The Girl with All the Gifts

61

Parks is determined to search even though he knows the chance of finding Gallagher is close to zero. They can’t shout and they can’t throw up any kind of a grid, because it’s just the three of them – himself, Helen Justineau and the kid. Dr Caldwell claimed she was too weak to walk very far, and since she looks as though a harsh word would break her in two, he didn’t argue the point.

But they don’t need a grid. Melanie turns herself around like a weathercock, sniffs the wind a couple of times. She ends up facing a little bit west of south.

“That way.”

“You’re sure?” Parks asks her.

A nod. No wasted words. She leads the way.

But the trail goes all over the place, up one road and down another, mostly keeping southerly at first, but then not even that. Gallagher seems to have doubled back on himself, when he was only a mile or so out from Rosie. Parks wonders if the kid might be stringing them along for some reason – to look important, maybe, and to have the grown-ups’ attention. But that’s bullshit. Maybe a ten-year-old with a pulse would pull a trick like that, but Melanie’s more grounded. If she didn’t know where Gallagher went, she’d just say so.

There’s something else going on though, and it’s between Melanie and Justineau – a dialogue of scared glances that reaches a crescendo at the point where the trail crosses a street into a back alley.

The kid stops and looks at him. “Get out your gun, Sergeant,” she says quietly. She’s gone way solemn.

“Hungries?” He doesn’t care how she knows. He just wants to be clear about what he’s walking into.

“Yes.”

“Where?”

The kid hesitates. They’re in a sort of parking apron behind some shops. Lots of doorways on three sides of them, mostly broken open or broken down. A rusting car off on one side that’s up on bricks, probably already immobile long before the Breakdown silenced the roads. Wheelie bins laid out in a long line for a collection that never came.

“There,” Melanie says at last. The doorway she nods towards is at first glance no different from any of the others. Second glance takes in the trodden-down weeds right in front of it, one of them a monster thistle that’s still wet with sap where it was broken.

Parks goes to silent running. Better late than never, he figures. He taps Justineau’s hand, indicates that she should take out her handgun. The two of them approach the door like cops in a pre-Breakdown TV drama, exaggeratedly furtive despite the crunch and grind of their footsteps on the broken ground.

Melanie steps in between and turns to face them.

“Cut me loose,” she says to Parks.

He looks her in the eye. “Hands?”

“Hands and mouth.”

“Not that long ago, you asked me to tie you up,” he reminds her.

“I know. I’ll be careful.”

She doesn’t need to say the rest out loud. If they’re walking into an enclosed space full of hungries, they’ll probably need her. Can’t argue with that. Parks unlocks the cuffs, slides them into his belt. Melanie undoes the muzzle for herself and hands it to him.

“Will you look after this for me, please?” she asks.

He pockets it, and Melanie walks before them into the darkness.

But they’re coming late to the party. Whatever happened here, it’s already over. A broad smeared trail of blood leads from the centre of an aisle into a corner out of the sun, which is where the hungries took Gallagher so they could eat him. He stares straight at the ceiling with a look of patient suffering on his face, like the more mannerly depictions of Christ on the cross. Unlike Christ, he’s been chewed down to the bone in most places. His jacket is gone. No sign of it anywhere. His shirt, ripped wide open, frames the hollow chasm of his torso. His dog tags have fallen among exposed vertebrae. The hungries appear somehow to have eaten his throat without breaking the steel chain – like that party trick where you whip out the tablecloth without disturbing the crockery.

Justineau turns away, tears squeezed out from her closed eyes, but she makes no sound. Neither does Parks, for a moment or two. All he can think of is that he had a command of one and he let the boy die alone. That’s the sort of sin you go to hell for.

“We should bury him,” Melanie says.

For a moment his anger turns on her. “Fuck’s the point?” he growls, glaring at her. “They didn’t leave enough to bury. You could scoop him up and drop him in a frigging litter bin.”

Melanie meets him more than halfway. Teeth bared, she snarls right back at him. “We have to bury him. Or dogs and other hungries will get him and eat even more of him. And there won’t be anywhere to show where he died. You should honour a fallen soldier, Sergeant!”

“Honour a… Where the fuck did that come from?”

“The Trojan War, most likely,” Justineau mutters. She wipes her eyes with the heel of her hand. “Melanie, we can’t… there isn’t anywhere. And we don’t have the time. We’d just be making ourselves into targets. We’re going to have to leave him.”

“If we can’t bury him,” Melanie says, “then we have to burn him.”

“With what?” Justineau demands.

“With the stuff in the big barrels,” Melanie says impatiently. “From the room with the generator in it. It says Inflammable on it, and that means it burns.”

Justineau says something else. Trying to explain, maybe, why dragging twenty-gallon drums of aviation fuel through the streets is another activity that they won’t be engaging in.

But Parks is thinking, with a sort of dull wonder: as far as the kid is concerned, the world never ended. They taught her all these old, old things, filled her head with all this unserviceable shit, and they thought it didn’t matter because she was never going to leave her cell except to be dismantled and smeared on microscope slides.

