by S. L. Grey
But my stomach figures it out before my brain registers what I’m looking at, and I have to swallow convulsively as saliva floods into my mouth.
It isn’t wood.
Of course it isn’t.
I grab Farrell’s arm to steady myself. ‘Oh God,’ I breathe.
‘What?’
‘You don’t want to know.’
‘Christ,’ he says. ‘Is that what I think it is?’
The thing on the table was once a person, its back twisted into an impossible converse foetal position, its limbs drawn tightly into its sides as if they’ve shrunk into its body. Its skin is a cracked, hard, blackened mass; its fingers, toes and hair are gone. I can’t tell if it was once male or female, young or old. Then the nausea disappears and I find myself taking a step forward and gazing down at the face, nothing but a charcoal rictus mask. It looks fragile, like, if I touched it, it would crumble.
‘You think this is someone from the crash?’ Farrell asks.
I jump as a door in the far right-hand corner of the room swings open and bashes against the wall. A stocky man wearing thick green gloves and a gore-spattered industrial-looking apron appears. He’s mumbling to himself. He starts when he catches sight of us.
‘What are you doing in here?’ he says in a thick accent. ‘You should not be in here.’
Farrell clears his throat. ‘Sorry, we—’
‘No, no, no. This is not good.’ He’s foreign – Spanish or Cuban. I can’t tell how old he is; his olive skin is unlined, but his hair is wispy and thinning. He stares at the dressing covering my nose and my hand automatically leaps to my face. His gaze slides to Farrell’s hospital gown, blue scrub trousers and bare feet. ‘How did you get here?’
‘We’re lost,’ Farrell says, trying to grin charmingly. ‘We’d really appreciate it if you’d point us towards the exit.’
He remains impassive. ‘There is no exit down here. This is a restricted area.’
‘Yeah. Sorry about that,’ Farrell says. ‘Please, we—’
‘Which ward are you from? You are patients? You should not be here.’
The black doors smash open, and a porter pushing a gurney containing a sheet-draped body barrels in. ‘Incoming,’ the porter says. He’s a youngish guy with cornrows and bloodshot eyes.
The Cuban man sighs. ‘How many more times? Do not bring them in here. They are to go to the viewing room for storage.’
The porter stares at him blankly.
‘The viewing room. Now!’ the man snaps.
The porter shrugs. ‘Don’t know it, boss.’ He glances at me and Farrell, then at the charred body on the table, but his bored, slightly resentful expression doesn’t change.
‘Wait here,’ the Cuban guy says to us. Muttering under his breath, he herds the porter and the gurney back towards the double doors.
‘Now’s our chance,’ Farrell whispers when they’ve disappeared.
We head towards the door in the corner of the room. Farrell stumbles into one of the shallow drains in the floor and I grab his arm to steady him, trying not to step into the globs of… matter… and drying blood that haven’t been sluiced away.
The door opens into a long, narrow corridor. It ends in a metal rolldown shutter like the doors you see in warehouses and halfway along it there’s another door set into the wall. I jiggle its handle and push against it.
‘Locked.’
‘Fucking great,’ Farrell mutters.
‘There has to be a way to open that rolling door.’ Then I see it. There’s a chunky control panel hanging from a thick cord attached to the ceiling.
I race up to it and press the single red button.
Nothing happens for a second, and then there’s a whir as the metal door’s mechanism grinds into life. It starts inching upwards. Light seeps in from underneath. Daylight. I’m sure of it.
‘I think we can get out this way,’ I say, as Farrell shuffles up behind me.
The door behind us bangs open.
‘Hey! No, no! You must not open that!’ the Cuban man shouts. He jogs towards us. ‘No!’
