

She breathes in shallow sips. The smell of the human remains, and of years of enclosed decay, freights the air so heavily it’s almost a physical presence.

With the spoons, Caldwell takes a range of samples from the hungry that was killed by Sergeant Parks. She’s only interested in brain tissue, but multiple samples mean more chance of getting at least one that’s not too badly contaminated by flora and fauna from skin, clothes or ambient air.

After sealing each container carefully, she puts them back into her pockets. She discards the soiled spoons, for which she has no further use.

She thinks as she works: I should have done this years ago. Men like the sergeant have their uses, and she knows she could never have collected the test subjects by herself. But if she’d been there with the trappers as part of the team, she wouldn’t have had to rely on their inadequate observations and unreliable memories.

So she wouldn’t have wasted so much time exploring blind alleys.

She would have known, for example, that although most hungries have only the two states – the rest state and the hunting state – some have a third state that corresponds to a degraded version of normal consciousness. They can interact with the world around them, fitfully and partially, in ways that echo their behaviour before they were infected.

The woman with the baby carriage. The singing man, with his wallet full of photos. These are trivial examples, but they represent something momentous. Caldwell is very close, she knows, to an unprecedented breakthrough. She can’t do anything with these samples until she gets back to Beacon and has access to a microscope, but an idea is forming in her mind as to what it is she should be looking for. What shape her research will take, once she’s back in a lab and has everything she needs.

Including, of course, test subject number one.

Melanie.

Justineau is roused from sleep by a hand shaking her shoulder. She panics momentarily, thinking that she’s being attacked, but it’s Parks she’s struggling against, Parks’ grip that she’s trying to slap away. And it’s not just her. He’s waking everyone, telling them to get their arses over to the window. The sun has come up on a pretty ugly and depressing state of affairs, and they need to see it.

The hungries who chased them the day before have not dispersed. They stand two or three deep along the length of the fence around Wainwright House, most of them having stopped dead when they hit that barrier.

The downstairs hall is full of those who didn’t stop – who chased their human quarry all the way inside. From the stump of the top stair, you can stand and look down on a crowd of gaunt, gaping monsters, standing shoulder to shoulder like the audience for some sell-out event.

Which would be breakfast.

Tense and scared, the four of them canvass possibilities. They can’t shoot their way out, obviously. They could waste all their ammunition and not even make a dent in those numbers. Besides, loud noise was the trigger that got them into this mess in the first place; producing more of it runs the risk of attracting more monsters from even further afield.

Justineau wonders if maybe they can use that.

“If you were to throw some hand grenades,” she suggests to Parks, “say, from the top of the roof. The hungries will target on the sound, right? We could draw them off, and then when the fence is clear we just run in the opposite direction.”

Parks spreads his empty hands. “No grenades,” he says. “I just had the ones on my belt, and I used them all when I pulled up the drawbridge last night.”

Gallagher opens his mouth, shuts it, tries again. “Could make some Molotovs?” he suggests. He nods toward the kitchen. “There’s bottles of cooking oil in there.”

“I don’t believe breaking bottles would make a particularly loud noise,” Dr Caldwell says acerbically.

“It might be loud enough,” Parks muses, but he doesn’t sound convinced. “Even if it wasn’t, we could set fire to the fuckers and clear a bit of space for ourselves that way.”

“Not the ones downstairs in the hallway,” Caldwell counters. “I don’t relish the prospect of being trapped in a burning building.”

“And there’d be smoke,” Justineau says. “Probably a lot of it. If the junkers are still looking for us, we’d be putting up a big sign telling them where we are.”

“Just empty bottles, then?” Gallagher says. “No oil. We try to draw them away with the sound.”

Parks looks out of the window. He doesn’t even need to say it. The distance from the roof and windows of the house to the pavement outside the fence is about thirty yards. You could throw a bottle that far, but you’d need to put your shoulder into it, and you’d want luck and the wind to both be with you. If the thrown bottles fall short, they’ll just entice the hungries who stopped at the gates to come on inside.

Same thing would have gone for grenades too, of course. They probably would have done more harm than good.

