SARAH STOOD BY the window to see if the moon was visible tonight. The moon had been a comfort to her as a child. Her own mother used to tell her that the face she could see up there was the face of her father, who had died when she was very young.
‘He had been staring up at the moon, when his illness became too much for him,’ her mother had told her. ‘And when he died, the moon stayed in his eyes, you know, as though his eyes were a camera that had taken a picture. Trapped it for ever. Your father’s face was captured by the moon at the very same moment.’
‘They swapped faces,’ Sarah had said, decisively, she remembered, as if she would believe it even if her mother had said otherwise.
‘That face in the moon, that’s your dad, keeping an eye on you. Keeping you safe.’
She often looked out for the moon now when she felt lost or alone or afraid. It was nonsense, of course, but because her mother had said it, and it had helped her, it wasn’t really nonsense at all. It was as true as God or Santa Claus or insane men screaming towards her from dark corners of the world to try to destroy her. It was true if she wanted it to be.
There was too much cloud cover to see the moon now, but it was up there, a milky heart in the grey. Even that diffuse light was of some comfort.
‘It’s time to go.’
Nick leaped as if stuck with a needle. ‘Now? Can’t we wait till daylight, for Christ’s sake?’
‘You know me well enough to realise that isn’t going to happen. I need to find a doctor. I need to get help.’
‘But you were out there earlier. You saw what happened. You saw what’s going on out there.’
‘Yes I did, but I can see what’s going on in here too.’ She looked at Claire under a blanket, saw her quaking, saw the sweat on her face, the dark rings around her eyes. The blanket was up to her throat. By morning she might need to move it six inches north.
Nick put his hands to his face. ‘I can’t do this. I can’t go outside again.’
‘I’m not asking you to,’ Sarah said, soothingly. But she felt her confidence leak quickly out of her. She was aware that she shouldn’t rely on a man she barely knew to put himself in situations he didn’t deserve to be in, but she had blithely assumed he would back her up, especially after what had happened on the beach back in Southwold. Here was a man who had seen too much already. It was unfair to expect him to prolong his exposure to risk; it had gone beyond trying to impress her to get inside her knickers. Deaths were occurring. He didn’t want to join the statistics. There was nothing left on his meter. He was spent. Fair enough.
She turned to Tina. ‘I’ll knock on the door when I get back. One-two. One-two. Okay? So you know it’s me. Let me in quickly, won’t you?’ Tina nodded, and handed her a knife. She was moving her mouth as if trying to say something, but Sarah didn’t want to hear platitudes or rousing speeches of derring-do, especially from a woman who couldn’t back them up with actions of her own. She took the knife that Tina proffered and left abruptly. No good-byes. No last-minute efforts to muster support. She forced her legs to take her down the stairs and into the street before she could persuade herself that this was suicide, that her bravery was an illusion brought on by too little food and not enough sleep and that she should get under that blanket with her daughter upstairs, where it was safe.
Things outside had changed. She had never been in a city where the light was as subdued as this. Some spots of light remained, but too many huge pools of blackness stretched out between them. Nothing moved in those oases, but it wasn’t them she was worried about. The darkness seemed congealed, filled up. It settled against her skin like soot. Keep moving, she thought. Shift yourself.
It was quiet now, but she didn’t feel that was of particular significance because she couldn’t remember if it had been quiet earlier too, when they had set out to confirm Tina’s concerns about her city. It was a city’s size crowbarred into a town or a village’s sensibilities. It was unnerving. Places such as London were rendered pathetic by such anomalies. It had always been a big come-on of a city, used to thundering thoroughfares and clogged pavements. Seeing it weakened like this made her vulnerability more acute. If London couldn’t roll with the punches, how could she be expected to?
She spotted movement on the corner of Charlotte Street and sank back into the deep shadow of awnings near Tina’s entry door, fighting the urge to call out, to confirm to herself that these were normal people in a normal place living normal lives.
She was grateful for her instincts. Keep following those, she told herself. Say how you feel and act on it. No questions. No arguments.
