The Girl with All the Gifts

62

As soon as Parks and Justineau go off in search of Private Gallagher, taking test subject number one with them, Caroline Caldwell crosses to Rosie’s midsection door, opens up a compartment beside it at about head-height and pulls a lever from the vertical position to the horizontal. This is the override control for the external emergency access. Nobody can now enter the vehicle unless Caldwell lets them in herself.

That done, she goes to the cockpit and powers up one of three panels. The generator, twenty yards behind her in the rear of the vehicle, starts to hum – but not to roar, because Caldwell isn’t sending the power to the engine. She needs it in the lab, which is where she goes next. Since she’ll be working directly with infected tissue, she puts on gloves, goggles and face mask.

She boots up the scanning electron microscope, works her way patiently and punctiliously through the setting and display option screens, and mounts the first of her prepared slides.

With a pleasant tingle of anticipation, she puts her eyes to the output rig. The central nervous system of the Wainwright House hungry is instantly there, laid out before her avid gaze. Having chosen green as the key colour, she finds herself strolling under a canopy of neuronal dendrites, a tropical brainforest.

The resolution is so perfect, it takes Dr Caldwell’s breath away. Gross and fine structures are rendered in pin-sharp detail, like an illustration in a textbook. The fact that the brain tissue was so badly damaged before she was able to take her sample mainly shows itself by the presence, as she shifts the slide minutely under the turret, of foreign matter – dust motes, human hair and bacterial cells as well as the expected fungal mycelia – among the neurons. The nerve cells themselves are completely and thrillingly laid out to her gaze.

She sees what other commentators have seen, but what she has never been able to verify with the inadequate and jury-rigged equipment available to her at the base. She sees exactly how the cuckoo Ophiocordyceps builds its nests in the thickets of the brain – how its mycelia wrap themselves, thread-thin, around neuronal dendrites, like ivy around an oak. Except that ivy doesn’t whisper siren songs to the oak and steal it from itself.

Cuckoos? Ivy? Sirens? Focus, Caroline, she tells herself fiercely. Look at what’s in front of you, and draw appropriate inferences where the evidence exists to support them.

The evidence exists. Now she sees what other eyes have missed – the cracks in the fortress (focus!), the places where the massively parallel structures of the human brain have regrouped, forlorn and outnumbered, around and between the fungus-choked nerve cells. Some uninfected clusters of neurons have actually grown denser, although the newer cells are bloated and threadbare, ruptured from within by jagged sheets of amyloid plaque.

Caldwell’s scalp prickles as she realises the significance of what she’s seeing.

It would have happened quite slowly, she reminds herself. The earlier researchers didn’t chart this progression because, immediately post-Breakdown, it hadn’t yet reached a point where it could be visually verified. The only way anyone could have found it would have been by guessing it might be there and testing for it.

Caldwell lifts her head and steps back from the imaging rig. It’s hard, but necessary. She could stare into that green world for hours, for whole days, and keep on finding new wonders there.

Later, perhaps. But later is starting to be a word that has no referent for her. Later is another day or two of rising fever and loss of function, followed by a painful, undignified death. She has the first half of a working hypothesis. Now she has to finish this project, while she still can.

In Caldwell’s lab back at the base there are – or were – dozens of slides taken from the brain tissue of test subject sixteen (Marcia) and test subject twenty-two (Liam). If these were still available to her now, she’d use them. She’s not profligate with resources, despite the comment she once made in desperation to Justineau about amassing as many observations as she could in the hope that some pattern might finally emerge. Now she has her pattern – has, at least, a hypothesis that can be tested – but all her existing samples from the test subjects at the base, the children who seem to have a partial immunity to the effects of Ophiocordyceps, have been taken from her.

She needs new samples. From test subject number one.

