“When I saw that woman in the street in Stevenage, and the man in the care home, I could see that wasn’t the case. Both of them were still making connections, haphazardly, to their former lives. They were engaging in behaviours–pushing a pram, singing, looking at old photographs–that were completely without function as far as the parasite was concerned.”
Caldwell looks up at Melanie. Her mouth is unpleasantly dry, despite the sweat that’s running freely down her face. “Can I have a glass of water?” she asks.
“When you’ve finished,” Melanie promises. “Not yet.”
Caldwell accepts the verdict. She reads nothing in Melanie’s face that would give her room for negotiation. “Well,” she says, her voice faltering a little, “that made me think. About you, and the other children. Perhaps we’d missed the obvious explanation for why you’re so different.”
“Go on,” Melanie says. Her voice is level, but her eyes betray her fear and excitement. It comforts Caldwell a little–in the absence of the physical control she used to enjoy–to have at least this degree of power over her.
“I realised that you might have been born with the infection. That your parents might already have been infected when you were conceived. We thought that was impossible–that hungries couldn’t have a sex drive. But once I’d seen the survival of other human drives and emotions–mother love, and loneliness–it didn’t seem impossible at all.
“With that in mind, I went back to the cytological evidence. I was fortunate enough to be able to obtain a fresh sample of brain tissue—”
“From a boy,” Melanie says. “You killed him and cut off his head.”
“Yes, I did. And his brain was very different from a normal hungry brain. With the equipment I had back at the base, it was pretty much all I could do to verify and map the presence of the fungus. With this…”–she indicates with a nod of the head the microtome, the centrifuge, the scanning electron microscope–“I could look at individual neurons and how the fungal cells interacted with them. The boy here, and the man from the care home, they were so different there was almost no way to compare them. The fungus utterly wrecks the brain of a first-generation hungry. Goes through it like a train. The chemicals it secretes–the brute-force triggers that turn specific behaviours on and off–they cause terrible damage as they accumulate. And the fungus is drawing nutrients from the brain tissue too. The brain is progressively hollowed out, sucked dry.
“In the second generation–that’s you–the fungus is spread evenly throughout the brain. It’s thoroughly interwoven with the dendrites of the host’s neurons. In some places it actually replaces them. But it doesn’t feed on the brain. It gets its nourishment only when the host eats. It’s become a true symbiote rather than a parasite.”
“Miss Justineau said my mother was dead,” Melanie objects. It’s almost a protest–as though a lie from Helen Justineau is a thing that can have no place in the world.
“That was our best guess,” Caldwell says. “That your parents were junkers or other survivors who’d never made it to Beacon, and that you and they had all been fed on and infected at the same time. We had no model for hungries copulating. Still less for them giving birth in the wild, and the babies somehow surviving. You must be much hardier and more self-sufficient than normal human infants. Perhaps you were able to feed on the flesh of your mother until you were strong enough to—”
“Don’t,” Melanie says sharply. “Don’t talk about things like that.”
But talking is all that Caldwell has left now, and she can’t stop herself. She talks about her observations, her theory, her success (in working out the pathogen’s life cycle) and her failure (there’s no immunity, no vaccine, no conceivable cure). She tells Melanie where to find her slides and the rest of her notes, and who to give them to when they get to Beacon.
When it becomes harder for Caldwell to talk, Melanie comes closer and sits at her feet. The scalpel is still clutched in her hand, but she doesn’t bully or threaten now. She just listens. And Caldwell is full of gratitude, because she knows what this lethargy that’s flooding through her means.
The septicaemia is entering its final phase. She won’t live to write her findings down, to astonish the remaining scientific minds of humanity’s doomed rearguard with the spectacle of her clear-sightedness and their idiocy. It’s just Melanie. Melanie is the messenger sent by providence in her last hour to carry her trophies home.
68
It’s a bad night.
The room contains nothing except a table and a metal cistern that was once part of the house’s central heating system. Every movement makes the bare boards creak loudly, so for the most part Justineau and Sergeant Parks sit still.
