The Girl With All the Gifts(88)

“Melanie is back,” the doctor says, coming to her feet. “Good. I was concerned she might have—”

“Shut your mouth, Caroline,” Justineau interrupts savagely. “Seriously. Shut it now, and don’t open it again.”

Caldwell continues to stare at her. She makes to walk aft, but Justineau is in her way and she stays there. All that aggression that’s building up in her, it’s got to come out.

“Sit down,” Justineau says. “You don’t get to see her. You don’t get to talk to her.”

“Yeah, she does,” says Parks, from behind her. She turns, and he’s standing in the doorway. Melanie is behind him. He hasn’t even put her cuffs on yet, but she’s already replaced her muzzle. She’s sodden, her hair plastered to the side of her head, her T-shirt clinging to her bony body. The rain has petered out now, so this is from last night.

“She wants to talk to all of us,” Parks goes on. “And I think we want to listen. Tell them what you just told me, kid.”

Melanie stares hard at Justineau, then even harder at Dr Caldwell. “We’re not alone out here,” she says. “There’s somebody else.”





59


In the crew quarters, they choose places to sit. Even though Rosie’s full complement was meant to be a dozen, it feels way too small. They’re aware of each other’s proximity, and none of them looks any more comfortable with that than Justineau feels.

She’s sitting on the edge of a lower bunk. Caldwell sits on its counterpart, directly opposite. Gallagher is cross-legged on the floor, and Parks leans in the doorway.

Standing at the forward end of the narrow space, Melanie addresses them. Justineau has dried her hair with a towel, hung out her jacket, jeans and T-shirt to dry and put another towel around her as a temporary bathrobe. Her arms are inside the towel–behind her back, because Parks has cuffed her hands again. It was her idea. She turned her back to him, arms held together, and waited patiently while he did it.

There’s massive tension in her face, in the way she stands. She’s struggling to keep herself under control–not in the feeding frenzy way, but in the way someone might be if they’d just been mugged on the street or witnessed a murder. Justineau has seen Melanie scared before, but this is something new, and for a little while Justineau struggles to identify it.

Then she realises what it is. It’s uncertainty.

She speculates for the first time on what Melanie could have been, could have become, if she’d lived before the Breakdown. If she’d never been bitten and infected. Because this is a child here, whatever else she is, and she’s never lost that sense of her own centre before except when she smelled blood and turned, briefly into an animal. And look at how pragmatically, how ruthlessly, she’s coped with that.

But Justineau only pursues this train of thought for a moment. When Melanie starts to speak, she commands their full attention.

“I should have come back sooner,” she says, to everyone in the room. “But I was scared, so I ran away and hid at first.”

“They don’t need a dramatic build-up, kid,” Parks drops into the ensuing silence. “Just go ahead and tell them.”

But Melanie starts at the beginning and rolls right on, as though that’s the only way she knows how to tell it. She recounts her visit to the theatre the night before in spare and functional sentences. The only sign of her agitation is in the way she shifts from foot to foot as she speaks.

Finally she reaches the point where she looked down from the balcony with her dark-adapted eyes and saw what was below her.

“They were men like the ones I saw at the base,” she says. “With shiny black stuff all over them and their hair all spiked up. In fact, I think they were exactly the same ones from the base.” Justineau feels her stomach lurch. Junkers are maybe the worst news they could get right now. “There were lots and lots of them. They were fighting each other with sticks and knives, except that they weren’t. Not really. They were only pretending to fight. And they had guns too–like yours, in big racks on the walls. But they weren’t using them. They were just using the sticks and the knives. First knives, then sticks, then knives again. The man who was in charge of the fighting told them when to use sticks and when to change over. And someone asked when they could stop and he said not until I say so.”

Melanie shoots a glance at Caroline Caldwell. Her expression is unreadable.

“Did you get an idea how many there were?” Parks asks.

“I tried to count, Sergeant Parks, and I got to fifty-five. But there could have been more, underneath where I was standing. There was a part of the room that I couldn’t see, and I didn’t want to move in case they heard me. I think there were probably more.”

“Jesus!” Gallagher says. His voice is hollow with despair. “I knew it. I knew they wouldn’t stop!”

“What made you think,” Caldwell asks, “that this was the same group who attacked the base?”

“I recognised some of them,” Melanie says promptly. “Not their faces really, but the clothes they wore. Some of them had patches and bits of metal on them, and they made patterns. I remembered the patterns. And one of them had a word on his arm. Relentless.”

“A tattoo,” Parks translates.