The Girl With All The Gifts (27 page)

Melanie hesitates. “You should keep it,” she says. “In case you get attacked.”

Miss Justineau closes Melanie’s fingers over the object, which is still warm from being in her pocket. It’s like a little piece of Miss Justineau that she can take out into the world with her. The weight of her new knowledge is still pressing her down, but her heart swells with joy as she puts the alarm into the pocket of her brand-new unicorn jeans.

“Done,” she confirms to Sergeant Parks. Sergeant’s face says
about time
. He ties the leash up again around Melanie’s waist with a different knot.

“Once you’re down on the ground,” he tells her, “you pull on this end here, and the rope will come away.”

“Okay,” she says.

“I’m not taking your muzzle off,” Sergeant says. “But with your hands free, you could easily release the strap yourself and get it off. You’re a smart kid, and I bet you thought of that already.”

Melanie shrugs. Of course she has, and there doesn’t seem to be any point in trying to explain to him all over again why she won’t do that.

“Just so you know,” Sergeant Parks says, “if you want to stay with us, you’re going to need to keep the muzzle on. Or put it back on when you’re done. I don’t have any more of them, and as far as I’m concerned, your teeth are a loaded gun. So keep that thing safe, because that’s what gets you back in the door. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Okay then. Gallagher, give me a hand here.”

The two men move into position at the top of the stairs and get ready to pay out the rope, but at the last moment Miss Justineau kneels beside Melanie again and holds out her arms.

Melanie steps into the embrace, shivers deliciously as Miss Justineau’s arms close around her.

But she pulls away after no more than a moment. There’s just a tiny trace of the human smell, the Miss Justineau smell, underneath the bitterness of the chemicals. Enough to turn the pure pleasure of their proximity into something else entirely; something that threatens to escalate out of her control. “Not safe,” she mutters urgently. “Not safe.”

“Your e-blockers,” Sergeant Parks translates unnecessarily. “You need another layer.”

“I’m sorry,” Miss Justineau murmurs – not to Sergeant Parks, but to Melanie.

Melanie nods. She was scared for a moment there, but it’s okay. It was a very faint scent, and now that it’s gone, the hungry feeling is back under her control.

Sergeant Parks tells her to sit down on the top step, and then to push herself away. He and Kieran lower her down into the waiting crowd of hungries.

Who don’t react at all. Some of them follow the movement as she comes down, but Sergeant Parks makes sure that her descent is really slow and gradual, so it doesn’t get the hungries too excited. Their gaze sweeps over her without lingering. Or else they stare right through her, not registering her presence at all.

As soon as her feet are on the ground, she loosens the rope with a tug. Sergeant Parks draws it up again, just as slowly and gradually as he let it down.

Melanie glances up. Sees Sergeant Parks and Miss Justineau peering down at her. Miss Justineau waves; a slow opening and closing of her hand. Melanie waves back.

She threads her way carefully through the hungries, un-noticed, unmolested.

But she was lying when she said she wasn’t afraid. To be right here in the middle of them – to look up at their bowed heads and half-open mouths, their off-white eyes – is very frightening indeed. Yesterday she thought that the hungries were like houses that people used to live in. Now she thinks that every one of those houses is haunted. She’s not just surrounded by the hungries. She’s surrounded by the ghosts of the men and women they used to be. She has to fight a sudden urge to break into a run, to get out of here into the open air as quickly as she can.

She makes it to the door, pushing between the packed-together bodies. But the doorway itself is completely impassable. Too many hungries have squeezed themselves into the narrow space between the doorposts, and she’s not strong enough to break up that logjam. But the floor-to-ceiling windows to either side of the door have been shattered, every last sliver of glass forced out of their frames by the hungries charging through. Some of those closest to Melanie bear the slash marks from that difficult passage on their arms and bodies. From the new wounds a sluggish brown liquid has oozed. It doesn’t look much like blood.

Melanie pushes her way out through the left-hand window. More hungries are standing out on the driveway, but they’re not so tightly clustered and it’s easier for her to make her way through.

