They pushed their way through the revolving doors of the hospital entrance. A security guard was swollen into his black serge suit so completely that he had split its seams. It hung off him like a soiled superhero cloak. A porter in a luminous orange vest drew attention that ought never to be paid. Nurses in once-white uniforms were marbled with all the colours of the vital rainbow.
There was an arrow pointing to the pharmacy. Jane headed for it quickly, hoping to put some distance between himself and the bickering Aussies. He tried to avoid looking at the figures slouched in wheelchairs, or on gurneys from which they would never rise. He imagined all the
Do Not Resuscitate
signs on the ends of beds. He thought of the morgue. No need for a discreet room now. Or body bags – the whole country was doing that job now.
A short corridor led them past the radiology department. A man with a pair of crutches and his foot in an orthopaedic shoe was waiting for an X-ray. His face was covered with a towel. Jane stopped.
'What is it?' Chris asked.
'Where did that towel come from?'
They couldn't answer. There was the slightest creak. Jane turned to see the heavy door to the X-ray room widen, a grimy hand with split nails white upon its edge. Before he could raise his hand, a woman with wild eyes came out of the darkness and slammed the end of a desk lamp into the side of his head.
Jane touched the compress to the lump above his ear and winced. 'What are you doing here?' he asked. They were in the X-ray room. The woman had apologised profusely, assured him it was a case of mistaken identity. A boy sat in a plastic chair, his arm in a muddy-coloured cast. He watched Jane with big hopeful eyes, a child who has seen Santa unmasked and doesn't want to accept the truth.
'I work here,' the woman said. 'I'm a radiographer.'
'What happened?'
'I don't know. Fire. An explosion.'
'How did you and the boy . . .?'
'The shield we use, for the X-rays. Aidan here, I was showing him what I do, to calm him down. I was showing him the buttons I needed to press before giving him his X-ray. Then there was this flash. I thought it was the machinery. A malfunction. But there was thunder in the corridors. I thought the whole building was going to come down.'
Jane told them about his own experiences, toning it down for the sake of the boy. The woman shook her head throughout. He thought maybe it was in astonishment, but it turned out to be a rehearsal for her answer when he asked if she and Aidan were ready to leave.
'I haven't been out since it happened,' she said. She gave Jane a loaded stare, gesturing lightly towards the boy. 'Not sure how good an idea it would be. Maybe best to wait for help.'
Jane drew her to one side and lowered his voice. 'What's up with him?'
She shrugged. 'He's been having a series of tests. Doctors are worried he might have some kind of blood disease. It's early days.'
'And now, what? We won't know?'
The woman shook her head and turned to regard Aidan. He was flicking switches on the malfunctioned control panel. 'He's always been a sickly child, according to his reports. Maybe things will iron themselves out over time. Maybe not. There's no help for him now, if it's serious.'
'It might be that we're as much help as you're likely to see,' Jane said. 'There's a lot of . . . casualties out there.'
'But we're fairly safe, secure here. There's plenty of food and water. Medical supplies. People will come to the hospitals. You proved it.'
'If there are people, they will come.' He lowered his voice. 'I'm not sure how many people are left.'
Aidan watched them owlishly. He seemed fascinated, as if he were being read some amazing bedtime story. Jane wondered about the boy. About his parents.
'I'm on my way to London,' Jane continued, as if that alone might be inducement enough.
'Long way,' the woman said.
'Have you been out at all?' he asked.
She shook her head. 'I prefer to stay with what I know.'
'What about home? Family?'
She shook her head again. He could tell she resented having to explain to a stranger, no matter the extraordinary circumstances. 'My parents died when I was in my teens,' she said. 'I have brothers and sisters, but nobody local. I never married.'
Cruelly, he imagined her shaking her head whenever she was asked.
'What about you, Aidan?'
'Mum and Dad. Kerry, my sister.'
'You tried to get home to see them?'
He shook his head. 'They're here.'
Jane felt the air stiffen around him. 'OK,' he said. He wanted to move on, but Aidan was making things difficult. He felt perfectly happy about leaving the others to fend for themselves, but Aidan was Stanley's age. He couldn't abandon him without making some effort to get him safe.
'What about looters?'
The woman sighed. She still appeared nervous, uncertain about Jane. Her gaze flickered to Chris and Nance, who were dithering by the door, trying not to look at the stiff, shrouded body in the waiting area.
'A couple of days after it happened – I think, perception of time all messed up – I heard a bunch of people come in here, running around the corridors. I thought help had arrived, but they were screaming, laughing. We hid. They must have been pissed or drugged up. Plenty of free goodies on offer now, I suppose.'
'You saw them? They still around?'
'They moved on,' she said. 'I think they were just kids.'
'What did they take?'
The woman shrugged. 'The pharmacy has been raided. A lot of uppers and downers gone. The snack machines have been emptied. I saw a lot of empty wallets and purses lying around.'
'You can't buy anything, actually,' Aidan said. 'Actually, they're just idiots.'
The woman laughed, a little too breathily, a little too close to tears, but it broke the mood. She realised she was still holding the crutch and tossed it to one side.
'How's your head?' she asked.
'I think I need an X-ray.'
Jane liked her despite the assault. It wasn't just the Pavlovian response a lot of his oil platform colleagues displayed when confronted by a woman, although it had been a long time since Jane had enjoyed female company. There was something about her that nibbled at him. Maybe it was the way she had selflessly protected Aidan – the latent mother come to the fore – or maybe it was just the way she was decked out. She wore simple clothes – a short-sleeved white blouse, jeans, leather sandals and a long amber necklace. She had an easy physicality about her. She was slender, long-limbed, but not gawky. He liked the way she turned a rub of her forehead into a slow trawl of her long shaggy hair. He'd always liked girls with a thick mane on them.
