The Girl with All the Gifts

31

Sergeant Parks had planned to let them sleep until the sun’s well up, because he knows how hard the next day is going to be, but as things turn out, they wake up early. What rouses them is the sound of engines. A long way off at first, and rising and falling a lot, but it’s obvious that whatever the hell it is, it’s coming closer.

Under Parks’ terse directions they grab their stuff and get the hell out of there. He lets the hungry kid off the running rope and puts her back on the leash, trying hard not to make the buckets clank together. No telling how far the sound will carry in the pre-dawn stillness.

They run out into the luminous half-dark, past the church and into a field behind it, go a good hundred yards or more before Parks signals to them to kneel down among the towering weeds. They could – maybe should – go further but he wants to see what’s coming. From here he can get a good view of the road without being seen, and their trampled passage will heal over inside of a minute as the resilient grasses stand up straight again.

They sit and kneel like that for a long time, as the sun slowly separates from the horizon and low light soaks into the field like water into a rag. They don’t speak. They don’t move. Justineau opens her mouth at one point, maybe ten minutes in, but Parks gestures her to stay quiet and she does. She can see the urgency in his face.

When the wind shifts, they can hear the shouted voices of people as well as the drone of machines.

It’s a strange cavalcade when it finally comes. In the lead, one of the bulldozers Parks saw the day before. As it rolls down the road and turns a bend towards them, he gets a good view of its broad blade, which has been decorated with a flamboyant death’s head in metallic spray paint. He hears someone – he thinks it’s Gallagher – make a mewling sound of pure fear beside him. But it’s low enough that it won’t carry, so there’s no harm in him voicing what everyone is feeling.

Behind the bulldozer is a Humvee identical to the one they commandeered, and behind that a jeep. All three vehicles are packed with junker men in holiday mood, shouting out to each other and waving a wide variety of offensive weapons. They’re chanting something with a strong, repetitive rhythm, but Parks can’t make out the words.

The convoy stops at the church, where a couple of the junkers jump down and go inside. There’s a shout, and they come out again, looking a little more animated. They’ve found the dead hungry, Parks guesses. But they don’t have any way of telling how long it’s been there. Hungry blood doesn’t flow much and it’s the colour of mud to start with, so drying out doesn’t change it. You’d have to look close even to guess how the hungry was taken down, because the entry wound from Parks’ pistol was small and discreet and there wasn’t any exit wound.

The junkers check the garage too, and Parks tenses because this is where it could all go south. If they’ve left any trace of their presence there… But there are no alarums, and there’s no search. After a few minutes the junkers get back on the bulldozer and set off again. The convoy turns another corner and disappears from sight, although they can still hear it for a long time after that.

When everything’s gone quiet again, Justineau speaks. “They’re looking for us.”

“We can’t know that,” Dr Caldwell objects. “They could be foraging for food.”

“Base had plenty of supplies,” Parks says, pointing out the obvious. “And they only took it yesterday. I’d have expected them to get the fence back up again and make themselves at home. If they’re out here instead, it makes sense to me that they’d be looking for survivors.” Which means they’ve made it personal. He doesn’t say it, but he thinks now that the ones Gallagher accidentally got killed might have been important, or popular. The attack on the base could have been totally opportunistic, but this wild hunt was whipped up to settle scores.

But he doesn’t say any of this, because he doesn’t want Gallagher to feel like he’s got all those deaths on his conscience. The boy’s sensitive enough that he might go down under the weight of that. Hell, Parks would buckle more than a little himself.

They’re all looking scared and shaken, Gallagher most of all, but there’s no time for hand-holding. The good news is that the junkers headed north, which means they’ve got a window for their run to the south and they’d better use it. “Ten minutes,” Parks says. “We eat and run.”

They go deeper into the long grass, one by one, to relieve themselves and wash and whatever else they need to do, and then they eat a quick, joyless breakfast of carb-and-protein mix 3. The hungry kid is a silent, passive observer to all of this. She doesn’t piss and this time she doesn’t eat, either. Parks ties her leash to a tree when he goes off to perform his own ablutions.

When he comes back, he finds that Justineau has untied the leash from the tree and is holding it herself. That’s fine by Parks. He’d rather keep his hands free. With a minimum of discussion – a minimum of interaction of any kind – they hit the road. Every face Parks looks at is drawn and scared. They fled from a nightmare, and fuck if it isn’t right here again, bumping along behind them. What he knows and doesn’t say is that they’re heading into worse.

They go east at first, towards Stotfold, but there’s no need to stop there now so they detour south, hit the road that used to be the A507 and keep right on going.

This is wild country, for a lot of reasons. In the first days and weeks of the Breakdown, the UK government, like a whole lot of others, thought they could contain the infection by locking down the civilian population. Not surprisingly, this didn’t stop people running like rats when they saw what was happening. Thousands, maybe millions, tried to get out of London along the north–south arteries, the A1 and M1. The authorities responded ruthlessly, first with military roadblocks and then with targeted airstrikes.

