The Girl With All the Gifts(99)

Being a man of a practical turn of mind, he takes the walkie-talkie from Gallagher’s belt and transfers it to his own before breaking open the little plastic tubes one at a time and emptying the lighter fluid out on to Gallagher’s corpse. Justineau watches, shaking her head. “What about the smoke?” she asks him.

“What about it?” Parks grunts.

Melanie turns her back on the two of them and walks down the aisle, all the way to the front of the shop. She comes back a moment later carrying a bright yellow cagoule in a plastic wrapper.

She kneels and puts it under Gallagher’s head. She’s kneeling in his blood, which isn’t even dry yet. When she stands again, red-black streaks adorn her knees and calves.

Parks gets to the last lighter. He could use it to light the pyre, but he doesn’t. He pours it on, like the rest, then strikes a spark with his tinderbox to start the blaze.

“God bless, Private,” he mutters, as the flames consume what little is left of Kieran Gallagher.

Melanie is saying something too, but it’s under her breath–to the dead body, not to the rest of them–and Parks can’t hear. Justineau, to do her justice, waits in silence until they’re done, which is basically when the greasy, stinking flames force them back.

They make the return trip to Rosie a lot more widely spaced than on the outward journey, and with a lot less to say to each other. The shop blazes behind them, sending up a thick pillar of smoke that spreads, far over their heads, into a black umbrella.

Justineau is treating Parks like a dog that’s showing a little foam around the gums, which he feels is probably more than fair right then. Melanie walks ahead of them both, shoulders hunched and head lowered. She hasn’t asked for her cuffs and muzzle to be replaced, and Parks hasn’t offered.

When they’re most of the way back, the kid stops. Her head snaps up, suddenly alert.

“What’s that?” she whispers.

Parks is about to say he can’t hear anything, but there is a vibration in the air and now it assembles itself into a sound. Something stirring into wakefulness, sullen and dangerous, asserting its readiness to pick a fight and win it.

Rosie’s engines.

Parks breaks into a run, turning the corner of the Finchley High Road in time to see the distant speck grow in seconds into a behemoth.

Rosie weaves a little, both because there’s debris in the road and because Dr Caldwell is driving with her thumbs hooked into the bottom of the steering wheel. Every twitch of her arm translates into a yawing roll of the long vehicle.

Without even thinking about it, Parks steps into the road. He has no idea what Caldwell is doing, what she might be fleeing from, but he knows he has to stop her. Rosie lurches like a drunk to miss him, smashing into a parked car, which is dragged along with it for a few yards before breaking apart in a shower of rust and glass.

Then it’s gone by. They’re staring at the mobile lab’s tail lights as it accelerates away from them.

“What the f*ck?” Justineau exclaims in a bewildered tone.

Parks seconds that emotion.





62


As soon as Parks and Justineau go off in search of Private Gallagher, taking test subject number one with them, Caroline Caldwell crosses to Rosie’s midsection door, opens up a compartment beside it at about head-height and pulls a lever from the vertical position to the horizontal. This is the override control for the external emergency access. Nobody can now enter the vehicle unless Caldwell lets them in herself.

That done, she goes to the cockpit and powers up one of three panels. The generator, twenty yards behind her in the rear of the vehicle, starts to hum–but not to roar, because Caldwell isn’t sending the power to the engine. She needs it in the lab, which is where she goes next. Since she’ll be working directly with infected tissue, she puts on gloves, goggles and face mask.

She boots up the scanning electron microscope, works her way patiently and punctiliously through the setting and display option screens, and mounts the first of her prepared slides.

With a pleasant tingle of anticipation, she puts her eyes to the output rig. The central nervous system of the Wainwright House hungry is instantly there, laid out before her avid gaze. Having chosen green as the key colour, she finds herself strolling under a canopy of neuronal dendrites, a tropical brainforest.

The resolution is so perfect, it takes Dr Caldwell’s breath away. Gross and fine structures are rendered in pin-sharp detail, like an illustration in a textbook. The fact that the brain tissue was so badly damaged before she was able to take her sample mainly shows itself by the presence, as she shifts the slide minutely under the turret, of foreign matter–dust motes, human hair and bacterial cells as well as the expected fungal mycelia–among the neurons. The nerve cells themselves are completely and thrillingly laid out to her gaze.

She sees what other commentators have seen, but what she has never been able to verify with the inadequate and jury-rigged equipment available to her at the base. She sees exactly how the cuckoo Ophiocordyceps builds its nests in the thickets of the brain–how its mycelia wrap themselves, thread-thin, around neuronal dendrites, like ivy around an oak. Except that ivy doesn’t whisper siren songs to the oak and steal it from itself.

Cuckoos? Ivy? Sirens? Focus, Caroline, she tells herself fiercely. Look at what’s in front of you, and draw appropriate inferences where the evidence exists to support them.