Twenty feet away, two men in charcoal suits drifted along Percy Street like sharks cruising the shallows. One of them was wearing the skin of a woman’s upper torso like a stole. Her boned head hung down over his shoulder, flapping with each step, measuring out the distance they were travelling with her empty black eye sockets. He twisted and twiddled one of her nipples distractedly as he chatted to the other man who toyed with a rosary of teeth and chewed on something too large for his mouth, now and then spitting dark juice into the gutter.
Sarah checked her breathing and moved off once the two men had crossed the road in the direction of Bedford Square. She moved north, quickly, flitting between the pools of shade and never lingering too long, never positioning herself with acres of black space at her shoulder. She couldn’t believe she had given up Southwold for this. Not for the first time, she mulled over the possibility that madness was eating away her brain. These things weren’t real. They couldn’t be real. Which meant that she was deranged. Fine. Everyone was mental these days.
She wedged herself in a doorway to view the road ahead and then made a spiderish dash to the next little sanctuary a few metres further along. In this way she covered the distance between Percy Street and University College Hospital in half an hour. It was frustrating to be able to see her goal throughout the journey, but she knew that to break her cover and run was to invite failure. There was too much riding on this. If she died, Claire was finished. That was all she had to know; then it was easy.
No figures moved that she could see in the windows of the National Health Service building. She edged along Grafton Way, keen on scouting the area around the hospital first before she attempted to enter it. There was no point in being cautious up to a point and then abandoning that for a gung-ho approach once her destination was reached.
There was a makeshift car park on the south side of the street; an excavated pit that sank below the level of the road, guarded by a booth and a barrier. Several cars were positioned around the uneven ground. Shadows shifted within them. Other figures loitered by the old UCH building. Badness radiated from all corners.
There was the muffled sound of a heavy iron gate and the jolt and shudder of a mechanism. More metallic squeals and thuds. A yellow skip was wheeled into the street from a side door. Almost instantly, a crowd gathered around the large bin, jostling for position. A whispered roar. She could practically feel the heat of their need. Sarah saw it as a good diversion and was readying herself for a sprint past them so that she could approach the hospital from the junction of Gordon Street and Euston Road, when she heard footsteps, lots of them, in the direction she had arrived from. Her distraction was such that she almost lost balance and fell from the kerb into the road. She recovered and stood trembling by the wall, her hands flat against it, growing colder against the cement while she waited for something to develop.
A hundred or so figures turned into the road and she saw she would have to approach the crowd at the skip or risk walking against this gang as they marched towards her. She began to inch her way towards the skip, wondering if she could pass herself off as one of them. She pulled the knife from her pocket. The handle felt alien to her grip, suddenly too slippery. She felt her mouth become stripped of fluid, her tongue turning within it like a loose pebble in the drum of a washing machine. As she gained ground on the rabble, she saw that the skip bore red letters that she couldn’t quite read. She saw an S and an A. She saw the word CAUTION. She saw the interlinked circles of a biohazard sign. A woman broke clear of the pack and staggered to one side, her hands wet, holding her face. Holding something to her face. Eating.
The gang behind her were almost upon her. Sarah knew she stuck out, was too timid, too undecided. She’d be unmasked within seconds. She launched herself away from the wall and ran towards the skip. She began yelling, as the others were, and jutted out her hands, being careful to conceal the knife in her palm. The jag of adrenaline helped her overcome the stifling fear of attack; being able to scream when the last half hour had been a suffocatingly quiet odyssey was relief of a kind too. She rammed herself into the thick of it, finding liberation in being able to muscle up against the monsters instead of shying away from them. Her confidence escalated, despite the squirm of their bodies against hers. A man appeared over the lip of the skip and handed out fistfuls of sealed yellow bags and small yellow buckets. These were received joyously, and cracked and torn open with the zeal of children being handed a tub of sweets. One of them was slapped into Sarah’s hand with enough force to make her cry out. She dropped it when she saw what the rest of the words on the side of the skip said: MEDICAL SHARPS – DISPOSE OF PROPERLY.
People around her were ramming spent syringes into their mouths and sucking whatever juices they could from them. Others gnawed dried blood from broken glass vials and test tubes. Sarah backed away, checking her hand to see that the skin had not suffered a needle-stick injury.
Then she heard someone say: ‘She’s not with us.’
