M.R. Carey Quotes

Melanie finds this interesting in spite of herself - that you can use words to hide things, or not to touch them, or to pretend that they're something different than they are.

The horror of the unknown is more frightening than any horror you can understand

Every kid is born a fascist," Liz said. "You have to pound democracy into them a little at a time.

These things fill Melanie's mind with wild surmise. She says nothing, drinks it all in. "Transfer

a squatter in the ruins of empire,

She thinks: all journeys are the same journey, whether you're moving or not. And the things that look like endings are all just stations on the way.

But along with these scary thoughts, she also thinks: Sergeant has a name. The same way the teachers do. The same way the children do. Up until now, Sergeant has been more like a god or a Titan to Melanie; now she knows that he's just like everyone else, even if he is scary. He's not just Sergeant, he's Sergeant Parks. The enormity of that change, more than anything else, is what keeps her awake until the doors unlock in the morning and the teachers come.

briefly to have stabilised, and a hundred initiatives

And the beautiful woman hugged her to her mortal soul, and said, "You are my special girl. You will always be with me, and I will never let you go."

And they lived together, for ever after, in great peace and prosperity.

She's as big as four-fifths of five-eighths of fuck all, but she takes no bullshit from anyone.

Even the air seems to have a smell - earthy and rich and complicated, made out of things living nd things dying and things long dead. The smell of the world where nothing stops moving, nothing stays the same.

She speculates for the first time on what Melanie could have been, could have become, if she'd lived before the Breakdown. If she'd never been bitten and infected. Because this is a child here, whatever else she is, and she's never lost that sense of her own centre before except when she smelled blood and turned, briefly into an animal. And look at how pragmatically, how ruthlessly, she's coped with that. But Justineau only pursues this train of thought for a moment. When Melanie starts to speak, she commands their full attention. "I

Parks waits a long while, until he's absolutely certain that Justineau's monologue is finished. The truth is, for most of the time he's been trying to figure out what it is exactly that she's trying to tell him. Maybe he was right the first time about where they were heading, and Justineau airing her ancient laundry is just a sort of palate-cleanser before they have sex. Probably not, but you never know. In any case, the countermove to a confession is an absolution, unless you think the sin is unforgivable. Parks doesn't.

"It was an accident," he tells her, pointing out the obvious. "And probably you would have ended up doing the right thing. You don't strike me as the sort of person who just lets shit slide." He means that, as far as it goes. One of the things he likes about Justineau is her seriousness. He frigging flat-out hates frivolous, thoughtless people who dance across the surface of the world without looking down.

"Yeah, but you don't get it," Justineau says. "Why do you think I'm telling you all this?"

"I don't know," Parks admits. "Why are you telling me?"

Justineau steps away from the parapet wall and squares off against him – range, zero metres. It could be erotic, but somehow it's not.

"I killed that boy, Parks. If you turn my life into an equation, the number that comes out is minus one. That's my lifetime score, you understand me? And you … you and Caldwell, and Private Ginger f**king Rogers … my God, whe

Loyalty is just the wheels on the bus ... meaning that it keeps things moving but it's neutral when it comes to the direction they move in.

But the world is winding down, and you take what you're given.

fine, dark grey strands. Like plague-flavoured candy floss, Justineau thinks.

Parks is on his knees now, a few feet to Justineau's left. He's working the crank to open the door. But it's not opening, even though he's encouraging it with a continuous stream of bad language. Caldwell must have disabled the emergency access. Melanie

She breathes in shallow sips. The smell of the human remains, and of years of enclosed decay, freights the air so heavily it's almost a physical presence. With

If she hadn't talked to the kids about death that day. If she hadn't read them "The Charge of the Light Brigade", and if they hadn't asked what being dead was like, then she wouldn't have stroked Melanie's hair and none of this would have happened. She wouldn't have made a promise she couldn't keep and couldn't walk away from. She could be as selfish as she's always been, and forgive herself the way everybody else does, and wake up every day as clean as if she'd just been born.

