24
Melanie is coming down.
At first she can’t think at all. Then, when thoughts come back, she shrinks away from them, like Mr Whitaker when his bottle is almost empty. Her mouth is haunted by memories that want to be real again. Her mind is reeling from what she’s done.
And her body is wracked with a million tics and shakes–each cell reporting in unfit for duty, demanding what it can’t have.
She’s always been a good girl. But she ate pieces of two men, and very probably killed them both. Killed them with her teeth.
She was hungry, and they were her bread.
So what is she now?
These conundrums come and go as the residual hunger allows her to focus on them. Sometimes they’re very big and very clear, sometimes far away and seen through skeins of fuzz and smoke.
Something else that comes and goes: a memory. When she was lying on the table, tied down, and sawing at the plastic band that held her left wrist–left hand twisted round, the scalpel held awkwardly between the very tips of her fingers–one of the hungries loomed over her.
She froze at once. Stared up, breathless, into that savage, vacant face. There was nothing she could do, not even scream. Not even close her eyes. Free will fled away along the vectors of her fear.
For a strained second which then broke, abruptly, into pieces. The hungry gaped, slack-jawed, head hanging down and shoulders hunched up like a vulture. Its gaze slid away from Melanie’s, to the left and then to the right. It put out its tongue to taste the air, and then it stumbled on around the table, heading for a writhing mass of motion on the lab’s floor, almost out of Melanie’s field of vision.
It had only met her stare for that one second by blind chance.
After that it didn’t even seem to know she was there.
What with the withdrawal effects and with worrying at this puzzle, it’s a long while before Melanie notices the world she’s sitting in.
Wild flowers surround her. A couple of them–daffodils and campion–are familiar from Miss Justineau’s lesson on the day of the vernal equinox. The rest are completely new, and there are dozens of them. She turns her head, very slowly, staring at one after another.
She registers the tiny buzzing things that fly between them and guesses that they’re bees, because of what they’re doing–visiting one flower after another, bullying their way into the core of each one with a shrugging, rocking gait, and then backing out again and taking off for the next.
Something much bigger flies across the field in front of her. A black bird that might be a crow or a jackdaw, its song a hoarse, thrilling war cry. Sweeter and softer songs weave around it, but she can’t see the birds–if they are birds–that make those sounds.
The air is heavy with scents. Melanie knows that some of them are the scents of the flowers, but even the air seems to have a smell–earthy and rich and complicated, made out of things living and things dying and things long dead. The smell of a world where nothing stops moving, nothing stays the same.
Suddenly she’s an ant all scrunched up on the floor of that world. A static atom in a sea of change. The immensity of earth envelops her, and enters into her. She sips it, with each gulp of heady, supercharged atmosphere.
And even in this dazed, strung-out state, even with those memories of meat and monstrous violence lying thwart across her mind, she really, really likes it.
The smells, especially. They affect her very differently from the smell of people, but they still excite her–wake something in her mind that must have been asleep until then.
They help her to push the meat hunger and the memories away into a middle distance where they don’t hurt and shame her so very much.
By degrees, she comes back to herself. Which is when she realises that Miss Justineau is standing a little way away from her, watching her in silence. Miss Justineau’s face is wary, full of questions.
Melanie chooses to answer the most important one. “I won’t bite, Miss Justineau.
“But you’d better not get any closer than that,” she adds quickly, scrambling back as Miss J takes a step towards her. “You smell all… and there’s blood on you. I don’t know what I’ll do.”
“Okay.” Miss Justineau stops where she is, and nods. “We’ll find a place to wash, and then we’ll freshen up the e-blocker. Are you okay, Melanie? It must have been really frightening for you.” Her face is full of concern, along with something else. Fear, maybe.
And she should be afraid. They’re outside the fence, in region 6, and they must be miles and miles away from the base. They’re out among the monsters, the hungries, with no refuge close to hand.
“Are you okay?” Miss Justineau asks again.
Melanie nods, but it’s a lie. She’s not okay, not yet. She doesn’t know if she’ll ever be okay again. Being strapped down on the table with Dr Caldwell’s knife in front of her eyes was the scariest thing that ever happened to her. Until she saw Miss J about to be killed, and then that became the scariest thing. And now, it’s the thought of biting and eating pieces of those two men.
