The Girl With All the Gifts Page 23

  “Jesus Christ!” Helen Justineau says, in a kind of a whisper.

  “Fascinating,” Dr Caldwell murmurs. “Absolutely fascinating.”

  “If you say so, Doc,” the Sarge says. “But I’m thinking we should keep the hell away from it, right?”

  Fearless or foolhardy, Caldwell reaches out to touch one of the growths. Its surface indents a little under the pressure of her finger, but fills out quickly to its original shape once she draws her hand back.

  “I don’t think it’s dangerous,” she says. “Not yet. When these fruits ripen, that may be a very different matter.”

  “Fruits?” Justineau echoes. She says it in exactly the same tone that Gallagher would have used. Fruits out of a dead man’s rotten, broken-open body? Where would you have to go to get sicker than that?

  Melanie squeezes in beside Gallagher, peers around his leg at the fallen hungry. He feels bad for her, that she has to see this. It’s not right for a little kid to be made to think about death.

  Even if she’s, you know, dead. Kind of.

  “Fruits,” Caldwell repeats, firmly and with satisfaction. “This, Sergeant, is the fruiting body of the hungry pathogen. And these pods are its sporangia. Each one is a spore factory, full of seeds.”

  “They’re its ball-sacks,” the Sarge translates.

  Dr Caldwell laughs delightedly. She was looking really beaten up and exhausted the last time Gallagher glanced at her, but this has brought her to life. “Yes. Exactly. They’re its ball-sacks. Break open one of these pods, and you’ll be having an intimate encounter with Ophiocordyceps.”

  “Then let’s not,” Parks suggests, pulling her back as she goes to touch the thing again. She looks up at him, surprised and seeming ready to argue the point, but the Sarge has already turned his attention to Justineau and Gallagher. “You heard the Doc,” he says, like it was her idea. “This thing, and any more of them we see, they’re off-limits. You don’t touch them, and you don’t go near them. No exceptions.”

  “I’d like to take some samples—” Caldwell starts to say.

  “No exceptions,” Parks repeats. “Come on, people, we’re wasting daylight. Let’s move out.”

  Which they do. But the interlude has left them all in a weird mood. Melanie goes back to Justineau and walks right at her side, as though she was back on the leash again. Dr Caldwell blathers on about life cycles and sexual reproduction until it almost sounds like she’s coming on to the Sarge, who lengthens his stride to get away from her. And Gallagher can’t keep from looking back, every now and again, at the ruined thing that’s become so weirdly pregnant.

  They see a dozen more of these fallen, fruiting hungries in the next couple of hours, some of them a lot further gone than the first one. The tallest of the white columns tower way over their heads, anchored at the base by a froth of grey threads that spills over the hungries’ bodies and almost hides them from sight. The central stems get thicker as they get taller, widening the gap in the hungry’s ribs or throat or abdomen or wherever they first broke through. There’s something kind of obscene about it, and Gallagher wishes to Christ they’d gone some other way so they didn’t have to know about this.

  He’s a little freaked out too, by what seems to be happening to the round growths on the fungal stems. They start out as just bumps or protuberances on the main vertical shaft. Then they get bigger, and fill out into shiny pearly-white spheroids that hang like Christmas tree ornaments. Then they fall off. Beside the tallest and thickest stems, there are thin scatterings of them around which they step over with gingerly care.

  Gallagher is happy when the sun drops below the horizon and he doesn’t have to look at the bastard things any more.

  48

  The third night, for Helen Justineau, is the strangest of all.

  They spend it in the cells of a police station on the Whetstone High Road, after Sergeant Parks has ordered a short detour to explore it. He’s hoping that the station will have an intact weapons locker. Their ammunition has been depleted by the skirmish in Stevenage, and every little helps.

  There’s no weapons locker, intact or otherwise. But there’s a board with keys hanging on it, and some of the keys turn out to be for the remand cells in the basement. Four cells, strung out in a row along a short corridor with a guardroom at the further end of it. The door that opens on to the stairwell is a two-inch thickness of wood, with a steel panel riveted on to the inside.

