The Girl With All the Gifts

by M. R. Carey

  But where else is there?

  “The Doc’s a real character, isn’t she?” Parks muses, leaning over the parapet wall and staring out into the darkness. Moonlight paints the town in woodcut black and white like a picture from a book. Black predominates, turning the streets into unfathomable riverbeds of rushing air.

  “That’s one word for what she is,” Justineau says.

  Parks laughs, jokingly raises the glass – like they’re toasting their shared opinion of Caroline Caldwell. “Truth is,” he says, “in a way I’m glad the whole thing is over. The base, I mean, and the mission. Not glad we’re on the run, obviously, and I’m praying we’re not the only ones who got away. But I’m glad I don’t have to do that any more.”

  “Do what?”

  Parks makes a gesture. In the near dark, Justineau can’t see what gesture it is. “Keep a lid on the madhouse. Keep the whole place ticking over, month after month, on string and good intentions. Christ, it’s amazing we lasted as long as we did. Not enough men, not enough supplies, no fucking communications, no proper chain of command…”

  He seems to stop very suddenly, which makes Justineau go back over his words to figure out which ones he wishes he hadn’t said. “When did communications stop?” she asks him.

  He doesn’t answer. So she asks again.

  “Last message from Beacon was about five months back,” Parks admits. “Normal signalling wavelengths have been empty ever since.”

  “Shit!” Justineau is deeply shaken. “So we don’t even know if … Shit!”

  “Most likely it just means they relocated the tower,” Parks says. “Wouldn’t even have to be far. The goosed-together crap we’re using for radios, they don’t work unless they’re pointed right at the signal source. It’s like trying to shoot a basketball into a hoop across sixty bloody miles.”

  They fall silent, contemplating this. The night seems wider now, and colder.

  “My God,” Justineau says at last. “We might be the last. The four of us.”

  “We’re not the last.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Yeah, I do. The junkers are doing fine.”

  “The junkers…” Justineau’s tone is sour. She’s heard stories, and now she’s seen them for herself. Survivalists who’ve forgotten how to do anything else besides survive. Parasites and scavengers almost as inhuman in their own way as Ophiocordyceps. They don’t build, or preserve. They just stay alive. And their ruthlessly patriarchal structures reduce women to pack animals or breeding stock.

  If that’s humanity’s last, best hope, then despair might actually be preferable.

  “There’ve been dark ages before,” Parks says, reading her a lot better than she likes. “Things fall down, and people build them up again. There’s probably never been a time when life was just … steady state. There’s always some crisis.

  “And then there’s the rest of the world, you know? Beacon was in touch with survivor communities in France, Spain, America, all kinds of places. The cities were hit worst – any place where there was a whole bunch of people crammed in together – and a lot of infrastructure fell with the cities. In less developed areas, the contagion didn’t spread so fast. There could be some places it never even reached at all.”

  Parks fills her glass.

  “I wanted to ask you something,” he says.

  “Go on.”

  “Yesterday, you said you were ready to take the kid and split up from the rest of us.”

  “So?”

  “Did you mean it, by the way? That’s not the question, but would you really have cut loose and tried to make it back to Beacon on your own?”

  “I meant it when I said it.”

  “Yeah.” He takes a sip of his brandy. “Thought so. Anyway, you called me something, just before you shoved your gun in Gallagher’s face. It didn’t make sense to me at the time. You said we were hard-wired soldier boys. What does hard-wired mean?”

  Justineau is embarrassed. “It’s sort of an insult,” she says.

  “Yeah, well I’d have been surprised if it was a kiss on the cheek. I was just curious. Does it mean like we’re really ruthless or something?”

  “No. It’s a term from psychology. It describes a behaviour that you’re born with and can’t change. Or that’s programmed into you so you don’t even think about it. It’s just automatic.”

  Parks laughs. “Like the hungries,” he suggests.

  Justineau is a little abashed, but she takes it on the chin. “Yes,” she admits. “Like the hungries.”

  “You give good trash talk,” Parks compliments her. “Seriously. That’s outstanding.” He tops up her glass again.

  And puts his arm around her shoulder.

  Justineau pulls away quickly. “What the hell is this?” she demands.

  “I thought you were cold,” Parks says, sounding surprised. “You were shivering. Sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

  For a long time she just stands there staring at him, in dead silence.

  Then she speaks. And there’s only one thing she can think of to say.

  Spits it out at him, like she wants to spit out, retrospectively, the booze, the memory, the last three years of her life.

  “You ever kill a kid?”

  40

  The question hits Parks squarely between the eyes.

  He was feeling pretty mellow up to this point. The brandy has soaked into him, dulling the pain from the many tiny shrapnel wounds he took in his legs and lower back when the stairs went to pieces. And here he thought the two of them were getting along, but no. The teacher’s got him clearly defined in her personal encyclopaedia. For Parks, Sergeant see bastard, bloodthirsty. He’s got a range of answers for this one, most of which would involve reminding her how she’s been able to stay off the hungries’ lunch menu for the last three years. Where her computer came from, and most of the other handy little gadgets that let her do her job. Why Beacon is still standing – if it is – for them to come home to.

