54

Gallagher wishes he was on his own.

It’s not that he doesn’t like Helen Justineau. If anything, it’s the opposite. He likes her a lot. He thinks she’s really beautiful. She’s had star or co-star billing in a number of his sexual fantasies, mostly playing the role of the highly experienced and wildly perverted older woman picking up a boy young enough to be her son and showing him the ropes. A lot of times, the ropes weren’t even metaphorical.

But that makes it all the more awkward to be out on a patrol with her. He’s scared of saying or doing something really stupid in front of her. He’s scared of being in a position where he has to make a quick decision and not being able to think of one because he’s thinking too much about her. He’s scared of not being able to hide how scared he is.

It doesn’t help that they can’t even talk to each other. Okay, they exchange a terse murmur every now and then, when they’ve come to the end of a street and they have to decide where to go next. But the rest of the time they walk along in complete silence, in the slo-mo shuffle that Sergeant Parks has taught them.

It sort of feels like overkill right then. In the first hour after they leave the armoured truck with the stupid name, they only see four live hungries, and none of them close up.

Then they find the first dead one. It’s fruited like all of those others, except that it’s fallen down on its stomach and the big white stem has punched its way out of the poor bastard’s back. Helen Justineau stares down at it, all sick and sombre. Gallagher guesses she’s thinking about the little hungry kid. Like a mother before the Breakdown, thinking the world’s a big place and there’s lots of sick people in it and where’s my baby girl?

Yeah. Full of sick people, the world. He’s related to a whole lot of them. And he met a whole lot more when the base fell. A part of his unease right now – maybe the biggest part – comes from the feeling that he’s not moving in a direction that makes any sense. Sure, he’s going home. But that’s like putting your foot back in a trap after you’ve somehow got free of it. They can’t go back to the base, obviously. There isn’t any base, not any more, and the bastards who tore it down might still be chasing them. But Gallagher can’t see Beacon as a refuge. He can only see it as a mouth opening in front of him to swallow him down.

He tries to shake off the mood of despair. He tries to look and feel like a soldier. He wants Helen Justineau to be reassured by his presence.

They’ve been working their way down a long road with shops on both sides, but the shops have all been ransacked long ago. They’re way too obvious – easy targets for anyone who came this way. Probably most of them got looted during the early days of the Breakdown.

So now they turn their attention to the houses in the side streets, which are harder to get into and harder to search. You have to do a recce for hungries first of all. And you have to make as little noise as you can breaking in, because obviously noise is going to bring them if there are any of them around. Then once you’re inside, you have to do another recce. Could be a whole nest of hungries in any of these houses – former residents or uninvited guests.

It’s slow going, and it preys on your nerves.

And it’s depressing because the rain has set in solidly now. They’re getting pissed on out of a grim, grey sky.

And last of all, it’s boring, if something can be both really scary and boring at the same time. The houses all seem the same to Gallagher. Dark. Musty-smelling with squishy carpets underfoot, mouldering curtains and sprays of black mildew up interior walls. Cluttered up with millions of things that don’t do anything except get in your way and almost trip you over. It’s like before the Breakdown people used to spend their whole lives making cocoons for themselves out of furniture and ornaments and books and toys and pictures and any kind of shit they could find. As though they hoped they’d be born out of the cocoon as something else. Which some of them were, of course, but not in the way they hoped.

In most of the houses, Justineau and Gallagher stay just long enough to check the kitchen. In some, there’s a utility room or a garage that they check too. They stay resolutely away from the fridges and freezers, which they know will be filled with a riot of stinking, festering shit. It’s canned goods and packet goods that are the jackpot here.

But they don’t find any. The kitchens are bare.

They move on to the next street, with similar results. At the very end of it, there’s a lock-up garage with a bright green door, which they almost walk past. But it’s right next to a looted corner shop, and Justineau slows to a halt.

“You thinking what I’m thinking?” she asks Gallagher.

He wasn’t thinking anything until she said it, but he thinks fast now, so he has something to say besides huh?

“The lock-up might belong to the shop,” he guesses.

“Damn straight. And it doesn’t look like anyone’s been in there. Let’s take a look, Private.”

They try the garage door, which is locked. It’s made of some light, thin metal, which is good in one way (it’s not going to be hard to break it down) and bad in another (anything they do to it is going to make a hell of a lot of noise).

Gallagher gets his bayonet wedged in under one corner of the door and pulls back on it. With a loud, shrill squeal, the metal folds. When it’s far enough away from the frame, they get their fingers around the edge of it and pull, slowly and steadily. It’s still making that same grinding noise, but there’s nothing they can do about that.

They bend back a triangular flap about three feet on its longest side. Then they look in all directions and listen, tense as hell. No sign or sound of anything coming, from either end of the street.

They go down on hands and knees and crawl inside. Gallagher clicks his torch on and plays it around.

The garage is full of boxes.

Most of them are empty. Out of the ones that have stuff in them, most turn out to be not food but papers and magazines, kids’ toys, stationery. The rest … well, there is food, but it’s snack food mostly. Packets of crisps, peanuts, pork scratchings. Chocolate bars and biscuits. Boiled sweets in tubes about the length of a rifle bullet. Individually wrapped Swiss rolls.

And bottles. All kinds of bottles. Lemonade and orangeade and limeade, cola and blackcurrant juice and ginger beer. Not water, but pretty much everything else you could imagine, as long as your imagination restricts itself to saccharine and carbon dioxide.

“You think any of this is still good?” Gallagher whispers.

“Only one way to find out,” Justineau whispers back.

They carry out a blind-taste challenge, ripping open plastic packets and nibbling cautiously on what’s inside. The crisps are foul, soft and crumbly, with a sour, sweaty tang to them. They spit them out hastily. The biscuits are okay, though. “Hydrogenated oils,” Justineau says, spraying crumbs. “Probably last until the heat death of the fucking universe.” The peanuts are best of all. Gallagher can’t believe their taste, as salty and intense as meat. He eats three packets before he can stop himself.

When he looks up, Justineau is grinning at him – but it’s a friendly grin, not a mean one. He laughs out loud, pleased that the two of them have shared this ridiculous feast – and that in the twilight of the garage she can’t see him blushing.

He shouts out to the Sarge on the walkie-talkie and tells him they’re bringing home the bacon. Or at least some stuff that’s got bacon flavouring in it. Parks says to load up and come back in, with his heartiest congratulations.

They fill up the backpacks and their pockets, and each of them takes a couple of boxes besides. When they emerge cautiously into the street again, ten minutes later, they’ve still got it to themselves.

They head for home in a mood of euphoria. They’ve done the hunter-gatherer thing, and they’ve done it well. Now they’re bringing the mammoth back to the cave. A campfire will be lit against the dark, and there’ll be carousing and stories.

Well, maybe not that. But a locked door, a decent meal and Fleetwood Mac if their luck is in.