In a room silted up a foot deep with old brown leaves, she startles a fox. It leaps for a broken window, but Melanie is on it so quickly that she catches it in mid-air. She’s thrilled at her own speed.
And at her strength. Though the fox is as big as she is, when it squirms and thrashes in her arms she just tightens her grip, closing down its range of movement, until it stills, quivering, whining, and lets her take it where she wants.
Back up the street to the green. Across the green to the fence where the hungries are clustered, every face turned away from her, every body still.
Melanie screams. It’s the loudest sound she can make. Not as loud as Miss Justineau’s personal alarm would be, but both her hands are full of fox and she doesn’t want to let it go until all the hungries are looking at her.
When the heads turn, she opens her arms. The fox is away like an arrow flying out of Ulysses’ bow.
Primed by the sound, awake and alert for prey, the hungries obey their programming. They start into violent motion, run after the fox as though they’re joined to it by taut strings. Melanie backs out of the way quickly, into a doorway, as the first wave goes by her.
There are so many of them, crowded in so tightly together, that some of them get knocked down and trampled on. Melanie sees them trying again and again to get up, only to be trodden underfoot each time. It’s almost funny, but the grey-brown froth that’s forced out of their mouths, like wine from grapes, makes it sort of sad and horrible too. When the rest of the horde have run on down the road, almost out of sight, some of these fallen struggle to their feet and limp and crawl after them. Others stay where they fell, twitching and scrabbling but too badly broken to get up off the ground.
Melanie skirts around them carefully. She feels bad for them. She wishes that there was something she could do to help them, but there isn’t anything. She goes back in through the gates and walks up to the house. She enters the hall, which is completely deserted now, and calls up to Sergeant Parks, who is exactly where he was when she left. “It worked. They’ve gone now.”
“Stay there,” Sergeant Parks calls down. “We’ll join you.”
And then, after looking at her hard for a few moments longer:
“Good job, kid.”
44
Getting everyone down to street level is easy enough, with the ropes. Sergeant Parks decides the order: Gallagher first, so there’s someone on the ground who knows how to use a gun, then Helen Justineau, then Dr Caldwell, with himself bringing up the rear. Dr Caldwell is the only one who presents any kind of a problem, since her bandaged hands won’t allow her to grip the rope. Parks makes a running knot, which he ties around her waist, and lowers her down.
They could retrace their steps, but it’s easier to keep going through the town. There are any number of places where they can pick up the A1 again, and they’ll actually get out from among the buildings more quickly if they steer east of south, past a region of desolate industrial estates. Not many people ever lived out here, and after the Breakdown the pickings were thin for uninfected survivors, whose needs ran more to food than to heavy plant, so they don’t see many hungries at all. Of course, they’re also following roughly the same line that the fox took, at least to start with. That irresistible moving target cleared the way for them very effectively.
So that’s twice now that the hungry kid has saved their bacon. If she makes the hat-trick, maybe Parks will even start to relax a little around her. Hasn’t happened yet though.
They discuss logistics as they walk, in low, measured voices that won’t carry too far. Parks feels they should stick to Plan A, despite the clusterfuck they just experienced.
His reasons are the same as they were. The direct route through London will save them at least two days’ travel, and they still need shelter when they stop and sleep.
“Even given that the shelter can turn into a trap?” Dr Caldwell asks tartly.
“Well, that’s an issue,” Parks allows. “But on the other hand, if we’d been out in the open when those hungries came for us last night, we wouldn’t have lasted ten fucking heartbeats. Just a thought.”
Caldwell doesn’t attempt a comeback, so he doesn’t have to remind her that it was her striking up an acquaintance with a female hungry out on the street that got them into trouble in the first place. And nobody else seems inclined to argue. They continue on their way, the conversation dying out into wary silence.
Over the course of the morning, their line stretches out unacceptably. Gallagher takes point, as Parks ordered him to do. Helen Justineau sticks with the kid, who manages a reasonable pace despite her shorter legs, but keeps being distracted and slowed by the things they pass. Dr Caldwell is slowest of all, the gap between her and the others gradually but steadily increasing. She quickens her stride whenever Parks asks her to, but always slows again after a minute or two. That desperate fatigue, so early in the day, worries him.
They’re moving now through a burn shadow, another artefact of the Breakdown. Before the government fell apart entirely, it passed a whole series of badly thought-out emergency orders, one of which involved chemical incendiaries sprayed from helicopter gunships to create cauterised zones that were guaranteed free from hungries. Uninfected civilians were warned in advance by sirens and looped messages, but a lot of them died anyway because they weren’t free to move when the choppers flew in.
The hungries, though, they ran ahead of the flame-throwers like roaches when the light goes on. All the incendiaries could do was to move them on a few miles in one direction or another, and in some cases to destroy infrastructure that might have saved a lot of lives. Luton Airport, for instance. That got torched with about forty planes still on the ground, so when the next memo came round–about evacuating the uninfected to the Channel Islands using commercial carrier fleets–all the army could do was shrug its collective shoulders and say, “Yeah, we wish.”
The buildings on this part of their route are foreshortened stumps, not so much burned down as rendered into tallow. The monstrous heat of the incendiaries melted not just metal but brick and stone. The ground they’re walking on carries a thin black crust of grease and charcoal, the residue of organic materials that burned and sublimed, took to the air and settled again wherever the hot winds of combustion took them.
The air has a sour, acid tang to it. After ten minutes or so, your breath is rasping in your throat and there’s an itchy feeling in your chest that you can’t scratch because it’s inside you.
It’s more than twenty years on and still nothing grows here, not even the hardiest and most bad-ass of weeds. Nature’s way of saying she’s not stupid enough to be caught like that twice over.
Parks hears the kid asking Justineau what happened here. Justineau makes heavy weather of the question, even though it’s an easy one. We couldn’t kill the hungries, so we killed ourselves. That was always our favourite party trick.
The burn shadow goes on for mile after mile, oppressing their spirits and draining their stamina. It’s past time they stopped, grabbed some rest and rations, but nobody’s keen to sit down on this tainted ground. By unspoken consensus, they press on.
It’s really sudden, when they reach the edge of it, but the shadow’s got one more miracle to show them. Over the space of a hundred steps they go from black to green, from death to hectic life, from dry-baked limbo to a field of massive thistles and dense hollyhocks.
But there was a house here on the borderland that burned but didn’t fall. And against its rear wall there are heat shadows, where something living collapsed against the hot brick and burned with different colours, different breakdown products. Two of them, one large and one small, painted in deep black against the grey-black of their surroundings.
An adult and a child, arms thrown up as though they were caught in the middle of an aerobics workout.
Fascinated, the hungry kid measures herself against the smaller shape. It fits her pretty well.
45
What she thinks is: this could have been me. Why not? A real girl, in a real house, with a mother and a father and a brother and a sister and an aunt and an uncle and a nephew and a niece and a cousin and all those other words for the map of people who love each other and stay together. The map called family.
Growing up and growing old. Playing. Exploring. Like Pooh and Piglet. And then like the Famous Five. And then like Heidi and Anne of Green Gables. And then like Pandora, opening the great big box of the world and not being afraid, not even caring whether what’s inside is good or bad. Because it’s both. Everything is always both.
But you have to open it to find that out.