The Girl with All the Gifts

32

They make, Caroline Caldwell supposes, good progress.

It’s hard for her to tell, though, because her time sense is slightly skewed by two extraneous factors. The first factor is a fever that has been rising in her since the evening of the previous day. The second factor is that she allowed herself to become dehydrated as they walked, exacerbating the effects of the first factor.

She watches her own sickness at one remove, not because her scientific vocation conditions everything she does, but because being at one remove actually seems to help. She can observe the sick tiredness of her limbs, identify the ache in her head occasioned by the tiny but repeated jolts of her feet on the asphalt – and still keep moving without a break, because these are purely physiological things, without any bearing in the end on what her mind does.

Which is to turn old questions over and over in the light of new evidence.

She’s read many detailed accounts of the hungries’ feeding, but never observed it at first hand (the feeding of the test subjects, under artificial and controlled conditions, was an entirely different thing). She finds it striking that the hungries who fed on the man in the car continued to eat until his body was non-viable – until there was almost no flesh left on his upper torso and he had been virtually decapitated.

This is counterintuitive. Caldwell would have expected the hungry pathogen to be better adapted. She would have expected Ophiocordyceps to manipulate the cells of the host’s hypothalamus more skilfully, suppressing the hunger drive after the first few bites so that the newly infected have a robust chance of survival. That would obviously be far more efficient, since a viable new host will become a new vector in its turn, providing increased opportunities for the pathogen to multiply quickly within a given ecological range.

Perhaps it’s a side effect of that very slow maturing: the fact that this strain of Ophiocordyceps never reaches its final, sexually seeding stage, but instead reproduces neotenously by asexual budding in the favourable environment of blood or saliva. Logically, you’d expect this to impede the spread of favourable mutations.

Something to consider in the next round of dissections. Examine the cells of the hypothalamus more closely. Look for differential levels of penetration by fungal mycelia.

A mile out of Stevenage – close enough to see the roofs of the houses and the blue-slated spire of a church – Sergeant Parks gives the order to stop. He turns to them and tells them what’s going to happen next, pointing at the sky as an unimpeachable witness. “Sun’s going down inside the next two hours. Could be those junkers are still looking for us, but either way we need a place to hole up for the night, and this is it. Gallagher and I will go in and disinfect, as far as that’s needed. Then we’ll come back and get you. Okay?”

Not okay, very obviously. Caldwell can see from Justineau’s face that it’s not okay for her either, but she chooses to make the point herself because she knows she’ll make it more clearly and succinctly.

“This isn’t going to work,” she tells Parks.

“It is if you do as you’re told.”

Caldwell gestures, cupping the fingers of her hand as though she’s holding the man’s words up for inspection. The tips of her fingers tingle unpleasantly. “That’s exactly why it isn’t going to work,” she says. “Because you’re seeing us purely as civilians, with yourself and Private Gallagher as our military escort. In trying to take all the risk on to yourself, you’re actually increasing the risk to all of us.”

Parks gives her a cold look. “Assessing risk is part of what I do,” he tells her.

She’s about to explain to him why his assessment is flawed, but Helen Justineau breaks in now, pre-empting her reply. “She’s right, Sergeant. We’re about to move into a built-up area, where we can expect to find a lot more hungries, at every stage of infection. It’s dangerous ground – we won’t know how dangerous until we’re in it. So what kind of sense does it make for you to cross it three times? You have to go out and do your reconnaissance, then come back here to collect us, then go in again. And what happens to us if those junkers turn up again while you’re gone? We wouldn’t last a second out here in the open. It’s got to be better if we go in with you.”

Parks chews on this for a good few seconds. But Caldwell knows him well enough to be confident of his answer. It’s not in his repertoire to say no to something just because somebody else thought of it. She and Justineau are right, and that’s all there is to it.

“Okay,” he says at last. “But the two of you have never done this before, so you’d damn well better follow my lead. Come to think of it,” he glances across at the private, “did you ever do a Hitchin run, Gallagher?”

The private shakes his head.

Parks puffs out his breath like a man about to bend down and lift a heavy load. “Okay. Road rules still apply – especially the one about keeping your mouths shut – but this is going to be different. We’re almost bound to see hungries, and to be in their line of sight. What you want to do is not trigger them. Move slowly and smoothly. Don’t look them directly in the eye. Don’t make any loud or sudden noises. As far as you can, you blend into the landscape. If in doubt, look at me and take your cue from me.”

Once he’s said his piece, he walks on. He doesn’t waste any more words or any more time. Caldwell approves of that.

Twenty minutes later, they’re coming level with the first buildings. Nobody has sighted any hungries yet, but it’s early days. Parks issues whispered commands, and they all stop. The four uninfected humans anoint themselves with e-blocker again.

