Lisa took her time negotiating the twisting drive, ready to pull in if another ambulance passed. She’d trained here and later spent so many months as a patient, first in a bed and then back and forth for therapy, that she knew the place inside-out.
There was a car park behind A&E. It was usually full during visiting time but should be quiet now. Lisa steered towards it and was relieved to find a space not far from Casualty. Chances were she’d have to haul the man out of the Transit and into the hospital without help, if the place was as busy as the chorus of sirens suggested.
All she could think about was getting the stranger through the doors. Then he would no longer be her concern, leaving her free to find a phone. Better yet, if there had been some kind of accident there could well be police in the hospital already.
Lisa pushed open the Transit’s door and dropped to the ground, reeling as the world went suddenly dizzy and her legs threatened to crumple beneath her. There was nothing she could do but wait, gulping down air, until the giddiness had passed. The moment she felt well enough to move again, she scurried around to the other side of the van, opened the door and clambered up. She grabbed the still-silent man by the shoulders and pushed him into the upright position. His eyes flicked open and looked straight into hers. A quizzical expression crossed his face, and then his features went slack again. Lisa resisted an urge to slap him, as much to take out some of her anger and frustration as to try to revive him. But he seemed to be coming round. When she tugged at him to pull him from the van she felt as though she was no longer dealing with a dead weight and the man was, without being fully conscious, nevertheless trying to help. He behaved as if he were seriously drunk rather than someone poisoned by carbon monoxide. Maybe the cool air had helped revive him.
Once Lisa had manoeuvred him out of the van he was able to stand with her support. She weaved towards the A&E doors, the weight of him leaning on her almost dragging her down. Without warning he jack-knifed and vomited. Lisa heard it spatter on the ground. She could smell, almost taste the acidity, making her want to throw up too. She forced down the bile that rose in her throat and staggered towards the entrance. Seconds later the automatic doors swished open to admit them.
The first thing Lisa noticed was that the waiting room was strangely quiet despite the fact that staff were bustling around with apparent well-drilled efficiency. Only a few people occupied the rows of grey plastic chairs, and they were being spoken to by a middle-aged woman with an air of stern authority about her.
Lisa glanced at the reception desk and found it empty. In the absence of any assistance she lowered the man into one of the hard seats. His head slumped forward, as though he were deeply asleep. Lisa felt like dropping into the chair beside him but she knew that, if she did, she would find it virtually impossible to move again.
Once she could speak to someone, explain how she’d found the man and that he was nothing to do with her, she would go looking for a phone.
The middle-aged woman finished talking to the other people and walked off in the direction of a corridor above which a sign said Trauma and Orthopaedics.
“Excuse me,” Lisa called, walking towards her. “I need to speak to - ”
“I’m sorry,” the older woman interrupted. “But minor casualties are having to wait. There’s been a train derailment on the Bath line. We’re expecting a lot of very seriously hurt people. We’ll see to your friend as soon as we have someone free.”
The disdain in her voice was unmistakable. Glancing around, Lisa could see why. The man was ineffectively pawing at his face with one hand, trying to wipe away the thin string of vomit that connected his lip to his chest.
“We can’t waste time on self-inflicted injuries,” the woman continued. “In any event, by the time we get to see him he’ll have probably sobered up.”
“No! It’s not like that. I found him in his van!”
But the woman had already turned and hurried off. Lisa felt like screaming, and thought for one confused moment that she had, until she realised that the wailing she could hear was the sound of more ambulances approaching.
Train derailment.
The words were so awful, yet anchored in the real world, unlike what she had been through. They spun around in her head, smashing through the barricades that the instinct to survive had thrown up for her, leaving her free to concentrate on staying alive. Now images flooded back; blood spurting from her sister’s face, her own flight through the storm-lashed woods, driving for the first time in two years without really being aware she was doing so. The reality, the sheer enormity of it, threatened to engulf her. She rocked back on her heels as a wave of darkness flooded her vision.
