The Girl With All the Gifts(103)

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.





63


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.