The Girl With All The Gifts (7 page)

“This is all one organism,” Caldwell says, with pride and perhaps even a perverse kind of affection in her voice. She points. “And we know now what kind of organism it is. We finally figured it out.”

“I thought it was pretty obvious,” Justineau says.

If Caldwell hears the sarcasm, she doesn’t appear to be troubled by it. “Oh, we knew it was a fungus,” she agrees. “There was an assumption at first that the hungry pathogen had to be a virus or a bacterium. The swift onset, and the multiple vectors of infection, seemed to point in that direction. But there was plenty of evidence to support the fungal hypothesis. If the Breakdown hadn’t come so quickly, the organism would have been isolated within a matter of days.

“As it was … we had to wait a little while. In the chaos of those first few weeks, a great many things were lost. Any testing that was being done on the first victims was curtailed when those victims attacked, overpowered and fed on the physicians and scientists who were examining them. The exponential spread of the plague ensured that the same scenario was played out again and again. And of course the men and women who could have told us the most were always, by the nature of their work, the most exposed to infection.”

Caldwell speaks in the dry, inflectionless tone of a lecturer, but her expression hardens as she stares down at the thing that is both her nemesis and the focal point of her waking life.

“If you grow the pathogen in a dry, sterile medium,” she says, “it will eventually reveal its true nature. But its growth cycle is slow. Quite astonishingly slow. In the hungries themselves, it takes several years for the mycelial threads to appear on the surface of the skin – where they look like dark grey veins, or fine mottling. In agar, the process is slower still. This specimen is twelve years old, and it’s still immature. The sexual or germinating structures – sporangia or hymenia – have yet to form. That’s why it’s only possible to catch the infection from the bite of a hungry or direct exposure to its bodily fluids. After two decades, the pathogen still hasn’t spored. It can only bud asexually, in a nutrient solution. Ideally, human blood.”

“Why are you showing me this?” Justineau demands. “I’ve read the literature.”

“Yes, Helen,” Caldwell agrees. “But I wrote it. And I’m still writing it. Through the cultures I took from badly decayed hungries – cultures like this one – I was able to establish that the hungry pathogen is an old friend in a new suit.
Ophiocordyceps unilateralis
.

“We encountered it first as a parasite on ants. And its behaviour in that context made it notorious. Nature documentaries dwelled on every lurid detail.”

Caldwell proceeds to dwell on every lurid detail, but she really doesn’t need to. Back when she first identified the hungry pathogen as a mutant
Cordyceps
, she was so happy that she just had to share. She persuaded Beacon to approve an educational programme for all base personnel. They filed into the canteen in groups of twenty, and Caldwell started the show by playing a short extract from a David Attenborough documentary, dateline twenty years or so before Breakdown.

Attenborough’s perfectly pitched voice, honey from an English country garden, described with incongruous gentleness how
Ophiocordyceps
spores lie dormant on the forest floor in humid environments such as the South American rainforest. Foraging ants pick them up, without noticing, because the spores are sticky. They adhere to the underside of the ant’s thorax or abdomen. Once attached, they sprout mycelial threads which penetrate the ant’s body and attack its nervous system.

The fungus hot-wires the ant.

Images on the screen of ants convulsing, trying in vain to scrape the sticky spores off their body armour with quick, spasmodic sweeps of their legs. Doesn’t help. The spores have commenced digging in, and the ant’s nervous system is starting to flood with foreign chemicals – expert forgeries of its own neurotransmitters.

The fungus gets into the driving seat, puts its foot on the accelerator and drives the ant away. Makes it climb to the highest place it can reach – to a leaf fifty feet or more above the forest floor, where it digs in with its mandibles, locks itself immovably to the leaf’s spinal ridge.

The fungus spreads through the ant’s body and explodes out of its head – a phallic sporangium skull-fucking the dying insect from the inside. The sporangium sheds thousands of spores, and falling from that great height they spread for miles. Which of course is the point of the exercise.

Thousands of species of
Cordyceps
, each one a specialist, bonded uniquely with a particular species of ant.

