The Girl With All the Gifts(20)

The deadline that was set for her is coming on at a rush. She’s expected to choose which of the class will be disassembled on Caroline Caldwell’s table. She has no idea what she’ll do now. All her options seem to be barred in one way or another.

The third thing is almost banal, in comparison. It’s just that the movement she saw over Parks’ shoulder, when he was warning her away from the perimeter, was on the wrong side of the fence. That was what had distracted her, thrown her off her stride for a moment, after the two of them ricocheted off one another and recoiled.

A human figure had been watching the fence from the edge of the woods, almost out of sight among the trees and the waist-high undergrowth.

Not a hungry. A hungry wouldn’t hold a branch aside with his hand to maintain a clear line of sight.

A junker, then. A wild man, who never came inside.

And therefore, she reasons, not a threat.

Because all the threats she’s concerned about right now relate to friendly fire.





12


If Eddie Parks knows one thing, it’s that he’s sick of this detail.

He was okay with the retrieval runs, as far as that went. The grab-bagging, the soldiers called it. Dirty work, and about as dangerous as you can get, but so what? You knew what the risks were going to be, and the rewards. You weighed them in your hands, and they made sense. You could see why you were doing it.

And that was what kept you doing it, week in and week out. Going into areas where you knew damn well there’d be hungries around every corner. The inner cities, where the population density was highest and the infection spread quicker than the fear of it.

And your life was on the line with every choice you made, every step you took, because there were all kinds of situations you could walk into and not walk out of. The hungries in the city, Christ f*cking Jesus… they’re like statues, most of the time, because they don’t move unless something else moves. You’re sprayed from head to foot with e-blocker, so they can’t smell you, and you can walk right by them as long as you do it slow enough and smooth enough that you don’t flip their trigger.

You can get yourself in really deep.

Then some clumsy bastard trips over a loose paving stone, or sneezes, or just scratches his ass, and one of the hungries whips its head round, on the sound or the movement or whatever the hell, and once one of them clocks you, it’s monkey-see-monkey-do for all the rest. They go from zero to sixty in half a heartbeat, and they’re all running in the same direction. So then you’ve got three choices, two of which will reliably get you killed.

If you freeze, the hungries will roll over you like some kind of gangrenous tsunami. They’ve got your number now, and they won’t be fooled no matter what you smell like.

If you turn and run, they’ll take you down. You can build up a bit of a lead at first, and even think you’re winning, but a hungry can keep up that same loping run pretty much for ever. He’s never going to stop, he’s never going to slow down, and over the distance he will take you.

So you fight.

Broad sweeps, below the waist, full automatic. Bust their legs, and they’ve got to drag themselves on their hands to get to you. Changes the odds a little. And if you can get yourself into a narrow place, where they can only come at you one or two at a time, that helps too. But you would not believe how much damage those f*ckers will take and still keep moving.

And some days you’ll stir up a different kind of opposition. Junkers. Survivalist arseholes who refused to come into Beacon when the call went out, preferring to live off the land and take their chances. Most of the junkers stay well away from the cities, like any sane person would, but their raiding parties still tend to see any built-up area for fifty miles around their camp as their very own preserve and property.

So when a Beacon grab-bagger patrol meets a troop of junker scavengers, the fur is going to fly every time. It was a junker who gave Sergeant Parks his scar, which isn’t romantic and understated like a duelling scar but a horrific, pucker-edged trench that crosses his face like a bend sinister on an old coat of arms. Parks tends to gauge the mettle of a new recruit by how long they can look him in the eye first time around, before that monstrous thing makes them take a desperate, abiding interest in their own boots.

But what makes all the aggravation of grab-bagging worthwhile is the stuff that’s still sitting around in all those houses and all those offices, waiting to be taken. Old tech, computers and machine tools and comms hardware that hasn’t been touched since the Breakdown–stuff that you can’t even make any more. They’ve got people back at Beacon, tech people, who know exactly how this stuff works, but the knowledge isn’t any good without the infrastructure. It’s like there used to be a whole factory for every frigging circuit board and every frigging piece of plastic. And the people who used to work in those factories are the ones who right now are so eager to chew their way through your Kevlar to the tender parts underneath.

So that old stuff is literally priceless. Parks gets that. They’re trying to find a way to remake the world twenty years after it fell apart, and the goodies that the grab-bag patrols bring home are… well, they’re a rope bridge over a bottomless canyon. They’re the only way of getting from this besieged here to a there where everything is back in good order.

But he feels like they lost their way somewhere. When they found the first of the weird kids, and some grunt who’d obviously never heard about curiosity and the cat called in a f*cking observation report.