The Girl With All the Gifts Page 27

  She walked up the stairs. They gave a metallic groan when she first put her weight on them, and shifted slightly with each step she took as though they were about to fall down. She almost turned back, but those shrieks and squeals from inside the building were louder now and she was curious as to what sort of creature was making them.

  At the top of the stairs there was a big room with pictures on the walls and lots of chairs and tables. The pictures were impossible to understand, containing words and pictures that seemed to bear no relationship to each other. One said Twisted Folk Autumn Tour, and showed a man playing a guitar. But then it showed the same man in the same position playing lots of other things – a dog, a chair, a tree, another man and so on. Some of the tables had plates and cups and glasses on them, but the cups and glasses were all empty and there was nothing on the plates except for indeterminate smears from food that had rotted away a long, long time ago so that now even the rot was gone.

  Nothing seemed out of place up here, or alive for that matter. Melanie could hear sounds of rapid movement now as well as the squealing, but the room was so big and so full of echoes that she couldn’t tell which direction the sounds were coming from.

  She looked around. There were staircases and doors everywhere. She took another staircase at random, then a door, then she walked along a corridor and through two other doors that swung open at her touch.

  And stopped at once, the way you might stop when you suddenly saw that you’d got too close to the edge of a cliff.

  The space she was in now was much, much bigger than the room downstairs, big as that had seemed. It was completely dark, but she guessed its size from the change in the echoes, and from the movement of the air in front of her face. She didn’t even have to think about these things. She just knew this place was vast.

  And the sounds were coming from below her, so that vastness extended in three dimensions, not two.

  Melanie held her hands out in front of her at chest height and stepped forward – little baby steps that brought her very quickly to the edge of a platform. Under her fingers was the cold metal of a rail or balustrade.

  She stood silently, listening to the squeals, the pounding of feet, and other rhythmical slaps and booms that came and went.

  Then someone laughed. A high, delighted trill.

  She stood rooted to the spot, amazed. She could feel that she was trembling. That laugh could have been made by Anne or Zoe or any of her friends in the class. It was a little girl’s laugh – or just possibly a little boy’s.

  She almost shouted out, but she didn’t. It was a nice laugh, and she thought that perhaps the person who made it must be nice too. But it couldn’t just be one person making all that noise. It sounded like lots and lots of people running around. Playing a game, perhaps, in the dark.

  She waited for so long that something strange happened. She started to be able to see.

  There wasn’t any more light to see by. It was just that her eyes decided to give her more information. She’d been told in a lesson once about something called accommodation. The rods and cones of the eye, especially the rods, change their zone of sensitivity so that they can see details and distinctions in what previously looked like total darkness. But there are functional limits to that process, and the resulting picture is mostly black and white because rods aren’t good at gradations of colour.

  This was different. It was like an invisible sun came up in the room, and Melanie could see by its light as well as she could see by day. Or like the space below her went from black ocean to dry land over the space of a few minutes. She wondered if this was something only hungries could do.

  She was in a theatre. She’d never seen one before, but she knew that was what it had to be. There were rows and rows of seats all facing the same way – and where they were facing there was a wide flat place with a wooden floor. A stage. There were more seats on a balcony on top of the first lot of seats, and that was where Melanie was – at one end of the balcony, standing at the edge where it looked down into the main auditorium below.

  And she was right about there being more than one person down there. There were at least a dozen.

  They weren’t playing a game, though. What they were doing was quite different.

  Melanie watched them in silence for a long time – perhaps as long as she’d listened to them, or a little more. Her eyes were wide, and her hands gripped very tight on to the balcony rail as though she were afraid of falling down.

  She watched until the noises and the movement died away. Then she slipped out, as quietly as she could, through the swing doors and down the stairs.

  Out on the street, where it was raining harder than ever, she walked a few faltering steps and came to a halt in the shadow of a wall whose ancient graffiti had faded to ghost patterns of black and grey.

  Something was happening to her face. Her eyes were burning, her throat convulsing. It was almost like the first breath you take in the shower room after the showers have been turned on and the air fills with bitter spray.

  But there was no spray here. She was just crying.

  The part of her mind that had stayed detached and watched her eat the cat watched this performance too, and mourned a little that – because of the rain – it was impossible to determine whether her weeping involved actual tears.

  58

  The night crawls past arthritically and aimlessly after a supper that – despite its perilously high salt and sugar content – nobody seems able to taste.

  Justineau sits in the crew quarters, twisted round in the seat so she can look through one of the slit windows at the street outside. Behind her she can hear Gallagher’s fitful snoring from the sleeping recess. He chose one of the top bunks, and stole blankets from most of the others to make himself a nest. He’s completely invisible up there, barricaded away from the world behind ramparts of dreams and polycotton.

  He’s the only one who sleeps at all. Parks is still stripping the generator, and he doesn’t seem inclined to stop. Intermittent clattering from back there tells Justineau that he’s making progress. Intermittent swearing announces his temporary setbacks.