'What's your name?' he asked. He was thinking,
Jesus, hit me again
.
'Rebecca,' she said. 'Becky. Becky Bass. It should be like the fish, or the brewery, but I prefer it pronounced like the guitar.'
A cough from the doorway. Chris said, 'This is fascinating, really. But we should get back to Angela and Brendan.'
'Do you know if anybody else survived?' Jane asked. 'Anyone from the hospital?'
The shake of the head. She had it down pat – a skill no doubt learned in childhood. You could say no all you liked with eyes as beautiful as that.
Becky agreed to accompany them on their search for supplies; Jane saw it as a start. She looked as though she wanted to go but the professional in her was the anchor. 'There's nothing to be done here,' Jane pressed.
'Survivors,' she said.
'They'd be here by now.'
'You weren't.'
'We've been on the road for days. I was thinking of Newcastle survivors.'
Becky turned to Aidan, as if silently canvassing for support.
'You can't stay here,' Jane said.
In the pharmacy she led them to a few of the shelves where stock had been ignored. Painkillers and antiseptic, syringes and penicillin went into Jane's rucksack, along with bottles he didn't recognise.
'Isn't that for diarrhoea?' Chris asked, intercepting a phial of potassium permanganate.
'Yes,' Becky said. 'But mix it with this' – she brandished a bottle of glycerin – 'and you get fire.'
Jane did his best to shield Aidan from the casualties as they made their way back to the entrance – a quadrangle was heaped with bodies wearing bloodied, rain-scarred hospital gowns – but Aidan did not seem affected by the atrocity. He kept batting away Jane's hand and asking, 'Is he dead?'
'He's been doing that for a week,' Becky explained. 'On the X-ray bed he was asking,
Will it hurt? Will I die?
'
It was probably the ideal age for a child to be caught up in an extinction-level event, Jane thought. Any younger and it would be non-stop crying. Any older and there'd be catatonia. Five-year-old boys and death were a fine match. In years to come, though, there could be some serious fallout in store for Aidan. Some enterprising young therapist, if there were any left, would get colossally rich on the back of this one day.
Brendan and Angela were in the same position in which they'd left them, holding on to each other as if afraid that one of them might defy gravity. They regarded Becky and Aidan with a naked pleading.
'We found some portable oxygen canisters,' Jane told them. 'And enough Ventolin to clear out Kong's chest.'
Brendan asked Becky: 'Are you a doctor?'
Aidan said, 'Am I looks like a doctor?'
They were readying to leave, Jane making his final appeals to Becky who was shaking her head, backing away, feeling for the entrance to the hospital behind her. A klaxon went off, dopplering through the blistered, blustery sky like the appetite cry of some fantastic beast. Jane swivelled on the step. He could see nothing beyond the thick ranks of cemetery cars. Dust had turned them all the same colour. It was piled thickly on the windscreens, obliterating any views within.
The klaxon came again, closer. Was this the sound they had heard in the nights on their approach to the city? Jane doubted it; that had been more organic – this was compressed, synthetic, impersonal. It had the air of code about it; he imagined a gathering of weaponised shadows closing in around them. Spies on rooftops coordinating an attack.
'I don't like this,' he said.
'What?' Chris said. 'Survivors? Like us? Are you worried your trip down to London is going to be delayed even more?' 'It doesn't feel right,' Jane said.
'That's because nothing
is
right any more,' Nance said. Chris curled an arm around her, trying to disguise his surprise at her support.
Jane's eyes were fast on a road filled with shadow, fifty yards or so away, opposite the car-park entrance. Something had moved within it, he was certain. Now he saw it again. A figure peeled itself away from the shelter of an overturned ice-cream van. A white scarf clung to the lower half of its face. Jane squinted, confused. It looked like a child, no older than nine or ten. There was something wrong with it. Its pallor was waxen, unnatural. He might have guessed this was some kind of sculpture, a fashion dummy escaped from the shop window, had it not been for the movements it made.
The klaxon made itself known again through the treacly air. The child's head snapped to the left; Jane followed her lead, again distracted by the apparent failure of her physicality. Was she sick? Was she disabled in some way? She raised her hand and he frowned and felt a tip of the tongue moment, a thing observed and then forgotten at the moment he noticed it. But all this was dismissed from his thoughts when he saw a half-dozen heads bobbing past the procession of naked trees at the far end of the car park. Steel flashed.
'We ought to leave,' Jane said. 'Is there another way out of the hospital?'
Becky led them back through the corridors. Jane heard something slam behind them. A crash. A cheer.
Chris said, 'Survivors,' but made no other attempt to get them to return. They were something other than survivors. They were drunk on that survival, or cursed by it. They had things on their mind other than finding family, or swapping tales of how they had dodged the breath of the devil. Survivors didn't knock about city streets clutching weapons, insanity flooding out of their wide-open mouths.
They were trying not to run, trying not to admit the panic in their legs, but they weren't far off it. Angela's breathing was shallow, irregular, edged with pain and fright. Brendan ushered her into a wheelchair and Jane didn't know what was worse, the protest of her lungs or the squeal of a loose castor.
'Did they see us?' Jane asked.
'I don't think so,' Nance said.
'Maybe they're coming here to stock up on pills,' Becky said. 'Maybe I ought to stick with you after all.'
The noise of pursuit carried on after the point where they would have reached the pharmacy.