The Girl With All the Gifts Read online

  Same with the left leg.

  The rat wasn’t a peace offering. It was bait. And it shouldn’t have worked because he doesn’t eat rat, but hey, what do you know? He’s a sucker for a pretty face. The little moppet manoeuvred him into position, and then two of her friends sliced him up from behind.

  He’s been hamstrung.

  He’s not walking out of here.

  He may never walk again.

  “Fuck!” Gallagher is surprised when the word comes out of him as a whisper. In his mind it was a shout.

  “Listen,” he says, aloud. “Listen to me. This is not … you’re not going to do this to me. You understand? You can’t…”

  The faces he’s seeing don’t change. The same expression on all of them. Wild, aching need, somehow reined in, somehow not acted on.

  They’re waiting for him to die, so they can eat him.

  He takes out his sidearm and points it. At the girl. Then at the kid who dropped the baseball bat. He looks to be one of the oldest. He’s got incongruously red, full lips, where most of them barely have lips at all. You don’t notice that at first because of the paint all over his face, which Gallagher realises is not abstract. It’s another face, kind of a monster’s face painted over his own, the open mouth encompassing everything from his nose to his chin. The work is smudgy enough and wobbly enough to suggest that he did it himself, probably in marker pen. His lank, black hair hangs straight down over his eyes, giving him a louche, rock-star look. He’s so skinny, Gallagher can count every rib.

  And the gun doesn’t bother him at all. He stares right past it, unblinking, into Gallagher’s eyes.

  Gallagher waves the gun at the other kids, one by one. They don’t even seem to see it. They don’t know what a gun is or why they should be afraid of one. He’s going to have to shoot at least one of them to make them get it.

  Better do it quick too. His hand is trembling and there’s a sort of fuzzy static behind his eyes. The world’s starting to jump a little, like a car on a bumpy road. He tries to focus through the shakes.

  Painted-face boy. The one who dropped the baseball bat. He’s right at the front of the crowd, and he’s probably the one in charge of Operation Eat-Kieran-Gallagher, so fuck him, he’s duly nominated.

  But he keeps moving. They all keep moving. Might hit the little girl if he’s not careful. For some reason, Gallagher doesn’t want to do that, even though she set him up. She’s too small. It would feel too much like murder.

  There he is, the little bastard. Target acquired. The gun feels like it weighs a couple of hundredweight but Gallagher only needs to hold it on the right line for a couple of seconds. Just time enough to squeeze, squeeze, and…

  The trigger doesn’t move.

  The clip’s empty.

  Gallagher used it up on the second day when they were running through the crowd of hungries to get into that hospital place. Wainwright House. Then he switched to the rifle, and it’s the rifle he’s had in his hands ever since whenever it seemed like they might have to fight. He’s never reloaded.

  He almost laughs. The kids haven’t even reacted because the gun doesn’t mean a damn thing to them. It’s the baseball bat that’s keeping them at bay.

  Except it’s not. Not any more. They’re advancing slowly from both ends of the aisle, creeping in closer to him a step or two at a time, like they’re on a dare. Painted-face boy is leading the pack, even though he doesn’t have a weapon any more. His bony fingers flex and contract.

  Numbness is creeping over Gallagher now, seeping up through his body from his wounded legs. But the terror effervescing in his mind keeps it back, and brings a sudden inspiration. Quickly he shifts on to his left side, so he can feel in the pockets of his fatigues for…

  Yes! There it is. His hand closes on the cold metal. Hail Mary, he thinks incredulously, full of grace.

  The kids are really close. Gallagher pulls the grenade from his pocket and holds it out for them to see.

  “Look!” he yells. “Look at this!” The inexorable advance slows and stops, but he knows it’s the shout and not the danger that has made the kids hesitate. They’re gauging how much fight he has left in him.

  “Boooooom!” Gallagher mimes an explosion, throwing his arms out wildly. Silence for a moment. Then painted-face boy barks back at him. He thinks it’s just a threat display. A pissing contest.

  And the kids are moving again. Closing in for the kill.

