The Girl With All the Gifts Read online

  Melanie chooses to answer the most important one. “I won’t bite, Miss Justineau.

  “But you’d better not get any closer than that,” she adds quickly, scrambling back as Miss J takes a step towards her. “You smell all … and there’s blood on you. I don’t know what I’ll do.”

  “Okay.” Miss Justineau stops where she is, and nods. “We’ll find a place to wash, and then we’ll freshen up the e-blocker. Are you okay, Melanie? It must have been really frightening for you.” Her face is full of concern, along with something else. Fear, maybe.

  And she should be afraid. They’re outside the fence, in region 6, and they must be miles and miles away from the base. They’re out among the monsters, the hungries, with no refuge close to hand.

  “Are you okay?” Miss Justineau asks again.

  Melanie nods, but it’s a lie. She’s not okay, not yet. She doesn’t know if she’ll ever be okay again. Being strapped down on the table with Dr Caldwell’s knife in front of her eyes was the scariest thing that ever happened to her. Until she saw Miss J about to be killed, and then that became the scariest thing. And now, it’s the thought of biting and eating pieces of those two men.

  However you look at it, it hasn’t been a good day at all. She wants to ask the question that’s burning a hole through her heart. Because Miss Justineau will know. Of course she will. Miss Justineau knows everything. But she can’t ask, because she can’t make the words come out. She doesn’t want to admit that there’s a doubt, a question there.

  What am I?

  So she says nothing. She waits for Miss Justineau to speak. And after a long time, Miss Justineau does. “You were very brave. If you hadn’t come along when you did, and if you hadn’t fought those men, they would have killed me.”

  “And Dr Caldwell was going to kill me and chop me up into pieces and put me in jars,” Melanie reminds her. “You saved me first, Miss Justineau.”

  “Helen,” Miss J says. “My name is Helen.”

  Melanie considers this statement.

  “Not to me,” she says.

  25

  When he gets down under the Humvee and takes a good look at the rear axle, Parks swears.

  Bitterly.

  He’s only a middling mechanic, but he can tell that it’s pretty much screwed. It’s taken a good whack just off centre, presumably when they leapt the security ditch, and it’s all bent into a shallow V, with a small but visible crack in the metal at the impact point. They’re lucky to have got this far without it breaking in two. They sure as hell won’t make it much further. Not on their own, anyway. And Parks has done enough shout-outs by this time, on normal and emergency frequencies, to know that there’s no help coming from the base.

  He debates with himself whether it’s worth looking at the engine. There’s something wrong there, too, that he might have a better chance of fixing, but the axle’s probably going to give long before that becomes an issue.

  Probably. But not certainly.

  With a sigh, he crawls out from under the Humvee and goes around to the front. Private Gallagher trails after him like a lost puppy, still begging for orders.

  “Is it okay, Sarge?” he asks, anxiously.

  “Just pop the bonnet for me, son,” Parks says. “We need to take a look at the insides, too.”

  The insides look okay, remarkably. The straining sounds from the engine have an obvious cause, which is that one of the motor mounts has been unscrewed. The engine block is hanging at an angle, vibrating against the top of the wheel arch where it’s touching. It would have torn itself to pieces eventually, but it doesn’t seem to have done much real damage yet. Parks gets the socket set out of the tool locker on the side of the vehicle and puts a new bolt through the mount, locking the engine back into place.

  He takes his time, because once he’s finished, he’s got to start making decisions about all this other shit.

  He holds the briefing inside the Hummer to lengthen the odds against nasty surprises, and he makes the little hungry kid sit outside on the bonnet.

  That’s the way he thinks of it, as a briefing. He’s the only soldier here except for Gallagher, who’s too young to have an opinion, let alone a plan. So it’s going to have to be Parks who calls the shots.

  That’s not how it goes down, though. The civilians have ideas of their own – always an omen of disaster and heartache in Parks’ book – and they’re not shy about expressing them.

