The Girl with All the Gifts

60

Gallagher is in the wind. He’s bolted. The pressure that had been building in him exploded outwards, all at once, and carried him out of there before he even registered what he was doing.

It’s not that he’s a coward. It’s more like a law of motion. Because the pressure, for him, was coming from in front as well as from behind – from the thought of what he was going back to. He just got squeezed sideways.

Yeah, but it’s also the thought of locking the door, turning out the lights and waiting for the junkers to find them. Like anyone could possibly miss them, just standing out there in the street.

When the base fell, Gallagher saw Si Brooks – the man who rented out his precious vintage porno mag to the whole barracks, and was privately in love with the girl on page twenty-three – get his face split open with the butt of a rifle. And Lauren Green, one of the few female privates he could talk to without getting tongue-tied, was stabbed in the stomach with a bayonet. And he would have got a helping of that too, if Sergeant Parks hadn’t grabbed him by the shoulder and hauled him away from the corner of the mess hall, where he was hiding, with a terse “I need a gunner.”

Gallagher has no illusions about how long he would have lasted otherwise. He was nailed to the spot with pure terror. But nailed was the wrong word, because what he was actually feeling right then was more like vertigo – as though if he moved, he was going to fall in some random direction, slantwise across the tilting world.

So he’s ashamed, now, to be running out on the Sarge, his saviour. But this is how you square the circle. Can’t go back. Can’t go forward. Can’t stay put. So you pick another direction and you get out from under.

The river is going to save him. There’ll be boats there, left over from the old days before the Breakdown. He can row or sail away and find an island somewhere, with a house on it but no hungries, and live on what he can grow or hunt or trap. He knows that Britain is an island, and that there are others close to it. He’s seen maps, although he doesn’t remember the fine detail. How hard can it be? Explorers and pirates used to do it all the time.

He’s heading south, with the aid of the compass from his belt. Or rather he’s trying to, but the streets don’t always help. He’s left the main drag, where he felt way too exposed, and is zigzagging his way through back streets. The compass tells him which way to go, and he follows its advice whenever the maze of avenues, crescents and cul-de-sacs allows him to. They’re mercifully empty. He hasn’t seen a live hungry since he flung open Rosie’s door and fled. Just a couple more of the dead ones with the trees growing out of them.

He’ll get to the river, which can only be another five miles or so, and then he’ll take stock. As he walks, the rain clouds roll on past and the sun comes out again. Gallagher is surprised, in a dislocated kind of way, to see it again. The warmth and the light seem to have nothing in common with the world he’s journeying through. It even makes him a little uneasy – dangerously exposed, as though the sun is a spotlight focused on him, keeping pace with him as he walks.

Something else too. He sees movement in the street ahead of him that makes him jump like a hare and all but piss himself. But then he realises it’s not in the street at all. There’s nothing there. It was the shadow of something moving behind and above him, up on one of the rooftops. A junker? Didn’t look big enough for that, and he’s pretty sure he would have been shot in the back already if they were on him. More likely a cat or something, but shit, that was a bad moment.

He’s still shaking, and his stomach feels like it’s going to do something that might be slightly projectile. Gallagher finds a place where the rusting remains of a car screen him from the street, and sits down for a moment. He takes a drink from his canteen.

Which is almost empty.

He’s aware suddenly that there are a whole lot of things he could really do with right now, and flat-out doesn’t have.

Like food. He didn’t feel like he could steal one of the backpacks when he left, so he’s got nothing. Not even the packet of peanuts he’d slipped under the pillow of his bunk for later.

Or his rifle.

Or the empty tube of e-blocker he was going to peel open so he could rub the last nubs of gel over his underarms and crotch.

He’s got his sidearm and six clips of ammunition. He’s got a little water left. He’s got the compass. And he’s got the grenade, which is still in the pocket of his fatigues where it’s sat ever since they abandoned the Humvee. That’s it. That’s the whole inventory.

What kind of idiot goes for a hike through enemy territory with just the clothes he’s standing up in? He’s got to resupply, and he’s got to do it fast.

The lock-up garage where he and Justineau found the snack foods is a couple of miles behind him now. He hates to double back and lose time. But he’d hate starving to death a whole lot more, and there’s no guarantee that he’ll find another mother lode like that between here and the Thames.

Gallagher stands up and gets himself moving again. It’s not easy, but he immediately feels better, just to be doing something. He’s got a defined goal, and he’s got a plan. He’s going backwards, but only so he can go forwards again and get further this time.

After five or six turns, compass or not, he’s totally lost.

And he’s pretty much certain now that he’s not alone. He doesn’t see any more moving shadows, but he can hear shuffling and skittering sounds coming from somewhere really close by. Whenever he pauses to listen, there’s nothing, but it’s right there behind the sound of his own footsteps when he starts walking again. Someone is moving when he moves, stopping when he stops.

