The Girl with All the Gifts

After the incident with Melanie, Justineau realizes that Parks has been right all along. Her empathy is her own worst enemy. She has no hope of saving Melanie or the other children. Her mere presence is the limit of her ability to help them. Lastly, she remembers seeing a figure inside the perimeter of the security fence during her encounter with Parks—not a hungry, but something else.

Parks reminisces about the early days of the Breakdown and his “retrieval runs.” Going into infested areas and eradicating zombie hordes was “[d]irty work, and about as dangerous as you can get” (68). When not fighting off zombies, the soldiers were likely to encounter “junkers”—survivalists who would rather take their chances off the grid than seek refuge inside Beacon. The only real advantage to the retrieval runs was scavenging for lost technology: 20-year-old computers and electronics from before the Breakdown. These artifacts serve as a bridge between then and now—a last symbolic hope of rebuilding civilization. During these scavenging expeditions, the soldiers encountered strange, feral children: zombie-human hybrids that scientists deemed worth studying. Thus was Hotel Echo created, but Parks finds his new duties—“nursemaiding these little hungries” (72)—frustrating. Melanie in particular disturbs him. He can’t reconcile her typical little-girl behavior with her true zombie nature, and that contradiction blurs the lines of his job.

With 28 soldiers under his command, Parks worries about the combat readiness of some of his troops. Troop rotation was supposed to be 18 months, but they’ve been stationed at Hotel Echo for four years. So much of this assignment is unconventional that Parks is forced to improvise. One day his men encountered three junkers while luring a group of hungries into an ambush. Private Gallagher, the “bait,” was nearly shot by a junker while fleeing the zombies, but he escaped. Meanwhile, the hungries walked into the trap, rolling into a ditch and dissolving in lime. Two of the junkers were infected, so the soldiers decapitated them and confiscated their gun, ammo, and other gear. Although Gallagher and his unit survived, Parks is concerned about the presence of junkers so close to the base’s perimeter. 

One Friday, Miss Justineau seems withdrawn, and Melanie is afraid she is upset over the incident in her cell. When she notices Justineau quietly sobbing at her desk, Melanie tries to lighten the mood by asking her for a story. She obliges, tearing up the assessments she’s been working on and reading the students stories from Greek mythology. As the soldiers wheel the children back to their cells after class, Justineau secretly slips Melanie the book of Greek myths. Justineau’s smell lingers on the book and triggers Melanie’s hunger response, but it eventually wears off, and she spends the rest of the night reading the book.

Monday has come but Justineau has not submitted her list of viable children for study. The mystery of these children persists: “There’s something in the children’s body chemistry which is retarding both the spread of the fungus and the virulence of its effects” (85). Rather than dissecting a large cross-section of the cohort, Caldwell decides to start with the one who shows the greatest resistance to the pathogen: Melanie.

Parks enters Melanie’s cell with orders to bring her to Caldwell’s lab. As he straps her into her chair, Melanie asks if she will come back or disappear like Liam and Marcia. Parks tells her to address her questions to Dr. Caldwell. She begs to see Justineau before she goes, but Parks refuses. Melanie implores him, calling him Eddie, but that familiarity enrages the sergeant; he grabs her throat and orders her to never use his first name again. She obeys, and he wheels her out of her cell.