They go back and forth, but nobody can suggest an easy or obvious way out. They’ve let themselves get cornered, by predators who won’t lose interest or wander away. Waiting this out isn’t an option, and all the other options look bad.

Justineau goes to check on Melanie. The girl is already on her feet, looking out of the window, but she turns at the sound of footsteps. Probably she’s heard their conversation in the next room. Justineau tries to reassure her. “We’ll think of something,” she says. “There’s a way out of this.”

Melanie nods calmly.

“I know,” she says.

Parks doesn’t like the idea, which doesn’t surprise Justineau at all. And Caldwell likes it even less.

Only Gallagher seems to approve, and he doesn’t do more than nod – seeming reluctant to say anything that directly contradicts his sergeant.

They’re sitting in the day room, on four chairs that they’ve pulled up into a small circle. It provides the illusion that they’re actually talking to each other, although Caldwell is off in her own world, Gallagher won’t speak until he’s spoken to, and Parks listens to nobody but himself.

“I don’t like the idea of letting her off the leash,” he says, for about the third time.

“Why the hell not?” Justineau demands. “You were happy enough to cut her loose two days ago. The leash and the handcuffs were so she could stay with us. Your idea of a compromise. So from your point of view, there’s nothing to lose here. Nothing at all. If she does what she says she’ll do, we’re out of this mess. If she runs away, we’re no worse off than we are now.”

Caldwell ignores this speech and makes her appeal directly to the sergeant. “Melanie belongs to me,” she reminds him. “To my programme. If we lose her, it will be your responsibility.”

It’s the wrong thing to say. Parks doesn’t seem to like being threatened. “I spent four years servicing your programme, Doc,” he reminds her. “Today is my day off.”

Caldwell starts to say something else, but Parks talks over her – to Justineau. “If we let her go, why would she come back?”

“I wish I could answer that,” Justineau says. “Frankly, it’s a complete mystery to me. But she says she will, and I believe her. Maybe because we’re all she knows.”

Maybe because she’s got a crush on me, and all love is as blind as it needs to be.

“I want to talk to her,” Parks says. “Bring her in.”

On the leash still, with her hands behind her back and the muzzle over her mouth, she faces Parks like the chieftain of a savage tribe, on her dignity, and Justineau is suddenly aware of the changes in her. She’s out in the world now, her education accelerating from a standing start to some dangerous, unguessable velocity. She thinks of an old painting.
And
When Did You Last See Your Father?
Because Melanie’s stance is exactly the same as the way the kid stands in that picture. For Melanie, though, that would be a completely meaningless question.

“You think you can do this?” Parks asks her instead. “What you said to Miss Justineau. You think you’re up to it?”

“Yes,” Melanie says.

“It means I’d have to trust you. Set you free, right here in the room with us.” He’s been holding something in his right hand, shaking it as though it’s a dice he was going to throw. He shows it to her now: the key to her handcuffs.

“I don’t think it means that, Sergeant Parks,” Melanie says.

“No?”

“No. You have to set me free, but you don’t have to trust me. You should put the chemical stuff all over your skin first, to make really sure I don’t smell you. And you should make Kieran unlock the handcuffs while you aim your gun at me. And you don’t have to take the cage thing off my mouth. I just need to be able to use my hands.”

Parks stares at her for a moment, like she’s something written in a language he doesn’t speak.

“Got it all figured out,” he acknowledges.

“Yes.”

He leans forward to look her in the eye. “And you’re not scared?”

Melanie hesitates. “Of what?” she asks him. Justineau is amazed at that momentary pause. Yes or no would be equally easy to say, whether they were true or not. The pause means that Melanie is scrupulous, is weighing her words. It means she’s trying to be honest with them.

As if they’ve done a single thing, ever, to deserve that.

“Of the hungries,” Parks says, like it’s obvious.

Melanie shakes her head.

“How come?”

“They won’t hurt me.”

“No? Why not?”

“Enough,” Justineau snaps, but Melanie answers anyway. Slowly. Ponderously. As though the words are stones she’s using to build a wall.

“They don’t bite each other.”

“And?”

“I’m the same as them. Almost. Close enough so they don’t get hungry when they smell me.”

