Chapter NineHolding

The stairs to the basement were full of porters.

Kept ones, in green, eyes shut, coming up two at a time with their long grey hands reaching. Rook met the first pair on the landing with his shield and drove them back down three steps by sheer weight. Marcus came in beside him. Between them, they filled the stairwell like a door.

"Go back," Rook said over his shoulder. "There's no way through. There's dozens of them."

"Jonah's down there."

"I know."

"And Sam's mum."

"I know, Okafor." He smashed a kept porter into the wall with the edge of his shield. It didn't bleed. It just got up again. "That's not what I said. I said there's no way through. Not for all of us."

I looked at him. He looked back, over the rim of his shield, sweat running down the clean pink line on his cheek where I'd closed the cut that morning.

"Then make one," I said. "For three."

He held my eyes for one more second. Then he said, "Marcus. Left." And the two of them stepped together, shields locked, and pushed. The kept porters went backwards down the stairs like furniture down a ramp. At the bottom landing, Rook and Marcus turned and planted themselves against the wall, holding the whole crowd of them back with their shoulders, and left a gap between the shields and the door to the basement.

A gap just wide enough for one person at a time.

"Go," Rook said through his teeth. "I'll hold the stairs. Get your crew."

It was the first time he'd chosen my way when it might cost him. I didn't have time to say anything about it. I went through the gap. Dez came behind me. Priya came last, sideways, with fire in both hands.

---

The basement of St Brendan's used to be the old mortuary and stores. I'd never been down there. I'd heard about it on placement, the way you hear about the bit of a hospital nobody goes to: long, low corridors, pipes along the ceiling, the smell of floor polish and something underneath it.

The System had made it into something else.

It was one huge room now. The walls had gone. The pillars were still there, holding up a ceiling that was much too high, and between them, in long, neat rows like a car park, there were trolleys. Hundreds of spaces. Most of them empty. Each one had a small white card on a stand at its head, like the cards they put on hospital beds, and the cards said the same word in the same plain letters.

HOLDING.

Fourteen of the trolleys had people on them, counting Jonah. The other twenty-five kept people in the building were still standing upstairs in the waiting room and on the wards, waiting their turn. Kept people, flat on their backs, grey-wrapped, hands folded across their chests. Every one of them had long fingers. Some only a little. Some much too long, and the grey had spread past the nails and up the wrists, and their faces had started to change. To lengthen. To go smooth and wet-looking at the jaw.

And at the far end of the room, by a set of steel doors, there was one trolley on its own.

The thing on it was grey and wet and too long in the back. It had a head that was mostly mouth. It was lying on its side, very still, breathing slowly.

It was a Hollow Hound. A small one. Not finished.

On one of its front legs, the one nearest to me, there was a hospital wristband.

I walked towards it. Dez said my name, and I didn't stop. I got close enough to read it. White plastic, the kind they put on you in A&E, slightly stretched now around a leg that had once been an arm.

ST BRENDAN'S. PATIENT: WALSH, DAVID. DOB 04/11/1961.

"Ask the System," I said out loud. My voice sounded very far away. "Ask it what it does with the ones it keeps."

Priya came up beside me. She looked at the wristband. Then she looked at the rows of trolleys and the people on them with their lengthening hands, and her face went white.

"It's a spawner," she said. "In games. That's what this is. It's where the monsters come from." She swallowed. "Mo, the hound in your ambulance. The one in the windscreen."

"I know."

"It might have been someone."

"I know." I didn't want to think about it. I filed it, the way you file the things you can't deal with on a shift, in the box at the back of your head that you open later when you're alone. "Not now. Jonah. Find Jonah."

---

He was near the front, on a trolley like all the others. The Porter had folded his hands on his chest. The grey had started at his feet and come up to his knees, and his fingers were very slightly too long.

He wasn't breathing in time with the others.

That was the first thing I noticed, and it was the thing that scared me most. Everyone else in Holding breathed together, in, out, slow and even. Jonah was breathing on his own, fast and shallow, with long gaps. One of his pupils was huge. The other was a pinpoint.

I've seen that once before, in a textbook. You don't forget it.

"Bleed on the brain," I said. "The bump from the ambulance. It's been bleeding all day, slowly, and now it's not slow any more." I looked at Dez. "He's got minutes."

"Then fix him."

"I've got one wave left." I could barely lift my arms. I'd held Claire and I'd held Kieran, and the cold had reached my shoulders. "If I use it on him, I won't be able to hold a pen. I won't be able to do anything. And I need to sign the transfer."

