The Girl With All The Gifts (25 page)

Parks shares out some more of the brandy. It’s going fast. Justineau drinks, although she’s just reached the stage where she knows it’s a bad idea. She’ll wake up feeling like shit.

She fans her face, which is uncomfortably hot. Booze always does this to her, even in medicinal amounts. “Jesus,” she says. “I’ve got to get some air.”

But there isn’t much air to be had. The window is safety-locked and opens all of five inches. “We could go up to the roof,” Parks suggests. “There’s a fire door at the end of the corridor that leads up there.”

“Anything to say the roof is safe?” Justineau asks, and the sergeant nods. Yeah, of course, he would have checked it. Love him or hate him, he’s the kind of man who’s built his identity around the blessed sacrament of getting the job done. She saw that out on the green, when he saved all their lives by reacting pretty nearly as fast as the hungries did.

“Okay,” she says. “Let’s see what the roof is like.”

And the roof is just fine. About ten degrees cooler than the day room, with a good, stiff wind blowing in their faces. Well, good is maybe overstating it, because the wind smells of rot – like there’s a big mountain of spoiled meat right next to them, invisible in the dark, and they’re inhaling its taint. Justineau clamps her glass over the lower half of her face like an oxygen mask and breathes brandy breath instead.

“Any idea what that is?” she asks Parks, her voice muffled and distorted by the glass.

“Nope, but it’s stronger over here,” Parks says, “so I suggest we go over there.”

He leads the way to the south-east corner of the building. They’re facing London and distant Beacon – the home that flung them out and is now reeling them back in. Justineau lets absence work its usual magic, even though she knows damn well that Beacon is a shit-hole. A big refugee camp governed by real terror and artificially pumped-up optimism – like the bastard child of Butlins and Colditz. It was already well on the way to totalitarianism when she lucked her way out of there, and she’s not looking forward to finding out what it’s become in the three years that have passed since.

But where else is there?

“The Doc’s a real character, isn’t she?” Parks muses, leaning over the parapet wall and staring out into the darkness. Moonlight paints the town in woodcut black and white like a picture from a book. Black predominates, turning the streets into unfathomable riverbeds of rushing air.

“That’s one word for what she is,” Justineau says.

Parks laughs, jokingly raises the glass – like they’re toasting their shared opinion of Caroline Caldwell. “Truth is,” he says, “in a way I’m glad the whole thing is over. The base, I mean, and the mission. Not glad we’re on the run, obviously, and I’m praying we’re not the only ones who got away. But I’m glad I don’t have to do that any more.”

“Do what?”

Parks makes a gesture. In the near dark, Justineau can’t see what gesture it is. “Keep a lid on the madhouse. Keep the whole place ticking over, month after month, on string and good intentions. Christ, it’s amazing we lasted as long as we did. Not enough men, not enough supplies, no fucking communications, no proper chain of command…”

He seems to stop very suddenly, which makes Justineau go back over his words to figure out which ones he wishes he hadn’t said. “When did communications stop?” she asks him.

He doesn’t answer. So she asks again.

“Last message from Beacon was about five months back,” Parks admits. “Normal signalling wavelengths have been empty ever since.”

“Shit!” Justineau is deeply shaken. “So we don’t even know if … Shit!”

“Most likely it just means they relocated the tower,” Parks says. “Wouldn’t even have to be far. The goosed-together crap we’re using for radios, they don’t work unless they’re pointed right at the signal source. It’s like trying to shoot a basketball into a hoop across sixty bloody miles.”

They fall silent, contemplating this. The night seems wider now, and colder.

“My God,” Justineau says at last. “We might be the last. The four of us.”

“We’re not the last.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Yeah, I do. The junkers are doing fine.”

“The junkers…” Justineau’s tone is sour. She’s heard stories, and now she’s seen them for herself. Survivalists who’ve forgotten how to do anything else besides survive. Parasites and scavengers almost as inhuman in their own way as
Ophiocordyceps
. They don’t build, or preserve. They just stay alive. And their ruthlessly patriarchal structures reduce women to pack animals or breeding stock.

If that’s humanity’s last, best hope, then despair might actually be preferable.

