Parks is amazed. Appalled. Even a little bit disgusted. He’s used to dealing with people who have at least some sort of survival instinct, and he knows that Justineau isn’t stupid. Back at the base, he thought of her as the best of Caldwell’s exasperating little coterie, and while that isn’t saying much, he actually liked and respected her. He still does.
But this is getting them nowhere.
“I’m sorry if I didn’t make myself clear,” he tells her now. “You’re not free to leave; she’s not free to stay. My standing orders don’t cover any of this, but I’m taking a position. I’m going to get all the human beings here back to Beacon, alive, and after that, someone else can call it.”
“You think you can keep me with you against my will?” Justineau asks, putting her hands on her hips.
“Yes.” He’s sure of it.
“You think you can do it and still keep moving at a decent pace?”
That’s a different question, with an uglier answer. He doesn’t want to threaten her. He has a sense that if he pushes it, coerces her instead of getting her to cooperate, a line will be crossed and he’ll never be able to pull back from it.
He tries a different tack. “I’m open to other suggestions,” he says, “so long as they’re not stupid. Keeping a hungry in here with us, even if she’s cuffed and muzzled, isn’t an option. They don’t react to physical damage the same way we do, and there’s things you can do with cuffs and muzzles if you don’t care about disfiguring yourself. She has to stay outside.”
Justineau arches an eyebrow. “And if I try to go outside with her, you’ll stop me.”
He nods. It feels like a softer option than saying yes, even if it means the same thing.
“Okay, then stop me.”
She makes for the door. Gallagher steps into her path and quick as a flash she’s got her gun–the one Parks gave her–up in his face. A nice slick move. She took advantage of the darkness inside the garage, waited to draw the gun until she was walking right past Parks, so that the angle of her body would cover the movement of her arm. Gallagher freezes, his head tilting back away from the weapon.
“Out of my way, Private,” Justineau says quietly. “Or your brains go public.”
Parks sighs. He takes out his own sidearm and rests it lightly on her shoulder. He knows from their brief acquaintance that she won’t shoot Gallagher. At least, not after just the one warning. But there’s no doubting the sincerity of her feelings. “You made your point,” he says glumly. “We’ll do this some other way.”
Because he doesn’t want to kill her unless she really forces the issue. He’ll do it if he has to, but they’re already short-handed, and out of the three of them–Justineau, Gallagher and the doctor–he suspects she might turn out to be the most useful.
So what they do is this. They tie the little girl to the wall with a running rope, attached to the handcuffs. Parks attaches all the canteens to the running rope, along with a whole bunch of stones in a tin bucket that he found outside. There’s no way she can move without making a racket that will wake them all.
Justineau is at pains to explain all this to the hungry kid, who’s calm and still throughout the whole procedure. She gets it, even if Justineau doesn’t–knows why, eblocker or not, she has to be treated like an unexploded munition. She doesn’t complain once.
The food they liberated from the Humvee is the tough and tasteless type 3 carb-and-protein mix, labelled–you have to assume satirically–Roast Beef and Potatoes, washed down with water that has an aftertaste of mud, so supper is nobody’s idea of a gourmet treat.
Justineau takes an extra spoon and feeds the kid, who therefore has to be released from the muzzle for a few minutes. Parks watches her closely the whole time she’s free, his gun in his holster but with the safety off and a round already chambered–but there’s no way he could get in there in time if Melanie took it into her head to bite Justineau. He’d just have to shoot the both of them.
But the kid is good as gold, as far as that goes. She swallows the meat chunks from the food mix without even chewing them, spits out the potatoes with a great show of distaste. She’s finished inside a minute.
Then Justineau wipes her mouth clean with a corner of cloth torn from God knows what and God knows where, and Parks snaps the muzzle closed again.
“It’s looser than before,” the hungry kid says. “You should tighten it.”
Parks tests it by sliding his thumb inside the strap, up against the back of her neck. She’s right, sure enough, and he adjusts it without a word.
The floor is cold and hard, the blankets thin. Their backpacks make pretty lousy pillows. And there’s the little monster right there among them, so Parks is tensing all the time for that bang and clatter from the canteens as she reverts to type and goes for them.
He stares up into the featureless dark, thinks of the flash of Justineau’s crotch he glimpsed when she was pissing on the gravel outside.
But the future is uncertain, and he can’t get up enough enthusiasm even to masturbate.
30
Melanie doesn’t dream. At least, she never has before tonight. There were fantasies she indulged, like the fantasy of saving Miss Justineau from monsters, but sleep for her has always been an un-time spent in un-space. She closes her eyes, opens them again and the day recycles.
Tonight, in the garage, it’s different. Maybe it’s because she’s outside the fence, not in her cell. Or maybe it’s because the things that have happened to her today are just too vivid and too strange for her mind to let go of them.
Whatever it is, her sleep is lurid and terrifying. Hungries, soldiers and men with knives lurch at her. She bites, and is bitten–kills, and is killed. Until Miss Justineau gathers her in her arms and holds her close.
As her teeth meet in Miss Justineau’s throat, she snaps instantly awake, her mind wrenching itself away from that unthinkable prospect. But she can’t stop thinking about it. The nightmare lays its stifling folds across her thoughts, and she knows there was something inside the dream images, some hidden payload that she’ll sooner or later have to face.
There’s a sour metal taste in her mouth. It’s like the taste of blood and flesh left behind a vengeful ghost. The mulchy, textureless food that Miss Justineau gave her shifts queasily in her stomach when she moves.
The garage is dark, except for a little filtered light (moonlight, it must be) from around the edges of the door. Silent, except for the level breathing of the four grown-ups.
The red-haired soldier who’s one of Sergeant’s people murmurs in his sleep–shapeless words that sound like protest or pleading.
After a time of staring into the dark, Melanie’s eyes adjust. She can see the outline of Miss Justineau’s body, not close but closer to her than the others. She wants to crawl over to her and curl up against her, her shoulders pressed into the precisely right-shaped arc of Miss Justineau’s lower back.
But with the atmosphere of that dream on her, she can’t. She doesn’t dare. And the movement would make the bucket and the canteens clang together anyway, which would wake everyone up.
She thinks about Beacon, and about what she said to Miss Justineau that time in the classroom, after the “Charge of the Light Brigade” lesson. It stands out very clear in her mind, and it’s easy to remember the exact words, because this was the conversation that ended with Miss Justineau stroking her hair.
Will we go home to Beacon? Melanie had asked. When we’re grown up? And Miss Justineau looked so sad, so stricken, that Melanie had immediately started to blurt out apologies and assurances, trying to stave off the effects of whatever terrible thing she’d inadvertently said.
Which she understands now. From this angle, it’s obvious. What she’d said, about going home to Beacon, was impossible, like hot snow or dark sunshine. Beacon was never home to her, and never could be.
That was what made Miss Justineau sad. That there never could be a going-home for her that meant being with other boys and girls and grown-ups and doing the things she used to hear about in stories. Still less a going-home that had Miss Justineau in it. She was meant to end up in jars in Dr Caldwell’s lab.
This time she’s living in now was never foreseen or intended. Not by anyone. That’s why they keep arguing about what they’re going to do.
Nobody knows. Nobody knows any better than she does where they’re really going.