His stomach lurches. He has a sense, for the first time in his soldiering career, of what a war crime might look like from the inside. And it’s not him who’s the criminal, or even Caldwell. It’s Justineau. And Mailer. And that drunken bastard Whitaker, and all the rest of them. Caldwell, she’s just a butcher. She’s Sweeney Todd, with a barber’s chair and a straight razor. She didn’t spend years twisting kids’ brains into pretzels.

“We can say a prayer for him,” Justineau is saying now. “But we can’t drag one of those fuel drums all the way here, Melanie. And even if we could—”

“Okay,” Parks says. “Let’s do it.”

Justineau looks at him like he’s gone mad. “This isn’t a joke,” she tells him grimly.

“Do I look like I’m joking? Hey, she’s right. She’s making more sense than either of us.”

“We can’t—” Justineau says again.

Parks loses it.

“Why the hell not?” he roars. “If she wants to honour the fucking dead, let her do it! School’s out, teacher. School’s been out for days now. Maybe you missed that.”

Justineau stares at him in bewilderment. Her face is a little pale. “You shouldn’t shout,” she mutters, making shushing motions with her hands.

“Did I get moved to your class?” Parks asks her. “Are you my teacher now?”

“The hungries that did this are probably still close enough to hear you. You’re giving away our position.”

Parks raises his rifle and squeezes off a round, making Justineau flinch and yelp. The shot punches a hole in the ceiling. Clods of damp plaster thud down, one of them bouncing off Parks’ shoulder and leaving a white streak where it hit. “I would welcome a word or two with them,” he says.

He turns to Melanie, who’s watching all this with wide eyes. It must be like seeing Mummy and Daddy quarrel. “What do you say, kid? Shall we give Kieran a Viking funeral?”

She doesn’t answer. She’s caught between a rock and a hard place, because if she says yes, then she’s siding with him against Justineau – and there’s no way that crush is subsiding any time soon.

Parks takes silence for consent. He goes around behind the counter, where he’s already seen a box of disposable lighters. They’re still full of fluid – only a few ccs in each one, but there are about a hundred of them. He brings them back to the pathetic remains.

Being a man of a practical turn of mind, he takes the walkie-talkie from Gallagher’s belt and transfers it to his own before breaking open the little plastic tubes one at a time and emptying the lighter fluid out on to Gallagher’s corpse. Justineau watches, shaking her head. “What about the smoke?” she asks him.

“What about it?” Parks grunts.

Melanie turns her back on the two of them and walks down the aisle, all the way to the front of the shop. She comes back a moment later carrying a bright yellow cagoule in a plastic wrapper.

She kneels and puts it under Gallagher’s head. She’s kneeling in his blood, which isn’t even dry yet. When she stands again, red-black streaks adorn her knees and calves.

Parks gets to the last lighter. He could use it to light the pyre, but he doesn’t. He pours it on, like the rest, then strikes a spark with his tinderbox to start the blaze.

“God bless, Private,” he mutters, as the flames consume what little is left of Kieran Gallagher.

Melanie is saying something too, but it’s under her breath – to the dead body, not to the rest of them – and Parks can’t hear. Justineau, to do her justice, waits in silence until they’re done, which is basically when the greasy, stinking flames force them back.

They make the return trip to Rosie a lot more widely spaced than on the outward journey, and with a lot less to say to each other. The shop blazes behind them, sending up a thick pillar of smoke that spreads, far over their heads, into a black umbrella.

Justineau is treating Parks like a dog that’s showing a little foam around the gums, which he feels is probably more than fair right then. Melanie walks ahead of them both, shoulders hunched and head lowered. She hasn’t asked for her cuffs and muzzle to be replaced, and Parks hasn’t offered.

When they’re most of the way back, the kid stops. Her head snaps up, suddenly alert.

“What’s that?” she whispers.

Parks is about to say he can’t hear anything, but there is a vibration in the air and now it assembles itself into a sound. Something stirring into wakefulness, sullen and dangerous, asserting its readiness to pick a fight and win it.

Rosie’s engines.

Parks breaks into a run, turning the corner of the Finchley High Road in time to see the distant speck grow in seconds into a behemoth.

Rosie weaves a little, both because there’s debris in the road and because Dr Caldwell is driving with her thumbs hooked into the bottom of the steering wheel. Every twitch of her arm translates into a yawing roll of the long vehicle.

Without even thinking about it, Parks steps into the road. He has no idea what Caldwell is doing, what she might be fleeing from, but he knows he has to stop her. Rosie lurches like a drunk to miss him, smashing into a parked car, which is dragged along with it for a few yards before breaking apart in a shower of rust and glass.

Then it’s gone by. They’re staring at the mobile lab’s tail lights as it accelerates away from them.

“What the fuck?” Justineau exclaims in a bewildered tone.

Parks seconds that emotion.