However you look at it, it hasn’t been a good day at all. She wants to ask the question that’s burning a hole through her heart. Because Miss Justineau will know. Of course she will. Miss Justineau knows everything. But she can’t ask, because she can’t make the words come out. She doesn’t want to admit that there’s a doubt, a question there.
What am I?
So she says nothing. She waits for Miss Justineau to speak. And after a long time, Miss Justineau does. “You were very brave. If you hadn’t come along when you did, and if you hadn’t fought those men, they would have killed me.”
“And Dr Caldwell was going to kill me and chop me up into pieces and put me in jars,” Melanie reminds her. “You saved me first, Miss Justineau.”
“Helen,” Miss J says. “My name is Helen.”
Melanie considers this statement.
“Not to me,” she says.
25
When he gets down under the Humvee and takes a good look at the rear axle, Parks swears.
Bitterly.
He’s only a middling mechanic, but he can tell that it’s pretty much screwed. It’s taken a good whack just off centre, presumably when they leapt the security ditch, and it’s all bent into a shallow V, with a small but visible crack in the metal at the impact point. They’re lucky to have got this far without it breaking in two. They sure as hell won’t make it much further. Not on their own, anyway. And Parks has done enough shout-outs by this time, on normal and emergency frequencies, to know that there’s no help coming from the base.
He debates with himself whether it’s worth looking at the engine. There’s something wrong there, too, that he might have a better chance of fixing, but the axle’s probably going to give long before that becomes an issue.
Probably. But not certainly.
With a sigh, he crawls out from under the Humvee and goes around to the front. Private Gallagher trails after him like a lost puppy, still begging for orders.
“Is it okay, Sarge?” he asks, anxiously.
“Just pop the bonnet for me, son,” Parks says. “We need to take a look at the insides, too.”
The insides look okay, remarkably. The straining sounds from the engine have an obvious cause, which is that one of the motor mounts has been unscrewed. The engine block is hanging at an angle, vibrating against the top of the wheel arch where it’s touching. It would have torn itself to pieces eventually, but it doesn’t seem to have done much real damage yet. Parks gets the socket set out of the tool locker on the side of the vehicle and puts a new bolt through the mount, locking the engine back into place.
He takes his time, because once he’s finished, he’s got to start making decisions about all this other shit.
He holds the briefing inside the Hummer to lengthen the odds against nasty surprises, and he makes the little hungry kid sit outside on the bonnet.
That’s the way he thinks of it, as a briefing. He’s the only soldier here except for Gallagher, who’s too young to have an opinion, let alone a plan. So it’s going to have to be Parks who calls the shots.
That’s not how it goes down, though. The civilians have ideas of their own–always an omen of disaster and heartache in Parks’ book–and they’re not shy about expressing them.
Starting from when Parks says they’re going to head south. It makes perfect sense–most likely it’s their only chance–but as soon as he says it, they’re up in his face.
“All my notes and samples are at the base!” Dr Caldwell says. “They have to be retrieved.”
“There are thirty kids there, too,” Justineau adds. “And most of your men. What are we going to do? Just walk away from them?”
“That’s exactly what we’re going to do,” Parks tells them. “If you shut up, I’ll tell you why. I’ve been up on that radio every ten or fifteen minutes since we stopped. Not only is there no answer from the base, there’s no answer full stop. Nobody else got out of there. Or if they did, they got out without wheels or comms, which means they might just as well be on another planet as far as we’re concerned. There’s no way to get their attention right now without getting the junkers bouncing at us too. If we meet them on the road, that’s great. Otherwise, we’re alone, and the only sensible thing to do is to head for home fires. For Beacon.”
Caldwell doesn’t answer. She’s unfolded her arms for the first time and she’s taking a furtive, fearful look at her injuries, like a poker player lifting the corners of his cards to see what Lady Luck has sent along.
But Justineau just keeps going at it, which is pretty much what Parks expects from her by this point. “What if we wait for a few days, and then start back towards the base? We can take it slowly, and scout out the ground as we go. If the junkers are still in possession, we back off. But if it’s clear, we can go on in. Maybe just me and Dr Caldwell, while you stay back and cover us. If the kids are still alive in there, I can’t just leave them.”