To the gates, and then out on to the street.

She walks past more hungries. They don’t turn as she goes by or seem to notice her at all. She crosses to the overgrown green and walks in among the trees and tall grass.

Melanie likes it here. If she were free, if she had lots of time and nothing that she needed to do, she’d like to stay here for a long time and pretend that she’s in the Amazon rainforest, which she knows about from a lesson with Miss Mailer, a long time ago, and from the picture on the wall of her cell.

But she’s not free, and time is pressing. If she takes too long, Miss Justineau might think she’s run away and left her, and she’d rather die than let Miss Justineau think that even for a second.

She’s hoping for a rat like the one that scared Dr Caldwell, but there are no rats. No birds, even, but in any case a bird probably wouldn’t do for what she needs.

So she looks further afield, walking up and down the streets, through the open doors of houses, through the jumbled, desecrated remains of vanished lives, trying not to be distracted by the ornaments, the photos, the hundreds and thousands of inscrutable objects.

In a room silted up a foot deep with old brown leaves, she startles a fox. It leaps for a broken window, but Melanie is on it so quickly that she catches it in mid-air. She’s thrilled at her own speed.

And at her strength. Though the fox is as big as she is, when it squirms and thrashes in her arms she just tightens her grip, closing down its range of movement, until it stills, quivering, whining, and lets her take it where she wants.

Back up the street to the green. Across the green to the fence where the hungries are clustered, every face turned away from her, every body still.

Melanie screams. It’s the loudest sound she can make. Not as loud as Miss Justineau’s personal alarm would be, but both her hands are full of fox and she doesn’t want to let it go until all the hungries are looking at her.

When the heads turn, she opens her arms. The fox is away like an arrow flying out of Ulysses’ bow.

Primed by the sound, awake and alert for prey, the hungries obey their programming. They start into violent motion, run after the fox as though they’re joined to it by taut strings. Melanie backs out of the way quickly, into a doorway, as the first wave goes by her.

There are so many of them, crowded in so tightly together, that some of them get knocked down and trampled on. Melanie sees them trying again and again to get up, only to be trodden underfoot each time. It’s almost funny, but the grey-brown froth that’s forced out of their mouths, like wine from grapes, makes it sort of sad and horrible too. When the rest of the horde have run on down the road, almost out of sight, some of these fallen struggle to their feet and limp and crawl after them. Others stay where they fell, twitching and scrabbling but too badly broken to get up off the ground.

Melanie skirts around them carefully. She feels bad for them. She wishes that there was something she could do to help them, but there isn’t anything. She goes back in through the gates and walks up to the house. She enters the hall, which is completely deserted now, and calls up to Sergeant Parks, who is exactly where he was when she left. “It worked. They’ve gone now.”

“Stay there,” Sergeant Parks calls down. “We’ll join you.”

And then, after looking at her hard for a few moments longer:

“Good job, kid.”

Getting everyone down to street level is easy enough, with the ropes. Sergeant Parks decides the order: Gallagher first, so there’s someone on the ground who knows how to use a gun, then Helen Justineau, then Dr Caldwell, with himself bringing up the rear. Dr Caldwell is the only one who presents any kind of a problem, since her bandaged hands won’t allow her to grip the rope. Parks makes a running knot, which he ties around her waist, and lowers her down.

They could retrace their steps, but it’s easier to keep going through the town. There are any number of places where they can pick up the A1 again, and they’ll actually get out from among the buildings more quickly if they steer east of south, past a region of desolate industrial estates. Not many people ever lived out here, and after the Breakdown the pickings were thin for uninfected survivors, whose needs ran more to food than to heavy plant, so they don’t see many hungries at all. Of course, they’re also following roughly the same line that the fox took, at least to start with. That irresistible moving target cleared the way for them very effectively.

So that’s twice now that the hungry kid has saved their bacon. If she makes the hat-trick, maybe Parks will even start to relax a little around her. Hasn’t happened yet though.

