by Tim Heath
“None taken,” she smiled back at him. She knew what he meant. “Well, I promise you, the moment we get the chance, you'll be breathing some fresh air. Maybe the oxygen will work wonders for your legs.”
John could tell she was joking and he smiled along with her.
“Maybe it can do wonders for your sense of humour too, Lorna.” At this, she laughed out loud.
“Well, on that note,” she said, changing the subject, “I need to clean up your wounds again and give you some fresh sheets.”
“I'm all yours.”
Thirty minutes later she'd changed all the bandages and covered the bed in fresh sheets. John's physical injuries were healing well. She'd had to put in two stitches on one wound the other day, which was now responding, but the rest were recovering naturally, which had been unexpected when he'd first come in. Then, he'd been a mess of blood and flesh. Not all of it had been John's, they had later found out, but he had lost a lot of blood, and did have some sizeable wounds of his own.
Weeks later, he was now coming through, getting stronger by the day. With strength returning to his legs and more steps taken, health-wise he was progressing well. And soon he was to venture outside, which marked another critical stage in his recovery and ultimate mission. Little did John know of what was resting on his shoulders at that moment but Lorna was playing her part at carrying that load right now. The better he got, the worse she felt. Then, it had been a distant prospect, and she'd got involved and kept the illusion going. Now, it was a concrete reality, and those thoughts that had been nagging her for weeks were once again battling for control in her mind. Could she send a healthy, recovering man, to his death? Could she play her part in that, a central role, not a side role, as if caught up in something beyond her? As if she had no excuse? Far from it. She was active in playing out her part. And yet, once again, the counter-thoughts came. What choice did she have? Wasn't this all for the greater good, the good of the multitudes? Yes, that was why she was doing this. It wasn't for her, it was for them, the others. The faceless millions. It wasn't just for her, she finished. No, this was something more significant. For life itself, a future she still wanted a part of, at the moment. She hadn't yet thought how that tomorrow would be, how it would feel. She would not let herself go there. Firstly, what would life be like without her James, whose death she knew she'd have to come to terms with when this was all over. That wasn't something she wanted to face right now, but it was there, nonetheless. And how would life feel with the knowledge of what she was willingly doing to John, her loyal and trusting patient? That was as hard a thought to deal with as was the loss of James. How could she go on, living a normal life, with the knowledge of all this? She realised thinking like this was futile and not getting her anywhere. Her steely resolve would pull her through even though she knew these questions would return.
It was early afternoon when Lorna was told that everything was set to visit the courtyard. It was sooner than she thought, but she passed on the good news straight away to John who was eager to get outside. A wheelchair was brought for him, as there was no way he could make it that far on his own at this stage. Three minutes after leaving his room for the first time, he arrived through the double doors that led out to the courtyard. Fresh air for the first time in his living memory.
On the way, Lorna had said very little. The hospital had seemed quiet, the corridors empty, though from the courtyard John could now see, on the higher floors, signs that there were other patients in the hospital. What hit John first, was the smell. It was somehow familiar but didn't resonate with anything in particular at that moment. He kept it to himself. Lorna helped him up from the chair, and he took his first steps, in the semi-outdoors, for the first time since before the incident. He managed to amble over to the maple tree, its dark red leaves still clinging to the branches, though a few had fallen to the ground already. He reached out and touched one, and it too came away in his hand. John let it fall slowly to the ground.
He was a prisoner on day release. The simple things in life, such as looking up at the sky, gave him the greatest pleasure. A vast expanse of sky was visible, above the three floors of the hospital that rose around him in a perfect square. He was aware that it had been an hour since he had had lunch, which he was sure was given to him around one. And yet the sky looked dark. There was a darkness that didn't seem to fit, even if they had been in the depths of winter, which he was sure was not the case. The tree in front of him, isolated as it was, still had most of its leaves. Deep inside him, something was starting to resonate but he could not pin down what it was.
Lorna was watching him, wondering what was going through his head. He was unusually silent, but she realised it was a big moment for him. She'd been outside yesterday, and yet she too, at that moment, having had just one day in the hospital, was enjoying the fresh air.
She carefully wheeled the chair over to him, and John sat back down.
“Is it alright if I just sit here for a moment?” he said.
“Yes, of course, take as long as you need.” She knew they had a twenty-minute window. They'd been barely five. He needed to build his strength up a lot more very soon to be able to make the walk he was expected to make.
John sat there in the hospital courtyard saying very little. He was taking deep breaths; each lungful of air seemed to be saying something to him, and he was working hard to translate the message. It wasn't as yet coming to him.
Ten minutes passed. Lights went on and off in various rooms around him, each one obvious with the fading light of the courtyard which had no special lighting of its own. From somewhere up above, screams could be heard. John glanced up but couldn't see anything.
“That would be the maternity ward,” Lorna said, the answer sounded genuine enough. In reality, that ward was housed in another building, far from where they were. It was of no real interest to John who returned to touching the tree.