Sarah abruptly turned and walked away, knowing that she had been discovered. She felt her skin tighten under the heat of dozens of eyes. Quiet descended. She knew she was being assessed. She knew that to look back at them was to give herself away. They weren’t sure about her. They were waiting for her to run, or throw a nervous glance. She forced herself to walk steadily. A man hurried out from behind a plastic curtain in the delivery bay at the back of the hospital. He had his lips clamped to a slashed blood bag and was trying to guzzle the contents before whoever was behind him caught up. More bags were clutched in his other hand; they shook and sloshed like strange octopoid creatures. Cries rang out from around the skip. Here was a feast. The scraps were discarded; leather hit tarmac at pace.
Sarah put her head down and ran as three men crashed out from the delivery bay in pursuit of the bloodsucker. She risked assessing the scene behind her as she reached the corner of the street; she had been forgotten in favour of the dense red booty now being wrestled from its owner, who was sitting on the floor, his eyes wide and glazed, like a sated drunk.
No more distractions, she thought. No more ifs and maybes. Be certain. Focus. Stay alive.
She stole along Euston Road like something borne on the breeze. She could hear terrible sounds – snapping, splintering, liquid half-cries – coming up from the underpass but made no detour to explore further. The great road was dead in either direction, off towards the Westway or back towards King’s Cross. Snatches of wild sound volleyed into the desertion. She heard mad laughter and screams in the direction of Hampstead Road.
There were no security guards on the doors, no nurses or porters or patients hurrying or strolling around the substantial entrance hall. Windows were cracked and smashed. A computer terminal was so much plastic rain across the floor. A wheelchair lay buckled on its side, one wheel turning slowly. A piece of gauze with a cloudy red centre hung from a piece of timber that had smashed through a wall. On the reception desk a partially eaten boy had been discarded; even the tongue lolling from his mouth had a chunk bitten out of it.
Okay, Sarah thought. You became inured to it after a while. After a while it was just a part of the scenery. You took it in, you processed it, you moved on.
She walked corridors that didn’t seem to have an end, past doors bearing signs she didn’t understand. The high, clinical reek of hospitals bleached her nostrils. Every turn she made was another into the unknown; she did not know what she was going to come up against. She poked her head into a staff room with a nurse sitting primly on a sofa with a pen and a book of wordsearch puzzles. The mug next to her still had steam curling off it. The nurse was in some kind of catatonic state, her face grey, fixed upon the puzzle grids as if she were determined not to allow what she was witnessing around her spoil her tea break. Sarah could not rouse her. She was stone.
She found toilets that she could not fully open the doors to. She pushed a piece of broken mirror in through the narrow gap she had managed to create and saw a mountain of bodies piled up just behind it. None were moving. She had to swallow hard against a deranged conviction that Claire was at the bottom of that heap, even though she knew her daughter was snoozing fitfully on the sofa back at Tina’s flat. It was the curse of being a parent: visions of hell, even while your children were sitting happily nearby. You trim a hedge with shears and imagine a playful hand slip between the blades at the moment they hack shut; you reverse the car out of the drive and feel the sludge of a tiny body trapped beneath the wheels. All of it fantasy, all of it fuelled by worry. She supposed it was a good thing, this panic button always being on. It meant you were always on the look-out for potential hazards, but it made for an exhausting life. Those bodies had horrified her, but there was no choice but to go on. She had to do something.
It was the start of a long night. A night of a dozen hospitals. The doctors, the surgeons, the cleaners and receptionists were all gone or all dead. It became attritional. She would not be beaten by what was obvious. She would not return to Tina’s flat, to her daughter, without her knight in shining armour. Nor would she accept that she was reluctant to return to the responsibility she bore, that she was looking for an end to her life tonight. No, that wasn’t it. No.
She travelled on foot and by the end of it, as the weak sun turned the roofs liquid white, she found herself close to collapse. She was in the car park of the Chelsea and Westminster hospital on the Fulham Road, with no knowledge of how she had arrived. She had seen so much depravity that it had her questioning her motives. If this was normality, then what was she doing? Accept it and assimilate. Death was on the cards anyway; it just meant that living this way would bring it along a bit quicker. She was about to head back to the city centre when she decided to have one last look around. It would be just her luck to throw in the towel now while a convention of the best lump surgeons in the world were having tea and biscuits inside.
