The Girl With All the Gifts(93)

“I don’t mind telling you,” Melanie says simply. “But it has to be our secret. I don’t want Dr Caldwell to know. Or Sergeant Parks. Or even Kieran.”

“Why not, Melanie?” Justineau coaxes. And gets it as soon as she’s asked. She holds up her hand to stop Melanie from saying it. But Melanie says it anyway.

“They’d catch them and put them in cells under the ground,” she says. “And Dr Caldwell would cut them up. So I made up something that I thought would make Sergeant Parks want to go away really fast, before anyone finds out they’re here. Please say you won’t tell, Miss Justineau. Please promise me.”

“I promise,” Justineau whispers. And she means it. Whatever comes of it, she won’t let Caroline Caldwell know that she’s sitting right next door to a new batch of test subjects. There’ll be no culling of these feral children.

Which means she’ll have to go back to Parks and maintain the lie. Or bring him in on it. Or come up with a better one.

The two of them are silent for a moment, both presumably thinking about how this changes things between them. Back when they first left the base, she’d offered Melanie the choice between staying with them and going into one of the nearby towns. “To be with your own kind,” she’d almost said, and stopped herself because she realised even as she was saying it that Melanie didn’t have a kind.

But now she does.

While she’s still thinking through the implications of what Melanie has just told her, Justineau starts to shake. For a surreal and terrifying moment she thinks it’s just her–that it’s some sort of seizure. But the vibration settles into a throbbing rhythm that she recognises, and there’s a low rumble in her ears that crests and then dies. The throbbing dies with it as quickly as it came.

“My God!” Justineau gasps.

She scrambles up off the floor and runs, heading aft.

Parks stands over the generator, his oily hands hovering as though he’s just performed a blessing. Or an exorcism. “Got it,” he says, giving Justineau a fierce grin as she comes into the room.

“But it died again,” she says.

Caldwell follows her into the room. The generator’s magical resurrection has brought her running too.

“No, it didn’t. I cut it off. Don’t want the noise to carry until we’re ready to drive out. You never know who’s listening, after all.”

“So we can leave!” Justineau says. “Keep going south. Let’s roll, Parks. To hell with anything else.”

He gives her a wry look. “Yeah,” he says. “Don’t want to have to tangle with those junkers. We might have to…” He stops and looks past the two women, his face serious all of a sudden.

“Where’s Gallagher?” he demands.





60


Gallagher is in the wind. He’s bolted. The pressure that had been building in him exploded outwards, all at once, and carried him out of there before he even registered what he was doing.

It’s not that he’s a coward. It’s more like a law of motion. Because the pressure, for him, was coming from in front as well as from behind–from the thought of what he was going back to. He just got squeezed sideways.

Yeah, but it’s also the thought of locking the door, turning out the lights and waiting for the junkers to find them. Like anyone could possibly miss them, just standing out there in the street.

When the base fell, Gallagher saw Si Brooks–the man who rented out his precious vintage porno mag to the whole barracks, and was privately in love with the girl on page twenty-three–get his face split open with the butt of a rifle. And Lauren Green, one of the few female privates he could talk to without getting tongue-tied, was stabbed in the stomach with a bayonet. And he would have got a helping of that too, if Sergeant Parks hadn’t grabbed him by the shoulder and hauled him away from the corner of the mess hall, where he was hiding, with a terse “I need a gunner.”

Gallagher has no illusions about how long he would have lasted otherwise. He was nailed to the spot with pure terror. But nailed was the wrong word, because what he was actually feeling right then was more like vertigo–as though if he moved, he was going to fall in some random direction, slantwise across the tilting world.

So he’s ashamed, now, to be running out on the Sarge, his saviour. But this is how you square the circle. Can’t go back. Can’t go forward. Can’t stay put. So you pick another direction and you get out from under.

The river is going to save him. There’ll be boats there, left over from the old days before the Breakdown. He can row or sail away and find an island somewhere, with a house on it but no hungries, and live on what he can grow or hunt or trap. He knows that Britain is an island, and that there are others close to it. He’s seen maps, although he doesn’t remember the fine detail. How hard can it be? Explorers and pirates used to do it all the time.

He’s heading south, with the aid of the compass from his belt. Or rather he’s trying to, but the streets don’t always help. He’s left the main drag, where he felt way too exposed, and is zigzagging his way through back streets. The compass tells him which way to go, and he follows its advice whenever the maze of avenues, crescents and cul-de-sacs allows him to. They’re mercifully empty. He hasn’t seen a live hungry since he flung open Rosie’s door and fled. Just a couple more of the dead ones with the trees growing out of them.