  Starting from when Parks says they’re going to head south. It makes perfect sense – most likely it’s their only chance – but as soon as he says it, they’re up in his face.

  “All my notes and samples are at the base!” Dr Caldwell says. “They have to be retrieved.”

  “There are thirty kids there, too,” Justineau adds. “And most of your men. What are we going to do? Just walk away from them?”

  “That’s exactly what we’re going to do,” Parks tells them. “If you shut up, I’ll tell you why. I’ve been up on that radio every ten or fifteen minutes since we stopped. Not only is there no answer from the base, there’s no answer full stop. Nobody else got out of there. Or if they did, they got out without wheels or comms, which means they might just as well be on another planet as far as we’re concerned. There’s no way to get their attention right now without getting the junkers bouncing at us too. If we meet them on the road, that’s great. Otherwise, we’re alone, and the only sensible thing to do is to head for home fires. For Beacon.”

  Caldwell doesn’t answer. She’s unfolded her arms for the first time and she’s taking a furtive, fearful look at her injuries, like a poker player lifting the corners of his cards to see what Lady Luck has sent along.

  But Justineau just keeps going at it, which is pretty much what Parks expects from her by this point. “What if we wait for a few days, and then start back towards the base? We can take it slowly, and scout out the ground as we go. If the junkers are still in possession, we back off. But if it’s clear, we can go on in. Maybe just me and Dr Caldwell, while you stay back and cover us. If the kids are still alive in there, I can’t just leave them.”

  Parks sighs. There’s so much craziness in this one short speech, it’s hard to know which way to come at it. “Okay,” he says. “First off, they were never alive to start with. Second—”

  “They’re children, Sergeant.” There’s a vicious edge to her voice. “Whether they’re hungries or not isn’t the issue.”

  “Begging your pardon, Miss Justineau, it’s very much the issue. Being hungries, they can live for a really long time without food. Maybe indefinitely. If they’re still locked up in that bunker, they’re safe. And they’ll stay safe until someone opens it up. If they’re not, the junkers probably just added them into that stampede they’ve got going, in which case they’re not our problem any more. But I’ll tell you what is. You’re talking about sneaking up close to that base. Scoping it out. How exactly do you propose to do that?”

  “Well, we come up through…” Justineau starts, but she stops right there because she’s seen it.

  “No way to be quiet if we bring the Hummer,” Parks says, voicing what she’s just now getting around to thinking. “They’ll hear us coming from a couple of miles off. And if we do it without the Hummer, then we’re bollock naked in an area that’s just had a couple of thousand hungries set loose in it. I wouldn’t give much for our chances.”

  Justineau says nothing. She knows he’s right, and she’s not going to argue for suicide.

  But now here comes Dr Caldwell again. “I think it’s a question of strict priorities, Sergeant Parks. My research was the entire reason for the base’s existence. However much risk is involved in retrieving the notes and samples from the lab, I believe we need to do it.”

  “And I don’t,” Parks says. “Same thing applies. If your stuff is okay, it’s okay because they left it. I think they most likely did, because they wouldn’t have been looking for paper – except maybe to wipe their arses on. They were looking for food
, weapons, petrol, stuff like that.” Unless they were looking for payback for the guys that Gallagher got killed, but he’s not going to say that right now.

  “The longer we leave it—” Caldwell starts to object.

  “So I’m making a judgement call.” Parks cuts her off. “We go south, and we keep on the radio. Soon as we’re close enough to get a ping from Beacon, we tell them what went down. They can airlift some people in – with some real firepower to back them up. They’ll get the stuff from your lab, and then probably swing by and pick us up on their way home. Or worst case, we don’t manage to make contact from the road, so we have to report once we get there. Same thing happens, but it happens a day or so later. Either way, everyone’s happy.”

  “I’m not happy,” Caldwell says, coldly. “I’m not happy at all. A delay of even a day in recovering those materials is unacceptable.”

