“I thought you cared about us.” Christ, that sounds weak.
“You know I do,” Henry said. “Jesus.” He turned away, his shoulder muscles hunching with the tension. “It’s what I want. To be with you.”
One last try. “Then come with me!”
“I can’t. I have to go find a way to stop this. I’m sorry.”
She held his gaze for one, two seconds.
Then he turned away, and ran toward the city center.
A helicopter flapped over her, silhouetted against the sun, so she couldn’t see if it was here to help the people, or to watch them die.
16
In support of the general evacuation of the eastern city that had been ordered, Morag Decker was assigned to assist at the Queensbury Hospital, off the Holyrood Road.
The area immediately around Arthur’s Seat remained chaotic and uncontrolled, because of the suddenness and scale of the devastation, the collapse of the roads, the inability of the emergency people to penetrate.
The wounded and dead still lay as if dropped from some other planet onto these quiet Edinburgh streets.
But here she was, a police constable, running past the casualties, making for the hospital as fast as she could manage.
She knew the drill, the work that ought to be done here: Attach a waterproof numbered disc or label to the remains. Each body or part of a body must be numbered. Mark the position of the remains with a similarly numbered peg or stake. Use yellow wax crayon on hard surfaces. Place the remains in a body bag and label with the same number. If during this procedure items or body parts fall from the remains they should not be replaced but put into a separate container and labeled to indicate the probable association with that body number…
She wanted nothing in the world so much as to go off duty, to go home, to shower away all the shit she’d been put through already today. That wasn’t an option right now.
She reached the hospital.
The car park was crammed. There was a queue of buses, cars, taxis, ambulances both ways at every exit. There seemed to be patients wandering everywhere: some complaining, some apparently enjoying the break from hospital routine, some actually pushing their drip bottles on portable stands. At the exits, hospital staff were chasing their patients, trying to get their details before they became lost in the crowds. A policeman was trying to ensure a one-way traffic flow through the grounds, but the system wasn’t working.
A cry went up when an ambulance, reversing, knocked over a wheeled stretcher. Fortunately the stretcher was empty.
She heard the hospital managers conferring with each other, and the consultants and senior nurses. Where the hell were they going to put all these patients? The Health Service had gotten very sleek and efficient, it seemed, but it didn’t have an ounce of spare capacity…
She found a senior police officer, a superintendent, trying to bring some order to the chaos; she told Morag to help out with room clearing.
Morag went into the hospital.
Away from the reception areas, the building had already mostly been cleared. The National Health: bulk-bought green paint on the walls, echoing corridors, metal-framed beds, the all-pervasive stink of disinfectant—as a child Decker had had an unhappy time in hospital, an extended stay to treat a badly fractured leg. Being here brought all of that back. Especially the smell.
But still, in here she was away from people for a time, the car horns and shouts of the exit areas were receding to a background wash of noise, and the loudest sound was the click of her heels on the polished floor.
She could feel herself starting to unwind, just a little. Was that wrong?
The doors to the wards were closed. When she looked along the corridors she could see pillows propped up against each of the doors, their fat cotton bellies protruding from the door frames. The pillows were a mark that the rooms had been cleared. It was standard procedure. You couldn’t go back into one of these rooms without knocking over the pillow, and you couldn’t prop it up again from inside the room. Fail-safe, supposedly.
She heard something from inside one “cleared” ward. A low mumbling.
She kicked the pillow out of the way, opened the door and went inside.
Bright sunlight streamed into the room, dazzling off the polished floor. There was a row of beds, roughly abandoned, sheets and blankets pulled aside and crumpled. She searched, quickly. Medical charts, clothes lockers, a trolley with medication.
The whimpering was coming from under one of the beds.
Morag went over and looked under the bed. There was an old woman huddled there, in a thick flannel nightdress. Bright, rheumy eyes stared out of the dark at Morag. “Who are you?”
“It’s all right, dear. You need to come out now.”
