The Girl With All the Gifts(85)

“I told you what I was thinking,” Parks says. “I’m not in the habit of lying to you.”

“Because this is not her natural f*cking habitat,” Justineau goes on. It feels like there’s something bitter that she swallowed, that she has to talk around. “She has no clue about this place. Less than we do, and God knows we don’t have much. She might be able to find food for herself, but that’s not the same as surviving, Parks. She’d be living with animals. Living like an animal. So an animal is what she’d be. The little girl would die. What would be left would be something a lot more like all the other hungries out there.”

“I let her loose so she could eat,” Parks says. “I didn’t think past that.”

“Yeah, but you’re not an idiot.” She’s come right up close to him, and he’s actually backed away a little, as far as he can in that narrow space. All she can see of his face in the torch’s angled beam is the tight set of his mouth. “Caroline can indulge the luxury of not thinking. You can’t.”

“Thought the Doc was meant to be a genius,” Parks mutters, with unconvincing nonchalance.

“Same thing. She only sees what’s at the bottom of her test tubes. When she calls Melanie test subject number one, she means it. But you know better. If you took a kitten away from its mother, then dumped it back again and the mother bit its throat out because it didn’t smell right, you’d know that was your fault. If you caught a bird and taught it to talk, and then it escaped and it starved to death because it didn’t know how to feed itself, you’d be absolutely clear that was on you.

“Well, Melanie’s not a cat, is she? Or a bird. She might have grown up into something like that, if you’d left her where you found her. Something wild that didn’t know itself and just did whatever it needed to do. But you dropped a net over her and brought her home. And now she’s yours. You interfered. You took on a debt.”

Parks says nothing. Slowly Justineau reaches behind her and draws the flare gun from where she hid it. She brings it out and lets him see it, in her hand.

She walks to the door of the engine room.

“Helen,” Parks says.

She goes through the aft weapons stations to the door. It’s locked but unguarded. Caldwell is in the lab, and Gallagher is in the crew quarters flicking through the old CDs like they were porn.

“Helen.”

She disengages the lock. It’s the first time she’s done it, but it’s not hard to figure out how the mechanism works. She glances back at Parks, who’s got his handgun out and pointed right at her. But only for a second. The hand falls to his side again, and he puffs out his cheeks in a sigh, like he’s put down a heavy weight.

Justineau opens the door and steps out. She puts her arm up over her head and pulls the trigger.

The sound is like a firework going off, but more drawn out. The flare whistles and sighs to itself as it ascends into the utter blackness above her.

There’s no light, nothing to see. The pistol was a good few years old, after all. Pre-Breakdown, like most of Parks’ kit. It must be a dud.

Then it’s like God turned on a light in the sky. A red light. From what she knows about God, that’s the colour he’d favour.

Everything is as clearly visible as in daylight, but this is nothing like daylight. It’s the light of an abattoir, or a horror movie. And it must have reached the interior spaces of Rosie, even though someone has pulled the light-proof baffles down over the tiny reinforced windows, because now Gallagher is looking out through the door right next to Parks, and Caroline Caldwell has deigned to step out of the lab too and is standing behind them, staring out in bewilderment at the crimson midnight.

“You’d better get back inside,” Parks tells Justineau in a voice of flat resignation. “She won’t be the only one that sees that.”





57


Melanie isn’t lost, but the sight of the flare cheers her.

She’s sitting on the roof of a house half a mile away from Rosie. She’s been sitting there for some hours now, in a steady downpour that’s already soaked her to the skin. She’s trying to make sense of something she saw late in the afternoon, just after she’d finally filled her belly. She’s been running it through in her mind ever since in endless, silent replay.

What she ate, after searching rain-slicked alleyways and sodden gardens for an hour and a half, was a feral cat. And she hated it. Not the cat itself, but the process of chasing and catching and eating it. The hunger was driving her, and driving her hard, telling her exactly what to do. As she ripped the cat’s belly open with her teeth and gorged herself on what came tumbling out, a part of her was entirely satisfied, entirely at peace. But there was another part that kept itself at a distance from the horrible cruelty and the horrible messiness. That part saw the cat still alive, still twitching as she crunched its fragile ribs to get at its heart. Heard its piteous miawling as it clawed at her uselessly, opening shallow cuts in her arms that didn’t even bleed. Smelled the bitter stench of excrement as she accidentally tore open its entrails, and saw her strew the guts in the air like streamers to get at the soft flesh underneath.

She ate it hollow.

And as she did, she dodged through all kinds of irrelevant thoughts. The cat in the picture on the wall of her cell, peacefully and intently lapping up its milk. The proverb about all cats being black at night, which she didn’t understand and Mr Whitaker couldn’t explain. A poem in a book.