The Girl With All the Gifts(51)

The others come up and join them, Gallagher last of all because he waits on Parks’ signal. Parks tells them to check the bags and boxes, but it’s mostly the kind of precious keepsakes that only mattered to their former owners. Not even clothes, but books and DVDs, letters and ornaments. The few items of food were perishable, and they’ve perished: withered apples, a rotten loaf, a bottle of whisky that shattered when the bag it was in hit the asphalt.

Justineau opens the rucksack. “Jesus Christ!” she mutters. She dips her hand in and brings out some of the contents. Money. Bundles of fifty-pound notes, bank-fresh in paper sleeves. Completely useless. Twenty-some years after the world went down the toilet, someone still thought it was coming back–that there would come a day when money would mean something again.

“Triumph of hope over experience,” Parks observes.

“Nostalgia,” Dr Caldwell says categorically. “The psychological comfort outweighs the logical objections. Everybody needs a security blanket.”

Only idiots, Parks thinks. Personally, he tends to see security in much less abstract terms.

Gallagher looks from one of them to the other, not sure what’s going on. He’s too young to remember money. Justineau starts in on an explanation, then shakes her head and gives it up. “Why would I ruin your innocence?” she says.

“There were one hundred pence in a pound,” the hungry kid says. “But only after the fifteenth of February 1971. Before that, there were two hundred and forty pence in the pound, but they didn’t say pence. They said pennies.”

Justineau laughs. “Very good, Melanie.” She tears the sleeve from one of the bundles of money, fans out the notes and throws them into the air. “Pennies from heaven,” she says as they blow away on the hot wind. The hungry kid smiles, as though the cascade of waste paper is a firework display. She squints into the sun to follow them as they fly.





32


They make, Caroline Caldwell supposes, good progress.

It’s hard for her to tell, though, because her time sense is slightly skewed by two extraneous factors. The first factor is a fever that has been rising in her since the evening of the previous day. The second factor is that she allowed herself to become dehydrated as they walked, exacerbating the effects of the first factor.

She watches her own sickness at one remove, not because her scientific vocation conditions everything she does, but because being at one remove actually seems to help. She can observe the sick tiredness of her limbs, identify the ache in her head occasioned by the tiny but repeated jolts of her feet on the asphalt–and still keep moving without a break, because these are purely physiological things, without any bearing in the end on what her mind does.

Which is to turn old questions over and over in the light of new evidence.

She’s read many detailed accounts of the hungries’ feeding, but never observed it at first hand (the feeding of the test subjects, under artificial and controlled conditions, was an entirely different thing). She finds it striking that the hungries who fed on the man in the car continued to eat until his body was non-viable–until there was almost no flesh left on his upper torso and he had been virtually decapitated.

This is counterintuitive. Caldwell would have expected the hungry pathogen to be better adapted. She would have expected Ophiocordyceps to manipulate the cells of the host’s hypothalamus more skilfully, suppressing the hunger drive after the first few bites so that the newly infected have a robust chance of survival. That would obviously be far more efficient, since a viable new host will become a new vector in its turn, providing increased opportunities for the pathogen to multiply quickly within a given ecological range.

Perhaps it’s a side effect of that very slow maturing: the fact that this strain of Ophiocordyceps never reaches its final, sexually seeding stage, but instead reproduces neotenously by asexual budding in the favourable environment of blood or saliva. Logically, you’d expect this to impede the spread of favourable mutations.

Something to consider in the next round of dissections. Examine the cells of the hypothalamus more closely. Look for differential levels of penetration by fungal mycelia.

A mile out of Stevenage–close enough to see the roofs of the houses and the blue-slated spire of a church–Sergeant Parks gives the order to stop. He turns to them and tells them what’s going to happen next, pointing at the sky as an unimpeachable witness. “Sun’s going down inside the next two hours. Could be those junkers are still looking for us, but either way we need a place to hole up for the night, and this is it. Gallagher and I will go in and disinfect, as far as that’s needed. Then we’ll come back and get you. Okay?”

Not okay, very obviously. Caldwell can see from Justineau’s face that it’s not okay for her either, but she chooses to make the point herself because she knows she’ll make it more clearly and succinctly.

“This isn’t going to work,” she tells Parks.

“It is if you do as you’re told.”

Caldwell gestures, cupping the fingers of her hand as though she’s holding the man’s words up for inspection. The tips of her fingers tingle unpleasantly. “That’s exactly why it isn’t going to work,” she says. “Because you’re seeing us purely as civilians, with yourself and Private Gallagher as our military escort. In trying to take all the risk on to yourself, you’re actually increasing the risk to all of us.”