  “Room at the inn,” Parks says.

  Justineau thinks he’s joking, but then she sees that he’s not and she’s appalled. “Why would we lock ourselves in here?” she demands. “It’s a trap. There’s only one exit, and once we lock this door we’re blind. We wouldn’t have any way of keeping track of what’s going on above us.”

  “All true,” Parks admits. “But we know those junkers followed us from the base. And now we’re getting into an area that had the densest population out of anywhere in the country. Wherever we stop, we’re going to want to maintain some kind of a perimeter. Locked steel door is the most discreet perimeter I can think of. Our lights won’t show, and any sound we make probably won’t reach the surface. We stay safe, but we don’t draw any attention to ourselves. Hard to imagine anything better, on that score.”

  There’s no vote, but people start putting their packs down. Caldwell slumps against the wall, then slides down it into a squatting position. It might not even be that she agrees with Parks’ argument. She’s just too tired to walk any further. Private Gallagher is unpacking the last few cans of food from Wainwright House, and then he’s opening them.

  It’s carried on the nod, and there’s no point in arguing.

  They close the door so they can put their torches on, but they don’t lock it at first; claustrophobia is already setting in, for most of them, and turning the key seems like too irrevocable a step. As they eat, the desultory conversation winds down into silence. Parks is probably right about their voices not carrying, but they still sound way too loud in this echoing vault.

  When they’re done, they slip away one by one into the guardroom to do whatever they need to do. No torches in there, so they’ve got something like privacy. Justineau realises that Melanie never needs to take a bathroom break. She vaguely remembers, somewhere in the briefing pack she was given when she arrived at the base, some notes by Caldwell on the digestive systems of the hungries. The fungus absorbs and uses everything they swallow. There’s no need for excretion, because there’s nothing to excrete.

  Parks locks the door at last. The key sticks in the lock, and he has to apply a lot of force to turn it. Justineau imagines – probably they all do – what would happen to them if the shank broke off in the lock. That’s a bloody solid door.

  They split up to sleep. Caldwell and Gallagher take a cell each, Melanie goes with Justineau and Parks sleeps at the foot of the stairs with his rifle ready to hand.

  When the last torch clicks off, the darkness settles on them like a weight. Justineau lies awake, staring at it.

  It’s like God never bothered.

  49

  Melanie thinks: when your dreams come true, your true has moved. You’ve already stopped being the person who had the dreams, so it feels more like a weird echo of something that already happened to you a long time ago.

  She’s lying in a cell that’s a bit like her cell back at the base. But she’s sharing it with Miss Justineau. Miss Justineau’s shoulder is touching her back, and she can feel it moving rhythmically with Miss Justineau’s breath. On one level, that fills her with a happiness so complete that it’s stupefying.

  But this isn’t anywhere they can stay, and live. It’s just a stop on the journey, which is full of uncertainties. And some of the uncertainties are inside her, not out in the world. She’s a hungry, with a driving need that will always come back no matter what she does. She has to be kept in chains, with a muzzle over her face, so she won’t eat anybody.

  And they lived together, for ever after, in great peace and p
rosperity.

  That was how the story she wrote ended, but it’s not how this real-life story will end. Beacon won’t take her. Or else it will take her and break her down in pieces. Miss Justineau’s happy ending isn’t hers.

  She’ll have to leave Miss J soon, and go off into the world to seek her fortune. She’ll be like Aeneas, running away from Troy after it fell and sailing the seas until he comes to Latium and founds the new Troy, which ends up being called Rome.

  But she seriously doubts now that the princes she once imagined fighting for her exist anywhere in this world, which is so beautiful but so full of old and broken things. And she already misses Miss J, even though they’re still together.

  She doesn’t think she’ll ever love anyone else quite this much.

  50

  The fourth day is the day of the miracle, which falls on Caroline Caldwell out of a clear sky.