I turn to face him. ‘I’m sorry, but you don’t understand. We really need to—’
‘What in the hell…?’ Farrell says, scrunching up his eyes and leaning forward. He sounds shell-shocked. ‘This can’t…’
I turn back to the door. It’s now halfway open, and my stomach clenches into a sick, hard knot. Even with his blurred vision, there’s no way Farrell could have mistaken what’s in front of us. I realise I’m looking straight into the back of a huge refrigerated truck that’s backed up against the doorway. There’s not enough space to slip around it, but, even if there was, I’m not sure I want to get any closer. The truck’s floor is piled with more of those black body bags, seemingly chucked randomly one on top of the other. To one side there’s a stack of bulbous transparent plastic bags, smaller, sealed with tape. I don’t want to think about what they contain.
I wait for the nausea to wash over me, but it doesn’t. All I feel is that strange detached calmness, as if my brain has decided that it’s not actually going to process what my eyes are seeing.
‘What the hell is this?’ Farrell says to the Cuban guy. ‘What the hell is going on?’
‘The accident – it is very bad. There are too many people to deal with. The city morgue is backed up as it is. We have to store them somewhere for now. It is standard procedure.’
‘You store them in a truck?’
The man nods. ‘Yes.’
‘But that’s disgusting. That’s not right!’ Farrell rubs a hand over his eyes. ‘How many bodies are there?’
‘There are many.’
‘Christ.’
The man shrugs. ‘You should not have been here. I now have no choice but to call security.’
‘Please,’ I say to him. ‘Please. We need to leave.’
‘How do I know that you are not thieves? Burglars? Ladrones?’
‘We’re not. You have to trust us.’ My cheeks are cold, and I rub my palms over them. Tears have leaked from my eyes without my being aware of them. ‘Please.’
He sighs. He looks from me to Farrell again, and seems to come to some sort of decision. ‘This way.’
We follow him back to the locked door. He pulls a bunch of keys out of his pocket, inserts one in the lock and opens the door. The hinges scream as if they haven’t been oiled in months.
‘What’s through here?’ Farrell asks. He squints his eyes and shakes his head as if he’s trying to clear his vision. ‘It’s too dark for me to see.’
The door opens into a dim, sloping concrete walkway that seems to go on forever. It looks dusty and unused.
‘It is the old service corridor. You go up here, yes? Take the elevator to the third floor.’
‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘We’re very grateful.’
‘You don’t tell anybody you were here. Okay?’
We head through the door, and it slams behind us, the lock clicking with finality. Farrell stumbles, bangs heavily into my side.
‘Christ,’ he says. ‘Can’t see a thing.’
I hold onto his elbow and guide him forwards. There’s something not quite right about the camber of the slope, the angle feels awkward. It’s slow going, but I begin to make out the lift doors at the end. They look old-fashioned, purely functional, larger than the kind you see in malls and parking lots. Made specially to accommodate the gurneys containing… But I don’t want to think about that. I don’t want to think about what we’ve just seen. I can’t. I tentatively touch the bandage on my face.
Farrell sighs, runs a hand through his hair. ‘Lisa, you think we’re doing the right thing?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, don’t you think we’re blowing this out of proportion?’
I pause and turn to look at him. It’s not warm in here, but sweat beads his forehead. ‘No. There’s something weird going on here, Farrell. What about that freaky guy who was spying on me?’
‘I k
now all that.’ He sounds irritable again, pissed off with me and I’m tempted to just agree with him. But I can’t. I can’t go back. ‘Say we get out of here,’ he continues. ‘What then?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You got any money?’
‘No.’
‘So what are we going to do when we do get out?’
‘I don’t know. We’ll go across to the mall, call someone.’
‘Who? You’re not even from here.’
‘Haven’t you got any friends? Someone who’ll give us a lift?’ He doesn’t answer. ‘Let’s just play it by ear. After what we saw… back there, you really want to stay here any longer?’
He shrugs.
We’ve reached the lift. I press the button, and the doors slide open with a clank. The interior is clad in stainless steel and I can’t avoid catching a glimpse of my reflection. A tall skinny woman with a dressing over her nose and lank blonde hair drooping over her shoulders stares back at me. I don’t recognise myself. I look older, haggard, tired. I look like a stranger.
‘What floor did he say?’
