The Girl with All the Gifts

29

Sergeant Parks has made his call. He’s heading into Stotfold.

It’s a nothing little place on the way to the A1, and he doesn’t have any high hopes for it. They won’t be able to replenish their supplies there, or find another transport. Anything that was worth having will have been found and taken long before. It’s got this one thing going for it, though: that it lies on their route, and with the afternoon wearing down into evening, they’re beggars rather than choosers. He wants to be under cover before nightfall.

But they’re still two miles out from the town – not even close enough yet to see the chimney of the watermill rising over the trees – when they pass a church.

It’s a stupid place to put a church, in Parks’ opinion, because it’s close to nothing very much. Even before the Breakdown, they couldn’t have got any passing trade. And it’s useless as a bivouac. Too many big windows, most of them smashed, and the massive arched doorway at the front gaping like a toothless mouth (no telling what happened to the doors).

But there’s a breezeblock garage right next to the bigger structure, and Parks likes the look of that. When he goes to check it out up close, telling the others to wait, he likes it even more. The wide, up-and-over door is made of sturdy metal. It won’t yield to pushing or clawing, which is mostly what the hungries do when they come up against a door, and is probably rusted into its jamb for added immobility. The other way in, at the side, is a wooden door with a Yale lock. A lot less secure, but the upside is that Parks can knock out the cylinder to open the door from the outside without damaging the wood, and then – if their luck is in – patch it up again or find some other kind of barricade once they’re inside.

He waves to Gallagher to come and join him. The two of them go over the church while the women wait out in the road. A first pass shows up no hungries, which is a good sign. Some bones on the floor, near the rood screen, but they look like animal bones. Left there by a fox or a weasel probably, or else by some passing Satanist.

Above the altar, in green spray paint, the words HE’S NOT LISTENING, MORONS. Parks takes that as a given. He’s never prayed in his life.

Someone else prayed here, though. In a pew, forgotten, Parks finds a woman’s handbag. It contains some loose change, a lipstick, a tiny hymnal, a set of car keys with a built-in locator and a single Xtra-Thin condom. Such blameless everyday objects that they dazzle him a little, raising the spectre of a time when the worst things anyone had to worry about were unsafe sex and forgetting where they parked their car.

Gallagher peers into a side room, a vestry or something, shines his torch around a bit, then slams the door to again. “All clear, Sarge,” he calls out.

It might be the door slamming, but more likely it’s the words. Something rushes out of the darkness at the back of the church. It hits Gallagher at a flat run, slams him right off his feet, and he goes down with a crash on to the wooden floor.

Parks turns around, sees the two bodies writhing together. He doesn’t even have to think about it. He draws his gun, tracks the dark blob of the hungry’s head as it lowers into the angle of Gallagher’s throat, and squeezes off a shot. The sound is less of a bang, more like the solid chunk you get when you bring an axe down on a block of wood.

His aim is spot on. The bullet smacks into the back of the hungry’s skull. An ordinary bullet would go right on through. Would hit Gallagher too, or at the very least spray his face and upper body with hungry cerebral tissue – with predictable and depressing consequences an hour or a day or a week down the line. But this is a soft-nosed, steel-aluminium round, designed for minimal penetration. It slows down, spreads out and pulps the hungry’s brain to pink milkshake.

Gallagher pushes the limp body to the side and gets out from under it. “Shit!” he pants. “I… I didn’t see it until it was on top of me. Thanks, Sarge.”

Parks verifies the kill. The hungry is completely inert, grey matter oozing from its eyes, nose, ears, pretty much everywhere. In life, it was male, dark-haired, a fair bit younger than Parks himself. It’s wearing the mouldering remains of a priest’s surplice, so it was probably infected right here. Maybe it’s been here ever since, waiting in the dark for a meal to wander by. Or maybe it comes back here after a kill. That does happen, weird as it sounds. Instead of just freezing in place like most of them do, some hungries have a homing instinct for a particular place. Parks wonders if Dr Caldwell knows about this, and if she does, how she squares it with that idea about the host mind dying as soon as the parasite shows up.