Their first visitors arrive about an hour after Melanie pulled the ladder away. A few minutes after she calls them on the walkie-talkie from the wilds of Hackney. Justineau can hear the hungries stumbling and scrabbling about in the room below, moving restlessly back and forth. The source of the smell, the chemical gradient they’re following, is above them, but they can’t get up there. All they can do is charge around, driven by eddies of air, random shifts in the intensity of the chemical trigger.
Justineau keeps hoping they’ll leave, or at least stop moving around, but this isn’t like Stevenage. At Wainwright House, the hungries were drawn by sound and movement. When the signals stopped, they stopped too, waiting for the fungus in their brains to give them further orders. Here, the orders are coming through continually, keeping them in constant, restless motion.
At first Parks opens the trap to peer down at them every so often, shining the light of the torch down into the dark to illuminate slack, grey faces, upturned, their milky eyes wide and their nostrils flared like the mouths of tunnels. But the view never changes, and after a while he gives up.
An hour or so after that, they hear thuds through the walls from whatever rooms are alongside of them. More hungries, following the scent or the heat trail as assiduously as the first bunch, but betrayed by local geography into going up the wrong stairwell, taking the wrong turn.
They’re at the centre of a great volume of space, filled with things that want to eat them.
No, Justineau corrects herself. Not the centre. There’s nothing up on the roof. Not yet, anyway.
She finds a skylight and climbs up on a table to look out of it. A hunter’s moon illuminates the wide sweep of streets southward towards the river. Fungal froth fills them to the brim, and it goes on as far as she can see. London is a no-go area, an exclusion zone for the living. Only hungries can thrive here. God alone knows how far east or west they’ll have to trek to get around it.
Well, God and maybe Melanie. They try to contact her on the walkie-talkie, but there’s no reply and no trace of her signal. Parks thinks it’s possible that she’s switched to another frequency, although he can’t think of any good reason why she’d do that.
“You should try to sleep,” he tells Justineau. He’s sitting in a corner of the room now, cleaning his gun by the light of the electric torch. It shines on the underside of his chin and eye sockets, and most unsettlingly of all on the diagonal furrow of his scar.
“Like you?” Justineau asks laconically. But she climbs down. She’s sick of looking at the endless grey escarpments.
She sits beside him. After a moment, she touches his arm, low down near the wrist. Then, with a slight feeling of unreality, she slips her hand into his.
“I haven’t been fair to you,” she says.
Parks laughs out loud. “I don’t think fairness was what I was looking for exactly.”
“Still. You got us this far, against all the odds, and for most of the way I’ve treated you like the enemy. I’m sorry about that.”
He takes her hand and raises it to head height. She thinks he’s going to kiss it, but he just turns it this way and that to let the torchlight shine on it. “It doesn’t matter,” he says. “Actually, it’s probably better this way. I could never respect any woman who had low enough standards to sleep with me.”
“That’s not funny, Parks.”
“No. I guess it isn’t. It is okay to call me Eddie, by the way.”
“Are you sure about that? It feels like fraternising.”
She’s actually angling for the laugh this time, and she’s pleased when it comes.
Does she want this? She doesn’t even know. She wants something, clearly. She didn’t hold Parks’ hand out of some abstract need for human contact. She held it to see what, if anything, his touch would do to her. But what it does is equivocal.
The scar doesn’t bother her. If anything, it takes his face out of the category of symmetrical and ordered things to which everybody else’s face belongs. It’s a face like the throw of a dice. She likes that arbitrariness, instinctively. It’s something she’s drawn to.
What she doesn’t like is the cruelties in his past, and in hers, over which she’ll have to crawl to get to him. She wishes she’d never told him that she was a murderer. She wishes that she was pristine, in his mind, so that touching him might feel like booting up a different version of herself.
But that’s not how you get reborn, if you ever can.
She pulls out of Parks’ grip. Then, holding his head between her hands, she kisses him on the lips.
After a moment, he turns off the torch. She knows why, and makes no comment.