“There’ve been dark ages before,” Parks says, reading her a lot better than she likes. “Things fall down, and people build them up again. There’s probably never been a time when life was just … steady state. There’s always some crisis.

“And then there’s the rest of the world, you know? Beacon was in touch with survivor communities in France, Spain, America, all kinds of places. The cities were hit worst – any place where there was a whole bunch of people crammed in together – and a lot of infrastructure fell with the cities. In less developed areas, the contagion didn’t spread so fast. There could be some places it never even reached at all.”

Parks fills her glass.

“I wanted to ask you something,” he says.

“Go on.”

“Yesterday, you said you were ready to take the kid and split up from the rest of us.”

“So?”

“Did you mean it, by the way? That’s not the question, but would you really have cut loose and tried to make it back to Beacon on your own?”

“I meant it when I said it.”

“Yeah.” He takes a sip of his brandy. “Thought so. Anyway, you called me something, just before you shoved your gun in Gallagher’s face. It didn’t make sense to me at the time. You said we were hard-wired soldier boys. What does hard-wired mean?”

Justineau is embarrassed. “It’s sort of an insult,” she says.

“Yeah, well I’d have been surprised if it was a kiss on the cheek. I was just curious. Does it mean like we’re really ruthless or something?”

“No. It’s a term from psychology. It describes a behaviour that you’re born with and can’t change. Or that’s programmed into you so you don’t even think about it. It’s just automatic.”

Parks laughs. “Like the hungries,” he suggests.

Justineau is a little abashed, but she takes it on the chin. “Yes,” she admits. “Like the hungries.”

“You give good trash talk,” Parks compliments her. “Seriously. That’s outstanding.” He tops up her glass again.

And puts his arm around her shoulder.

Justineau pulls away quickly. “What the hell is this?” she demands.

“I thought you were cold,” Parks says, sounding surprised. “You were shivering. Sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

For a long time she just stands there staring at him, in dead silence.

Then she speaks. And there’s only one thing she can think of to say.

Spits it out at him, like she wants to spit out, retrospectively, the booze, the memory, the last three years of her life.

“You ever kill a kid?”

The question hits Parks squarely between the eyes.

He was feeling pretty mellow up to this point. The brandy has soaked into him, dulling the pain from the many tiny shrapnel wounds he took in his legs and lower back when the stairs went to pieces. And here he thought the two of them were getting along, but no. The teacher’s got him clearly defined in her personal encyclopaedia. For
Parks
,
Sergeant
see
bastard
,
bloodthirsty
. He’s got a range of answers for this one, most of which would involve reminding her how she’s been able to stay off the hungries’ lunch menu for the last three years. Where her computer came from, and most of the other handy little gadgets that let her do her job. Why Beacon is still standing – if it is – for them to come home to.

But skip it. This isn’t going where he was hoping it would, and there’s nothing to be gained by telling this very attractive woman that she’s both a hypocrite and a whole lot stupider than he thought. It will only make the journey that bit harder.

So he writes it off and heads for the fire door. “I’ll leave you to enjoy the view,” he says over his shoulder.

“I mean, before the Breakdown,” Justineau says to his back. “It’s a straight question, Parks.”

Which makes him stop, and turn around again. “What the hell do you think I am?” he asks her.

“I don’t know what you are. Answer the question. Did you?”

He doesn’t need to think about the answer. He knows where his lines are. They’re not built to move, the way some people’s are.

“No. I’ve shot hungries as young as five or six. You don’t have much choice when they’re trying to eat you alive. But I never killed a kid who you could really say was still alive.”

“Well, I did.”

Now it’s her turn to turn away. She tells him the story without ever making eye contact with him, even though the rampart of a nearby chimney stack throws their faces into shadow and makes eye contact conditional in any case. In the confessional, you never see the priest’s face. But Parks is willing to bet that no priest ever had a face like his.

“I was driving home. After a party. I’d been drinking, but not that much. And I was tired. I was working on a paper, and I’d had a couple of weeks of early mornings and late nights, trying to bring it in. None of this matters. It’s just … you know, you try to make sense of it, afterwards. You look for reasons why it happened.”