She blinks furiously, trying to dredge up some more moisture from her now dry-baked tear ducts. Two of the shapes resolve. One is Selkirk, on her side on the floor of the lab, her legs jackknifing in furious staccato. The other is a hungry which is kneeling astride her, stuffing her spilled intestines into its mouth in pink, sagging coils. More hungries surge in from all sides, hiding Selkirk from view. She's a honey-pot for putrescent bees. The last Justineau sees of her is her inconsolable face. Melanie!

Caldwell speaks in the dry, inflectionless tone of a lecturer, but her expression hardens as she stares down at the thing that is both her nemesis and the focal point of her waking life. "If

This room is the strangest thing Melanie has ever seen. Of course, she's starting to realise that she hasn't seen all that much, but there are more things here of more baffling variety than she would have thought the whole world could hold.

The truth is the truth, the only prize worth having. If you deny it, you're only showing that you're unworthy of it.

admires her honesty, which turns white lies into red roadkill.

His stomach lurches. He has a sense, for the first time in his soldiering career, of what a war crime might look like from the inside. And it's not him who's the criminal, or even Caldwell. It's Justineau. And Mailer. And that drunken bastard Whitaker, and all the rest of them. Caldwell, she's just a butcher. She's Sweeney Todd, with a barber's chair and a straight razor. She didn't spend years twisting kids' brains into pretzels.

The second is that some things become true simply by being spoken. When she said to the little girl "I'm here for you", the architecture of her mind, her definition of herself, shifted and reconfigured around that statement. She became committed, or maybe just acknowledged a commitment. It has nothing to do with guilt for earlier crimes (although she has a pretty fair understanding of what she deserves), or any hope of redemption. It's just the outermost point on an arc. She's risen as far as she can, and now she's falling again, no longer in control (if she ever was to start with) of her own movements.

Literary puns. She had to admit, she did find that pretty hot.

Qui tacet consentire. If you don't say no, you just said yes. He

I don't like people very much. I'm all in favour of them as a concept, but I don't get on with them at all when I have to mix with them.

One of the things he likes about Justineau is her seriousness. He frigging flatout hates frivolous, thoughtless people who dance across the surface of the world without looking down.

But a thing can be easily breakable and still be a bastard to deal with. Ice is brittle, but try walking on half an inch of it.

Nothing is quite clear from the drug-fueled night when a blaze set in her apartment killed the little boy upstairs. But when the media brands Jess a child-killer, she starts to believe it herself.

Jess wasn't religious. Not even a little bit. She thought all gods were basically big bully-boy cops dreamed up by people who wanted the laws they liked on Earth to be true everywhere else.

But the future is uncertain, and he can't get up enough enthusiasm even to masurbate.

She's lived in Plato's cave, staring at the shadows on the wall. Now she's been turned around to face the fire.

It's not just Pandora who had that inescapable flaw. It seems like everyone has been built in a way that sometimes makes them do wrong and stupid things.

Caldwell doesn't answer. She's unfolded her arms for the first time and she's taking a furtive, fearful look at her injuries, like a poker player lifting the corners of his cards to see what Lady Luck has sent along. But

Out of my way, Private," Justineau says quietly. "Or your brains go public." Parks

Sergeant wheels the chair back to the door. Melanie takes this in, and reads it right. She won't be needing the chair again. She won't be going back to her cell. Tales the Muses Told is lying under her mattress back there, and she crashes head first into the realisation that she may never see it again. Those pages that smell of Miss Justineau are now, and perhaps for ever, inaccessibly distant. She

Entirely out of patience, Dr Caldwell reaches out her hand to pick up the scalpel again. But right then, something happens that makes her stop. Two things, really. The first is an explosion, loud enough to make the windows rattle in their frames. The second is an ear-splitting scream, like a hundred people shrieking all at the same time. Dr Selkirk's face looks first blank, then terrified. "That's general evacuation," she says. "Isn't it? Isn't that the evacuation siren?" Dr Caldwell doesn't waste time answering her. She crosses to the window and hauls up the blinds. Melanie

They walk on endlessly. Time elongates, fractures, rewinds and replays in stuttering moments that - while they have no coherent internal logic - all seem drearily familiar and inevitable.

