58
The night crawls past arthritically and aimlessly after a supper that–despite its perilously high salt and sugar content–nobody seems able to taste.
Justineau sits in the crew quarters, twisted round in the seat so she can look through one of the slit windows at the street outside. Behind her she can hear Gallagher’s fitful snoring from the sleeping recess. He chose one of the top bunks, and stole blankets from most of the others to make himself a nest. He’s completely invisible up there, barricaded away from the world behind ramparts of dreams and polycotton.
He’s the only one who sleeps at all. Parks is still stripping the generator, and he doesn’t seem inclined to stop. Intermittent clattering from back there tells Justineau that he’s making progress. Intermittent swearing announces his temporary setbacks.
In between them is the lab, where Caldwell works in silence, putting slide after slide under a Zeiss LSM 510 confocal microscope with its own built-in battery (the scanning electron microscope still awaits the quickening touch of electric current from Rosie’s generator), writing annotations for each in a leather-backed notebook, then racking it in a plastic box whose compartments she carefully numbers.
When the sun comes up, Justineau is silently amazed. It seemed entirely plausible that this ontological impasse would go on for ever.
Through the red dawn a tiny figure walks out of a side street and crosses to Rosie’s door.
Justineau gives an involuntary cry and runs to open it. Parks is there ahead of her, and he doesn’t move out of her way. There’s a thin, muffled sound: bare knuckles, knocking politely on the armour plating.
“You’re going to have to let me handle this,” Parks tells her. He’s got shadows under his eyes and oil smudges on his forehead and cheeks. He looks like he just murdered someone who bled India ink. There’s a weary, defeated set to his shoulders.
“What does ‘handle it’ mean?” Justineau demands.
“It just means I talk to her first.”
“With a gun in your hand?”
“No,” he grunts irritably. “With these.”
He shows her his left hand, in which he holds the leash and the handcuffs.
Justineau hesitates for a second. “I know how handcuffs work,” she says. “Why can’t I be the one to go out to her?”
Parks wipes his dirty brow on his dirty sleeve. “Jesus wept,” he mutters under his breath. “Because that’s what she asked for before she left, Helen. You’re the one she’s concerned about hurting, not me. I’m nearly certain she’s okay, because she just knocked on the door instead of clawing at it and bashing her head against it. But whatever kind of mood she’s in, the one thing she won’t want to see when it opens is you standing there. Especially if she’s got blood on her mouth or her clothes from feeding. You understand that, right? After she’s cleaned herself up, and after she’s got the cuffs back on, then you can talk to her. Okay?”
Justineau swallows. Her throat is dry. The truth is that she’s afraid. Mostly she’s afraid of what the last twelve hours might have done to Melanie. Afraid that when she looks into the girl’s eyes, she might see something new and alien there. For that very reason, she doesn’t want to put the moment off. And she doesn’t want Parks to look first.
But she does understand, whether she wants to or not, and she can’t go against what Melanie specifically asked for. She has to step back, and around the bulkhead wall, while he opens the door.
She hears the bolt slide back, the smooth sigh of hydraulically assisted hinges.
And then she flees, through the aft weapons stations to the lab space. Dr Caldwell looks up at her, indifferent at first. Until she realises what Justineau’s agitation must mean.
“Melanie is back,” the doctor says, coming to her feet. “Good. I was concerned she might have—”
“Shut your mouth, Caroline,” Justineau interrupts savagely. “Seriously. Shut it now, and don’t open it again.”
Caldwell continues to stare at her. She makes to walk aft, but Justineau is in her way and she stays there. All that aggression that’s building up in her, it’s got to come out.
“Sit down,” Justineau says. “You don’t get to see her. You don’t get to talk to her.”
“Yeah, she does,” says Parks, from behind her. She turns, and he’s standing in the doorway. Melanie is behind him. He hasn’t even put her cuffs on yet, but she’s already replaced her muzzle. She’s sodden, her hair plastered to the side of her head, her T-shirt clinging to her bony body. The rain has petered out now, so this is from last night.
