The Girl With All the Gifts(98)

“I know. I’ll be careful.”

She doesn’t need to say the rest out loud. If they’re walking into an enclosed space full of hungries, they’ll probably need her. Can’t argue with that. Parks unlocks the cuffs, slides them into his belt. Melanie undoes the muzzle for herself and hands it to him.

“Will you look after this for me, please?” she asks.

He pockets it, and Melanie walks before them into the darkness.

But they’re coming late to the party. Whatever happened here, it’s already over. A broad smeared trail of blood leads from the centre of an aisle into a corner out of the sun, which is where the hungries took Gallagher so they could eat him. He stares straight at the ceiling with a look of patient suffering on his face, like the more mannerly depictions of Christ on the cross. Unlike Christ, he’s been chewed down to the bone in most places. His jacket is gone. No sign of it anywhere. His shirt, ripped wide open, frames the hollow chasm of his torso. His dog tags have fallen among exposed vertebrae. The hungries appear somehow to have eaten his throat without breaking the steel chain–like that party trick where you whip out the tablecloth without disturbing the crockery.

Justineau turns away, tears squeezed out from her closed eyes, but she makes no sound. Neither does Parks, for a moment or two. All he can think of is that he had a command of one and he let the boy die alone. That’s the sort of sin you go to hell for.

“We should bury him,” Melanie says.

For a moment his anger turns on her. “Fuck’s the point?” he growls, glaring at her. “They didn’t leave enough to bury. You could scoop him up and drop him in a frigging litter bin.”

Melanie meets him more than halfway. Teeth bared, she snarls right back at him. “We have to bury him. Or dogs and other hungries will get him and eat even more of him. And there won’t be anywhere to show where he died. You should honour a fallen soldier, Sergeant!”

“Honour a… Where the f*ck did that come from?”

“The Trojan War, most likely,” Justineau mutters. She wipes her eyes with the heel of her hand. “Melanie, we can’t… there isn’t anywhere. And we don’t have the time. We’d just be making ourselves into targets. We’re going to have to leave him.”

“If we can’t bury him,” Melanie says, “then we have to burn him.”

“With what?” Justineau demands.

“With the stuff in the big barrels,” Melanie says impatiently. “From the room with the generator in it. It says Inflammable on it, and that means it burns.”

Justineau says something else. Trying to explain, maybe, why dragging twenty-gallon drums of aviation fuel through the streets is another activity that they won’t be engaging in.

But Parks is thinking, with a sort of dull wonder: as far as the kid is concerned, the world never ended. They taught her all these old, old things, filled her head with all this unserviceable shit, and they thought it didn’t matter because she was never going to leave her cell except to be dismantled and smeared on microscope slides.

His stomach lurches. He has a sense, for the first time in his soldiering career, of what a war crime might look like from the inside. And it’s not him who’s the criminal, or even Caldwell. It’s Justineau. And Mailer. And that drunken bastard Whitaker, and all the rest of them. Caldwell, she’s just a butcher. She’s Sweeney Todd, with a barber’s chair and a straight razor. She didn’t spend years twisting kids’ brains into pretzels.

“We can say a prayer for him,” Justineau is saying now. “But we can’t drag one of those fuel drums all the way here, Melanie. And even if we could—”

“Okay,” Parks says. “Let’s do it.”

Justineau looks at him like he’s gone mad. “This isn’t a joke,” she tells him grimly.

“Do I look like I’m joking? Hey, she’s right. She’s making more sense than either of us.”

“We can’t—” Justineau says again.

Parks loses it.

“Why the hell not?” he roars. “If she wants to honour the f*cking dead, let her do it! School’s out, teacher. School’s been out for days now. Maybe you missed that.”

Justineau stares at him in bewilderment. Her face is a little pale. “You shouldn’t shout,” she mutters, making shushing motions with her hands.

“Did I get moved to your class?” Parks asks her. “Are you my teacher now?”

“The hungries that did this are probably still close enough to hear you. You’re giving away our position.”

Parks raises his rifle and squeezes off a round, making Justineau flinch and yelp. The shot punches a hole in the ceiling. Clods of damp plaster thud down, one of them bouncing off Parks’ shoulder and leaving a white streak where it hit. “I would welcome a word or two with them,” he says.

He turns to Melanie, who’s watching all this with wide eyes. It must be like seeing Mummy and Daddy quarrel. “What do you say, kid? Shall we give Kieran a Viking funeral?”

She doesn’t answer. She’s caught between a rock and a hard place, because if she says yes, then she’s siding with him against Justineau–and there’s no way that crush is subsiding any time soon.

Parks takes silence for consent. He goes around behind the counter, where he’s already seen a box of disposable lighters. They’re still full of fluid–only a few ccs in each one, but there are about a hundred of them. He brings them back to the pathetic remains.