The Girl With All the Gifts(100)

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.