“Do you think anyone will listen?”
“Why shouldn’t they?”
“Because of the way you look. Like a dangerously crazy person. Unshaven chin, flashing eyes, floating hair, blood stains on your shirt already, and that jacket is so tight you have to walk with your elbows sticking out.”
Erik shrugged his shoulders as best he could under their present restrictions and slipped out through the ward doors.
He was cheered to see the extent of the chaos around him. Members of staff in different uniforms everywhere mingled with dozens of well-heeled civilians. Although at first sight the scene was one of apparent disorder, Erik soon got the impression that most of the individuals milling around him knew where they were going and what they were doing. Porters and sundry other helpers struggled through the crowds with quantities of luggage, their minds set on reaching their destinations and getting the job done. There was something of the atmosphere of a railway station or the check-in desks at a busy airport about the Unit now. Indeed, those individuals not in uniform looked from happy to downright gleeful, as though they were setting off on the holiday of their dreams. Even the seriously handicapped on crutches or in wheelchairs – and there were plenty of them – looked eagerly about them at the pallid grey walls and seemed transfixed with joy at the sight of their new home.
As Erik passed one of the corridors leading to the dome, he saw it was less crowded, so he turned down it, thinking it would be quicker to go straight on across the dome and out through the opposite exit. There, his sense of direction told him, he might find his way out of the Samuel Taylor Unit. He was convinced he had come in from that side.
In the dome, facing half-a-dozen desks, were queues of people that stretched right across the floor. They surrounded the now somewhat-battered and much less luxuriously leafed collection of plants, and effectively blocked off the whole of the inner floor area of the dome. Erik had to circumnavigate them. The countless echoes of their voices were disturbing and disorientating. Baffling sounds bounced around Erik like dancing bones and soft rubber balls and caused an extra interior echoing, as though his brain was clanging like a muffled bell inside his skull. This didn’t stop even when he put his hands over his ears. Also, he found he had to walk with a stoop to avoid stretching his wounds, and two or three times his legs had failed to do what he had expected and he had staggered a few steps sideways. As yet nobody had taken any undue notice of him, so far as he could tell, but he knew if he fell over it would not be easy or perhaps possible for him to get up again.
It must have been night-time, because the roof of the dome was dark and there was insufficient artificial lighting provided. Erik made his way around the dome by keeping close to the wall and staying in touch with it with the back of his left hand, like a blind man. When he found he was no longer in contact with anything, he knew he had reached the passage he was seeking on the far side, and thankfully turned into it.
When he emerged onto the circular corridor again, he faced a scene of even greater confusion than before, and it took him some time to realise that, in itself, this was good news, because most of the people in front of him were coming towards him and turning left and right. They were part of the new intake being met by hospital staff who inspected the red and blue cards the visitors were carrying and directed them where to go, in one direction or the other. If these people were coming in, then forward, for Erik, had to be the way out.
He launched himself into the approaching crowd who, for the most part, were reluctant or unable to step aside for him, so he had to dodge around most of the individuals pressing towards him. This was hard to achieve, as he felt he needed to keep moving as fast as he could. The constant stepping from side to side made him dizzy, and he began to find it difficult to focus his eyes. When he had gone just a few yards, he banged into someone pushing a wheelchair and only managed to keep upright by grabbing the arm of the next nearest person, a tall grey-bearded man, who slapped his face. Behind him someone shouted, and Erik guessed the call was an order for him to stop.
He had realised that in going against the flow he would mark himself out for the attention of those representatives of the Unit who were receiving the new patients, but they were being kept busy and he’d good reason to hope they might not notice him. Now, due to his clumsiness, it seemed they had. He daren’t look around to confirm this speculation because he feared if he did, he’d lose his balance, fall, and get swept along or trampled by the crowd. He kept going, trying to press on faster than ever, aware that someone much fitter could be in pursuit.
Having made some unimpeded progress, he got to a turning in the corridor he thought he could remember taking, widdershins, on his way in. As he changed direction, the crowd ahead of him appeared to be somewhat thinner than that which he’d left behind. Since no one had grabbed him so far, he assumed that if anyone had been chasing him they had given up.
He was attempting to calculate how much further he might have to get to the borderline of the Samuel Taylor Unit – it couldn’t be far now, he was sure – when, somewhere in the distance, certainly outside the hospital, there was a burst of sound that shook the foundations of the building. The floor beneath Erik’s feet became, for some seconds, unsteady. Ahead of him he could hear glass shattering and something heavy crashed to the ground. There was a second louder, because nearer, explosion. Some of the people around him faltered in their steps and looked indignantly at each other with expressions on their faces that said they demanded an explanation for this violation of peace and order. Others hurried forward faster, while those more feeble looked nervously back the way they had come and called for help.
None of this had any impact on Erik. He staggered on, but at a deliberately slower pace, to spare himself a little and preserve his remaining stock of energy and determination as much as he felt he safely could. Anyway, there were no more eruptions from without or interruptions from within, and the noises-off had given all those heading towards the Unit something more alarming to worry about than the oddly-dressed, bloody, possibly lunatic figure lurching towards them in the opposite direction.