Parks sighs. There’s so much craziness in this one short speech, it’s hard to know which way to come at it. “Okay,” he says. “First off, they were never alive to start with. Second—”
“They’re children, Sergeant.” There’s a vicious edge to her voice. “Whether they’re hungries or not isn’t the issue.”
“Begging your pardon, Miss Justineau, it’s very much the issue. Being hungries, they can live for a really long time without food. Maybe indefinitely. If they’re still locked up in that bunker, they’re safe. And they’ll stay safe until someone opens it up. If they’re not, the junkers probably just added them into that stampede they’ve got going, in which case they’re not our problem any more. But I’ll tell you what is. You’re talking about sneaking up close to that base. Scoping it out. How exactly do you propose to do that?”
“Well, we come up through…” Justineau starts, but she stops right there because she’s seen it.
“No way to be quiet if we bring the Hummer,” Parks says, voicing what she’s just now getting around to thinking. “They’ll hear us coming from a couple of miles off. And if we do it without the Hummer, then we’re bollock naked in an area that’s just had a couple of thousand hungries set loose in it. I wouldn’t give much for our chances.”
Justineau says nothing. She knows he’s right, and she’s not going to argue for suicide.
But now here comes Dr Caldwell again. “I think it’s a question of strict priorities, Sergeant Parks. My research was the entire reason for the base’s existence. However much risk is involved in retrieving the notes and samples from the lab, I believe we need to do it.”
“And I don’t,” Parks says. “Same thing applies. If your stuff is okay, it’s okay because they left it. I think they most likely did, because they wouldn’t have been looking for paper–except maybe to wipe their arses on. They were looking for food, weapons, petrol, stuff like that.” Unless they were looking for payback for the guys that Gallagher got killed, but he’s not going to say that right now.
“The longer we leave it—” Caldwell starts to object.
“So I’m making a judgement call.” Parks cuts her off. “We go south, and we keep on the radio. Soon as we’re close enough to get a ping from Beacon, we tell them what went down. They can airlift some people in–with some real firepower to back them up. They’ll get the stuff from your lab, and then probably swing by and pick us up on their way home. Or worst case, we don’t manage to make contact from the road, so we have to report once we get there. Same thing happens, but it happens a day or so later. Either way, everyone’s happy.”
“I’m not happy,” Caldwell says, coldly. “I’m not happy at all. A delay of even a day in recovering those materials is unacceptable.”
“What if I went to the base by myself?” Justineau demands. “You could wait for me here, and then if I didn’t come back—”
“That’s not going to happen,” Parks snaps. He doesn’t mean to rain on her parade, but he’s had enough of this bullshit. “Right now, those motherfuckers don’t know how far we got, which way we went, or even whether we’re alive or dead. And that’s how I want it to stay. If you go back and they catch you, right away they’ve got a line on us.”
“I won’t tell them anything,” Justineau says, but he doesn’t even have to say anything to shoot that one down. They’re all grown-ups here.
Parks waits for further objections, because he’s pretty sure they’re coming. But Justineau is looking through the glass now at the little hungry girl, who seems to be drawing something in the dust on the Hummer’s bonnet. There’s a look on the kid’s face like she’s trying to figure out a hard word on a smudged page. And the same look, now he comes to think of it, on Justineau’s face. That gives him a slightly queasy feeling. Meanwhile, Caldwell is flexing her fingers as if she’s checking out whether they still work, so he gets a free pass on that one.
“Okay,” he says, “here’s what we’ll do. There’s a stream a couple of clicks west of here that was still running clean last I heard. We’ll drive there first, pick up some water. Then we go to one of the supply caches and get ourselves provisioned. We need food and e-blockers, mainly, but there’s a lot of other stuff that would come in pretty useful. After that, we light straight out. East until we hit the A1, then south all the way to Beacon. Either we skirt around London or we push straight through, depending. We’ll scope out the situation there once we get closer. Any questions?”
There are a million questions, he knows damn well. He’s also got a pretty shrewd hunch as to which one is going to come first, and he’s not disappointed.
“What about Melanie?” Justineau demands.