The Queen of Yesterday

by Rob Kinsman

  “Ok, let’s have coffee and think what to do.”

  Zoe had never seen a look of such gratitude.

  Maja prepared them a cup of coffee brewed to her own special recipe. It looked slightly more like mud than Zoe was used to, but she appreciated the gesture.

  “How long do we wait?”

  “Until guests wake up.” Now back in familiar surroundings, Maja was a woman transformed: cool, confident, composed.

  “What if they don’t? We should go and check on them.”

  “I cannot disturb privacy of guests.”

  “We can’t spend the rest of our lives waiting for something to happen,” said Zoe, who had spent most of her life doing exactly this.

  “Mr Fletch.”

  “Who?”

  “Assistant manager. He pretend to go home but has been sleeping in room 147 for past three weeks.”

  “Let’s go have a word with him then.”

  Maja insisted on knocking four times before letting herself in with the electric key card. The two women moved cautiously into the room.

  Zoe decided to ignore the industrial quantities of pornography strewn across the room. The inflatable doll sharing the bed also suggested that this wasn’t the room of a man with outstanding social skills.

  “Mr Fletch. Please wake up.”

  Maja gently prodded him. His eyelids were quivering, the dream had trapped him in REM sleep.

  “Maybe we should try someone else,” said Zoe, a little freaked out by the perfect circle of the inflatable doll’s mouth.

  “We need you Mr Fletch.” To Zoe’s alarm Maja added an eerily loud impression of a cockerel. “Cock-a-doodle-do!”

  Mr Fletch didn’t stir. The dream had him firmly in its grip.

  “We should leave him alone with his inflatable friend,” said Zoe.

  “I think he is very unhappy man.”

  “Yeah. I got that impression.”

  Zoe persuaded Maja that they should check on some other guests, on the flimsy grounds that they could make sure no-one was in trouble. This quickly turned into voyeur’s heaven, with even Maja finally dissolving into fits of laughter as they unearthed the increasingly bizarre ways people treated hotel rooms when they didn’t expect to be disturbed. From kinky sex games to rooms which had been rearranged to fit the OCD occupant’s exacting demands, they saw things that made them want to laugh, cry and, occasionally, gag.

  They ended up back in the Ocean Room, sipping yet more sludgy coffee. Maja yawned like she was auditioning to be the new face of Lion Bars.

  “Don’t fall asleep on me.”

  “I drink more coffee.”

  Maja topped up her already half-full cup and necked the contents. Her brow furrowed, and her cute nose scrunched up.

  “Why did you wake up?”

  “I told you,” replied Zoe cautiously. “I didn’t sleep.”

  “I telephone you twice. You were asleep.” There was no malice in Maja’s voice, just a desire to understand.

  “I don’t know why I woke up,” said Zoe plainly. “I don’t seem to be like other people.”

  “Why?”

  Zoe shifted, uneasy. “It’s complicated.”

  “This is what boyfriend say to me after three in bed romp.”

  Even as she said it, Zoe hated herself for her next question:

  “Were you one of the three?”

  Maja gave her a harsh, Eastern-European glare.

  “Sorry. None of my business,” said Zoe, sheepish. Maja yawned again. “Coffee not working?”

  “I have done eighteen hour shift.” After the disturbed nights Zoe had been subjected to recently, that sounded like a holiday. “Day staff should have been here at six. I think they oversleep.”

  “Probably.”

  Zoe liked Maja. At first she’d irritated the hell out of her, but in the circumstances she now seemed a lucky find. Maybe in a normal life they would have been friends.

  “Maja, can you drive?”

  “Of course. Who cannot?”

  Zoe, for one. She’d asked for lessons for her 17th birthday, just like everyone else at her sixth form college. Instead, her parents had given her a book of Shakespeare plays so she could try and get as ‘clever as the other girls’. Zoe was not one of the cool kids that summer.

  “I want to go and check something out,” she said. “An address I was sent. There’s a man I’ve been looking for, he disappeared.”

  “Is he filthy love cheat?”

  This sounded strangely adorable in Maja’s accent. Zoe wished she’d been born a lesbian, she would have had far more interesting partners to choose from.

  “Not exactly. I need to ask him about something important. But the place he might be is across town, and I guess public transport isn’t running. I thought we could have a road trip.”

  “You and me?”

  “Yeah. How about it? While the streets are quiet.”

  “You have car?”

  “Um, no. But I thought we could borrow one. No-one’s going to notice. We can put it back.”

  “I do not know,” said Maja gravely. “I have to be here for guests.”

  “Your assistant manager, the one with the inflatable friend, does he have a car?”

  “Yes. Very smug man. Refuses to travel on tube with ‘peasants’.”

  “Well… if we borrowed his car then we could say we were going to look for help. And he’s hardly going to cause you trouble now you’ve seen his, ahem, companion. Come on, it’ll be fun. We’ll be like Thelma and Louise.”

  “They died.”

  “Ok, it’s not a great example.”

  Maja considered for a moment.

  “Road trip is good.”

  Zoe looked out the window from her fifth floor room. It gave her a good view of the static city beneath. The roads without traffic were like veins without blood.

