Running between the mildewed seats and across the booming stage. Naked as the day they were born. And filthy, although their skin underneath the dirt was the same bone white as her own. Their hair hanging lank and heavy, or in a few cases standing up in spikes. Some of them had sticks in their hands, and some of them had bags–old plastic bags, with words on them like Foodfresh and Grocer’s Market.
“But I wasn’t lying about the knives. They had those too. Not stabbing knives like Sergeant Parks’ and Kieran’s. Knives like you might cut bread or meat with in a kitchen.”
Fifteen of them. She counted. And when she made up the story of the junkers, she just added forty more.
But they weren’t junkers. They were children of every age from maybe four or five to about fifteen. And what they were doing was chasing rats. Some of them beating the floor and the seats with their sticks to get the rats running. Others catching them when they ran, biting off their heads and dropping the limp bodies into the bags. They were much faster than the rats, so it wasn’t hard for them. They made it into a game, laughing and taunting each other with shrieks and funny faces as they ran.
Children like her. Children who were hungries too, and alive, and animated, and enjoying the thrill of the hunt. Until they sat down, at last, and feasted on the small, blood-drenched corpses, the big ones choosing first, the little ones pushing in between them to snatch and steal. Even that was a game, and they were still laughing. There was no threat in it.
“There was a boy who seemed to be the leader. He had a big stick like a king’s sceptre, all shiny, and his face was painted in lots of different colours. It made him look sort of scary, but he wasn’t scary to the little ones: he was protecting them. When one of the other big kids showed her teeth to one of the little ones and looked like she was going to bite him, the painted-face boy put his stick on the big kid’s shoulder and she stopped. But mostly they didn’t try to hurt each other. It seemed like they were a family almost. They all knew each other, and they liked being together.”
It was a midnight picnic. Watching it, Melanie felt like she was looking at her own life through the wrong end of a telescope. This was what she would have been if she hadn’t been taken away to the base. This was what she was supposed to be. And the way she felt about that kept changing as she thought about it. She was sad that she couldn’t join the picnic. But if she hadn’t gone to the base, she would never have learned so many things and she would never have met Miss Justineau.
“I started to cry,” Melanie says. “Not because I was sad, but because I didn’t know if I was sad or not. It was like I was missing all those kids down there, even though I’d never even met them. Even though I didn’t know their names. They probably didn’t have names. It didn’t seem like they could talk, because they just made these squeaking and growling sounds at each other.”
The emotions that cross the little girl’s face are painfully intense. Justineau puts her hand up against the side of the cage, slides her fingers through the mesh.
Melanie leans forward, letting her forehead touch the tips of Justineau’s fingers.
“So… why didn’t you tell us all this?” It’s the first thing Justineau can think of to ask. She skirts around Melanie’s existential crisis with instinctive caution, afraid to confront it head on. She knows Melanie won’t let her go into the cage and hug her, not with that fear of losing herself, so all she has is words, and words feel inadequate for the job.
“I don’t mind telling you,” Melanie says simply. “But it has to be our secret. I don’t want Dr Caldwell to know. Or Sergeant Parks. Or even Kieran.”
“Why not, Melanie?” Justineau coaxes. And gets it as soon as she’s asked. She holds up her hand to stop Melanie from saying it. But Melanie says it anyway.
“They’d catch them and put them in cells under the ground,” she says. “And Dr Caldwell would cut them up. So I made up something that I thought would make Sergeant Parks want to go away really fast, before anyone finds out they’re here. Please say you won’t tell, Miss Justineau. Please promise me.”
“I promise,” Justineau whispers. And she means it. Whatever comes of it, she won’t let Caroline Caldwell know that she’s sitting right next door to a new batch of test subjects. There’ll be no culling of these feral children.
Which means she’ll have to go back to Parks and maintain the lie. Or bring him in on it. Or come up with a better one.
The two of them are silent for a moment, both presumably thinking about how this changes things between them. Back when they first left the base, she’d offered Melanie the choice between staying with them and going into one of the nearby towns. “To be with your own kind,” she’d almost said, and stopped herself because she realised even as she was saying it that Melanie didn’t have a kind.
But now she does.
While she’s still thinking through the implications of what Melanie has just told her, Justineau starts to shake. For a surreal and terrifying moment she thinks it’s just her–that it’s some sort of seizure. But the vibration settles into a throbbing rhythm that she recognises, and there’s a low rumble in her ears that crests and then dies. The throbbing dies with it as quickly as it came.
“My God!” Justineau gasps.
She scrambles up off the floor and runs, heading aft.
Parks stands over the generator, his oily hands hovering as though he’s just performed a blessing. Or an exorcism. “Got it,” he says, giving Justineau a fierce grin as she comes into the room.
“But it died again,” she says.
Caldwell follows her into the room. The generator’s magical resurrection has brought her running too.
“No, it didn’t. I cut it off. Don’t want the noise to carry until we’re ready to drive out. You never know who’s listening, after all.”
“So we can leave!” Justineau says. “Keep going south. Let’s roll, Parks. To hell with anything else.”
He gives her a wry look. “Yeah,” he says. “Don’t want to have to tangle with those junkers. We might have to…” He stops and looks past the two women, his face serious all of a sudden.
“Where’s Gallagher?” he demands.