Gallagher inspects himself for cuts, bites, and stray hungry bodily fluids. Parks examines him too – minutely. Despite the close encounter, Gallagher checks out clean. He’s still thanking Parks, with a post-traumatic shake in his voice. Parks has had so many close calls like this back in his grab-bagging days, he doesn’t see it as anything much. He just tells Gallagher not to talk in a threat situation. Hand signals are every bit as good, and a damn sight safer.

They go back outside where the civilians – waiting fifty yards away, at the bottom of the gravel drive – seem to be completely unaware that anything has happened. They must have put the sounds from the church down to a vigorous search.

“Everything okay?” Justineau asks.

“Everything is fine,” Parks says. “We’re almost done. Just keep an eye on the road and shout if anything comes.”

He turns his attention to the garage, which on closer inspection is even better than he thought. He was ready to break the lock with his rifle butt, but he doesn’t have to. When he tries the handle of the door, it opens. Whoever was here last left it on the latch.

They go in slowly and carefully, covering each other. Parks drops down on one knee, rifle set to full auto, ready to do a kneecapping sweep. Gallagher gets out his torch and shines it into the corners of the room.

Which is empty. Clean. Nothing for anyone to hide behind, and no scope at all for nasty surprises.

“All good,” Parks mutters. “Okay, this will do just fine. Go get them.”

Gallagher shepherds the civilians inside and Parks shuts the door, the lock now fully engaged so it closes with a solid click. The civilians are less enthusiastic than Parks was when they see the confined space and inhale its stale, spent air, but they’re not inclined to mount much of an argument. Truth is, the two women aren’t used to keeping up a quick march, and none of them – including Parks himself, unless you go back a while – are used to being outside of a fence as night comes on. They’re freaked and exhausted and starting at shadows. So is he, except that he does his freaking and starting mostly inside, so it doesn’t notice as much.

The only sticking point is the girl, which comes as no surprise. Parks suggests that she sleep in the church, and Justineau countersuggests that Parks go fuck himself. “Same point as before,” she tells him, getting all pissed off again, which he’s thinking now is pretty much Justineau’s default setting. And truth to tell, he likes it a lot. If you’re going to let yourself feel anything at all, anger’s better than most of the alternatives. “Even if hungries were the only threat here,” she’s saying now, “all of this – all of it – is as strange to Melanie as it is to us. And as scary. We can’t leave her tied up in an empty building by herself all night.”

“Then stay out there with her,” Parks says.

Which has the desired effect of shutting Justineau up for a few seconds. Into that silence he states his manifesto. “We’ve got a long way to go, so we may as well lay down some ground rules now. You do what I say, when I say it, and you might reach Beacon with your arse still attached. If you keep behaving like you’ve got a right to an opinion, we’ll be dead before this time tomorrow.”

Justineau stares at him, speechless. He waits for the apology and the submission.

She holds out her hand. “Keys.”

Parks is perplexed. “Which keys? We don’t have any keys. The door was—”

“The keys to Melanie’s handcuffs,” Justineau says. “We’re leaving.”

“No,” Parks says, “you’re not.”

“What – you think we’re all your soldiers now, Sergeant Parks? Seriously?” All of a sudden she doesn’t even sound angry any more. She just sounds sourly amused. “We’re not. None of us are under your command, except for Private Parts over there. So that ‘come with me if you want to live’ bullshit doesn’t wash. I’d rather take my chances outside than fall in and trust my life to two hard-wired little soldier boys and a certifiable psychopath. Keys. Please. Let’s do this. You just said we’re a liability, so cut us loose.”

“Absolutely not!” Caldwell raps out. “I’ve already told you, Sergeant. The girl is part of my research. She belongs to me.”

Justineau shakes her head, staring at the floor. “Do I have to punch you in the head again, Caroline? I don’t want to hear from you on this.”

Parks is amazed. Appalled. Even a little bit disgusted. He’s used to dealing with people who have at least some sort of survival instinct, and he knows that Justineau isn’t stupid. Back at the base, he thought of her as the best of Caldwell’s exasperating little coterie, and while that isn’t saying much, he actually liked and respected her. He still does.