  She splashed her face with water, freshening herself up for the trip. For the first time in ages she was actually properly excited by something. Even her fears about what she’d find at the address Skyhawk had sent her seemed bearable since she wouldn’t have to face them alone. She skipped down the stairs, seeing what lay ahead more as an adventure than a curse.

  Maja had fallen asleep at the table in the Ocean Room. Zoe prodded and poked her, but it was no use. The dream had claimed her. Zoe was alone again.

  Twelve

  As visions of the apocalypse went, the streets were surprisingly tidy. Although the world’s heart had only just stopped beating, there weren’t the broken buildings and signs of carnage you would have got if the cause had been, say, giant radioactive lizard monster. In a very British way, people had simply locked their businesses, parked their cars and gone to sleep safely tucked up at home.

  Walking through the city, Zoe saw a few homeless men dreaming on park benches, but most people were back in the comfort of their own homes / wards / cells. She wasn’t completely alone, of course, there were still all the insomniacs and night shift workers who hadn’t had the opportunity to doze off yet. But the reality was that most people willingly sank back into the dream, hoping the sinister tone of the previous night’s episode was just a blip. Presumably sooner or later even those who resisted would be overcome by fatigue.

  Zoe had originally thought about trying to team up with some of the wandering souls she occasionally saw in the distance. However, the first people she came close to were busy pulling televisions out of a broken shop window. The shop alarm screeched angrily through the empty streets, but the perpetrators were entirely unbothered by it. Zoe left them well alone.

  As she marched onwards she began to fantasise about all the places she could go without being caught. If she ended up as the only person who could still wake up normally then sooner or later the city would be hers. She could explore palaces and galleries. If she could figure out how to use the projectors then she could have private screenings of the latest films. Or she could play on the Centre Court at Wimbledon, albeit against herself.

/>   It was a bleak realisation that even if she robbed the Bank of England she wouldn’t have anywhere to spend the money. She could help herself to the latest fashions, but who’d be there to appreciate how they looked on her? All she’d have were things, but no-one to share them with.

  She found herself crossing the Thames, the mighty current swelling below her. Once again, that nagging thought, wondering if she should just jump in and be done with it. It would only take a few seconds.

  It was an idle but disturbing fantasy. She walked briskly away from the thick, welcoming water.

  Her destination was still some miles distant, and there was every chance it was just some ruse of Skyhawk’s to lure her back into his world. She didn’t care, at least it gave her some purpose. If she really was living in a world gone mad then she was going to have to impose her own meaning onto it, and if that involved hiking halfway across London on a spurious tip-off then so be it. It was better than just sitting and hoping things would go back to normal, not that she knew what normal would even look like anymore.

  Before the dream. That was normality.

  Back then so many things had been within her grasp, her limits largely self imposed. But somehow she’d never realised this, and now it was too late. That past, so full of promise, belonged to someone else.

  As these bleak thoughts raced through her head, she almost didn’t notice the impressive Victorian building looming up before her.

  Oh shit.

  While she’d been lost in a spiral of self pity there were others whose needs were more pressing.

  How am I going to stop the people in the hospitals dying?

  She settled down on the front step, not quite brave enough to venture through the doors. Once she’d seen inside there would be no pretending this wasn’t her problem.

  Even with the best will in the world, she couldn’t save everyone. What if they all slept for a week, or even longer? Perhaps she should go back and check on Maja. She felt such a selfish idiot. Instead of staying to look after her new friend she’d decided to go off on her own little adventure, convinced that somehow she really was the centre of the world.

  Christ, what about my parents?

  Assuming she really was the only person in the world immune to the dream’s steely grip, then it would only take a day or so before they needed water – or, in her dad’s case, real ale – to survive. But, unable to drive, it would be hellish trying to get back to the depths of Norfolk.

  It was obvious that these thoughts would eventually drive her mad. For now she had to do what she could, and the people in the building behind her were the ones who wouldn’t make it through the night without their pills and infusions. Unfortunately Zoe’s entire medical knowledge came from watching Holby City, so she wasn’t likely to be much help unless she was called on to sleep with an emotionally conflicted surgeon. Pretending she’d never seen the hospital was definitely the most sensible course of action.

  The doors slid welcomingly open. The receptionist was asleep in her chair. Presumably, like Maja, relief had never come and she’d eventually dozed off. A few visitors were snoring gently in the waiting area. There were countless dozens of discarded coffee cups around the small café area. Clearly at least some people had been trying to stay awake and man the fort.

  On the wall next to the lifts was a map and directions to the various wards. The A&E department seemed the most obvious place to start. It could be packed full of people bleeding to death, waiting for staff who’d never arrive.

  Please let there be somebody else there.

  Three deserted corridors later and she entered a world of gently beeping machines and monitors. At least she couldn’t hear the flat-lined sound so familiar from the television. The patients were housed in a variety of little side rooms and cubicles, all of them asleep. The walking wounded seemed to have had time to either go home or get themselves into a bed once they’d realised what was happening. The nurses’ station in the middle of the room was empty; there was no sign of any staff.

