The Girl With All the Gifts(53)
They look like they’re posing for paintings, or sunk into such deep introspection that they’ve forgotten what it was they were meant to be doing. Not like they’re waiting; not like a single sound or movement out of place would wake them and launch them into instant motion.
Parks raises his hand, waves the party on with a slow sweep of his arm. The movement serves both as a command and as a reminder of the unhurried pace they need to keep up. The sergeant leads the way, his rifle ready in his hands but pointed at the ground. His gaze is on the ground too for a lot of the time. He scans the visual field with quick, darting glances, his eyes the only part of him at odds with his slow, shambling stride. Caldwell recalls belatedly the hypothesis that hungries retain the rudimentary pattern recognition that all babies are born with–that they’re capable of identifying a human face, and respond to it by slipping into a slightly heightened mode of arousal and awareness. Her own researches have failed either to confirm or to refute this, but she is prepared to accept that it might be true for all but the most severely decayed.
So they avoid the eyes of the hungries as they shuffle on down the high street. They look at each other, at the gaping shop windows, at the road ahead or at the sky, letting the macabre still-life figures hover in their peripheral vision.
Except for the test subject. Melanie doesn’t seem to be able to look away from her larger counterparts even for a moment; she stares at them as though they exert a hypnotic fascination, almost tripping at one point because she’s not looking where she’s going.
That stumble causes Sergeant Parks to turn his head–slowly, measuredly–and give her a baleful glare. She understands the reprimand, and the warning. Her own nod, in return, is so gradual that it takes ten seconds to be completed. She wants him to know that she won’t make that mistake again.
They pass the first group of hungries and keep on going. More houses, terraced this time, and then another row of shops. A side street that they pass is much more densely populated. Hungries stand silently in a tight cluster, as though awaiting the start of a parade. Caldwell guesses that they converged on a kill, and then when they were done simply remained there, in the absence of a trigger that would induce them to move.
She wonders, walking on, whether the sergeant’s strategy is a sound one. They’re embedding themselves very deeply. There are now enemies behind them as well as in front and–potentially–on all sides. Parks wears a troubled expression. Probably he’s thinking the same thing.
Caldwell is about to suggest that they retrace their steps and–as the least bad of a number of unpleasant options–spend the night in one of the semi-detached houses on the outskirts of the town. They might have hungries for neighbours, but at least they’ll have a clear escape route.
But ahead of them, there’s an old-fashioned village green–or the remains of one at least. The green itself has run to jungle, but at least it’s jungle that seems to have a very sparse hungry population. There are a few of them on the strip of road that surrounds the open space, but not nearly so many as on the street they’re on.
Something else too. Private Gallagher sees it first, points–slowly, but emphatically. On the other side of the green is exactly what the sergeant told them to look for: a big detached house, two storeys, standing in its own grounds. It’s a mini-mansion of modern design, masquerading as a country house of an earlier age–but given away by its anachronistic excess. It’s a Frankenstein’s monster of a house, with a half-timbered front, Gothic arches on the ground-floor windows, pilasters framing the front door, gables adhering like barnacles to the roof ridge. The sign on the gate says WAINWRIGHT HOUSE.
“Good enough,” Parks says. “Let’s go.”
Justineau is about to take the direct route, across the overgrown green, but Parks blocks her with a hand on her shoulder. “No telling what’s in there,” he mutters. “Might startle a cat, or a bird, and get all the deadheads for miles around looking in our direction. Let’s stick to the open road.”
So they skirt the edge of the weeds and couch grass, instead of going through, and that’s why Caldwell sees it.
She slows down, and then she stops. She can’t help herself; she stares. It’s such a crazy, impossible thing.
One of the hungries is walking down the centre of the road. A female–biological age when she encountered the Ophiocordyceps pathogen probably late twenties or early thirties. She seems quite well preserved, unblemished apart from bite damage to the left side of her face. Only the grey threads around her eyes and mouth indicate how long it must have been since she left the human race. She’s wearing tan trousers, a white blouse with quarter-length sleeves; stylish summer wear, but the effect is somewhat tarnished by the fact that she’s got one shoe missing. In her long, straight, blonde hair there’s a single cornrow braid.
She’s pushing a baby carriage.
Out of the two things that make this impossible, Caldwell is arrested first by the less remarkable. Why is she walking? Hungries either run, when they pursue prey, or stand still when they don’t. There’s no intermediate state of leisurely perambulation.
And then: why is she clinging to an object? Among the myriad things a human being loses when Ophiocordyceps infiltrates the brain and redecorates is the ability to use tools. The baby carriage ought to be as meaningless to this creature as the equations of general relativity would be.