He’s quiet for a moment, then, “Maybe they can manage without me?” he says.
Uh. I shake my head. The truth is harsh. “It’s me they can manage without.”
“But maybe I can’t, Ru,” he says.
I feel like I want to cry. “Yeah, you can,” I tell him. “Just pretend we’re back at school.”
I get that in quick—so quick. To him, I was a clueless snob. To me, he was the subnerd of subnerds. If the rain hadn’t fallen, I don’t suppose we would ever have even spoken.
It’d be very wrong if you thought I was in any way being noble at this point. I am saying what I am saying, but my heart is running about like a headless chicken. And what solution there is to this, I do not know. I don’t even know what to say next. Nor, it seems, does the Spratt.
“I’d better go to work,” he says.
I stare up at him, blinking. I don’t want him to go. But I can’t say it.
“Will you be OK?” he asks.
“Sure,” I say, taking a slurp of tea. “Happy number crunching.”
“I’ll see if I can check on Saskia at lunchtime,” he says. “Then I’ll come back here. You sure you’ll be OK?”
“Sure I’m sure.”
“Well, there’s always the TV if you get bored.”
Oh yes, they’ve got TV.
I’d pull myself together enough to be enraged about that too, but I’ve got other things on my mind. The second the Spratt shoves off, I spring into action. The temptation of all my friends’ unlocked phones, which has been quietly gnawing away at the weaker parts of my brain all night, instantly gets the better of me, and then the consequences of the temptation of the unlocked phones gets the better of me too.
Much gasping and weeping takes place. I find out a number of unpleasant and alarming things (e.g., just how many people knew Andrew Difford had gone around saying I was a lousy kisser). (Seriously, if I ever have the misfortune to clap eyes on him again, he’s gonna wish the rain had got him first.) Most hideous and heartbreaking of all, I find out that it could, incredibly, be possible that Saskia was right about Caspar. On my friends’ phones I find texts from him and about him that are not exactly reassuring. But it cannot be true. To console myself, I press the beautiful earphones that had once been pressed into his beautiful ears (ears that I had nibbled, and not like a hamster would) into my own ears and crank up Caspar’s MP3. I don’t stop to question why anyone would have bothered to keep it charged.
My misery is complete. That moron Spratt has deleted my true love’s achingly gorgeous acoustic demo tracks (surely written for me and surely all about me) and has replaced them with a ghastly medley of eighties hits from the car journey we had taken together, when we’d laughed.
I am not laughing now.
In despair, I am forced to turn to the TV. It is actually fairly totally excellent—they’ve even got more channels than we ever had at home, so I pass a jolly/miserable morning scarfing down pastries and channel hopping and feeling sorry for myself—when I remember to. TV is so distracting, right? You don’t even have to skip commercials anymore because there aren’t any. This isn’t live TV I realize, just streamed reruns of every kind of program…and that would have been OK by me for the rest of the day, but I stumbled across that talent show.
I watch again, jaw wobbling, as that poor girl loses. That poor girl who was actually very talented indeed, but just not as talented—and certainly not as boringly gorgeous—as that other girl, the one that won (even though I’d voted for Miss Loser with all my might and have a colossal phone bill to prove it hidden under my bed at home).
It makes me thoroughly depressed. Because…basically…I am Miss Loser, aren’t I? The kind of girl who’d lose even with a head start.
I don’t want to feel like I am useless like the army/government has said…but maybe—URGH! IT HURTS MY HEAD TO EVEN THINK IT!—maybe I am. I never meant to be useless. I only ever meant to be me. And it’s not fair—it’s SO not fair—that I never got to find out who that “me” was. I was just getting around to it, don’t you see? I was going to be fantastic. My life was going to be fantastic.
I feel that room and the hypnotically animally scent of boy-pong that fills it closing around me. As my own looted packing was useless (OK, so those super-skinny jeans? I only need to look at them to know it’s a no), and I couldn’t squeeze into Saskia’s stuff even if I wanted to, I put some of the Spratt’s clothes on. I go to find the bathroom. What’s inside the toilet is already fizzing with bleach—and I discover why: in a most un-luxury way, the toilet doesn’t flush. Maybe you need a swipe-card for that too? Swipe and wipe?
This apocalypse. It’s really getting on my nerves. It’s REALLY getting on my nerves.
I come out of the bathroom. I walk to the end of the corridor. I look out of the window in the door. My recollection of the night before is so hazy and jumbled, I wouldn’t have known I was even looking at “the hospital,” but I see the ice-cream van parked outside, under a canopy, alongside an ambulance.
I think about Saskia.
I block out the hideous memory of her screaming.
I feel pretty sorry for myself right now, but the stuff that’s in my head is a mess of ugly choices that exist in reality—and not in fear. Sask has not had the benefit of a calming anti-freak-out chat from the Spratt. As far as I know, no one is offering to go anywhere with her—and if, before the rain fell, my life was surely going to be fantastic (I was convinced it was heading that way), Sask’s already was.
When you look at it like that, taking dead families out of the equation, she’s lost things she actually had (including, specifically, a foot). I’ve lost things I never had (a hot boyfriend, a life).