But at some point a
Cordyceps
came along that was a lot less finicky. It jumped the species barrier, then the genus, family, order and class. It clawed its way to the top of the evolutionary tree, assuming for a moment that evolution is a tree and has a top. Of course, the fungus might have had a helping hand. It might have been grown in a lab, for any number of reasons; coaxed along with gene-splicing and injected RNA. Those were very big jumps.

“This,” Caldwell is saying, tapping the sealed lid of the fish tank, “is what’s inside the subjects’ heads. Inside their brains. When you walk into that classroom, you think you’re talking to children. But you’re not, Helen. You’re talking to the thing that killed the children.”

Justineau shakes her head. “I don’t believe that,” she says.

“I’m afraid it doesn’t matter what you believe.”

“They exhibit behavioural responses that have no bearing on the fungus’s survival.”

Caldwell shrugs off-handedly. “Yes, of course they do. For the moment. Waste not, want not.
Ophiocordyceps
doesn’t devour the entire nervous system all in one go. But if one of those things you think of as your pupils smells human flesh, human pheromones, it’s the fungus that you’ll be dealing with. The first thing it does is to consolidate its control of the motor cortex and the feeding reflex. That’s how it propagates itself – in saliva, mainly. The bite gives nourishment to the host and spreads the infection at the same time. Hence the extreme caution we take in the handling of the test subjects. And hence” – she sighed – “the need for this lecture.”

Justineau feels an intense desire to assert herself against a judgement that’s already been made. She takes hold of the lid of the fish tank and wrenches it open.

Caldwell gives a wordless yell as she recoils, hand clasped to her mouth.

Then she thinks about what she’s doing, and lowers her hand. She glares at Justineau, her cool detachment holed below the waterline.

“That was very stupid,” she says.

“But not dangerous,” Justineau points out. “You said it yourself, Caroline. No sex organs yet. No spores. No way for the fungus to spread in air. It needs blood and sweat and spit and tears. You see? You’re just as likely as anyone to make a false assessment – to see a risk where there really isn’t any.”

“It’s a poor analogy,” Caldwell says. There’s an edge in her voice you could part a hair on. “And overestimating risk isn’t even an issue here. The danger – all the danger – lies in ignoring it.”

“Caroline.” Justineau tries one last time. “I’m not arguing that we should stop the programme. Just that we should switch to other methods.”

Caldwell smiles, brittle, precise. “I’m open to other methods,” she tells Justineau. “That’s why I asked for a developmental psychologist to join the team in the first place.” The smile fades out, an inevitable ebb tide. “
My
team. Your methods are adjuncts to mine, called on when I need them. You don’t dictate our approach, and you don’t talk to Beacon over my head. Has it occurred to you, Helen, that we’re here under military rather than civilian jurisdiction? Do you ever think about that?”

“Not much,” Justineau admits.

“Well, you should. It makes a difference. If I do decide that you’re compromising my programme, and if I inform Sergeant Parks of that fact, you won’t be sent home.”

She fixes Justineau with a stare that’s incongruously gentle and concerned.

“You’ll be shot.”

Silence falls between them.

“I am interested in what’s going on inside their heads,” Caldwell says at last. “Mostly I find I can determine that by examining physical structures under a microscope. When I can’t, I look at your reports. And what I expect to find there is clear, rational assessment building to an occasional well-justified conjecture. Do you understand that?”

A long pause. “Yes,” Justineau says.

“Good. In that case, and as a starting point, I’d like you to list the subjects in order of their importance to your assessments – as of now. Tell me which ones you still need to observe, and how much you need them. I’ll try to take your priorities into account when I’m choosing the next subjects to be brought over here and dissected. We need masses of comparative measurements. We’re stonewalled, and the only thing I can think of that might bring us any new insights is bulk data. I want to process half the cohort in the next three weeks.”

Justineau can’t take that blow without flinching. “Half the class?” she repeats faintly. “But that’s … Caroline! Jesus…!”

“Half the cohort,” Caldwell insists. “Half of our remaining supply of test subjects.
The class
is a maze you’ve built for them to run through. Don’t reify it into something that merits consideration on its own account. I need the list by Sunday, but earlier is better. We’ll begin processing on Monday morning. Thanks for your time, Helen. If there’s anything that I or Dr Selkirk can do to help, just let us know. But the final decision is yours, of course. We won’t encroach on that.”