Erik was not much aware of his surroundings, but he realised that the people he was passing must be the tail-end of the new intake when he came to a point where there was hardly anyone approaching him in the corridor ahead. He was, therefore, running out of indicators to show him the way to go. The significance of this was just beginning to sink in, causing an extra dimension of despair to rise up in Erik’s addled and shook-up brain, when he noticed a kaleidoscopic spread of bright colours in front of him that seemed to be hovering and vibrating in the otherwise empty air. Fearing he’d reached exhaustion and was hallucinating, he wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his ill-fitting jacket, then looked again towards the way ahead.
The last decorations he had passed on the walls of the old hospital on the way in, he remembered, had been posters advertising reduced-rate holiday weekends in Ireland. They featured a selection of luridly colourful photographs of gardens and beaches a tourist taking advantage of those offers could hope to enjoy. They had remained in Erik’s memory because he’d stayed at one of the hotels illustrated himself within the last year.
He was looking at the posters now. They were just a couple of yards away. Their colours had shocked his eyes because for so long his surroundings had been uniformly grey.
A few paces more and he had put the Samuel Taylor Unit behind him. He stopped running, propped himself against the wall alongside the posters, and reached out to touch the nearest of them fondly, with an unsteady hand.
His first thought then was to get help for the protestor and any one else like him who might still be left alive in the Unit. Once he had discharged that duty, he could get medical assistance for himself then do the one simple thing he wanted to do more than anything else – sleep.
He pushed himself away from the wall and continued his progress into the hospital. He had not gone many paces when all the lights in the building flickered, w
ent off for perhaps half a minute, then flashed on again. During the period of darkness, cries of consternation sounded from the nearby wards.
Erik had blundered on without stopping, with his arms outstretched, feeling his way through the darkness. When the electric power came on again, he found he was standing next to the open door of a Children’s Ward that was full of frantic activity. It took him a few seconds to work out that the place was being evacuated. Nurses were attempting to push the obviously frightened children in their beds towards the door. The first of these was emerging into the corridor close to him when Erik saw the cause of the commotion. Rats. There were perhaps half-a-dozen of them running helter-skelter across the floor, over the beds, and anywhere else they pleased. The nurses were trying to stamp on the creatures when they got the chance but, as far as Erik could make out, there had only been one casualty so far, and that was not quite dead.
A tall, hawk-faced woman appeared in front of him, running. As she passed him, she shouted to the nurses in the Children’s Ward that there had been yet another change of plan. “The patients are to be kept where they are,” she added.
The nurses angrily protested at this.
“Of course I know about the rats,” the obviously managerial woman said, almost shouting, “but it’s a case of the least of two evils. Things are happening outside. Nobody seems to know what yet, but there’s serious trouble of some kind so your orders are to keep the children here. You know the emergency procedures. Close the doors and windows and keep them shut until you’re told to do otherwise.” She started pushing the bed of the one child who had been brought out back in to the ward.
Erik decided there was nothing he could do to help and that the nurses were in no position to help him. So, following the exit signs that had begun to appear, he walked on.
There was an increasing amount of noise and movement on either side and up ahead, and it wasn’t long before he found himself in a situation similar to the one he had put behind him in the Samuel Taylor Unit, if not worse. It must have been the evening visitors’ hour, because the wards he passed were again full of the families and friends of the bed-bound patients, but the atmosphere was very different now. The shaking floors and flickering lights minutes earlier had caused general consternation and alarm among the guests who had, in some cases, deserted the people they had come to see to discuss with each other the possible cause of the disturbances. Some, drawn by the screeches of many sirens, had come out into the corridor and were staring out of the windows into the darkness beyond and reporting the hyperactivity of police cars and ambulances in the streets outside. The upper floors of the hospital had a good view of a large section of the city.
“There’re fire engines going by, but there’s no smoke anywhere,” one woman said, “and I can’t smell anything burning.”
“The street lights are off in some parts,” her partner observed. “Other than that, I can’t see much to worry about.”
Erik walked into one of the wards and asked a nurse for help. He held his jacket open so she could see the blood that had seeped out of his wounds and onto his shirt. The sight of this did not produce the reaction he had anticipated. She gave him a glare of suspicion and anger. “Who are you?” she demanded. “How did you get like that?”
Erik began to tell her, but soon realised he was wasting words and the nurse’s time. What he was saying didn’t sound to make much sense, even to him, and he could see in the nurse’s eyes that she was becoming increasingly irritated. She waved a hand to shut him up and snapped, “That’s enough. You’ll have to go away, please. I don’t want you on my ward. People are upset enough. Having someone who looks the way you do here can only make things worse.”
Erik glanced down at himself. He hadn’t given a thought to his appearance for some time.
“I can see you’re hurt,” the nurse said, with some slight note of apology, “but there’s no help for you here. We can’t treat you. You need to go to Accident and Emergency on the ground floor.” She put a hand on his shoulder and urged him towards the door, then turned back to the task of keeping order.
