The Girl with All the Gifts

41

Caroline Caldwell waits until the sergeant and Justineau leave the room. Then she gets up quickly and goes through into the kitchen.

She saw the Tupperware boxes earlier, stacked in the furthest cupboard along – ranged in order of size, so they formed a steep-sided pyramid. Nobody else spared them a second glance, because the boxes were empty. But Caldwell noted them with a small surge of pleasure. Every so often, even now, the universe gives you exactly what you need.

She takes six boxes of the smallest size and six teaspoons, dropping them one by one into the pockets of her lab coat. She brings a torch, too, but doesn’t turn it on until she reaches her destination and closes the door.

She breathes in shallow sips. The smell of the human remains, and of years of enclosed decay, freights the air so heavily it’s almost a physical presence.

With the spoons, Caldwell takes a range of samples from the hungry that was killed by Sergeant Parks. She’s only interested in brain tissue, but multiple samples mean more chance of getting at least one that’s not too badly contaminated by flora and fauna from skin, clothes or ambient air.

After sealing each container carefully, she puts them back into her pockets. She discards the soiled spoons, for which she has no further use.

She thinks as she works: I should have done this years ago. Men like the sergeant have their uses, and she knows she could never have collected the test subjects by herself. But if she’d been there with the trappers as part of the team, she wouldn’t have had to rely on their inadequate observations and unreliable memories.

So she wouldn’t have wasted so much time exploring blind alleys.

She would have known, for example, that although most hungries have only the two states – the rest state and the hunting state – some have a third state that corresponds to a degraded version of normal consciousness. They can interact with the world around them, fitfully and partially, in ways that echo their behaviour before they were infected.

The woman with the baby carriage. The singing man, with his wallet full of photos. These are trivial examples, but they represent something momentous. Caldwell is very close, she knows, to an unprecedented breakthrough. She can’t do anything with these samples until she gets back to Beacon and has access to a microscope, but an idea is forming in her mind as to what it is she should be looking for. What shape her research will take, once she’s back in a lab and has everything she needs.

Including, of course, test subject number one.

Melanie.