They head on into town, staying in a tight cluster so that none of them presents a clear and unambiguous human silhouette. These are residential streets, upmarket once, now gone to semi-ruin through a hectic month or so of looting and urban warfare followed by two decades of neglect. The gardens are small pockets of jungle that have broken their borders to colonise parts of the street. Waist-high weeds have smashed and grabbed their way up between tilted flagstones, mature brambles throwing up fist-thick stalks like the tentacles of subterranean monsters. But the shallowness of the soil underneath the pavement has stopped them from uniting their forces and throwing down the houses once and for all. There’s a precarious balance of power.

Parks has already told them what he’s looking for. Not a house on a street like this, with neighbours on all sides. That would be too difficult to secure. He wants a detached structure standing in its own grounds, with reasonable lines of sight at least out of the upstairs windows, and ideally with the doors intact. He has realistic expectations, though, and he’ll take anything that’s broadly okay if it means not going too deeply into the town.

But there’s nothing he likes here, so they move on.

Five minutes later, keeping up their intent and silent stroll, they come into a wider road into which several streets feed. There’s an arcade of shops here. The road surface is crunchy with shattered glass, all the shopfronts broken into and ransacked by looters of a bygone era. Empty tin cans on the ground, rusted to the thinness and delicacy of shells, roll and rattle when the wind comes up a little.

And there are hungries.

Perhaps a dozen of them, widely scattered.

The party of living humans comes to a halt when they see them, only Parks remembering to slow his steps gradually rather than going straight from motion into stillness.

Caldwell is fascinated. She turns her head slowly to examine each of the hungries in turn.

They’re a mix of old and new. The older ones can be identified very easily both by their mouldering clothing and by their extreme gauntness. When a hungry feeds, it also feeds the pathogen within it. But if prey can’t be found, Ophiocordyceps will draw its nutrients directly from the flesh of the host.

Closer to, she can also see the mottled colouring on the older ones. Grey threads have broken the leathery surface of their skin in a network of fine lines, crossing and re-crossing like veins. The whites of the eyes are grey too, and if the hungry’s mouth is open you can see a fuzz of grey on the tongue.

The newer hungries are dressed more nattily – or at least their clothes have had less time to rot – and they still have a broadly human appearance. Paradoxically, that makes them a lot more unpleasant to look at, because the wounds and torn flesh through which they contracted the infection in the first place are clearly visible. On an older hungry, the general bleaching and weathering of the skin surface and clothing, along with the overlay of grey mycelia, softens and disguises the wounds; makes something more architectural out of them.

The hungries are in their stationary mode, which is why Caldwell can get away with this unhurried inspection. They stand or sit or kneel at random points along the length of the road, completely motionless, their eyes on nothing and their arms mostly dangling at their sides or – if they’re sitting – folded in their laps.

They look like they’re posing for paintings, or sunk into such deep introspection that they’ve forgotten what it was they were meant to be doing. Not like they’re waiting; not like a single sound or movement out of place would wake them and launch them into instant motion.

Parks raises his hand, waves the party on with a slow sweep of his arm. The movement serves both as a command and as a reminder of the unhurried pace they need to keep up. The sergeant leads the way, his rifle ready in his hands but pointed at the ground. His gaze is on the ground too for a lot of the time. He scans the visual field with quick, darting glances, his eyes the only part of him at odds with his slow, shambling stride. Caldwell recalls belatedly the hypothesis that hungries retain the rudimentary pattern recognition that all babies are born with – that they’re capable of identifying a human face, and respond to it by slipping into a slightly heightened mode of arousal and awareness. Her own researches have failed either to confirm or to refute this, but she is prepared to accept that it might be true for all but the most severely decayed.

So they avoid the eyes of the hungries as they shuffle on down the high street. They look at each other, at the gaping shop windows, at the road ahead or at the sky, letting the macabre still-life figures hover in their peripheral vision.

Except for the test subject. Melanie doesn’t seem to be able to look away from her larger counterparts even for a moment; she stares at them as though they exert a hypnotic fascination, almost tripping at one point because she’s not looking where she’s going.

That stumble causes Sergeant Parks to turn his head – slowly, measuredly – and give her a baleful glare. She understands the reprimand, and the warning. Her own nod, in return, is so gradual that it takes ten seconds to be completed. She wants him to know that she won’t make that mistake again.

They pass the first group of hungries and keep on going. More houses, terraced this time, and then another row of shops. A side street that they pass is much more densely populated. Hungries stand silently in a tight cluster, as though awaiting the start of a parade. Caldwell guesses that they converged on a kill, and then when they were done simply remained there, in the absence of a trigger that would induce them to move.

She wonders, walking on, whether the sergeant’s strategy is a sound one. They’re embedding themselves very deeply. There are now enemies behind them as well as in front and – potentially – on all sides. Parks wears a troubled expression. Probably he’s thinking the same thing.

