Chapter 6 of 35 · Free
Chapter SixConvoy
The first Raker landed on the ambulance roof while I was still counting children.
"Fourteen, fifteen..." Thump. The whole of Medic Fourteen rocked on its springs. Something with long grey arms and a face like a folded umbrella swung down over the empty windscreen, upside down, and looked at Jonah in the driver's seat.
Jonah looked back at it.
"No," he said, and put his foot down.
We were in the Harbour General car park, at half past eight on a grey Tuesday morning, and the plan had been to walk. That was the whole plan. Seventeen children, four patients from Ward 2, Rook's crew, Mrs Adeyemi in her cardigan, and Medic Fourteen at the front at walking pace with Jonah driving and the slowest patients on the stretcher. Gale Street police station was a mile and a half away. At the speed of whoever's slowest, Rook had said, and he'd meant it.
Then the Rakers came off the multistorey.
Medic Fourteen lurched forward ten metres and stopped dead. The Raker flew off the roof, hit the tarmac, rolled, and got up. Three more were dropping off the top level of the car park behind it, unfolding as they fell, all arms. Above each of them, small and white, floated Raker, Level 4.
"Kids in the middle!" I shouted. "Middle, middle, hold hands, don't let go!"
Seventeen children did what I said, which has never happened to anyone in the history of children. Lily grabbed Sam. Sam grabbed a boy in dinosaur pyjamas. Mrs Adeyemi stood at the front of them like a lollipop lady with her arms out.
Rook was already moving. So were Tash and Marcus, the three of them closing on the nearest Raker in a triangle like they'd practised it, and maybe they had. Priya stepped up on the ambulance bumper and set the second one alight. Kieran went for the third with his knives.
The fourth went for me.
I didn't freeze. I want that written down somewhere. I thought about freezing, and the list started, and then the Raker swung one of those long arms at my head and I simply wasn't there any more. I'd ducked behind the open back door of the ambulance before I knew I'd moved. The arm hit the door with a clang that left a dent the size of a dinner plate.
"Sorry," I said to the door.
Dez hit the Raker with a fire extinguisher. It seemed to be our thing now.
It took four minutes. Four minutes is long, in a fight. Tash took a claw across the ribs that opened her hi-vis and the shirt underneath and the skin under that. Rook pulled her back by the collar and dropped her at my feet without a word, the way you'd drop off a parcel.
I knelt. I pressed. That was all it needed: a long, deep cut, bleeding hard, but nothing I couldn't close with my hands. No wave, no numbness. Just the job. A small +20 floated up and faded, and under it, in smaller letters, the word held.
I was getting used to that word. Since the Children's Wing, every number I earned went into a pot I couldn't touch. Five hundred and something, the System had said, waiting for Iron Tier. Priya said it was like being paid in a currency from a country that didn't exist yet.
"Cheers, Medic," Tash said, sitting up and looking at her ribs. She sounded annoyed, like I'd cleaned her car without asking.
"Any time," I said. "Please don't make it any time."
Everyone was alive. Everyone was standing. We counted the children again. Seventeen. We counted the patients. Four. Jonah leaned out of the empty windscreen and gave me a thumbs up that was trying very hard to look casual.
Rook came back wiping grey stuff off his sledgehammer.
"That's how it's going to be," he said, to me. "All the way. They come off the roofs and they come out of the drains, and every time we stop, more of them hear us."
"Then we don't stop," I said.
"We'll have to stop. You'll make us."
I didn't argue. He wasn't wrong.
He wasn't wrong on Marsh Road, either.
It was the same road I'd driven up five hours earlier with no windscreen and a concussed partner. In daylight it looked worse. The car on its side outside the pharmacy was still there, but the horn had finally stopped. The bus with its doors open was still there, and so was nobody. Every shop window was broken. Every third streetlight had been bent over at the top, like a flower someone had stepped on.
Halfway down, we heard the knocking.
It came from a little red hatchback that had been crushed against a lamppost, its roof folded in like a drinks can. Someone inside was banging on the glass. Not hard. Steady, tired, like someone who'd been at it for hours and had stopped expecting anyone to come.
I was already walking towards it.
"Okafor," Rook said.
"I know."
"We said we don't stop."
"I know. I'm stopping anyway. You can go ahead without me if you want." I didn't look back. "I'm not going to tell you you're wrong. I'm just not going to walk past."
There was a pause behind me. Then Rook said, flat as a pavement, "Tash, Marcus. Watch the roofs. Two minutes."
