The Girl With All the Gifts(32)

Justineau slams the lab door in their faces. It’s not locked, but that’s a detail. Hungries are no better with locks than wild dogs would be. The door shudders from their repeated assaults, but it doesn’t open.

The women are in a short corridor, with the shower unit at the other end of it. Justineau is heading for the shower and the doors beyond, which she left wide open when she came in, but she slows and stops before she gets there. In the space between this block and the vehicle sheds, a running firefight is going on. The men she can see ducking and shooting and taking cover behind the angle of the next building are not Sergeant Parks’ men, in the khaki she’s always hated; they’re savages in motley, their hair blacked and sculpted with tar, machetes tucked into their belts.

Junkers.

While Justineau is still staring, two of the men leap into the air, back-flipping at impossible speed. The flash and roar of the grenade comes half a second later, and the peristaltic shudder of the shockwave a heartbeat after that.

Caldwell points to another door–maybe she says something too, but the wild carillon in Justineau’s ears blots out all other sounds. The door is locked. Caldwell rummages in her pockets, leaving dark red Bézier curves of blood on her white lab coat. Her hands, Justineau sees, are in a really bad state, flaps of skin hanging loose from deep incisions where she gripped the jagged glass sliver to hit out with it.

Pocket after pocket. Caldwell can’t find the key. She tears open the coat at last, tries her trouser pockets, and it’s there. She gets the door open and they’re in what turns out to be a storeroom, filled with a dozen or more identical grey steel shelf units. It’s a refuge.

It’s a trap. As soon as Caldwell locks the door from the inside, Justineau realises she can’t stay here. Melanie is wandering around somewhere outside, like Red Riding Hood in the deep, dark woods, surrounded by men who are firing automatic weapons.

Justineau has to find her. Which means she has to get outside.

Caldwell leans against the end of a shelf unit, either pulling herself together or retreating into some inner space that’s nicer than this one. Justineau ignores her, checks out the narrow room. There are no other doors, but there’s a window, high up on the wall. It will open on to the side of the building that’s closest to the perimeter fence and furthest from the fighting. From there, she could maybe make a run for it–back to the classroom block, where Melanie will have gone to ground if she was able to find her way back there.

Justineau starts to empty the nearest shelf unit, sweeping boxes and bottles, bags of surgical gauze, rolls of paper towel off the shelves on to the floor. Caldwell watches her in silence as she pulls the unit over to the window, where it can serve as a ladder.

“They’ll kill you,” Caldwell says.

“Theb fhtay hhhere,” Justineau snarls over her shoulder. But when she starts to climb, Caldwell steadies the unit with her shredded hands–then clambers up after her, emitting a little gasp of pain every time she has to grip the cold metal of the unit.

The window secures with a catch. Justineau releases it and tilts it open an inch. Outside, just a stretch of untrodden grass. The shouts and gunshots are deadened by distance.

She pushes the window fully open and climbs through, dropping down on to the grass. It’s still wet with morning dew, cold against her ankles. The ordinariness of that feeling is like a telegram from the other side of the world.

Caldwell has more trouble getting out, because she’s trying not to use her injured hands to support her weight. She falls heavily, unable to keep her balance, and sprawls full length in the grass. Justineau helps her up, none too gently.

From the corner, they can see right across the parade ground to the classroom block and the barracks proper. There are hungries everywhere, in tight groups and running hard. Justineau thinks they’re running at random, but then she sees the junker herders in their weird armour, driving them on with spear points, Tasers and good old-fashioned fire.

Clinically she notes that the junkers are all plastered with tar–not just their hair, but the flesh of their arms and hands, the weave of their Kevlar vests. It must do something similar to what the e-blocker spray does, masking the smell of their endocrine sweat so that the hungries don’t turn and swim up that chemical gradient all the way to their tormentors’ throats.

But mostly she thinks: hungries as bioweapons! Win or lose, the base is done for.

“I’m going to try to get across to the classroom block,” she tells Caldwell. “You should probably give it a few seconds, then head for the fence. At least some of them will be looking the other way.”

“The classroom block is underground,” Caldwell snaps. “There’s only one way in or out. You’ll be trapped.”

What a wonderful pair of scientists the two of them are. Assembling known facts into valid inferences. Forensic minds refusing to quit in the face of this utter f*cking nightmare.

Justineau doesn’t bother to answer. She just runs. She’s plotted a course and she sticks to it, giving the nearest pack of hungries a wide berth as they sweep on past her, heading for the barracks. The junkers who are herding them are too busy with what they’re doing to turn aside for her.

And their comrades, coming up behind them, are taking fire from both sides: Parks’ people are using the terrain, turning the open spaces between the wooden huts into killing grounds.