Chapter EightThe Porter

I didn't hear him come in. I heard the trolley.

It was a small sound, a squeaky wheel, the kind every hospital trolley in the country has. It came from the doorway behind me while I was staring at Claire Teague's hands, and I turned round, and he was there.

Up close, the Porter was easier to see, and that was worse. He was tall and stooped and very thin, in a green porter's uniform that hung off him like a coat on a hook. His face was ordinary. That was the strangest thing about him. It was the face of every porter you've ever walked past in a hospital corridor without looking at, a pleasant, forgettable face with nothing behind it. His eyes were the grey of the bandages. His arms reached almost to his knees, and his fingers were long and narrow, with grey nails.

Just like Claire's were going to be.

Above his head, in plain white letters, it said The Porter, Floor Boss, Level 9.

"Bed fourteen," he said. His voice was flat and polite and tired, the voice of a man who'd said the same words ten thousand times. "Transport for bed fourteen. Destination: Holding."

"No," I said.

He checked his clipboard. "Bed fourteen," he said again, and pushed the trolley forward.

Dez stepped in front of it.

The Porter stopped. He looked at Dez for a moment with those grey eyes, and then, gently, he put one long hand flat on Dez's chest and moved him aside. Just moved, the way you'd move a chair that was in the way of a trolley, and Dez slid two metres across the lino and hit the wall.

"Excuse me," said the Porter.

I put myself between him and Claire. I didn't have a plan. I had a pair of trauma shears and a feeling in my stomach like falling.

"She's not going anywhere," I said. "She's mine. My patient. I'm her paramedic."

For the first time, I felt him actually see me. His head tilted.

"Paramedic," he said slowly, as if the word was in a language he used to speak.

Then he lifted his hand and reached past me for Claire, and her lengthening fingers twitched towards him like they recognised him.

---

The first thing I tried was the thing that had worked before.

There was a nurses' station halfway down the corridor. I ran for it. I know, I know. I ran. It didn't matter here; nobody had told me not to, and the Porter didn't even look up. I found the drawer, found the pad, St Brendan's Hospital, Patient Discharge, and wrote Claire Teague across the top with my hands shaking so much the letters went off the line. I signed it. I pushed everything I had into the pen.

Nothing happened.

The Porter lifted Claire off the floor, gently, a centimetre at a time.

"It's not working!" I shouted. "Why isn't it... Dez!"

"Two signatures!" Dez had got back on his feet and was holding his shoulder. "You need two. Clinician and nurse in charge."

The nurse in charge of this ward was standing ten metres away from me with her eyes shut and her name badge under a grey wrap. Siobhan, Staff Nurse. Breathing in. Breathing out.

There was nobody here to countersign. There was nobody here at all.

The Porter laid Claire on the trolley, flat and straight, and folded her too-long hands across her chest, and wrote something on his clipboard.

I did the only thing I could think of. I went back, knelt beside the trolley, and put both hands flat on Claire's chest, and held.

Stay.

Stem the Tide doesn't mend anything. I'd worked that out. It holds people where they are. So I held her where she was, exactly as she was, and I felt the change in her stop. Not reverse. Stop. Her fingers stopped growing. The grey at her nails stopped spreading. My own fingers went numb, then my palms, then my wrists, cold and heavy.

The Porter looked down at my hands. Then at his clipboard. Then at my hands again.

"Patient unstable," he said, sounding faintly puzzled. "Cannot transport unstable patient."

He let go of the trolley.

I stared at him. He stared back, politely, with his clipboard under his arm. Then he turned, walked to the next room, and came back with a different trolley and a different kept person, an old man in a hospital gown, and wheeled him away towards the lifts, humming.

I didn't let go of Claire. I couldn't. The moment I did, I knew, she'd be stable again and back on his list.

"Dez," I said. "I've got a problem."

"I know."

"I can't hold her forever. I've got two more of these, maybe. Then my arms stop."

"I know." He crouched beside me. "So think fast, Mo. You're good at that, when you have to be."

---

I thought.

I'm not clever, not in the way Priya is clever. But I know hospitals. I know how they work, because I've spent a year of placements watching them, and three weeks moving people in and out of them. And the one thing I know about porters is this: porters don't decide anything.

A porter never decides where a patient goes. Somebody fills in a slip, and the porter takes the patient where the slip says. Ward to X-ray. X-ray to theatre. Theatre to recovery. The porter's job is the corridor in between, and in the corridor in between, the porter is in charge of you.