Dez was already beside me. He always was.
There was a woman in the driver's seat, maybe thirty, with blood all down one side of her face and her legs trapped under the folded dashboard. In the back, strapped into a booster seat, was a boy of about five. He wasn't crying. He was holding his mum's hand through the gap between the seats, and he looked at me through the window with the same polite calm Sam had had in the ambulance, and that, more than anything, made my throat close.
"Hi," I said through the glass. "I'm Mo. I'm a paramedic. We're going to get you out."
"Leo first," the woman said. Her voice was thick. "Please. Get Leo first."
"Both of you," I said. "That's a rule. I just made it."
The rear door wouldn't open. Dez fixed that by tearing it off. I'm not exaggerating. He put both hands in the gap and pulled, and something in the hinge gave with a scream of metal, and he set the door down on the pavement and looked faintly embarrassed about it. Five hours ago he'd been a security guard. Now the plate over his head said Bulwark · Lv 6, and apparently that meant doors were optional.
Leo came out easily. He had a cut on his forehead and a seatbelt bruise across his chest, and he was breathing fine, and when I passed him to Kieran he said "thank you" like he'd been brought up properly.
His mum was harder.
Her name was Hana. The dashboard had come down across her thighs, and when Dez braced his shoulder against it and lifted, I saw why she'd stopped banging hard. Her left leg was bent where legs don't bend, and she'd been bleeding slowly into the footwell for hours. Now it was coming fast and dark. Her lips were the colour of putty.
"Hana," I said. "Look at me. Not the leg. Me."
Then I put both hands on her thigh above the break and held.
Pressure Point isn't for this. A crushed femur, blood loss for hours, shock. That's a Critical, and a Critical needs more than one point. So I did what I'd done with Dez on the ward floor and thought about all of it at once, and held it, and felt Stem the Tide go out of me and into her, and felt my fingers go numb.
It held. She stopped dying. Her lips went from putty to something closer to pink. A small +40 floated up off my hands. Held.
But she didn't stop hurting, and her leg was still broken, and now my arms were dead to the wrist.
"Splint," I said. "Dez, we need a splint and a carry. I can't lift her. I can't feel my hands."
"How long?"
"Ten minutes. Maybe twenty."
He didn't ask what that meant for the rest of the walk. He just went to find a splint.
We used a broom handle from the pharmacy and three of Mrs Adeyemi's cardigans. Hana went on the stretcher in Medic Fourteen, and the man from traction on Ward 2 gave up his place without being asked and walked the rest of the way on crutches, on the leg I'd been told was nearly mended.
Leo walked beside the ambulance holding Sam's hand. Sam was explaining things to him in a low, serious voice. I heard the words paramedic, magic and don't look at the roofs.
Two minutes, Rook had said. It had been eleven.
I walked beside the driver's door for a while after that, because my hands were useless and I didn't want anyone to see me shaking them out.
"You all right?" Jonah said, through the hole where his windscreen used to be.
"My arms have gone to sleep."
"That's the price, is it? For the big one?"
"I think so. It comes back." I flexed my fingers. Nothing. "Mostly."
He drove in silence for a bit, at four miles an hour, steering round a pram somebody had left in the middle of the road.
"Twenty-six years," he said eventually, "I've been telling rookies the same thing. You can't save everyone, so don't try. Pick the ones you can and get them to hospital. It's the only way you last." He glanced at me. "You're going to try, aren't you? All of them."
"I don't know how not to."
"No," he said. "I didn't think you did." He didn't sound angry. He sounded tired, and something else I couldn't name. "Then I'd better keep driving, hadn't I."
It wasn't permission. It was better than permission.
He rubbed his temple, where the door frame had caught him at three in the morning, and squinted at the roofs as if they'd gone slightly out of focus.
The Rakers found us twice more before Gale Street.
The first time was at the junction with Ash Lane, where a pack of them came out of a burst water main like rats out of a pipe. Priya dealt with that, mostly. She'd stopped throwing everything she had in one go and started throwing short, careful bursts, and she'd started calling out where she was going to throw before she did it, so nobody walked into it. Somewhere between the Children's Wing and Ash Lane, she'd stopped playing a game.
The second time was outside the police station itself.
Gale Street station is a squat brick building with a blue lamp over the door and, as of that morning, a barricade of three wheelie bins, a burnt-out car and a large amount of office furniture across the front. There were people on the roof, armed with what looked like table legs. One of them shouted "Guv!" when Rook came round the corner, and someone started dragging a filing cabinet out of the way. Rook's two officers, Hale and Mensah, went up onto that roof within the hour, and that was where they stayed for most of the week.
