The Girl With All the Gifts(97)

He almost laughs. The kids haven’t even reacted because the gun doesn’t mean a damn thing to them. It’s the baseball bat that’s keeping them at bay.

Except it’s not. Not any more. They’re advancing slowly from both ends of the aisle, creeping in closer to him a step or two at a time, like they’re on a dare. Painted-face boy is leading the pack, even though he doesn’t have a weapon any more. His bony fingers flex and contract.

Numbness is creeping over Gallagher now, seeping up through his body from his wounded legs. But the terror effervescing in his mind keeps it back, and brings a sudden inspiration. Quickly he shifts on to his left side, so he can feel in the pockets of his fatigues for…

Yes! There it is. His hand closes on the cold metal. Hail Mary, he thinks incredulously, full of grace.

The kids are really close. Gallagher pulls the grenade from his pocket and holds it out for them to see.

“Look!” he yells. “Look at this!” The inexorable advance slows and stops, but he knows it’s the shout and not the danger that has made the kids hesitate. They’re gauging how much fight he has left in him.

“Boooooom!” Gallagher mimes an explosion, throwing his arms out wildly. Silence for a moment. Then painted-face boy barks back at him. He thinks it’s just a threat display. A pissing contest.

And the kids are moving again. Closing in for the kill.

“It’s a bomb!” Gallagher shouts desperately. “It’s a f*cking grenade. It will rip you apart. Go and eat a stray dog or something. I’ll do it. I mean it. I’ll really do it.”

No reaction. He takes the pin between thumb and forefinger.

He doesn’t want to kill them. Just to make sure his own exit is a white light and a sudden shock, rather than something drawn out and horrible, beyond his capacity to endure. It’s not like they’ve left him a choice. He doesn’t have any choice at all.

“Please,” he says.

Nothing.

And when it comes to it, he can’t do it. If he could make them understand what it was he was threatening them with, maybe it would be different.

He drops the baseball bat, and the feral children take him like a wave. The grenade is knocked out of his hand and rolls away.

“I don’t want to hurt you!” Gallagher shrieks. And it’s the truth, so he tries not to fight back as they clutch and bite and tear at him. They’re just kids, and their childhood has probably been as big a load of shit as his was.

In a perfect world, he would have been one of them.





61


Parks is determined to search even though he knows the chance of finding Gallagher is close to zero. They can’t shout and they can’t throw up any kind of a grid, because it’s just the three of them–himself, Helen Justineau and the kid. Dr Caldwell claimed she was too weak to walk very far, and since she looks as though a harsh word would break her in two, he didn’t argue the point.

But they don’t need a grid. Melanie turns herself around like a weathercock, sniffs the wind a couple of times. She ends up facing a little bit west of south.

“That way.”

“You’re sure?” Parks asks her.

A nod. No wasted words. She leads the way.

But the trail goes all over the place, up one road and down another, mostly keeping southerly at first, but then not even that. Gallagher seems to have doubled back on himself, when he was only a mile or so out from Rosie. Parks wonders if the kid might be stringing them along for some reason–to look important, maybe, and to have the grown-ups’ attention. But that’s bullshit. Maybe a ten-year-old with a pulse would pull a trick like that, but Melanie’s more grounded. If she didn’t know where Gallagher went, she’d just say so.

There’s something else going on though, and it’s between Melanie and Justineau–a dialogue of scared glances that reaches a crescendo at the point where the trail crosses a street into a back alley.

The kid stops and looks at him. “Get out your gun, Sergeant,” she says quietly. She’s gone way solemn.

“Hungries?” He doesn’t care how she knows. He just wants to be clear about what he’s walking into.

“Yes.”

“Where?”

The kid hesitates. They’re in a sort of parking apron behind some shops. Lots of doorways on three sides of them, mostly broken open or broken down. A rusting car off on one side that’s up on bricks, probably already immobile long before the Breakdown silenced the roads. Wheelie bins laid out in a long line for a collection that never came.

“There,” Melanie says at last. The doorway she nods towards is at first glance no different from any of the others. Second glance takes in the trodden-down weeds right in front of it, one of them a monster thistle that’s still wet with sap where it was broken.

Parks goes to silent running. Better late than never, he figures. He taps Justineau’s hand, indicates that she should take out her handgun. The two of them approach the door like cops in a pre-Breakdown TV drama, exaggeratedly furtive despite the crunch and grind of their footsteps on the broken ground.

Melanie steps in between and turns to face them.

“Cut me loose,” she says to Parks.

He looks her in the eye. “Hands?”

“Hands and mouth.”

“Not that long ago, you asked me to tie you up,” he reminds her.