The Girl With All the Gifts(21)

Nice going, soldier. Because you couldn’t keep from observing, the grab-baggers suddenly get a whole slew of new orders. Bring us one of those kids. Let’s take a good long look at him/her/it.

And the techies looked, and then the scientists looked, and they got the itch to kill a few cats too. Hungries with human reactions? Human behaviours? Human-level brain functions? Hungries who can do something besides run and feed? And they’re running naked and feral through the streets of the inner cities, right alongside the regular variety? What’s the deal?

More orders. Requisition a base, a long way from anywhere. Mount a perimeter, and stand by. They’d been raiding the ragged hinterlands of Stevenage and Luton, so RAF Henlow seemed to fit the bill. It was more or less intact, it offered plenty of space both above the ground and in reinforced bunkers underneath it, and it had a functional airstrip.

They dropped in, and then they dug in. Disinfected. Decorated. Waited.

And in due course Dr Caldwell came along with her white coat and her bright red lipstick and her microscope, and a letter from Beacon with a whole lot of signatures and authorisations on it. “This is my show now, Sergeant,” she said. “I’ll take that building over there and the sheds on either side of it. Go get me some more of those kids. As many as you can find.”

Just like that. Like she was ordering fast food, back in the days when there was fast food and you could order it.

Looking back on it, that was the point where Parks’ life stopped making sense. When he stopped being a grab-bagger and became a hunter and trapper.

It’s not like he wasn’t good at it. Hey, he was shit-hot. He realised right out of the gate that you could spot the oddballs, the kids who were different, by the way they moved. Hungries toggle between two states. They’re frozen in place most of the time, just standing there like they’re never going to move again. Then they smell prey, or hear it, or catch sight of it, and they break into that terrifying dead sprint. No warm-up, no warning. Warp factor nine.

But the weird kids move even when they’re not hunting, so you can tell them apart. And they react to stuff that isn’t food, so you can get their attention–with a mirror, say, or the beam of light from a torch, or a piece of coloured plastic.

Cut them out of the pack. Not that there’s a pack exactly, because the hungries always treat other hungries like they’re part of the scenery. But get them to come out where they’re alone, and exposed. Then drop the nets.

He and his team took thirty in the space of about seven months. It wasn’t even hard once they got into the rhythm of it. Then Caldwell told them to stand down and wait for further orders. Said she had enough material to work with.

And how messed up is this? Suddenly Parks is in charge of a kindergarten. He finds himself defending a base that isn’t doing a damn thing apart from nursemaiding these little hungries. They’ve got their own rooms, the same pallet beds as the soldiers, weekly feeding (which if you ever want to eat again yourself, you don’t want to see), even a schoolroom.

Why a schoolroom?

Because Caldwell wants to know if these spooky little monsters can learn. She want to see inside their heads. Not just the hardware–she’s got her operating table for that side of things–but the squishy stuff too. Like, what are they thinking?

Here’s what Parks is thinking. The regular hungries are clean compared to these kid-shaped monstrosities. At least you can tell that the regular hungries are animals. They don’t say “Good morning, Sergeant” when you kneecap them.

There isn’t a whole lot more of that he can choke down, to be honest. The blonde one… Melanie. She’s test subject number one, for some reason, even though she was about the eleventh or the twelfth one he bagged. She scares the shit out of him, and he can’t explain why. Or maybe he can, and he doesn’t like to think about it. Certainly a part of it is that unfailing good-little-girl smarminess she’s got. An animal like that, even if it looks like a human being, should make meaningless sounds or no sounds at all. Hearing it talk just muddies the waters.

But Parks is a soldier. He knows how to shut up and do what he’s told. In fact, that’s his speciality subject. And he gets what Caldwell is doing. These kids–presumably the kids of junker families that got trapped and bitten and infected–seem to have some kind of partial immunity to the hungry pathogen. Oh, they’re still flesh-eaters. Still react in the same way to the smell of live meat, which is the sign by which ye shall frigging well know them. But the light inside their heads didn’t go out, for some reason–or not all the way out. They were living like animals when the grab-baggers found them, but they rehabilitate really nice and they can walk and talk and whistle and sing and count up to big numbers and all the rest of it.

Whereas their mummies and daddies are in the wind. If they all got taken and fed on as a family unit, the adults just went the same way as everyone else who gets bitten. They turned into full-on brain-dead monsters.

The kids got stuck halfway. So maybe they’re the best hope of finding an actual cure.

See? Parks is no fool. He knows what’s being done here, and he’s served that purpose silently and uncomplainingly. He’s served it for the best part of four years now.

Rotation was meant to happen after eighteen months.

There are other people in the same boat, and it’s fair to say that Parks is more worried about them than he is about himself. That’s not bleeding-heart bullshit; it’s just that he knows his own limits better than he knows theirs. There are twenty-eight men and women under his command (he doesn’t count Caldwell’s people, who mostly don’t know what an order is), and with that small a number, base security needs all of them to be combat-fit and ready to respond if a situation develops.