But she knows that Helen Justineau will resist any attempt she makes to dissect Melanie, or even to take a biopsy from her brain. And both Sergeant Parks and Private Gallagher have, as Caldwell feared from the start, developed unacceptably close relationships with the test subject through repeated interaction in a partially normalised social context. There’s no guarantee, now, that if she announced an intention to obtain brain tissue samples from Melanie, she would be supported by anyone in the group.

So she makes her plans on the assumption that she has already issued that announcement and been refused.

She unfolds and assembles the collapsible airlock around the midsection door. Its ingenious multi-hinged construction makes this relatively straightforward, despite the clumsiness of her hands. It’s not just the bandages now; the earlier tenderness of the inflamed tissue has given way to a general loss of sensation and response. She tells her fingers to do something, and they react late, move fitfully, like a car starting in winter.

But she perseveres. Fully extended, the airlock bolts into eight grooved channels, four in the ceiling of the vehicle and four in its floor. Each bolt needs to be shot home and then anchored with a sleeve bracket that tightens by the turning of a wheel. Caldwell has to use both hands and a wrench. Eight times. Long before she’s finished, feeling has returned to her hands in the form of intense and unremitting pain. The agony makes her whimper aloud in spite of herself.

The sides and front of the airlock are made of an ultra-flexible but extremely strong plastic. Its top and bottom now need to be sealed with a quick-hardening solution shot from a hand-held applicator. Caldwell has to hold it in the crook of her left elbow, using the thumb of her right hand to depress the trigger.

The result is a mess, but she verifies that the seal is perfect by pumping the air out of the airlock and watching the pressure gauge drop smoothly to zero.

Very good.

She pumps fresh air in, bringing the airlock to normal pressure. She takes manual control of the doors and routes it to her own computer in the lab. She leaves both doors closed, but only the inner door locked. Then she manhandles a cylinder of compressed phosgene gas into the airlock’s reserve chamber. She had already noted the cylinder’s presence during her initial search of the lab’s contents, and assumed that it was there to assist in the synthesis of organic polymers. But it has other uses, of course, including the rapid and effective suffocation of large lab animals without widespread tissue damage.

Now she waits. And while she waits, she examines her own feelings about what she’s about to do. She’s reluctant to dwell on the effects of the gas on her human companions. Phosgene is more humane than its close relative, chlorine, but that’s not saying very much. Caldwell is hoping that Melanie will enter the airlock first, and that it will be possible to lock the outer door before anyone else follows her in.

She’s aware, though, that this is unlikely. It’s far more probable that Helen Justineau will either enter alongside Melanie or else precede her into the vehicle. This prospect doesn’t trouble Caldwell too much. There’s even a certain rightness to it. Justineau’s many interventions have contributed very substantially to the present absurd situation – in which Caldwell has to plot to recover control of her own specimen.

But she hopes, at least, that it won’t be necessary to kill Parks or Gallagher. The two soldiers will probably bring up the rear, covering Justineau and Melanie until they’re inside Rosie. By which time, the door can be locked against them.

None of this is perfect. It’s not as though she wants to commit what more or less amounts to murder. But her hypothesis is so huge in its implications that to shrink from murder would be a crime against humanity. She has a duty, and she has an interval of time in which she can still work. That interval is most likely measurable not in days, but in hours.

Caldwell has pulled back the baffles from the window in the lab so that she can peer out into the street and see the rescue party when it returns. But the pain in her hands and arms has exhausted her. Despite her best efforts, she dozes. She drifts in and out of consciousness. Every time she forces her eyelids open, they lower themselves again by subliminal increments.

After one of these times, Caldwell finds herself meeting – at a distance, through the window – the gaze of a small child, who is standing in a doorway almost directly opposite her.

A hungry, obviously. Age at time of primary infection, no more than five. Naked, scrawny and indescribably filthy, like a disaster victim in a charity appeal broadcast before the Breakdown, in those innocent days when a few thousand dead felt like a disaster.