Justineau finds herself in the open air, walking in some random direction. Sunlight hits her face, and she swerves away from it. Her face is hot enough already.

Half of our remaining…

Her mind collides with the words, sends them careening out of reach.

Another time she might admire Caldwell’s brutal honesty about her own failings.
We’re stonewalled
. She identifies with the project so completely that vanity on her own account is impossible.

On the other hand:
the final decision is yours
. That’s pure sadism. Serve at my altar, Helen. You even get to choose the sacrifices, so how cool is that?

Half of…

Things will fall apart, and the centre won’t hold. Perforated with fears and insecurities, the class will tear along every fold. They’ll finally ask the questions Justineau can’t answer. She’ll have to choose between confession and evasion, and either one will probably kick her right over the edge of the catastrophe curve.

Which is maybe where she deserves to be. Child-killer. Facilitator of mass murder, smiling a Judas smile as she ticks the boxes. The thought of Parks putting a gun to her head has its own peculiar appeal at that moment.

Then she walks right into him, hard enough that they both stagger. He recovers first, grips her shoulders lightly to steady her.

“Hey,” he says. “You all right, Miss Justineau?”

His broad, flat face, made asymmetrical and inconceivably ugly by the scar, radiates friendly solicitude.

Justineau pulls out of his grasp, her own face twisting as her anger finds its level. Parks blinks, seeing the visceral emotion, uncertain where it came from or where it might be going.

“I’m fine,” Justineau says. “Get out of my way, please.”

The sergeant gestures over his shoulder, towards the fence at his back. “Sentry clocked some movement in the woods over there,” he says. “We don’t know if it’s hungries or what it is. Either way, perimeter’s off-limits for now. Sorry. That was why I tried to head you off.”

Movement in the middle distance, in the direction where he’s pointing, distracts her for a second so that she has to wrench her attention back.

She faces him, trying to take a breath that’s long and level, trying to pull all the slopping emotions back inside so he won’t see them in her face. She doesn’t want to be understood by this man, even on such a superficial level.

And thinking about what he’s already seen, what he might know or think he knows of her, makes her suddenly see the timing of her humiliation in a new perspective. When Parks saw her breaking the no-contact rule, he threatened to put her on a charge. But then nothing happened. Until now.

Parks went and told tales about her to Caroline Caldwell. She’s sure of it. The four-month gap between the Melanie incident and this dressing-down doesn’t dent that conviction. Things percolate slowly through bureaucracies, take their own sweet time.

She has to fight the urge to punch Parks full in his ruin of a face. Maybe find the flaw, the pressure point that will make him crumble into pieces and be gone out of her life.

“I’m still here, Sergeant,” she tells him, stung into defiance. “You took your best shot, and all she did was smack my hand and set me extra homework.”

Parks’ forehead creases, in the areas where it still can – where the scar tissue doesn’t render it permanently creased. “Sorry?” he says.

“Don’t be.” She starts to walk around him, remembers that she can’t keep going in this direction and turns, so she’s broadside on to him for a moment.

“I didn’t take any shot at all,” the sergeant says quickly. “I don’t report to Dr Caldwell, if that’s what you think.”

He sounds like he means it. He sounds like he really wants her to believe him.

“Well you should,” Justineau says. “It’s an excellent way of pissing me off. Don’t mess up your perfect score, Sergeant.”

Something like distress shows in Parks’ face now. “Look,” he says, “I’m trying to help you. Seriously.”

“To help me?”

“Exactly. I’ve clocked up a lot of years in the field. And I’ve survived more grab-bagger sweeps than almost anyone. I mean hard-core shit. Inner city.”

“So?”

Parks shrugs massively, is silent for a second as though he’s hit the limits of his vocabulary – which doesn’t strike her as too unlikely. “So I know what I’m talking about,” he says at last. “I know the hungries. You don’t live that long outside the fence unless you work out the moves. What you can get away with, and what’s going to get you killed.”