  “What if I went to the base by myself?” Justineau demands. “You could wait for me here, and then if I didn’t come back—”

  “That’s not going to happen,” Parks snaps. He doesn’t mean to rain on her parade, but he’s had enough of this bullshit. “Right now, those motherfuckers don’t know how far we got, which way we went, or even whether we’re alive or dead. And that’s how I want it to stay. If you go back and they catch you, right away they’ve got a line on us.”

  “I won’t tell them anything,” Justineau says, but he doesn’t even have to say anything to shoot that one down. They’re all grown-ups here.

  Parks waits for further objections, because he’s pretty sure they’re coming. But Justineau is looking through the glass now at the little hungry girl, who seems to be drawing something in the dust on the Hummer’s bonnet. There’s a look on the kid’s face like she’s trying to figure out a hard word on a smudged page. And the same look, now he comes to think of it, on Justineau’s face. That gives him a slightly queasy feeling. Meanwhile, Caldwell is flexing her fingers as if she’s checking out whether they still work, so he gets a free pass on that one.

  “Okay,” he says, “here’s what we’ll do. There’s a stream a couple of clicks west of here that was still running clean last I heard. We’ll drive there first, pick up some water. Then we go to one of the supply caches and get ourselves provisioned. We need food and e-blockers, mainly, but there’s a lot of other stuff that would come in pretty useful. After that, we light straight out. East until we hit the A1, then south all the way to Beacon. Either we skirt around London or we push straight through, depending. We’ll scope out the situation there once we get closer. Any questions?”

  There are a million questions, he knows damn well. He’s also got a pretty shrewd hunch as to which one is going to come first, and he’s not disappointed.

  “What about Melanie?” Justineau demands.

  “What about her?” Parks counters. “She’s running no risk here. She can live off the land, like any hungry does. They prefer people, but they’ll eat any kind of meat once they get the scent of it. And you know first-hand now how quick they run. Quick enough to bring down most things, over the distance.”

  Justineau stares at him like he’s talking in a foreign language. “Do you remember back just now when I used the word children?” she says. “Did it sink in at all? I’m not concerned about her intake of proteins, Sergeant. I’m concerned about the rat-bastard ethics of leaving a little girl alone in the middle of nowhere. And when you say she’s safe, I presume you mean from other hungries.”

  “They ignore their own,” Gallagher pipes up – the first time he’s spoken. “Don’t even seem to realise they’re there. I think they must smell different.”

  “But she’s not safe from the junkers,” Justineau goes on, ignoring him. “And she’s not safe from any other refusenik human enclaves there might be around here. They’ll just trap her and douse her with quicklime without even realising what she is.”

  “They’ll know bloody well what she is,” Parks says.

  “I’m not leaving her.”

  “She can’t ride with us.”

  “I’m not leaving her.” The set of Justineau’s shoulders tells Parks that she means it – that they’re at match point here.

  “What if she rides on the roof?” Caldwell says, cutting through the impasse. “With the damage to the axle, I imagine we’ll be travelling quite slowly, and there are rails up there for her to hold on to. You could even put up the pedestal for her, perhaps.” They all look at her, and she shrugs. “I thought I’d made my position clear. Melanie is part of my research – possibly the only part that’s left. If we have to go to some trouble to bring her along with us, it’s worth it.”

  “You’re not touching her,” Justineau says tersely.

  “Well, that’s an argument we can leave until we reach Beacon.”

  “Agreed,” Parks says quickly. “No to the pedestal – it opens up to the inside of the vehicle. But she can ride on the roof. I don’t have any problem with that, as long as she keeps a reasonable distance from all of us whenever we have to open the doors.”

  And that’s what they finally agree, just when he’s starting to think they’ll sit here and argue until their brains bleed out of their frigging ears.

  Justineau goes out to tell the monster what’s what.

  Parks details Gallagher to keep that little moppet in his line of sight at all times, and not ever to find himself away from his rifle or sidearm. He’ll be watching her himself, of course, but a little overkill never hurts.

  26

  “What do you want to do?” Miss Justineau asks her.

