The Girl With All the Gifts(42)
“You still dead set against cutting the kid loose?” he asks her.
“Yes.”
“Then I’m laying down some conditions.”
He goes around to the side of the Humvee. There’s another locker there, that nobody has opened yet. It turns out to be full of the highly specialised kit that Parks and his people used to use, way back in the day, when they raided the towns of Herts, Beds and Bucks for the high-functioning hungries that Caroline Caldwell was so eager to meet. Restraint harnesses, handcuffs, stun batons, telescoping poles with lasso collars at their business end; a whole chandler’s shop full of ways to bring dangerous animals in alive, with minimal risk to their handlers.
“No,” Justineau says, her throat dry.
But Melanie, when she sees this filthy arsenal, says yes just as quickly, just as firmly. She looks Parks in the eye, appraising, maybe approving. “It’s a good idea,” she says. “To make sure I can’t hurt anyone.”
“No,” Parks says. “The good idea would be something else entirely. This is just making the best of a bad job.” Justineau is in no doubt about his meaning. He’d like to put a bullet in Melanie’s head and leave her by the roadside. But given that the civilians have joined forces against him, given that both Caldwell and Justineau, for their different reasons, want Melanie to stay on as a member of their party, this is his grudging compromise.
The two soldiers cuff Melanie’s hands behind her back. They attach an adjustable leash to the chain of the cuffs, and play it out to about two metres. Then they put a mask over the lower half of the girl’s face, which looks something like a dog’s muzzle or a medieval scold’s bridle. It’s made for an adult but fully adjustable, and they lock it really tight.
When they start to attach a hobble to Melanie’s ankles, which will allow her to walk but not to run, Justineau steps in. “Forget it,” she snaps. “Do I have to keep reminding you that we’re running from junkers as well as hungries? Making sure Melanie can’t bite is one thing. Making sure she can’t run either–that’s just killing her without wasting a bullet.”
Which the sergeant clearly wouldn’t mind at all. But he thinks about it for a while and finally gives a curt nod.
“You keep talking about killing in relation to the test subjects, Helen,” Caldwell says, didactic by default. “I’ve told you this before. In most cases, brain function stops a few hours after infection, which meets the clinical definition of death as far as—”
Justineau turns around and punches Caldwell in the face.
It’s a hard punch, and it hurts her hand a lot more than she expects, the shock travelling up her arm all the way to the elbow.
Caldwell staggers and almost falls, her arms flailing for balance as she takes one and then two steps back. She stares at Justineau in utter astonishment. Justineau stares right back, nursing the hand she hit with. But she’s got one hand left if it turns out to be needed, and of course that’s one more than Caldwell has just then.
“Keep talking,” she suggests. “I’ll knock the teeth out of your mouth one by one.”
The two soldiers stand by, interested but impartial. Clearly, they don’t have a dog in this catfight.
Melanie also watches, big-eyed, mouth wide open. The anger drains out of Justineau, replaced by a surge of shame at her loss of self-control. She feels the blood rush into her face.
Caldwell’s blood is showing too. She licks a trickle of it from her lip. “You’re both my witnesses,” she says to Parks and Gallagher, her voice thick. “That was an unprovoked assault.”
“We saw it,” Parks confirms. His tone is dry. “I look forward to being someplace where our witnessing will make a difference. Okay, are we done? Anyone got any speeches they want to make? No? Then let’s move out.”
They walk on down the lane, due east, leaving the Humvee spavined and silent behind them. Caldwell stands alone for a few moments before joining the exodus. Clearly she’s amazed that the attack on her person has elicited so little interest. But she’s a realist. She rolls with the bad news.
Justineau wonders if they should have pushed the Humvee into one of the neighbouring fields to hide their trail a little, but she presumes that with the axle broken and the back end of the vehicle hard against the ground, it would be way too heavy to move. And burning it would be a whole lot worse, of course–like sending up a signal flare to tell the enemy exactly where they are.
Plenty of other enemies waiting out there for them without that.
28
Melanie builds the world around her as she goes.
This is mostly countryside, with fields on all sides. Rectangular fields, mostly, or at least with roughly squared-off edges. But they’re overgrown with weeds to the grown-ups’ shoulder height, whatever crops they were once planted with swallowed up long ago. Where the fields meet the road, there are ragged hedges or crumbling walls, and the surface they’re walking on is a faded black carpet pitted with holes, some of them big enough for her to fall into.
A landscape of decay–but still gloriously and heart-stoppingly beautiful. The sky overhead is a bright blue bowl of almost infinite size, given depth by a massive bank of pure white cloud at the limit of vision that goes up and up and up like a tower. Birds and insects are everywhere, some of them familiar to her now from the field where they stopped that morning. The sun warms her skin, pouring energy down on to the world out of that upturned bowl–it makes flowers grow on the land, Melanie knows, and algae in the sea; starts food chains all over the place.