  One by one Zoe started examining the patients. Unlike a traditional medical examination, this primarily involved looking at them and feeling extremely happy if they were still alive.

  Zoe hadn’t watched many zombie movies so didn’t know that it was par for the course during an apocalyptic event for at least one apparently inert person to suddenly lurch into life. So, while the old man with the mangled arm wasn’t technically a zombie he did still manage to scare the living shit out of her.

  “Help me,” he cried, grabbing for her with his one limb which remained arm-shaped. Zoe let out a little shriek, which she felt rather ashamed of once she realised he was a lot more frightened than she was.

  “Sorry, I didn’t see you.”

  The old man looked bitterly tired, but pain and discomfort had kept him awake.

  “What can I do?” said Zoe. The man just stared at her, confused, tired and desperate. “I’ll be right back.”

  She strode purposefully away, unable to bear it any longer. She headed for the nurses’ station and flicked through some patient notes, trying to make it look like she knew what she was doing.

  This was a mistake. I can’t do anything to help these people.

  “Who are you?”

  Still on edge, Zoe jumped. The wired young man behind her looked like someone from a local news report about violence outside nightclubs. “I said who are you?”

  “My name is Zoe. I came to see if I could help. Do you work here?” Unless the hospital’s new uniforms were sponsored by Nike then it seemed unlikely, but she thought it best to ask.

  “Fuck off, you stuck up bitch.”

  “Don’t talk to me like that,” she replied, with a steely resolve she didn’t know she was capable of. The young man bent his head sideways like a curious animal. His eyes were bloodshot, his manner hyperactive. He was clearly high on something or another.

  “Where’s the key?” he mumbled.

  “What key?”

  Even as she said it she realised: the drug’s cabinet. The man spat in her eye. Obviously this was the point to run away. He was stronger than her, out of his head on God knows what, and the hope of reinforcements slim. But something inside her snapped, and she was surprised to find herself saying a combination of words including ‘off’, ‘pikey’, ‘arsehole’, ‘you’ and ‘fuck’.

  It was hard to say which of them was more amazed by her outburst.

  “You’ve got a whole city to run around in,” she continued. “So leave these people alone.”

  He reached out to grope her breast, like an ape trying to establish its dominance. Zoe hadn’t consciously registered the kidney dish, but her hand seemed to find it.

  The man went down clutching his bleeding temple. He made a low moan and passed out.

  Zoe didn’t know what to do. On one hand, if you were going to batter someone unconscious then the A&E department was probably the safest place to do it. In the absence of any staff, however, she might as well have clobbered him in an underground car park at night.

  There was movement in one of the cubicles. It was the old man with the mangled arm. He looked even more frightened than before, primarily as a result of having just watched Zoe beat a man to the ground with a metal dish.

  “It’s alright,” she said calmly. The old man recoiled as Zoe approached him, holding his stump up in front of his face. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  The man screamed.

  “Ok, ok.” Zoe stepped away from him. It didn’t seem to help. The man continued hollering and didn’t stop until Zoe had backed all the way into the corridor.

  Fresh air, regroup, start again.

  As she approached reception, the gateway to the outside world, she heard movement.

  Christ, not more junkies.

  With relief she saw a dumpy little nurse approaching her. She was accompanied by a security guard, who was clearly getting value for money from his gym membership. Both of them looked like they could fall asleep any
minute.

  “Thank God,” said Zoe.

  The nurse eyed her suspiciously.

  “How are you awake?”

  “I just am. I want to help.”

  The security guard and the nurse exchanged a look.

  “Are you a doctor?”

  “No.”

  “Then I’d like you to leave please.”

  For a moment Zoe thought she was joking, but the nurse didn’t look like she’d cracked a smile since at least the mid-eighties.

  “But I can help!”

  The security guard took a step forward. “Come on, love.” He swept his hand towards the exit. “We’ve had some dodgy sorts in here. Have to be careful.”

  “Yeah, I know. I knocked one of them out for you. He’s in A&E. If you get a moment you might want to take a look at him.” This didn’t seem to convince anyone that Zoe was a trustworthy, responsible citizen. “Just let me give out tablets. I can help.”

  “How will you know what to give people?”

  “Isn’t it written down somewhere?”

  “You must be joking if you think we’re going to trust someone off the street to start giving out medicine willy nilly,” said the nurse, sternly. “Get it wrong and we’ll have a lawsuit on our hands.”

  Zoe was stunned. She didn’t mind being accused of being a junkie looter, but this was over the line.

  “A lawsuit?”

  “The Trust has very strict rules about who has access to patients.”

  “In case you hadn’t noticed, the world’s gone crazy. Who the hell is going to be able to sue you? The lawyers are asleep. The judges are asleep. The whole bloody world is napping, and you’re worried about the sodding Trust guidelines?”

  Nurse Ratched looked somewhere between unmoved and catatonic. Zoe accepted defeat and bitterly shuffled towards the exit. Once she was outside she saw them building a barricade against the door to prevent any more unwelcome visitors.

  She headed away, continuing towards the address Skyhawk had given her. It seemed that chasing up futile leads was all she was good for.