Inside, endlessly infolded, is a fine, fractal froth of spores like grey soap bubbles that spills out through the opening she’s made. Curious, she dips her finger in. There’s no resistance. Even as densely packed together as this, the spores seem to have no mass at all.
She becomes aware, while she’s doing this, that she’s no longer alone in the lab. Sergeant Parks has entered and is watching her in silence. He has his gun – not the rifle, but the sidearm – in his hand, as casually as such a thing can be carried in a civilised space such as a lab, where it has no conceivable place.
Caldwell ignores him for a while as she continues to cut carefully into the grey gourd to examine its interior structure.
“The good news,” she observes, her eyes and her attention staying on the contents of the tank, “is that the sporangium’s integument appears to be extremely resilient. None of the ones we saw on the ground had broken open, and it’s impossible to tear them open with your bare hands. They appear to require an external environmental trigger in order to germinate, and so far that trigger hasn’t materialised.”
Parks doesn’t answer. He still hasn’t moved.
“Did you ever consider a scientific career, Sergeant?” Caldwell asks him, still with her back to him.
“Not really,” Parks says.
“Good. You’re really far too stupid.”
The sergeant looms at her side. “You think I’m missing something?” he demands. Caldwell is very conscious of the gun. When she glances down, it’s there, directly in her line of sight. The sergeant is holding it in both hands, ready to fire.
“Yes.”
“What am I missing?”
She puts down the scalpel and withdraws her hands, very slowly, from the gloves and from the tank. Then she turns to look him in the eyes. “You see that I’m pale and sweating. You see that my eyes are red. You see that I’m slowing down, as I walk.”
“Yeah, I see that.”
“And you’re ready with your diagnosis.”
“Doc, I know what I know.”
“Ah, but you don’t, Sergeant. Not really.” She’s begun to undo the bandages on her left hand. She holds it up for him to see. As the white linen falls away, her flesh is laid bare. The hand itself is fish-belly white and a little puckered. Red lines begin at the wrist and climb her arm – climb downwards, since her hand is raised, but gravity’s no guide here. The poison is finding its way to her heart, and it pays no mind to the vagaries of local topography.
“Blood poisoning,” Caldwell says. “Severe inflammatory sepsis. The first thing I did when we arrived here was to give myself a massive dose of amoxicillin, but it’s almost certainly far too late. I’m not turning into a hungry, Sergeant. I’m only dying. So please leave me alone to get on with my work.”
But Parks stays where he is for a few moments longer. Caldwell understands. He’s a man with a strong preference for the sorts of problem that have a simple, unitary solution. He thought Caldwell was such a problem, but now he realises she isn’t. It’s hard for him to cope with the shift in perspective.
She understands, but she can’t really help. And she doesn’t really care. What matters now is her research, which – after so long a period of stagnation – is finally starting to look promising.
“You’re saying these fruit things aren’t dangerous?” he asks her.
Caldwell laughs. She can’t help herself. “Not at all, Sergeant,” she assures him. “Unless the prospect of a planet-wide extinction event troubles you.”
His face, as open as a book, announces relief, then confusion, finally suspicion. “What?”
Caldwell is almost sorry to have to burst the precious bubble of his ignorance. “I already told you that the sporangia contained the spores of the hungry pathogen. But you don’t seem to have taken in what that means. In its immature, asexual form, Ophiocordyceps toppled our global civilisation in the space of three years. The only reason it didn’t achieve global pandemic status at once, the only reason any pockets of uninfected humans were able to survive, was because the immature organism can only propagate – neotenously – in biofluid.”