"Mo." Dez took hold of my shoulders, both of them, and turned me to face him. It was the first time he'd ever done that. "Fix him first. We'll work out the pen."

He was right. It's always the same answer: the person in front of you first.

I put my hands on Jonah's head. I couldn't feel his hair or the lump on his temple or anything at all. I put them there by looking at them, like moving someone else's arms.

Stay.

The last wave went out of me. It came from somewhere lower than my ribs this time, somewhere that hurt, and it went into Jonah slowly, slowly. I felt something warm run out of my nose and drip onto my lip. I didn't wipe it. I couldn't.

Jonah's breathing changed. It steadied. His pupils stopped getting worse. The grey around his knees stopped climbing.

He opened his eyes.

"Mo," he said. His voice was slurred and thick. "Why's your nose bleeding?"

"Because I'm an idiot," I said. "And so are you. You should have told me about your head."

"You'd have made me stay at Gale Street."

"Yes."

"Then I was right not to." He tried to sit up and failed. "What's the plan?"

I told him. A crew of two. A receiving hospital. A transfer form for every person in this room. He listened with his eyes half closed, and when I'd finished, he said something I didn't expect.

"Thirty-nine forms," he said. "That's half an hour of writing, and we've got about five minutes before whatever's in that lift comes down. You don't do thirty-nine transfers, Mo. Not in a major incident."

I stared at him.

"Major incident," he said again, slowly, like he was teaching a rookie. Which he was. "Mass casualty. First crew on scene declares it, and then you've got the authority to move everyone, one form, one sign-off, and argue about the paperwork later. Twenty-six years. I've declared three."

"I've never declared one."

"Then today's your first."

---

There's a script for declaring a major incident. Every paramedic learns it. It's called METHANE, and it's a list, and I'm good at lists.

Priya held the radio to my mouth, because I couldn't. Dez held the clipboard. Jonah held the pen, very slowly, lying on his trolley. Upstairs, I could hear Rook and Marcus holding the stairs, the crash of the shield, Rook swearing in a steady, tired voice.

"Gale Street, this is Medic Fourteen," I said. "Major incident declared."

Then I did the list.

Ferreira had counted the casualties on the CCTV, floor by floor, while we argued. I gave Gale Street her number and everything else in order.

Major incident: declared.

Exact location: St Brendan's Hospital, basement.

Type: mass casualty, System-related.

Hazards: one Floor Boss, many hostiles, risk of conversion.

Access: main stairs, contested.

Number of casualties: thirty-eight, plus one crew.

Emergency services: one receiving hospital. Harbour General.

There was a pause on the line.

"Medic Fourteen, this is Harbour General." Mrs Adeyemi's voice, crisp as a starched apron. "Receiving. Go ahead with your transfer."

Jonah wrote on the form. Inter-hospital transfer. Major incident. Patients: 38 + 1 crew. From: St Brendan's. To: Harbour General. His writing was a mess. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.

"Crew," he said, and signed. J. Fisk, Paramedic.

Then he held the pen out to me.

I looked at my hands. They lay at my sides like gloves someone had left on a table.

So I leaned down and took the pen in my teeth.

"Oh my God," Priya said. "Mo."

"Hold the clipboard still," I said, through the pen.

Dez held it still. I signed my name with my mouth, badly, an M and a squiggle and an Okafor that went right off the edge of the form, the way you'd sign with your foot. It took about ten seconds. It felt like ten minutes.

When I spat the pen out, there was a silence.

"I'm going to tell everyone about that," Priya said. "Forever. At your wedding. At your funeral. Mo Okafor signed a major incident with her face."

"With my teeth."

"Face."

Dez didn't say anything. He was looking at the form, at the squiggle that went off the edge, with an expression I'd never seen on him before. It took me a second to recognise it, because it was the last thing I expected. He was trying very hard not to laugh.

"Don't," I said.

"I'm not."

"You are. Your face is doing a thing."

"My face is fine." His voice cracked on fine. "Twenty years on doors. I've seen people sign for their coats with a lot less style."

"Harbour General," said Mrs Adeyemi on the radio, "accepts all thirty-nine. Beds to follow." And then, quieter, just for me: "Well done, Miss Okafor."

---

Holding woke up.