‘Three,’ Farrell snaps, folding his arms and moving away from me. I can feel tears pricking my eyes again and I will them not to fall. I know he’s worried and probably as freaked out as I am, but… Please don’t hate me.
I press the button and the lift shudders upwards. My stomach drops and I’m hit with another wave of wooziness.
The lift grumbles to a stop.
I swallow the tears back and do my best to sound normal. ‘When we get out we just have to—’
The doors slide open onto pure chaos.
‘Where the fuck are we?’ Farrell asks.
But it’s obvious where we are. We’re at ground zero. Casualty. After the near silence of the morgue, the noise is overwhelming. Screams, howls, shouting, and above it all someone’s yelling, ‘I shouldn’t be here! I’ve got medical aid! Listen to me!’
The corridor in front of us is stacked with hospital beds and gurneys and, although I’m trying not to look too closely at the patients lying on them, I can’t help it: a half-naked woman, her thighs covered in seeping blisters; a sobbing boy, his knees drawn up to his chest; a nurse frantically trying to jab a drip into the arm of an emaci ated teenage girl whose face is a mask of blood. Nurses run up and down the corridor, shouting instructions at each other and a doctor in a bloodstained white coat hurries past us, screaming into a cellphone, ‘Don’t you understand? There are no more fucking beds!’
I grab Farrell’s arm to hold him back as a pair of grim-faced paramedics dressed in soot-smeared overalls speed past us clutching a defibrillator. They disappear into a curtained-off area.
‘Which way?’ Farrell asks.
I rip my eyes away from the sight of a nurse pulling a shard of glass out of the arm of a screaming boy, a woman with gore-soaked blonde hair bawling next to them, and search for the signs.
The right-hand corridor leads to Maternity, the left to casualty and admissions. There has to be an exit through there.
‘Left,’ I say. ‘Stay close.’
No one tries to stop us as we weave our way through the chaos. We edge past a man lying on a filthy sheet. His right arm ends in a bandaged stump and he stares up at us blankly. A small child sits huddled next to a woman wrapped in a blanket; neither looks up as we pass.
The noise intensifies as we head further into the casualty ward, and I realise that the patients we’ve already passed are the ones who are going to make it; the ones who aren’t going to end up in the black bags, stored in the refrigerated truck.
‘Triage,’ I mumble. ‘That’s what they’re probably doing.’
‘What?’ Even though I know he can’t see clearly, Farrell’s eyes are glassy with horror.
‘They’re prioritising the injured. Sorting them into the ones that are the most critical.’
‘Jesus, Lisa.’
A harried nurse pushes out of a curtained-off area, and for a split second I get a glimpse of a woman whose face is nothing but a mass of raw flesh. We stumble through what was once the waiting-room area. The plastic chairs have been shoved aside to make room for more makeshift beds and drip stands, and another pair of paramedics, their faces scored with exhaustion, race past us, pushing a twitching body on a gurney. Next to the nurses’ station a doctor is trying to revive a hugely fat man, his shirt cut away to reveal a fish-belly white stomach. The doctor yells for back-up.
Someone grabs my wrist. At first I think it’s Farrell, but it can’t be.
Head down, he’s making his way towards the glass exit doors, the flash of emergency lights blasting into the waiting room, saturating the scene in flickering red light.
I look down and straight into the eyes of a skinny dark-haired woman. She’s young, maybe a year or two older than me, and she’s lying on the floor next to the admissions desk. Even though her clothes are torn and covered in soot and filth, I can tell that they were once expensive. She tightens her grip on my wrist. I try to loosen it, but she’s strong.
‘Help me,’ she whispers. ‘My daughter – I need to find my daughter.’
‘I… I…’
‘Please.’ She begs me with her eyes. But what can I do? Farrell is almost at the exit doors now.
Follow him. Run.
‘I’m sorry,’ I whisper, hating myself. Pulling my wrist free, I skitter away. I don’t look back.
