The Girl With All The Gifts (40 page)

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
.

Miss Justineau is furious, so Melanie does her best to be furious too. But it’s hard, for lots of reasons.

She’s still sad about Kieran being killed, and the being sad seems to stop the being angry from getting started. And Dr Caldwell driving away in the big truck means that Melanie won’t have to see either one of them again, which makes her want to jump up and down and punch the air with her hands.

So while Sergeant Parks is using all the bad words he knows, it seems like, and Miss Justineau is sitting by the side of the road with a sad, dazed face, Melanie is thinking
Goodbye, Dr Caldwell. Drive far, far away, and don’t come back.

But then Miss Justineau says, “That’s it. We’re dead.”

And that changes everything. Melanie thinks about what’s going to happen now, instead of just about how she feels, and her stomach goes all cold suddenly.

Because Miss Justineau is right.

They’ve used up the last of the e-blocker. The food smell is really strong on them, and Melanie is amazed that she’s able to be this close without wanting to bite them. She’s become used to it somehow. It’s like the part of her that just wants to eat and eat and eat is locked up in a little box, and she doesn’t have to open the box if she doesn’t want to.

But that’s not going to help Miss Justineau and Sergeant Parks very much. They’ve got to keep walking through this city, smelling like food, and they won’t walk far before they meet something that wants to eat them.

“We have to follow her,” Melanie says, full of urgency now that she sees what’s at stake. “We have to get back inside.”

Sergeant Parks gives her a searching look. “Can you do it?” he asks her. “The way you did with Gallagher? Is there a trail?”

Melanie hasn’t even thought of it until then, but now she breathes in deep – and finds it at once. There’s a trail so strong it’s like a river running through the air. It’s got a bit of Dr Caldwell in it, and a bit of something else that might be a hungry or more than one hungry. But mostly it’s the stinky chemical smell of Rosie’s engine. She could follow it blindfolded. She could follow it in her sleep.

Parks sees it in her face. “Okay,” he says. “Let’s get going.”

Justineau stares at him, wild-eyed. “She was pushing sixty miles an hour!” she says, her mouth twisted in a snarl. “She’s gone. There’s no way in God’s green earth we’re going to catch up with her.”

“Won’t know unless we try,” Parks counters. “Want to lie down and die, Helen, or give it a shot?”

“It’s going to come to the same thing either way.”

“Then die on your feet.”

“Please, Miss Justineau!” Melanie begs. “Let’s go a little way, at least. We can stop when it gets dark, and find somewhere to hide.” What she’s thinking is: they have to get out of these streets, where the hungry children who are just like her live and hunt. She thinks she might be able to protect Miss J against ordinary hungries, but not against the painted-face boy and his fierce tribe.

Sergeant Parks holds out a hand. Miss Justineau just stares at it, but he keeps it there in front of her, and in the end she takes it. She lets him haul her to her feet.

“How many hours of daylight have we got left?” she asks.

“Maybe two.”

“We can’t move in the dark, Parks. And Caroline can. She’s got headlights.”

Parks concedes the point with a curt nod. “We follow until it’s too dark to see. Then we hole up. In the morning, if there’s still a strong trail, we carry on. If not, we look for some tar or creosote or some other shit like that to mask our scent, the way the junkers do, and we keep on heading south.”

He turns to Melanie. “Go ahead, Lassie,” he says. “Do your stuff.”

Melanie hesitates. “I think…” she says.

“Yeah? What is it?”

“I think maybe I’ll be able to run a lot faster than the two of you, Sergeant Parks.”

Parks laughs – a short, harsh sound. “Yeah, I think so too,” he says. “We’ll do the best we can. Keep us in sight, that’s all.” Then he has a better idea, and turns to Justineau. “Let her have the walkie-talkie,” he tells her. “If we lose her, she can call us and talk us in.”

Justineau hands the rig to Melanie, and Sergeant Parks shows her how to send and receive with it. It’s simple enough, but designed for much bigger fingers than hers. She practises until she gets it right. Then Parks shows her how to hook it on to the waistband of her pink unicorn jeans, where it looks ridiculously large and cumbersome.

Miss Justineau gives her a smile of encouragement. Underneath it Melanie can see all her fears, her grief and exhaustion. How close she is to empty.

She goes up to Miss J and gives her a short, intense hug. “It’ll be all right,” she says. “I won’t let anything hurt you.”

It’s the first time they’ve hugged like this – with Melanie giving comfort rather than receiving it. And she remembers Miss Justineau making the same promise to her, although she couldn’t say exactly when. She feels a pang of nostalgia for that time, whenever it was. But she knows that you can’t be a child for ever, even if you want to be.

She sets off at a run, and slowly accelerates. But she holds herself to a speed that the two grown-ups can just about keep up with. At each junction she waits until they jog into sight before setting off again. Walkie-talkie or not, she’s not going to leave them to their own devices with the night coming on – a night that she knows contains so many terrible things.

Caroline Caldwell gets out of Rosie using the cockpit door rather than the midsection door. The midsection door still has the airlock attached and her hungry specimen jammed into it.

She walks twenty paces forward. That’s as far as she can go, more or less.

She stares at the grey wall for a long time. For whole minutes, probably, although she doesn’t really trust her time sense any more. Her wounded mouth throbs in time with her heartbeat, but her nervous system is like a flooded carburettor; the engine doesn’t catch, the confused signals don’t coalesce into pain.

Caldwell registers the wall’s construction, its height and width and depth – the depth is just an estimate – and the time it must have taken to form. She knows exactly what she’s looking at. But knowing doesn’t help. She’s going to die soon, and she’ll die with this …
thing
in front of her. This gauntlet, flung down by a bullying, contemptuous universe that allowed human beings to grope their way to sentience just so it could put them in their place that bit more painfully.