The Girl With All the Gifts(108)

Twenty feet in, Melanie finds the first fallen bodies. She slows to a halt, amazed at what she’s seeing. The hungries have fallen down in the middle of the street, or slumped at the bases of walls–just like the bodies they saw when they were walking into London. But there are so many more of them here! From their split skulls and exploded heads, grey stems about six inches in diameter have sprouted like the trunks of trees. The stems grow straight upwards to incredible heights, and the threads pour out from them at all angles in endless proliferation. Some of them connect to whatever other stems are nearest, making a dense net like a million spiderwebs all woven together. Others wrap around whatever is in their path, or if there’s nothing, they shelve gently down to the ground. Wherever the threads touch the ground, another trunk appears, but these trunks are a lot thinner and shorter than the trunks that grow straight out of the bodies of the hungries.

Melanie goes closer. She can’t help herself. The sad husks at the bottom of each fungus tree don’t scare her. There’s nothing of humanity left in them, nothing to remind anyone that they were once alive. They’re more like clothes that someone has taken off and left lying on the ground.

Close up, she can see the grey fruit that hangs on these ghost trees. She reaches up to touch one of the spherical growths, which is just a little higher up on the trunk than the top of her head. Its surface is cool and leathery, and gives very slightly under the touch of her fingers. She presses hard, and makes an indentation. When she takes her hand away, the mark slowly disappears. The surface of the ball is elastic enough to spring back into shape. After a slow count of ten, it looks exactly the same as it did before she touched it.

Melanie wanders on through the grey wilderness. It doesn’t seem to have a further side; it just keeps going. And it keeps getting thicker. After a while, there’s only just enough space between the trunks for her to slide her skinny body through, and the moonlight is dripping down like dirty water through a raft of threads so tightly intertwined they’re almost like a solid mass.

Melanie’s shoulder bumps into one of the grey balls and it falls to the ground with a muffled plop. She stoops to pick it up. There’s a puckered ring where it was attached to the trunk, but the rest of the surface is smooth and unbroken. She squeezes it in her hand, and once again it returns quickly to the shape it had before she touched it.

If she goes any further, she’ll be bumping into the trunks. She touches one and finds that it feels unpleasantly clammy. She recoils a little. She was expecting the trunks to be smooth and dry like the fruit they bear, which in Melanie’s opinion would have been a lot less disgusting.

Something moves off to her left and she starts violently. She thought she had this twilit world to herself. A strange figure stumbles towards her, silhouetted in the dull moonlight. From the neck downwards it looks like a man–but it has no shoulders or neck or head. Its upper body is just an undifferentiated lump.

She backs away from the thing, scared more than anything by its utter strangeness. But it’s not attacking her. It doesn’t even seem to know she’s there.

As it passes her, she recognises it for what it is. It’s a hungry whose torso has started to split open. The first foot or so of one of the upright trunks is thrusting upwards from its chest, splintered spars of rib protruding outwards from its point of origin. Threads have blossomed profusely from the trunk, disguising what’s left of the hungry’s head, which has been forced sideways at a steep angle by the relentless upward growth.

Melanie stares at the apparition, both relieved–because the horror of the unknown is more frightening than any horror you can understand–and revolted at this strange violation of human flesh.

The hungry shambles on past her, its zigzag course dictated by the trunks it bumps into and bounces off. It’s almost more ridiculous than it is horrible. It will fall down soon, Melanie imagines–and then the trunk will be pointing sideways. It will have to find some way to right itself.

This whole forest grew from the ruined dead. This is where the hungries end up after all their faithful service to the infection that made them what they are.

Melanie sees her future, and accepts it. But she’s not ready to die with so many important things still to be done.

She turns and walks back the way she came, following the tunnel of her own cleared path through the crowding grey filaments.





67


Dr Caldwell works on through the night, feverishly busy. The fever is literal, and it’s currently running at 103 degrees.

Extracting the hungry boy’s brain takes a lot longer without Dr Selkirk to help–and Dr Caldwell’s hands are so clumsy that it’s virtually impossible to take it out without damaging it. She does the best she can, removing most of the skull in inch-wide jigsaw pieces before she finally screws up her courage and severs the brain stem.

When she lifts it out, although her hands tremble violently, it comes clean.

She powers up the microtome and takes slices from the brain, choosing cross-sections that will allow her to examine most major structures. She mounts her slides, awed at how perfectly the microtome has done its job. The slices are exquisite, with no crush damage or smearing despite their ethereal thinness.

Caldwell labels each slide, and then examines them in sequence–a virtual tour of the hungry boy’s brain beginning at its base and proceeding upwards and forwards.