The Girl with All the Gifts

Every once in a while in the block, there’s a day that doesn’t start right. A day when all the repeating patterns that Melanie uses as measuring sticks for her life fail to occur, one after another, and she feels like she’s bobbing around helplessly in the air–a Melanie-shaped balloon. The week after Miss Justineau told the class that their mothers were dead, there’s a day like that.

It’s a Friday, but when Sergeant and his people arrive they don’t bring a teacher with them and they don’t open the cell doors. Melanie already knows what’s going to happen next, but she still feels a prickle of unease when she hears the clacking of Dr Caldwell’s high-heeled shoes on the concrete floor. And then a moment or two later she hears the sound of Dr Caldwell’s pen, which Dr Caldwell will sometimes keep clicking on and off and on and off even when she doesn’t want to write anything.

Melanie doesn’t get up off the bed. She just sits there and waits. She doesn’t like Dr Caldwell very much. That’s partly because the rhythms of the day get disrupted whenever Dr Caldwell shows up, but it’s mostly because she doesn’t know what Dr Caldwell is for. The teachers teach, and Sergeant’s people take the kids back and forth between the classroom and the cells, and feed them and shower them on Sundays. Dr Caldwell just appears, at unforeseeable times (Melanie tried to work out once if there was a pattern, but she couldn’t find one), and everyone stops doing what they were doing, or what they’re meant to do, until she’s gone again.

The clacking of the shoes and the clicking of the pen get louder and louder and then stop.

“Good morning, Doctor,” Sergeant says, out in the corridor. “To what do we owe the pleasure?”

“Sergeant,” Dr Caldwell answers. Her voice is almost as soft and warm as Miss Justineau’s, which makes Melanie feel a little bit guilty about not liking her. She’s probably really nice if you get to know her. “I’m starting a new test series, and I need one of each.”

“One of each?” Sergeant repeats. “You mean, a boy and a girl?”

“A what and a what?” Dr Caldwell laughs musically. “No, I don’t mean that at all. The gender is completely irrelevant. We’ve established that much. I meant high and low end of the bell curve.”

“Well, you just tell me which ones you want. I’ll pack them up and bring them over.”

There’s a rustling of papers. “Sixteen should do fine for the lower end,” Dr Caldwell says. Her heel taps on the floor of the corridor a few times, but she’s not walking because the sound doesn’t get louder or softer. Her pen clicks.

“You want this one?” Sergeant asks. His voice sounds really close.

Melanie looks up. Dr Caldwell is looking in through the grille in her cell door. Her eyes meet Melanie’s, for a long time, and neither of them blinks.

“Our little genius?” Dr Caldwell says. “Wash your mouth out, Sergeant. I’m not going to waste number one on a simple stratum comp. When I come for Melanie, there’ll be angels and trumpets.”

Sergeant mutters something Melanie can’t hear, and Dr Caldwell laughs. “Well, I’m sure you can supply some trumpets at least.” She turns away, and the click-clack-click of her heels recedes along the corridor.

“Two little ducks,” she calls. “Twenty-two.”

Melanie doesn’t know the cell numbers for all the kids, but she remembers most of them from when a teacher has called someone in the class by their number instead of their name. Marcia is number sixteen and Liam is number twenty-two. She wonders what Dr Caldwell wants them for, and what she’ll say to them.

She goes to the grille and watches Sergeant’s people go into cell 16 and cell 22. They wheel Liam and Marcia out, and down the corridor–not towards the classroom, but the other way, towards the big steel door.

Melanie watches them as far as she can, but they go further than that. She thinks they have to have gone through the door, because what else is down at that end of the corridor? They’re seeing with their own eyes what’s outside the door!

Melanie hopes it’s a Miss Justineau day, because Miss Justineau lets the kids talk to each other about stuff that’s not in the lesson, so when Liam and Marcia come back she’ll be able to ask them what Dr Caldwell talked to them about, and what they did, and what’s on the far side of the door.

Of course, she hopes it will be a Miss Justineau day for a lot of other reasons too.

And it turns out it is. The children make up songs for Miss Justineau to play on her flute, with complicated rules for how long the words are and how they rhyme. They have great fun, but the day goes on and Liam and Marcia don’t come back. So Melanie can’t ask, and she goes back to her cell that night with her curiosity, if anything, burning even brighter.

Then it’s the weekend, with no lessons and no talking. All through Saturday Melanie listens, but the steel door doesn’t open and nobody comes or goes.

Liam and Marcia aren’t in the shower on Sunday.

And Monday is Miss Mailer, and Tuesday is Mr Whitaker, and somehow after that Melanie feels afraid to ask because the possibility has opened up in her mind, like a crack in a wall, that Liam and Marcia might not come back at all, the same way Ronnie didn’t come back after she shouted and screamed that time. And maybe asking the question will change what happens. Maybe if they all pretend not to notice, Liam and Marcia will be wheeled in one day and it will be like they never went away. But if anyone asks, “Where did they go to?” then they’ll really be gone and she’ll never see them again.

© 2013 by M.R. Carey