The little boy is watching Caldwell avidly and unblinkingly. And he’s not alone. It’s late afternoon now, and the long shadows provide a lot of natural cover. But like the details in a puzzle picture, the other hungries emerge from the background one by one. An older, red-haired girl behind the rusting hulk of a parked car. A black-haired boy, older still, crouched in the remains of a shop window display with an aluminium baseball bat clutched in his hands. Two more behind him, in the shop itself, on hands and knees underneath a rack of sun-bleached and mouldering dresses.

A whole pack of them! Caldwell is enthralled. She’d always known, when Parks and his people said the supply of test subjects in the wild had dried up, that it could mean many things. One possibility – at the time she thought it implausible, but she’s not so certain now – was that the feral infected children had been intelligent enough to perceive the sergeant and his trappers as a threat and to move on to new hunting grounds.

Now Caldwell watches as the black-haired boy signals to the two behind him with a toss of the head, and they come up level with him to see what he’s seeing. He’s the leader, obviously. He’s also one of the very few who are not completely naked. He wears a camouflage jacket on his narrow, bony shoulders. At some point, he’s brought down a soldier and taken a fancy to his hide as well as his flesh. His face is a riot of smudged colour – a tribal display of status and potency.

Caldwell sees how the hungry children operate as a pack. How they signal using silent gestures and facial expressions. How they coordinate their efforts against this unfamiliar thing in their midst.

Perhaps it’s the sound that has brought them, the steady hum of the generator. Or perhaps they’ve been watching Rosie for a while now, having followed Justineau or Gallagher back here after one of their excursions. But whatever it was that attracted their attention, now they’ve seen her.

And having seen her, they’re stalking her.

Even though she’s immured behind unbreakable glass in an oversized battle tank whose armaments could blast the buildings all around into rubble and powder. Even though there’s no obvious way to reach her, and no way of quantifying the risk she poses. Even though, crucially, they can’t smell her through steel and glass and polymer and airtight seals.

They recognise her as prey, and they’re responding accordingly.

Caldwell is not immediately conscious of having made the decision as she rises to her feet and walks softly out of the lab towards the midsection door. But it’s a good decision. She can justify it on any number of grounds.

She returns the door-control functions to the panel beside the airlock itself. Then she slides the outer door open and closed again, several times over, testing its operation at various speed settings. She watches the hydraulic valves, as thick as her forearms, sliding smoothly backwards and forwards at the top and bottom of the door. Even at the third speed setting – there are seven that are faster – she estimates that the valves are exerting in excess of five hundred foot-pounds of pressure. The inner door, by contrast, is operated by simpler mechanical servos. It was never anticipated that the airlock would have to function as a second restraint cage.

Caldwell takes into account a number of highly pertinent factors. There’s no telling whether test subject one will even return from the expedition. If she does, it’s far from certain that the ambush Caldwell has already mounted will work. Or if it works, how any survivors would respond to the deaths of those caught in the airlock.

But the truth – or at least part of it – is that she can’t resist. These monsters are hunting her. She wants to hunt them in return and to enfold their efforts effortlessly in her wider stratagem.

With the outer door opened fully, she slides the inner airlock door open halfway. She stands up against the opening and waits.

Her body is still sticky with sweat from her earlier exertions. Her pheromones, she knows, are now spreading outward from her body on the turbulent gradients of the cooling afternoon air. With every breath, the hungry children are inhaling her. Sentient they may be, and cooperative, and sly. But their nature being what it is, it’s only a matter of time before they respond.

It’s the red-haired girl who moves first. She comes out from behind the car, walks straight into the open and advances towards Rosie’s inviting doorway.

The boy in the camouflage jacket makes a sound like a bark. The red-haired girl slows, reluctantly, and turns to face him.

The younger boy from the shop doorway shoots past her at a dead run and flings himself directly at the door. It’s so sudden and so fast that Caldwell – even though this is exactly what she’s been waiting for – barely has time to react.

Her thumb closes on a switch.

The hungry boy leaps the sill of the outer door and throws himself at Caldwell like a missile, arms outstretched to catch and clutch.