“Doc,” the sergeant says, looking pained, “if you’re gonna talk like a fucking encyclopaedia…”
“Blood and spit, Sergeant. It lives in blood and spit. It doesn’t like to venture out into the open air, and it doesn’t thrive there. But the adult form…” She waves a hand over the innocuous white globe nestling at the bottom of the tank. “Well, the adult form will take no prisoners. Each sporangium contains, at a rough estimate, from one to ten million spores. They will be airborne and light enough to travel tens or hundreds of miles from their place of origin. If they float into the upper atmosphere, as some of them will, they could easily cross continents. They will be robust enough to survive for weeks, months, perhaps years. And if you breathe them in, you’ll be infected. You can see a hungry coming, but you’ll have a harder time with an organism less than a millimetre across. A harder time seeing it, and a harder time keeping it out. I estimate that what’s left of Humanity 1.0 will close up shop within a month of one of these pods opening.”
“But … you said they won’t open,” Parks says, stricken.
“I said they won’t open by themselves. This species is a sport, a mutant form, and its development is haphazard. But sooner or later, the trigger event – whatever it is – will happen. It’s only a matter of time, with the probability rising gradually towards a hundred per cent.”
Parks doesn’t seem to have anything to say to that. He withdraws at last, and leaves her to it. And although she didn’t let his presence slow her down too much, she’s a lot happier to be alone.
56
Helen Justineau enjoyed the foraging expedition more than she thought she was going to. Found that time spent in the company of Kieran Gallagher was surprisingly bearable.
But when they get back to Rosie, with only ten minutes of daylight to spare, and they find Melanie hasn’t returned yet, the worry drops on her like a ten-ton weight in an old Monty Python sketch. Where the hell could she be all this time? How hard would it have been for her to rustle up something to eat?
Justineau remembers the fox, back in Stevenage. She hadn’t seen Melanie catch it, but she’d seen her walking along with the animal squirming in her arms, shifting its weight as it struggled so that she wouldn’t lose her balance. If you can catch a fox, then a rat or a stray dog or a cat or a bird ought to be no trouble at all.
There’s no telling what Melanie might have run into out there. Justineau should have tried to find her, instead of staying with Private Function and looking for food.
She’s instantly contrite about that instinctive surge of contempt for Gallagher. His only faults, really, are that he’s young, green as grass, and flat-out idolatrous when it comes to Sergeant Parks.
Who is somewhat taciturn and withdrawn, Justineau realises now. He took the barest glance at what they’d found, commended them with a nod and a grunt, and then went back into the engine room.
She follows him there. “What do we do if she doesn’t come back?” she demands.
The sergeant has his head down in the guts of the generator, which he’s started to dismantle. His voice comes back muffled. “What do you think?”
“I’m going to go and look for her,” Justineau says.
That gets Parks right way up again pretty quick, which is why she said it. She’s not seriously contemplating going out into the dark. There’d be no point. She wouldn’t be able to use the torch without announcing her presence and location to anyone and everything else on the streets. Without the torch she’d be blind – and with it only marginally less so. The hungries would home in on the moving light, or on her scent, or on her body heat, and it would all be over in a minute.
So when Parks tells her these things, in slightly cruder and more emphatic terms, she doesn’t even bother to listen. She waits him out and then says again, “Then what do we do?”
“There isn’t anyt
hing we can do,” Parks says. “She’s a lot safer out there than you or I would be, and she’s a smart kid. With the night coming on, she knows enough to go to ground and wait for daylight.”
“What if she can’t find her way back? What if she gets turned around in the dark, or just forgets the way? We have no idea how far she went, and these streets probably all look alike to her. Even in daylight, she might not be able to locate us again.”
Parks is looking at her hard. “I’m not sending up a flare,” he says. “If that’s what you’re thinking about, forget it.”
“What do we lose?” Justineau demands. “We’re in a frigging tank, Parks. Nothing can touch us.”
He throws down the manual he’s been clutching all this time and picks up a wrench. For a moment she thinks he’s going to hit her with it. She realises, with sharp surprise, that he’s as tense as she is. “They wouldn’t have to touch us,” he points out grimly. “They’d just have to camp out on the doorstep for a day or so. We’re not well placed to stand up to a siege, Helen. Not with salted peanuts and Jaffa Cakes.”
