The Girl With All the Gifts(44)
She has a chance. She’s in the field, and opportunities will come.
This could still work out well.
Private Kieran Gallagher knows all about monsters, because he comes from a family in which monsters predominate. Or maybe it’s just that his family was more given than most to letting its monsters come out and sniff the air.
The key that let them out was always the same: bootleg vodka, made in a still that his father and older brother had set up in a shed behind an abandoned house about a hundred yards from where they lived. The provisional government in Beacon was officially against unlicensed alcohol, but unofficially they didn’t really care so long as you stayed inside your house when you were shit-faced and only beat up your own people.
So Gallagher grew up in a weird microcosm of the wider world outside Beacon. His father, and his brother Steve, and his cousin Jackie looked like normal human beings and even sometimes acted like them, but most of the time they veered between two extremes: reckless violence when they were drinking, and comatose somnolence when the drink wore off.
Ricocheting off that, Gallagher has tried to live the life of the safe and solid middle ground, looking out for the things that make other people go off the rails so he can avoid them assiduously. He was the only soldier on the base who refused the solace of twenty-two per cent proof home-brew beer cooked up in a bucket or a bathtub. The only one who didn’t look out for magic mushrooms when he was on wide patrol. The only one who didn’t think it was hilarious to watch the antics of that teacher, Whitaker, as he drank himself to death.
And he’s always assumed that by steering into the middle of the channel, he was going to manage not to get wrecked. Now he knows you can get wrecked in clear waters too, and he’s thinking oh please, don’t let me die. I haven’t even lived yet, so it’s not fair to let me die.
He’s so scared, he’s worried that he might actually piss himself. He’s never understood before how being scared could make you do that; but now, thrown into the hungries’ world with only Sergeant Parks to back him up and with all those miles to walk before they get back to Beacon, he can feel his nuts tightening and his bladder loosening with every step he takes.
The question is, which is he more afraid of? Dying out here, or going home? They’ve both got their terrors, about equally vivid in his mind.
He’s always had shit-awful luck, from the day he was born. Got the beatings at home and at school, never managed to swap smokes for gropes behind the gym like his brother (the one time he tried, his dad caught him stealing the cigarettes and took it out of him with the end of a belt), got into the army by default to escape from that madhouse, carries a stupid misspelled tattoo (qui audet piscitur–“who dares, fishes”) because the tattooist was drunk and missed out three letters, caught gonorrhoea from the first girl who ever let him roll her, got the second pregnant and skipped out on her (nothing in excess, not even love), then realised too late that his feelings for her went way beyond sex. If he ever gets back to Beacon and sees her again, he’ll try to explain that to her. I’m a coward and a worthless piece of shit, but if you give me a second chance I’ll never run out on you again.
Not going to happen, is it?
This is what’s going to happen. Somewhere between here and Beacon, a hungry will take a bite out of him. Because that’s the way his life is set up to work.
He’s comforted by something in the thigh pocket of his fatigues. It’s a grenade–one that rolled into a corner when Parks was clipping the others into his belt. Gallagher picked it up, intending to hand it to the Sarge, but then on an impulse he swiped it and stowed it instead. He’s keeping it for a Hail Mary manoeuvre.
There are so many things in the world that he’s scared shitless about. The hungries might eat him. The junkers might torture or murder him. They might run out of food and water somewhere between here and Beacon and die by inches.
If it comes to it, Gallagher is going to pull the pin on his own life. And to hell with the middle of the road.
Helen Justineau is thinking about dead children.
She can’t narrow it down, or doesn’t want to. She thinks about all the children in the world who ever died without growing up. There must have been billions of them. Hecatombs of children, apocalypses, genocides of them. In every war, every famine, thrown to the wall. Too small to protect themselves, too innocent to get out of the way. Killed by madmen, perverts, judges, soldiers, random passers-by, friends and neighbours, their own parents. By stupid chance or ruthless edict.
Every adult grew from a kid who beat the odds. But at different times, in different places, the odds have been appallingly steep.
And the dead kids drag at every living soul. A weight of guilt you haul around with you like the moon hauls the ocean, too massive to lift and too much a part of you to ever let it go.
If she hadn’t talked to the kids about death that day. If she hadn’t read them “The Charge of the Light Brigade”, and if they hadn’t asked what being dead was like, then she wouldn’t have stroked Melanie’s hair and none of this would have happened. She wouldn’t have made a promise she couldn’t keep and couldn’t walk away from.
She could be as selfish as she’s always been, and forgive herself the way everybody else does, and wake up every day as clean as if she’d just been born.
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