The Girl With All the Gifts(37)

“Not to me,” she says.





25


When he gets down under the Humvee and takes a good look at the rear axle, Parks swears.

Bitterly.

He’s only a middling mechanic, but he can tell that it’s pretty much screwed. It’s taken a good whack just off centre, presumably when they leapt the security ditch, and it’s all bent into a shallow V, with a small but visible crack in the metal at the impact point. They’re lucky to have got this far without it breaking in two. They sure as hell won’t make it much further. Not on their own, anyway. And Parks has done enough shout-outs by this time, on normal and emergency frequencies, to know that there’s no help coming from the base.

He debates with himself whether it’s worth looking at the engine. There’s something wrong there, too, that he might have a better chance of fixing, but the axle’s probably going to give long before that becomes an issue.

Probably. But not certainly.

With a sigh, he crawls out from under the Humvee and goes around to the front. Private Gallagher trails after him like a lost puppy, still begging for orders.

“Is it okay, Sarge?” he asks, anxiously.

“Just pop the bonnet for me, son,” Parks says. “We need to take a look at the insides, too.”

The insides look okay, remarkably. The straining sounds from the engine have an obvious cause, which is that one of the motor mounts has been unscrewed. The engine block is hanging at an angle, vibrating against the top of the wheel arch where it’s touching. It would have torn itself to pieces eventually, but it doesn’t seem to have done much real damage yet. Parks gets the socket set out of the tool locker on the side of the vehicle and puts a new bolt through the mount, locking the engine back into place.

He takes his time, because once he’s finished, he’s got to start making decisions about all this other shit.


He holds the briefing inside the Hummer to lengthen the odds against nasty surprises, and he makes the little hungry kid sit outside on the bonnet.

That’s the way he thinks of it, as a briefing. He’s the only soldier here except for Gallagher, who’s too young to have an opinion, let alone a plan. So it’s going to have to be Parks who calls the shots.

That’s not how it goes down, though. The civilians have ideas of their own–always an omen of disaster and heartache in Parks’ book–and they’re not shy about expressing them.

Starting from when Parks says they’re going to head south. It makes perfect sense–most likely it’s their only chance–but as soon as he says it, they’re up in his face.

“All my notes and samples are at the base!” Dr Caldwell says. “They have to be retrieved.”

“There are thirty kids there, too,” Justineau adds. “And most of your men. What are we going to do? Just walk away from them?”

“That’s exactly what we’re going to do,” Parks tells them. “If you shut up, I’ll tell you why. I’ve been up on that radio every ten or fifteen minutes since we stopped. Not only is there no answer from the base, there’s no answer full stop. Nobody else got out of there. Or if they did, they got out without wheels or comms, which means they might just as well be on another planet as far as we’re concerned. There’s no way to get their attention right now without getting the junkers bouncing at us too. If we meet them on the road, that’s great. Otherwise, we’re alone, and the only sensible thing to do is to head for home fires. For Beacon.”

Caldwell doesn’t answer. She’s unfolded her arms for the first time and she’s taking a furtive, fearful look at her injuries, like a poker player lifting the corners of his cards to see what Lady Luck has sent along.

But Justineau just keeps going at it, which is pretty much what Parks expects from her by this point. “What if we wait for a few days, and then start back towards the base? We can take it slowly, and scout out the ground as we go. If the junkers are still in possession, we back off. But if it’s clear, we can go on in. Maybe just me and Dr Caldwell, while you stay back and cover us. If the kids are still alive in there, I can’t just leave them.”

Parks sighs. There’s so much craziness in this one short speech, it’s hard to know which way to come at it. “Okay,” he says. “First off, they were never alive to start with. Second—”

“They’re children, Sergeant.” There’s a vicious edge to her voice. “Whether they’re hungries or not isn’t the issue.”

“Begging your pardon, Miss Justineau, it’s very much the issue. Being hungries, they can live for a really long time without food. Maybe indefinitely. If they’re still locked up in that bunker, they’re safe. And they’ll stay safe until someone opens it up. If they’re not, the junkers probably just added them into that stampede they’ve got going, in which case they’re not our problem any more. But I’ll tell you what is. You’re talking about sneaking up close to that base. Scoping it out. How exactly do you propose to do that?”

“Well, we come up through…” Justineau starts, but she stops right there because she’s seen it.

“No way to be quiet if we bring the Hummer,” Parks says, voicing what she’s just now getting around to thinking. “They’ll hear us coming from a couple of miles off. And if we do it without the Hummer, then we’re bollock naked in an area that’s just had a couple of thousand hungries set loose in it. I wouldn’t give much for our chances.”