It sounds like they’re almost on top of him. He ought to be able to see them, but he can’t. He can’t even be sure what direction they’re coming from. But the shadow he saw… that was definitely cast by something up on the roof. If he’s being stalked, Gallagher thinks, that would be a great way for the stalker to stay close to him without being seen.

Okay. So let’s see them jump clear across the street.

He breaks into a run, without warning. Sprints across the street and then sidelong into an alley.

Across a sort of parking area behind some burnt-out shops. Through one of the gaping back doors, into a narrow hallway. A vulcanised rubber swing door, rotten and sticky to the touch, takes him on to the sales floor, which Gallagher crosses quickly and…

Slows. Then stops.

Because this is some sort of mini-market, with about six cramped aisles and shelves from floor to ceiling.

On the shelves: toilet brushes, eggcups in the shape of smiling chicks, tin bread bins decorated with Union Jacks, wooden mousetraps with their name (“The Little Nipper”) stamped on their sides, cheese graters with easy-grip handles, chopping boards, tea towels, novelty condiment sets, bin liners, car seat protectors, magnetic screwdrivers.

And food.

Not much of it – just one section of shelving at the end of an aisle – but the tins and packets don’t seem to have been touched. They’re still neatly arrayed by type, all the soups on one shelf, foreign cuisine on another, rice and pasta on a third. Just as some anonymous and probably long-dead retail grunt set them out on what must have seemed like an ordinary morning, in a world that nobody thought could end.

The tins are blown, every one of them. They’re full in the sun right now, as they must have been on every sunny day going back to before Gallagher was even born.

But there are packets too. He examines them first with hope, and then with excitement.

Gourmet’s Feast Chicken Curry with Rice – just add water!

Gourmet’s Feast Beef Stroganoff – just add water!

Gourmet’s Feast Mixed Meat Paella – just add water!

In other words, desiccated foods in airtight sachets.

Gallagher tears one open and takes a tentative sniff. It smells pretty bloody good, all things considered. And he really doesn’t care whether or not this stuff ever met a chicken or a cow, as long as he can keep it down.

He pours in about a third of his remaining water, grips the neck of the sachet tight and shakes it for half a minute or so. Then he opens it and squeezes a dollop of the resulting paste straight into his mouth.

It’s delicious. A gourmet’s feast, just like it says on the label. And he doesn’t even need to chew. It slides down as easy as soup. The slight grittiness doesn’t bother him either, until some of the unmixed powder accidentally goes down his throat and he breaks into a fit of explosive coughing, anointing all the packets left on the shelf with brown flecks of curried spit.

He finishes off the packet, with a bit more caution. Then he rips open a few more of them, discarding the cardboard sleeves and stuffing his many pockets with the food sachets. When he reaches the river, he’ll celebrate with two or three of them chosen at random. A mix-and-match supper.

Speaking of which, he should really get going. But he can’t resist casting a quick eye over the rest of the store, wondering what other marvels it might contain.

When he finds the magazine rack, Gallagher’s heart leaps. The entire top shelf – ten feet or more of display space – is full of porno mags. He takes them down, one after another, and turns the pages as reverently as if they contained holy writ. Women of inconceivable beauty smile back at him with love, understanding and welcome. Their legs and hearts are wide open.

If he were still at the base, this treasure trove would make him rich beyond measure. Pilgrims would come from every barracks to pay him in tobacco and alcohol for a half-hour in the company of these ladies. The fact that he doesn’t smoke and fears alcohol almost as badly as he fears hungries and junkers does nothing to tarnish this dazzling vision. He’d be the man, nonetheless. One of those guys who gets a nod or a word from everybody when he walks into the mess hall, and takes it as his due. A man whose acknowledgement, when granted, confers status on those who get a nod or a word in return.

The creak of a floorboard startles Gallagher back from eternal glory into the here and now. He lowers the magazine that’s in his hands. Ten feet away, hidden until that moment by the magazine although she’s not making any effort to conceal herself, is a girl. She’s tiny, naked, skinny as a bag of sticks. For a startling moment, she looks like a black and white photograph, because her hair is jet and her skin is pure, unmitigated white. Her eyes are as black and bottomless as holes drilled through a board. Her mouth is a straight, bloodless line.

She could be five or six years old, or an emaciated seven.

She just stands there, staring at Gallagher. Then, when she’s sure she’s got his attention, she holds out her hand and shows him what she’s holding. It’s a dead rat without a head.

Gallagher looks from the rat to the girl’s face. Then back to the rat. They stand like that for what feels like a long time. Gallagher sucks in a long, tremulous breath.