More of the same. It was wallpaper. It was background. She looked through the sprays of red and the jagged ends of bone. She had learned early on not to hurry along the corridors lest she slip in some slick of serous fluid or another. As with all the other hospitals, she found more people the deeper she proceeded. Some were dead. Some of them were doctors, the knowledge she craved trapped for ever inside their cold heads. There were further signs that the devastation had occurred recently. And there were fresh atrocities. She stumbled upon a ward of twelve lifeless in-patients that had been feasted on while they drowsed, splayed ribs in their opened chests like some unspeakable attempt at culinary presentation. Each had been stabbed violently in the arms and legs first, the blood that had flowed from the lesions showing that the victims were alive at that time, before any fatal wound was inflicted. These poor people had been attacked in their beds by things that wanted them to suffer in extreme agony before they were killed. Who would do that? Why would they do that?
A shadow moved. ‘It’s because their hearts will taste sweeter.’
Sarah screamed.
‘Violent death,’ he said, tipping his head in the direction of the corpses. ‘The liver releases a great whack of sugar to help the fight for life. The liver doesn’t know it’s inside a sick body lying in a hospital bed pissing through a catheter. It’s thinking fight or flight. It’s thinking, “I don’t want to die, here … have some jungle juice and let’s get the fuck away”. But if the victim dies quickly, the sugar stays inside the stopped heart. Bingo. Supper time.’
‘Are you a doctor?’
‘No.’
‘Then stay away from me.’
‘You won’t live.’
‘I think I’ll have at least a say in the matter,’ she said. ‘Just fuck off. I’m doing fine. I’ve got a knife.’
‘I’ll get you a fork and you can eat yourself before any of the nutjobs in here do it for you. I can help. Really, I can.’
Sarah maintained the distance between them as the shadow moved deeper into the room. She could hear the rasp of its breathing. He was not in good shape. ‘You don’t sound in a fit enough state to help yourself, never mind anybody else.’
‘Appearances can be deceiving,’ he said.
‘Tell me about it. You might have a belly full of these poor bastards for all I know.’
‘I’ve resisted that,’ he said, forcefully. She believed him. She couldn’t understand why, having not even seen his face so far, but she believed him nonetheless. ‘I am like them, but I’m not like them. I helped them. Unwittingly, unwillingly. Occasionally it felt as though I was on their side. But I’m not. I know I’m not.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Bo. Bo Mulvey.’
‘Why are you here?’
He moved towards her and again she stepped back. Footsteps outside the ward. Hard and fast. Many.
‘I’m here because I did a silly thing,’ he said. He showed her his heavily bandaged hand. The dressing was streaked with oil and blood and grime. But then so was the rest of him. His hair was lank, greasy. His skin was grey and tired, loose on his obvious bones, and painfully thin. Sarah thought that if she touched him, her finger might poke through. ‘I’ve been searching the city for painkillers. The heavy-duty stuff. But there’s not a lot of it left.’
‘You did that to yourself?’
He nodded. ‘I did it to stop myself … turning. I’m not sure it’s worked.’ He turned his head away from her. The footsteps were joined by hollers and whoops, the sound of bottles smashing and, shockingly, the sound of gunfire.
‘I’m leaving,’ he said. ‘You can come with me if you want to. But make up your mind quick. I don’t want to die here.’
‘I can’t leave. I’m trying to find a doctor.’
He laughed.
‘Fuck you,’ she spat, and jabbed the knife in his direction.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Good luck.’
He moved past her and she smelled how ripe he was, how death was trying to bring him down if only it could get a grip on him. Without thinking she reached out a hand and grabbed his jacket. She said, ‘Help me.’
‘We have to leave,’ he said. ‘Now.’
‘Help me find someone. A paramedic. A surgeon. A fucking ambulance driver. Do that and I’ll put the knife away. I’ll trust you.’
‘What makes you think I need your trust?’
‘You’re crying,’ she said.