That was when the last Raker came off the roof of the chip shop across the road and landed on the officer pulling the filing cabinet.
I was closest. Not because I was brave, but because I'd been at the front with Jonah, talking him through a tight turn. The Raker had its arms round the officer's shoulders and its folded face pressed to his neck, and I heard a wet sound I'm still not going to describe.
I couldn't use my hands. They were still dead from Hana, two pale things on the ends of my arms.
So I kicked it. Hard, in the side of its folded head, with my work boots. It's not technique. It's panic and steel toecaps. The Raker let go and turned on me, and Rook's sledgehammer came down on it from behind, and that was that.
The officer was on the ground with two neat rows of holes in his neck, bleeding into the gutter. He was young. Younger than me.
I knelt. My hands were still mostly dead, but the feeling was coming back now, in hot, prickling waves, like when you've slept on your arm. I pressed them flat on either side of his neck anyway. It hurt. It hurt so much I made a noise. But there was just enough of me left for Pressure Point, one point at a time, and I closed the first row of holes and then the second.
+20. Held.
The officer stared up at me. "Who the hell are you?"
"Mo," I said. "Paramedic. Sorry about the kick. Not you. Him."
He started to laugh, a little hysterically. "You're the one off the radio. From Harbour General."
Inside, Gale Street smelt of burnt toast and too many people.
There were forty-three of them, counting the officers. The custody suite was full of blankets. The front desk had become a kitchen. Someone had made a children's corner out of a stack of lost-property teddy bears, and seventeen children walked straight into it and sat down, as though they'd agreed on it beforehand.
Mrs Adeyemi took one look at the canteen and announced that it was now a ward. Nobody argued. Within ten minutes she had Hana on a table, the man on crutches on a sofa and two volunteers boiling water.
Sergeant Nell Bell ran the radio room. She was fifty or so, grey-haired, with a biro behind each ear, a police fleece zipped to the chin, and the look of someone who'd been awake since about Monday. The room had six radios, a kettle and a whiteboard covered in lines of handwriting.
"Harbour General," she said, when Rook brought me in. "You're the medic."
"Yes. Hi. Sorry."
"What for?"
"I'm still working that out."
She pointed at the whiteboard. It was a list of names: hospitals, clinics, GP surgeries, care homes. Every single one had a line through it.
"St Brendan's went quiet at four-oh-six. Their pharmacy line kept picking up till then, and then it stopped," she said. "The Royal at four-forty. Northfield Infirmary about five. We kept calling. Nothing. No screaming, no static. Just that tone." "Then, two hours ago, your inspector answered from Harbour General. You're the only one."
"We had a boss," I said. "The Matron. We beat her. Floor's cleared."
Bell was quiet for a moment. Then she picked up a marker and, very carefully, rubbed the line off Harbour General with her thumb.
Sam found me in the corridor outside the canteen.
He'd been round the whole station. I could tell from his face. He'd looked in every room, in the custody suite, in the queue for the toilets, behind the front desk. He'd done it quietly and thoroughly, the way he'd held pressure on his own leg in the ambulance.
"She isn't here," he said.
"No," I said. "Not yet."
"You said that's next."
"I know. It is." I crouched down so we were level. "We'll find out where the taxi went. Someone will know."
Someone did.
There was a man called Faisal sitting on the stairs by the front desk, in a high-vis vest with Harbour Cabs on the back, drinking tea out of a mug that said World's Best Grandad. He'd been staring at the wall. When Sam walked past, his eyes moved to the Harbour Hawks shirt, three sizes too big, and stayed there.
"Hawks," he said. "That's a big shirt for a little lad."
"It's my dad's," Sam said. "He lives in Cork now. That's why it's big."
The man put his tea down. He looked at Sam properly then, at his face, and something changed in his.
"Hang on," he said. "Hang on. I know that shirt. I had a woman in the back last night, just after three. Crying her eyes out. She said her boy had gone off in an ambulance in a Hawks shirt three sizes too big and could I follow it."
Sam went very still beside me.
"I lost the ambulance at the Halliday junction," the man said. "The lights were all out, things in the road. Harbour General's doors were shut, so I took her to the next nearest. Your mum? Blonde, coat over her pyjamas?" He swallowed. "I dropped her at St Brendan's. The doors were open. She went in looking for you."