“Hey,” he says at last. “How are you doing?”

It’s about the stupidest line you could come up with, but he’s having a really hard time believing this is happening. This little girl is a hungry, that’s obvious. But she’s one of the Melanie kind of hungries, that can think and doesn’t have to eat people if it doesn’t want to.

And she’s giving him a peace offering. A pretty major one, given how agonisingly thin she is.

But she doesn’t make a move towards him, and she doesn’t say anything. Can she even speak? The kids at the base were more like animals when they were first brought in. They learned to talk pretty quickly once they heard other people talking, but he remembers them squealing like little piglets or chittering like chimps to start with.

Doesn’t matter. There’s other stuff. Body language.

Gallagher gives the girl a big wide smile and a friendly wave. She’s still not moving, and her face is as rigid as a mask. She just jiggles the rat at him, the way you’d do for a dog.

“You’re a very pretty little girl,” Gallagher tells her inanely. “What’s your name? My name’s Kieran. Kieran Gallagher.”

The rat jiggles again. The girl’s mouth opens and closes as though she’s miming eating.

This is ridiculous. He’s going to have to take the rat, or the impasse will go on for ever.

Gallagher puts down the porno mag very slowly – face down, as if this living dead kid was capable of being embarrassed or corrupted by the bare breasts on the cover. He shows her his empty hands. Moving in the gradual, strolling gait Sergeant Parks taught him, he advances on her, one step at a time. He’s careful to keep his hands in full view and the smile on his face the whole time.

He reaches out one hand, very slowly, for the rat.

The little brat hauls it back, out of his reach. Gallagher stops dead, wondering if maybe he’s misunderstood.

Pain explodes in his left leg, then his right, sudden and astonishing. He screams and falls, both legs buckling under him so that he hits the floor as heavy and ungainly as a toppled wardrobe. Diminutive figures flee away on both sides of him from the intersecting aisle where they’d been crouching hidden. He doesn’t get a good look at them because he’s in pain and he’s angry and he’s too thoroughly confused even to realise at first what it is that’s just happened.

He levers himself up on one elbow and looks down at his feet, but he can’t process what he’s seeing. There’s red everywhere. Blood. It’s blood. And it’s his. He knows that because he can feel it now as well as see it. The backs of his calves pulse and throb agonisingly. From the knees down, his trousers are already saturated.

What did they do? he wonders dazedly. What did they just do to me?

He catches a blur of movement in his peripheral vision, and he turns. Another little kid is rushing on him. His face is a bright splash of random colour, in which his eyes show out as two black pinpricks. His arm is raised high, and he’s holding a shining metal something over his head that glints blindingly in the slanting afternoon light.

Gallagher flinches away with a shriek of terror as the boy swings. For a crazy moment he thinks the weapon is a sword, but as it flashes past him he sees that it’s too fat, too solid. The metal shelf unit takes most of the force of the blow. Gallagher brings his arm up to smack the kid in the chest backhanded, and the kid weighs nothing so the blow sends him spinning head over heels. The weapon – it’s an aluminium baseball bat – flies out of his hand and clatters at Gallagher’s feet.

Which are now in an actual puddle. A puddle of his own blood.

The painted-face kid scrambles away, but there’s two more of them running in now from either side, one with a knife and the other swinging what looks like a butcher’s cleaver. Gallagher screams again at the top of his voice, and snatches up the baseball bat.

The hungry kids abort their attack runs, back-pedal right out of his reach.

But they’re everywhere now. Gallagher can’t see how many but it seems like dozens. Hundreds, maybe. Little pale faces peer at him through the gaps in the shelves, duck in and out of view. Bolder ones crowd the ends of the aisle, staring at him openly. They’re armed with everything under the sun, from knives and forks to broken branches. They’re mostly stark naked like the girl, but some are wearing weirdly assorted clothes that must have been looted from shop displays. One boy has a leopard-print bra fastened diagonally across his upper body, tied at the bottom end to a webbing belt from which a whole bunch of ornamental key rings are hanging.

The little girl he saw first is still standing there, Gallagher sees now. She’s just stepped back a little to give the ones with the weapons a bit more room. She’s chewing on the dead rat, calm and patient.

Gallagher tries to get up, but his legs won’t bear his weight. He can’t take his eyes off the kids in case they attack again, so he reaches down with his free hand to try and figure out by feel what it is that’s happened to him. There’s a broad rent in the right leg of his trousers, halfway between knee and ankle. Gingerly he reaches through it to touch the edges of the wound. It’s not wide, but it’s long and it’s straight and you have to figure it’s deep.

Same with the left leg.

The rat wasn’t a peace offering. It was bait. And it shouldn’t have worked because he doesn’t eat rat, but hey, what do you know? He’s a sucker for a pretty face. The little moppet manoeuvred him into position, and then two of her friends sliced him up from behind.