He raised his hands and batted at his cheeks, shocked by the tears.
‘You fighting against this. It’s a lonely job, yes? I’m right?’
Bo couldn’t speak. He wanted to run. He wanted to get outside and keep running until his lungs combusted. But the gutsy blonde with the knife and the attitude had rattled him. And he liked it. It gave him the nudge he needed, the hand on the back of the head forcing him to look in a direction he had been ignoring for too long. She seemed to understand him, without him needing to open his mouth. He had missed that in a person. There was a way out of this that did not involve the extreme measures he was drifting towards.
‘There are no doctors,’ he said. ‘They were targeted. When you’re trying to wipe out a race, you don’t want anybody around who’s useful at patching people up again.’ He took a risk and grabbed her elbow, steered her into the corridor away from the approaching rabble. She allowed him to lead her, folding the knife into her pocket.
‘I think I realised that hours ago,’ she said.
‘Then why are you here?’
‘My daughter needs help. What do I do? Give up? You don’t have kids, do you?’
‘No.’
‘Well, take it from me. You don’t give up. Hospitals were the only place I could go.’
Bo made a noise that might have been laughter or bafflement but came out like a cough from a sick man. ‘This isn’t a hospital any more,’ he said. ‘This is a fast-food restaurant.’
‘I have to try.’
‘If there’s anybody here who can help you, they’re dead. Understand that. We need to get moving.’
She pulled clear of him. ‘Let’s get one thing clear, bucko,’ she said. ‘I don’t take orders.’
‘You do now,’ he hissed, clamping his good hand over her mouth and pulling her through a set of swing doors into the stairwell. A doctor was sprawled over the edge of the upper landing. Her head had been chiselled open for the goodies inside. It was a neat operation; the body’s white coat was spotless, the brain scooped out with minimum fuss, like a scrupulous breakfaster at a lightly boiled egg.
Bo frowned hard at Sarah when she began trying to bite his fingers. He put a foot to the door to prevent it closing completely, and through the half-inch gap that remained she watched as a jumble of shadow moved stealthily into view. She slackened against him as the shadows resolved themselves into three figures. Their heads were shaved, dyed red.
‘What?’ she mouthed against his skin.
He pulled her back. The door closed, but not before they noticed the lead figure halt and swing his head their way, his mouth dropping open like a badly packed tool bag.
‘Who was that?’ she whispered as Bo led her down the stone steps, her voice breathy as if they had just seen a cinema legend nonchalantly strolling along.
‘Someone I wish I didn’t know,’ he said. ‘Someone you certainly don’t want to know. Someone who wants me dead, and I’m not sure why. He’s going to have to get in a queue for that before long.’
‘Did he see us?’
‘I doubt it. He had his mouth open, though. He might have heard us. He might have smelled us.’
He paused at the landing and listened. Nothing.
‘I think we might be all right. Come on.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘Basement. We can get out at one of the refuse collection points.’
‘But that’s where they congregate. I saw them. It looks to me as if they’re after easy food.’
‘Everywhere is easy food now,’ he said. ‘We don’t have any good options available to us. Some of those things, they’re clever, adaptable, mean enough to get their meat wherever they want it. They’ll bring it down in the street if they can. Others are weaker and stupid. They’ll grub about in bins. They’re like us. That’s the problem, really.’
‘Who are they?
‘We can talk about that later.’
To the left, at the foot of the steps was a large locked door with a glass window. Through it Bo could see banks of switches and fuse boxes. To the right, the corridor led to a locked partition accessible by key card. The red light in the security housing glared at them. They stood looking at it for so long that Sarah believed it must change colour because of their interest in it.
‘Wait here,’ Bo said at last.
He was not gone for long but Sarah didn’t like the feeling his absence inspired. Before meeting him she had been alone. Now he was gone, she felt lonely. It bothered her that she should feel so different in such a short time. It was needling that she should be so fickle, when she had never dreamed she was that way inclined. Nick had helped, but his help was of the puppy-dog variety, there was always the feeling that he was waiting for his reward. This guy was driven, and that made her feel safer.
He returned with a big smile – which helped the parlous state of his face, but not much – and a key card.
‘Where did you find that?’ Sarah asked.