  But skip it. This isn’t going where he was hoping it would, and there’s nothing to be gained by telling this very attractive woman that she’s both a hypocrite and a whole lot stupider than he thought. It will only make the journey that bit harder.

  So he writes it off and heads for the fire door. “I’ll leave you to enjoy the view,” he says over his shoulder.

  “I mean, before the Breakdown,” Justineau says to his back. “It’s a straight question, Parks.”

  Which makes him stop, and turn around again. “What the hell do you think I am?” he asks her.

  “I don’t know what you are. Answer the question. Did you?”

  He doesn’t need to think about the answer. He knows where his lines are. They’re not built to move, the way some people’s are.

  “No. I’ve shot hungries as young as five or six. You don’t have much choice when they’re trying to eat you alive. But I never killed a kid who you could really say was still alive.”

  “Well, I did.”

  Now it’s her turn to turn away. She tells him the story without ever making eye contact with him, even though the rampart of a nearby chimney stack throws their faces into shadow and makes eye contact conditional in any case. In the confessional, you never see the priest’s face. But Parks is willing to bet that no priest ever had a face like his.

  “I was driving home. After a party. I’d been drinking, but not that much. And I was tired. I was working on a paper, and I’d had a couple of weeks of early mornings and late nights, trying to bring it in. None of this matters. It’s just … you know, you try to make sense of it, afterwards. You look for reasons why it happened.”

  The words come out of Helen Justineau in a flat monotone. Parks thinks of Gallagher’s written report, with its proceeding tos and its thereupons. But Justineau’s bowed head and the tightness of her grip on the parapet wall add their own commentary.

  “I was driving along this road. In Hertfordshire, between South Mimms and Potter
s Bar. A few houses, every now and then, but mostly miles of hedges, then a pub, then some more hedges. I wasn’t expecting … I mean, it was late. Way after midnight. I didn’t think anyone at all would be out, still less…

  “Someone ran into the road in front of me. He came through a gap in one of the hedges, I think. There wasn’t anywhere else he could have come from. He was just there, suddenly, and I hit the brakes but I was already right on top of him. It didn’t make a bit of difference. I must have been going over fifty when I hit him, and he just … he bounced off the car like a ball.

  “I stopped, a long way up the road. A hundred yards or so. I got out, and came running back. I was hoping, obviously … but he was dead, no question. A boy. About eight or nine years old, maybe. I’d killed a child. Broken him in pieces, inside his skin, so his arms and legs didn’t even bend the right way.

  “I think I stayed there a long time. I was shaking, and crying, and I couldn’t … I couldn’t get up. It felt like a long time. I wanted to run away, and I couldn’t even move.”

  She looks at the sergeant, now, but the darkness hides her expression almost completely. Only the twisted line of her mouth shows. It reminds him, right then, of the line of his scar.

  “But then I did,” she says. “I did move. I got up, and I drove away. Locked my car in the garage and went to bed. I even slept, Parks. Can you believe that?

  “I never did make up my mind what to do about it. If I confessed, I’d most likely go to jail, and my career would be over. And it wouldn’t bring him back, so what would be the point? Of course, I knew damn well what the point was, and I picked up that phone about six or seven times in the next couple of days, but I never dialled. And then the world ended, so I didn’t have to. I got away with it. Got away clean.”

  Parks waits a long while, until he’s absolutely certain that Justineau’s monologue is finished. The truth is, for most of the time he’s been trying to figure out what it is exactly that she’s trying to tell him. Maybe he was right the first time about where they were heading, and Justineau airing her ancient laundry is just a sort of palate-cleanser before they have sex. Probably not, but you never know. In any case, the countermove to a confession is an absolution, unless you think the sin is unforgivable. Parks doesn’t.

  “It was an accident,” he tells her, pointing out the obvious. “And probably you would have ended up doing the right thing. You don’t strike me as the sort of person who just lets shit slide.” He means that, as far as it goes. One of the things he likes about Justineau is her seriousness. He frigging flat-out hates frivolous, thoughtless people who dance across the surface of the world without looking down.

  “Yeah, but you don’t get it,” Justineau says. “Why do you think I’m telling you all this?”

  “I don’t know,” Parks admits. “Why are you telling me?”

  Justineau steps away from the parapet wall and squares off against him – range, zero metres. It could be erotic, but somehow it’s not.

  “I killed that boy, Parks. If you turn my life into an equation, the number that comes out is minus one. That’s my lifetime score, you understand me? And you … you and Caldwell, and Private Ginger fucking Rogers … my God, whether it means anything or not, I will die my own self before I let you take me down to minus two.”

  She says the last words right into his face. Sprays him with little flecks of spit. This close up, dark as it is, he can see her eyes. There’s something mad in them. Something deeply afraid, but it’s damn well not afraid of him.

  She leaves him with the bottle. It’s not what he was hoping for, but it’s a pretty good consolation prize.

  41

  Caroline Caldwell waits until the sergeant and Justineau leave the room. Then she gets up quickly and goes through into the kitchen.