Caldwell is about to suggest that they retrace their steps and – as the least bad of a number of unpleasant options – spend the night in one of the semi-detached houses on the outskirts of the town. They might have hungries for neighbours, but at least they’ll have a clear escape route.

But ahead of them, there’s an old-fashioned village green – or the remains of one at least. The green itself has run to jungle, but at least it’s jungle that seems to have a very sparse hungry population. There are a few of them on the strip of road that surrounds the open space, but not nearly so many as on the street they’re on.

Something else too. Private Gallagher sees it first, points – slowly, but emphatically. On the other side of the green is exactly what the sergeant told them to look for: a big detached house, two storeys, standing in its own grounds. It’s a mini-mansion of modern design, masquerading as a country house of an earlier age – but given away by its anachronistic excess. It’s a Frankenstein’s monster of a house, with a half-timbered front, Gothic arches on the ground-floor windows, pilasters framing the front door, gables adhering like barnacles to the roof ridge. The sign on the gate says wainwright house.

“Good enough,” Parks says. “Let’s go.”

Justineau is about to take the direct route, across the overgrown green, but Parks blocks her with a hand on her shoulder. “No telling what’s in there,” he mutters. “Might startle a cat, or a bird, and get all the deadheads for miles around looking in our direction. Let’s stick to the open road.”

So they skirt the edge of the weeds and couch grass, instead of going through, and that’s why Caldwell sees it.

She slows down, and then she stops. She can’t help herself; she stares. It’s such a crazy, impossible thing.

One of the hungries is walking down the centre of the road. A female – biological age when she encountered the Ophiocordyceps pathogen probably late twenties or early thirties. She seems quite well preserved, unblemished apart from bite damage to the left side of her face. Only the grey threads around her eyes and mouth indicate how long it must have been since she left the human race. She’s wearing tan trousers, a white blouse with quarter-length sleeves; stylish summer wear, but the effect is somewhat tarnished by the fact that she’s got one shoe missing. In her long, straight, blonde hair there’s a single cornrow braid.

She’s pushing a baby carriage.

Out of the two things that make this impossible, Caldwell is arrested first by the less remarkable. Why is she walking? Hungries either run, when they pursue prey, or stand still when they don’t. There’s no intermediate state of leisurely perambulation.

And then: why is she clinging to an object? Among the myriad things a human being loses when Ophiocordyceps infiltrates the brain and redecorates is the ability to use tools. The baby carriage ought to be as meaningless to this creature as the equations of general relativity would be.

Caldwell can’t help herself. She advances, crab-wise, to intersect the female hungry’s trajectory, careful at these close quarters to watch her only out of the corner of her eye. Out of the corner of her other eye, she’s aware of Parks raising his hand in a halt gesture. She ignores him. This is too important, and she can’t in conscience let it pass.

She stands full in the path of the oncoming carriage, the shambling ex-woman. It bumps against her, with minimal force, and the woman stops dead. Her shoulders slump, her head bows. Now she looks the part: the lights going out, system powering down until something happens to kick-start it again.

Parks and the others have frozen. They’re all looking Caldwell’s way, watching this play out because there’s nothing they can do now to influence it. By the same token, it’s too late for Caldwell to worry about whether her e-blockers will work at point-blank range, so she doesn’t.

Moving with glacial slowness, she comes around to the side of the carriage. From this angle, she can see that the hungry has more injuries than was immediately apparent. Her shoulder has been torn, flesh hanging there in desiccated strips. The white blouse isn’t white at all at the back – it’s black from neckline to hem with ancient, crusted blood.

Inside the pushchair there’s a row of ducks on an elasticated string, which bob and rock in a desultory dance, and a big yellow blanket, dusty and rucked up, which hides whatever else might be there.

The hungry doesn’t seem aware of Caldwell at all. That’s good. The doctor makes her movements even more gradual, even more unhurried. Reaches out her hand to the topmost edge of the blanket.

She takes a fold of the thick, stiff fabric between finger and thumb. Slow as a glacier now, she peels it back.

The baby has been dead for a long time. Two large rats, nesting in what’s left of its ribcage, start up at once and leap with shrill squeals of protest over Caldwell’s left and right shoulders.

Caldwell staggers back with a wordless shriek.

The hungry’s head snaps up and round. It stares at Caldwell, eyes widening. Its mouth gapes open on grey rot and black stumps of teeth.

Sergeant Parks fires a single shot into the back of its skull. Its mouth opens wider still, its head tilting sideways. It falls forward on to the carriage, which rolls and pitches it off on to the road’s gravelled surface.

On all sides, hungries stir to life, swivelling their heads like range-finders.

“Move,” Parks growls. “On me.”

Then he bellows:

“Run!”