The Girl with All the Gifts

38

“I found this,” Gallagher says, when Helen Justineau comes back to the table. Her own food has gone cold by this time, and the rest of them have almost finished eating, but he felt like this was something they all had to be there for. He thinks Helen Justineau has a sexy smile for an older woman, and he hopes one day she’ll use it on him.

He sets down on the table a bottle that he found in a storage cupboard while they were searching. It was on the floor, covered with a pile of mouldering J Cloths, and he wouldn’t have seen it at all except that he kicked it by accident and heard the clink and slosh as its contents were disturbed.

Glancing down, he saw a little of the label, a teasing hint of brown and gold where the sheltering mound of sky-blue cloths had slid away. Metaxa three-star brandy. Full and unopened. On his own account he recoiled from it and from the poisoned release it represented. He piled the cloths on top of it again to hide it from sight.

But he kept going back to it. He’d been fretting all day about this journey. About going back to Beacon and the narrow, walled-in world he’d been so happy to leave behind. He’d been feeling like he was walking between the rock and the hard place. Maybe, he thought, desperate situations require desperate remedies.

The others stare at the bottle now, their dangling conversation comprehensively hijacked.

“Shit!” Sergeant Parks mutters, with something of reverence in his tone.

“This is the good stuff, right?” Gallagher asks, feeling himself blush.

“No.” Sergeant Parks shakes his head slowly. “No, this isn’t so great, all things considered, but it’s real. Not tin-bucket rotgut.” He turns the bottle over in his hands, examines the seal both by eye and by sniffing at it. “Promises well,” he comments. “Normally I wouldn’t get out of bed for anything less than French cognac, but fuck it. Get some glasses, Private.”

Gallagher does.

He doesn’t get that smile from Justineau. She’s almost as switched off as Dr Caldwell, like all the piled-up crises of the day have strung out her nerves too far and thin for normal stuff.

But what’s even cooler than a smile would have been is that the Sarge pours for him first. “Founder of the feast, Private,” he says, when he’s filled all their glasses. “You get to give the toast.”

Gallagher’s already hot face gets a bit hotter. He raises the glass. “One bottle for the four of us, thank fuck there are no more of us!” he recites. One of his father’s, heard in a roar that carried through thin floorboards to where a pre-teen Kieran Gallagher lay under a single blanket and listened to the grown-ups carouse.

Then call each other cunts.

Then fight.

The toast is accepted, the glasses chinked together. They drink. The raw, sweet booze sears its way down Gallagher’s throat. He tries his best to keep his mouth closed on it, but he explodes into coughing. Not as bad as Dr Caldwell, though. She claps her hand to her mouth and – as the cough rises despite her best efforts – sprays brandy and spit out between her fingers.

They all laugh out loud, including the doctor. In fact, she laughs the longest. The laughing takes up each time the coughing stops, and then gives way to it again. It’s like alcohol is magic, and they’ve all suddenly relaxed with each other even though they’ve only taken a single mouthful of it. Gallagher remembers enough of those family drinking sessions to be sceptical of that particular miracle.

“Your turn,” the Sarge says to Justineau, pouring again.

“For a toast? Shit.” Justineau shakes her head, but she lifts the brimming glass. “May we live as long as we want. How about that?” She tips it back, drinks the glass empty in one go. The Sarge matches her. Gallagher and Dr Caldwell sip more cautiously.

“It’s may we live as long as we want, and never want as long as we live,” Gallagher corrects Justineau. He knows this stuff like holy writ.

Justineau sets the glass back down. “Yeah, well,” she says. “No point in asking for the moon and the stars, is there?”

The Sarge refills their glasses, tops up Gallagher’s and Caldwell’s. “Doc?” he asks. Caldwell shrugs. She’s not interested in offering any heart-warming exhortations.

Parks taps each of their glasses with his own, three times round.

“To the wind that blows, the ship that goes and the lass that loves a sailor.”

“You know any sailors?” Justineau asks sardonically, after they’ve both emptied their glasses again and Gallagher has sipped politely. They’re already making serious inroads into the bottle.

“Every man’s a sailor,” Parks says. “Every woman’s an ocean.”

“Horseshit,” Justineau exclaims.

The Sarge shrugs. “Maybe, but you’d be amazed how often it works.”

More laughter, with a slightly wild edge to it. Gallagher stands. This is no good for him, and he was stupid to try it. He’s starting to remember things that he steers clear of most of the time, for good and sufficient reasons. Ghosts are rising in his sight, and he doesn’t want to have to look them in the eye. He knows them too well already. “Sarge,” he says. “I’ll swing round one more time, make sure everything’s secure.”

“Good for you, son,” Parks says.

They don’t even look at him as he leaves.

He wanders round the corridors of the first-floor level, finding nothing that they didn’t find the time before. He covers his mouth and nose as he walks past the room with the dead hungry in it; the stink is really bad.

But it’s worse when he gets to the top of the staircase that the Sarge blew out. It’s like the breath of hell, right there. There’s no sound, no movement. Gallagher stands at the brink and peers down into impenetrable shadow. Eventually he gets up the courage to take the torch from his belt, aim it straight down and click it on.

