Chapter TwoStabilise

The first thing that came down the corridor was a wheelchair, on its own, rolling slowly towards us with nobody in it.

The second thing was the man chasing it.

He was big, in a black security fleece with HARBOUR GENERAL across the back, and he was running the way big men run when they've stopped caring how it looks. Behind him, filling the corridor from wall to wall, came something that had probably been a cleaning trolley once. Now it had legs. Too many of them, thin and jointed like a crab's, clattering on the lino, and a bucket for a body that sloshed with something dark.

"Back in the ambulance," I said to Sam. "Now. Lock the door. Don't open it for anyone who isn't me."

"How will I know it's you?"

"I'll be apologising."

He went. I heard the lock click. Jonah was still in there, breathing slow and even on the stretcher, which meant there were two people I could not let anything get past me to. That made it simpler. I like simple.

I did not like the trolley.

The security guard skidded round the corner into the bay, saw me, and did a visible double take. "Are you real?"

"I'm a paramedic," I said, which wasn't an answer.

"Run," he said, which was.

The trolley-thing came round the corner after him and swung one of its legs like a scythe. The guard tried to duck. He was too slow, or too big, or both. The leg hooked in and caught him high on the inside of the thigh, and he went down hard.

I heard him shout. I saw the blood. A lot of it, fast and bright, the kind that comes in spurts.

Arterial.

The list started in my head. It always does. You are a three-week paramedic. You have a pair of scissors. That thing has eight legs and a bucket. This is not a scenario they covered. You're going to freeze, you're going to watch him bleed out, you're going to.

Just looked, from the floor, with his hand clamped over the top of his leg and his face going grey.

The list stopped.

"Okay," I said, and ran at the trolley.

---

That makes it sound braver than it was. What I actually did was grab a fire extinguisher off the wall on the way past, because it was red and heavy and it was there, and pull the pin while I ran, and point it at the bucket.

It turns out cleaning-trolley monsters do not enjoy a face full of carbon dioxide. The whole thing jerked back, legs scrabbling, and blundered sideways into the wall. I kept spraying until the extinguisher coughed and died, and then I threw it, which was pointless but felt nice, and dropped to my knees next to the guard.

"Hi," I said. "I'm Mo. What's your name?"

"Dez." His teeth were gritted. "It's in my leg."

"I can see that. You've been very brave and very loud. I'm going to touch you now and it's going to hurt and I'm sorry."

The wound was high on the inside of his thigh, deep, pumping. Femoral, or close enough that the difference didn't matter. I've seen this exactly once before, on a training mannequin called Gerald, and Gerald died. You can't tourniquet that high. You pack it and you press it and you pray.

I packed it with everything I had in my pockets, gauze and a folded dressing and finally, horribly, the corner of my own sleeve. Then I put both hands on it and leaned.

Dez made a noise I'm not going to write down.

"I know," I said. "I know, I know. You're doing so well. Talk to me. What's the worst job you've ever had?"

"This one," he managed.

"Fair."

The warmth came again. It started in my chest this time and ran down both arms like water, hotter than in the ambulance, and I felt it pour into him through my hands. Under my palms, the pumping slowed. Faltered. Stopped.

Behind me, I heard legs on lino.

The trolley-thing had recovered. It was coming back, slower now, more careful, bucket sloshing. I didn't let go. I couldn't. If I lifted my hands now, everything I'd done would come apart, and the warmth wasn't finished.

"Mo," Dez said, looking past me. "Mo."

"I know."

"It's right behind you."

"I know. I'm busy."

Something hissed through the air over my head. A ball of fire the size of a grapefruit smacked into the trolley-thing's bucket and burst. There was a sound like a chip pan going up. The thing screamed, a metallic screech, and folded up on itself, legs curling in like a dead spider's, and lay smoking on the floor.

A teenage girl was standing in the doorway to the main corridor, in a hospital gown and a pair of fluffy pink slippers, with one hand held out in front of her. The hand was still smoking.

"Oh my God," she said. "That worked. That actually worked."

Under my palms, the last of the warmth went out of my hands and into Dez, and the System came back.

[Triage Warden · Lv 3 · Ember Tier]
+40 XP: Life Stabilised (Critical) · Kills: +0
Next: Lv 4 at 90 XP

Two levels. For one man. I thought about how much one kill had been worth in the ambulance and did the maths, and I'm not good at maths, but even I could see what the System wanted from me.