Then she felt a steadying hand grip her elbow. “Are you all right?”
Lisa blinked. A nurse whose kind face looked oddly familiar was staring at her. “Yes,” she said. “Thank you. I just felt a little … dizzy there for a moment.”
“It’s Lisa, isn’t it? Lisa Morgan?”
“Yes.” For the life of her she couldn’t remember the woman. Presumably they had met through the job, though Lisa had no recollection of working with her.
“You nursed my mum at St Jude’s. Mary Edwards. I’m Janine.”
“Mary?” Lisa remembered a sweet lady who loved a laugh and who seemed full of life despite her years. She remembered, too, the quiet middle-aged woman who regularly visited. “Of course. I was so sorry to hear she’d died. I was on leave.”
“Mum was old. She’d had a good innings and she was asleep and out of pain when she moved on.” The nurse’s gaze drifted elsewhere for a moment, and then a fond smile lit up her face. “She thought the world of you, you know.”
Lisa could not bring herself to respond. Dealing with death – or, specifically, having to break the bad news to relatives – had always made her uncomfortable, never more so than since her own near-fatal accident. Thank God none of her patients had died on her shift in the three months since she’d returned to work. But it was bound to happen before long, and she dreaded it. Being here now, in A&E, the strident wails of sirens drawing ever closer, was enough to bring her out in a sweat.
The nurse looked towards the main doors. Lisa followed her glance. Flashes of blue light circled through the glass, casting strange shadows in the waiting area.
“I have to get moving,” Janine said. “It’ll be a while before someone can see your friend there, but if you want to go along that corridor and take the fourth door on the right you might find it a bit quieter. We usually only use it for children but I think this waiting room is going to be full of the walking wounded and distressed relatives before long. If anyone asks what you’re doing, tell them I told you it was okay.”
“Is there a phone I could use?”
“Same corridor, only further down,” Janine called back as she walked away.
“Thanks!”
Lisa almost left the man right then, once she knew there was a phone nearby. But he would only be in the way once the casualties were brought in. She had to move him, not because she felt any sense of responsibility but for the sake of the seriously injured. After all, it wasn’t as if she’d been asked to bring him here; it was just the way it had worked out. She cursed him under her breath, then noticed an abandoned wheelchair on the other side of the waiting room. She went over and wheeled it back, then helped him into it. He seemed even more aware of what she was trying to do and it took little more than guidance and support on her part. She looked him in his red eyes and realised he was attempting to speak. Whatever he had to say would have to wait. All Lisa could think about was moving him quickly, without wasting any more time.
The room Janine had directed her to was maybe twenty or thirty yards down the corridor. It bore reminders of the presence of children. A box of toys had been tidied away, though a couple of comics lay strewn beneath one of the chairs. A battered plastic
crane hung from the side of another, suspended from a hook on the end of its string. The walls were painted bright yellow and decorated with posters for kids’ TV shows. Normality was the first word that sprung to her mind. Even though she had no children and, unlike Alison, had never seriously thought about having them, these signs of youthful innocence were somehow comforting.
She kicked the wheelchair’s brake on. Her semi-conscious charge would be no better off in one of the seats and she would no longer delay getting to the phone. As far as she was concerned, he was on his own now. Someone would find him eventually and then it was up to him to explain how he’d ended up in such a state.
Lisa had barely taken a single step into the corridor when she had to dodge to one side to make way for a group of grim-faced medics moving rapidly towards her, along with a trolley with a young woman on it. The green sheet that covered her glistened darkly around her midriff. They wheeled the trolley expertly into a curtained cubicle across the way, seemingly oblivious to Lisa’s presence. Lisa knew she shouldn’t watch but she found herself unable to move. She must have looked much the same way, battered and bloodied and close to death, when they’d wheeled her into this very same hospital all those months ago.
