The Girl with All the Gifts

20

Justineau tries to stand. It’s not easy, because her guts are churning, her lungs are full of acid and the floor under her feet heaves like the deck of a ship. Her face feels like a mask of white-hot iron, fitted way too tight over her skull.

Things are moving around her, quickly, with no accompanying narrative apart from panting breath and a single muffled shriek. She’s been blind since Caldwell sprayed her, and although the initial rush of tears washed most of the pepper spray out of her eyes, they’re still swollen half shut. She sees blurred shapes, crashing against each other like flotsam in the wake of a flood.

She blinks furiously, trying to dredge up some more moisture from her now dry-baked tear ducts.

Two of the shapes resolve. One is Selkirk, on her side on the floor of the lab, her legs jackknifing in furious staccato. The other is a hungry which is kneeling astride her, stuffing her spilled intestines into its mouth in pink, sagging coils.

More hungries surge in from all sides, hiding Selkirk from view. She’s a honey-pot for putrescent bees. The last Justineau sees of her is her inconsolable face.

Melanie! Justineau thinks. Where’s Melanie?

The room is a sea of scrambling, clutching bodies. Justineau backs away from the feeding frenzy, almost backs into another. By the window of the room, Caroline Caldwell is fighting for her life with silent ferocity. Two hungries who came over the sill crawling on hands and knees, leaving pieces of themselves on the jagged edges of the broken glass, have gripped her legs and are swarming up her body. Their jaws are working like the interlocking scoops of mechanical diggers. Caldwell has got her hands on the tops of their heads, as though in benediction, but what she’s actually doing is pushing against them as hard as she can, trying desperately to stop them from bending forward and sinking their teeth into her. She’s losing that battle, inch by inch.

Justineau finds the fire extinguisher where she dropped it, its bright red paint calling out to her across the lab’s anodyne whites and greys. She picks it up, turns like a hammer-thrower and swings it underarm. It makes contact with a hollow clang, and the head of one of the hungries sags sideways, the neck snapped cleanly. It still doesn’t let go, but Caldwell’s right hand is freed because the thing’s jaws can’t be brought to bear now that its neck is no longer pulling its weight.

With the strength and resolution of sheer terror, Caldwell uses her free hand to grip a slender triangle of glass that’s still adhering to the window frame, and pulls it loose. Her own blood wells up between her fingers as she slashes at the other hungry again and again, flaying its face off its skull in broad strips.

Justineau leaves her to it. With the window right in front of her, she can orientate herself. She turns to face the operating table. Amazingly, her line of sight is clear. Most of the hungries are fighting over scraps of Jean Selkirk, which means they’re down on hands and knees, snouts in the trough.

The operating table is empty. The plasticated straps that had held Melanie immobile now hang useless, sheared clean through. The scalpel that Caldwell put down before she used the pepper spray is lying discarded at the head end of the table.

Justineau looks around wildly. She makes a sound like a moan, which is lost in the liquid snuffling sounds of the monsters’ banquet. The chaos of the room has resolved itself into simplicity. Selkirk hosting the feast. Caldwell carving at the face and upper body of the hungry that’s still blindly trying to ascend her, until it finally falls away, effectively peeled.

Melanie is nowhere.

Caldwell is free now, and she’s frantically gathering up notes and samples with her blood-slicked hands, trying to pile up too many things in her arms until they fall to the floor in a clattering cascade. The sound is loud enough to rouse the hungries who are eating Selkirk. Their heads jerk up and turn, left and then right, in eerie synchrony.

Caldwell is down on one knee, picking up the fallen treasures. Justineau grips her by her collar and hauls her upright.

“Come on!” she shouts. Or she tries to shout. But she’s swallowed some of the pepper spray, so her tongue is three times its normal size. She sounds like Charles Laughton in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Doesn’t matter. She’s hauling Caldwell to the door like a mother dragging a wilful child as the hungries surge up from the floor and trample over what’s left of Dr Selkirk in their eagerness to reach this new food source.

Justineau slams the lab door in their faces. It’s not locked, but that’s a detail. Hungries are no better with locks than wild dogs would be. The door shudders from their repeated assaults, but it doesn’t open.

The women are in a short corridor, with the shower unit at the other end of it. Justineau is heading for the shower and the doors beyond, which she left wide open when she came in, but she slows and stops before she gets there. In the space between this block and the vehicle sheds, a running firefight is going on. The men she can see ducking and shooting and taking cover behind the angle of the next building are not Sergeant Parks’ men, in the khaki she’s always hated; they’re savages in motley, their hair blacked and sculpted with tar, machetes tucked into their belts.

Junkers.

While Justineau is still staring, two of the men leap into the air, back-flipping at impossible speed. The flash and roar of the grenade comes half a second later, and the peristaltic shudder of the shockwave a heartbeat after that.

Caldwell points to another door – maybe she says something too, but the wild carillon in Justineau’s ears blots out all other sounds. The door is locked. Caldwell rummages in her pockets, leaving dark red Bézier curves of blood on her white lab coat. Her hands, Justineau sees, are in a really bad state, flaps of skin hanging loose from deep incisions where she gripped the jagged glass sliver to hit out with it.