Not fighting. Saving.

And saving meant I'd always have to be where the danger was.

"Cool," I said faintly. "Great. Love that for me."

---

The girl's name was Priya. She was sixteen, in for a broken wrist and a night of observation after falling off a wall she would not explain, and she had chosen a combat class within one second of being offered it.

"Pyromancer," she said, flexing her fingers. Little sparks danced along the knuckles of her good hand. "Obviously. It's the best damage-per-second class in basically every game ever made. You chose healer?"

"I chose not to let a nine-year-old bleed to death," I said. "Healer chose me."

"Support classes are so slept on." She considered me. "You'll be really useful in a party."

"Thank you?"

"No, I mean it. Damage dealers are ten a penny. Everyone wants to hit things. Nobody wants to keep the people hitting things alive." She shrugged. "That's how it works in games. The System seems to like games."

That was as close to a manual as we were going to get, and I took it.

Dez could stand, just about. The wound under my packing had closed into something that looked days old, angry and pink but sealed. He leaned on the wall and on me and on Priya's good shoulder, in rotation, and kept looking at his leg like it belonged to someone else. Over his head, now that I thought to look, it said Dez Haldane · Bulwark · Lv 1. He'd picked it while he was bleeding on the bay floor, he told me, because the picture was a door.

"That should have killed me," he said.

"It nearly did," I said. "Please don't do it again. I've only got one sleeve left."

He looked at me then, a long, level look. He had the face of a man who'd spent twenty years on doors, nightclubs first and then this hospital, deciding who got in. "Thanks," he said. Just that. It was enough.

I went back for Sam and Jonah.

Sam opened the ambulance door before I'd finished saying sorry, which meant he'd been watching through the window, which meant he'd seen the trolley, which I was going to have to deal with at some point. Jonah was sitting up on the stretcher, holding his head and swearing quietly and fluently in a way I found very comforting.

"There's a dead thing in the bay," he said. "And a dead thing on Calder Street, apparently. Sam's been telling me. Mo, what the hell?"

"I'll explain later," I said. "I don't know anything, so it'll be a short explanation. Can you walk?"

"I can stagger."

"Staggering's fine. Staggering's great."

He swung his legs off the stretcher and stopped, looking at the empty windscreen, then at the glass on the seats, then at me.

"You drove," he said.

"I did."

"Medic Fourteen."

"I know. I clipped a bollard on Marsh Road, and I think the wing mirror's gone, and I definitely went through a red light, but in fairness all the lights were red, and also the windscreen was already gone before I started, so that one's not on me."

Jonah studied me. Then he put one big hand on top of my head, the way you'd pat a dog that had done something unexpectedly clever, and left it there for a second.

"Well done, rookie," he said. "Next time, mind the bollard."

It was the nicest thing anyone had said to me in three weeks. I had to look away so he wouldn't see my face.

He staggered. My shoulder, the one the hound had slammed into the cabinet, picked that moment to remind me it existed when I took his weight. Between Dez, Jonah and me, we had one and a half working adults and a lot of limping. Priya and Sam walked in the middle. Sam had attached himself to the hem of my jacket and wasn't letting go, and I didn't make him.

---

The emergency department was empty.

Not cleared. Empty. The bays had their curtains half drawn and the beds were made. A coffee cup sat on the nurses' station with steam still coming off it. The screens over every bay showed a flat blue nothing. On the big wall display where the waiting times usually go, the System had written, in that plain white font, Floor One: Wards 1 to 4. Boss location: Children's Wing. I didn't like that last part, and I liked it even less the longer I looked at it.

"Where is everyone?" Dez said. "There were twenty staff on tonight. More."

Nobody answered him.

We heard the first patient before we saw her: a thin, steady moaning from the side room off Ward 1. Inside, an old woman was sitting up in bed with her drip pulled half out and her arm bleeding. There was a thing like a grey jellyfish on the ceiling above her, trailing filaments, and every time it brushed her she flinched and the bleeding got worse.

"Priya," I said.

"On it."

She lit it up. It dropped and fizzled on the floor like a wet firework. I was already at the bed, pressing gauze over the drip site, telling the woman, whose name was Mrs Adeyemi and who wanted me to know she'd been a ward sister here for thirty years and the hygiene standards had slipped, that she was going to be fine.

"I'm sure I am," she said, "but who are you?"

"Mo. Paramedic. Sorry."

"What are you apologising for?"

"Everything, mostly."

