Melanie squeezes in beside Gallagher, peers around his leg at the fallen hungry. He feels bad for her, that she has to see this. It’s not right for a little kid to be made to think about death.
Even if she’s, you know, dead. Kind of.
“Fruits,” Caldwell repeats, firmly and with satisfaction. “This, Sergeant, is the fruiting body of the hungry pathogen. And these pods are its sporangia. Each one is a spore factory, full of seeds.”
“They’re its ball-sacks,” the Sarge translates.
Dr Caldwell laughs delightedly. She was looking really beaten up and exhausted the last time Gallagher glanced at her, but this has brought her to life. “Yes. Exactly. They’re its ball-sacks. Break open one of these pods, and you’ll be having an intimate encounter with Ophiocordyceps.”
“Then let’s not,” Parks suggests, pulling her back as she goes to touch the thing again. She looks up at him, surprised and seeming ready to argue the point, but the Sarge has already turned his attention to Justineau and Gallagher. “You heard the Doc,” he says, like it was her idea. “This thing, and any more of them we see, they’re off-limits. You don’t touch them, and you don’t go near them. No exceptions.”
“I’d like to take some samples—” Caldwell starts to say.
“No exceptions,” Parks repeats. “Come on, people, we’re wasting daylight. Let’s move out.”
Which they do. But the interlude has left them all in a weird mood. Melanie goes back to Justineau and walks right at her side, as though she was back on the leash again. Dr Caldwell blathers on about life cycles and sexual reproduction until it almost sounds like she’s coming on to the Sarge, who lengthens his stride to get away from her. And Gallagher can’t keep from looking back, every now and again, at the ruined thing that’s become so weirdly pregnant.
They see a dozen more of these fallen, fruiting hungries in the next couple of hours, some of them a lot further gone than the first one. The tallest of the white columns tower way over their heads, anchored at the base by a froth of grey threads that spills over the hungries’ bodies and almost hides them from sight. The central stems get thicker as they get taller, widening the gap in the hungry’s ribs or throat or abdomen or wherever they first broke through. There’s something kind of obscene about it, and Gallagher wishes to Christ they’d gone some other way so they didn’t have to know about this.
He’s a little freaked out too, by what seems to be happening to the round growths on the fungal stems. They start out as just bumps or protuberances on the main vertical shaft. Then they get bigger, and fill out into shiny pearly-white spheroids that hang like Christmas tree ornaments. Then they fall off. Beside the tallest and thickest stems, there are thin scatterings of them around which they step over with gingerly care.
Gallagher is happy when the sun drops below the horizon and he doesn’t have to look at the bastard things any more.
48
The third night, for Helen Justineau, is the strangest of all.
They spend it in the cells of a police station on the Whetstone High Road, after Sergeant Parks has ordered a short detour to explore it. He’s hoping that the station will have an intact weapons locker. Their ammunition has been depleted by the skirmish in Stevenage, and every little helps.
There’s no weapons locker, intact or otherwise. But there’s a board with keys hanging on it, and some of the keys turn out to be for the remand cells in the basement. Four cells, strung out in a row along a short corridor with a guardroom at the further end of it. The door that opens on to the stairwell is a two-inch thickness of wood, with a steel panel riveted on to the inside.
“Room at the inn,” Parks says.
Justineau thinks he’s joking, but then she sees that he’s not and she’s appalled. “Why would we lock ourselves in here?” she demands. “It’s a trap. There’s only one exit, and once we lock this door we’re blind. We wouldn’t have any way of keeping track of what’s going on above us.”
“All true,” Parks admits. “But we know those junkers followed us from the base. And now we’re getting into an area that had the densest population out of anywhere in the country. Wherever we stop, we’re going to want to maintain some kind of a perimeter. Locked steel door is the most discreet perimeter I can think of. Our lights won’t show, and any sound we make probably won’t reach the surface. We stay safe, but we don’t draw any attention to ourselves. Hard to imagine anything better, on that score.”
There’s no vote, but people start putting their packs down. Caldwell slumps against the wall, then slides down it into a squatting position. It might not even be that she agrees with Parks’ argument. She’s just too tired to walk any further. Private Gallagher is unpacking the last few cans of food from Wainwright House, and then he’s opening them.
It’s carried on the nod, and there’s no point in arguing.
They close the door so they can put their torches on, but they don’t lock it at first; claustrophobia is already setting in, for most of them, and turning the key seems like too irrevocable a step. As they eat, the desultory conversation winds down into silence. Parks is probably right about their voices not carrying, but they still sound way too loud in this echoing vault.
When they’re done, they slip away one by one into the guardroom to do whatever they need to do. No torches in there, so they’ve got something like privacy. Justineau realises that Melanie never needs to take a bathroom break. She vaguely remembers, somewhere in the briefing pack she was given when she arrived at the base, some notes by Caldwell on the digestive systems of the hungries. The fungus absorbs and uses everything they swallow. There’s no need for excretion, because there’s nothing to excrete.
Parks locks the door at last. The key sticks in the lock, and he has to apply a lot of force to turn it. Justineau imagines–probably they all do–what would happen to them if the shank broke off in the lock. That’s a bloody solid door.
They split up to sleep. Caldwell and Gallagher take a cell each, Melanie goes with Justineau and Parks sleeps at the foot of the stairs with his rifle ready to hand.
When the last torch clicks off, the darkness settles on them like a weight. Justineau lies awake, staring at it.
It’s like God never bothered.
49
Melanie thinks: when your dreams come true, your true has moved. You’ve already stopped being the person who had the dreams, so it feels more like a weird echo of something that already happened to you a long time ago.
She’s lying in a cell that’s a bit like her cell back at the base. But she’s sharing it with Miss Justineau. Miss Justineau’s shoulder is touching her back, and she can feel it moving rhythmically with Miss Justineau’s breath. On one level, that fills her with a happiness so complete that it’s stupefying.
But this isn’t anywhere they can stay, and live. It’s just a stop on the journey, which is full of uncertainties. And some of the uncertainties are inside her, not out in the world. She’s a hungry, with a driving need that will always come back no matter what she does. She has to be kept in chains, with a muzzle over her face, so she won’t eat anybody.
And they lived together, for ever after, in great peace and prosperity.
That was how the story she wrote ended, but it’s not how this real-life story will end. Beacon won’t take her. Or else it will take her and break her down in pieces. Miss Justineau’s happy ending isn’t hers.
She’ll have to leave Miss J soon, and go off into the world to seek her fortune. She’ll be like Aeneas, running away from Troy after it fell and sailing the seas until he comes to Latium and founds the new Troy, which ends up being called Rome.
But she seriously doubts now that the princes she once imagined fighting for her exist anywhere in this world, which is so beautiful but so full of old and broken things. And she already misses Miss J, even though they’re still together.
She doesn’t think she’ll ever love anyone else quite this much.