Pocket after pocket. Caldwell can’t find the key. She tears open the coat at last, tries her trouser pockets, and it’s there. She gets the door open and they’re in what turns out to be a storeroom, filled with a dozen or more identical grey steel shelf units. It’s a refuge.

It’s a trap. As soon as Caldwell locks the door from the inside, Justineau realises she can’t stay here. Melanie is wandering around somewhere outside, like Red Riding Hood in the deep, dark woods, surrounded by men who are firing automatic weapons.

Justineau has to find her. Which means she has to get outside.

Caldwell leans against the end of a shelf unit, either pulling herself together or retreating into some inner space that’s nicer than this one. Justineau ignores her, checks out the narrow room. There are no other doors, but there’s a window, high up on the wall. It will open on to the side of the building that’s closest to the perimeter fence and furthest from the fighting. From there, she could maybe make a run for it – back to the classroom block, where Melanie will have gone to ground if she was able to find her way back there.

Justineau starts to empty the nearest shelf unit, sweeping boxes and bottles, bags of surgical gauze, rolls of paper towel off the shelves on to the floor. Caldwell watches her in silence as she pulls the unit over to the window, where it can serve as a ladder.

“They’ll kill you,” Caldwell says.

“Theb fhtay hhhere,” Justineau snarls over her shoulder. But when she starts to climb, Caldwell steadies the unit with her shredded hands – then clambers up after her, emitting a little gasp of pain every time she has to grip the cold metal of the unit.

The window secures with a catch. Justineau releases it and tilts it open an inch. Outside, just a stretch of untrodden grass. The shouts and gunshots are deadened by distance.

She pushes the window fully open and climbs through, dropping down on to the grass. It’s still wet with morning dew, cold against her ankles. The ordinariness of that feeling is like a telegram from the other side of the world.

Caldwell has more trouble getting out, because she’s trying not to use her injured hands to support her weight. She falls heavily, unable to keep her balance, and sprawls full length in the grass. Justineau helps her up, none too gently.

From the corner, they can see right across the parade ground to the classroom block and the barracks proper. There are hungries everywhere, in tight groups and running hard. Justineau thinks they’re running at random, but then she sees the junker herders in their weird armour, driving them on with spear points, Tasers and good old-fashioned fire.

Clinically she notes that the junkers are all plastered with tar – not just their hair, but the flesh of their arms and hands, the weave of their Kevlar vests. It must do something similar to what the e-blocker spray does, masking the smell of their endocrine sweat so that the hungries don’t turn and swim up that chemical gradient all the way to their tormentors’ throats.

But mostly she thinks: hungries as bioweapons! Win or lose, the base is done for.

“I’m going to try to get across to the classroom block,” she tells Caldwell. “You should probably give it a few seconds, then head for the fence. At least some of them will be looking the other way.”

“The classroom block is underground,” Caldwell snaps. “There’s only one way in or out. You’ll be trapped.”

What a wonderful pair of scientists the two of them are. Assembling known facts into valid inferences. Forensic minds refusing to quit in the face of this utter fucking nightmare.

Justineau doesn’t bother to answer. She just runs. She’s plotted a course and she sticks to it, giving the nearest pack of hungries a wide berth as they sweep on past her, heading for the barracks. The junkers who are herding them are too busy with what they’re doing to turn aside for her.

And their comrades, coming up behind them, are taking fire from both sides: Parks’ people are using the terrain, turning the open spaces between the wooden huts into killing grounds.

Justineau has to swerve away from three soldiers who are running right towards her, rifles in their hands, and then she’s sideways on to another stampeding wedge of hungries. She tacks and weaves, and only realises she’s lost her way when she rounds another corner and what’s in front of her is about a dozen spike-haired men, their limbs black and shiny with tar that must still be liquid, firing from behind a makeshift barricade of overturned dumpsters.

The junkers turn and see her. Most of them turn right back again and keep on firing, but two immediately stand and walk towards her. One pulls a knife from a sheath at his belt and hefts it in his hand. The other just levels the gun he’s already carrying.

Justineau freezes. No point in running, turning her back to the gun, and when she tries to come up with another response, her brain floods with a cold flush of nothing at all.

The knife man kicks her legs out from under her, sends her sprawling. He grips the sleeve of her shirt, hauls her half upright, and holds her out to the other as though he’s offering her up as a gift.

“Do it,” he says.

Justineau raises her head. Usually a bad idea to make eye contact with a wild animal, but if she’s going to die anyway, she wants to die telling him to go screw himself and – if she has time – exactly how and where.

It’s the gunner whose gaze she meets. And she realises with an almost surreal jolt of surprise how young he is. Still in his teens, probably. He moves the gun from her head to point it at her chest, maybe because he doesn’t want to go home from this with the image of her exploded face hanging in the gallery of his dreams.

There’s something ritualistic about all this, the way the older man holds her still and waits for the other to dispatch her. It’s a rite of passage – a bonding moment, maybe, between a father and a son.

The youngster steels himself, visibly.

Then he’s gone. Knocked off his feet. Something dark and subliminally fast has whipped by and taken him with it. He writhes on the asphalt, struggling with an enemy that despite its tiny size spits and mewls and claws at him like an entire sackful of pissed off cats.

It’s Melanie. And she’s not taking any prisoners.

The man – boy, rather – gives a scream that tails off into a liquid gurgle as her jaws close on his throat.