  “It’s a bomb!” Gallagher shouts desperately. “It’s a fucking grenade. It will rip you apart. Go and eat a stray dog or something. I’ll do it. I mean it. I’ll really do it.”

  No reaction. He takes the pin between thumb and forefinger.

  He doesn’t want to kill them. Just to make sure his own exit is a white light and a sudden shock, rather than something drawn out and horrible, beyond his capacity to endure. It’s not like they’ve left him a choice. He doesn’t have any choice at all.

  “Please,” he says.

  Nothing.

  And when it comes to it, he can’t do it. If he could make them understand what it was he was threatening them with, maybe it would be different.

  He drops the baseball bat, and the feral children take him like a wave. The grenade is knocked out of his hand and rolls away.

  “I don’t want to hurt you!” Gallagher shrieks. And it’s the truth, so he tries not to fight back as they clutch and bite and tear at him. They’re just kids, and their childhood has probably been as big a load of shit as his was.

  In a perfect world, he would have been one of them.

  61

  Parks is determined to search even though he knows the chance of finding Gallagher is close to zero. They can’t shout and they can’t throw up any kind of a grid, because it’s just the three of them – himself, Helen Justineau and the kid. Dr Caldwell claimed she was too weak to walk very far, and since she looks as though a harsh word would break her in two, he didn’t argue the point.

  But they don’t need a grid. Melanie turns herself around like a weathercock, sniffs the wind a couple of times. She ends up facing a little bit west of south.

  “That way.”

  “You’re sure?” Parks asks her.

  A nod. No wasted words. She leads the way.

  But the trail goes all over the place, up one road and down another, mostly keeping southerly at first, but then not even that. Gallagher seems to have doubled back on himself, when he was only a mile or so out from Rosie. Parks wonders if the kid might be stringing them along for some reason – to look important, maybe, and to have the grown-ups’ attention. But that’s bullshit. Maybe a ten-year-old with a pulse would pull a trick like that, but Melanie’s more grounded. If she didn’t know where Gallagher went, she’d just say so.

  There’s something else going on though, and it’s between Melanie and Justineau – a dialogue of scared glances that reaches a crescendo at the point where the trail crosses a street into a back alley.

  The kid stops and looks at him. “Get out your gun, Sergeant,” she says quietly. She’s gone way solemn.

  “Hungries?” He doesn’t care how she knows. He just wants to be clear about what he’s walking into.

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  The kid hesitates. They’re in a sort of parking apron behind some shops. Lots of doorways on three sides of them, mostly broken open or broken down. A rusting car off on one side that’s up on bricks, probably already immobile long before the Breakdown silenced the roads. Wheelie bins laid out in a long line for a collection that never came.

  “There,” Melanie says at last. The doorway she nods towards is at first glance no different from any of the others. Second glance takes in the trodden-down weeds right in front of it, one of them a monster thistle that’s still wet with sap where it was broken.

  Parks goes to silent running. Better late than never, he figures. He taps Justineau’s hand, indicates that she should take out her handgun. The two of them approach the door like cops
in a pre-Breakdown TV drama, exaggeratedly furtive despite the crunch and grind of their footsteps on the broken ground.

  Melanie steps in between and turns to face them.

  “Cut me loose,” she says to Parks.

  He looks her in the eye. “Hands?”

  “Hands and mouth.”

  “Not that long ago, you asked me to tie you up,” he reminds her.

  “I know. I’ll be careful.”

  She doesn’t need to say the rest out loud. If they’re walking into an enclosed space full of hungries, they’ll probably need her. Can’t argue with that. Parks unlocks the cuffs, slides them into his belt. Melanie undoes the muzzle for herself and hands it to him.

  “Will you look after this for me, please?” she asks.

  He pockets it, and Melanie walks before them into the darkness.

