The Girl With All the Gifts(56)

They hang a right off the main corridor, then a left, and eventually they find a day room that’s big enough for their needs. Straight-backed chairs line the walls, which are decorated with cheap framed prints of anonymous English pastoral scenes. Haywains predominate. Parks is indifferent to the haywains, and the room’s got a few too many doors for his liking, but he’s pretty sure by this time that it’s the best they’re going to find.

“We’ll sleep here,” he tells the civilians. “But first we’ve got to check the rest of this floor. Make sure there are no surprises.”

The last we means himself and Gallagher, mostly, but the quicker the better for this, so he decides to rope Justineau in too. “You said you wanted to help,” he reminds her. “Help with this.”

Justineau hesitates–looking straight at Dr Caldwell, so it isn’t hard to see what’s going through her mind. She’s worried about leaving Caldwell alone with the kid. But Caldwell was hit worse than anyone by the fight and flight. She’s pale and sweating, breath still coming in quick pants long after the rest of them have got their second wind.

“We’ll be five minutes,” Parks says. “What do you think is going to happen to her in five minutes?” His own voice surprises him; the anger and the tension in it. Justineau stares at him. Maybe Gallagher flashes him a quick look too.

So he explains himself. “Easier to stay in line of sight if there are three of us. Kid’s no use because she won’t know what to look for. We go out, we come back, and they stay here so we know where to find them. Okay?”

“Okay,” Justineau says, but she’s still looking at him hard. Like, where’s that other shoe, and who’s it likely to hit when it drops?

She kneels and puts a hand on Melanie’s shoulder. “We’re going to take a quick look around,” she says. “We’ll be right back.”

“Be careful,” Melanie says.

Justineau nods.

Yeah.





34


Alone with Dr Caldwell, the first thing Melanie does is to walk away to the further end of the room and put her back to the wall. She watches every move that Dr Caldwell makes, scared and wary, ready to bolt through the open door after Miss Justineau.

But Dr Caldwell sinks into one of the chairs, either too exhausted or too lost in her own thoughts to pay any attention to Melanie. She doesn’t even look at her.

Any other time, Melanie would explore. All day she’s been seeing new and amazing things, but Sergeant has set a brisk, steady pace and she’s never had time to stop and investigate any of the wonders that went by on both sides of the road: trees and lakes, latticework fences, road signs pointing to places whose names she knows from her lessons, hoardings whose mostly obliterated posters have become mosaics of abstract colour. Living things too–birds in the air, rats and mice and hedgehogs in the weeds alongside the road. A world too big to take in all at once, too new to have names.

And now here she is, in this house that’s so different from the base. There must be so many things to discover. This room alone is filled with mysteries both large and small. Why are the chairs only at the edges of the room, when the room is so enormous? Why is there a little wire cradle on the wall next to the door, with a plastic bottle in it and a sign that says CROSS-INFECTION COSTS LIVES? Why is there a faded picture on one of the tables (wild horses galloping across a field) that’s been cut up into hundreds and hundreds of wiggly-shaped pieces and then stuck back together again?

But right now, all Melanie wants to do is to go somewhere quiet and be by herself, so she can think about the terrible thing that just happened. The terrible secret she just found out.

Apart from the door that they came in by, there are two more doors out of the room. Melanie goes to the nearest one, keeping Dr Caldwell (who still hasn’t moved) always in the corner of her eye. She finds another room, very small and mostly white. There are white cupboards and white shelves, with black and white tiles on the walls. One of the cupboards has a window in it and lots of dials and switches at the top. It smells of old grease. Melanie knows just about enough to guess that the cupboard with a window in it is a cooker. She’s seen pictures in books. This must be a kitchen of some kind–a place where you make nice things to eat. But it’s too small for her to hide in. If Dr Caldwell came after her, she’d be trapped.

She goes out again. Dr Caldwell hasn’t moved, so she walks right past her, giving her a wide berth, and goes to the other door. The next room is very different from the kitchen. Its walls are painted in bright colours, and there are posters, too. One shows ANIMALS OF THE BRITISH HEDGEROWS, and another has words starting with each letter of the alphabet. Apple. Boat. Cat. Digger. Elephant. The pictures are cheerful and simple. The boat and the digger have smiling faces at their front ends, which Melanie is almost certain is unrealistic.

There are chairs in here too, but they’re smaller and they’re all over the place in little clusters, not arranged neatly around the edges of the room. On the floor are toys, strewn as casually as if they were put down a moment before. Girl dolls in dresses and soldier dolls in uniform. Cars and trucks. Plastic building blocks stuck together in the shape of cars or houses or people. Animals made of plush in colours washed out almost to grey.

And books. Lots of them thrown down on chairs, tables, the floor. Hundreds more on a big bookcase to one side of the door. Melanie is in no mood right then to pick them up and read them; the secret weighs heavily on her mind. In any case, even if she wanted to, her hands are stuck behind her back by the handcuffs, and her feet, though they’re bare, aren’t nearly flexible enough to turn the pages. She scans their titles instead.