Transport for bed fourteen. Destination: Holding.

He didn't keep people. He moved them. And something, somewhere, had written Holding on every slip.

So I needed a slip that said something else. And I needed to be the one who could write it.

There's only one kind of patient move in a hospital that a porter doesn't do. It's the kind where a patient leaves one hospital and goes to another. An inter-hospital transfer. For that, you don't call a porter. You call an ambulance.

You call a crew.

"Dez," I said. "Get Jonah. Tell him to bring the transfer forms from the ambulance, the green ones in the side cabinet, and the radio. Tell him I need a crew of two."

He didn't ask why. He just went.

---

I knelt by Claire's trolley with my hands going dead on her chest and went through it the way I'd been taught. A transfer needs a crew of two. Me and Jonah. And it needs the receiving hospital, the one the patient is being sent to, to accept. Someone there has to say yes.

There was only one hospital in Harbour City that was still answering.

"Harbour General," I said out loud. "It's cleared. It's ours. If Harbour General says yes..."

"Then who's in charge at Harbour General?" Priya said. She'd come up behind me with Kieran and Ferreira, all of them out of breath. "Nobody's there. We all left."

I thought about the canteen at Gale Street. About a woman in a cardigan with her reading glasses on a chain, who'd announced that a police station canteen was now a ward and nobody had argued.

I've been the nurse in charge on this floor since before you were shaving, she'd told Rook. Until somebody tells me otherwise, I still am.

"Mrs Adeyemi," I said. "She's the nurse in charge of Harbour General. She can accept them. Over the radio."

Priya stared at me. Then she grinned, the big, wild, sixteen-year-old grin, the one she'd had in the ED when her first fireball worked.

"That," she said, "is the most game-brained thing I've ever heard. I love it."

She held the radio Tash had given her at Gale Street to my mouth, because my hands were busy holding Claire. It took three tries to get Gale Street. When Sergeant Bell answered, she sounded like she'd been sitting with her hand on the transmit button for an hour.

"Go ahead, St Brendan's."

"It's Mo. The medic. I need Mrs Adeyemi on the radio. Please. It's important."

There was a pause, a muffled conversation, and the sound of someone being handed a handset by someone who clearly didn't think they should be using it.

"This is Sister Adeyemi." Her voice was crisp, the voice of someone answering a ward phone at two in the morning. "Who am I speaking to?"

"Mo. Paramedic. Sorry. I need you to be Harbour General."

"I beg your pardon?"

I told her. It came out in a rush: the Porter, the slips, the rule, the transfer. I said crew of two and receiving acceptance and you're the nurse in charge in the wrong order, twice. She didn't interrupt once. When I'd finished, there was a silence on the line.

"An inter-hospital transfer," she said. "From St Brendan's to Harbour General. How many patients?"

I looked down the corridor at the kept, standing in their rows, breathing together.

"I don't know. Thirty. Forty. Everyone who's left."

"Harbour General doesn't have forty beds staffed."

"I know."

"Or any staff at all, as of this morning."

"I know."

Another silence. Then I heard her take a breath, the kind you take before you sign something you're going to be responsible for.

"Then I'll accept them anyway," she said. "Have your crew radio me with each name, and I'll confirm the bed. Proper procedure, Miss Okafor."

"Yes, Sister."

Behind her, very faint, I heard a small voice ask Is that Mo? Did she find her? and I had to close my eyes for a second before I could answer it.

"Tell Sam," I said, "I'm working on it."

---

The Porter didn't like it.

Maybe the System told him. Maybe the rule told him, the way it tells you when you've put a foot wrong. But the next time he came out of the lift, he wasn't pushing a trolley. He came straight down the corridor towards us, long arms swinging, clipboard under his arm, with a look on his ordinary face like a man who'd been told his whole department was being restructured.

And behind him, out of the lift, came the others.

They were porters. Kept ones. Four of them, in green uniforms under their grey wraps, eyes closed, walking. They moved like sleepwalkers, but fast, in a line, and their hands were long and grey like his.

"Kieran," Rook's voice came over Priya's radio, crackling. "Kieran, where are you? I've got the stairs, I can't get to you."

"Pharmacy corridor," Kieran said. He'd gone very calm, which I'd learned meant he was scared. "We've got four coming. And the big one."

"Hold them."

"Yeah," said Kieran. "Yeah. Okay."

He held them.

