The Girl with All the Gifts

56

Helen Justineau enjoyed the foraging expedition more than she thought she was going to. Found that time spent in the company of Kieran Gallagher was surprisingly bearable.

But when they get back to Rosie, with only ten minutes of daylight to spare, and they find Melanie hasn’t returned yet, the worry drops on her like a ten-ton weight in an old Monty Python sketch. Where the hell could she be all this time? How hard would it have been for her to rustle up something to eat?

Justineau remembers the fox, back in Stevenage. She hadn’t seen Melanie catch it, but she’d seen her walking along with the animal squirming in her arms, shifting its weight as it struggled so that she wouldn’t lose her balance. If you can catch a fox, then a rat or a stray dog or a cat or a bird ought to be no trouble at all.

There’s no telling what Melanie might have run into out there. Justineau should have tried to find her, instead of staying with Private Function and looking for food.

She’s instantly contrite about that instinctive surge of contempt for Gallagher. His only faults, really, are that he’s young, green as grass, and flat-out idolatrous when it comes to Sergeant Parks.

Who is somewhat taciturn and withdrawn, Justineau realises now. He took the barest glance at what they’d found, commended them with a nod and a grunt, and then went back into the engine room.

She follows him there. “What do we do if she doesn’t come back?” she demands.

The sergeant has his head down in the guts of the generator, which he’s started to dismantle. His voice comes back muffled. “What do you think?”

“I’m going to go and look for her,” Justineau says.

That gets Parks right way up again pretty quick, which is why she said it. She’s not seriously contemplating going out into the dark. There’d be no point. She wouldn’t be able to use the torch without announcing her presence and location to anyone and everything else on the streets. Without the torch she’d be blind – and with it only marginally less so. The hungries would home in on the moving light, or on her scent, or on her body heat, and it would all be over in a minute.

So when Parks tells her these things, in slightly cruder and more emphatic terms, she doesn’t even bother to listen. She waits him out and then says again, “Then what do we do?”

“There isn’t anything we can do,” Parks says. “She’s a lot safer out there than you or I would be, and she’s a smart kid. With the night coming on, she knows enough to go to ground and wait for daylight.”

“What if she can’t find her way back? What if she gets turned around in the dark, or just forgets the way? We have no idea how far she went, and these streets probably all look alike to her. Even in daylight, she might not be able to locate us again.”

Parks is looking at her hard. “I’m not sending up a flare,” he says. “If that’s what you’re thinking about, forget it.”

“What do we lose?” Justineau demands. “We’re in a frigging tank, Parks. Nothing can touch us.”

He throws down the manual he’s been clutching all this time and picks up a wrench. For a moment she thinks he’s going to hit her with it. She realises, with sharp surprise, that he’s as tense as she is. “They wouldn’t have to touch us,” he points out grimly. “They’d just have to camp out on the doorstep for a day or so. We’re not well placed to stand up to a siege, Helen. Not with salted peanuts and Jaffa Cakes.”

She knows he’s right, as far as that goes. It doesn’t matter, since she’s already swiped the flare pistol from the mess of stuff Parks dumped on the floor when he gave her the pack. She’s tucked it into the back of her jeans, where it barely makes a bulge. So long as she stays out of the light, she’s fine.

But whatever is eating Parks, it’s different from what’s eating her. Not knowing makes her uneasy. “What’s the matter?” she demands. “Did something happen while we were out?”

“Nothing happened,” Parks says too quickly. “But we’ve got no e-blockers left, and nothing here we can use instead. From now on, any time we step outside, we’re leaving a scent trail that leads right back to our front door. And if the kid does come back, we’ll need a lot more than a muzzle and a leash to keep her under control. She’s going to be smelling us all the time. What do you think that’s going to do to her?”

That question winds its way viciously and insinuatingly through Justineau’s mind. For a moment she can’t speak. She remembers what the feeding frenzy did to Melanie back at the base. She imagines Melanie losing control like that again, inside Rosie.

How will they even let her in to put the muzzle and handcuffs back on her?

Knowing Parks the way she does – as a man who sees the angles and dots the i’s, she wonders how much of this he thought through beforehand. “Is that why you let her go so easily?” she demands. “Did you think you were releasing her into the wild?”

“I told you what I was thinking,” Parks says. “I’m not in the habit of lying to you.”

“Because this is not her natural fucking habitat,” Justineau goes on. It feels like there’s something bitter that she swallowed, that she has to talk around. “She has no clue about this place. Less than we do, and God knows we don’t have much. She might be able to find food for herself, but that’s not the same as surviving, Parks. She’d be living with animals. Living like an animal. So an animal is what she’d be. The little girl would die. What would be left would be something a lot more like all the other hungries out there.”

“I let her loose so she could eat,” Parks says. “I didn’t think past that.”

“Yeah, but you’re not an idiot.” She’s come right up close to him, and he’s actually backed away a little, as far as he can in that narrow space. All she can see of his face in the torch’s angled beam is the tight set of his mouth. “Caroline can indulge the luxury of not thinking. You can’t.”

“Thought the Doc was meant to be a genius,” Parks mutters, with unconvincing nonchalance.

“Same thing. She only sees what’s at the bottom of her test tubes. When she calls Melanie test subject number one, she means it. But you know better. If you took a kitten away from its mother, then dumped it back again and the mother bit its throat out because it didn’t smell right, you’d know that was your fault. If you caught a bird and taught it to talk, and then it escaped and it starved to death because it didn’t know how to feed itself, you’d be absolutely clear that was on you.

“Well, Melanie’s not a cat, is she? Or a bird. She might have grown up into something like that, if you’d left her where you found her. Something wild that didn’t know itself and just did whatever it needed to do. But you dropped a net over her and brought her home. And now she’s yours. You interfered. You took on a debt.”

Parks says nothing. Slowly Justineau reaches behind her and draws the flare gun from where she hid it. She brings it out and lets him see it, in her hand.

She walks to the door of the engine room.

“Helen,” Parks says.

She goes through the aft weapons stations to the door. It’s locked but unguarded. Caldwell is in the lab, and Gallagher is in the crew quarters flicking through the old CDs like they were porn.

“Helen.”

She disengages the lock. It’s the first time she’s done it, but it’s not hard to figure out how the mechanism works. She glances back at Parks, who’s got his handgun out and pointed right at her. But only for a second. The hand falls to his side again, and he puffs out his cheeks in a sigh, like he’s put down a heavy weight.

Justineau opens the door and steps out. She puts her arm up over her head and pulls the trigger.

The sound is like a firework going off, but more drawn out. The flare whistles and sighs to itself as it ascends into the utter blackness above her.

There’s no light, nothing to see. The pistol was a good few years old, after all. Pre-Breakdown, like most of Parks’ kit. It must be a dud.

Then it’s like God turned on a light in the sky. A red light. From what she knows about God, that’s the colour he’d favour.

Everything is as clearly visible as in daylight, but this is nothing like daylight. It’s the light of an abattoir, or a horror movie. And it must have reached the interior spaces of Rosie, even though someone has pulled the light-proof baffles down over the tiny reinforced windows, because now Gallagher is looking out through the door right next to Parks, and Caroline Caldwell has deigned to step out of the lab too and is standing behind them, staring out in bewilderment at the crimson midnight.

“You’d better get back inside,” Parks tells Justineau in a voice of flat resignation. “She won’t be the only one that sees that.”