The Girl With All the Gifts(28)

The door closes behind Sergeant. The two women begin to undress her.

They use scissors, cutting her out of her cotton shift.





17


For Helen Justineau, the first hint that something is wrong is when she’s walking down the corridor from the shower to the classroom. She looks for Melanie’s face in the mesh window of her door, but Melanie doesn’t appear.

She unlocks the classroom and stands at her desk while the children are wheeled in one by one. She says hello to each in turn. The twentieth child (the twenty-first, until Marcia was taken) ought to be Melanie, but it’s Anne. One of the deadpan soldier boys deposits her and immediately heads for the door.

“Hold on,” Justineau says.

The private stops, turns back to face her with minimal civility. “Yes, miss?”

“Where’s Melanie?”

He shrugs. “One of the cells was empty,” he offers. “I went on to the next one. Is there a problem?”

Justineau doesn’t answer. She leaves the classroom, walks out into the corridor. She goes to Melanie’s cell. Nothing to be seen there. The door of the cell stands open. The bed and the chair are both empty.

Nothing about this feels right. The soldier is at her back, asking her again if there’s a problem. She ignores him and heads for the stairs.

Sergeant Parks is standing at the top, talking in a low voice to a group of three soldiers who all look very scared–very far from business as usual. At another time that might give Justineau pause. At another time she’d at least wait for him to finish, but she barges right in.

“Sergeant,” she says. “Has Melanie been moved?”

Parks has seen her walk up, but he stares at her now as though he’s only just registered who she is. “I’m sorry, Miss Justineau,” he says. “We’ve got something of an emergency. Potentially. We’re clocking large number of hungries close to the perimeter.”

“Has Melanie been moved?” Justineau repeats.

Sergeant Parks tries again. “If you go back to the classroom, we can talk about this as soon as—”

“Just answer me. Where is she?”

Parks glances away, just for a second, then looks her square in the eyes. “Dr Caldwell asked for her to be sent over to the lab.”

Justineau’s stomach free-falls. “And you… you took her?” she asks stupidly.

He nods. “About half an hour ago. I would have told you, obviously, but class hadn’t started and I didn’t know where you were.”

But she should have known as soon as she saw the empty cell. Once it’s said, it becomes so blindingly obvious that she curses herself for wasting these few precious minutes. She’s off at a run toward the lab complex. Parks is shouting at her–something about needing to get inside–but there’ll be time for him later.

If she’s too late, all the time in the worthless f*cking world.





18


Dr Caldwell and Dr Selkirk wash Melanie all over her body, very thoroughly, with disinfectant soap that smells just like the spray from the showers. She submits to this in silence, her thoughts racing.

“Do you like learning about science, Melanie?” Dr Caldwell asks her. Dr Selkirk shoots Dr Caldwell a slightly startled look.

“Yes,” Melanie says guardedly.

When she’s clean, Dr Caldwell picks up some sort of tool about the size of a blackboard rubber. She presses on it, and it starts to hum in her hand. She puts it against the side of Melanie’s head, draws it across her scalp in short, straight lines. It sends vibrations through her skin into her skull.

Melanie is about to ask what this thing is, but then she sees Dr Selkirk lift up a handful of blonde hair and drop it into a plastic bin.

Dr Caldwell is thorough, going over the whole of Melanie’s head twice. The second time she presses harder and it actually hurts, just a little. Dr Selkirk scoops away more drifts of Melanie’s hair. Then she wipes her hands carefully with a wet paper towel taken from a dispenser on the wall.

Dr Caldwell applies bright blue paint to Melanie’s scalp, from a plastic jar labelled BACTERICIDE GEL E2J. Melanie tries to imagine what she must look like now, bareheaded and blue. She must be a little bit like a Pictish warrior. Mr Whitaker showed them some pictures of Picts, one time when his voice was blurry, and he couldn’t stop laughing at the phrase pictures of Picts. If someone went into battle naked, the Picts said he was sky-clad. Melanie has almost never been naked. It’s not a nice feeling at all, she decides; it makes her feel vulnerable and ashamed.

“I don’t,” she says.

“What?” Dr Caldwell sets down the brush and wipes her fingers against her white coat, leaving sky-blue streaks.

“I don’t like learning about science. I want to go back to the classroom, please.”

Dr Caldwell meets her gaze, for the first time. “I’m afraid that’s not possible,” she says. “Close your eyes, Melanie.”

“No,” Melanie says. She’s certain that if she does, Dr Caldwell will do something mean to her. Something that will hurt.

And suddenly, like seeing the other side of an optical illusion, she knows what that something will be. They’re going to cut her up and put pieces of her in jars like these pieces of other people all around her.