“This pond certainly needs a bit of attention,” he said, looking down at the pitiful excuse for a pond in front of them. When Lorna had first started at the hospital, it had been a pleasant enough looking body of water, with about a dozen different varieties of fish. Patients would take it in turns to feed the fish, it was deemed useful therapy for many, as indeed it was. Now, it just looked a mess, a sad reflection of the struggling times the hospital was in, which pre-dated even this latest catastrophe.
“Fancy doing some fishing then?”
“I'd be scared at what I might catch,” John said.
“Well, I don't want you to catch a cold, so I think five more minutes and that had better be your lot for today, okay John?” She was aware their time would soon be up and didn't want to cause any problems for anyone.
“Yes, sure,” John replied. “Can we come back here tomorrow? It's nice to be outside.”
Lorna didn't know what the answer should be, but said anyway:
“Yes, of course, John. Maybe you'll be able to walk around the pond next time?”
“Either that or take a dip in it.”
He sat there for another few minutes, breathing in the air, the light beginning to fade some more. He couldn't help but take it all in. When time was up, Lorna started to walk with the chair. Coming back in through the doors, it was as if inside, from his depths, his body screamed an answer to him. He did recognise that smell. The air, the smells around that had hit his nostrils as soon as he'd entered the courtyard. It was from the visions. He knew it was. And that made no sense to him whatsoever. He remained silent on the short journey back to his room, each corridor leading to another, each place looking the same as the last until finally, they were back at his spot. The guards who usually sat outside his room, were at that moment out of sight as they had arranged. John was silent as he stood up from the wheelchair. It had been nice to escape for a while, though at that moment, with his thoughts racing, there was something strangely comfortable with being back in his bed again. He said nothing as Lorna left the room, taking the chair away, greeting the tw
o guards who had now returned to the corridor outside.
“That was strange,” he said aloud to himself, no one else in the room to listen to him. That was really strange he thought again, picking up a book from his bedside table, but for the first time in weeks, unable to read. His mind was too distracted to be able to focus.
25
The following week went by quickly in the hospital. Overall, more patients had been arriving each day, death an hourly occurrence, with no let-up in sight. For John, the most important and well hidden patient in the building, it had been a week of great progress. Daily visits to the courtyard had been arranged, and the physiotherapy sessions had been stepped up in both frequency and intensity. Happening twice a day, the first before breakfast, and the second before dinner, John was now able to walk around the courtyard unaided, and was getting stronger by the day. It was thought, though untested, that he probably could walk from his room to the courtyard by now, which was about two hundred metres, maybe more. Certainly it was as far as they'd need him to walk at the RAF base, the Ground Zero of this potential world catastrophe, not far from the heart of London. His time had nearly come.
For John, the days were bringing more questions than anything else. He had not shared anything with Lorna, which was strange, he knew. It just didn't feel right to. Each day, in the outdoor air of the courtyard, enclosed and unnatural as it was, that same sense returned to him each time he came out through the double doors and breathed his first lungful of air; the smell was known to him. He couldn't see how any of this made sense. It didn't. How could a vision, something taking place in his mind, remind him of this smell? Maybe the vision was actually real, and yet he woke up in the hospital bed each time, even after that first one he remembered. It wasn't as if he was going anywhere else. Lorna was right there with him, each time he opened his eyes, she was there, smiling. Always smiling. It was his oldest memory of anyone that he had. Lorna, the smiling girl.
So how could he relate the air around him to those visions? And yet he knew it was the same. He knew this air. And the sky itself. Most of the week he'd come out in the afternoon. Twice he'd asked to come out later. On those occasions, it was naturally dark from being after sunset. He noticed how it looked in the confines of a small courtyard. He took in what light came through various windows, where the brightest part of the sky was. He worked out which direction was west. No stars were visible, but that was not uncommon. It was the afternoon light that gave him the most problems. Not night-time, because he'd now seen that, and yet there was something. Something was there, but he couldn't tell what. In this regards, it was different from what he had seen before. In the visions, there had been this darkness, something beyond the physical, a sense of foreboding and death. But John couldn't get away from the feeling that the smell of the air and the visions were trying to tell him something. What was it that he was picking up, a message from another place? Was this the start of what he had seen? He dared not even ask himself the question, he was afraid of the answer.
Weeks ago, when the visions had finished, he was ready. He was 'all in' and would do what was needed. Now there had been this gap, this silence, this waiting. Prepared as he had felt then, now he was not so sure. He was no one's hero, that was for sure. He'd been working hard, and still could only barely walk for about ten minutes. Hardly the thing of comic book superheroes. Who was he kidding? He knew he would need to talk this through with Lorna. She was his only friend, and besides the doctor and physiotherapist, who he was now seeing twice a day, the only other person he saw and talked with. It was becoming noticeable, each time they made the three minute walk to and from the courtyard, that not another soul was around. No one. In a hospital so obviously busy, they never passed anyone. For John, who had spent most of the last month reading book after book, his own conspiracy theory was starting to build. Yet he had no idea what to make of any of it.