He’s been hamstrung.

He’s not walking out of here.

He may never walk again.

“Fuck!” Gallagher is surprised when the word comes out of him as a whisper. In his mind it was a shout.

“Listen,” he says, aloud. “Listen to me. This is not… you’re not going to do this to me. You understand? You can’t…”

The faces he’s seeing don’t change. The same expression on all of them. Wild, aching need, somehow reined in, somehow not acted on.

They’re waiting for him to die, so they can eat him.

He takes out his sidearm and points it. At the girl. Then at the kid who dropped the baseball bat. He looks to be one of the oldest. He’s got incongruously red, full lips, where most of them barely have lips at all. You don’t notice that at first because of the paint all over his face, which Gallagher realises is not abstract. It’s another face, kind of a monster’s face painted over his own, the open mouth encompassing everything from his nose to his chin. The work is smudgy enough and wobbly enough to suggest that he did it himself, probably in marker pen. His lank, black hair hangs straight down over his eyes, giving him a louche, rock-star look. He’s so skinny, Gallagher can count every rib.

And the gun doesn’t bother him at all. He stares right past it, unblinking, into Gallagher’s eyes.

Gallagher waves the gun at the other kids, one by one. They don’t even seem to see it. They don’t know what a gun is or why they should be afraid of one. He’s going to have to shoot at least one of them to make them get it.

Better do it quick too. His hand is trembling and there’s a sort of fuzzy static behind his eyes. The world’s starting to jump a little, like a car on a bumpy road. He tries to focus through the shakes.

Painted-face boy. The one who dropped the baseball bat. He’s right at the front of the crowd, and he’s probably the one in charge of Operation Eat-Kieran-Gallagher, so fuck him, he’s duly nominated.

But he keeps moving. They all keep moving. Might hit the little girl if he’s not careful. For some reason, Gallagher doesn’t want to do that, even though she set him up. She’s too small. It would feel too much like murder.

There he is, the little bastard. Target acquired. The gun feels like it weighs a couple of hundredweight but Gallagher only needs to hold it on the right line for a couple of seconds. Just time enough to squeeze, squeeze, and…

The trigger doesn’t move.

The clip’s empty.

Gallagher used it up on the second day when they were running through the crowd of hungries to get into that hospital place. Wainwright House. Then he switched to the rifle, and it’s the rifle he’s had in his hands ever since whenever it seemed like they might have to fight. He’s never reloaded.

He almost laughs. The kids haven’t even reacted because the gun doesn’t mean a damn thing to them. It’s the baseball bat that’s keeping them at bay.

Except it’s not. Not any more. They’re advancing slowly from both ends of the aisle, creeping in closer to him a step or two at a time, like they’re on a dare. Painted-face boy is leading the pack, even though he doesn’t have a weapon any more. His bony fingers flex and contract.

Numbness is creeping over Gallagher now, seeping up through his body from his wounded legs. But the terror effervescing in his mind keeps it back, and brings a sudden inspiration. Quickly he shifts on to his left side, so he can feel in the pockets of his fatigues for…

Yes! There it is. His hand closes on the cold metal. Hail Mary, he thinks incredulously, full of grace.

The kids are really close. Gallagher pulls the grenade from his pocket and holds it out for them to see.

“Look!” he yells. “Look at this!” The inexorable advance slows and stops, but he knows it’s the shout and not the danger that has made the kids hesitate. They’re gauging how much fight he has left in him.

“Boooooom!” Gallagher mimes an explosion, throwing his arms out wildly. Silence for a moment. Then painted-face boy barks back at him. He thinks it’s just a threat display. A pissing contest.

And the kids are moving again. Closing in for the kill.

“It’s a bomb!” Gallagher shouts desperately. “It’s a fucking grenade. It will rip you apart. Go and eat a stray dog or something. I’ll do it. I mean it. I’ll really do it.”

No reaction. He takes the pin between thumb and forefinger.

He doesn’t want to kill them. Just to make sure his own exit is a white light and a sudden shock, rather than something drawn out and horrible, beyond his capacity to endure. It’s not like they’ve left him a choice. He doesn’t have any choice at all.

“Please,” he says.

Nothing.

And when it comes to it, he can’t do it. If he could make them understand what it was he was threatening them with, maybe it would be different.

He drops the baseball bat, and the feral children take him like a wave. The grenade is knocked out of his hand and rolls away.

“I don’t want to hurt you!” Gallagher shrieks. And it’s the truth, so he tries not to fight back as they clutch and bite and tear at him. They’re just kids, and their childhood has probably been as big a load of shit as his was.

In a perfect world, he would have been one of them.