  In between them is the lab, where Caldwell works in silence, putting slide after slide under a Zeiss LSM 510 confocal microscope with its own built-in battery (the scanning electron microscope still awaits the quickening touch of electric current from Rosie’s generator), writing annotations for each in a leather-backed notebook, then racking it in a plastic box whose compartments she carefully numbers.

  When the sun comes up, Justineau is silently amazed. It seemed entirely plausible that this ontological impasse would go on for ever.

  Through the red dawn a tiny figure walks out of a side street and crosses to Rosie’s door.

  Justineau gives an involuntary cry and runs to open it. Parks is there ahead of her, and he doesn’t move out of her way. There’s a thin, muffled sound: bare knuckles, knocking politely on the armour plating.

  “You’re going to have to let me handle this,” Parks tells her. He’s got shadows under his eyes and oil smudges on his forehead and cheeks. He looks like he just murdered someone who bled India ink. There’s a weary, defeated set to his shoulders.

  “What does ‘handle it’ mean?” Justineau demands.

  “It just means I talk to her first.”

  “With a gun in your hand?”

  “No,” he grunts irritably. “With these.”

  He shows her his left hand, in which he holds the leash and the handcuffs.

  Justineau hesitates for a second. “I know how handcuffs work,” she says. “Why can’t I be the one to go out to her?”

  Parks wipes his dirty brow on his dirty sleeve. “Jesus wept,” he mutters under his breath. “Because that’s what she asked for before she left, Helen. You’re the one she’s concerned about hurting, not me. I’m nearly certain she’s okay, because she just knocked on the door instead of clawing at it and bashing her head against it. But whatever kind of mood she’s in,
the one thing she won’t want to see when it opens is you standing there. Especially if she’s got blood on her mouth or her clothes from feeding. You understand that, right? After she’s cleaned herself up, and after she’s got the cuffs back on, then you can talk to her. Okay?”

  Justineau swallows. Her throat is dry. The truth is that she’s afraid. Mostly she’s afraid of what the last twelve hours might have done to Melanie. Afraid that when she looks into the girl’s eyes, she might see something new and alien there. For that very reason, she doesn’t want to put the moment off. And she doesn’t want Parks to look first.

  But she does understand, whether she wants to or not, and she can’t go against what Melanie specifically asked for. She has to step back, and around the bulkhead wall, while he opens the door.

  She hears the bolt slide back, the smooth sigh of hydraulically assisted hinges.

  And then she flees, through the aft weapons stations to the lab space. Dr Caldwell looks up at her, indifferent at first. Until she realises what Justineau’s agitation must mean.

  “Melanie is back,” the doctor says, coming to her feet. “Good. I was concerned she might have—”

  “Shut your mouth, Caroline,” Justineau interrupts savagely. “Seriously. Shut it now, and don’t open it again.”

  Caldwell continues to stare at her. She makes to walk aft, but Justineau is in her way and she stays there. All that aggression that’s building up in her, it’s got to come out.

  “Sit down,” Justineau says. “You don’t get to see her. You don’t get to talk to her.”

  “Yeah, she does,” says Parks, from behind her. She turns, and he’s standing in the doorway. Melanie is behind him. He hasn’t even put her cuffs on yet, but she’s already replaced her muzzle. She’s sodden, her hair plastered to the side of her head, her T-shirt clinging to her bony body. The rain has petered out now, so this is from last night.

  “She wants to talk to all of us,” Parks goes on. “And I think we want to listen. Tell them what you just told me, kid.”

  Melanie stares hard at Justineau, then even harder at Dr Caldwell. “We’re not alone out here,” she says. “There’s somebody else.”

  59

  In the crew quarters, they choose places to sit. Even though Rosie’s full complement was meant to be a dozen, it feels way too small. They’re aware of each other’s proximity, and none of them looks any more comfortable with that than Justineau feels.

  She’s sitting on the edge of a lower bunk. Caldwell sits on its counterpart, directly opposite. Gallagher is cross-legged on the floor, and Parks leans in the doorway.

  Standing at the forward end of the narrow space, Melanie addresses them. Justineau has dried her hair with a towel, hung out her jacket, jeans and T-shirt to dry and put another towel around her as a temporary bathrobe. Her arms are inside the towel – behind her back, because Parks has cuffed her hands again. It was her idea. She turned her back to him, arms held together, and waited patiently while he did it.

  There’s massive tension in her face, in the way she stands. She’s struggling to keep herself under control – not in the feeding frenzy way, but in the way someone might be if they’d just been mugged on the street or witnessed a murder. Justineau has seen Melanie scared before, but this is something new, and for a little while Justineau struggles to identify it.

  Then she realises what it is. It’s uncertainty.

  She speculates for the first time on what Melanie could have been, could have become, if she’d lived before the Breakdown. If she’d never been bitten and infected. Because this is a child here, whatever else she is, and she’s never lost that sense of her own centre before except when she smelled blood and turned, briefly into an animal. And look at how pragmatically, how ruthlessly, she’s coped with that.

  But Justineau only pursues this train of thought for a moment. When Melanie starts to speak, she commands their full attention.