  But they’re coming late to the party. Whatever happened here, it’s already over. A broad smeared trail of blood leads from the centre of an aisle into a corner out of the sun, which is where the hungries took Gallagher so they could eat him. He stares straight at the ceiling with a look of patient suffering on his face, like the more mannerly depictions of Christ on the cross. Unlike Christ, he’s been chewed down to the bone in most places. His jacket is gone. No sign of it anywhere. His shirt, ripped wide open, frames the hollow chasm of his torso. His dog tags have fallen among exposed vertebrae. The hungries appear somehow to have eaten his throat without breaking the steel chain – like that party trick where you whip out the tablecloth without disturbing the crockery.

  Justineau turns away, tears squeezed out from her closed eyes, but she makes no sound. Neither does Parks, for a moment or two. All he can think of is that he had a command of one and he let the boy die alone. That’s the sort of sin you go to hell for.

  “We should bury him,” Melanie says.

  For a moment his anger turns on her. “Fuck’s the point?” he growls, glaring at her. “They didn’t leave enough to bury. You could scoop him up and drop him in a frigging litter bin.”

  Melanie meets him more than halfway. Teeth bared, she snarls right back at him. “We have to bury him. Or dogs and other hungries will get him and eat even more of him. And there won’t be anywhere to show where he died. You should honour a fallen soldier, Sergeant!”

  “Honour a … Where the fuck did that come from?”

  “The Trojan War, most likely,” Justineau mutters. She wipes her eyes with the heel of her hand. “Melanie, we can’t … there isn’t anywhere. And we don’t have the time. We’d just be making ourselves into targets. We’re going to have to leave him.”

  “If we can’t bury him,” Melanie says, “then we have to burn him.”

  “With what?” Justineau demands.

  “With the stuff in the big barrels,” Melanie says impatiently. “From the room with the generator in it. It says Inflammable on it, and that means it burns.”

  Justineau says something else. Trying to explain, maybe, why dragging twenty-gallon drums of aviation fuel through the streets is another activity that they won’t be engaging in.

  But Parks is thinking, with a sort of dull wonder: as far as the kid is concerned, the world never ended. They taught her all these old, old things, filled her head with all this unserviceable shit, and they thought it didn’t matter because she was never going to leave her cell except to be dismantled and smeared on microscope slides.

  His stomach lurches. He has a sense, for the first time in his soldiering career, of what a war crime might look like from the inside. And it’s not him who’s the criminal, or even Caldwell. It’s Justineau. And Mailer. And that drunken bastard Whitaker, and all the rest of them. Caldwell, she’s just a butcher. She’s Sweeney Todd, with a barber’s chair and a straight razor. She didn’t spend years twisting kids’ brains into pretzels.

  “We can say a prayer for him,” Justineau is saying now. “But we can’t drag one of those fuel drums all the way here, Melanie. And even if we could—”

  “Okay,” Parks says. “Let’s do it.”

  Justineau looks at him like he’s gone mad. “This isn’t a joke,” she tells him grimly.

  “Do I look like I’m joking? Hey, she’s right. She’s making more sense than either of us.”

  “We can’t—” Justineau says again.

  Parks loses it.

  “Why the hell not?” he roars. “If she wants to honour the fucking dead, let her do it! School’s out, teacher. School’s been out for days now. Maybe you missed that.”

  Justineau stares at him in bewilderment. Her face is a little pale. “You shouldn’t shout,” she mutters, making shushing motions with her hands.

  “Did I get moved to your class?” Parks asks her. “Are you my teacher now?”

  “The hungries that did this are probably still close enough to hear you. You’re giving away our position.”

  Parks raises his rifle and squeezes off a round, making Justineau flinch and yelp. The shot punches a hole in the ceiling. Clods of damp plaster thud down, one of them bouncing off Parks’ shoulder and leaving a white streak where it hit. “I would welcome a word or two with them,” he says.

  He turns to Melanie, who’s watching all this with wide eyes. It must be like seeing Mummy and Daddy quarrel. “What do you say, kid? Shall we give Kieran a Viking funeral?”

  She doesn’t answer. She’s caught between a rock and a hard place, because if she says yes, then she’s siding with him against Justineau – and there’s no way that crush is subsiding any time soon.