Before he can reach her, the inner door slams shut.

Caldwell has underestimated the power of the servos. The door closes on the hungry’s upper body like a nutcracker, crushing its ribs. The hungry opens its mouth to scream, but its lungs are terminally and irreversibly deflated. Screaming is no longer an option. It’s been trapped with one arm behind its torso, inside the airlock, the other thrust forward. It’s still straining futilely to reach Caldwell, its slender fingers stretched out. One of them actually flicks the sleeve of her lab coat, but the infection can’t be contracted from a scratch, only from blood or saliva. With her goggles and face mask in place, she’s not at risk.

The creature’s head, Caldwell notes, is completely undamaged. She feels a dizzying surge of elation, and she laughs aloud.

She half laughs. The rest of the sound is choked off as something streaks in from the street and smacks into her jaw, ripping right through the wire and paper of the face mask. The agony is astonishing. Caldwell’s mouth fills up with blood in which broken-off pieces of tooth grate against each other with a dull, shipwrecked sound.

The stone clatters along the floor, dark red with her spilled blood. The red-haired girl is already loading another into the strip of faded cloth or leather she’s using as a sling.

The boy’s crushed body is wedging the door open about three inches, the outer door is still gaping wide, and the hungries outside, its cohort, its friends, are racing into the breach with their makeshift weapons raised.

Caldwell’s hand lashes out by pure reflex, hitting the controls for the outer door. It starts to close, but she’s forgotten to raise the speed from level three to level ten. At the last moment, the tip of the baseball bat is thrust into the narrowing gap, where it wedges tight. The hydraulics whine, and the edge of the door bites deep into the metal of the bat, starts to slice it in two. But now, little hands come groping around the edges of the door, some of them reaching for Caldwell, most of them wrestling with the door to keep it from closing.

They can’t get to her. But they’re pulling at the door determinedly, shifting their position to allow more hands to get a grip, to add their efforts. Caldwell knows how strong that door is, so when she sees it start to open again, the sudden shock makes her body rebel against her will. She staggers back, fists coming up to her mouth as though she could hide behind them.

The painted face of the black-haired boy appears in the gap of the outer door. He fixes her with baleful, bloodshot eyes, telling her in wordless grimaces that this is personal now.

Which means he thinks of himself as a person. Amazing.

Caldwell sprints for the cockpit, where she slams down two more levers, engaging wheels and weapons. She can’t operate both at once, of course. She’ll be lucky if she can remember how to drive this thing, on a few days’ training received two decades ago. For a terrifying moment, the entire console seems suddenly alien and meaningless. She has to drag her brain out of the adrenalin flood and back under her conscious control.

The button marked E. That comes first, and it’s right there, in the centre of the steering column. It stands for ELEVATE. Rosie’s chassis lifts itself eight inches higher off the road, hissing like a snake as the hydraulics kick in. Caldwell sees some of the hungries scatter, but the booming and banging from the midsection tells her that some of them are still at work there.

Panic twists her innards. She has to get out of here. She knows she might be bringing the enemy with her, but if she stays, she’s dog meat. They’ll get the outer door open eventually, and then the inner door will hold them for a few seconds at most.

Caldwell takes the steering column in her unresponsive hands, pushes hard forward and prays. The brakes disengage without being asked to. Rosie shakes herself like a dog and lurches into motion, so fast and so sudden that Caldwell is thrown backwards into the driving seat. Her hands slip partway off the grips and the behemoth slews across the road, punching into a lamp post and ripping it right out of the ground with a clang like the bell that signals the start of a boxing match.

Caldwell has to grip more tightly and pull hard to bring Rosie straight again. The pain makes her scream aloud, but she can barely hear the sound over the full-throated roar of the engines. She has no idea what’s happening at the midsection door, because the engine noise hides those sounds too. So she pushes harder, takes the column all the way to the top of its grooved channel. The street becomes a grey blur.