  Except that it’s not clear, really. Not any more. The weather has turned. A thin rain is soaking through their clothes, there’s no food left, and everyone is in a dismal, surly mood. Parks is worried about the e-blocker, and taking it out on everybody. They’re running low on the stuff, and had to go sparingly when they anointed themselves before unlocking the door. And they’ve still got at least three days’ journey ahead of them. If they don’t manage to restock at some point, they’ll be in dead trouble.

  They’re still walking south, with the whole of north London and central London and south London to get through. Even for the young private, Caldwell sees, some of the shock and awe has drained away. The only one who’s still looking at every new thing they pass with indefatigable wonder is test subject number one.

  As for Caldwell, she’s thinking about lots of things. Fungal mycelia growing in a substrate of mammalian body cells. The GABA-A receptor in the human brain, whose widespread and vital operation concerns the selective conduction of chloride ions across the plasma membranes of specific neurons. And the more immediate issue of why they’re seeing so few hungries now, when yesterday morning they were seeing clusters of several hundred at a time.

  Caldwell hypothesises a number of possible answers to this question: deliberate clearance by uninfected humans, competition from an animal species, the spread of a disease through the hungry population, an unknown side effect of Ophiocordyceps itself, and so on. Obviously the existence of the fallen, fruiting hungries is a factor – they’ve seen a lot more since they set out that morning, so many that new sightings arouse no comment – but it’s unlikely that this is the sole explanation. For that, there would have to be hundreds of thousands of the things, not just dozens. To Caldwell’s intense annoyance, she comes across no observational evidence that would help her to choose between the various scenarios she’s theorised.

  Moreover – and this distresses her even more – she’s finding it hard to concentrate. The pain from her damaged hands is now a persistent and agonising throbbing, as though she had an extra heart beating in each of her palms in very imperfect synchrony. The ache in her head tries to keep pace with both at once. Her legs feel so weak, so insubstantial, she can hardly believe that they’re carrying her weight. It’s more like her body is a helium balloon, bobbing along above them.

  Helen Justineau says something to her, the rising inflection suggesting a question. Caldwell doesn’t hear, but nods her head in order to prevent any further repetition.

  Perhaps Ophiocordyceps induces different behaviours in the mature stage than in its neotenous, asexual form. Migratory behaviours or sessile ones. Morbid photosensitivity or some parallel to the height-seeking reflex of infected ants. If she knew where the hungries had gone, she could begin to construct a model of the mechanism, and that might lead her to an understanding of how the fungus–neuron interface ultimately functions.

  The day has a drifting, dreamlike feel. It seems to come to Caldwell from a great distance, only reporting in occasionally. They find a cluster of fallen hungries, who have fruited in the same way as the others – but in this case, they’ve lain down so close together that the trunks or stems that grow out of their chests are now joined together by rafts of mycelial threads.

  While the others stare at the fungal glade in sick fascination, Caldwell kneels and picks up one of the fallen sporangia. It looks and feels solid enough, but weighs very little. There’s a pleasing smoothness to its integument. Nobody sees as she slips it, very carefully, into the pocket of her lab coat. The next time Sergeant Parks glances around at her, she’s fidgeting with her bandages again and looks as though she’s been doing it the whole time.

  They walk on endlessly. Time elongates, fractures, rewinds and replays in stuttering moments that – while they have no coherent internal logic – all seem drearily familiar and inevitable.

  The GABA-A receptor. The hyperpolarisation of the nerve cell, occurring after the peak of its firing and determining the lag time before it’s ready to reach action potential again. So precariously balanced a mechanism, and yet so much depends on it!

  “Approach with caution,” Sergeant Parks is saying now. “Don’t assume it’s empty.”