“Where’s the damned crash trolley?” yelled one of the doctors as two nurses hooked the woman up to the ECG and a drip stand.
“No output,” the nurse at the ECG monitor said.
The doctor called for Atropine, then peeled the sheet back. “Shit! I could just about get my hands in and massage her heart without cutting her open.”
Someone handed him the paddles for the defribulator. “Clear!” he shouted before placing the paddles on the young woman’s chest. Her body bucked violently.
Lisa watched the ECG monitor. Nothing. No output. Flatline.
She remembered the empty feeling of failure from her training days.
They tried again without success. And again. Then Lisa heard the words, “I think we’d better leave it there,” followed by confirmation of the time of death. One of the nurses unhooked the ECG machine and eased the catheter out of the dead woman’s arm before pulling the black-stained sheet over her face. Then the team dispersed quickly, no doubt to attend to others more in need of assistance. Lisa had seen it before and hated it. There were parts of the hospital that she loved to work in and others that she hated. Casualty was definitely one of the latter.
The nurse was the last to vacate the cubicle, leaving the curtain open in her haste to catch up with her colleagues. As if a spell had been broken, Lisa suddenly became aware of a hubbub of voices from the direction of the main waiting room and guessed it must be a flurry of activity now. It occurred to her that, given the sheer scale of the accident, there must be police around. No point trying to get through by phone. With a train derailment and every available officer called in to help deal with it her chances of succeeding would have been virtually nil.
As she hurried along the corridor towards reception, a small boy emerged from one of the cubicles ahead and began to walk slowly and unsteadily towards her. He was maybe ten or eleven years old. His face was pale, his eyes half-closed. He held one arm pressed to his stomach, as if in pain. The other hung loosely at his side. As he neared her, staggering like a drunk, Lisa could see his jeans and shirt were ripped, revealing shredded flesh. Lisa slowed her pace, appalled and moved at the same time. The poor little thing must have been in the train wreck; hurt and, judging by the dried blood on his forehead, concussed. It was unimaginable that anyone could have been so careless as to leave a kid that age alone, no matter what was going on.
“Hey,” she said softly. “Let’s get you back to your room, shall we?”
The boy said nothing. He continued hobbling along the corridor towards her, feet making sucking noises on the tiles. Behind him Lisa could see a dark, scuffed line. A sudden chill ran through her when she realised the boy was leaving a trail of blood. Lisa took an involuntary step backwards and looked around, desperately hoping to spot someone who could deal with this. But there was no one else in sight.“Hey kid,” she said. “I really don’t think you should be out of bed.”
The child halted. His mouth opened. Bubbles of red foam emerged, but no sound. The boy tried again, lips moving faster now, as if he were desperate to say something. His chest suddenly convulsed and he spewed up a torrent of liquid crimson. His eyes opened, showing nothing but white.
“He’s looking for you,” he croaked, blood running from his mouth. He lifted his arm from his stomach to point directly at Lisa, revealing a long tear in his shirt. Something wet and slimy moved beneath it. “The King of all the dead,” the boy said, and took a step forward. The glistening mass bulged through the rent in the fabric and spilled to the floor, where it lay in a heap of grey-red coils. Lisa could not move, could not take her eyes off him, could not release the scream trapped in her throat.
The child stumbled towards her but lost his footing on the slippery mess of his own intestines. He crashed to the floor. The noise jolted Lisa out of her stunned inertia. She turned and raced down the corridor, gasping for breath, trying to block the image of the boy’s innards unravelling before her eyes.
Panic seized her as, for one dreadful moment, she sensed that the boy had somehow managed to catch up. A wild glance over her shoulder confirmed that he had not; but Lisa’s momentary relief swiftly turned to a feeling of pure dread when she saw that, while the child had been unable to stand, he was still coming after her, pulling himself along the floor inch by tortured inch by his hands, entrails fanning out to form a glittering, bloody pattern behind him.
“Where the hell am I?” a hoarse voice asked.
