The Girl With All the Gifts(78)

“Might take a while.”

“Probably. But Christ, this thing’s got more firepower than most armies. Hundred-and-fifty-five-millimetre field guns. Flame-throwers. It’s got to be worth trying, right?”

Justineau turns, intending to tell Melanie that they might be staying here longer than expected–but Melanie is already there, standing right behind her.

“I need to talk to Sergeant Parks,” she says.

Parks looks up from the manuals, his face impassive. “We got something to talk about?” he demands.

“Yes,” Melanie says. She turns to Justineau again. “In private.”

It takes a moment for Justineau to realise that she’s been dismissed. “Okay,” she says, trying to sound indifferent. “I’ll go help Gallagher do whatever he’s doing.”

She leaves them to it. She can’t imagine what Melanie might have to say to Parks that she doesn’t want an audience for, and that uncertainty translates very readily into unease. Parks may have become relaxed about the leash, but Justineau knows he still sees Melanie essentially as a smart but dangerous animal–all the more dangerous for being smart. She needs to watch what she says around him, as much as what she does. She needs Justineau watching her back, constantly.

Gallagher is doing more or less the same thing that Dr Caldwell is doing, which is inventorying supplies–but he’s doing it in the crew quarters, and he’s already finishing up when Justineau gets there. He shows her the last cupboard he opened. It contains a CD player and two racks of music CDs. Justineau feels memories prickle into stereophonic life as she scans the titles, which are–to say the least–an eclectic mix. Simon and Garfunkel. The Beatles. Pink Floyd. Frank Zappa. Fairport Convention. The Spinners. Fleetwood Mac. 10CC. Eurythmics. Madness. Queen. The Strokes. Snoop Dogg. The Spice Girls.

“You ever hear any of this stuff?” Justineau asks Gallagher.

“A little bit here and there,” he tells her, wistfulness in his voice. The only sound system on the base was the one hooked up to the cell block, that played wall-to-wall classical. One or two of the base personnel had digital music players and hand-operated chargers that worked by turning a wheel, but these priceless heirlooms were obsessively guarded by their owners.

“You think there’s any way we can play them?” Gallagher asks now.

Justineau has no idea. “If Parks gets the generator going, this thing will probably go live at the same time everything else does. It’s been shielded from the weather in here–apart from temperature changes. There certainly isn’t any damp, which would have been the worst thing. If the fuse didn’t blow and the circuit boards are sound, there’s no reason why it wouldn’t play. Don’t get your hopes up too high, Private, but you might get dinner and a show tonight.”

Gallagher looks suddenly cast down. “I don’t think so,” he says glumly.

“How come?”

He opens his empty hands in a wide shrug, indicating all the cupboards he’s already opened and searched.

“No dinner.”





53


Parks calls a meeting in the crew quarters, but it only has four attendees.

“Where’s Melanie?” Justineau demands, instantly alarmed, instantly suspicious.

“She left,” Parks says. And then, in the face of Justineau’s ferocious scepticism, “She’s coming back. She just had to go outside for a while.”

“She ‘had to go outside’?” Justineau repeats. “She doesn’t get calls of nature, Parks, so if you’re saying—”

“She did not,” Sergeant Parks says, “go out for a bathroom break. I’ll explain later if you insist, but she was actually pretty keen that I didn’t tell you about it, so it’s your call. In the meantime, we’ve got some other stuff that we need to discuss, and we need to discuss it now.”

They’re sitting on the edges of the ground-floor bunks, precariously balanced. The sleeping berths are in vertical stacks of three, so the four of them have to lean forward to avoid bumping their heads on the middle cots, whose steel frames are at exactly the height best calculated to smack someone’s brains out. There would have been more room in the lab, but apart from Caldwell, they all seem to prefer not to spend too much time in a space where the potpourri is formaldehyde.

Parks indicates Caldwell with a nod. “From what the Doc says, this thing we’re sitting in was some kind of research station, designed to move around freely in inner-city areas and to be secure against attack from hungries or anything else it came up against.

“Which was a great idea, and I’m not knocking it. Only at some point, a couple of things happened–can’t be sure in what order. The generator blew. Or something in the power feed blew, maybe, since the generator mostly looks okay to my admittedly shit-ignorant eye.”

“Maybe they ran out of fuel,” Gallagher hazards.

“Nope. They didn’t. The fuel is a high-octane naphtha–kerosene mix, like jet fuel, and they’ve got about seven hundred gallons of it. And the tanks for the flame-throwers are full too–at a pinch, they would have been able to jury-rig something out of that. So most likely it was a mechanical failure of some kind. They should have been able to fix it, because they’ve got multiple spares for every damn part, but… well, for some reason they didn’t. Maybe they’d already taken some casualties, and the people they lost were the ones who were the best mechanics. Anyway, when we get that generator stripped down, we’ll see what’s what.”