The Girl with All the Gifts

68

It’s a bad night.

The room contains nothing except a table and a metal cistern that was once part of the house’s central heating system. Every movement makes the bare boards creak loudly, so for the most part Justineau and Sergeant Parks sit still.

Their first visitors arrive about an hour after Melanie pulled the ladder away. A few minutes after she calls them on the walkie-talkie from the wilds of Hackney. Justineau can hear the hungries stumbling and scrabbling about in the room below, moving restlessly back and forth. The source of the smell, the chemical gradient they’re following, is above them, but they can’t get up there. All they can do is charge around, driven by eddies of air, random shifts in the intensity of the chemical trigger.

Justineau keeps hoping they’ll leave, or at least stop moving around, but this isn’t like Stevenage. At Wainwright House, the hungries were drawn by sound and movement. When the signals stopped, they stopped too, waiting for the fungus in their brains to give them further orders. Here, the orders are coming through continually, keeping them in constant, restless motion.

At first Parks opens the trap to peer down at them every so often, shining the light of the torch down into the dark to illuminate slack, grey faces, upturned, their milky eyes wide and their nostrils flared like the mouths of tunnels. But the view never changes, and after a while he gives up.

An hour or so after that, they hear thuds through the walls from whatever rooms are alongside of them. More hungries, following the scent or the heat trail as assiduously as the first bunch, but betrayed by local geography into going up the wrong stairwell, taking the wrong turn.

They’re at the centre of a great volume of space, filled with things that want to eat them.

No, Justineau corrects herself. Not the centre. There’s nothing up on the roof. Not yet, anyway.

She finds a skylight and climbs up on a table to look out of it. A hunter’s moon illuminates the wide sweep of streets southward towards the river. Fungal froth fills them to the brim, and it goes on as far as she can see. London is a no-go area, an exclusion zone for the living. Only hungries can thrive here. God alone knows how far east or west they’ll have to trek to get around it.

Well, God and maybe Melanie. They try to contact her on the walkie-talkie, but there’s no reply and no trace of her signal. Parks thinks it’s possible that she’s switched to another frequency, although he can’t think of any good reason why she’d do that.

“You should try to sleep,” he tells Justineau. He’s sitting in a corner of the room now, cleaning his gun by the light of the electric torch. It shines on the underside of his chin and eye sockets, and most unsettlingly of all on the diagonal furrow of his scar.

“Like you?” Justineau asks laconically. But she climbs down. She’s sick of looking at the endless grey escarpments.

She sits beside him. After a moment, she touches his arm, low down near the wrist. Then, with a slight feeling of unreality, she slips her hand into his.

“I haven’t been fair to you,” she says.

Parks laughs out loud. “I don’t think fairness was what I was looking for exactly.”

“Still. You got us this far, against all the odds, and for most of the way I’ve treated you like the enemy. I’m sorry about that.”

He takes her hand and raises it to head height. She thinks he’s going to kiss it, but he just turns it this way and that to let the torchlight shine on it. “It doesn’t matter,” he says. “Actually, it’s probably better this way. I could never respect any woman who had low enough standards to sleep with me.”

“That’s not funny, Parks.”

“No. I guess it isn’t. It is okay to call me Eddie, by the way.”

“Are you sure about that? It feels like fraternising.”

She’s actually angling for the laugh this time, and she’s pleased when it comes.

Does she want this? She doesn’t even know. She wants something, clearly. She didn’t hold Parks’ hand out of some abstract need for human contact. She held it to see what, if anything, his touch would do to her. But what it does is equivocal.

The scar doesn’t bother her. If anything, it takes his face out of the category of symmetrical and ordered things to which everybody else’s face belongs. It’s a face like the throw of a dice. She likes that arbitrariness, instinctively. It’s something she’s drawn to.

What she doesn’t like is the cruelties in his past, and in hers, over which she’ll have to crawl to get to him. She wishes she’d never told him that she was a murderer. She wishes that she was pristine, in his mind, so that touching him might feel like booting up a different version of herself.

But that’s not how you get reborn, if you ever can.

She pulls out of Parks’ grip. Then, holding his head between her hands, she kisses him on the lips.

After a moment, he turns off the torch. She knows why, and makes no comment.