The Girl with All the Gifts

34

Alone with Dr Caldwell, the first thing Melanie does is to walk away to the further end of the room and put her back to the wall. She watches every move that Dr Caldwell makes, scared and wary, ready to bolt through the open door after Miss Justineau.

But Dr Caldwell sinks into one of the chairs, either too exhausted or too lost in her own thoughts to pay any attention to Melanie. She doesn’t even look at her.

Any other time, Melanie would explore. All day she’s been seeing new and amazing things, but Sergeant has set a brisk, steady pace and she’s never had time to stop and investigate any of the wonders that went by on both sides of the road: trees and lakes, latticework fences, road signs pointing to places whose names she knows from her lessons, hoardings whose mostly obliterated posters have become mosaics of abstract colour. Living things too – birds in the air, rats and mice and hedgehogs in the weeds alongside the road. A world too big to take in all at once, too new to have names.

And now here she is, in this house that’s so different from the base. There must be so many things to discover. This room alone is filled with mysteries both large and small. Why are the chairs only at the edges of the room, when the room is so enormous? Why is there a little wire cradle on the wall next to the door, with a plastic bottle in it and a sign that says CROSS-INFECTION COSTS LIVES? Why is there a faded picture on one of the tables (wild horses galloping across a field) that’s been cut up into hundreds and hundreds of wiggly-shaped pieces and then stuck back together again?

But right now, all Melanie wants to do is to go somewhere quiet and be by herself, so she can think about the terrible thing that just happened. The terrible secret she just found out.

Apart from the door that they came in by, there are two more doors out of the room. Melanie goes to the nearest one, keeping Dr Caldwell (who still hasn’t moved) always in the corner of her eye. She finds another room, very small and mostly white. There are white cupboards and white shelves, with black and white tiles on the walls. One of the cupboards has a window in it and lots of dials and switches at the top. It smells of old grease. Melanie knows just about enough to guess that the cupboard with a window in it is a cooker. She’s seen pictures in books. This must be a kitchen of some kind – a place where you make nice things to eat. But it’s too small for her to hide in. If Dr Caldwell came after her, she’d be trapped.

She goes out again. Dr Caldwell hasn’t moved, so she walks right past her, giving her a wide berth, and goes to the other door. The next room is very different from the kitchen. Its walls are painted in bright colours, and there are posters, too. One shows ANIMALS OF THE BRITISH HEDGEROWS, and another has words starting with each letter of the alphabet. Apple. Boat. Cat. Digger. Elephant. The pictures are cheerful and simple. The boat and the digger have smiling faces at their front ends, which Melanie is almost certain is unrealistic.

There are chairs in here too, but they’re smaller and they’re all over the place in little clusters, not arranged neatly around the edges of the room. On the floor are toys, strewn as casually as if they were put down a moment before. Girl dolls in dresses and soldier dolls in uniform. Cars and trucks. Plastic building blocks stuck together in the shape of cars or houses or people. Animals made of plush in colours washed out almost to grey.

And books. Lots of them thrown down on chairs, tables, the floor. Hundreds more on a big bookcase to one side of the door. Melanie is in no mood right then to pick them up and read them; the secret weighs heavily on her mind. In any case, even if she wanted to, her hands are stuck behind her back by the handcuffs, and her feet, though they’re bare, aren’t nearly flexible enough to turn the pages. She scans their titles instead.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar

Fox in Socks

Peepo!

The Cops and the Robbers

What Do You Do With a Kangaroo?

Where the Wild Things Are

The Man Whose Mother Was a Pirate

Pass the Jam, Jim

The titles are like stories in themselves. Some of the books have fallen apart or else been torn, their pages scattered across the floor. It would make her sad, if her heart wasn’t full already with a dizzying cargo of emotions.

She’s not a little girl. She’s a hungry.

It’s too crazy, too terrible to be true. But too obvious now to be ignored. The hungry that turned from her at the base, when it could have eaten her… that could have been anything. Or nothing. It could have smelled Dr Selkirk’s blood and been distracted by that, or it could have been looking for someone bigger to eat, or the blue disinfectant gel could have disguised Melanie’s smell the way the shower chemicals always disguised the smell of the grown-ups.

But outside, just now, when she stepped in front of Sergeant Parks – impulsive, without thinking, wanting to fight the monsters the same way he did, instead of hiding from them like a big scaredy-cat – they didn’t even seem to see her. They certainly didn’t hunger for her, the way they did for everyone else. It was like she was invisible. Like there was a bubble of pure nothing where Melanie was.

That’s not the big proof, though. That’s the little proof that pushes her up against the big proof, which is so very big that she wonders how she could have failed to see it right away. It’s the word itself. The name. Hungries.