In the perfect circle of the torchlight, he sees six or seven hungries crammed shoulder to shoulder. The light makes them squirm and surge, but they’re too tightly packed to move very far.

Gallagher plays the torch’s beam forward and back. The whole length of the hall, they’re packed in like sardines. The hungries they were running from a few hours ago, and their friends, and their friends’ friends. They move peristaltically as the light passes over them. Their jaws open and close.

The sound of gunshots brought them, from wherever they happened to be. Something loud means something living. Now they’re here, and they’ll stay here until they score a meal or until the next big thing winds up their fungus-fucked clockwork and sets them moving.

Gallagher retreats, sickened and scared. He’s lost his enthusiasm for being nightwatchman.

He goes back to the day room. Parks and Justineau are still working their way through the bottle, while Dr Caldwell is stretched out asleep across three chairs.

He thinks maybe he should check in on the hungry kid. Should at least make sure the tether tying her to the radiator is still secure.

He goes through to the room with the toys in it. The kid is sitting on the beanbag, really still and quiet, head down and staring at the floor. Gallagher stifles a shiver; she looks, for a moment, exactly like the monsters filling the downstairs hall.

He props the door open with a chair. He’s buggered if he’s going to be alone with this thing in the near dark. He walks across to her, making a fair amount of noise so she knows he’s coming. She looks up, and it’s a relief to him when she does. It’s not that rangefinder thing that the hungries do, when they look past you on both sides before zeroing in on you. It’s more like what a human being would do.

“What’ve you got there?” Gallagher asks her. The floor is littered with books, so presumably that’s what she was looking at. With her hands cuffed behind her back, looking is all she can do. He picks up the nearest book. The Water-Babies, by Charles Kingsley. It looks really old, with a faded dust jacket on the cover, torn at one corner. The picture shows a bunch of cute little fairies rising into the air over the rooftops of a city. London, maybe, but Gallagher has never seen London and doesn’t have any way of knowing.

The hungry kid is watching him and not saying a word. It’s not an unfriendly look, but it’s really intent. Like she doesn’t know what he’s there for and she’s ready for the surprise not to be a nice one.

All she knows of him is that he’s one of the people who used to tie her up in that chair all the time, and wheel her in and out of the classroom. Gallagher can’t remember now if he’s ever spoken to her before this. Consequently, the words come out a little skewed, a little self-conscious. He’s not even all that sure why he says it.

“You want me to read this to you?”

A moment’s silence. A moment more of that big-eyed stare.

“No,” the kid says.

“Oh.” That’s his entire conversational strategy, shot to shit. He doesn’t have a Plan B. He heads for the door again, and the lighted room beyond. He’s swung the chair out of the way and he’s about to close the door behind him when she blurts it out.

“Can you look on the shelves?”

He turns and steps back inside, replacing the chair. “What?”

There’s a long silence. Like she’s sorry she spoke, and she’s not sure she wants to say it again. He waits her out.

“Can you look on the shelves? Miss Justineau gave me a book, but I had to leave it behind. If the same book is here…”

“Yeah?”

“Then… you could read me that.”

Gallagher hadn’t noticed the bookcase before. He follows the girl’s gaze now, sees it against the wall next to the door. “Okay,” he says. “What was the book called?”

“Tales the Muses Told.” There’s a quickening of excitement in the girl’s voice. “By Roger Lancelyn Green. It’s Greek myths.”

Gallagher goes over to the bookcase, clicks on his torch and plays it over the shelves. Most of these are picture books for little kids, with stapled spines rather than square ones, so he has to pull them out to see what they’re called. There are a few real books, though, and he works his way through them painstakingly.

No Greek myths.

“Sorry,” he says. “It’s not here. You don’t want to try something new?”

“No.”

“There’s Postman Pat here. And his black and white cat.” He holds up a book to show her. The hungry kid gives it a cold stare, then looks away.

Gallagher rejoins her, pulls up a chair at what he considers a safe distance. “My name’s Kieran,” he tells her. This elicits no response at all. “Is there one story in particular that’s your favourite?”

But she doesn’t want to talk to him, and he can understand that. Why the hell would she?

“I’m gonna read this one,” he says. He holds up a book called I Wish I Could Show You. It’s got the same kind of pictures in it as The Cat in the Hat, which is why he chose it. He used to love that story about the cat and the fish and the kids and the two Things called 1 and 2. He liked to imagine his own house getting trashed like that, and then getting put right again just a second before his dad walked in. For Gallagher, aged about seven, that was a huge, illicit thrill.

“I’m gonna sit here and read this one,” he tells the girl again.

She shrugs like that’s his business, not hers.

Gallagher opens the book. The pages are damp, so they stick to each other a little, but he’s able to pull them apart without tearing them.

“When I was out walking one day in the street,” he recites, “I met a young man with red boots on his feet. His belt had a buckle, his hat had a feather. His shirt was of silk and his pants were of leather, and he could not stand still for two seconds together.”

The kid pretends not to listen, but Gallagher isn’t taken in. It’s pretty obvious that she’s tilting her head so she can see the pictures.