The Girl With All the Gifts(50)

“Third and last, if you do get a hungry after you, then you don’t run. There’s no way you’re going to beat it, and you’ve got a better chance if you’re facing it head-on. Hit it with anything. Bullets, bricks, your bare hands, harsh language. If you’re lucky, you’ll bring it down. Leg and lower body shots improve your chances of getting lucky, unless it’s right in close. In which case, you go for the head so it’s got something to chew on besides you.”

He catches the eye of the hungry kid. She’s watching him as intently as the others, a frown of concentration on her dead pale face. Another time, Parks might have laughed. It’s a little bit like a cow listening to a recipe for beef stew.

“I’m assuming there’s a different rule for junkers,” Helen Justineau says.

Parks nods. “We run into those bastards again, we’ll hear them a long time before we see them. In which case we get the f*ck off the road and we wait them out, same as last time. As long as they stay in convoy like that, we should be fine.”

Nobody’s got anything else to say about these instructions. They go on up to the road and head south, and for a good couple of hours they walk in complete silence.

It’s a glorious summer day, quickly becoming uncomfortably hot as the sun climbs up the sky. A wind rises and falls fitfully, but it doesn’t do much to cool them. Worried by their profuse sweating and what it might bring down on them, Parks makes them stop and apply another layer of e-blocker to all the places that need it. Most of those places are underneath their clothes. They turn away from each other by unspoken agreement, forming the vertices of a square at whose centre the hungry kid stands silent, staring not at the grown-ups–the humans–but at the burning spotlight of the sun.

The e-blocker routine is basic but essential. Lay it on thick at crotch and armpits, elbows and the backs of knees. A little bit all over, and a quick-dissolving slimy lozenge of the stuff on your tongue. It’s not the sweat that matters; it’s mainly the pheromones. The hungries may not have enough brains left to see people as people, but they’re shit-hot when it comes to following a chemical gradient.

They move on again. Justineau and the hungry kid walk side by side, the leash slack between them. Caldwell walks behind the two of them, most of the time, with her hands either loose at her sides or crossed against her chest. Gallagher takes the rear position, while Parks himself is on point.

Around about noon, they see something on the road ahead of them. It’s just a dark blob at first–not moving, so Parks doesn’t flag it up immediately as a danger. But he gestures to them to spread out as they approach it. He’s mindful of how easy they are to see on the empty road, the only moving things in a landscape like a still photo.

It’s a car. It sits dead centre in the road, but skewed slightly, its nose tilting into what used to be the slow lane. The bonnet is up, the boot likewise, and the four doors are all open. It’s not rusted, or burned out. Chances are it hasn’t been there very long.

Parks has the others hang back, circles it by himself. It looks empty at first glance, but as he comes around the driver’s side he glimpses something in the back seat that looks vaguely human. The rest of the way he’s got his gun in his hand and he’s hair-trigger, ready to unload on anything that moves.

Nothing moves. The dark, hunched shape used to belong to the species Homo sapiens, but it’s nothing very much now. You can tell that it was a man, because of his jacket and because of his face, which is mostly intact. The rest of the flesh of his upper body has been eaten away, the head all but detached by a massive apple-coring bite that’s been taken out of his throat. In the depths of that old, dry wound, nubs of bone or cartilage show.

Nobody else in the car. Nothing in the boot, apart from a battered pair of shoes and a coil of rope. Lots of stuff scattered on the road all around, though–bags and boxes, a rucksack, and something that looks like a games console or else part of a sound system.

The car tells its own story, as though it were a diorama in a museum. Group of like-minded people share a ride, going… somewhere. Somewhere up north. The car starts coughing or banging, or else it just stops. One of the gang gets out to take a look, throws up the bonnet, pronounces the car DOA. So they all start getting their stuff out of the boot. These lackwits can’t tell trash from treasure, but there’s nothing wrong with the instinct.

They were interrupted. Most of them dropped their shit and ran for the hills. One of them jumped back in the car, and maybe he saved the others by that action, because it looks like a lot more than one hungry partook of him.

“You try turning the key?” Justineau asks. Parks is really pissed off to see her walking right up to the car, even though he hasn’t signalled clear yet. But the woman’s not stupid; on reflection, Parks is aware that his body language changed as he walked around the car–from total threat-readiness to his still cautious but looser business-as-usual. She was just responding to that change a little faster than the others.

“You try it,” he suggests.

Justineau leans into the car, goes suddenly still as she sees its other occupant. But if she flinches from that sight, it’s only for a heartbeat. She reaches forward, and Parks hears a muted click as the key turns. The engine doesn’t make a sound. He didn’t really expect it to.

He’s looking off to both sides of the road now. There’s scrub and bushes to their right, a length of wooden hoarding on the left. Most likely the occupants of the car ran the obvious way, towards the bushes. No telling how far they got, but they didn’t come back for their stuff, or to bury their dead. Parks revises his earlier thought, that the sacrifice of the back-seat passenger saved the rest. It’s not likely that anyone walked away from this.