The Girl With All the Gifts(81)

“People in general? You were being philosophical?”

“I was being a grumpy bastard. It’s what I wear to the office most days. I guess you probably noticed that.”

She hesitates, wrong-footed. She didn’t think Parks was capable of self-deprecation. But then she didn’t think he was capable of changing his mind.

“Any more rules of engagement?” she asks him, still hurting in some obscure way, still not mollified. “How to survive when shopping? Top tips for modern urban living?”

Parks gives the question more consideration than she was expecting.

“Use up the last of that e-blocker,” he suggests. “And don’t die.”





54


Gallagher wishes he was on his own.

It’s not that he doesn’t like Helen Justineau. If anything, it’s the opposite. He likes her a lot. He thinks she’s really beautiful. She’s had star or co-star billing in a number of his sexual fantasies, mostly playing the role of the highly experienced and wildly perverted older woman picking up a boy young enough to be her son and showing him the ropes. A lot of times, the ropes weren’t even metaphorical.

But that makes it all the more awkward to be out on a patrol with her. He’s scared of saying or doing something really stupid in front of her. He’s scared of being in a position where he has to make a quick decision and not being able to think of one because he’s thinking too much about her. He’s scared of not being able to hide how scared he is.

It doesn’t help that they can’t even talk to each other. Okay, they exchange a terse murmur every now and then, when they’ve come to the end of a street and they have to decide where to go next. But the rest of the time they walk along in complete silence, in the slo-mo shuffle that Sergeant Parks has taught them.

It sort of feels like overkill right then. In the first hour after they leave the armoured truck with the stupid name, they only see four live hungries, and none of them close up.

Then they find the first dead one. It’s fruited like all of those others, except that it’s fallen down on its stomach and the big white stem has punched its way out of the poor bastard’s back. Helen Justineau stares down at it, all sick and sombre. Gallagher guesses she’s thinking about the little hungry kid. Like a mother before the Breakdown, thinking the world’s a big place and there’s lots of sick people in it and where’s my baby girl?

Yeah. Full of sick people, the world. He’s related to a whole lot of them. And he met a whole lot more when the base fell. A part of his unease right now–maybe the biggest part–comes from the feeling that he’s not moving in a direction that makes any sense. Sure, he’s going home. But that’s like putting your foot back in a trap after you’ve somehow got free of it. They can’t go back to the base, obviously. There isn’t any base, not any more, and the bastards who tore it down might still be chasing them. But Gallagher can’t see Beacon as a refuge. He can only see it as a mouth opening in front of him to swallow him down.

He tries to shake off the mood of despair. He tries to look and feel like a soldier. He wants Helen Justineau to be reassured by his presence.

They’ve been working their way down a long road with shops on both sides, but the shops have all been ransacked long ago. They’re way too obvious–easy targets for anyone who came this way. Probably most of them got looted during the early days of the Breakdown.

So now they turn their attention to the houses in the side streets, which are harder to get into and harder to search. You have to do a recce for hungries first of all. And you have to make as little noise as you can breaking in, because obviously noise is going to bring them if there are any of them around. Then once you’re inside, you have to do another recce. Could be a whole nest of hungries in any of these houses–former residents or uninvited guests.

It’s slow going, and it preys on your nerves.

And it’s depressing because the rain has set in solidly now. They’re getting pissed on out of a grim, grey sky.

And last of all, it’s boring, if something can be both really scary and boring at the same time. The houses all seem the same to Gallagher. Dark. Musty-smelling with squishy carpets underfoot, mouldering curtains and sprays of black mildew up interior walls. Cluttered up with millions of things that don’t do anything except get in your way and almost trip you over. It’s like before the Breakdown people used to spend their whole lives making cocoons for themselves out of furniture and ornaments and books and toys and pictures and any kind of shit they could find. As though they hoped they’d be born out of the cocoon as something else. Which some of them were, of course, but not in the way they hoped.

In most of the houses, Justineau and Gallagher stay just long enough to check the kitchen. In some, there’s a utility room or a garage that they check too. They stay resolutely away from the fridges and freezers, which they know will be filled with a riot of stinking, festering shit. It’s canned goods and packet goods that are the jackpot here.

But they don’t find any. The kitchens are bare.

They move on to the next street, with similar results. At the very end of it, there’s a lock-up garage with a bright green door, which they almost walk past. But it’s right next to a looted corner shop, and Justineau slows to a halt.

“You thinking what I’m thinking?” she asks Gallagher.