Lorna, too, had felt a distance growing between them over the last week and she couldn't put her finger on why. She guessed the healthier John got, the greater the reality grew as to what he might be walking towards. A healthy John meant an available John. That was her best guess at the moment. She too had to come to terms with what his recovery meant. The loss of Alison had really hit home over the past seven days and without anyone to talk to, Lorna too was processing things silently in her own head, increasing the distance between her and John.
Lorna was called into another briefing with the team who were watching over things in the background. They had started making preparations for what needed to follow. She was amazed, and a little disturbed, at how easily they were dealing with things, how matter-of-factly, as if he was just an animal going to the slaughter house.
“There is one added complication,” they said to Lorna, the tone changing completely, as a briefcase was placed on the table. Lorna remained silent.
“The base in question has been unapproachable, as you know. We've not been able to salvage anything, and yet there remains something very important that we need to recover. Something highly classified that is of great value to the country. And it exists only on the base. It will most certainly be destroyed in the ensuing explosion should John fulfil his mission, so we need him to be able to recover it before that happens.”
“What?” Lorna said, feeling that to ask anything more of John was taking a liberty, considering they were already tricking him into giving his life for them.
“Relax, he won't know anything about it. With this device,” he said, pulling a small black object like a mobile phone from the case on the table, before continuing; “we can pull the data we need, as he is walking. It will happen automatically. He then just needs to leave it somewhere safe before continuing with...the operation.”
“I don't understand?” Lorna said, confused at yet another thing being asked of her.
“When the time comes, you just need to make sure this is on him. There is even a small phone attached to it, so that it passes as a cell phone. We'll give him a wireless headset and you can speak with him as he makes the final walk. That will be a real help to him, I'm sure. We just need to make sure he drops the phone where we need it to be left. By then, it will have collected the data we need from the base.”
“What is it that he'll be collecting, exactly?” Lorna said, as if standing on the side of John, making sure nothing else unethical was being asked of him.
“That's a matter of national intelligence, and believe me, not even we know what it is,” he said, telling the truth. Lorna understood he was being honest with her, aware that they were all in this together and she was as much in the dark as the rest of them.
“Okay, I'll make sure he has this,” she said, taking it from the man, who had locked it back in the briefcase it had arrived in.
“Keep this safe. We don't have another one,” he warned.
“Okay, I hear you.” In truth, Lorna thought they were being overly dramatic.
“It's state of the art software, you know,” another added, not helping the overwhelming pressure she already felt. “We only had access to it a few weeks back, nothing else like it exists. Worth a fortune, no doubt.”
“I'll keep it safe for you, don't worry.” Lorna picked up the case and held it by her side. It felt no heavier than a small handbag. She imagined the device inside weighed nothing more than an average phone.
“This is all legal, isn't it?” she asked, but instantly thought it would have been better to have said nothing.
“Of course. And it is as vital as the mission itself.”
'Hardly,' she thought, but let it slide. How could some data be more important than the walk of one man, a walk of personal death, that would lead to the salvation of millions? Nothing was making much sense. She went back to her staff room and locked the briefcase away in a safety deposit box, which sat attached to the far wall. Previously, it had housed the strongest and most lethal drugs, locked away from would-be addicts.
She sat down briefly in a chair, taking a moment to ju
st gather her thoughts. 'In for a penny, in for a pound' raced through her mind. “I guess I've come this far, so there's no turning back now,” she said out loud, the words actually bringing some relief, as if voicing it took some of the sting away. It felt good. “And I can do this. I will do this. There is life for me at the end of the tunnel!” She was practically shouting now and she stopped herself. John was nowhere near, but it didn't seem wise to get too carried away. “Okay, enough of this and back to it,” she said, walking out as she headed towards her patient once again, her John. 'No, he's not mine,' she caught herself, 'he's our John'. And she was smiling at the thought as she walked back into his room, her patient having fallen asleep, a book lying open on his chest.
It was the end of October, fifty-six days since the incident at the RAF base on the edge of London. A London that had now changed dramatically since then, the four probes, each exploding with nuclear force, doing severe damage and causing much death. The official figures were not really known, the best estimates well below the reality. Hundreds of thousands of people had already died, and as many were terminally affected by the aftermath of the radiation poisoning. And yet even that colossal figure would be nothing compared to the death toll if the main reactors blew at the base, the six nuclear payloads getting more unstable by the day. They'd been overheating for fifty-six days, leaking and fragmenting all the time, making the clean up and rescue efforts more hazardous by the hour. They were not far from exploding.
John, now mobile and walking for short periods, was ready. The moment had come. There was no time to lose, and it was vital that John was able to get to the base and shut the system down before it was too late. Getting the next stage right was vital. The country risked losing everything if they were to fail now. Masked from the media, the true nature of what might be about to happen was kept secret, for fear that the news would cause mass hysteria, panic on a global scale. The already struggling transport sectors would be overrun with people fleeing the country. There were not enough vessels to transport everyone, nor enough time. If news got out, the boats and planes would stay away entirely, trapping millions of people; the damage from that alone would be high.