The Girl with All the Gifts

Melanie, Parks, and Justineau catch up with the stalled lab sitting idly before a 40-foot barricade. As they approach, they find the headless and mangled body of the hungry child lying in the road. Caldwell watches them from the window but refuses to let them in, fearing they will try to stop her work. Justineau examines the barrier and finds it’s composed of millions of translucent tendrils interwoven into a massive fungal drift. Melanie runs her hand through it, but Justineau pulls her away. Parks, meanwhile, suggests that Melanie look for a way around the barricade while he and Justineau search for shelter for the night. 

Melanie suspects Caldwell has cut the boy’s head off, and she is angry. She feels a kinship with the children. The only difference between her and them, she reasons, is the influence of Miss Justineau. While Parks and Justineau search for a secure location, Melanie sets out to find a break in the wall. After following the tendril wall for a full hour, she still finds no passage, so she decides to push through it. Twenty feet in, she finds bodies—the source of the tendrilled wall—from whose ruptured heads sprout stalks of fungal growth. As she pushes further in, the growth becomes denser and her passage more difficult. She is startled by a hungry stumbling through the fungal forest, its body split open by a protruding growth. Melanie imagines this is her ultimate fate as well. She pushes her way back out of the tendrils to Parks and Justineau.

Caldwell dissects the boy’s brain and has begun to examine it when she hears a broken transmission from Rosie’s radio and sees the sweep of a flashlight beam across the cockpit windshield. She hears voices. She dons a biohazard suit and steps outside. She follows the flashlight beam but discovers it’s simply hanging from a metal rail at Rosie’s aft end—a trick to lure her out. When she dashes back inside, the mobile lab is empty. She closes and locks the door and heads back to her lab, where she finds Melanie sitting; she used the walkie-talkie to transmit a message and then hid, waiting for Caldwell to emerge so she could sneak inside. Now, brandishing an infected scalpel, she warns Caldwell not to do anything to harm her. She wants to know what makes her and the other infected children different. Caldwell explains that the children were born with the pathogen, the product of two infected parents. Rather than devouring and controlling the brain as it does in a regular hungry, the second-generation infection interacts with the brain. It becomes a symbiotic relationship rather than parasitic. She talks and Melanie listens until Caldwell’s fever and infection enter their final phase. She will die with no recognition for her work. 

Parks and Justineau huddle in a loft while hungries congregate below. Unable to sleep, she confesses to Parks that she’s treated him unfairly. She takes his hand, wishing for a moment that she had never confessed to killing the boy by the roadside. Despite their mutually hard histories—obstacles that feel too massive to overcome—she kisses him. They make love in the loft.

During the night, Parks hears strange sounds from below—vocalizations hungries normally don’t make. He opens the trap door and shines his flashlight down into the crowd of hungries. The feral children, armed with a variety of weapons, take down the hungries, aiming next for Parks and Justineau. As the children try to force open the trap door, Parks and Justineau climb through a skylight onto the roof. They stumble along a narrow walkway as the children pursue. Parks fires his gun, killing one child and scattering the rest. More children emerge from hiding, hurling stones from slingshots. Parks fires a few bursts from the automatic rifle, ordering Justineau back inside the building. She finds a window, and they scramble through.

They run down the stairs, looking for an exit. They find one, but a feral child wielding two knives blocks their way. Finding a back door, they burst through into a weedy, brambly garden. They tear through the thorny branches, hoping the prickly barbs will slow down the mostly naked children. They climb a wall and land in a parking lot, although Justineau is hit with a stone; she falls, unconscious. Parks carries her through the lot, but the coordinated attack channels them into the open where they are more vulnerable. The leader of the pack tackles Parks. With teeth filed down to points, he tears a shred of flesh from the sergeant’s arm. One of the children goes after Justineau, but Parks retrieves his gun and fires, knocking her away. Suddenly, in a blur of motion, Melanie appears, “[s]pitting fire and screaming like all the demons of hell” (391). 

Trying to make herself intimidating, Melanie dons the biohazard helmet, smears her naked body with blue disinfectant gel, and charges the children armed with a flare pistol and Justineau’s alarm. She targets the lead boy, striking his chin with the butt of the pistol, but he recovers and swings his baseball bat at her head. He knocks the helmet off but misses her head. She fires another flare directly at the boy’s head. He falls to the ground, clutching his face, and Melanie picks up the bat, finishing the job. The other children flee.

Melanie leads the couple safely back to Rosie. She suggests using its flamethrowers to burn a passage through the fungal wall. Melanie and Parks work together to power up the flame throwers, and Parks blasts fire directly into the wall. It burns easily and quickly.

Now delirious, Parks needs to get away from Melanie and Justineau. Melanie leads him outside and sits him down. Parks takes out his sidearm, loads a full magazine, and hands the gun to Melanie. He wants her to kill him before the infection takes over. Parks, however, can taste the fungus in the air, and Melanie confesses that burning the tendrils has opened the spore pods, releasing the pathogen into the air. It’s unfortunate but necessary, Melanie claims, to infect everyone so that the second generation of humanity will all be like her: “They’ll be the next people. The ones who make everything okay again” (399). They sit in silence for a while until a chirping bird activates Parks’s hunger reflex. Melanie puts a bullet in the sergeant’s head. 

Justineau regains consciousness inside Rosie and searches for the others. She finds Caldwell’s body slumped on the floor of the lab. Outside, a gray cloud of spores rains down. Melanie approaches, gesturing for Justineau to open the door. She understands that the spores mean 100% infection: This will be Melanie’s world now. She dons a biohazard suit and steps outside. Melanie walks among a group of children who are sitting on the ground, obediently facing Justineau. Melanie is their leader now. She greets Justineau as she did back at the base. Marker in hand, Justineau begins to teach.