The woman clutched birdlike arms to her chest.
Morag straightened up and checked the name on the medical card fixed to the bed. “Mrs. Docherty, is it? I’m the police. It’s safe to come out now.”
Those rheumy eyes turned again, distrustful. “The police?”
“Yes.” She showed Mrs. Docherty her warrant card.
“I didn’t hear the all-clear.”
Morag made herself smile. “How’s your hearing, Mrs. Docherty?”
“Not what it was…” Mrs. Docherty reached out a thin hand.
It took some time and care to get Mrs. Docherty out and on her feet.
Together they began to shuffle to the door. Mrs. Docherty wouldn’t go anywhere without her handbag.
“That’s what we had to do in the war. Stay under the bed.”
“I know. You did the right thing.”
Mrs. Docherty’s hair was a tangle of white, her body a sagging sack, pulled down by gravity; she could barely walk. But, Morag noted absently, she had good, high cheekbones. A beauty, in her day.
She thought of the people she’d walked past in the street, before coming here, in the end, to assist this old lady. Which of those others might have been a better choice to spend her time on? Which a better investment, for the human race? Was there some lost Einstein, someone who might have figured out the truth of this disaster? Or even somebody who might have been able to go on and help someone else in turn?
Someone, in short, she admitted to herself, who was of more use than this old dear…
But even if that was so, who was she, Morag, to choose? What did useful mean? To a husband or daughter or grandchild, this old lady might be the most valuable person in the world.
So she held Mrs. Docherty’s arm as they made their slow, difficult way along the corridors.
“…I rather enjoyed the war,” Mrs. Docherty was saying. “Old Winnie. Bit of a lad, we always thought. One of us. Of course I was only a girl…”
They reached the exit, and Morag handed her over to a nurse.
The traffic lights were either out altogether, or scrambled. The pain in Ted’s chest, as he tried to control the car at speeds of no more than a few miles an hour, was blinding.
Jack sat in the front seat beside him, belted in, clutching his box of books and toys. The boy was silent, Ted thought. Too silent. But there was nothing he could do about that for now; the lad was going to see a lot more nasty stuff before they were done with all this.
If, he thought through his pain, they ever were.
Ted called by a camping gear shop, but it was as empty as if it had been looted. Same with an Army surplus store.
He queued at a petrol station. Fifteen minutes; not as bad as he’d feared, and there was still some supply. He got Jack to fill the tank while he limped inside. He tried to pay with a credit card. The tills were working but the operator wouldn’t take his card; there was no line to the card operators. No phone lines either; it sounded as if a telephone exchange had gone down.
Christ, he thought. Lose a telephone exchange and suddenly you can’t buy petrol. Everything has got too complex. Too interlinked. We’re too fragile.
He paid in cash, and through the nose too, the sharks.
The traffic moved a little more easily once they reached the A1 past Duddingston, heading east. But at the roundabout at Bingham they ran into a queue of traffic, all of it heading east. It was like holiday traffic, cars crammed with kids and grandparents and pets and luggage.
The westbound carriageway was kept empty, save for fuel trucks and emergency vehicles which raced into the city. The traffic inched forward, so slowly he wasn’t sure if it was really moving, or just compressing.
A couple of cars ahead, he saw a driver, a fat middle-aged man in a suit, get out to look up the road for the obstruction. He slammed his fist into the roof of his car with frustration, and yelled at somebody in the car. His wife, maybe.
The day was getting hotter.
The western horizon, in the rear view mirror, was turned orange by a smudge of smoke and dust, underlit here and there by the crimson glow of fires.
Ted tried the radio, looking for some guidance from the police. But there was only a stream of lurid on-the-spot reports from the trouble spots in the city, which didn’t do either of them a damn bit of good, so he pressed buttons until he found what sounded to his antique ears like a modern pop station, and left the radio there.
It took an hour to move the half-mile or so to the next roundabout. There were police in yellow ponchos, he saw, walking into the traffic stream and directing it; all the exits from the roundabout save one had been blocked off by police cars, their lights flashing.
