The Girl With All the Gifts(31)

“Target the live ones!” he bellows. “The junkers! Fire on the junkers!” But they only get in a couple of ragged volleys before he yells at them to fall back, to get away from the fence.

Because the fence is going to give, and they’re going to be neck deep in rotting cannibals.

They retreat in good order, firing as they go.

The wave hits. It doesn’t even slow. Hungries slam full-tilt into the mesh and into the concrete stanchions that support it. It leans inwards, groans and creaks, but seems to be holding. The front ranks of walking corpses are treading water.

But more and more hungries fetch up behind them, push against them, transmit their own weight and momentum to the point of impact, the flimsy barricade of woven wire links.

The concrete posts themselves are starting to list drunkenly. A stretch of fence goes down, suddenly unviable, as a fence post tilts clean out of the ground along with a hemispheric divot of earth.

Dozens of the don’t-know-they’re-dead come down with it, trampled and ground down and compressed to mincemeat. But there are plenty more where they came from. They rush forward, their pistoning feet threshing the remains of the fallen.

As quick as that, the hungries are through.





20


Justineau tries to stand. It’s not easy, because her guts are churning, her lungs are full of acid and the floor under her feet heaves like the deck of a ship. Her face feels like a mask of white-hot iron, fitted way too tight over her skull.

Things are moving around her, quickly, with no accompanying narrative apart from panting breath and a single muffled shriek. She’s been blind since Caldwell sprayed her, and although the initial rush of tears washed most of the pepper spray out of her eyes, they’re still swollen half shut. She sees blurred shapes, crashing against each other like flotsam in the wake of a flood.

She blinks furiously, trying to dredge up some more moisture from her now dry-baked tear ducts.

Two of the shapes resolve. One is Selkirk, on her side on the floor of the lab, her legs jackknifing in furious staccato. The other is a hungry which is kneeling astride her, stuffing her spilled intestines into its mouth in pink, sagging coils.

More hungries surge in from all sides, hiding Selkirk from view. She’s a honey-pot for putrescent bees. The last Justineau sees of her is her inconsolable face.

Melanie! Justineau thinks. Where’s Melanie?

The room is a sea of scrambling, clutching bodies. Justineau backs away from the feeding frenzy, almost backs into another. By the window of the room, Caroline Caldwell is fighting for her life with silent ferocity. Two hungries who came over the sill crawling on hands and knees, leaving pieces of themselves on the jagged edges of the broken glass, have gripped her legs and are swarming up her body. Their jaws are working like the interlocking scoops of mechanical diggers. Caldwell has got her hands on the tops of their heads, as though in benediction, but what she’s actually doing is pushing against them as hard as she can, trying desperately to stop them from bending forward and sinking their teeth into her. She’s losing that battle, inch by inch.

Justineau finds the fire extinguisher where she dropped it, its bright red paint calling out to her across the lab’s anodyne whites and greys. She picks it up, turns like a hammer-thrower and swings it underarm. It makes contact with a hollow clang, and the head of one of the hungries sags sideways, the neck snapped cleanly. It still doesn’t let go, but Caldwell’s right hand is freed because the thing’s jaws can’t be brought to bear now that its neck is no longer pulling its weight.

With the strength and resolution of sheer terror, Caldwell uses her free hand to grip a slender triangle of glass that’s still adhering to the window frame, and pulls it loose. Her own blood wells up between her fingers as she slashes at the other hungry again and again, flaying its face off its skull in broad strips.

Justineau leaves her to it. With the window right in front of her, she can orientate herself. She turns to face the operating table. Amazingly, her line of sight is clear. Most of the hungries are fighting over scraps of Jean Selkirk, which means they’re down on hands and knees, snouts in the trough.

The operating table is empty. The plasticated straps that had held Melanie immobile now hang useless, sheared clean through. The scalpel that Caldwell put down before she used the pepper spray is lying discarded at the head end of the table.

Justineau looks around wildly. She makes a sound like a moan, which is lost in the liquid snuffling sounds of the monsters’ banquet. The chaos of the room has resolved itself into simplicity. Selkirk hosting the feast. Caldwell carving at the face and upper body of the hungry that’s still blindly trying to ascend her, until it finally falls away, effectively peeled.

Melanie is nowhere.

Caldwell is free now, and she’s frantically gathering up notes and samples with her blood-slicked hands, trying to pile up too many things in her arms until they fall to the floor in a clattering cascade. The sound is loud enough to rouse the hungries who are eating Selkirk. Their heads jerk up and turn, left and then right, in eerie synchrony.

Caldwell is down on one knee, picking up the fallen treasures. Justineau grips her by her collar and hauls her upright.

“Come on!” she shouts. Or she tries to shout. But she’s swallowed some of the pepper spray, so her tongue is three times its normal size. She sounds like Charles Laughton in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Doesn’t matter. She’s hauling Caldwell to the door like a mother dragging a wilful child as the hungries surge up from the floor and trample over what’s left of Dr Selkirk in their eagerness to reach this new food source.