The Girl With All the Gifts(117)

“Good,” Sergeant says. And then he’s quiet for a long time. “Listen,” he says at last. “Could you… Kid, listen. Could you do me a favour?”

“What is it?” Melanie asks.

Sergeant takes his sidearm out of its holster. He has to reach across his body to do this with his left hand. He ejects the empty magazine, and gropes around in his belt until he finds a fresh one, which he snaps home. He shows Melanie where to put her fingers, and he shows her how to take off the safety. He chambers a round.

“I’d like…” he says. And then he goes quiet again.

“What would you like?” Melanie asks him. She’s holding the big gun in her tiny hands and she knows, really, what the answer is. But he has to say it so she’s sure she’s right.

“I’ve seen enough of them to know… I don’t want that,” Sergeant says. “I mean…” He swallows noisily. “Don’t want to go out like that. No offence.”

“I’m not offended, Sergeant.”

“I can’t shoot left-handed. Sorry. It’s a lot to ask.”

“It’s all right.”

“If I could shoot left-handed…”

“Don’t worry, Sergeant. I’ll do it. I won’t leave you until it’s done.”

They sit side by side while the dawn comes up, the sky lightening by such tiny increments that you can’t tell when the night stops and the day begins.

“We burned it?” Sergeant asks.

“Yes.”

He sighs. The sound has a liquid undertow.

“Bullshit,” he groans. “This stuff in the air… it’s the fungus, right? What did we do, kid? Tell me. Or I’ll take that gun away from you and send you to bed early.”

Melanie resigns herself. She didn’t want to trouble him with this stuff when he’s dying, but she won’t lie to him after he’s asked her for the truth. “There are pods,” she says, pointing towards where the fungus wall is still burning. “In there. Pods full of seeds. Dr Caldwell said this was the fungus’s mature form, and the pods were meant to break open and spread the seeds on the wind. But the pods are very tough, and they can’t open by themselves. Dr Caldwell said they needed something to give them a push and make them open. She called it an environmental trigger. And I remembered the trees in the rainforest that need a big fire to make their seeds grow. I used to have a picture of them, on the wall of my cell back at the base.”

Parks is struck dumb with the horror of what he’s just done. Melanie strokes his hand, contrite. “That’s why I didn’t want to tell you,” she says. “I knew it would make you sad.”

“But…” Parks shakes his head. As hard as it is for her to explain, it’s a lot harder for him to understand. She can see that it’s hard for him even to frame the words. Ophiocordyceps is demolishing the parts of his mind it doesn’t need, leaving him less and less to think with. In the end he settles for, “Why?”

Because of the war, Melanie tells him. And because of the children. The children like her–the second generation. There’s no cure for the hungry plague, but in the end the plague becomes its own cure. It’s terribly, terribly sad for the people who get it first, but their children will be okay and they’ll be the ones who live and grow up and have children of their own and make a new world.

“But only if you let them grow up,” she finishes. “If you keep shooting them and cutting them into pieces and throwing them into pits, nobody will be left to make a new world. Your people and the junker people will keep killing each other, and you’ll both kill the hungries wherever you find them, and in the end the world will be empty. This way is better. Everybody turns into a hungry all at once, and that means they’ll all die, which is really sad. But then the children will grow up, and they won’t be the old kind of people but they won’t be hungries either. They’ll be different. Like me, and the rest of the kids in the class.

“They’ll be the next people. The ones who make everything okay again.”

She doesn’t know how much of this Sergeant has even heard. His movements are changing. His face slackens and then twists by turns, his hands jerking suddenly like the hands of badly animated puppets. He mutters “Okay” a few times, and Melanie thinks that might mean he gets what she said. That he accepts it. Or it might just mean that he’s remembered she was talking to him and wants to reassure her that he’s still listening.

“She was blonde,” he says suddenly.

“What?”

“Marie. She was… blonde. Like you. So if we’d had a kid…”

His hands circle each other, searching for a meaning that evades them. After a while he goes very still, until the sound of a bird singing on a wire between the houses makes him sit bolt upright and swivel his head, left and then right, to locate the source of the sound. His jaw starts to open and close, the hunger reflex kicking in sudden and strong.

Melanie pulls the trigger. The soft bullet goes into Sergeant’s head and doesn’t come out again.





72


Helen Justineau comes back to consciousness like someone trudging home after a twenty-mile hike. It’s exhausting, and it’s slow. She keeps seeing familiar landmarks, and thinking that she must be almost there, but then she’ll get lost again and have to keep slogging on through her own shattered thoughts–reliving the events of the night in a hundred random resequencings.