The monsters are named for the feeling that filled her when she smelled Miss Justineau in the cell, or the junker men outside the block. The hungries smell you, and then they chase you until they eat you. They can’t stop themselves.

Melanie knows exactly how that feels. Which means she’s a monster.

It makes sense now why Dr Caldwell thinks it was okay to cut her up on a table and put pieces of her in jars.

The door behind her opens, making almost no sound.

She turns to see Dr Caldwell standing in the doorway, staring down at her. The expression on Dr Caldwell’s face is complicated and confusing. Melanie flinches back from it.

“Whatever the pertinent factor is,” Dr Caldwell says, her voice a quick, low murmur, “you’re its apogee. Do you know that? Genius-level mind and all that grey muck growing through your brain doesn’t affect it one bit. Ophiocordyceps should have eaten out your cortex until all that’s left is motor nerves and random backfires. But here you are.” She takes a step forward, and Melanie locksteps back away from her.

“I’m not going to harm you,” Dr Caldwell says. “There’s nothing I can do out here anyway. No lab. No scopes. I just want to look at gross structures. The root of your tongue. Your tear ducts. Your oesophagus. See how far the infection has progressed. It’s something. Something to be going on with. The rest will wait. But you’re a crucially important specimen, and I can’t just—”

When Dr Caldwell reaches for her, Melanie ducks under her grip and sprints for the door. Dr Caldwell spins and lunges, almost fast enough. The tips of her fingers slide across Melanie’s shoulder, but the bandages make her clumsy and she doesn’t manage to catch a hold.

Melanie runs as if there’s a tiger behind her.

Hearing Dr Caldwell’s furious gasp. “Damn! Melanie!”

Out into the big room with the chairs around the edges. Melanie doesn’t even know if she’s being followed, because she doesn’t dare look back. Bile rises in her throat as she thinks of the lab and the table and the long-handled knife.

In her panic, she just runs through the first door she sees, not even sure if it’s the right one. It’s not. It’s the kitchen and she’s trapped. She makes a sound inside the muzzle, an animal squeal.

She runs back out into the chair room. Dr Caldwell is on the other side of it. The door to the corridor is halfway between them.

“Don’t be stupid,” Dr Caldwell says. “I won’t hurt you. I just want to examine you.”

Melanie starts to walk towards her, head down, docile.

“That’s right,” Dr Caldwell soothes. “Come on.”

When Melanie comes level with the door that leads out to the corridor, she bolts through it.

Since she doesn’t know where she’s going, it doesn’t matter what turns she takes, but she remembers them anyway. Left. Left. Right. She can’t help herself. It’s the same instinct that made her memorise the return route to the cell block, when Sergeant Parks took her to Dr Caldwell’s lab. Home keeps meaning different things, but she has to know her way back to it. It’s a need buried too deep in her to be pulled out.

The corridors all look alike, and they offer no hiding places – at least, not to someone who doesn’t have the use of their hands. She runs past door after door, all closed.

She goes to ground at last in an alcove, a slight widening of the corridor that creates an angle, a bulwark just wide enough for her body. It would only fool someone who wasn’t actually looking for her, since anyone walking by would be able to see her just by turning their head. If Dr Caldwell finds her, she’ll run again, and if Dr Caldwell catches her, she’ll shout for Miss Justineau. That’s her plan – the best she can come up with.

Her ears are straining for the sounds of distant footsteps. When she hears the singing, from much closer, she jumps like a rabbit.

“Now fetch me… my children…”

The voice is so hoarse, it’s almost not a voice at all. Breath forced through a crack in a wall, driven by a broken bellows. It’s like a song that was left behind here by someone who died, and now it’s gone back to the wild.

And it’s just those five words. Silence before, and silence after.

For about a minute. Melanie counts under her breath, trembling.

“And fetch them… at speed…”

She doesn’t jump this time, but she bites her lip. She can’t imagine the mouth that would make that sound. She’s heard of ghosts – Miss Justineau told the class some ghost stories once, but she stopped when she got too close to that whole taboo subject of death – and she wonders whether it might be a ghost of someone who died here, singing a song from when he was alive.

“Bid them hasten… or I shall… be dead…”

She has to know. Even if it is a ghost, that won’t be as scary as not knowing. She follows the sound, out of the alcove and around a bend in the corridor.

Light as red as blood comes through an open door, and it makes her scared for a moment. But as soon as she steps inside, she can see that it’s just the light of the sunset coming in through an open window.

Just! She’s only ever seen it once before, and this one’s better. The sky catches fire from the ground on up, and the flames go through every colour, cooling from red-orange to violet and blue at the zenith.

It blinds her, for at least ten or twenty seconds, to the fact that she’s not alone.