She knows he’s right, as far as that goes. It doesn’t matter, since she’s already swiped the flare pistol from the mess of stuff Parks dumped on the floor when he gave her the pack. She’s tucked it into the back of her jeans, where it barely makes a bulge. So long as she stays out of the light, she’s fine.
But whatever is eating Parks, it’s different from what’s eating her. Not knowing makes her uneasy. “What’s the matter?” she demands. “Did something happen while we were out?”
“Nothing happened,” Parks says too quickly. “But we’ve got no e-blockers left, and nothing here we can use instead. From now on, any time we step outside, we’re leaving a scent trail that leads right back to our front door. And if the kid does come back, we’ll need a lot more than a muzzle and a leash to keep her under control. She’s going to be smelling us all the time. What do you think that’s going to do to her?”
That question winds its way viciously and insinuatingly through Justineau’s mind. For a moment she can’t speak. She remembers what the feeding frenzy did to Melanie back at the base. She imagines Melanie losing control like that again, inside Rosie.
How will they even let her in to put the muzzle and handcuffs back on her?
Knowing Parks the way she does – as a man who sees the angles and dots the i’s, she wonders how much of this he thought through beforehand. “Is that why you let her go so easily?” she demands. “Did you think you were releasing her into the wild?”
“I told you what I was thinking,” Parks says. “I’m not in the habit of lying to you.”
“Because this is not her natural fucking habitat,” Justineau goes on. It feels like there’s something bitter that she swallowed, that she has to talk around. “She has no clue about this place. Less than we do, and God knows we don’t have much. She might be able to find food for herself, but that’s not the same as surviving, Parks. She’d be living with animals. Living like an animal. So an animal is what she’d be. The little girl would die. What would be left would be something a lot more like all the other hungries out there.”
“I let her loose so she could eat,” Parks says. “I didn’t think past that.”
“Yeah, but you’re not an idiot.” She’s come right up close to him, and he’s actually backed away a little, as far as he can in that narrow space. All she can see of his face in the torch’s angled beam is the tight set of his mouth. “Caroline can indulge the luxury of not thinking. You can’t.”
“Thought the Doc was meant to be a genius,” Parks mutters, with unconvincing nonchalance.
“Same thing. She only sees what’s at the bottom of her test tubes. When she calls Melanie test subject number one, she means it. But you know better. If you took a kitten away from its mother, then dumped it back again and the mother bit its throat out because it didn’t smell right, you’d know that was your fault. If you caught a bird and taught it to talk, and then it escaped and it starved to death because it didn’t know how to feed itself, you’d be absolutely clear that was on you.
“Well, Melanie’s not a cat, is she? Or a bird. She might have grown up into something like that, if you’d left her where you found her. Something wild that didn’t know itself and just did whatever it needed to do. But you dropped a net over her and brought her home. And now she’s yours. You interfered. You took on a debt.”
Parks says nothing. Slowly Justineau reaches behind her and draws the flare gun from where she hid it. She brings it out and lets him see it, in her hand.
She walks to the door of the engine room.
“Helen,” Parks says.
She goes through the aft weapons stations to the door. It’s locked but unguarded. Caldwell is in the lab, and Gallagher is in the crew quarters flicking through the old CDs like they were porn.
“Helen.”
She disengages the lock. It’s the first time she’s done it, but it’s not hard to figure out how the mechanism works. She glances back at Parks, who’s got his handgun out and pointed right at her. But only for a second. The hand falls to his side again, and he puffs out his cheeks in a sigh, like he’s put down a heavy weight.
Justineau opens the door and steps out. She puts her arm up over her head and pulls the trigger.
The sound is like a firework going off, but more drawn out. The flare whistles and sighs to itself as it ascends into the utter blackness above her.
There’s no light, nothing to see. The pistol was a good few years old, after all. Pre-Breakdown, like most of Parks’ kit. It must be a dud.
