‘This is Saeed Khalid,’ Mohammed said, walking over to the main counter in the café. The young Arab gave Stephanie a blank look.
‘I’m Carmen and this is Jessica,’ Frank’s wife said, stepping up to shake Steph’s hand.
Steph turned to the gathering. ‘Okay, everyone. It seems you are the only survivors above the site of the missile attack.’
‘Is that what happened? A missile?’ Frank asked.
‘Yes. It was a terrorist attack. We do not yet know who perpetrated it, or why, but the top floors are cut off. Local emergency services are doing a fantastic job evacuating everyone below the impact site.’
‘But what about us?’ Saeed said, a nasty edge to his voice. ‘My father is a major shareholder in the company that owns this damned building. He will already know I’m trapped here. He will do something.’
‘Perhaps he will,’ Steph replied diplomatically. ‘But we cannot rely on it.’
‘So what are you going to do about it?’
Steph held the young Arab’s gaze and Saeed looked away.
‘We are doing all we can. My colleagues are in a rescue vehicle positioned above the roof. One of the team is working her way down through the rubble in a special machine to reach us and that will hopefully open a way up to the . . .’
‘She?’ Saeed interrupted.
‘Yes “she”. Do you have a problem with that?’
The man shrugged and walked off, shaking his head.
‘Don’t mean to be rude,’ Charlotte Emmington said softly, ‘but it does sound a bit of a long shot.’
‘Not really,’ Steph responded. ‘We’ve conducted missions like this before. But the fact is, there’s no other way out. I can’t take you down and until we clear the path up we can’t go higher than this level.’ She said nothing about the tower’s structural integrity. It would only cause panic and achieve nothing. She glanced at her watch, touched her wrist monitor and tried Chloe. As Charlotte went to ask a question, Steph raised a hand and spoke into her comms. ‘Chloe. Come in, Chloe. Are you receiving me?’
No reply. She tried again. Nothing. She turned to Charlotte.
‘So,’ the woman said. ‘What should we do now?’
‘We have to wait for the way to be cleared. In the meantime,’ and she turned to the group, ‘does anyone here have medical training?’
Jessica stepped forwards. ‘I’m an intern at MGH.’
‘Massachusetts General?’
‘Yes.’
Carmen looked at Jessica and then turned to her husband with a surprised expression. ‘Why didn’t you say?’
‘Complicated,’ Jessica replied and gave the older woman a weak smile. Looking back to Steph, she added, ‘How may I help?’
‘Right, well, I have a field med-kit that will get us started.’ She turned to the men in the group. ‘Could one or more of you search for some medicines, please? This is a mall after all. Just have to hope there’s a pharmacy on this level.’
‘There is,’ Abu replied. They all stared at him and he suddenly looked nervous. ‘It’s a few doors further on from Cloud Electrics. I saw it earlier.’
‘Perfect,’ Steph responded and ruffled the boy’s hair. ‘What would we do without you, Abu?’
The kid beamed.
‘I’ll go,’ Mohammed said and Frank stepped forwards with him.
‘Jessica, could you go too? I could get started with the med-kit. You’ll know what we need. We could work up a wishlist, yeah?’
The young American nodded. ‘Sure.’
It took only 10 minutes for the group to return with a shopping list of medical supplies. This included several boxes of bandages, antiseptic, antibiotics, painkillers, scissors, sterilising kits, steristrips and an inhaler for Carmen. Steph took off the Hopjet and placed it against the wall at the back of the café, then found her med-kit. Jessica began to set up a makeshift treatment area. Between them the two doctors triaged the survivors and then started patching them up.
There were no critical injuries. One of the women from the new group had a badly lacerated arm, a similar injury to Saeed’s. Steph sealed up both the woman and Saeed’s wounds with a wonder substance from the E-Force med-kit called SkinGloo. This, as its name implied, healed wounds without the need for stitches or even steristrips.
The other serious injury was a fractured cheekbone sustained by one of the men in the party. Steph injected him with fast-acting painkillers followed by an infusion of nanobots, tiny dedicated machines that would find their way to the wound site and begin to reconstruct tissue, deal with damaged cells and restore proper circulation. Using this system, the injured man’s face would be fully repaired within an hour.
The two women had everyone patched up within 15 min- utes and the café fell quiet. It was almost as though they had all agreed by mutual, subconscious consent that nothing could be done immediately and that they might as well get some rest. Steph tried Chloe again but the line was still dead.
‘You look all-in,’ she said, watching Jessica slump into a chair.
The girl glanced over to where some makeshift mattresses had been thrown together using tablecloths and cushions from the café’s sofas and armchairs. ‘Guess I am. It’s not been a typical morning, exactly. Usually by now I’d be onto about my tenth manicure.’ She gave Steph a wan smile.
‘So how did you end up doing that for a living?’
‘Oh, it’s not a career,’ Jessica laughed. ‘I’m travelling. Landed in Dubai three weeks ago. I was planning to move on next week.’
‘What about medical school?’
Jessica’s expression darkened. ‘I, um . . . decided to take some time off. Needed to sort myself out.’
‘Well, you know, Jessica, medical school has to be the most stressful years of your life. I almost gave up a dozen times.’
‘I had particular problems.’
Steph decided not to probe and just gave the girl a sympathetic look.
‘My, um, my parents were killed in a crash, three months ago.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry.’
Jessica raised her hands. ‘No, I don’t mind talking about it. I . . . I’ve been bottling it up, really. I thought by getting away from Boston, from my old life, I could escape from the memory. But there’s nowhere to run to. You can’t erase the past.’
‘You can always go back.’
‘Yes, MGH has been great. It’s just . . . I don’t know whether I want to practise medicine anymore.’
‘Really?’
‘My parents were brought into the ER of the hospital. I was on duty. The Chief Resident wouldn’t let me get involved, of course. But when Mum and Dad both died, I dunno, I sort of lost faith I guess. Up to then, I saw doctors as saviours and I wanted to dedicate my life to the profession. But . . .’
‘I understand,’ Steph said, placing a hand on Jessica’s arm. ‘I think it’s a perfectly natural reaction. And if you want my opinion, you did the right thing by getting away from it all. You can’t run away from the past but you can give yourself some breathing space, time to analyse, to really question your drives and what it is you want to do next.’ She looked up and saw a tear trickling down Jessica’s cheek. She was about to say something when her comms sounded.
‘Chloe? Thank God! What’s your status?’
‘I’ve broken through to the mezzanine just above 199. I can see the door ahead.’
‘We’re in a café to the north of the emergency stairway.’
‘See you in a few minutes.’
Steph looked back into Jessica’s face. ‘That was my colleague. She’s coming down to 199 in what we call a Cage. It’s a great machine that can shrug off anything you can throw at it.’
Jessica raised her eyebrows. ‘So she’s opened up a way to the roof?’
‘Hopefully.’ Steph stood up, shuffled around the table and took two steps towards the dozen survivors grouped together on the other side of the café.
BOOM.
The room shook. A shockwave crashed through the café from the mall. A terrible roar rattled the room. Steph shot a glance upwards just as a chunk of concrete about a metre square ripped away from the ceiling. It span through the air and smashed into thousands of pieces on the marble floor.