The Girl With All the Gifts(72)

As the fields beside the road give way to streets, and then more streets, and then a hell of a lot more streets on top of that, they sight more and more hungries. The Sarge has already told him about the density law. The more living people there once were in any place, the more hungries will probably be there now, unless it’s a place where burn patrols have been through or bombs have been dropped. And that’s just what they find.

But the thing about the hungries is that they cluster, just like they did in Stevenage, and with that near-disaster fresh in his memory, the Sarge isn’t taking any chances. They go slowly, doing recce along parallel streets and choosing the ones where the hungries aren’t. If you’re prepared to fake and double a little bit, you can stay clear of the mouldy bastards for long stretches. He and Parks take point on this at first, but increasingly they use the kid because (a) she runs no risk and (b) they know after Stevenage that she’ll come back. She’s the perfect advance scout.

The first few times, Sergeant Parks undoes the leash each time and then ties her up again when she comes back. Then one time he forgets to tie her up, or decides not to, and after that the leash just stays tucked in his belt. She’s still got the muzzle on, and her hands cuffed behind her, but she walks along with the rest of them, free to stride ahead or dawdle along behind.

The density of hungries holds high but steady through most of that afternoon. And then, weirdly, it starts to come down again. It’s after they’ve passed through a place called Barnet, and they’re walking down a long straight road strewn with abandoned vehicles. It’s the sort of terrain that the Sarge hates, and he’s watchful, keeping them in a tight group as they thread their way through the saloon car Sargasso.

But they barely see a single hungry, all the way down the road. Even though this area is all built up and ought to be crawling. And when they do get a sighting, mostly the deadbeats are a long way off, sprinting across the street north of them in pursuit of a stray cat, or just loitering at corners like streetwalkers from some apocalyptic nightmare.

The kid–Melanie–is walking beside Gallagher, for part of the way. She catches his gaze and then points, with her eyes, up and right. When he looks, he sees another marvel. It’s like a cross between a car and a house. Bright red, with two rows of windows, and–he can see them very clearly–a flight of stairs inside it. But it’s on wheels. The whole thing is on wheels. Insane!

The two of them, Gallagher and the kid, go up and examine it together. This takes the kid further away from Helen Justineau than she’s been at any time since they left Stevenage, but Justineau is looking at something else and talking with the Sarge and the doctor. They’re free, for a moment, to follow their shared curiosity.

The two-storey car has crashed into the front of a shop. It’s canted over on its side, just a little, and all of its windows are shattered. The perished tyres have fallen away in curved strips like the grey-black rinds of some weird fruit. There’s no blood, no bodies, nothing to indicate what happened to this awkward, towering chariot. It just reached the end of its journey here, probably a very long time ago, and it’s stood here ever since.

“It’s called a bus,” Melanie tells him.

“Yeah, I knew that,” Gallagher lies. He’s heard the word, but he’s never seen one. “Of course it’s a bus.”

“Anyone could ride on them, if they had a ticket. Or a card. There was a card that you could put into a machine, and the machine would read it and let you on to the bus. They’d stop and start all the time, to let people get on and off. And there were special parts of the road that only buses could go on. They were a lot better for the environment than everyone driving their own cars.”

Gallagher nods slowly, like none of this is news to him. But the truth is, this vanished world is something he’s profoundly ignorant of, and barely ever thinks about. A child of the Breakdown, he was a lot less interested in tales of the glorious past than in how he could cadge a bit of someone else’s bread ration. He uses the artefacts of the past all the time, obviously. His gun and knife were made back then. So were the base’s buildings, and the fence, and most of the furniture. The Humvee. The radio. The fridge in the rec room. Gallagher is a squatter in the ruins of empire, but he doesn’t interrogate the ruins any more than you’d interrogate the meat you eat to try to guess what animal it came from. Most of the time it’s better not to know.

In fact, the ancient relic that most excited his curiosity was a porno mag that Private Si Brooks had under the mattress of his bunk. Leafing reverently through its pages, for the standard price of one and a half ciggies, Gallagher had wondered at length whether the women of the pre-Breakdown world really had bodies with those colours and those textures. None of the women he’s ever seen look like that. He blushes to remember this now, with the little girl beside him, and he glances down to make sure that his thoughts haven’t surfaced in some readable way on his face.

Melanie is still looking at the bus, fascinated by its construction.

Gallagher decides enough is enough. They should go back to the others. Almost unconsciously, he reaches out a hand to take hers. He freezes in the middle of the gesture. Melanie hasn’t noticed, and she couldn’t take his hand in any case because her own are cuffed behind her back, but what a stupid, stupid thing to do. If the Sarge had seen…

But the Sarge is still in deep and earnest conversation with Justineau and Dr Caldwell, and hasn’t seen a thing. Relieved, shaken, sheepish, Gallagher joins them.