The Girl With All the Gifts(70)
Caldwell doesn’t attempt a comeback, so he doesn’t have to remind her that it was her striking up an acquaintance with a female hungry out on the street that got them into trouble in the first place. And nobody else seems inclined to argue. They continue on their way, the conversation dying out into wary silence.
Over the course of the morning, their line stretches out unacceptably. Gallagher takes point, as Parks ordered him to do. Helen Justineau sticks with the kid, who manages a reasonable pace despite her shorter legs, but keeps being distracted and slowed by the things they pass. Dr Caldwell is slowest of all, the gap between her and the others gradually but steadily increasing. She quickens her stride whenever Parks asks her to, but always slows again after a minute or two. That desperate fatigue, so early in the day, worries him.
They’re moving now through a burn shadow, another artefact of the Breakdown. Before the government fell apart entirely, it passed a whole series of badly thought-out emergency orders, one of which involved chemical incendiaries sprayed from helicopter gunships to create cauterised zones that were guaranteed free from hungries. Uninfected civilians were warned in advance by sirens and looped messages, but a lot of them died anyway because they weren’t free to move when the choppers flew in.
The hungries, though, they ran ahead of the flame-throwers like roaches when the light goes on. All the incendiaries could do was to move them on a few miles in one direction or another, and in some cases to destroy infrastructure that might have saved a lot of lives. Luton Airport, for instance. That got torched with about forty planes still on the ground, so when the next memo came round–about evacuating the uninfected to the Channel Islands using commercial carrier fleets–all the army could do was shrug its collective shoulders and say, “Yeah, we wish.”
The buildings on this part of their route are foreshortened stumps, not so much burned down as rendered into tallow. The monstrous heat of the incendiaries melted not just metal but brick and stone. The ground they’re walking on carries a thin black crust of grease and charcoal, the residue of organic materials that burned and sublimed, took to the air and settled again wherever the hot winds of combustion took them.
The air has a sour, acid tang to it. After ten minutes or so, your breath is rasping in your throat and there’s an itchy feeling in your chest that you can’t scratch because it’s inside you.
It’s more than twenty years on and still nothing grows here, not even the hardiest and most bad-ass of weeds. Nature’s way of saying she’s not stupid enough to be caught like that twice over.
Parks hears the kid asking Justineau what happened here. Justineau makes heavy weather of the question, even though it’s an easy one. We couldn’t kill the hungries, so we killed ourselves. That was always our favourite party trick.
The burn shadow goes on for mile after mile, oppressing their spirits and draining their stamina. It’s past time they stopped, grabbed some rest and rations, but nobody’s keen to sit down on this tainted ground. By unspoken consensus, they press on.
It’s really sudden, when they reach the edge of it, but the shadow’s got one more miracle to show them. Over the space of a hundred steps they go from black to green, from death to hectic life, from dry-baked limbo to a field of massive thistles and dense hollyhocks.
But there was a house here on the borderland that burned but didn’t fall. And against its rear wall there are heat shadows, where something living collapsed against the hot brick and burned with different colours, different breakdown products. Two of them, one large and one small, painted in deep black against the grey-black of their surroundings.
An adult and a child, arms thrown up as though they were caught in the middle of an aerobics workout.
Fascinated, the hungry kid measures herself against the smaller shape. It fits her pretty well.
45
What she thinks is: this could have been me. Why not? A real girl, in a real house, with a mother and a father and a brother and a sister and an aunt and an uncle and a nephew and a niece and a cousin and all those other words for the map of people who love each other and stay together. The map called family.
Growing up and growing old. Playing. Exploring. Like Pooh and Piglet. And then like the Famous Five. And then like Heidi and Anne of Green Gables. And then like Pandora, opening the great big box of the world and not being afraid, not even caring whether what’s inside is good or bad. Because it’s both. Everything is always both.
But you have to open it to find that out.
46
They stop and eat, setting their faces against the dead zone they’ve just crossed.
Sergeant Parks has brought some of the tins from the kitchen in Wainwright House with him in his pack. Miss Justineau and Dr Caldwell and the soldiers eat cold sausage and beans and cold Scotch broth. Melanie eats something called Spam, which is a bit like the meat she had the night before, but not so nice.
They face south, away from the thing that Miss Justineau called a burn shadow–but Melanie keeps turning her head to look back the way they’ve come. They’re on a rise in the ground, so she can see a long way to the north, all the way back to the town where they slept last night and where she loosed the fox. Mile after mile of gentle rise and fall, baked and blackened to charcoal. She catechises Miss Justineau again to make sure she understands, the two of them talking in low voices that don’t carry.