“She wants to talk to all of us,” Parks goes on. “And I think we want to listen. Tell them what you just told me, kid.”
Melanie stares hard at Justineau, then even harder at Dr Caldwell. “We’re not alone out here,” she says. “There’s somebody else.”
59
In the crew quarters, they choose places to sit. Even though Rosie’s full complement was meant to be a dozen, it feels way too small. They’re aware of each other’s proximity, and none of them looks any more comfortable with that than Justineau feels.
She’s sitting on the edge of a lower bunk. Caldwell sits on its counterpart, directly opposite. Gallagher is cross-legged on the floor, and Parks leans in the doorway.
Standing at the forward end of the narrow space, Melanie addresses them. Justineau has dried her hair with a towel, hung out her jacket, jeans and T-shirt to dry and put another towel around her as a temporary bathrobe. Her arms are inside the towel–behind her back, because Parks has cuffed her hands again. It was her idea. She turned her back to him, arms held together, and waited patiently while he did it.
There’s massive tension in her face, in the way she stands. She’s struggling to keep herself under control–not in the feeding frenzy way, but in the way someone might be if they’d just been mugged on the street or witnessed a murder. Justineau has seen Melanie scared before, but this is something new, and for a little while Justineau struggles to identify it.
Then she realises what it is. It’s uncertainty.
She speculates for the first time on what Melanie could have been, could have become, if she’d lived before the Breakdown. If she’d never been bitten and infected. Because this is a child here, whatever else she is, and she’s never lost that sense of her own centre before except when she smelled blood and turned, briefly into an animal. And look at how pragmatically, how ruthlessly, she’s coped with that.
But Justineau only pursues this train of thought for a moment. When Melanie starts to speak, she commands their full attention.
“I should have come back sooner,” she says, to everyone in the room. “But I was scared, so I ran away and hid at first.”
“They don’t need a dramatic build-up, kid,” Parks drops into the ensuing silence. “Just go ahead and tell them.”
But Melanie starts at the beginning and rolls right on, as though that’s the only way she knows how to tell it. She recounts her visit to the theatre the night before in spare and functional sentences. The only sign of her agitation is in the way she shifts from foot to foot as she speaks.
Finally she reaches the point where she looked down from the balcony with her dark-adapted eyes and saw what was below her.
“They were men like the ones I saw at the base,” she says. “With shiny black stuff all over them and their hair all spiked up. In fact, I think they were exactly the same ones from the base.” Justineau feels her stomach lurch. Junkers are maybe the worst news they could get right now. “There were lots and lots of them. They were fighting each other with sticks and knives, except that they weren’t. Not really. They were only pretending to fight. And they had guns too–like yours, in big racks on the walls. But they weren’t using them. They were just using the sticks and the knives. First knives, then sticks, then knives again. The man who was in charge of the fighting told them when to use sticks and when to change over. And someone asked when they could stop and he said not until I say so.”
Melanie shoots a glance at Caroline Caldwell. Her expression is unreadable.
“Did you get an idea how many there were?” Parks asks.
“I tried to count, Sergeant Parks, and I got to fifty-five. But there could have been more, underneath where I was standing. There was a part of the room that I couldn’t see, and I didn’t want to move in case they heard me. I think there were probably more.”
“Jesus!” Gallagher says. His voice is hollow with despair. “I knew it. I knew they wouldn’t stop!”
“What made you think,” Caldwell asks, “that this was the same group who attacked the base?”
“I recognised some of them,” Melanie says promptly. “Not their faces really, but the clothes they wore. Some of them had patches and bits of metal on them, and they made patterns. I remembered the patterns. And one of them had a word on his arm. Relentless.”
“A tattoo,” Parks translates.
“I think so,” Melanie says, her eyes on Dr Caldwell again. “And then, while I was watching, three more men came in. They talked about a trail that they were following, and they said they’d lost it. The leader got really angry with them and sent them straight back out again. He said if they didn’t bring back prisoners, he was going to let the other men use them to practise on with their knives and sticks.”