A tall black policeman—just a kid—reached the car.
“What’s going on, officer?”
“When you get to the front of the queue, follow the diversion signs, sir—”
“What diversion?”
“To the college at Brunstane, the Jewel. That’s designated as the Evacuation Assembly Point.”
“What?”
“You can park your car in the side streets there. You have to register with the Police Casualty Bureau, and transport will be laid on to take you to the Rest Centers.”
“Transport laid on?” He slapped the steering wheel. “What do you call this?”
The copper looked strained and tired. He’d clearly been through this spiel a hundred times already, and no doubt had the same reaction from every driver.
Ted said, “Let me talk to your commander.”
“The super? I don’t think that’s necessary, sir. If you’ll just—”
From his chest pocket Ted dug out his old warrant card, now—melodramatically—stained by blood. “I can help, son. I won’t cause you grief.”
The copper hesitated. “Come with me.”
Ted beckoned to Jack, and then clambered out of the car.
So they walked through the traffic, Ted leaning on the copper’s arm, clutching Jack’s hand, all three moving at the stately pace enforced by Ted’s weakness. There were coppers everywhere, trying to get irate drivers to cool down and be patient.
…You’re telling me I’ve got to leave my car up there? What gash is this? I’ve got three kids here. How am I going to carry this luggage? Are you going to help me?…
…Why do I have to go to the Rest Center? I have a sister in Prestonpans. If I can get to her house…
…You guys don’t know what you’re doing. Do you? You don’t fucking know…
The control center had been set up on the roundabout itself, in the back of a police Land Rover which had been bumped onto the grass, leaving untidy scuff marks. The local commander turned out to be a superintendent, a thin, forty-ish man surrounded by a ring of officers, and beyond that by a wider, untidy crowd of irate drivers. There were maps of the area opened over the back of the Rover, Emergency Procedures Manuals spread out on the grass.
The atmosphere was tense: the crackle of lapel radios, officers watching the crowd nervously, eyes sharp.
Ted knew that look well. Trouble brewing.
With an effort, Ted’s tame copper got him through to the center of things.
Finally the super made eye contact with Ted.
“Billy MacEwen,” Ted said.
The super’s thin face creased. Ted knew what he was thinking: I don’t need this complication. “Ted Dundas. I haven’t seen you since—”
“Since you were a buck-toothed copper on the beat. You’ve done well for yourself.”
“Is Murphy here trying to get you to the Rest Center? Ted, you should—”
There was blackness around the edge of his vision. Just a little longer.
“Listen to me,” Ted rasped. “You’re not going to be able to keep this up.”
“What?”
“Christ, boy, this isn’t 1940.”
“The Procedure Manuals—”
“—are out of date. Just look around. This is how people behave now, Billy. They have their cars. They aren’t going to get out to be processed by us, and herded onto buses. Get out of the way. Let them leave. Back off, and just keep the roads open. Manage the traffic, Billy, not the people.”
“But the registration—”
Ted sighed. “We always assume people are going to panic, and have to be herded and registered. Bullshit. I tell you, if you bottle people up here you’ll have a riot on your hands, Billy boy.”
As if on cue, there was a tinkle of glass somewhere. Raised voices. The coppers around Ted straightened up further, peering out like meerkats. Some of them bustled off toward the disturbance.
“I mean it,” Ted said gently.
Billy MacEwen was thinking hard. Evidently this wasn’t the first time he’d had advice like this. “Ted, you know how the command structure works. I’m only a silver commander. Gold says—”
“Gold isn’t here,” Ted said wearily. The blackness was closer, like a curtain closing. “Just do it while you still have control.”
MacEwen didn’t respond.
Ted closed his eyes, and let himself lean a little harder against the young copper, Murphy.
“I think it’s the Rest Center for you anyway, sir,” Murphy said.
