The Girl With All the Gifts(41)

“Is it too scratchy?” she asks.

Melanie shakes her head, and gives a smile–weak, but sincere. “It’s really soft,” she says. “And warm. Thank you, Miss Justineau.”

“You’re welcome, Melanie. Does it… smell okay?”

“It doesn’t smell of blood. Or of you. It doesn’t smell of anything very much.”

“Then I guess it will do for now,” Justineau says. “Until we can find something better.”

Parks has been waiting all this time, not even trying to look patient. Justineau climbs into the Humvee, giving Melanie a final wave. As soon as the door is closed, Melanie swarms up the outside of the vehicle and finds herself a comfortable place, wedged in behind the cover of the pedestal gun. She holds on tight as the Humvee starts to roll.

Now they’re doubling back on their own tracks, eastwards, to the ancient north–south slash of the A1. They take it slow, to avoid giving the rear axle any further shocks. And they’re careful to skirt around the towns. That’s where you always get the heaviest concentrations of hungries, Parks says, and the noise of the Humvee would bring them running. But all the same, they’re making good time.

For about five miles.

Then the Humvee rocks and yaws like a dinghy on a wild sea, pitching them out of their seats on to the floor. Caldwell gives an anguished howl as she steadies herself, unthinking, with her injured hands. She goes into a tight crouch around them, hugging them against her chest.

There’s a single, jolting crash, after which the Humvee starts up a different kind of shuddering, intense and agonising. A shriek like an air-raid siren splits the air. The axle’s gone, and they’re dragging their backside across the tarmac.

Parks slams on the brakes and brings them to a dead stop. They slew over, settle onto the road with a hydraulic sigh, more like an animal lying down than anything mechanical.

Parks sighs too. Braces himself.

Justineau has never felt anything for the sergeant up to now apart from resentment and suspicion–spiking into real hatred when he delivered Melanie into Caldwell’s hands–but in this moment she admires him. The loss of the Humvee is a crushing blow, and he doesn’t even take the time to curse about it.

He gets them moving. Gets them out of their dead transport. First thing Justineau does is to check on Melanie, who’s managed to hold on through all the bucking and shaking. She takes the girl’s hand briefly and squeezes it. “Change of plan,” she says. Melanie nods. She gets it. Without being asked, she climbs down again and grabs some distance, just as she did at the cache site.

Sergeant Parks throws open the boot, takes a backpack for himself and gives the other one to Gallagher. They’ll need as much water as they can take with them, but there’s no way they can carry those big drums. Everyone gets a canteen, fills it from one of the drums. Parks takes the fifth canteen himself (the possibility of him giving it to Melanie is never raised). Everyone except Melanie has a good, long swig from the half-empty drum, until their stomachs are uncomfortably full. When it’s mostly empty, Parks offers it to Melanie to finish, but she’s never drunk water in her life. The little moisture her body needs, she’s used to taking from live meat. The thought of pouring water into her mouth makes her wrinkle up her face and back away.

Everyone gets a knife and a handgun, the sheath and holster clipping right on to their belts. The soldiers take rifles too, and Parks scoops up a double handful of grenades like strange black fruit. The grenades are smooth-sided, not sculpted into lozenges like the ones Justineau has seen in old war movies. Parks also helps himself–after a moment’s thought–to the flare gun, which he slips into the backpack, and to a pair of walkie-talkies from under the Humvee’s dash. He gives one of these to Gallagher and hooks the other into his belt.

Into the backpacks too go the meagre food supplies, divided evenly between them. Justineau adds the first aid kit, despite its awkward bulk. Chances are pretty good that they’ll need it.

They work with feverish haste, even though the country road they’re on is silent except for birdsong. They take their cue from Parks, who is grim-faced and urgent, speaking in monosyllables, chivvying them along.

“Okay,” he says at last. “We’re good to go. Everybody ready to move out?”

One by one they nod. It’s starting to sink in that a journey you could do in half a day on good roads has just become a four-or five-day trek through terra completely incognita, and Justineau presumes that that’s as hard for the rest of them to come to terms with as it is for her. She was brought to the base by helicopter, directly from Beacon–and she lived in Beacon for long enough that it became her status quo. Thoughts from before that time, from the Breakdown, when the world filled with monsters who looked like people you knew and loved, and every living soul went scrambling and skittering for cover like mice when the cat wakes up, have been so deeply suppressed, for so long, that they’re not memories at all–they’re memories of memories.

And that’s the world they’re going to walk through now. Home is seventy-odd miles away. Seventy miles of England’s green and pleasant land, all gone to the hungries and as safe to wander in as it would be to dance a mazurka in a minefield. A bewildering prospect, even if that were all.

And Sergeant Parks’ face tells her, even before he speaks, that that’s not all.