The Girl with All the Gifts

24

Melanie is coming down.

At first she can’t think at all. Then, when thoughts come back, she shrinks away from them, like Mr Whitaker when his bottle is almost empty. Her mouth is haunted by memories that want to be real again. Her mind is reeling from what she’s done.

And her body is wracked with a million tics and shakes – each cell reporting in unfit for duty, demanding what it can’t have.

She’s always been a good girl. But she ate pieces of two men, and very probably killed them both. Killed them with her teeth.

She was hungry, and they were her bread.

So what is she now?

These conundrums come and go as the residual hunger allows her to focus on them. Sometimes they’re very big and very clear, sometimes far away and seen through skeins of fuzz and smoke.

Something else that comes and goes: a memory. When she was lying on the table, tied down, and sawing at the plastic band that held her left wrist – left hand twisted round, the scalpel held awkwardly between the very tips of her fingers – one of the hungries loomed over her.

She froze at once. Stared up, breathless, into that savage, vacant face. There was nothing she could do, not even scream. Not even close her eyes. Free will fled away along the vectors of her fear.

For a strained second which then broke, abruptly, into pieces. The hungry gaped, slack-jawed, head hanging down and shoulders hunched up like a vulture. Its gaze slid away from Melanie’s, to the left and then to the right. It put out its tongue to taste the air, and then it stumbled on around the table, heading for a writhing mass of motion on the lab’s floor, almost out of Melanie’s field of vision.

It had only met her stare for that one second by blind chance.

After that it didn’t even seem to know she was there.

What with the withdrawal effects and with worrying at this puzzle, it’s a long while before Melanie notices the world she’s sitting in.

Wild flowers surround her. A couple of them – daffodils and campion – are familiar from Miss Justineau’s lesson on the day of the vernal equinox. The rest are completely new, and there are dozens of them. She turns her head, very slowly, staring at one after another.

She registers the tiny buzzing things that fly between them and guesses that they’re bees, because of what they’re doing – visiting one flower after another, bullying their way into the core of each one with a shrugging, rocking gait, and then backing out again and taking off for the next.

Something much bigger flies across the field in front of her. A black bird that might be a crow or a jackdaw, its song a hoarse, thrilling war cry. Sweeter and softer songs weave around it, but she can’t see the birds – if they are birds – that make those sounds.

The air is heavy with scents. Melanie knows that some of them are the scents of the flowers, but even the air seems to have a smell – earthy and rich and complicated, made out of things living and things dying and things long dead. The smell of a world where nothing stops moving, nothing stays the same.

Suddenly she’s an ant all scrunched up on the floor of that world. A static atom in a sea of change. The immensity of earth envelops her, and enters into her. She sips it, with each gulp of heady, supercharged atmosphere.

And even in this dazed, strung-out state, even with those memories of meat and monstrous violence lying thwart across her mind, she really, really likes it.

The smells, especially. They affect her very differently from the smell of people, but they still excite her – wake something in her mind that must have been asleep until then.

They help her to push the meat hunger and the memories away into a middle distance where they don’t hurt and shame her so very much.

By degrees, she comes back to herself. Which is when she realises that Miss Justineau is standing a little way away from her, watching her in silence. Miss Justineau’s face is wary, full of questions.

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.