The Girl With All The Gifts (43 page)

“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.

“With that in mind, I went back to the cytological evidence. I was fortunate enough to be able to obtain a fresh sample of brain tissue—”

“From a boy,” Melanie says. “You killed him and cut off his head.”

“Yes, I did. And his brain was very different from a normal hungry brain. With the equipment I had back at the base, it was pretty much all I could do to verify and map the presence of the fungus. With this…” – she indicates with a nod of the head the microtome, the centrifuge, the scanning electron microscope – “I could look at individual neurons and how the fungal cells interacted with them. The boy here, and the man from the care home, they were so different there was almost no way to compare them. The fungus utterly wrecks the brain of a first-generation hungry. Goes through it like a train. The chemicals it secretes – the brute-force triggers that turn specific behaviours on and off – they cause terrible damage as they accumulate. And the fungus is drawing nutrients from the brain tissue too. The brain is progressively hollowed out, sucked dry.

“In the second generation – that’s you – the fungus is spread evenly throughout the brain. It’s thoroughly interwoven with the dendrites of the host’s neurons. In some places it actually replaces them. But it doesn’t
feed
on the brain. It gets its nourishment only when the host eats. It’s become a true symbiote rather than a parasite.”

“Miss Justineau said my mother was dead,” Melanie objects. It’s almost a protest – as though a lie from Helen Justineau is a thing that can have no place in the world.

“That was our best guess,” Caldwell says. “That your parents were junkers or other survivors who’d never made it to Beacon, and that you and they had all been fed on and infected at the same time. We had no model for hungries copulating. Still less for them giving birth in the wild, and the babies somehow surviving. You must be much hardier and more self-sufficient than normal human infants. Perhaps you were able to feed on the flesh of your mother until you were strong enough to—”

“Don’t,” Melanie says sharply. “Don’t talk about things like that.”

But talking is all that Caldwell has left now, and she can’t stop herself. She talks about her observations, her theory, her success (in working out the pathogen’s life cycle) and her failure (there’s no immunity, no vaccine, no conceivable cure). She tells Melanie where to find her slides and the rest of her notes, and who to give them to when they get to Beacon.

When it becomes harder for Caldwell to talk, Melanie comes closer and sits at her feet. The scalpel is still clutched in her hand, but she doesn’t bully or threaten now. She just listens. And Caldwell is full of gratitude, because she knows what this lethargy that’s flooding through her means.

The septicaemia is entering its final phase. She won’t live to write her findings down, to astonish the remaining scientific minds of humanity’s doomed rearguard with the spectacle of her clear-sightedness and their idiocy. It’s just Melanie. Melanie is the messenger sent by providence in her last hour to carry her trophies home.

It’s a bad night.

The room contains nothing except a table and a metal cistern that was once part of the house’s central heating system. Every movement makes the bare boards creak loudly, so for the most part Justineau and Sergeant Parks sit still.

Their first visitors arrive about an hour after Melanie pulled the ladder away. A few minutes after she calls them on the walkie-talkie from the wilds of Hackney. Justineau can hear the hungries stumbling and scrabbling about in the room below, moving restlessly back and forth. The source of the smell, the chemical gradient they’re following, is above them, but they can’t get up there. All they can do is charge around, driven by eddies of air, random shifts in the intensity of the chemical trigger.

Justineau keeps hoping they’ll leave, or at least stop moving around, but this isn’t like Stevenage. At Wainwright House, the hungries were drawn by sound and movement. When the signals stopped, they stopped too, waiting for the fungus in their brains to give them further orders. Here, the orders are coming through continually, keeping them in constant, restless motion.

At first Parks opens the trap to peer down at them every so often, shining the light of the torch down into the dark to illuminate slack, grey faces, upturned, their milky eyes wide and their nostrils flared like the mouths of tunnels. But the view never changes, and after a while he gives up.

An hour or so after that, they hear thuds through the walls from whatever rooms are alongside of them. More hungries, following the scent or the heat trail as assiduously as the first bunch, but betrayed by local geography into going up the wrong stairwell, taking the wrong turn.

They’re at the centre of a great volume of space, filled with things that want to eat them.

No
, Justineau corrects herself.
Not the centre. There’s nothing up on the roof. Not yet, anyway.

She finds a skylight and climbs up on a table to look out of it. A hunter’s moon illuminates the wide sweep of streets southward towards the river. Fungal froth fills them to the brim, and it goes on as far as she can see. London is a no-go area, an exclusion zone for the living. Only hungries can thrive here. God alone knows how far east or west they’ll have to trek to get around it.

Well, God and maybe Melanie. They try to contact her on the walkie-talkie, but there’s no reply and no trace of her signal. Parks thinks it’s possible that she’s switched to another frequency, although he can’t think of any good reason why she’d do that.

“You should try to sleep,” he tells Justineau. He’s sitting in a corner of the room now, cleaning his gun by the light of the electric torch. It shines on the underside of his chin and eye sockets, and most unsettlingly of all on the diagonal furrow of his scar.

“Like you?” Justineau asks laconically. But she climbs down. She’s sick of looking at the endless grey escarpments.

She sits beside him. After a moment, she touches his arm, low down near the wrist. Then, with a slight feeling of unreality, she slips her hand into his.

“I haven’t been fair to you,” she says.

Parks laughs out loud. “I don’t think fairness was what I was looking for exactly.”

“Still. You got us this far, against all the odds, and for most of the way I’ve treated you like the enemy. I’m sorry about that.”

He takes her hand and raises it to head height. She thinks he’s going to kiss it, but he just turns it this way and that to let the torchlight shine on it. “It doesn’t matter,” he says. “Actually, it’s probably better this way. I could never respect any woman who had low enough standards to sleep with me.”