‘On the doctor with the open mind,’ he said, and swiped the plastic across the housing. Even after the light had turned green and a soft, pneumatic thunk heralded the release of the door, Sarah was convinced the red light was still showing, it burned in her memory so brightly, no longer a no entry indication but now more of a warning. They passed through the pharmacy, Bo smashing cabinets and stuffing his pockets with drugs – ‘There’s got to be something here that can do me right, no?’ – and on through another linking corridor to the mortuary.
‘Great,’ Sarah said.
Bo indicated to her to be quiet and used the card again on this second security mechanism. The door released itself. Refrigerated air flowed past him and tightened her arms. They moved through an admission and removal area into body reception. Beyond were stacked the storage fridges. Everything was covered in red handprints.
‘Oh my God,’ Sarah said, when she saw the bodies.
‘It’s okay, they’re dead.’
Sarah tugged at his leather jacket. ‘I’m sold on what you said about getting moving,’ she said. ‘Let’s go.’
But Bo was moving deeper into the room. His boots sloshed through shit and chemicals; the drainage gullies were blocked with body parts, hanks of hair, torn clothing. A woman was lying across a laminar flow table, her lower half gone, a grey spaghetti remaining. There was a partially sucked Polo mint in her gaping mouth. Three more bodies were drunkenly slouched against the wall, the eyes that remained in their faces opaque with death, or shock.
‘What are we doing here?’ Sarah asked. ‘You looking for a date?’
‘Weapons,’ Bo said. ‘Knives. I don’t know. Drills? Meathooks?’
‘Okay,’ Sarah said, happy for a task. She started on the drawers and immediately found a cleaver. ‘Some butcher’s shop this is.’
‘Bag it,’ Bo said. He put a cartilage knife and a couple of bone rongeurs and Austin chisels in his pocket along with a packet of circle-curved suture needles. ‘Bag it and take whatever else you can lay your hands on.’
They’d done a circuit of the mortuary and were heading for the door when the first heavy blow rang along the corridor.
‘Fuck,’ said Bo.
‘This was a trap,’ Sarah said. ‘You tricked me.’ She checked behind her but there was no exit. The windows were either as small as letter-boxes or secured by bolted steel bars. Another blow. The sound of glass cracking, of metal gritting, squealing as it was wrenched free.
Bo craned his neck. ‘There’s a dozen of them. Maybe more. They haven’t necessarily seen us.’
‘Fucking great,’ Sarah said. She felt close to tears. She felt hungry. ‘I haven’t necessarily shat my pants, but all these things … they’re on the cards, aren’t they?’
‘We hide,’ Bo said.
‘What? Where?’
‘The refrigerators.’
‘They’ll find us.’
‘If they’re looking for us.’
‘What else would they be doing?’
‘Same as they’re all doing,’ he said, bustling her towards the rear of the mortuary where nine great vacuum-locked doors stood. ‘Looking for food, scraps, whatever they can get.’
One of the bodies on the floor rolled over, spitting crimson sputum from his grey-blue lips. Bo tipped him back over on to his chest and jumped down hard on the nape of his neck. Sarah turned away when she saw his intent, but could not block out the deep, dense sound of bones crunching.
‘Come on,’ he gentled. ‘Come on.’
He threw open the first of the doors, indicating she should do the same. There were four drawers in each refrigerator; all of them were occupied. Something wasn’t right, but her mind was so fogged with fear she couldn’t pin it down.
‘Get in,’ Bo urged. He was clambering into a drawer that contained a child, a boy in his early teens who was so white he was almost indistinguishable from the hard plastic that contained him. More blows rained down on the security doors. She heard the door groaning as it came away from its hinges. She slid into the drawer, shutting her eyes to the figure that was already in there. She smelled of germicidal soap. She could almost believe she was lying in the dark with Claire, and that everything was all right. She closed her eyes and dragged the drawer back into its sheath, scrabbling with the door, pulling it behind her as the security entrance crashed free and the world was filled with footsteps and screams. The threat of imminent death was so great that she found it inside herself to reach out and hold the inflexible creature lying beside her. Who then shifted in the dark and said: ‘Do not scream.’