  “I should have come back sooner,” she says, to everyone in the room. “But I was scared, so I ran away and hid at first.”

  “They don’t need a dramatic build-up, kid,” Parks drops into the ensuing silence. “Just go ahead and tell them.”

  But Melanie starts at the beginning and rolls right on, as though that’s the only way she knows how to tell it. She recounts her visit to the theatre the night before in spare and functional sentences. The only sign of her agitation is in the way she shifts from foot to foot as she speaks.

  Finally she reaches the point where she looked down from the balcony with her dark-adapted eyes and saw what was below her.

  “They were men like the ones I saw at the base,” she says. “With shiny black stuff all over them and their hair all spiked up. In fact, I think they were exactly the same ones from the base.” Justineau feels her stomach lurch. Junkers are maybe the worst news they could get right now. “There were lots and lots of them. They were fighting each other with sticks and knives, except that they weren’t. Not really. They were only pretending to fight. And they had guns too – like yours, in big racks on the walls. But they weren’t using them. They were just using the sticks and the knives. First knives, then sticks, then knives again. The man who was in charge of the fighting told them when to use sticks and when to change over. And someone asked when they could stop and he said not until I say so.”

  Melanie shoots a glance at Caroline Caldwell. Her expression is unreadable.

  “Did you get an idea how many there were?” Parks asks.

  “I tried to count, Sergeant Parks, and I got to fifty-five. But there could have been more, underneath where I was standing. There was a part of the room that I couldn’t see, and I didn’t want to move in case they heard me. I think there were probably more.”

  “Jesus!” Gallagher says. His voice is hollow with despair. “I knew it. I knew they wouldn’t stop!”

  “What made you think,” Caldwell asks, “that this was the same group who attacked the base?”

  “I recognised some of them,” Melanie says promptly. “Not their faces really, but the clothes they wore. Some of them had patches and bits of metal on them, and they made patterns. I remembered the patterns. And one of them had a word on his arm. Relentless.”

  “A tattoo,” Parks translates.

  “I think so,” Melanie says, her eyes on Dr Caldwell again. “And then, while I was watching, three more men came in. They talked about a trail that they were following, and they said they’d lost it. The leader got really angry with them and sent them straight back out again. He said if they didn’t bring back prisoners, he was going to let the other men use them to practise on with their knives and sticks.”

  That seems to be the end of the story, but Melanie waits, tense and expectant, in case there are questions.

  “Christ almighty!” Gallagher moans. He buries his head in his folded arms, and keeps it there.

  Justineau turns to Parks. “What do we do?” she asks him.

  Because like it or not, he’s the one who’s going to formulate their strategy. He’s the only one who really has a chance of bringing them out of here, now that they’ve run out of e-blocker and there’s an army of murderous lunatics camped on their doorstep. She’s heard stories about what the junkers do to people they take alive. Probably bullshit, but enough that you’d want to make sure they took you dead.

  “What do we do?” Gallagher echoes, unfolding from his crouch. He stares at her like she’s crazy. “We get out of here. We run. Now.”

  “Not yet we don’t,” Parks says deliberately. And then when they turn to him, “Better to roll than to run. I’m maybe an hour away from getting the generator working – and from where I stand, this bucket still gives us our best chance. So we don’t make a break for it. We lock down until we’re good and ready.”

  “It’s anomalous behaviour,” Caldwell muses.

  Parks gives her a shrewd glance. “From the junkers? Yeah, it is.”

  “They were in convoy when we saw them. Using the base’s vehicles to
cover the ground fast. Switching to a fixed base – a command post of some kind – makes no sense. A group that size is going to find it hard to live off the land. Scavenging has proved difficult enough even for the four of us.”

  Justineau can just about find room to be surprised. “Wow,” she says, shaking her head. “Why don’t you go and tell them that, Caroline? They nearly made a really stupid mistake there. They need someone with your wisdom and foresight to smack their heads together and get them thinking straight.”

  Caldwell ignores this sally. “I think we may be missing something that would make sense of this,” she says, forensically precise. “It doesn’t make sense as it stands.”

  Parks comes away from the door-frame, rubbing his shoulder. “We lock down,” he says again. “Nobody goes out there until further notice. Private, did you find any duct tape in those lockers?”

  Gallagher nods. “Yes, sir. Three full rolls, one started.”

  “Tape up the windows. No telling how good those flare-baffles are.”

  When he mentions flares, Justineau feels a rush of shame and retrospective dread. When she fired that flare last night, she could have brought the junkers right down on their heads. Parks should have shot her when he had the chance.

  “And check how we’re doing for water,” he’s saying now. “Doc, you were going to see if there was any in the filtration tank.”

  “The tank is full,” Caldwell says. “But I wouldn’t advise drinking from it until the generator is running. There’s algae in there, and probably a lot more contaminants besides. We can rely on the filters to do their job, but only once they get some power.”

  “Then I guess I’d better get back to work,” Parks says. But he doesn’t leave. He’s looking at Melanie. “What about you?” he demands. “Are you holding up? Been most of a day now since any of us put any blocker on.”