So maybe that means I can’t have lost them?
Hn.
It just feels like it.
It also feels like…the least I can do is to go and see her. Maybe, if she hasn’t started screaming again, I’ll be able to give her a calming anti-freak-out chat. And I’ll just see if there’s anything she wants. Like flowers and fruit! That’s what people take people who are in the hospital, isn’t it? Flowers and fruit! Ha! And if there is any fresh fruit to be had anywhere, Monsieur le Chef would have it. And I’ll ask Sask about him too—whether he really is that guy off the TV.
Yes. I’ll go see Sask.
I step out of the building.
From the door I leave by, there is no polytunnel walkway; there is just open space—and clear sky. Clear September sky. A school sky: clear and blue and warm—only the odd dunce of a congestus cloud skulking about. They are my weak point, those clouds: cumulus mediocris, cumulus congestus. One rains, one doesn’t. In my opinion, no one but a total nerd could tell them apart.
In any case, I am not worried—not in the least. The sky above me, the only sky that counts, is blue as blue can be, which explains why there are kids out. I catch a glimpse of one wandering up to the ice-cream-van ambulance. Makes me smile, seeing that; he’s studying the menu of delights—poor thing. Half an arm missing, bandaged.
You’re probably thinking things already. I wasn’t. I just saw a hurt kid.
And as I get closer, I hear other kids—laughing, shouting…one crying…and I…I detour, around the back of the building, figuring, if I am thinking anything at all, that this might be an easier way in. No tricky nurse station/desk/explanation/camera situation. Just slip in, right?
I round the corner.
Kids out playing in the yard. Emergency exit door to ward open.
I don’t really think about what this is. I don’t think about it until I walk into the ward.
I don’t want them to make a film out of this story anymore. I do not want this picture—ever—to be seen in another person’s mind.
Except…maybe you should know it. Maybe you should know.
The ward. What would I say, Darius Spratt? How much time, r
eally, does it take to understand what you are seeing if you look? In 0.1 MICROMETERS OF A SECOND I get it:
The ward is full of kids—KIDS. Some are out of their beds, walking or limping about…kids with hands and arms and feet and legs chopped off. And fingers. I’m guessing those are the lucky ones in the ward. The ward of bandaged stumps.
They look with wide eyes at me, at the scary crazy lady—yeah, I guess that’s what I am to them, even though I am only fifteen years old. Shaved head, black eyes, wearing a boy’s clothes, tooth missing in a mouth that is open in a silent scream.
I can hardly breathe.
A nurse strides past me to tell the kids off, to shut the door and come inside. Then she comes bustling up to me. “There is no public access here,” she says.
“I’ve come to see my friend,” I tell her.
There is no feeling in my voice. I breathe—I try to breathe.
“There is no public access.” She takes hold of my elbow and leads me out of that place.
She shuts the door. I see that ward name again:
Sunnyside
So we’re back where I was last night. At the nurses’ station, in a corridor, surrounded by a maze of doors. The nurse behind the desk—who is not the same one who was there last night—does this WT?! thing at the sight of me and looks in panic at the other one.
If there’s one thing I learned in school it’s that in potentially traumatic and difficult situations (“Did you copy this homework from someone, Ruby?”) it is best, at least to begin with, to show no emotion whatsoever. That is OK, because I am not aware of feeling any emotion. It is also best, at least to begin with, to stick to your story (“No, I did not copy this homework”). Words! Oh, words! You come back to me now!
“I’ve just come to see my friend,” I tell them. “Her name is Saskia Miller. I brought her in. Last night. Someone chopped her foot off.”
“No visitors are allowed here.”
No. I expect not, eh? I expect not.
“I will be five minutes,” I tell them. “And then I will go.”
THEY—ARE—STILL—FREAKING.
“I’LL GO. I promise you I’ll just go.”
“I’m sorry,” the desk nurse says. “Your friend died.”
I. FEEL. SICK.
“No! She was OK! She was going to be OK! They said she’d be fine!”
They won’t look at me.
“Did you kill her?”
Obviously, the ideal answer to this question is no…but that’s not what they say. In fact, they don’t say anything.
“Oh my . It’s true, isn’t it? It is true! You’re killing people!”
“You need to leave,” I get told.
Too right, I do. I blunder back into the Sunnyside ward of kids.
“You gotta come with me,” I tell them.
I grab at them, the loose kids. They are terrified of me.
“Just go—please go!” the nurse says.
“Not without them,” I tell her. I get hold of the nearest kid, who—smart kid—smart, dumb, lovely, hurt, doomed kid—twists out of my grasp and squeals, “But we don’t wanna go with her!” Which sets the rest of them off, crying and whining about how they don’t want to go with me.
“Just GO,” the nurse yells at me.
And I turn and I run for the door. The fire door, the emergency exit that is now shut.
I shove it open. Before she can scream, I run out.
All those times I’ve gone outside and forgotten to look up at the sky?
I look up at the sky.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Oh,” I whisper.
Hiya, Ruby! yells the rain. It is falling on my face.
It is pouring down. Where’d that come from?
It is pouring down. I feel each drop—I swear, EACH DROP—land on me.
I am going to die.