There are thirty kids there, too," Justineau adds. "And most of your men. What are we going to do? Just walk away from them?" "That's exactly what we're going to do," Parks tells them. "If you shut up, I'll tell you why. I've been up on that radio every ten or fifteen minutes since we stopped. Not only is there no answer from the base, there's no answer full stop. Nobody else got out of there. Or if they did, they got out without wheels or comms, which means they might just as well be on another planet as far as we're concerned. There's no way to get their attention right now without getting the junkers bouncing at us too. If we meet them on the road, that's great. Otherwise, we're alone, and the only sensible thing to do is to head for home fires. For Beacon." Caldwell

So Gallagher grew up in a weird microcosm of the wider world outside Beacon. His father, and his brother Steve, and his cousin Jackie looked like normal human beings and even sometimes acted like them, but most of the time they veered between two extremes: reckless violence when they were drinking, and comatose somnolence when the drink wore off. Ricocheting

When the sun comes up, Justineau is silently amazed. It seemed entirely plausible that this ontological impasse would go on for ever. Through

everyone down to street level is easy enough, with the ropes. Sergeant Parks decides the order: Gallagher first, so there's someone on the ground who knows how to use a gun, then Helen Justineau, then Dr Caldwell, with himself bringing up the rear. Dr Caldwell is the only one who presents any kind of a problem, since her bandaged hands won't allow her to grip the rope. Parks makes a running knot, which he ties around her waist, and lowers her down. They

It was an accident," he tells her, pointing out the obvious. "And probably you would have ended up doing the right thing. You don't strike me as the sort of person who just lets shit slide." He means that, as far as it goes. One of the things he likes about Justineau is her seriousness. He frigging flat-out hates frivolous, thoughtless people who dance across the surface of the world without looking down. "Yeah,

Yesterday she thought that the hungries were like houses that people used to live in. Now she thinks that every one of those houses is haunted.

But the knowledge isn't any good without the infrastructure.

Overthrow is a nicely judged word. It suggests a wrestler being flung to the mat. That only happens when you move outside your centre of gravity. Your enemy can't throw you if you have your feet firmly planted. Which

The hungry she caught is still moving sluggishly, despite the horrific damage the door mechanism has done to the muscles and tendons of its upper body. Seen from this close, the size of the head in relation to the body suggests that it may have been even younger at the time of initial infection than Caldwell had previously estimated. But

Pritchard tutted. "Justice? Justice is even more problematic than truth. It's an emergent property of a very complicated system.

Facilitator of mass murder, smiling a Judas smile as she ticks the boxes.

Justineau doesn't have any answer. She watches with an eerie sense of dislocation as Caldwell crosses to another part of the lab, comes back with a glass fish tank in which she's set up one of her tissue cultures. It's an older one, with several years of growth. The tank is about eighteen inches by twelve by ten inches high, and its interior is completely filled with a dense mass of fine, dark grey strands. Like plague-flavoured candy floss, Justineau thinks. It's impossible even to tell what the original substrate was; it's just lost in the toxic froth that has sprouted from it. "This

Parks is amazed. Appalled. Even a little bit disgusted. He's used to dealing with people who have at least some sort of survival instinct, and he knows that Justineau isn't stupid. Back at the base, he thought of her as the best of Caldwell's exasperating little coterie, and while that isn't saying much, he actually liked and respected her. He still does. But

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.

She faces him, trying to take a breath that's long and level, trying to pull all the slopping emotions back inside so he won't see them in her face.

Not everyone who looks human is human," he says. "No," Miss Justineau agrees. "I'm with you on that one." Kenny's

It's just instinct. Faulty learning. He takes a step back, groping for his sidearm instead of swinging the rifle like a club. Wastes a second that he doesn't have, and it's all over. Except that it isn't. In combat, Parks narrows down. It's not even a conscious thing, so much, or a trick he's learned. It just happens. He does the job that's in front of him, and pretty much shunts everything else into a holding pattern. So

And the sun comes out, like a kiss on the cheek from God.