There are clean stretches still, and some of them are extensive. For miles at a time, though, the two great roads are cratered like First World War battlefields and strewn with rusted hulks like a mechanical version of the elephants’ graveyard. You could still walk the road, in between the ruined cars, if you chose to – but only a madman would do it. With visibility down to almost nothing, a hungry could jump out at you from any direction and you wouldn’t have more than a heartbeat’s warning.

Parks’ plan is to join the A1 at junction 10, just north of Baldock. He knows from his grab-bagging days that there’s a nice, open corridor there, going south a good ten or fifteen miles. They can do it easily in a day if the weather holds: leave the junkers way behind them. They’ll make Stevenage before dark, and hopefully find a good place to sleep without venturing too deep into the urban hinterlands.

For the first few years after the Breakdown, and even after the retreat from London, Beacon used to maintain an armed presence on the main north–south roads. The idea was to allow the grab-baggers a safe passage, both on their outward journey and – more importantly – when they went home again laden down with good things from the land of how-it-used-to-be. But they found out the hard way that there was a down side to those sweet, clear lines of sight. Hungries could spot you from a long way off, and home in on your movements. After a few costly clusterfucks, the permanent posts were dismantled and the grab-baggers took their chances. In recent years they’ve gone in and out by chopper, when they’ve gone at all. The roads have been given up for lost.

All of which means that Parks is very watchful as they approach the wide stretch of blacktop, marching in single file up the gentle curve of the old approach road. A sign where they join it points to Baldock services, making a number of unsubstantiated promises: food, petrol, a picnic area, even a bed for the night. From the top of the rise they can see the roofless ruin that used to be the service station, burned out long before. Parks remembers stopping there once, when he was a child, on the way back from a family holiday in the Peak District. Remembers a few highlights anyway: lukewarm hot chocolate with thick sludge at the bottom where it wasn’t stirred properly, and a weird man in the gents’ toilet, with bulging Marty Feldman eyes, who was singing Bruce Springsteen’s “The River” in a scary monotone.

From where Parks is standing, Baldock services was no great loss.

The A1, though, is the same as it ever was. A little weed-choked and pitted, maybe, but as straight as a ruler at this point and pointed due south towards home sweet home. There’s a whole lifeless metropolis between here and there, of course, but the sergeant can count his blessings and get as high as two. Right now they’ve got a good elevation. They can see for miles.

And the sun comes out, like a kiss on the cheek from God.

“Okay, listen to me,” he says, looking at each of them in turn. Even Gallagher needs to hear this, although most of it’s general issue for when you’re outside the fence. “Road protocols. Let’s get them straight before we go out there. First is, you don’t talk. Not out loud. Sound carries, and the hungries home in on it. It’s not as strong a trigger for them as smell, but you’d be amazed how good their hearing is.

“Second, you clock any movement, any at all, and you signal. Raise your hand, like this, with the fingers spread. Then point. Make sure everyone sees. Don’t just whip your gun out and start shooting, because nobody will know what you’re shooting at and they won’t be able to back you up. If it’s close enough so you can see it’s a hungry, and if it’s moving towards us, then you can break rule one. Shout hungry, or hungries, and if you feel like it, give me a range and an address. Three o’clock and a hundred yards, or whatever.

“Third and last, if you do get a hungry after you, then you don’t run. There’s no way you’re going to beat it, and you’ve got a better chance if you’re facing it head-on. Hit it with anything. Bullets, bricks, your bare hands, harsh language. If you’re lucky, you’ll bring it down. Leg and lower body shots improve your chances of getting lucky, unless it’s right in close. In which case, you go for the head so it’s got something to chew on besides you.”

He catches the eye of the hungry kid. She’s watching him as intently as the others, a frown of concentration on her dead pale face. Another time, Parks might have laughed. It’s a little bit like a cow listening to a recipe for beef stew.

“I’m assuming there’s a different rule for junkers,” Helen Justineau says.

Parks nods. “We run into those bastards again, we’ll hear them a long time before we see them. In which case we get the fuck off the road and we wait them out, same as last time. As long as they stay in convoy like that, we should be fine.”

Nobody’s got anything else to say about these instructions. They go on up to the road and head south, and for a good couple of hours they walk in complete silence.

It’s a glorious summer day, quickly becoming uncomfortably hot as the sun climbs up the sky. A wind rises and falls fitfully, but it doesn’t do much to cool them. Worried by their profuse sweating and what it might bring down on them, Parks makes them stop and apply another layer of e-blocker to all the places that need it. Most of those places are underneath their clothes. They turn away from each other by unspoken agreement, forming the vertices of a square at whose centre the hungry kid stands silent, staring not at the grown-ups – the humans – but at the burning spotlight of the sun.

The e-blocker routine is basic but essential. Lay it on thick at crotch and armpits, elbows and the backs of knees. A little bit all over, and a quick-dissolving slimy lozenge of the stuff on your tongue. It’s not the sweat that matters; it’s mainly the pheromones. The hungries may not have enough brains left to see people as people, but they’re shit-hot when it comes to following a chemical gradient.