There’s another impact, then a third, but Caldwell is aware of them only as vibrations. Rosie has so much momentum now that she parts the world like water.

Figures in the street, briefly in front of her, then beside her, then gone. More hungries? One of them looked like Parks, but there’s no way of finding out without stopping, and she doesn’t want to do that. In fact, for the moment she doesn’t even remember how.

Some parts of the console, though, are starting to look a lot more familiar now. Caldwell realises that she doesn’t have to be blind. Rosie has cameras mounted along her entire length, most of which can be swivelled to look in any direction. She flicks them all on, and scans the left-hand feeds. One of them is dead-centred on the midsection door, where two hungries have managed to keep their grip on the moving juggernaut. One is the leader, his jacket whipping in Rosie’s slipstream like a flag. The other is the red-haired girl.

Caldwell swerves right, up a steep incline where a road sign points towards Highgate and Kentish Town. She leaves the turn to the last moment, then yanks the steering column as hard as she can so that Rosie lists sharply, but the incline slows her and the effect isn’t as spectacular as she was hoping. The hungries are still hanging on, still wrestling with the partly opened door.

Caldwell has been here before, a long time ago. Pre-Breakdown. Memories stir, filling her mind with surreal juxtapositions. Houses she once aspired to live in flick past her, squat and dark like widows in a Spanish cemetery waiting patiently for the resurrection.

At the top of the hill, she turns again. She misjudges the angle, punches out part of the wall of a pub that stands on the corner. Rosie isn’t perturbed, though the rear-view cameras show the building slumping into ruin behind her.

There’s a narrow elbow of road, then a long, wide sweep down towards central London. Caldwell piles on the acceleration again, and leans hard over, deliberately scraping Rosie’s left flank against the long exterior wall of what looks like a school building. The sign above the gate reads La Sainte Union. Pulverised brick powders the windscreen, and there’s a shriek of tortured metal even louder than the engine roar. Rosie endures and Caldwell is rewarded by the sight of at least one of the hungries flung loose in the hard rain.

She yells at the top of her voice – a banshee shriek of triumph and defiance. Blood from her wounded mouth flecks the windscreen in front of her.

She veers back out into the centre of the road, glancing at the cameras again. No sign of the hungries now. She has to stop so that she can examine her prize and make sure it’s still intact. But the hungries she’s just shaken off might still be alive. She remembers the look on the painted face of the black-haired boy. He’ll follow her for as long as his legs still work.

So she drives on, more or less due south, through Camden Town. Euston lies beyond, and after that she’ll be approaching the river. The streets remain empty, but Caldwell is wary. Eleven million people used to live in this city. Behind these blind windows and closed doors some of them must still be waiting, stuck halfway between life and death.

She’s figured out the brakes by this time, and she slows, intimidated by the echoing bellow of Rosie’s engines in these desolate landscapes. She feels for a sickening moment that she might be the last human being left alive on the face of a necrotic planet. And that it might not matter after all. To have the race that built these mausoleums lie in them finally, quiet and resigned, and crumble into dust.

Who’d miss us?

It’s the comedown after the adrenalin high of taking her specimen and shaking off her enemies. That and the fever. Caldwell shudders, and her vision swims. The road ahead of her seems to dissolve all at once into a grey smear. The dysfunction is sudden and spectacular. Is she going blind? That can’t happen. Not yet. She needs another day. A few hours, at least.

She brings Rosie to a jerking, screaming stop.

Locks the column.

And runs a hand over her face, massaging her eyes with thumb and forefinger to clear them. They feel like hot marbles nestling in her skull. But when she ventures to open them and look out through the cockpit’s windshield, there’s nothing wrong with how they work.

There really is a grey wall, forty feet high, that’s been thrown across the road ahead of her. And finally, after a minute or more of baffled awe, she knows it for what it is.

It’s her nemesis, her mighty opposite.

It’s Ophiocordyceps.