I AM GOING TO DIE.
“Sorry,” I say to myself, to my life…to the nurse, who’s standing—looking utterly horrified—at the door.
But I don’t want to die! this! ! No. NO.
I’m coming back in—right, Nurse? And you’re gonna cure me.
I don’t want to die. I do not want to die.
That nurse sees me coming, and she’d love to shut the door, but she can’t because she’d have to reach out into the rain—but her face—her face. The terror on it!
Too bad, lady—comin’ in… She looks down; I look down. I see small kids coming up, clustering around her. I see the terror on their faces and—
“Hey,” I say.
I stop where I am…right in front of them all, getting rained on.
I’m great with kids, me.
I try to smile at them. “Hey.”
My own stupidity pours down on my head harder than the rain itself.
What did I think they’d be able to do for me anyway? Cut my head off?
I am .
.
I’m .
I feel…how I suppose Simon, my stepdad, must have felt…how a ton of other people must have felt…like I just wanna go home. To die. Only I will never make it home.
I’m never going to make it home.
I sit down. I do not fall to my knees. I just sit. And it rains on me.
Hiya, Ruby! shrieks the rain.
“,” I hear the nurse swear, calling on a God I can’t seriously believe she believes in anymore. She pulls kids away from the door. “,” she says.
I am not offended. I am not emotionally hurt in the slightest. I’m going to die. That’s all.
I get it.
Who would want to see this?
Those kids shouldn’t have to see another person die.
I stare into the face of the sky. To every side of me, I can see scraps of blue sky, clouds that have yet to decide to become killers.
But—hey!—hello you, cloud that is raining on me.
Cumulus congestus. I get the difference between congestus and mediocris now. Yeah, I get it.
I stumble, roaring—finally roaring!—through the rain…and around the corner…
“RUBY!” I hear this shout so muffled it seems to come from somewhere inside my own head. “RUBY!”
I turn. I look. I see this wibbly-wobbly shadow person, hands pressed against the plastic of an army polytunnel walkway.
D-A-R-I-U-S S-P-R-A-T-T
Wibbly-wobbly shadow Spratt.
“DARIUS!” I run at him—
His hands and mine, they press together through the plastic, palm to palm.
“You were right,” he is shouting. “Saskia was right. I checked. They’re killing people. They’re killing kids. The numbers I was crunching, they’re doses. Bacteria doses, survival rates—oh, Ruby, I…”
I’m doomed. It’s going to hurt a lot.
I wipe my hand across the plastic so, for one last moment, I can see his face more clearly. He has no words left, so I must find some for us both.
“Get out of here,” I tell him.
The rain pours down between us.
“JUST GO! PLEASE, DARIUS! JUST GO!”
I close my eyes. I do not want to see this…but I feel it anyway. My heart lurches at the change of pressure. The gentle warmth under my palms is lost. He has gone.
I open my eyes.
Gone.
I saw a film once, where a guy who was going to die saw his life flash before him—and it made him smile, because he knew that although his family had annoyed him, it had been good. And he could feel like that because the people he cared about were still alive.
I can only hope Dar lives.
The rest of the people I care about are all dead. Most of them.
My dad. I’m never going to find my dad.
I wasn’t going to find him anyway. Not him—not the Dan brot
her-brat.
I cannot die happy picturing people in the future feeling sad because I am not there (obviously).
I’ve got nothing. I’ve got nothing left.
I just wonder how bad it’s going to hurt.
I sit down.
I am not even crying.
Hey, rain! Look! I am not even crying.
Who cares? laughs the rain, tumbling down my cheeks.
Yeah, well—whatever. WHATEVER.
I hit the rain with THE GRIN OF INDIFFERENCE, a smile known to teens all over the world as it is often our last defense against some appalling outrage. Of course, it is fairly completely and utterly useless as a form of defense, since it is generally likely to provoke intense anger in the recipient and make things a whole lot worse… But it’s what you do, isn’t it? When there’s nothing else you can do.
There is nothing else I can do.
The rain couldn’t care less.
So I think of a thing I can think about. My one last thought. I think of the plants and the creatures and the planet, and about how all that…about how all those things will go on.
(Apart from Whitby, almost certainly possibly…but he was just limping, wasn’t he? Wasn’t he?! He could still be OK, couldn’t he? And apart from Darling the Chihuahua… Can’t bear to think about that… And apart from the guinea pigs Gimli and Prince Charming—whom Ruby the Cat may have eaten… And apart from Fluffysnuggles the hamster whom I left in a mint-chocolate-chip ice-cream carton in an abandoned car. He WILL make it home.)
It’s a pretty desperate image, snatched out of the dripping, glinting, sharp-toothed jaws of death, but it is all I have right now. That’s it. That’s all I have: the planet is going to go on. Like a lonely merry-go-round in the middle of space, but with not enough people left to enjoy the ride.
I lie down on the tarmac.
You are a stupid, stupid girl! laughs the rain, pouring down on me.
I start to get cold.
In fact, I am freezing cold and really wishing the whole hideous, painful death thing would just hurry up and get on with it when a bunch of people in biosuits stomp out and pull me up off the tarmac and drag me into the building.
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