They move on again. Justineau and the hungry kid walk side by side, the leash slack between them. Caldwell walks behind the two of them, most of the time, with her hands either loose at her sides or crossed against her chest. Gallagher takes the rear position, while Parks himself is on point.

Around about noon, they see something on the road ahead of them. It’s just a dark blob at first – not moving, so Parks doesn’t flag it up immediately as a danger. But he gestures to them to spread out as they approach it. He’s mindful of how easy they are to see on the empty road, the only moving things in a landscape like a still photo.

It’s a car. It sits dead centre in the road, but skewed slightly, its nose tilting into what used to be the slow lane. The bonnet is up, the boot likewise, and the four doors are all open. It’s not rusted, or burned out. Chances are it hasn’t been there very long.

Parks has the others hang back, circles it by himself. It looks empty at first glance, but as he comes around the driver’s side he glimpses something in the back seat that looks vaguely human. The rest of the way he’s got his gun in his hand and he’s hair-trigger, ready to unload on anything that moves.

Nothing moves. The dark, hunched shape used to belong to the species Homo sapiens, but it’s nothing very much now. You can tell that it was a man, because of his jacket and because of his face, which is mostly intact. The rest of the flesh of his upper body has been eaten away, the head all but detached by a massive apple-coring bite that’s been taken out of his throat. In the depths of that old, dry wound, nubs of bone or cartilage show.

Nobody else in the car. Nothing in the boot, apart from a battered pair of shoes and a coil of rope. Lots of stuff scattered on the road all around, though – bags and boxes, a rucksack, and something that looks like a games console or else part of a sound system.

The car tells its own story, as though it were a diorama in a museum. Group of like-minded people share a ride, going… somewhere. Somewhere up north. The car starts coughing or banging, or else it just stops. One of the gang gets out to take a look, throws up the bonnet, pronounces the car DOA. So they all start getting their stuff out of the boot. These lackwits can’t tell trash from treasure, but there’s nothing wrong with the instinct.

They were interrupted. Most of them dropped their shit and ran for the hills. One of them jumped back in the car, and maybe he saved the others by that action, because it looks like a lot more than one hungry partook of him.

“You try turning the key?” Justineau asks. Parks is really pissed off to see her walking right up to the car, even though he hasn’t signalled clear yet. But the woman’s not stupid; on reflection, Parks is aware that his body language changed as he walked around the car – from total threat-readiness to his still cautious but looser business-as-usual. She was just responding to that change a little faster than the others.

“You try it,” he suggests.

Justineau leans into the car, goes suddenly still as she sees its other occupant. But if she flinches from that sight, it’s only for a heartbeat. She reaches forward, and Parks hears a muted click as the key turns. The engine doesn’t make a sound. He didn’t really expect it to.

He’s looking off to both sides of the road now. There’s scrub and bushes to their right, a length of wooden hoarding on the left. Most likely the occupants of the car ran the obvious way, towards the bushes. No telling how far they got, but they didn’t come back for their stuff, or to bury their dead. Parks revises his earlier thought, that the sacrifice of the back-seat passenger saved the rest. It’s not likely that anyone walked away from this.

The others come up and join them, Gallagher last of all because he waits on Parks’ signal. Parks tells them to check the bags and boxes, but it’s mostly the kind of precious keepsakes that only mattered to their former owners. Not even clothes, but books and DVDs, letters and ornaments. The few items of food were perishable, and they’ve perished: withered apples, a rotten loaf, a bottle of whisky that shattered when the bag it was in hit the asphalt.

Justineau opens the rucksack. “Jesus Christ!” she mutters. She dips her hand in and brings out some of the contents. Money. Bundles of fifty-pound notes, bank-fresh in paper sleeves. Completely useless. Twenty-some years after the world went down the toilet, someone still thought it was coming back – that there would come a day when money would mean something again.

“Triumph of hope over experience,” Parks observes.

“Nostalgia,” Dr Caldwell says categorically. “The psychological comfort outweighs the logical objections. Everybody needs a security blanket.”

Only idiots, Parks thinks. Personally, he tends to see security in much less abstract terms.

Gallagher looks from one of them to the other, not sure what’s going on. He’s too young to remember money. Justineau starts in on an explanation, then shakes her head and gives it up. “Why would I ruin your innocence?” she says.

“There were one hundred pence in a pound,” the hungry kid says. “But only after the fifteenth of February 1971. Before that, there were two hundred and forty pence in the pound, but they didn’t say pence. They said pennies.”

Justineau laughs. “Very good, Melanie.” She tears the sleeve from one of the bundles of money, fans out the notes and throws them into the air. “Pennies from heaven,” she says as they blow away on the hot wind. The hungry kid smiles, as though the cascade of waste paper is a firework display. She squints into the sun to follow them as they fly.