The Girl With All the Gifts(71)

“Was it green before?” Melanie asks, pointing.

“Yes. Just like the countryside we passed through right after we left the base.”

“Why did they burn it?”

“They were trying to keep the hungries contained, in the first few weeks after the infection appeared.”

“But it didn’t work?”

“No. They were scared, and they panicked. A lot of the people who should have been making the important decisions were infected themselves, or else they ran away and hid. The ones who were left didn’t really know what they were doing. But I’m not sure there was anything better they could have done. It was too late, by then. All the evil shit they were afraid of had already happened, pretty much.”

“The evil shit?” Melanie queries.

“The hungries.”

Melanie contemplates this equation. It may be true, but she doesn’t like it. She doesn’t like it at all. “I’m not evil, Miss Justineau.”

Miss J is penitent. She touches Melanie on the arm, gives her a brief but reassuring squeeze. It’s not as nice as a hug, but also not so dangerous. “I know you’re not, sweetheart. I wasn’t saying that.”

“But I am a hungry.”

A pause. “You’re infected,” Miss J says. “But you’re not a hungry, because you can still think, and they can’t.”

That distinction hasn’t struck Melanie until now, or at least hasn’t weighed much against the planetary mass of her realisation. But it is a real difference. Does it make other differences possible? Does it make her not be a monster after all?

These ontological questions come first, and loom largest. Another, more practical one peeps out from behind them.

“Is that why I’m a crucially important specimen?”

Miss J makes a hurting face, then an angry one. “That’s why you’re important to Dr Caldwell’s research project. She believes she can find something inside you that will help her to make medicine for everyone else. An antidote. So they can’t ever be turned into hungries, or if they’re turned, they can be changed back again.”

Melanie nods. She knows that’s really important. She also knows that not all the evils that struck this land had the same cause and origin. The infection was bad. So were the things that the important-decision people did to control the infection. And so is catching little children and cutting them into pieces, even if you’re doing it to try to make medicine that stops people being hungries.

It’s not just Pandora who had that inescapable flaw. It seems like everyone has been built in a way that sometimes makes them do wrong and stupid things. Or almost everyone. Not Miss Justineau, of course.

Sergeant Parks is signalling to them to stand and start walking again. Melanie walks ahead of Miss Justineau, letting the leash run taut as she revolves all these dizzying things in her mind. For the first time she doesn’t wish that she was back in her cell. She’s starting to see that the cell was a tiny piece of something much bigger, of which everyone who’s with her here used to be a part.

She’s starting to make connections that build outwards from her own existence in some surprising and scary directions.





47


London swallows them very slowly, a piece at a time.

It’s not like Stevenage, where you basically walk in from open fields and open roads and find yourself suddenly in the heart of the town. For Kieran Gallagher, who found Stevenage pretty big and impressive, this is an experience at once so intense and so drawn out that it’s hard to process.

They walk, and they walk, and they walk, and they’re still coming into the city–whose heart, Sergeant Parks tells him, is at least another ten miles south of them at this point.

“All the places we’ve passed through today,” Helen Justineau tells Gallagher, taking pity on his awe and unease, “they used to be separate towns. But the developers just kept building outwards from London, as more and more people came to live there, and eventually all those other towns just got absorbed into the mass.”

“How many people?” Gallagher knows he sounds like a ten-year-old, but he still has to ask.

“Millions. A lot more people than there are in the whole of England now. Unless…”

She doesn’t finish the sentence, but Gallagher knows what she means. Unless you count the hungries. But you can’t. They’re not people any more. Well, except for this weird little kid, who’s like…

He’s not sure what she’s like. A live girl, maybe, dressed up as a hungry. But not even that. An adult, dressed as a kid, dressed as a hungry. Weirdly, probing his feelings the way you stick your tongue into the place where a tooth fell out, Gallagher finds himself liking her. And one of the reasons why he likes her is because she’s so different from him. She’s as big as four-fifths of five-eighths of f*ck all, but she takes no bullshit from anyone. She even talks back to the Sarge, which is like watching a mouse bark at a pitbull. Frigging amazing!

But he and the kid have got this much in common: they both walk into London with their mouths hanging open, barely able to process what they’re seeing. How could there ever have been enough people to live in all these houses? How could they ever have built their towers so high? And how could anything in the whole world ever have conquered them?