He held them at the corner where the corridor turned towards the pharmacy, with Ferreira and Ray barricaded behind him and two kitchen knives that glowed cold blue. Priya was beside him, throwing fire. Dez was coming back down the corridor at a run, with Jonah behind him carrying a radio and a clipboard of green forms.

I couldn't help. That was the worst part. I was kneeling by Claire's trolley with both hands on her chest and my arms dead to the elbow, holding her where she was, and I could only watch.

The first kept porter reached Kieran and he cut it, and it didn't bleed, and it didn't stop. The second caught his arm. The third and fourth came round him like water round a rock. Priya burned one, and it went down, and the other three kept coming.

Then the Porter himself reached out, past them all, and put one long hand on Kieran's chest.

Not gently, this time.

I heard Kieran's ribs go. All of them, it sounded like, a sound like someone stepping on a bundle of sticks. He folded up and went down, and didn't move, and his knives went out like candles.

"No," I said.

I had to let go of Claire.

There wasn't a choice. Claire was being held. Kieran was dying. I took my hands off her chest, and I felt the grey start moving again under the wrap, slow and patient, and I ran.

We split, said the list, in the cold voice it uses at three in the morning. You split them.

---

He was on the floor at the corner. Priya was standing over him throwing fire at anything that moved, both hands, screaming at them. Dez had arrived and was standing on his other side with a fire extinguisher, because of course he was. Behind them, the Porter had picked up Claire's trolley again and was wheeling it away.

I dropped beside Kieran. His chest was wrong. It moved in when it should have moved out. His lips were going blue.

Stay.

My arms were already numb to the elbow. I put my hands on him anyway and pushed out the second wave. It came slowly, like water through a blocked pipe, and the cold went up past my elbows towards my shoulders, and for a horrible second I thought it wasn't going to be enough.

Then Kieran breathed.

Badly. Shallowly. But in, and out. A small +40 came off my hands, and the word held, and I didn't care.

"Cheers, Medic," he whispered.

"Stop saying that."

"Can't. It's my catchphrase now. I nicked it off Tash."

Ferreira dropped down on his other side. She'd left the axe somewhere. Her hands went straight to his chest, feeling the ribs, the way mine would have if they'd worked.

"Flail segment," she said. "Left side. He needs it strapped, and he needs to not move." She glanced at me, at my arms hanging uselessly at my sides. "I've got him. I've done this on a mannequin. Twice."

"Was the mannequin called Gerald?"

She stared at me. "How did you know that?"

"Every mannequin is called Gerald." I got one foot under me. "Gerald died, by the way. Every time I touched him."

"Not this time," she said, and started tearing strips off Kieran's shirt.

Doctors. You can't help liking them, even when they're terrified.

"Mo," Dez said. "Mo, the trolley."

I looked up. The Porter was at the lifts with Claire. The doors were opening.

"Jonah!" I shouted. "Forms!"

Jonah was already there. He'd come down the corridor behind Dez with the radio and the clipboard, and he was kneeling beside me now, pulling a green form off the clip and a pen out of his top pocket.

"Inter-hospital transfer," he said. "Patient name?"

"Claire Teague."

He started writing. His hand was steady, the steadiest thing in the building. Then it stopped.

He put the pen down very carefully on the floor and looked at it.

"Mo," he said. His voice had gone strange. Slow. "Mo, I can't... the letters are..."

His eyes rolled up. He folded forward over the clipboard, and his head hit the lino with a soft, dull sound.

At the end of the corridor, the lift doors closed on Claire. Then the Porter came back for us.

The head injury. The lump on his temple I'd only half healed in the ambulance at three in the morning, because he hadn't been dying and the System hadn't cared. He'd been walking like his head hurt all day. He'd been carrying Mrs Adeyemi's handbag so nobody would see his hands shake. I'd noticed. I'd noticed, and I'd thought, later.

I reached for him. My arms didn't work. They were two dead weights hanging off my shoulders, and they wouldn't lift.

And the Porter was there.

I hadn't seen him leave the lifts. Nobody ever saw him move. He was just standing over us, looking down at Jonah on the floor with that pleasant, empty face.

"Staff member, unwell," he said. He checked his clipboard. He wrote something. "Collapsed in corridor. Transport required."

"No," I said. "No, he's crew. He's my crew. You can't..."

The Porter lifted Jonah onto an empty trolley as if he weighed nothing. He folded Jonah's hands across his chest.

"Destination," he said politely, "Holding."

And he wheeled my crew of two down the corridor and into the lift, and the doors closed, and I heard, very faintly, the soft ding as it went down.