It started at the front. A woman three trolleys down from Jonah coughed. Then a man. Then someone further back began to cry. All along the rows, the grey wraps loosened and slid away like bedsheets, and the people underneath them started breathing on their own, out of time, messy, real. Their fingers shrank back. Not all at once, and not all the way, but back. The smoothness went out of their faces.

Up near the front, a woman in a green parka over pink pyjamas sat up on her trolley and said, in a dry, cracked voice, "Sam?"

I started crying then. I couldn't wipe my face, so I let it run.

I went to her. I couldn't help her down, so I just stood beside her trolley while she stared at her hands, at the fingers still a little too long, the nails still a little grey.

"What's happening to me?" she said. "Where's Sam? I was looking for Sam."

"Sam's at Gale Street police station," I said. "He's fine. He's not even a bit hurt. The last time I saw him, he was eating toast and telling a five-year-old not to look at the roofs."

Really looked, the way people do when they're trying to decide if you're real.

"You're the paramedic," she said. "From the patio door. You promised me."

"I did."

"You're not supposed to promise."

"I know," I said. "I'm terrible at my job."

She laughed, a cracked, frightened sound, and then she put her too-long hands over her face and sobbed, and I stood there and let her, because I couldn't hold her and it was the only thing I had.

Upstairs, I found out later, the same thing was happening in the waiting room and on every ward. Siobhan the staff nurse woke up standing in the middle of her own ward and immediately asked who'd left the drugs trolley unlocked.

Only one trolley in the basement didn't empty. At the far end, by the steel doors, the small hound went on sleeping, breathing slowly, the wristband tight on its stretched leg. Nobody had signed a form for it. I didn't know if there was still a David Walsh in there to sign one for. I looked at it for a long moment, and then I made myself walk away, and added it to the list of things I was coming back for.

The Porter came out of the lift.

He looked at the room. At the trolleys emptying. At people sitting up and swinging their legs off and holding on to each other. His ordinary face showed nothing. Then he looked down at his clipboard, and something happened to him that I can only describe as a man reading new instructions.

"Inter-hospital transfer," he said slowly. "Major incident. Thirty-nine patients." He looked up. "Destination: Harbour General."

And he walked to the nearest trolley, where an old man was struggling to sit up, and gently, carefully, he helped him down.

"He has to," Priya breathed. "He's a porter. He has to help with the transfer. It's the rule."

He did. All of them. He moved through the rows helping people off their trolleys and pointing them to the stairs, polite and patient and tired. Upstairs, the noise on the stairs had stopped. The kept porters had stopped fighting. When I made it up to the landing much later, they were standing in a line against the wall, holding the door for everyone to go through, eyes still shut.

Rook was sitting on the bottom step with his shield across his knees, breathing hard. Marcus was beside him, helmet off for the second time I'd ever seen, a bruise the size of a fist coming up on his jaw. They watched them climb past, the ones from the basement first, then the wards coming down to meet them.

"You held it," I said.

"You said three." Rook didn't look at me. "So I held it for three."

"Thank you."

"Don't." He watched a nurse go by with an old man on her arm. "I'd have gone round. I'd have left them and gone round, this morning. Looked for another way." He was quiet for a moment. "I don't think there was one."

When the last of them had gone up the stairs, the Porter stopped in the middle of the empty room. He looked at his clipboard. There was nothing left on it to do.

"Transfer complete," he said, and I swear he sounded relieved.

Then he came apart. Quietly. Like a sheet of wet paper, into grey flakes that drifted down onto the floor between the empty trolleys and were gone. Only the clipboard was left, lying face up on the lino.

+1,560 XP: 39 lives stabilised (Critical) · held
Floor cleared: St Brendan's

I barely looked at it. I was watching the stairs, where Claire Teague had gone up between Dez and Priya on legs that kept giving way, saying her son's name over and over, as if it would keep him real.

"Mo." It was Jonah, sitting up on his trolley, grey and shaky but alive. He was holding the Porter's clipboard. He'd picked it up off the floor. "Mo. You need to see this."

He held it up so I could read it, because I still couldn't hold anything.

It was a list. Pages of it. Every trolley the Porter had moved since four o'clock that morning. Name, bed number, time. Ahmed, Rukhsana, 05:40. Kowalski, Piotr, 06:15. Twenty-odd of them. Each one ticked off, neat and careful, in the same tired handwriting.

The thirty-nine at the bottom were marked Harbour General. One line near the top, Walsh, David, 04:20, said Holding (in progress).

All the others had a different word in the last column. The column headed Destination.

Every single one of them said Westfield Holding.