  She saw the Tupperware boxes earlier, stacked in the furthest cupboard along – ranged in order of size, so they formed a steep-sided pyramid. Nobody else spared them a second glance, because the boxes were empty. But Caldwell noted them with a small surge of pleasure. Every so often, even now, the universe gives you exactly what you need.

  She takes six boxes of the smallest size and six teaspoons, dropping them one by one into the pockets of her lab coat. She brings a torch, too, but doesn’t turn it on until she reaches her destination and closes the door.

  She breathes in shallow sips. The smell of the human remains, and of years of enclosed decay, freights the air so heavily it’s almost a physical presence.

  With the spoons, Caldwell takes a range of samples from the hungry that was killed by Sergeant Parks. She’s only interested in brain tissue, but multiple samples mean more chance of getting at least one that’s not too badly contaminated by flora and fauna from skin, clothes or ambient air.

  After sealing each container carefully, she puts them back into her pockets. She discards the soiled spoons, for which she has no further use.

  She thinks as she works: I should have done this years ago. Men like the sergeant have their uses, and she knows she could never have collected the test subjects by herself. But if she’d been there with the trappers as part of the team, she wouldn’t have had to rely on their inadequate observations and unreliable memories.

  So she wouldn’t have wasted so much time exploring blind alleys.

  She would have known, for example, that although most hungries have only the two states – the rest state and the hunting state – some have a third state that corresponds to a degraded version of normal consciousness. They can interact with the world around them, fitfully and partially, in ways that echo their behaviour before they were infected.

  The woman with the baby carriage. The singing man, with his wallet full of photos. These are trivial examples, but they represent something momentous. Caldwell is very close, she knows, to an unprecedented breakthrough. She can’t do anything with these samples until she gets back to Beacon and has access to a microscope, but an idea is forming in her mind as to what it is she should be looking for. What shape her research will take, once she’s back in a lab and has everything she needs.

  Including, of course, test subject number one.

  Melanie.

  42

  Justineau is roused from sleep by a hand shaking her shoulder. She panics momentarily, thinking that she’s being attacked, but it’s Parks she’s struggling against, Parks’ grip that she’s trying to slap away. And it’s not just her. He’s waking everyone, telling them to get their arses over to the window. The sun has come up on a pretty ugly and depressing state of affairs, and they need to see it.

  The hungries who chased them the day before have not dispersed. They stand two or three deep along the length of the fence around Wainwright House, most of them having stopped dead when they hit that barrier.

  The downstairs hall is full of those who didn’t stop – who chased their human quarry all the way inside. From the stump of the top stair, you can stand and look down on a crowd of gaunt, gaping monsters, standing shoulder to shoulder like the audience for some sell-out event.

  Which would be breakfast.

  Tense and scared, the four of them canvass possibilities. They can’t shoot their way out, obviously. They could waste all their ammunition and not even make a dent in those numbers. Besides, loud noise was the trigger that got them into this mess in the first place; producing more of it runs the risk of attracting more monsters from even further afield.

  Justineau wonders if maybe they can use that.

  “If you were to throw some hand grenades,” she suggests to Parks, “say, from the top of the roof. The hungries will target on the sound, right? We could draw them off, and then when the fence is clear we just run in the opposite direction.”

  Parks spreads his empty hands. “No grenades,” he says. “I just had the ones on my belt, and I used them all when I pulled up the drawbridge last night.”

  Gallagher opens his mouth, shuts it, tries again. “Could make some Molotovs?” he suggests. He nods toward the kitchen. �
��There’s bottles of cooking oil in there.”

  “I don’t believe breaking bottles would make a particularly loud noise,” Dr Caldwell says acerbically.

  “It might be loud enough,” Parks muses, but he doesn’t sound convinced. “Even if it wasn’t, we could set fire to the fuckers and clear a bit of space for ourselves that way.”

  “Not the ones downstairs in the hallway,” Caldwell counters. “I don’t relish the prospect of being trapped in a burning building.”

  “And there’d be smoke,” Justineau says. “Probably a lot of it. If the junkers are still looking for us, we’d be putting up a big sign telling them where we are.”

  “Just empty bottles, then?” Gallagher says. “No oil. We try to draw them away with the sound.”

  Parks looks out of the window. He doesn’t even need to say it. The distance from the roof and windows of the house to the pavement outside the fence is about thirty yards. You could throw a bottle that far, but you’d need to put your shoulder into it, and you’d want luck and the wind to both be with you. If the thrown bottles fall short, they’ll just entice the hungries who stopped at the gates to come on inside.

  Same thing would have gone for grenades too, of course. They probably would have done more harm than good.

  They go back and forth, but nobody can suggest an easy or obvious way out. They’ve let themselves get cornered, by predators who won’t lose interest or wander away. Waiting this out isn’t an option, and all the other options look bad.

  Justineau goes to check on Melanie. The girl is already on her feet, looking out of the window, but she turns at the sound of footsteps. Probably she’s heard their conversation in the next room. Justineau tries to reassure her. “We’ll think of something,” she says. “There’s a way out of this.”