But this is getting them nowhere.

“I’m sorry if I didn’t make myself clear,” he tells her now. “You’re not free to leave; she’s not free to stay. My standing orders don’t cover any of this, but I’m taking a position. I’m going to get all the human beings here back to Beacon, alive, and after that, someone else can call it.”

“You think you can keep me with you against my will?” Justineau asks, putting her hands on her hips.

“Yes.” He’s sure of it.

“You think you can do it and still keep moving at a decent pace?”

That’s a different question, with an uglier answer. He doesn’t want to threaten her. He has a sense that if he pushes it, coerces her instead of getting her to cooperate, a line will be crossed and he’ll never be able to pull back from it.

He tries a different tack. “I’m open to other suggestions,” he says, “so long as they’re not stupid. Keeping a hungry in here with us, even if she’s cuffed and muzzled, isn’t an option. They don’t react to physical damage the same way we do, and there’s things you can do with cuffs and muzzles if you don’t care about disfiguring yourself. She has to stay outside.”

Justineau arches an eyebrow. “And if I try to go outside with her, you’ll stop me.”

He nods. It feels like a softer option than saying yes, even if it means the same thing.

“Okay, then stop me.”

She makes for the door. Gallagher steps into her path and quick as a flash she’s got her gun – the one Parks gave her – up in his face. A nice slick move. She took advantage of the darkness inside the garage, waited to draw the gun until she was walking right past Parks, so that the angle of her body would cover the movement of her arm. Gallagher freezes, his head tilting back away from the weapon.

“Out of my way, Private,” Justineau says quietly. “Or your brains go public.”

Parks sighs. He takes out his own sidearm and rests it lightly on her shoulder. He knows from their brief acquaintance that she won’t shoot Gallagher. At least, not after just the one warning. But there’s no doubting the sincerity of her feelings. “You made your point,” he says glumly. “We’ll do this some other way.”

Because he doesn’t want to kill her unless she really forces the issue. He’ll do it if he has to, but they’re already short-handed, and out of the three of them – Justineau, Gallagher and the doctor – he suspects she might turn out to be the most useful.

So what they do is this. They tie the little girl to the wall with a running rope, attached to the handcuffs. Parks attaches all the canteens to the running rope, along with a whole bunch of stones in a tin bucket that he found outside. There’s no way she can move without making a racket that will wake them all.

Justineau is at pains to explain all this to the hungry kid, who’s calm and still throughout the whole procedure. She gets it, even if Justineau doesn’t – knows why, e-blocker or not, she has to be treated like an unexploded munition. She doesn’t complain once.

The food they liberated from the Humvee is the tough and tasteless type 3 carb-and-protein mix, labelled – you have to assume satirically – Roast Beef and Potatoes, washed down with water that has an aftertaste of mud, so supper is nobody’s idea of a gourmet treat.

Justineau takes an extra spoon and feeds the kid, who therefore has to be released from the muzzle for a few minutes. Parks watches her closely the whole time she’s free, his gun in his holster but with the safety off and a round already chambered – but there’s no way he could get in there in time if Melanie took it into her head to bite Justineau. He’d just have to shoot the both of them.

But the kid is good as gold, as far as that goes. She swallows the meat chunks from the food mix without even chewing them, spits out the potatoes with a great show of distaste. She’s finished inside a minute.

Then Justineau wipes her mouth clean with a corner of cloth torn from God knows what and God knows where, and Parks snaps the muzzle closed again.

“It’s looser than before,” the hungry kid says. “You should tighten it.”

Parks tests it by sliding his thumb inside the strap, up against the back of her neck. She’s right, sure enough, and he adjusts it without a word.

The floor is cold and hard, the blankets thin. Their backpacks make pretty lousy pillows. And there’s the little monster right there among them, so Parks is tensing all the time for that bang and clatter from the canteens as she reverts to type and goes for them.

He stares up into the featureless dark, thinks of the flash of Justineau’s crotch he glimpsed when she was pissing on the gravel outside.

But the future is uncertain, and he can’t get up enough enthusiasm even to masturbate.