She snorted. Her bleeding stopped. A small +10 floated up off my hand and faded, and I ignored it, because Mrs Adeyemi was asking for her slippers.

Jonah set up at the nurses' station with Sam and a pile of patient notes, because his head was still too bad to stand for long, and read out names and bed numbers so we'd know who to look for. Most of the names belonged to empty beds.

Ward 1 had one more. A young man with his leg in traction had tried to get under his own bed when the lights changed and had torn the pin site open doing it. He was very embarrassed about this. He was also bleeding into the sheets, steadily, while three jellyfish-things drifted down from the ceiling tiles towards the smell of it.

Priya got two. The third dropped onto Dez's back.

I saw the filaments go into his neck and saw his knees start to go, and then Dez, who had been nearly dead forty minutes earlier, reached over his own shoulder, grabbed the thing in a pillowcase like a man bagging a cat, and threw it out of the window. The glass broke. The pillowcase went with it. I will remember that for the rest of my life.

"Leg," Dez said, pointing at the traction man, and sat down on the floor to have a quiet moment.

I did the leg. Another small +10 came and went.

Ward 2 was worse. Two elderly brothers had barricaded themselves into the bathroom with a commode, and something with a lot of fingers was trying to get in. It had come out of the sluice room. I didn't look at it closely. It had one brother's wrist through the gap in the door when we got there, and it was pulling, and the brother on the other side was pulling back and shouting what I'm fairly sure was the Lord's Prayer.

Priya set the thing on fire. It let go. It ran, if that's the word, burning, down the corridor, and Dez shut the fire doors on it.

The brothers wouldn't open up until Dez showed them his badge through the gap. When they did, one had a wrist cut to the bone by those fingers and the other had a gash on his scalp from the commode. I did both. Two more small numbers floated up. I didn't watch them, but I felt the last one go in, a small click behind my ribs, like a seatbelt fastening. Level four, probably. It didn't seem like the moment to check.

Four people. Out of a hospital that should have had hundreds.

"Where are the rest?" I said, mostly to myself. We were standing in the corridor between Ward 2 and the stairwell. The lights flickered. Somewhere above us, something heavy was being dragged across a floor.

"Upstairs, maybe," Priya said. "Floors in games go up. You clear one, you get the next."

"There's only one floor on the sign."

"Then they're somewhere on this floor." She chewed her lip. "Somewhere we haven't been yet."

We all looked at the corridor sign. Arrows pointing left and right, painted in the hospital's cheerful primary colours. Wards 3 and 4 to the left. The lifts straight on. And to the right, past a set of double doors decorated with painted balloons and cartoon animals, the Children's Wing.

The balloons on the doors had gone grey.

"I don't like that," Dez said.

"Me neither," I said.

"We should secure what we've got first," Jonah said from behind us. He'd come up quietly, Sam at his side. He looked better. Paler, but steady, and his voice had gone back to its one calm setting. "Get everyone in one room. Barricade it. Then decide."

He was right. He's always right. It's annoying.

"Okay," I said. "Ward 2. The big bay. Everyone in there."

We got the four patients into the big bay on Ward 2, with Mrs Adeyemi organising everyone as if it was a normal shift and she'd been put in charge. Dez wedged a bed against the door. Priya sat by it, sparks ready, watching the corridor through the glass for anything with fingers.

Sam found me at the window.

"Are we safe now?" he asked.

I looked at him. He'd been so good. He'd done everything I'd asked. He hadn't cried once, which worried me more than if he had.

"Safer," I said. "Safer than we were. That's the best I can do right now. Is that okay?"

He thought about it. "Okay."

"How's the leg?"

"It doesn't even itch."

"Good. Show-off."

He almost smiled.

That was when the scream came.

It was high and thin and very young, and it came from the right, from past the grey balloons. A child. Somewhere in the Children's Wing, a child was screaming, and then the scream cut off, and the silence after it was worse.

Every head in the bay came up.

"Mo," Dez said quietly.

"I know."

The PA crackled overhead. The soft, kind voice didn't speak this time. It sang.

It was a lullaby. I knew it. Everyone knows it, the one about the baby and the treetop and the bough. She sang it slowly and sweetly, and she sang it wrong. When she got to the part where the cradle falls, she stopped. Just stopped, and breathed, and started again from the beginning.

Sam's fingers closed on my jacket.

"That's her," he whispered. "Isn't it? The Matron."

I was already standing up.