The Girl With All the Gifts(104)

Parks sees it in her face. “Okay,” he says. “Let’s get going.”

Justineau stares at him, wild-eyed. “She was pushing sixty miles an hour!” she says, her mouth twisted in a snarl. “She’s gone. There’s no way in God’s green earth we’re going to catch up with her.”

“Won’t know unless we try,” Parks counters. “Want to lie down and die, Helen, or give it a shot?”

“It’s going to come to the same thing either way.”

“Then die on your feet.”

“Please, Miss Justineau!” Melanie begs. “Let’s go a little way, at least. We can stop when it gets dark, and find somewhere to hide.” What she’s thinking is: they have to get out of these streets, where the hungry children who are just like her live and hunt. She thinks she might be able to protect Miss J against ordinary hungries, but not against the painted-face boy and his fierce tribe.

Sergeant Parks holds out a hand. Miss Justineau just stares at it, but he keeps it there in front of her, and in the end she takes it. She lets him haul her to her feet.

“How many hours of daylight have we got left?” she asks.

“Maybe two.”

“We can’t move in the dark, Parks. And Caroline can. She’s got headlights.”

Parks concedes the point with a curt nod. “We follow until it’s too dark to see. Then we hole up. In the morning, if there’s still a strong trail, we carry on. If not, we look for some tar or creosote or some other shit like that to mask our scent, the way the junkers do, and we keep on heading south.”

He turns to Melanie. “Go ahead, Lassie,” he says. “Do your stuff.”

Melanie hesitates. “I think…” she says.

“Yeah? What is it?”

“I think maybe I’ll be able to run a lot faster than the two of you, Sergeant Parks.”

Parks laughs–a short, harsh sound. “Yeah, I think so too,” he says. “We’ll do the best we can. Keep us in sight, that’s all.” Then he has a better idea, and turns to Justineau. “Let her have the walkie-talkie,” he tells her. “If we lose her, she can call us and talk us in.”

Justineau hands the rig to Melanie, and Sergeant Parks shows her how to send and receive with it. It’s simple enough, but designed for much bigger fingers than hers. She practises until she gets it right. Then Parks shows her how to hook it on to the waistband of her pink unicorn jeans, where it looks ridiculously large and cumbersome.

Miss Justineau gives her a smile of encouragement. Underneath it Melanie can see all her fears, her grief and exhaustion. How close she is to empty.

She goes up to Miss J and gives her a short, intense hug. “It’ll be all right,” she says. “I won’t let anything hurt you.”

It’s the first time they’ve hugged like this–with Melanie giving comfort rather than receiving it. And she remembers Miss Justineau making the same promise to her, although she couldn’t say exactly when. She feels a pang of nostalgia for that time, whenever it was. But she knows that you can’t be a child for ever, even if you want to be.

She sets off at a run, and slowly accelerates. But she holds herself to a speed that the two grown-ups can just about keep up with. At each junction she waits until they jog into sight before setting off again. Walkie-talkie or not, she’s not going to leave them to their own devices with the night coming on–a night that she knows contains so many terrible things.





64


Caroline Caldwell gets out of Rosie using the cockpit door rather than the midsection door. The midsection door still has the airlock attached and her hungry specimen jammed into it.

She walks twenty paces forward. That’s as far as she can go, more or less.

She stares at the grey wall for a long time. For whole minutes, probably, although she doesn’t really trust her time sense any more. Her wounded mouth throbs in time with her heartbeat, but her nervous system is like a flooded carburettor; the engine doesn’t catch, the confused signals don’t coalesce into pain.

Caldwell registers the wall’s construction, its height and width and depth–the depth is just an estimate–and the time it must have taken to form. She knows exactly what she’s looking at. But knowing doesn’t help. She’s going to die soon, and she’ll die with this… thing in front of her. This gauntlet, flung down by a bullying, contemptuous universe that allowed human beings to grope their way to sentience just so it could put them in their place that bit more painfully.

Caldwell makes herself move, eventually. She does the only thing she can think of to do. She picks up the gauntlet.

Returning to Rosie, she lets herself back in through the cockpit door, which she closes and locks. She goes through the crew quarters and the lab to the midsection. She stops briefly in the lab to replace her face mask, which was ripped when the slingshot stone smacked into it. She scrubs up and dons surgical gloves, takes a bone-saw from a rack and a plastic tray from a shelf. A bucket would be better, but she has no bucket.

The hungry she caught is still moving sluggishly, despite the horrific damage the door mechanism has done to the muscles and tendons of its upper body. Seen from this close, the size of the head in relation to the body suggests that it may have been even younger at the time of initial infection than Caldwell had previously estimated.