Lisa jumped at the sound. She spun around and saw that the man she had brought here was now fully conscious and leaning against the doorway to the children’s room. His hands pawed at his vomit-stained T-shirt, his gaze fixed on Lisa. “In hospital,” she said.
“Hospital? What the hell am I –” He slurred his words like a drunk.
“We don’t have time for this,” Lisa yelled, hearing the slap-slither, slap-slither from behind that told her the child had not given up.
The man looked over her shoulder. His eyes were half-open in the manner of someone who had only just awoken “Hey,” he said. “That kid’s fallen over.”
Lisa could not bring herself to turn round. Without thinking, she grabbed the man by the elbow and pulled him away from the door. “We have to get out of here.”
“We can’t just leave him. He might be hurt.”
A crash suddenly echoed around the corridor, making them both start. Lisa saw movement in the periphery of her vision. She turned to look into the treatment cubicle opposite, the one in which she had watched them try and fail to save the young woman’s life. The drip which had been left to one side of the bed now lay on the floor, knocked there by the arm which had emerged from beneath the sheet.
Lisa shook her head violently. The doctor had pronounced the woman dead.
And corpses stayed dead. They did not come back to life. Neither did they pull themselves along hospital corridors, dragging their guts behind them.
The sheet started to fall away as the woman sat up in her death bed.
“Move,” Lisa ordered. “Now.”
Without waiting to see if the man followed she ran at full stretch along the corridor, away from A&E, not knowing where she would end up and not giving a damn either. From further back came the sound of footsteps, hesitant at first, then growing stronger as her unwanted charge did his best to catch up. It struck her that she would be safer if she wasn’t alone, so she reluctantly slowed her pace until she could hear his laboured breathing close behind. Lisa glanced back, just to make sure, and wished she hadn’t. The dead woman lurched out of the cubicle, her chest a huge gaping wound, flesh and clothing hanging in tattered rags. She walked in a shuffling gait, too slow for her to be a th
reat. Lisa saw her lips move and, while she could hear nothing, she knew, was somehow certain, what the dead woman was saying.
King of all the dead. King of all the dead. King –
Lisa hurriedly looked forward again. The corridor turned sharply to the left and she followed it, passing room after room, their doors thankfully closed. When she saw the public telephone and knew it was out of reach, she could have cried.
Ahead there was another door, this one with glass in the upper frame, revealing nothing but darkness. Lisa slowed as she approached it.
Please God, don’t let it be locked.
It wasn’t. Lisa could see a bar across the width of the door. Above it was a sign. Emergency Exit. Alarm Will Sound.
Alarm or not, she was going through. She rammed down on the bar and barged the door open. Cold air slapped her face as she stumbled into the night. She heard hinges squeal and guessed her companion had emerged after her and was pushing the door back into place, though if an alarm had gone off – presumably in security, since there’d been nothing audible when she’d hit the bar – it hardly seemed worth the effort. Then it struck her that perhaps she’d missed the point. Maybe he was closing the door because he, too, had seen what she’d seen and would put up any available barricade to protect himself against it.
She searched around, frantically trying to get her bearings. There was no sign of the car park from here. Ahead a three-storey building stood in darkness except for its windows, which glistened coldly where they captured the moon. Lisa recognised it as the trauma and orthopaedic block, where she’d spent three months in her training days. Her headlong flight along the corridors had taken her to the back of the wards. From around the side of the block she saw a sudden sweep of bright light accompanied by a swirl of blue; another ambulance, heading for casualty.
And that was where she needed to go.
She glanced back nervously, certain that something hideous had limped out of the partly-closed door in pursuit of them, but there was nothing. The man stumbled after her on unsteady legs as she set off, but managed to follow unaided. She knew she should have left him at the hospital, where he could get medical attention if he needed it. But she couldn’t abandon him to whatever the hell those things were. For all she knew there were more of them, hunting them down.
King of All the Dead Page 3