The Girl With All the Gifts(92)

Justineau stops, with the door half open. “You said you could only smell me a little bit,” she says. “Is it enough to be uncomfortable for you?”

“Not yet.” Melanie’s voice is tight.

“Then we’re okay. If that changes, you tell me and I’ll get out. But I don’t like you being in a cage like an animal with me out there looking in. This would feel better for me. If it’s okay with you.”

But it’s clear from Melanie’s face that it’s not okay. Justineau gives up. She closes the door and locks it again. Then she sits down and leans her shoulder against the mesh, legs crossed.

“Okay,” she says. “You win. But come on over here and sit with me at least. If you’re inside and I’m outside, that should be fine, right?”

Melanie advances cautiously, but she stops halfway, evidently fearful of a situation that could spiral quickly out of her control. “If I tell you to get further back, you have to do it right away, Miss Justineau.”

“Melanie, there’s a wire-mesh screen in between us and you’ve got your muzzle on. You can’t hurt me.”

“I don’t mean that,” Melanie says quietly.

Obviously. She’s talking about changing, in front of her teacher and her friend. Ceasing to be herself. That prospect scares her a lot.

Justineau feels ashamed, not just about the thoughtless comment but about what she’s come here to do. Melanie must have lied for a reason. Breaking down the lie feels wrong. But so does the thought of some new random factor out there that Melanie wants them all to run away from. Parks is right. They have to know.

“When you went into the theatre last night…” she begins tentatively.

“Yes?”

“And saw the junkers…”

“There weren’t any junkers, Miss Justineau.”

Just like that. Justineau’s got her next few lines already prepared. She stares stupidly, mouth open. “No?” she says.

“No.”

And Melanie tells her what she really saw.


Running between the mildewed seats and across the booming stage. Naked as the day they were born. And filthy, although their skin underneath the dirt was the same bone white as her own. Their hair hanging lank and heavy, or in a few cases standing up in spikes. Some of them had sticks in their hands, and some of them had bags–old plastic bags, with words on them like Foodfresh and Grocer’s Market.

“But I wasn’t lying about the knives. They had those too. Not stabbing knives like Sergeant Parks’ and Kieran’s. Knives like you might cut bread or meat with in a kitchen.”

Fifteen of them. She counted. And when she made up the story of the junkers, she just added forty more.

But they weren’t junkers. They were children of every age from maybe four or five to about fifteen. And what they were doing was chasing rats. Some of them beating the floor and the seats with their sticks to get the rats running. Others catching them when they ran, biting off their heads and dropping the limp bodies into the bags. They were much faster than the rats, so it wasn’t hard for them. They made it into a game, laughing and taunting each other with shrieks and funny faces as they ran.

Children like her. Children who were hungries too, and alive, and animated, and enjoying the thrill of the hunt. Until they sat down, at last, and feasted on the small, blood-drenched corpses, the big ones choosing first, the little ones pushing in between them to snatch and steal. Even that was a game, and they were still laughing. There was no threat in it.

“There was a boy who seemed to be the leader. He had a big stick like a king’s sceptre, all shiny, and his face was painted in lots of different colours. It made him look sort of scary, but he wasn’t scary to the little ones: he was protecting them. When one of the other big kids showed her teeth to one of the little ones and looked like she was going to bite him, the painted-face boy put his stick on the big kid’s shoulder and she stopped. But mostly they didn’t try to hurt each other. It seemed like they were a family almost. They all knew each other, and they liked being together.”

It was a midnight picnic. Watching it, Melanie felt like she was looking at her own life through the wrong end of a telescope. This was what she would have been if she hadn’t been taken away to the base. This was what she was supposed to be. And the way she felt about that kept changing as she thought about it. She was sad that she couldn’t join the picnic. But if she hadn’t gone to the base, she would never have learned so many things and she would never have met Miss Justineau.

“I started to cry,” Melanie says. “Not because I was sad, but because I didn’t know if I was sad or not. It was like I was missing all those kids down there, even though I’d never even met them. Even though I didn’t know their names. They probably didn’t have names. It didn’t seem like they could talk, because they just made these squeaking and growling sounds at each other.”

The emotions that cross the little girl’s face are painfully intense. Justineau puts her hand up against the side of the cage, slides her fingers through the mesh.

Melanie leans forward, letting her forehead touch the tips of Justineau’s fingers.

“So… why didn’t you tell us all this?” It’s the first thing Justineau can think of to ask. She skirts around Melanie’s existential crisis with instinctive caution, afraid to confront it head on. She knows Melanie won’t let her go into the cage and hug her, not with that fear of losing herself, so all she has is words, and words feel inadequate for the job.