  In her lab at the base, Caldwell has a voltage clamp of the SEVC-d variety, which can be used to measure very small changes in ion currents across the surface membranes of living nerve cells. She never trained herself to use it properly, but she knows that the Cordyceps-infected display both different levels of excitation from healthy subjects and different rates of change in electrical activity. Variation within the infected community is large, though, and unpredictable. Now she’s wondering whether it correlates with another variable that she’s failed to detect.

  A hand touches her shoulder. “Not yet, Caroline,” Helen Justineau says. “They’re still checking it out.”

  Caldwell looks on down the road. Sees what’s standing there, a hundred yards ahead of them.

  She’s afraid at first that she might be hallucinating. She knows she’s suffering from extreme fatigue and mild disorientation, arising either from the infection contracted when she injured her hands at the base or (less likely) from the untreated water they’ve been drinking.

  Ignoring Justineau, she walks forward. In any case, the sergeant rounds the side of the thing now, and gives the all-clear. There’s no reason to hang back.

  She raises her hand and touches the cool metal. In curlicues of raised chrome, from under its mantle of dust and filth, it speaks to her. Speaks its name.

  Which is Rosalind. Rosalind Franklin.

  51

  Caroline Caldwell was brought up to believe in the second law of thermodynamics. In a closed system, entropy must increase. No ifs or ands or buts. No time off for good behaviour, since time’s arrow always points in the same direction. Through the gift shop to the exit, with no stamp on your hand, nothing that would let you come round and have another ride.

  It’s twenty years now since Charlie and Rosie went off the grid. Twenty years since they launched – without her – and lost their way in a disintegrating world. And now here’s Rosie staring Caroline Caldwell in the eye, as demure as you please.

  Rosie is a refutation of entropy just by being here. So long as she’s still virgo intacta, not looted or torched.

  “Door’s locked,” Sergeant Parks says. “And nobody’s answering.”

  “Look at the dust,” Justineau offers. “This thing hasn’t moved in a long, long time.”

  “Okay, I think we should take a look inside.”

  “No!” Caldwell yelps. “Don’t! Don’t force the door!”

  They all turn to look at her, surprised by her vehemence. Even test subject number one stares, her blue-grey eyes solemn and unblinking. “It’s a laboratory!” Caldwell says. “A mobile research facility. If we break the seals, we could compromise whatever’s inside. Samples. Experiments in progress. Anything.”

  Sergeant Parks doesn’t look impressed. “You really think that’s an issue right now, Doctor?”

  “I don’t know!” Caldwell says, anguished. “But I don’t wan
t to take the chance. Sergeant, this vehicle was sent here to research the pathogen, and it was crewed by some of the finest scientific minds in the world. There’s no telling what they found or what they learned. If you smash your way in, you could do untold damage!”

  She physically interposes herself between Parks and the vehicle. But she doesn’t need to. He’s not making any move towards the door.

  “Yeah,” he says dourly. “Well, I don’t think it’s going to be an issue. That’s some serious plate on that thing. We’re not getting in there any time soon. Maybe if we found a crowbar, but even then…”

  Caldwell thinks hard for a moment, sieving her memory. “You don’t need a crowbar,” she says.

  She shows him where the emergency external access crank is hidden, cradled in two brackets underneath Rosie’s left flank, right beside the midsection door. Then, with the crank held awkwardly in her bandaged left hand, she goes down on her knees and gropes under the body of the vehicle, close to the forward wheel arch. She remembers – she thinks she remembers – the position of the socket into which the crank will fit, but it’s not where she expects it to be. After a few minutes of blind rummaging, watched in bemused silence by the others, she finally locates the slot and is able to insert the end of the crank into it. There’s an override control, but it was only meant to be engaged in conditions of actual siege. The vehicle’s designers anticipated a range of situations in which it would be necessary to enter Rosie from the outside without compromising her interior spaces by blasting or forcing a way in.

  “How do you know about all this?” Justineau asks her.

  “I was attached to the project,” Caldwell reminds her tersely. She’s lying by omission, but she doesn’t blush. The pain of these memories runs much deeper than the embarrassment, and nothing would induce her to explain further.