  Parks takes silence for consent. He goes around behind the counter, where he’s already seen a box of disposable lighters. They’re still full of fluid – only a few ccs in each one, but there are about a hundred of them. He brings them back to the pathetic remains.

  Being a man of a practical turn of mind, he takes the walkie-talkie from Gallagher’s belt and transfers it to his own before breaking open the little plastic tubes one at a time and emptying the lighter fluid out on to Gallagher’s corpse. Justineau watches, shaking her head. “What about the smoke?” she asks him.

  “What about it?” Parks grunts.

  Melanie turns her back on the two of them and walks down the aisle, all the way to the front of the shop. She comes back a moment later carrying a bright yellow cagoule in a plastic wrapper.

  She kneels and puts it under Gallagher’s head. She’s kneeling in his blood, which isn’t even dry yet. When she stands again, red-black streaks adorn her knees and calves.

  Parks gets to the last lighter. He could use it to light the pyre, but he doesn’t. He pours it on, like the rest, then strikes a spark with his tinderbox to start the blaze.

  “God bless, Private,” he mutters, as the flames consume what little is left of Kieran Gallagher.

  Melanie is saying something too, but it’s under her breath – to the dead body, not to the rest of them – and Parks can’t hear. Justineau, to do her justice, waits in silence until they’re done, which is basically when the greasy, stinking flames force them back.

  They make the return trip to Rosie a lot more widely spaced than on the outward journey, and with a lot less to say to each other. The shop blazes behind them, sending up a thick pillar of smoke that spreads, far over their heads, into a black umbrella.

  Justineau is treating Parks like a dog that’s showing a little foam around the gums, which he feels is probably more than fair right then. Melanie walks ahead of them both, shoulders hunched and head lowered. She hasn’t asked for her cuffs and muzzle to be replaced, and Parks hasn’t offered.

  When they’re most of the way back, the kid stops. Her head snaps up, suddenly alert.

  “What’s that?” she whispers.

  Parks is about to say he can’t hear anything, but there is a vibration in the air and now it assembles itself into a sound. Something stirring into wakefulness, sullen and dangerous, asserting its readiness to pick a fight and win it.

  Rosie’s engines.

  Parks breaks into a run, t
urning the corner of the Finchley High Road in time to see the distant speck grow in seconds into a behemoth.

  Rosie weaves a little, both because there’s debris in the road and because Dr Caldwell is driving with her thumbs hooked into the bottom of the steering wheel. Every twitch of her arm translates into a yawing roll of the long vehicle.

  Without even thinking about it, Parks steps into the road. He has no idea what Caldwell is doing, what she might be fleeing from, but he knows he has to stop her. Rosie lurches like a drunk to miss him, smashing into a parked car, which is dragged along with it for a few yards before breaking apart in a shower of rust and glass.

  Then it’s gone by. They’re staring at the mobile lab’s tail lights as it accelerates away from them.

  “What the fuck?” Justineau exclaims in a bewildered tone.

  Parks seconds that emotion.

  62

  As soon as Parks and Justineau go off in search of Private Gallagher, taking test subject number one with them, Caroline Caldwell crosses to Rosie’s midsection door, opens up a compartment beside it at about head-height and pulls a lever from the vertical position to the horizontal. This is the override control for the external emergency access. Nobody can now enter the vehicle unless Caldwell lets them in herself.

  That done, she goes to the cockpit and powers up one of three panels. The generator, twenty yards behind her in the rear of the vehicle, starts to hum – but not to roar, because Caldwell isn’t sending the power to the engine. She needs it in the lab, which is where she goes next. Since she’ll be working directly with infected tissue, she puts on gloves, goggles and face mask.

  She boots up the scanning electron microscope, works her way patiently and punctiliously through the setting and display option screens, and mounts the first of her prepared slides.

  With a pleasant tingle of anticipation, she puts her eyes to the output rig. The central nervous system of the Wainwright House hungry is instantly there, laid out before her avid gaze. Having chosen green as the key colour, she finds herself strolling under a canopy of neuronal dendrites, a tropical brainforest.