The Girl With All the Gifts(96)

What did they do? he wonders dazedly. What did they just do to me?

He catches a blur of movement in his peripheral vision, and he turns. Another little kid is rushing on him. His face is a bright splash of random colour, in which his eyes show out as two black pinpricks. His arm is raised high, and he’s holding a shining metal something over his head that glints blindingly in the slanting afternoon light.

Gallagher flinches away with a shriek of terror as the boy swings. For a crazy moment he thinks the weapon is a sword, but as it flashes past him he sees that it’s too fat, too solid. The metal shelf unit takes most of the force of the blow. Gallagher brings his arm up to smack the kid in the chest backhanded, and the kid weighs nothing so the blow sends him spinning head over heels. The weapon–it’s an aluminium baseball bat–flies out of his hand and clatters at Gallagher’s feet.

Which are now in an actual puddle. A puddle of his own blood.

The painted-face kid scrambles away, but there’s two more of them running in now from either side, one with a knife and the other swinging what looks like a butcher’s cleaver. Gallagher screams again at the top of his voice, and snatches up the baseball bat.

The hungry kids abort their attack runs, back-pedal right out of his reach.

But they’re everywhere now. Gallagher can’t see how many but it seems like dozens. Hundreds, maybe. Little pale faces peer at him through the gaps in the shelves, duck in and out of view. Bolder ones crowd the ends of the aisle, staring at him openly. They’re armed with everything under the sun, from knives and forks to broken branches. They’re mostly stark naked like the girl, but some are wearing weirdly assorted clothes that must have been looted from shop displays. One boy has a leopard-print bra fastened diagonally across his upper body, tied at the bottom end to a webbing belt from which a whole bunch of ornamental key rings are hanging.

The little girl he saw first is still standing there, Gallagher sees now. She’s just stepped back a little to give the ones with the weapons a bit more room. She’s chewing on the dead rat, calm and patient.

Gallagher tries to get up, but his legs won’t bear his weight. He can’t take his eyes off the kids in case they attack again, so he reaches down with his free hand to try and figure out by feel what it is that’s happened to him. There’s a broad rent in the right leg of his trousers, halfway between knee and ankle. Gingerly he reaches through it to touch the edges of the wound. It’s not wide, but it’s long and it’s straight and you have to figure it’s deep.

Same with the left leg.

The rat wasn’t a peace offering. It was bait. And it shouldn’t have worked because he doesn’t eat rat, but hey, what do you know? He’s a sucker for a pretty face. The little moppet manoeuvred him into position, and then two of her friends sliced him up from behind.

He’s been hamstrung.

He’s not walking out of here.

He may never walk again.

“Fuck!” Gallagher is surprised when the word comes out of him as a whisper. In his mind it was a shout.

“Listen,” he says, aloud. “Listen to me. This is not… you’re not going to do this to me. You understand? You can’t…”

The faces he’s seeing don’t change. The same expression on all of them. Wild, aching need, somehow reined in, somehow not acted on.

They’re waiting for him to die, so they can eat him.

He takes out his sidearm and points it. At the girl. Then at the kid who dropped the baseball bat. He looks to be one of the oldest. He’s got incongruously red, full lips, where most of them barely have lips at all. You don’t notice that at first because of the paint all over his face, which Gallagher realises is not abstract. It’s another face, kind of a monster’s face painted over his own, the open mouth encompassing everything from his nose to his chin. The work is smudgy enough and wobbly enough to suggest that he did it himself, probably in marker pen. His lank, black hair hangs straight down over his eyes, giving him a louche, rock-star look. He’s so skinny, Gallagher can count every rib.

And the gun doesn’t bother him at all. He stares right past it, unblinking, into Gallagher’s eyes.

Gallagher waves the gun at the other kids, one by one. They don’t even seem to see it. They don’t know what a gun is or why they should be afraid of one. He’s going to have to shoot at least one of them to make them get it.

Better do it quick too. His hand is trembling and there’s a sort of fuzzy static behind his eyes. The world’s starting to jump a little, like a car on a bumpy road. He tries to focus through the shakes.

Painted-face boy. The one who dropped the baseball bat. He’s right at the front of the crowd, and he’s probably the one in charge of Operation Eat-Kieran-Gallagher, so f*ck him, he’s duly nominated.

But he keeps moving. They all keep moving. Might hit the little girl if he’s not careful. For some reason, Gallagher doesn’t want to do that, even though she set him up. She’s too small. It would feel too much like murder.

There he is, the little bastard. Target acquired. The gun feels like it weighs a couple of hundredweight but Gallagher only needs to hold it on the right line for a couple of seconds. Just time enough to squeeze, squeeze, and…

The trigger doesn’t move.

The clip’s empty.

Gallagher used it up on the second day when they were running through the crowd of hungries to get into that hospital place. Wainwright House. Then he switched to the rifle, and it’s the rifle he’s had in his hands ever since whenever it seemed like they might have to fight. He’s never reloaded.