The words come out of Helen Justineau in a flat monotone. Parks thinks of Gallagher’s written report, with its
proceeding to
s and its
thereupon
s. But Justineau’s bowed head and the tightness of her grip on the parapet wall add their own commentary.

“I was driving along this road. In Hertfordshire, between South Mimms and Potters Bar. A few houses, every now and then, but mostly miles of hedges, then a pub, then some more hedges. I wasn’t expecting … I mean, it was late. Way after midnight. I didn’t think anyone at all would be out, still less…

“Someone ran into the road in front of me. He came through a gap in one of the hedges, I think. There wasn’t anywhere else he could have come from. He was just there, suddenly, and I hit the brakes but I was already right on top of him. It didn’t make a bit of difference. I must have been going over fifty when I hit him, and he just … he bounced off the car like a ball.

“I stopped, a long way up the road. A hundred yards or so. I got out, and came running back. I was hoping, obviously … but he was dead, no question. A boy. About eight or nine years old, maybe. I’d killed a child. Broken him in pieces, inside his skin, so his arms and legs didn’t even bend the right way.

“I think I stayed there a long time. I was shaking, and crying, and I couldn’t … I couldn’t get up. It felt like a long time. I wanted to run away, and I couldn’t even move.”

She looks at the sergeant, now, but the darkness hides her expression almost completely. Only the twisted line of her mouth shows. It reminds him, right then, of the line of his scar.

“But then I did,” she says. “I did move. I got up, and I drove away. Locked my car in the garage and went to bed. I even slept, Parks. Can you believe that?

“I never did make up my mind what to do about it. If I confessed, I’d most likely go to jail, and my career would be over. And it wouldn’t bring him back, so what would be the point? Of course, I knew damn well what the point was, and I picked up that phone about six or seven times in the next couple of days, but I never dialled. And then the world ended, so I didn’t have to. I got away with it. Got away clean.”

Parks waits a long while, until he’s absolutely certain that Justineau’s monologue is finished. The truth is, for most of the time he’s been trying to figure out what it is exactly that she’s trying to tell him. Maybe he was right the first time about where they were heading, and Justineau airing her ancient laundry is just a sort of palate-cleanser before they have sex. Probably not, but you never know. In any case, the countermove to a confession is an absolution, unless you think the sin is unforgivable. Parks doesn’t.

“It was an accident,” he tells her, pointing out the obvious. “And probably you would have ended up doing the right thing. You don’t strike me as the sort of person who just lets shit slide.” He means that, as far as it goes. One of the things he likes about Justineau is her seriousness. He frigging flat-out hates frivolous, thoughtless people who dance across the surface of the world without looking down.

“Yeah, but you don’t get it,” Justineau says. “Why do you think I’m telling you all this?”

“I don’t know,” Parks admits. “Why are you telling me?”

Justineau steps away from the parapet wall and squares off against him – range, zero metres. It could be erotic, but somehow it’s not.

“I killed that boy, Parks. If you turn my life into an equation, the number that comes out is minus one. That’s my lifetime score, you understand me? And you … you and Caldwell, and Private Ginger fucking Rogers … my God, whether it means anything or not, I will die my own self before I let you take me down to minus two.”

She says the last words right into his face. Sprays him with little flecks of spit. This close up, dark as it is, he can see her eyes. There’s something mad in them. Something deeply afraid, but it’s damn well not afraid of him.

She leaves him with the bottle. It’s not what he was hoping for, but it’s a pretty good consolation prize.

Caroline Caldwell waits until the sergeant and Justineau leave the room. Then she gets up quickly and goes through into the kitchen.

She saw the Tupperware boxes earlier, stacked in the furthest cupboard along – ranged in order of size, so they formed a steep-sided pyramid. Nobody else spared them a second glance, because the boxes were empty. But Caldwell noted them with a small surge of pleasure. Every so often, even now, the universe gives you exactly what you need.

She takes six boxes of the smallest size and six teaspoons, dropping them one by one into the pockets of her lab coat. She brings a torch, too, but doesn’t turn it on until she reaches her destination and closes the door.