Erik left the ward and stumbled on until he came to a lift close to some stairs leading down. A nervous-looking porter stood in front of the lift. Erik asked him what was going on.
“No idea,” the man said. “I’ve to keep people out of the elevator in case they get trapped if there’s another power cut.”
Erik said, “I don’t think I can make it down the stairs.”
“You’re in a bad way, I can see that.”
“If the lift is working, I’d like to risk it.”
“Going down, you mean? I can’t let you do that.”
“I’m going to fall down soon, and I know I won’t be able to get up again.” Erik opened his jacket again. “I have to get to A and E.”
The porter took a look at Erik’s chest, hissed and said, “Fuck that!”
Erik nodded. “I know,” he said.
The porter looked from side to side, then made up his mind and pressed the call button of the lift. The doors opened at once.
“It’s on the ground floor.”
“The A and E?”
“Yep. There’ll be someone like me waiting when you get out,” the porter said. “Tell him Kev Naylor said it’s okay to let you go.”
“Thanks.”
“Right in front of you, it will be, the A and E.”
Erik thought about the porter’s last words as the lift sank. Poetry!
There was a rat in the lift with him: an old, scabby, skinny one with a kink in its tail where it must once have been injured. It didn’t take any notice of Erik, but stuck its twitchy nose up a couple of times to sniff the air. Erik thought it could probably smell his blood. It waited by the edge of the door, and when the door opened it was first out.
The rat and Erik passed an astonished porter, who looked as though he was going to try and stop Erik’s progress until Erik told him what Kev Naylor had said about it being okay. The porter rubbed the back of his neck in consternation but let Erik pass.
“Dirty bloody things,” he said, as the creature scuttled away. “Don’t know what’s got into them. Used to see one or two sometimes, cowardly buggers, slinking about in the shadows, but in the last few weeks they’re everywhere and they don’t seem to give a toss about anyone.”
“Maybe it’s something they’ve eaten,” Erik said.
“And they’ll go for you,” the porter said. “They’re as brave as lions.”
Seconds after the lift doors slid shut the overhead lights flickered again, then dimmed and stayed that way.
Through the resulting gloom, Erik could see that the reception area of the A and E Department in front of him was crowded with a clutter of stretcher trolleys that had been left at all angles, like derailed carriages after a train wreck. On each of them was a fully-clothed body with arms and legs thrust out as though each person had been caught and frozen in the middle of some strenuous activity. The expressions on the faces Erik could see were similarly grotesque, expressing various degrees of mental and bodily excruciation. Among the trolleys a number of bewildered, stranded people stood twisting and stumbling on the spot, searching around for familiar faces. Most of the outstretched people were silent and, Erik assumed, dead, though some occasionally coughed in soft, painful spasms. The area stank of vomit and something else that Erik could not identify, a stench he had never come across before.
The stretcher trolleys were packed so closely together it would have been impossible for a fit person to push through them to the treatment rooms of the A and E, and Erik knew that in his condition there was no hope that he could do so. He was near the end of his strength. His legs felt boneless, and when he moved he swayed from side to side like an elastic man.
Aware that he would soon tumble, and for the last time too, almost certainly, unless he received some medical attention, Erik sought a place to sit down and rest for a while. All the chairs around the sides of the A and E waiting ro
om were full of slumped bodies, so he made his way back out past the lift door towards the deserted reception desk near the Main Entrance. It was a long way, but Erik thought if there was no hope for him in the building, he might as well try to seek help outside of it. Though there was no panic, there were many bewildered people milling apparently aimlessly about and nobody seemed to be in charge of any part of the establishment. Erik made his way through the chaos until he came to a stop by a radiator under a large window. He judged that the top of the heater was about the right height for him to rest his backside on.
A number of people were pressed against the window, looking out. Erik joined them and leaned over the radiator to lay claim to some part of it. After pushing aside a couple of small potted plants similar to those he’d seen in the dome – cuttings, presumably – he supported his sagging weight by resting his elbows on the window ledge. Beyond the window, the stabbing lights of stationary police cars and ambulances, dancing in stroboscopic staccato, made it impossible to make out exactly what, if anything, was happening on the approach to the A and E and the main entry to the Admission Section of the hospital. The vehicles drawn up outside remained where they were, and nobody came or went in or out of them.
Someone near Erik said, “I tried to get out of the main door but couldn’t. It’s locked.”
“And sealed,” a woman said, sounding almost pleased. “It’s an emergency. A nurse told me the hospital is on Red Alert.”
Another woman said. “But I need to get home to my kids. Where’s the danger? What is it? Does anybody know?”
“Terrorists.”
The common opinion seemed to be that bombs had been detonated close by.
Erik felt something brush against his sockless ankles, then a sharp pain at the top of his left foot. He turned away from the window, kicked out at the rat with his other foot and hit it, but it did him no good because he lost his balance along with the last vestige of his strength and found himself sinking. He reached out to grasp something to stop himself falling, but only managed to grab hold of one of the small potted plants that he pulled down with him as he descended.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 17 Page 42