The Girl With All the Gifts(38)

Justineau says nothing. She knows he’s right, and she’s not going to argue for suicide.

But now here comes Dr Caldwell again. “I think it’s a question of strict priorities, Sergeant Parks. My research was the entire reason for the base’s existence. However much risk is involved in retrieving the notes and samples from the lab, I believe we need to do it.”

“And I don’t,” Parks says. “Same thing applies. If your stuff is okay, it’s okay because they left it. I think they most likely did, because they wouldn’t have been looking for paper–except maybe to wipe their arses on. They were looking for food, weapons, petrol, stuff like that.” Unless they were looking for payback for the guys that Gallagher got killed, but he’s not going to say that right now.

“The longer we leave it—” Caldwell starts to object.

“So I’m making a judgement call.” Parks cuts her off. “We go south, and we keep on the radio. Soon as we’re close enough to get a ping from Beacon, we tell them what went down. They can airlift some people in–with some real firepower to back them up. They’ll get the stuff from your lab, and then probably swing by and pick us up on their way home. Or worst case, we don’t manage to make contact from the road, so we have to report once we get there. Same thing happens, but it happens a day or so later. Either way, everyone’s happy.”

“I’m not happy,” Caldwell says, coldly. “I’m not happy at all. A delay of even a day in recovering those materials is unacceptable.”

“What if I went to the base by myself?” Justineau demands. “You could wait for me here, and then if I didn’t come back—”

“That’s not going to happen,” Parks snaps. He doesn’t mean to rain on her parade, but he’s had enough of this bullshit. “Right now, those motherf*ckers don’t know how far we got, which way we went, or even whether we’re alive or dead. And that’s how I want it to stay. If you go back and they catch you, right away they’ve got a line on us.”

“I won’t tell them anything,” Justineau says, but he doesn’t even have to say anything to shoot that one down. They’re all grown-ups here.

Parks waits for further objections, because he’s pretty sure they’re coming. But Justineau is looking through the glass now at the little hungry girl, who seems to be drawing something in the dust on the Hummer’s bonnet. There’s a look on the kid’s face like she’s trying to figure out a hard word on a smudged page. And the same look, now he comes to think of it, on Justineau’s face. That gives him a slightly queasy feeling. Meanwhile, Caldwell is flexing her fingers as if she’s checking out whether they still work, so he gets a free pass on that one.

“Okay,” he says, “here’s what we’ll do. There’s a stream a couple of clicks west of here that was still running clean last I heard. We’ll drive there first, pick up some water. Then we go to one of the supply caches and get ourselves provisioned. We need food and e-blockers, mainly, but there’s a lot of other stuff that would come in pretty useful. After that, we light straight out. East until we hit the A1, then south all the way to Beacon. Either we skirt around London or we push straight through, depending. We’ll scope out the situation there once we get closer. Any questions?”

There are a million questions, he knows damn well. He’s also got a pretty shrewd hunch as to which one is going to come first, and he’s not disappointed.

“What about Melanie?” Justineau demands.

“What about her?” Parks counters. “She’s running no risk here. She can live off the land, like any hungry does. They prefer people, but they’ll eat any kind of meat once they get the scent of it. And you know first-hand now how quick they run. Quick enough to bring down most things, over the distance.”

Justineau stares at him like he’s talking in a foreign language. “Do you remember back just now when I used the word children?” she says. “Did it sink in at all? I’m not concerned about her intake of proteins, Sergeant. I’m concerned about the rat-bastard ethics of leaving a little girl alone in the middle of nowhere. And when you say she’s safe, I presume you mean from other hungries.”

“They ignore their own,” Gallagher pipes up–the first time he’s spoken. “Don’t even seem to realise they’re there. I think they must smell different.”

“But she’s not safe from the junkers,” Justineau goes on, ignoring him. “And she’s not safe from any other refusenik human enclaves there might be around here. They’ll just trap her and douse her with quicklime without even realising what she is.”

“They’ll know bloody well what she is,” Parks says.

“I’m not leaving her.”

“She can’t ride with us.”

“I’m not leaving her.” The set of Justineau’s shoulders tells Parks that she means it–that they’re at match point here.

“What if she rides on the roof?” Caldwell says, cutting through the impasse. “With the damage to the axle, I imagine we’ll be travelling quite slowly, and there are rails up there for her to hold on to. You could even put up the pedestal for her, perhaps.” They all look at her, and she shrugs. “I thought I’d made my position clear. Melanie is part of my research–possibly the only part that’s left. If we have to go to some trouble to bring her along with us, it’s worth it.”