Chapter 7
FARRELL
I can still make out the whoops and wails of the ambulances as they negotiate their way through the chaos back there. I can even imagine screaming and crying, but that’s probably just reverberations from the hellish soundscape we blundered through. Whether it was the injured people or their desperate relatives I couldn’t tell, but all their shouts and cries meant the same thing: pain and fear. And the smell. Burned clothes, burned hair, burned flesh.
I inhale deeply to try to clear the person-ash out of my lungs and get my breath back. Take in air right to the bottom of my lungs, slowly out; deep inhalation, slowly out. As I do, I think of Katya. If Nomsa left a message for her, why hasn’t she come to see me? Was what happened on Monday morning that bad? Or maybe it’s just that she’s on a shoot. Yes. A job. That’s much more likely. I’ll get home, sort this out.
Next thing, I’m on my arse on the grass.
‘Are you okay?’ Lisa asks.
My mind comes back into focus. I must have just gone faint from all the heavy breathing. It’s the first time I’ve had some fresh air all week. For a moment I expect my vision to resolve out of the grey like it does after you’ve passed out, but then I remember that I can’t see. Where the hell are my eye drops? Have I lost them?
I fumble around on the grass.
‘Here,’ Lisa says, pressing the vial into my hand.
‘Thanks.’ I tip a couple of drops into each eye. Even though Nomsa said twice a day, morning and night, I’m desperate for this shit to clear out of my eyes, and to have my full senses back. Outside, in Johannesburg, you’ve got to be on your guard.
I concentrate on what I can make out. Greenery, spots of colour, a fresh smell: freshly cut grass and floral scent. I breathe again, careful not to overdo it, stay sitting on the spongy grass, my arse getting wet from the dew. I imagine the clean air replacing every molecule of the death stench we’ve been through. There’s birdsong.
‘Where are we?’
Lisa’s still standing by my side. ‘A garden. Someone’s house.’
‘How did we get in here?’
‘I don’t know, we were just running. I went through this gate across the road.’
I can picture the sort of house, those boxy suburban properties around the concrete monolith of New Hope Hospital. But why would anyone leave their gate open to the street? ‘We’d better hope there are no dogs.’
‘Let’s keep going.’ Lisa grabs my wrist and tries to help me up, but she crashes down over me when she starts to pull. Her body is warm, tense. She struggles off me, sits on t
he grass next to me and groans.
‘You okay? We both seem to be falling today.’
‘Ugh, headrush. I’m starving. I was supposed to have the surgery today so I haven’t eaten for ages.’
‘Are you sure it’s okay for you to be out here? I mean, if you were supposed to have an operation, then shouldn’t you—’
‘But you said that I shouldn’t risk having surgery there again!’
Christ. Is she really that suggestible? What do I know? ‘Why were they going to operate again anyway?’
‘They said… I had complications after the last one.’
‘Shit, Lisa. That doesn’t sound good. What kind of complications?’ Christ, what if she collapses on me or something? Starts haemorrhaging or whatever.
‘I’m not going back there. You didn’t see what I saw. I’m not just being paranoid. There’s something seriously wrong in that place.’
‘Christ, Lisa. Of course it’s going to be a bit weird. There’s just been a huge accident—’
‘Besides that!’ she snaps. ‘I know about hospitals, and I’m telling you, there’s something wrong there. Normal hospitals don’t just let psychos drift around stalking their patients. You saw him too!’
‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Okay.’ But now I’m out here, breathing normal air that doesn’t stink like puke and death and cheap disinfectant, I’m starting to think maybe I overreacted. What if that grey freak was just some deranged old man with dementia or something? That could be it. The Green Section was full of freaky old people.
‘Plus, that woman in my room,’ Lisa continues. ‘She died after a hip replacement. That doesn’t happen. That fre— that man. He was trying to tell me to run… Like he knows something.’
Honestly, I’m trying not to, but all I hear is a hysterical woman. I’m trying to give her the benefit of the doubt, but it sounds to me like she’s just got a notion in her head and is making up a whole plot around it. What a Z-type fuck-up.