The Girl With All the Gifts(23)

“Lime, sir.” Gallagher is reproachful. “There’s a pit by the road there that we dug out back in April. We didn’t even half fill it yet. We rolled them in and shovelled three bags in on top of them, so they should render down nicely so long as it doesn’t rain.”

This purely operational stuff perks Gallagher up a little, but he becomes sombre again as he gets back to his own story. “After we were done, we went back to the hedge. The boss man and one of the other two were lying there on the ground, right where I’d seen them before. They were really badly chewed up, but they were still twitching. Then the boss man opened his eyes, and I verified––” Gallagher catches himself slipping back into report-speak, stops and starts again. “He was crying blood, the way they do sometimes when the rot’s just getting into them. It was obvious they were both infected.”

Parks is impassive. He saw that punchline coming. “Did you finish them off?” he asks–the bluntness deliberate. Call a spade a spade. Make Gallagher see that it’s all just business as usual. It won’t help him now, but it might take the edge off later.

“Barley–Private Barlow–decapitated them both with the second bloke’s machete.”

“Mask and gloves on?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you retrieved their kit?”

“Yes, sir. Handgun is well maintained, and there were forty rounds of ammo in one of the packs. Binoculars are a bit cack, to be honest, but the boss man had a walkie-talkie too. Nielson thinks it might work with our long-range sets.”

Parks nods approval. “You handled a tricky situation really well,” he tells Gallagher, and he means it. “If you’d frozen when you came through that hedge, the civilians would still have died–and most likely they’d have held you up long enough to kill you too. This is a better outcome all round.”

Gallagher says nothing.

“Think about it,” Parks persists. “These junkers were less than a mile away from our perimeter, armed and tooled up for surveillance. Whatever they were doing, they weren’t just out taking the air. I know you feel like shit right now, Private, but what happened to them isn’t down to you. Even if they were lily-white. Junkers choose to live outside the fences, so they take what comes with that.

“Go and get drunk. Maybe pick a fight with somebody or get yourself laid. Burn it off. But do not waste a bastard second of my time or yours with feeling guilty about this bullshit. Drop a penny in the poor box, move along.”

Gallagher comes to attention, seeing the dismiss looming.

“Now dismiss.”

“Yes, sir.”

The private rips off a smart salute. Mostly they don’t bother these days, but it’s his way of saying thanks.

Truth is, Gallagher may be green, but he’s far from the worst of an indifferent-to-sod-awful bunch of soldiers, and Parks can’t afford to have him join the walking wounded. If the lad had killed the junkers himself, gutted them and made balloon animals out of their colons, Parks would still have done his best to put a positive spin on it. His own people are his priority here, first and last.

But somewhere in the stack, he’s also thinking this: junkers? On his doorstep?

Like he didn’t have enough to bloody worry about.





13


The week goes by, slow and inexorable. Three Mr Whitaker days in a row reduce the class to unaccustomed lethargy.

Whether by accident or design, Sergeant stays away from Melanie. She hears his voice yelling transit in the mornings, but he’s never visible when she’s taken out from her cell, or when she’s brought back to it. Each time, she feels a surge of anticipation. She’s ready to fight him again, and declare her hate for him, and defy him to hurt her some more.

But he doesn’t come into her line of sight, and she has to swallow all those feelings back into herself the way a rat or a rabbit will sometimes reabsorb into its womb a litter of young that it can’t safely give birth to.

Friday is a Miss Justineau day. Normally this would be a cause of intense and uncomplicated joy. This time, Melanie is afraid as well as excited. She almost ate Miss Justineau. What if Miss Justineau is angry about that, and doesn’t like her any more?

The start of the lesson does little to reassure her. Miss J has come back unhappy and preoccupied, folded in on herself so that her emotions are impossible to read. She says good morning to the class as a whole, not to each individual boy and girl. She makes no eye contact.

She tests the children with short-answer and multiple-choice questions for most of the day. Then she sits at her desk and marks their answers, writing the test scores down in a big notebook while the class works on sums.

Melanie isn’t thinking much about the sums, which she finishes in a few minutes. They’re just easy calculus, most of them with single variables. Her attention is focused on Miss Justineau, and to her horror she sees that Miss Justineau is crying silently as she works.

Melanie searches her mind frantically for something to say. Something that might comfort Miss J, or at least distract her from her sorrows. If it’s the marking that’s making her sad, they can switch to a different activity that’s easier and more fun.

“Can we have stories, Miss Justineau?” she asks. Miss Justineau doesn’t seem to have heard. She goes on tallying up the test scores.