Parks nods slowly. This is where the catechism has been leading all this time. He wants to know how much Melanie has already guessed. Where her head is. He’s working his way through the logistics.

“The same as them, or almost the same? Which is it?”

Melanie’s face is unreadable, but some powerful emotion flits across it, doesn’t settle. “I’m different because I don’t want to eat anyone.”

“No? Then what was that red stuff all over you when you jumped on board the Humvee, day before yesterday? Looked like blood to me.”

“Sometimes I
need
to eat people. I never
want
to.”

“That’s all you’ve got, kid? Shit happens?”

Another pause. Longer, this time. “It hasn’t happened to you.”

“Very true,” Parks admits. “Still feels like we’re splitting hairs, though. You’re offering to help us against those things down there, when it seems to me that you’d want to be down there with them, looking up at us, waiting for the dinner bell to ring. So I guess that’s what I’m asking you. Why would you come back, and why would I believe you’d come back?”

For the first time, Melanie lets her impatience show. “I’d come back because I want to. Because I’m with you, not with them. And there isn’t any way to be with them, even if I wanted to. They’re…” Whatever concept she’s reaching for, it eludes her for a moment. “They’re
not
with each other. Not ever.”

Nobody answers her, but Parks looks happy with this. Like she got the secret password. She’s in the club. The hopelessly-outnumbered-and-surrounded-by-monsters club.

“I’m with you,” Melanie says again. And then, as if it needed saying, “Not you, really. I’m with Miss Justineau.”

Surprisingly, Parks seems satisfied with this too. He stands, with a decisive air. “I get that,” he says. “Okay, kid. We’re going to trust you to get this job done. Let’s go.”

Melanie stays where she is.

“What?” Parks demands. “Something else you need?”

“Yes,” Melanie tells him. “I want to wear my new clothes, please.”

They take her to the top of the stairs. To where the top of the stairs was, before Sergeant Parks exploded them. Melanie peers over the edge.

There are lots and lots of hungries down there. Maybe a hundred or more, all standing together in the hallway. They look up as the two men and two women come into view, their heads all moving together like flowers following the sun.

Sergeant Parks doesn’t get his gun out, but he makes Melanie turn away as he unlocks the cuffs, and he tells her not to move. She feels them fall away, and she wants to wiggle her fingers to make sure they still work okay, but she doesn’t.

Sergeant Parks unties the leash from around her neck, too, and she turns to Miss J, who’s ready with the little bundle of clothes.

It’s unpleasant to have the sweater – Miss Justineau’s sweater, which she’s worn all this time – lifted off over her head. To be momentarily naked again. It’s not the scrutiny of the adults she dislikes, it’s the feel of air directly on her body. The sensation of being so exposed.

But as Miss J dresses her in her new finery, that feeling goes away. She likes the jeans and the T-shirt very much – and the jacket, which is a little like Sergeant Parks’ jacket. It’s only the trainers that feel strange. She’s never worn shoes before, and the loss of the stream of information her feet receive from the ground is disturbing. It’s possible that she and the trainers might not be a long-term thing. But they’re so beautiful!

“Done?” Parks says.

“You look great, Melanie,” Miss Justineau tells her.

She nods thanks, and agreement. She knows she does.

But they’re not done. Not yet. Miss Justineau takes something out of her pocket and holds it out for Melanie to take. It’s a tiny thing, made out of grey plastic. Rectangular, with a single round button on it. Around the edge of the button, in red letters are the words
SAFE
and
GUARD
. And then underneath,
DANGER 150 DECIBELS
.

“When you get to the part where you have to make a big noise,” Miss Justineau tells her, “this might help.”

“What is it?” Melanie asks. She’s trying to look casual and calm, like getting a present from Miss Justineau is no big deal.

“It’s a personal alarm. From a long time ago. People used to carry them in case they got attacked.”

“By hungries?”

“No, by other people. It makes a noise like the end-of-the-day klaxon back at the base, but much, much louder – loud enough to make people panic, so they want to run away. But hungries wouldn’t run away, they’d run towards the sound. It might not work at all, after all this time, but you never know.”