The Girl With All the Gifts(101)

None of this is perfect. It’s not as though she wants to commit what more or less amounts to murder. But her hypothesis is so huge in its implications that to shrink from murder would be a crime against humanity. She has a duty, and she has an interval of time in which she can still work. That interval is most likely measurable not in days, but in hours.

Caldwell has pulled back the baffles from the window in the lab so that she can peer out into the street and see the rescue party when it returns. But the pain in her hands and arms has exhausted her. Despite her best efforts, she dozes. She drifts in and out of consciousness. Every time she forces her eyelids open, they lower themselves again by subliminal increments.

After one of these times, Caldwell finds herself meeting–at a distance, through the window–the gaze of a small child, who is standing in a doorway almost directly opposite her.

A hungry, obviously. Age at time of primary infection, no more than five. Naked, scrawny and indescribably filthy, like a disaster victim in a charity appeal broadcast before the Breakdown, in those innocent days when a few thousand dead felt like a disaster.

The little boy is watching Caldwell avidly and unblinkingly. And he’s not alone. It’s late afternoon now, and the long shadows provide a lot of natural cover. But like the details in a puzzle picture, the other hungries emerge from the background one by one. An older, red-haired girl behind the rusting hulk of a parked car. A black-haired boy, older still, crouched in the remains of a shop window display with an aluminium baseball bat clutched in his hands. Two more behind him, in the shop itself, on hands and knees underneath a rack of sun-bleached and mouldering dresses.

A whole pack of them! Caldwell is enthralled. She’d always known, when Parks and his people said the supply of test subjects in the wild had dried up, that it could mean many things. One possibility–at the time she thought it implausible, but she’s not so certain now–was that the feral infected children had been intelligent enough to perceive the sergeant and his trappers as a threat and to move on to new hunting grounds.

Now Caldwell watches as the black-haired boy signals to the two behind him with a toss of the head, and they come up level with him to see what he’s seeing. He’s the leader, obviously. He’s also one of the very few who are not completely naked. He wears a camouflage jacket on his narrow, bony shoulders. At some point, he’s brought down a soldier and taken a fancy to his hide as well as his flesh. His face is a riot of smudged colour–a tribal display of status and potency.

Caldwell sees how the hungry children operate as a pack. How they signal using silent gestures and facial expressions. How they coordinate their efforts against this unfamiliar thing in their midst.

Perhaps it’s the sound that has brought them, the steady hum of the generator. Or perhaps they’ve been watching Rosie for a while now, having followed Justineau or Gallagher back here after one of their excursions. But whatever it was that attracted their attention, now they’ve seen her.

And having seen her, they’re stalking her.

Even though she’s immured behind unbreakable glass in an oversized battle tank whose armaments could blast the buildings all around into rubble and powder. Even though there’s no obvious way to reach her, and no way of quantifying the risk she poses. Even though, crucially, they can’t smell her through steel and glass and polymer and airtight seals.

They recognise her as prey, and they’re responding accordingly.

Caldwell is not immediately conscious of having made the decision as she rises to her feet and walks softly out of the lab towards the midsection door. But it’s a good decision. She can justify it on any number of grounds.

She returns the door-control functions to the panel beside the airlock itself. Then she slides the outer door open and closed again, several times over, testing its operation at various speed settings. She watches the hydraulic valves, as thick as her forearms, sliding smoothly backwards and forwards at the top and bottom of the door. Even at the third speed setting–there are seven that are faster–she estimates that the valves are exerting in excess of five hundred foot-pounds of pressure. The inner door, by contrast, is operated by simpler mechanical servos. It was never anticipated that the airlock would have to function as a second restraint cage.

Caldwell takes into account a number of highly pertinent factors. There’s no telling whether test subject one will even return from the expedition. If she does, it’s far from certain that the ambush Caldwell has already mounted will work. Or if it works, how any survivors would respond to the deaths of those caught in the airlock.

But the truth–or at least part of it–is that she can’t resist. These monsters are hunting her. She wants to hunt them in return and to enfold their efforts effortlessly in her wider stratagem.

With the outer door opened fully, she slides the inner airlock door open halfway. She stands up against the opening and waits.

Her body is still sticky with sweat from her earlier exertions. Her pheromones, she knows, are now spreading outward from her body on the turbulent gradients of the cooling afternoon air. With every breath, the hungry children are inhaling her. Sentient they may be, and cooperative, and sly. But their nature being what it is, it’s only a matter of time before they respond.

It’s the red-haired girl who moves first. She comes out from behind the car, walks straight into the open and advances towards Rosie’s inviting doorway.