Will we go home to Beacon? Melanie had asked. When we're grown up? And Miss Justineau looked so sad, so stricken, that Melanie had immediately started to blurt out apologies and assurances, trying to stave off the effects of whatever terrible thing she'd inadvertently said. Which she understands now. From this angle, it's obvious. What she'd said, about going home to Beacon, was impossible, like hot snow or dark sunshine. Beacon was never home to her, and never could be. That

While the others stare at the fungal glade in sick fascination, Caldwell kneels and picks up one of the fallen sporangia. It looks and feels solid enough, but weighs very little. There's a pleasing smoothness to its integument. Nobody sees as she slips it, very carefully, into the pocket of her lab coat. The next time Sergeant Parks glances around at her, she's fidgeting with her bandages again and looks as though she's been doing it the whole time. They

There's no point in denying the truth when the truth is self-evident.

Nothing goes on forever. If it did, there wouldn't be anything else, would there?

It's equinox, with the world balanced between winter and summer, life and death, like a spinning ball balanced on the tip of someone's finger.

The wave hits. It doesn't even slow. Hungries slam full-tilt into the mesh and into the concrete stanchions that support it. It leans inwards, groans and creaks, but seems to be holding. The front ranks of walking corpses are treading water. But

His broad, flat face, made asymmetrical and inconceivably ugly by the scar, radiates friendly solicitude. Justineau

She's figured out the brakes by this time, and she slows, intimidated by the echoing bellow of Rosie's engines in these desolate landscapes. She feels for a sickening moment that she might be the last human being left alive on the face of a necrotic planet. And that it might not matter after all. To have the race that built these mausoleums lie in them finally, quiet and resigned, and crumble into dust. Who'd

They think he doesn't understand. That he can't see. They can't see him.

necrotic planet.

Evidence is evidence, Your Honour. Like water, it finds its level.

You can't save people from the world. There's nowhere else to take them.

Rough edges were what you needed because they were what you sharpened yourself against. Nobody ever got sharp from lying in a feather bed.

Parks stares at her for a moment, like she's something written in a language he doesn't speak. "Got it all figured out," he acknowledges. "Yes." He leans forward to look her in the eye. "And you're not scared?" Melanie hesitates. "Of what?" she asks him. Justineau is amazed at that momentary pause. Yes or no would be equally easy to say, whether they were true or not. The pause means that Melanie is scrupulous, is weighing her words. It means she's trying to be honest with them. As if they've done a single thing, ever, to deserve that. "Of

They're at the gates now, and there's no lock on them that Parks can see, but they don't open. Used to be electric, obviously, but bygones are bygones and in the brave new post-mortem world that just means they don't bloody work. "Over!" he yells. "Up and over!" Which is easily said. A head-high rampart of ornamental ironwork with functional spear points on top says different. They try, all the same. Parks leaves them to it, turns his back to them and goes on firing. The up side is that now he can be indiscriminate. Set to full auto and aim low. Cut the hungries' legs out from under them, turning the front-runners into trip hazards to slow the ones behind. The down side is that more and more of them keep coming. The noise is like a dinner bell. Hungries are crowding into the green space from the streets on every side, at what you'd have to call a dead run. There's no limit to their numbers, and there is a limit to his ammo. Which

Hungries toggle between two states. They're frozen in place most of the time, just standing there like they're never going to move again. Then they smell prey, or hear it, or catch sight of it, and they break into that terrifying dead sprint. No warm-up, no warning. Warp factor nine.

