The Girl With All the Gifts(52)
Parks gives her a cold look. “Assessing risk is part of what I do,” he tells her.
She’s about to explain to him why his assessment is flawed, but Helen Justineau breaks in now, pre-empting her reply. “She’s right, Sergeant. We’re about to move into a built-up area, where we can expect to find a lot more hungries, at every stage of infection. It’s dangerous ground–we won’t know how dangerous until we’re in it. So what kind of sense does it make for you to cross it three times? You have to go out and do your reconnaissance, then come back here to collect us, then go in again. And what happens to us if those junkers turn up again while you’re gone? We wouldn’t last a second out here in the open. It’s got to be better if we go in with you.”
Parks chews on this for a good few seconds. But Caldwell knows him well enough to be confident of his answer. It’s not in his repertoire to say no to something just because somebody else thought of it. She and Justineau are right, and that’s all there is to it.
“Okay,” he says at last. “But the two of you have never done this before, so you’d damn well better follow my lead. Come to think of it,” he glances across at the private, “did you ever do a Hitchin run, Gallagher?”
The private shakes his head.
Parks puffs out his breath like a man about to bend down and lift a heavy load. “Okay. Road rules still apply–especially the one about keeping your mouths shut–but this is going to be different. We’re almost bound to see hungries, and to be in their line of sight. What you want to do is not trigger them. Move slowly and smoothly. Don’t look them directly in the eye. Don’t make any loud or sudden noises. As far as you can, you blend into the landscape. If in doubt, look at me and take your cue from me.”
Once he’s said his piece, he walks on. He doesn’t waste any more words or any more time. Caldwell approves of that.
Twenty minutes later, they’re coming level with the first buildings. Nobody has sighted any hungries yet, but it’s early days. Parks issues whispered commands, and they all stop. The four uninfected humans anoint themselves with e-blocker again.
They head on into town, staying in a tight cluster so that none of them presents a clear and unambiguous human silhouette. These are residential streets, upmarket once, now gone to semi-ruin through a hectic month or so of looting and urban warfare followed by two decades of neglect. The gardens are small pockets of jungle that have broken their borders to colonise parts of the street. Waist-high weeds have smashed and grabbed their way up between tilted flagstones, mature brambles throwing up fist-thick stalks like the tentacles of subterranean monsters. But the shallowness of the soil underneath the pavement has stopped them from uniting their forces and throwing down the houses once and for all. There’s a precarious balance of power.
Parks has already told them what he’s looking for. Not a house on a street like this, with neighbours on all sides. That would be too difficult to secure. He wants a detached structure standing in its own grounds, with reasonable lines of sight at least out of the upstairs windows, and ideally with the doors intact. He has realistic expectations, though, and he’ll take anything that’s broadly okay if it means not going too deeply into the town.
But there’s nothing he likes here, so they move on.
Five minutes later, keeping up their intent and silent stroll, they come into a wider road into which several streets feed. There’s an arcade of shops here. The road surface is crunchy with shattered glass, all the shopfronts broken into and ransacked by looters of a bygone era. Empty tin cans on the ground, rusted to the thinness and delicacy of shells, roll and rattle when the wind comes up a little.
And there are hungries.
Perhaps a dozen of them, widely scattered.
The party of living humans comes to a halt when they see them, only Parks remembering to slow his steps gradually rather than going straight from motion into stillness.
Caldwell is fascinated. She turns her head slowly to examine each of the hungries in turn.
They’re a mix of old and new. The older ones can be identified very easily both by their mouldering clothing and by their extreme gauntness. When a hungry feeds, it also feeds the pathogen within it. But if prey can’t be found, Ophiocordyceps will draw its nutrients directly from the flesh of the host.
Closer to, she can also see the mottled colouring on the older ones. Grey threads have broken the leathery surface of their skin in a network of fine lines, crossing and re-crossing like veins. The whites of the eyes are grey too, and if the hungry’s mouth is open you can see a fuzz of grey on the tongue.
The newer hungries are dressed more nattily–or at least their clothes have had less time to rot–and they still have a broadly human appearance. Paradoxically, that makes them a lot more unpleasant to look at, because the wounds and torn flesh through which they contracted the infection in the first place are clearly visible. On an older hungry, the general bleaching and weathering of the skin surface and clothing, along with the overlay of grey mycelia, softens and disguises the wounds; makes something more architectural out of them.
The hungries are in their stationary mode, which is why Caldwell can get away with this unhurried inspection. They stand or sit or kneel at random points along the length of the road, completely motionless, their eyes on nothing and their arms mostly dangling at their sides or–if they’re sitting–folded in their laps.