The Girl With All the Gifts(43)

A million smells freight the complicated air.

The few houses they see are far off, but even at this distance Melanie observes the signs of ruin. Windows broken, or boarded up. Doors hanging off their hinges. One big farmhouse has its roof all fallen in, the spine of the roof making a perfect downward-pointing parabola.

She remembers Mr Whitaker’s lesson, which feels like a very long time ago now. The population of Birmingham is zero… This world she’s seeing was built by people, to meet their needs, but it’s not meeting their needs any more. It’s all changed. And it’s changed because they’ve retreated from it. They’ve left it to the hungries.

Melanie realises now that she’s been told all this already. She just ignored it, ignored the self-evident logic of her world, and believed–out of the many conflicting stories she was given–only the parts she wanted to believe.


Sergeant Parks is wrestling with a logistical problem, and he still hasn’t seen a way out of it.

His initial instinct was to stay clear of the towns on their route–of any built-up area at all–and make this whole stroll strictly cross-country. The argument for doing that is obvious. The hungries mostly stay close to where they were first turned, or infected, or whatever you want to call it. It’s not a homing instinct, it’s just a side effect of the fact that when they’re not hunting, they’re mostly standing stock still, like little kids playing Grandmother’s Footsteps. So the cities and towns are full of them, the countryside more sparsely populated, exactly the way it used to be before the Breakdown.

But Parks has got three good points to set against that one. The first is the temperature thing–something he noticed when he was out in the field, and teaches to all the soldiers under his command, even though Caldwell says the evidence is still “far from conclusive”. The hungries’ known triggers are endocrine sweat from an unmasked human body, rapid movement and loud noises. But there’s a fourth, which mostly comes into play when the temperature drops at night. They can zero in on you by your body heat, somehow. They can pick you out in the dark like you were a neon sign saying FINE DINING HERE.

And that being the case, point two kicks in. They’ll need shelter. If they sleep out in the open, they’ll get hungries swarming on them from all directions. Okay, there are other places besides towns that will give you shelter, but most of them presuppose that you’ve got the time and the manpower to do proper reconnaissance.

Which brings in point three. Time. Ducking and weaving away from any built-up areas will add about twenty extra miles to their route, which doesn’t matter all that much as far as the raw numbers go. But the raw numbers aren’t worth a shit. What matters is that it will take them across the hardest, slowest terrain, and probably double their journey time. Not to mention the fact that it’s hard to run away across a field full of mature brambles with inch-long thorns, or a pasture choked with knee-high knotweed. Hungries don’t care if they rip themselves open, and they’ll happily keep running if they’ve got your scent, even as they flay themselves to the bone. Humans will slow down a lot more in that terrain, and get taken that much more easily.

So they’re walking right now along a country lane, between two weed-choked fields, and they’re about to pass through a village. Or else tack on three extra miles to the journey by slogging all the way around it.

One way or the other, Parks is going to have to make his mind up soon.


Caroline Caldwell goes through the stages of grief, in the prescribed order.

Denial is a stage she goes through very quickly indeed, because her reason strikes down the demeaning, treacherous thought as quickly as it rises. There’s no point in denying the truth when the truth is self-evident. There’s no point in denying the truth even if you have to wade through thorn thickets and minefields to get to it. The truth is the truth, the only prize worth having. If you deny it, you’re only showing that you’re unworthy of it.

So Caldwell accepts that her work–the pith and substance of the last decade of her life–is lost.

And lets herself feel the toxic anger and indignation that boils in her like heartburn at that thought. If Justineau hadn’t intervened, if she’d been allowed to make that final dissection, would it have made any difference? Of course not. But Justineau ensured that the last minutes of Caldwell’s time at the base were wasted. It would be absurd to build anything further on top of that transgression, but it’s enough as it stands. Justineau ruined her work, and her work is now gone. Justineau will pay, when they get back to Beacon, with the trashing of her career and with a court-martial that will probably see her shot.

Bargaining is another stage that Caldwell doesn’t linger over. She doesn’t believe in God, or the gods, or fate, or any higher or lower power that has dominion over her. There’s no one to bargain with. But she agrees–even in a deterministic world governed by impartial physical forces–that if the lab is found to be intact and a rescue team from Beacon returns her notes and samples to her in good order, she will light a candle to nobody at all in recognition for the universe having (en passant, by something indistinguishable from chance) been kind to her.

When she holds that thought up to the light and sees how pathetic it is, how cravenly equivocating, she sinks into black depression.

From which she is saved by this thought: there wasn’t anything in the lab worth keeping anyway. The samples, possibly, but she has a living sample with her. The notes were mostly descriptive–a very detailed and circumstantial account of the hungry pathogen’s life cycle (incomplete, since she’s yet to culture a sample to the mature, sexual stage) and the course of the infection both in the regular way of things and in the anomalous state represented by the children. She has this stuff by heart, so the loss of the notes is not crucial.