Then it’s like God turned on a light in the sky. A red light. From what she knows about God, that’s the colour he’d favour.
Everything is as clearly visible as in daylight, but this is nothing like daylight. It’s the light of an abattoir, or a horror movie. And it must have reached the interior spaces of Rosie, even though someone has pulled the light-proof baffles down over the tiny reinforced windows, because now Gallagher is looking out through the door right next to Parks, and Caroline Caldwell has deigned to step out of the lab too and is standing behind them, staring out in bewilderment at the crimson midnight.
“You’d better get back inside,” Parks tells Justineau in a voice of flat resignation. “She won’t be the only one that sees that.”
57
Melanie isn’t lost, but the sight of the flare cheers her.
She’s sitting on the roof of a house half a mile away from Rosie. She’s been sitting there for some hours now, in a steady downpour that’s already soaked her to the skin. She’s trying to make sense of something she saw late in the afternoon, just after she’d finally filled her belly. She’s been running it through in her mind ever since in endless, silent replay.
What she ate, after searching rain-slicked alleyways and sodden gardens for an hour and a half, was a feral cat. And she hated it. Not the cat itself, but the process of chasing and catching and eating it. The hunger was driving her, and driving her hard, telling her exactly what to do. As she ripped the cat’s belly open with her teeth and gorged herself on what came tumbling out, a part of her was entirely satisfied, entirely at peace. But there was another part that kept itself at a distance from the horrible cruelty and the horrible messiness. That part saw the cat still alive, still twitching as she crunched its fragile ribs to get at its heart. Heard its piteous miawling as it clawed at her uselessly, opening shallow cuts in her arms that didn’t even bleed. Smelled the bitter stench of excrement as she accidentally tore open its entrails, and saw her strew the guts in the air like streamers to get at the soft flesh underneath.
She ate it hollow.
And as she did, she dodged through all kinds of irrelevant thoughts. The cat in the picture on the wall of her cell, peacefully and intently lapping up its milk. The proverb about all cats being black at night, which she didn’t understand and Mr Whitaker couldn’t explain. A poem in a book.
I love little kitty, her coat is so
warm.
And if I don’t hurt her, she’ll do me no harm.
She didn’t love little kitty all that much. Little kitty didn’t taste half as nice as the two men she ate back at the base. But she knew that little kitty would keep her alive, and she hoped that the hunger would quiet down a little now and not try to order her around so much.
Afterwards, she wandered the streets, feeling both miserable and agitated, unable to keep still. She kept coming back within sight of Rosalind Franklin to make sure it was still there, then veering off again into this or that side street and getting herself lost for an hour or so. She didn’t want to go back yet. She was starting to feel as though she’d need to eat again before she did that.
With each loop she walked a little further, and dragged her feet a little more. She was probing the edges of her hunger, exploring the feel and the urgency of it in the way Sergeant Parks explored the rooms at Wainwright House with his rifle in his hands and his eyes going backwards and forwards. It was enemy territory and she had to get to know it.
On one of her outward swings, she found herself in front of a big white building with lots of windows. The windows on the ground floor were enormous, and all broken. There were more windows higher up that were still in their frames. The sign in front of the building said ARTS DEPOT – a little ARTS and then a much bigger DEPOT, sitting right above the door. And the door used to be made of glass, so now it wasn’t really there at all. It was just an empty frame, gripping a few fragments of broken glass at its very edges.
There were noises coming from inside – shrill, short bursts of sound, like the yelps of a hurt animal.
A hurt animal would go down very nicely right around then, Melanie thought.
She went inside, into a room with a very high ceiling and two staircases at the end of it. The staircases were metal, with rubbery bits for you to put your hands on. There was another sign at the bottom of them. The light was starting to fade now, and Melanie could only just read it. It said: CHILDREN MUST BE CARRIED ON THE ESCALATOR.