The words come out of Helen Justineau in a flat monotone. Parks thinks of Gallagher's written report, with its proceeding tos and its thereupons. But Justineau's bowed head and the tightness of her grip on the parapet wall add their own commentary. "I

The fact that he doesn't smoke and fears alcohol almost as badly as he fears hungries and junkers does nothing to tarnish this dazzling vision. He'd be the man, nonetheless. One of those guys who gets a nod or a word from everybody when he walks into the mess hall, and takes it as his due. A man whose acknowledgement, when granted, confers status on those who get a nod or a word in return. The

Tolkien disapproved of Lewis's Narnia books because they worked by analogy, taking an existing myth and retelling it with different names and circumstances, whereas he felt that you should make your own myth out of whole cloth. But it's not possible to read The Silmarillion without seeing how Sauron's fall mirrors Satan's. It's only a question of how you triangulate your relationship to your source material.

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.

When she holds that thought up to the light and sees how pathetic it is, how cravenly equivocating, she sinks into black depression. From

Out of my way, Private, or your brains go public.

This isn't life. It's something that's playing out in its own self-contained subroutine.

It's may we live as long as we want, and never want as long as we live,

It doesn't matter," she explains to Miss J. "I want to be where you are. And I don't know the way back to wherever I was before, anyway. I don't even remember it. All I remember is the block, and you. You're ... " Now it's Melanie's turn to hesitate. She doesn't know the words for this. "You're my bread," she says at last. "When I'm hungry. I don't mean that I want to eat you, Miss Justineau! I really don't! I'd rather die than do that. I just mean ... you fill me up the way the bread does to the man in the song. You make me feel like I don't need anything else.

Hit it with anything. Bullets, bricks, your bare hands, harsh language.

He hands her his pack, which he's emptied. "You mean me?" Justineau demands. "You think I'm not pulling my weight?" It would feel good to have a stand-up argument with Parks right then, but he doesn't seem keen to play. "No, I didn't mean you. I meant in general." "People in general? You were being philosophical?" "I was being a grumpy bastard. It's what I wear to the office most days. I guess you probably noticed that." She hesitates, wrong-footed. She didn't think Parks was capable of self-deprecation. But then she didn't think he was capable of changing his mind. "Any more rules of engagement?" she asks him, still hurting in some obscure way, still not mollified. "How to survive when shopping? Top tips for modern urban living?" Parks gives the question more consideration than she was expecting. "Use up the last of that e-blocker," he suggests. "And don't die.

Stock was a rationalist and an atheist. Most of the time she saw the world as a big machine where things just played themselves out. Anonymous forces, impersonal powers, action and reaction, cause and effect. It would be comforting to live in a world that had order and purpose in it, which she supposed was why so many people pretended they did.

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.

Pain has no agenda at all. It teaches us nothing, except what hurts. And if you can't avoid the things that hurt then what use is the lesson?

I killed that boy, Parks. If you turn my life into an equation, the number that comes out is a minus one. That's my lifetime score, you understand me? And you ... you and Caldwell, and Private Ginger fucking Rogers ... my God, whether it means anything or not, I will die my own self before I let you take me down to minus two.

She's always been a good girl. But she ate pieces of two men, and very probably killed them both. Killed them with her teeth. She was hungry, and they were her bread.

In fact, it's almost big enough to cross time zones. The lab is amidships and takes up nearly half the available space. In front of it and behind it there are weapons stations where two gunners can stand back to back and look out to either side of the vehicle through slit windows like the embrasures in a medieval castle. Each of these stations can be sealed off from the lab by a bulkhead door. Further aft, there's something like an engine room. Forward, there are crew quarters, with a dozen wall-mounted cot beds and two chemical toilets, the kitchen space, and then the cockpit, which has a pedestal gun of the same calibre as the Humvee's and about as many controls as a passenger jet. Justineau

Parks joins her and they continue to boggle in unison. "Any idea?" the sergeant asks at last. Justineau shakes her head. "You?" "I prefer to look at all the evidence first. Then I get someone smarter than I am to explain it to me." They

Melanie thinks: when your dreams come true, your true has moved. You've already stopped being the person who had the dreams, so it feels more like a weird echo of something that already happened to you a long time ago.