  For a moment Melanie doesn’t even understand the question. She waits for Miss J to clarify, and eventually – a little haltingly – she does.

  “We’re driving south, towards Beacon. But you could go anywhere. The soldiers trapped you, in Luton or Bedford or somewhere like that, where you were living. You could go back there if you wanted, and be with … well, with your own…”

  She hesitates. “What?” Melanie prompts. “With who?”

  Miss Justineau shakes her head. “Be on your own, I mean. Be free to do what you want. In Beacon, you wouldn’t be free. They’d only put you in another cell.”

  “I liked my cell. I liked the classroom.”

  “But there probably wouldn’t be any more lessons, Melanie. And Dr Caldwell would be in charge of you again.”

  Melanie nods. She knows all this. And it’s not that she isn’t afraid. It’s just that the fear makes no difference.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she explains to Miss J. “I want to be where you are. And I don’t know the way back to wherever I was before, anyway. I don’t even remember it. All I remember is the block, and you. You’re…” Now it’s Melanie’s turn to hesitate. She doesn’t know the words for this. “You’re my bread,” she says at last. “When I’m hungry. I don’t mean that I want to eat you, Miss Justineau! I really don’t! I’d rather die than do that. I just mean … you fill me up the way the bread does to the man in the song. You make me feel like I don’t need anything else.”

  Miss J doesn’t seem to have an answer for that. She doesn’t have any answer at all for a few moments. She looks away, looks back, looks away again. Her eyes fill up with tears and she can’t speak at all for a while. When she can finally meet Melanie’s gaze, she seems to have accepted that the two of them are going to stay together – if not for ever, at least for now. “You’re going to have to ride up on the roof,” she tells Melanie. “Are you okay with that?”

  “Yes,” Melanie says at once. “Sure. That’s fine, Miss Justineau.”

  It’s better than fine. It’s a relief. The thought of getting back inside the Humvee has been terrifying Melanie ever since she realised it was a possibility, so it’s purely wonderful that they’ve thought of an alternative. Now she doesn’t have to ride with Dr Caldwell, who scares her so badly it’s like scissors cutting into her chest. But more importantly, there’s no danger that she’ll get hungry again with Miss Justineau sitting right next to her
.

  Now Miss Justineau is looking at the picture Melanie drew in the dust on the Humvee’s bonnet. Blobs and blocks, with a single wavy line threading through them. She gives Melanie a curious glance. “What’s this?”

  Melanie shrugs. She doesn’t want to say. It’s the route she memorised, from Dr Caldwell’s lab all the way back to the stairs that lead down to the block. To her cell. It’s the way home, and she drew it even though she knows that she’s never going to retrace those steps, to sit in the classroom with the other children. Knows that home is just an idea now to be visited in memories but not ever again found in the way that you find your ground and stand on it and know that it’s yours.

  All she has – to describe to herself how she feels now – is stories she’s been told, about Moses not getting to see that land where there was all the milk, and Aeneas running away after Troy fell down, and a poem about a nightingale and a sad heart standing in alien corn.

  It all comes together inside her, and she can’t begin to explain. “It’s just a pattern,” she says, feeling bad because it’s a lie. She’s lying to Miss Justineau, who she loves more than anyone in the world. And of course the other part of the feeling, that’s even harder to say, is that they’re each other’s home now. They have to be.

  If only she didn’t have the memory of that terrible hunger, coming up from inside her. The horrifying pleasure of blood and meat in her mouth. Why hasn’t Miss Justineau asked her about that? Why wasn’t she surprised that Melanie could do those things?

  “Those men…” she says tentatively.

  “The men at the base?”

  “Yes. Them. What I did to them…”

  “They were junkers, Melanie,” Miss Justineau says. “Killers. They would have done worse to you, if you’d let them. And to me. You shouldn’t feel bad about anything that happened. You couldn’t help it. You’re not to blame for any of it.”

  In spite of her fears, Melanie has to ask. “Why? Why am I not to blame?”