Christ, he could barely see. Taste of iron in his mouth. The sunlight seemed remote, and at least the pain was gone. The vertical, marked out by these pillarlike young coppers, was tilting sideways.
Where was Jack? Still here. Safe.
He didn’t fight it. He’d made his point. MacEwen wasn’t going to lose face by changing his strategy in front of him. Not a bad time to pass out.
Not Billy’s fault anyhow, he thought. They just weren’t ready for this. None of them were. How could they have known?
Time to leave the stage for a bit, he thought, and he smiled, and gave himself up to the darkness.
The policewoman gave Henry directions to the police authority headquarters in Fettes Avenue, on the north side of the New Town.
Traffic was snarled everywhere, and Henry had to walk. So he stomped his way north along the Mayfield Road toward the city center.
Close to Arthur’s Seat the smell of smoke, the wail of sirens, the clatter of helicopters filled Henry’s sensorium, masking the outlines of the familiar world. But away from the zone of the immediate disaster—just a few hundred yards—normality seemed undisturbed. True, the traffic was clogged, but there were people walking, coming to and from work—they were even carrying shopping, for God’s sake. In his torn and bloodied clothes, he felt out of place. Ill-mannered. People stared at him.
Only the smoke rising from the east of the city served as a reminder that all was not well, here.
It took him two hours to reach the Lothian and Borders police authority headquarters.
The desk officer stopped him, of course, and Henry resorted to a mix of persuasion, string-pulling, ranting and bluster to penetrate the layers of bureaucracy which, inevitably, surrounded the decision makers here. He even produced his passport. But ultimately it was his physical state, the filth and blood, that bore testimony that here was a man who had just walked out of the heart of it all, that lent him the authority to bamboozle these low-ranking cops.
Actually it wasn’t the first time he had had to bully
his way through obstructive organizations: a career at NASA had trained him in that.
Even so, he was kept waiting on a hard-backed plastic chair, cradling a polystyrene cup of what might have been tea, for more than an hour. Then, at last, he was ushered into the big incident room that was, he was told, serving as the command center for the response to the emergency.
The control room was chaos, on first appearance.
Police officers and civilians moved from area to area, desk to desk, shouting and gesturing. Mobile phones and pagers sounded continually. The walls were coated with white boards, on which were listed cryptic notes, contact numbers, lists of areas and actions. There was an immense map of the east of the city, cluttered with color-coded stickers: bright primary colors, red and green and yellow and blue. There were yellow emergency jackets and hard hats, some scorched, hanging on pegs and draped over the chairs. The desks were covered with yellowed Home Office procedure manuals.
On one desk he saw a document marked “Evacuation Plans 2 and 3.” It was dated 1938. It was the plan for evacuating the city that had been used during the Second World War.
Holy shit, he thought.
At last he was brought to the Chief Constable.
“Yes. I’m Romano. Who the hell are you?”
The Chief Constable was a woman, fifty-ish, with strong Italian-extract features, hair that was thick and black though streaked with gray. She stood before the big area map, hands empty, an island of stillness amid the bustle of the pot-bellied male cops around her.
“Henry Meacher. I’m from NASA.”
Romano laughed. “NASA. That’s all we bloody need.”
“Yes, you do,” Henry said seriously. “Are you the decision maker here?”
“For now.”
“Then I need to understand what you’re planning.”
Romano eyed him. Henry thought he could read the calculation there, the mind of a senior officer accustomed to using her time efficiently. This guy is different. He might have something. Or he might not. He has thirty seconds before I throw him out.
Romano said, “We’re evacuating the area in the vicinity of the disaster.” On the wall map a rough chinagraph-pencil circle, diverting to follow the lines of the streets, enclosed Arthur’s Seat and the Moonseed surge area, to a radius of about a mile. “We’re setting up assembly points and Rest Centers here and here.” Points on the roads leading out of the marked area, and outside. She raised an eyebrow at Henry. “Does that meet with NASA’s approval?”
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