They discuss logistics as they walk, in low, measured voices that won’t carry too far. Parks feels they should stick to Plan A, despite the clusterfuck they just experienced.

His reasons are the same as they were. The direct route through London will save them at least two days’ travel, and they still need shelter when they stop and sleep.

“Even given that the shelter can turn into a trap?” Dr Caldwell asks tartly.

“Well, that’s an issue,” Parks allows. “But on the other hand, if we’d been out in the open when those hungries came for us last night, we wouldn’t have lasted ten fucking heartbeats. Just a thought.”

Caldwell doesn’t attempt a comeback, so he doesn’t have to remind her that it was her striking up an acquaintance with a female hungry out on the street that got them into trouble in the first place. And nobody else seems inclined to argue. They continue on their way, the conversation dying out into wary silence.

Over the course of the morning, their line stretches out unacceptably. Gallagher takes point, as Parks ordered him to do. Helen Justineau sticks with the kid, who manages a reasonable pace despite her shorter legs, but keeps being distracted and slowed by the things they pass. Dr Caldwell is slowest of all, the gap between her and the others gradually but steadily increasing. She quickens her stride whenever Parks asks her to, but always slows again after a minute or two. That desperate fatigue, so early in the day, worries him.

They’re moving now through a burn shadow, another artefact of the Breakdown. Before the government fell apart entirely, it passed a whole series of badly thought-out emergency orders, one of which involved chemical incendiaries sprayed from helicopter gunships to create cauterised zones that were guaranteed free from hungries. Uninfected civilians were warned in advance by sirens and looped messages, but a lot of them died anyway because they weren’t free to move when the choppers flew in.

The hungries, though, they ran ahead of the flame-throwers like roaches when the light goes on. All the incendiaries could do was to move them on a few miles in one direction or another, and in some cases to destroy infrastructure that might have saved a lot of lives. Luton Airport, for instance. That got torched with about forty planes still on the ground, so when the next memo came round – about evacuating the uninfected to the Channel Islands using commercial carrier fleets – all the army could do was shrug its collective shoulders and say, “Yeah, we wish.”

The buildings on this part of their route are foreshortened stumps, not so much burned down as rendered into tallow. The monstrous heat of the incendiaries melted not just metal but brick and stone. The ground they’re walking on carries a thin black crust of grease and charcoal, the residue of organic materials that burned and sublimed, took to the air and settled again wherever the hot winds of combustion took them.

The air has a sour, acid tang to it. After ten minutes or so, your breath is rasping in your throat and there’s an itchy feeling in your chest that you can’t scratch because it’s inside you.

It’s more than twenty years on and still nothing grows here, not even the hardiest and most bad-ass of weeds. Nature’s way of saying she’s not stupid enough to be caught like that twice over.

Parks hears the kid asking Justineau what happened here. Justineau makes heavy weather of the question, even though it’s an easy one.
We couldn’t kill the hungries, so we killed ourselves. That was always our favourite party trick.

The burn shadow goes on for mile after mile, oppressing their spirits and draining their stamina. It’s past time they stopped, grabbed some rest and rations, but nobody’s keen to sit down on this tainted ground. By unspoken consensus, they press on.

It’s really sudden, when they reach the edge of it, but the shadow’s got one more miracle to show them. Over the space of a hundred steps they go from black to green, from death to hectic life, from dry-baked limbo to a field of massive thistles and dense hollyhocks.

But there was a house here on the borderland that burned but didn’t fall. And against its rear wall there are heat shadows, where something living collapsed against the hot brick and burned with different colours, different breakdown products. Two of them, one large and one small, painted in deep black against the grey-black of their surroundings.

An adult and a child, arms thrown up as though they were caught in the middle of an aerobics workout.

Fascinated, the hungry kid measures herself against the smaller shape. It fits her pretty well.

What she thinks is:
this could have been me
. Why not? A real girl, in a real house, with a mother and a father and a brother and a sister and an aunt and an uncle and a nephew and a niece and a cousin and all those other words for the map of people who love each other and stay together. The map called
family
.