Mike Carey: The Girl With All the Gifts

Her name is Melanie. It means “the black girl”, from an ancient Greek word, but her skin is actually very fair so she thinks maybe it’s not such a good name for her. She likes the name Pandora a whole lot, but you don’t get to choose. Miss Justineau assigns names from a big list; new children get the top name on the boys’ list or the top name on the girls’ list, and that, Miss Justineau says, is that.

There haven’t been any new children for a long time now. Melanie doesn’t know why that is. There used to be lots; every week, or every couple of weeks, voices in the night. Muttered orders, complaints, the occasional curse. A cell door slamming. Then, after a while, usually a month or two, a new face in the classroom–a new boy or girl who hadn’t even learned to talk yet. But they got it fast.

Melanie was new herself, once, but that’s hard to remember because it was a long time ago. It was before there were any words; there were just things without names, and things without names don’t stay in your mind. They fall out, and then they’re gone.

Now she’s ten years old, and she has skin like a princess in a fairy tale; skin as white as snow. So she knows that when she grows up she’ll be beautiful, with princes falling over themselves to climb her tower and rescue her.

Assuming, of course, that she has a tower.

In the meantime, she has the cell, the corridor, the classroom and the shower room.

The cell is small and square. It has a bed, a chair and a table. On the walls, which are painted grey, there are pictures; a big one of the Amazon rainforest and a smaller one of a pussycat drinking from a saucer of milk. Sometimes Sergeant and his people move the children around, so Melanie knows that some of the cells have different pictures in them. She used to have a horse in a meadow and a mountain with snow on the top, which she liked better.

It’s Miss Justineau who puts the pictures up. She cuts them out from the stack of old magazines in the classroom, and she sticks them up with bits of blue sticky stuff at the corners. She hoards the blue sticky stuff like a miser in a story. Whenever she takes a picture down, or puts a new one up, she scrapes up every last bit that’s stuck to the wall and puts it back on the little round ball of the stuff that she keeps in her desk.

When it’s gone, it’s gone, Miss Justineau says.

The corridor has twenty doors on the left-hand side and eighteen doors on the right-hand side. Also it has a door at either end. One door is painted red, and it leads to the classroom–so Melanie thinks of that as the classroom end of the corridor. The door at the other end is bare grey steel and it’s really, really thick. Where it leads to is a bit harder to say. Once when Melanie was being taken back to her cell, the door was off its hinges, with some men working on it, and she could see how it had all these bolts and sticking-out bits around the edges of it, so when it’s closed it would be really hard to open. Past the door, there was a long flight of concrete steps going up and up. She wasn’t supposed to see any of that stuff, and Sergeant said, “Little bitch has got way too many eyes on her” as he shoved her chair into her cell and slammed the door shut. But she saw, and she remembers.

She listens, too, and from overheard conversations she has a sense of this place in relation to other places she hasn’t ever seen. This place is the block. Outside the block is the base, which is Hotel Echo. Outside the base is region 6, with London thirty miles to the south and then Beacon another forty-four miles further–and nothing else beyond Beacon except the sea. Most of region 6 is clear, but the only thing that keeps it that way is the burn patrols, with their frags and fireballs. This is what the base is for, Melanie is pretty sure. It sends out burn patrols, to clear away the hungries.

The burn patrols have to be really careful, because there are lots of hungries still out there. If they get your scent, they’ll follow you for a hundred miles, and when they catch you they’ll eat you. Melanie is glad that she lives in the block, behind that big steel door, where she’s safe.

Beacon is very different from the base. It’s a whole great big city full of people, with buildings that go up into the sky. It’s got the sea on one side of it and moats and minefields on the other three, so the hungries can’t get close. In Beacon you can live your whole life without ever seeing a hungry. And it’s so big there are probably a hundred billion people there, all living together.

Melanie hopes she’ll go to Beacon some day. When the mission is complete, and when (Dr Caldwell said this once) everything gets folded up and put away. Melanie tries to imagine that day; the steel walls closing up like the pages of a book, and then… something else. Something else outside, into which they’ll all go.

It will be scary. But so amazing!

Through the grey steel door each morning Sergeant comes and Sergeant’s people come and finally the teacher comes. They walk down the corridor, past Melanie’s door, bringing with them the strong, bitter chemical smell that they always have on them; it’s not a nice smell, but it’s exciting because it means the start of another day’s lessons.

At the sound of the bolts sliding and the footsteps, Melanie runs to the door of her cell and stands on tiptoe to peep through the little mesh-screen window in the door and see the people when they go by. She calls out good morning to them, but they’re not supposed to answer and usually they don’t. Sergeant and his people never do, and neither do Dr Caldwell or Mr Whitaker. And Dr Selkirk goes by really fast and never looks the right way, so Melanie can’t see her face. But sometimes Melanie will get a wave from Miss Justineau or a quick, furtive smile from Miss Mailer.

Whoever is going to be the teacher for the day goes straight through into the classroom, while Sergeant’s people start to unlock the cell doors. Their job is to take the children to the classroom, and after that they go away again. There’s a procedure that they follow, which takes a long time. Melanie thinks it must be the same for all the children, but of course she doesn’t know that for sure because it always happens inside the cells and the only cell that Melanie sees the inside of is her own.

To start with, Sergeant bangs on all the doors and shouts at the children to get ready. What he usually shouts is “Transit!” but sometimes he adds more words to that. “Transit, you little bastards!” or “Transit! Let’s see you!” His big, scarred face looms up at the mesh window and he glares in at you, making sure you’re out of bed and moving.

And one time, Melanie remembers, he made a speech–not to the children but to his people. “Some of you are new. You don’t know what the hell you’ve signed up for, and you don’t know where the hell you are. You’re scared of these frigging little abortions, right? Well, good. Hug that fear to your mortal soul. The more scared you are, the less chance you’ll screw up.” Then he shouted, “Transit!” which was lucky because Melanie wasn’t sure by then if this was the transit shout or not.

After Sergeant says “Transit”, Melanie gets dressed, quickly, in the white shift that hangs on the hook next to her door, a pair of white trousers from the receptacle in the wall, and the white pumps lined up under her bed. Then she sits down in the wheelchair at the foot of her bed, like she’s been taught to do. She puts her hands on the arms of the chair and her feet on the footrests. She closes her eyes and waits. She counts while she waits. The highest she’s ever had to count is two thousand five hundred and twenty-six; the lowest is one thousand nine hundred and one.