The Girl With All the Gifts(73)

Then he sees what it is that the other three are looking at, and these thoughts slip from his mind. It’s a hungry, lying full length on the ground, in an alcove formed by the entrance of a shop.

Sometimes they fall down and can’t get up, when the rot inside them f*cks up their nervous system to the point where it doesn’t really work any more. He’s seen them sprawled on their sides, random shudders passing through them like jolts of electricity, their grey-on-grey eyes staring at the sun. Maybe that’s what happened to this one.

But something else has happened to it too. Its chest has broken wide open, forced open from within by… Gallagher has no idea what that thing is. A white column, at least six feet high, flaring at the top into a sort of flat round pillow thing with fluted edges–and with bulbous growths on its sides like blisters. The texture of the column is rough and uneven, but the blisters are shiny. If you tilt your head when you look at them, they’ve got an oil-on-water sheen to them.

“Jesus Christ!” Helen Justineau says, in a kind of a whisper.

“Fascinating,” Dr Caldwell murmurs. “Absolutely fascinating.”

“If you say so, Doc,” the Sarge says. “But I’m thinking we should keep the hell away from it, right?”

Fearless or foolhardy, Caldwell reaches out to touch one of the growths. Its surface indents a little under the pressure of her finger, but fills out quickly to its original shape once she draws her hand back.

“I don’t think it’s dangerous,” she says. “Not yet. When these fruits ripen, that may be a very different matter.”

“Fruits?” Justineau echoes. She says it in exactly the same tone that Gallagher would have used. Fruits out of a dead man’s rotten, broken-open body? Where would you have to go to get sicker than that?

Melanie squeezes in beside Gallagher, peers around his leg at the fallen hungry. He feels bad for her, that she has to see this. It’s not right for a little kid to be made to think about death.

Even if she’s, you know, dead. Kind of.

“Fruits,” Caldwell repeats, firmly and with satisfaction. “This, Sergeant, is the fruiting body of the hungry pathogen. And these pods are its sporangia. Each one is a spore factory, full of seeds.”

“They’re its ball-sacks,” the Sarge translates.

Dr Caldwell laughs delightedly. She was looking really beaten up and exhausted the last time Gallagher glanced at her, but this has brought her to life. “Yes. Exactly. They’re its ball-sacks. Break open one of these pods, and you’ll be having an intimate encounter with Ophiocordyceps.”

“Then let’s not,” Parks suggests, pulling her back as she goes to touch the thing again. She looks up at him, surprised and seeming ready to argue the point, but the Sarge has already turned his attention to Justineau and Gallagher. “You heard the Doc,” he says, like it was her idea. “This thing, and any more of them we see, they’re off-limits. You don’t touch them, and you don’t go near them. No exceptions.”

“I’d like to take some samples—” Caldwell starts to say.

“No exceptions,” Parks repeats. “Come on, people, we’re wasting daylight. Let’s move out.”

Which they do. But the interlude has left them all in a weird mood. Melanie goes back to Justineau and walks right at her side, as though she was back on the leash again. Dr Caldwell blathers on about life cycles and sexual reproduction until it almost sounds like she’s coming on to the Sarge, who lengthens his stride to get away from her. And Gallagher can’t keep from looking back, every now and again, at the ruined thing that’s become so weirdly pregnant.

They see a dozen more of these fallen, fruiting hungries in the next couple of hours, some of them a lot further gone than the first one. The tallest of the white columns tower way over their heads, anchored at the base by a froth of grey threads that spills over the hungries’ bodies and almost hides them from sight. The central stems get thicker as they get taller, widening the gap in the hungry’s ribs or throat or abdomen or wherever they first broke through. There’s something kind of obscene about it, and Gallagher wishes to Christ they’d gone some other way so they didn’t have to know about this.

He’s a little freaked out too, by what seems to be happening to the round growths on the fungal stems. They start out as just bumps or protuberances on the main vertical shaft. Then they get bigger, and fill out into shiny pearly-white spheroids that hang like Christmas tree ornaments. Then they fall off. Beside the tallest and thickest stems, there are thin scatterings of them around which they step over with gingerly care.

Gallagher is happy when the sun drops below the horizon and he doesn’t have to look at the bastard things any more.





48


The third night, for Helen Justineau, is the strangest of all.

They spend it in the cells of a police station on the Whetstone High Road, after Sergeant Parks has ordered a short detour to explore it. He’s hoping that the station will have an intact weapons locker. Their ammunition has been depleted by the skirmish in Stevenage, and every little helps.

There’s no weapons locker, intact or otherwise. But there’s a board with keys hanging on it, and some of the keys turn out to be for the remand cells in the basement. Four cells, strung out in a row along a short corridor with a guardroom at the further end of it. The door that opens on to the stairwell is a two-inch thickness of wood, with a steel panel riveted on to the inside.