A Lovely Way to Burn

Thirty-Nine

The hospital was a nightmare of darkened corridors. Stevie had told Ahumibe that she could not afford to give in to fear, but terror fluttered in her chest. The building felt alive, as though the people who had died in the hospital wards had slipped into the fabric of its walls and were watching, and waiting.

Stevie wrapped her scarf around her face and counted each turn beneath her breath, trying to focus on the challenge of navigating her way to an exit. She kept her torch off and her hand on the gun. The sound of howling echoed up ahead and she corrected her route to avoid it. She saw other people ghosting through the dark, and pointed the gun straight ahead, both hands gripping the stock, so there could be no mistaking her urge for solitude.

Rats moved, swift and busy, along the walls, and Stevie knew that she would have to leave London soon, before other diseases took hold. Sudden footsteps charged along the corridor and she pinned herself flat against the wall, melting into the darkness, until the runner rushed by, a panicked breeze of pumping arms and pounding legs.

The dead were everywhere. They were slumped on waiting-room chairs, like a Tory indictment against NHS inefficiency, stretched out on beds, sprawled across desks, or lay where they had fallen, limbs tangled in positions impossible to hold in life.

Moans and harsh rattling breaths echoed from the shadows of abandoned rooms, and Stevie knew without a doubt that there was no God. If there were, he or she would have saved a better person than her, one who was ready to sacrifice themselves to the care of the dying, rather than continue a quest for the truth about an already dead man.

A man stepped out of the shadows, leading a little girl of around six or seven years old along an empty corridor. Stevie moved into the centre of the hall and aimed the gun at his head.

‘It’s all right,’ the man said. ‘She belongs to me.’

Stevie looked at the child and asked, ‘Is that true, sweetheart? Is this your daddy?’

The girl had one hand gripped in the man’s. The other was wrapped around a disreputable-looking toy monkey whose fur was matted from over-loving. She stuck her thumb in her mouth and shook her head.

‘I’m her uncle,’ the man said, his eyes on the gun.

Stevie looked at the little girl, who kept her thumb in her mouth and whispered, ‘Uncle Colin.’

‘Are you happy to go with Uncle Colin?’

The girl had the stunned stare of a road-accident victim. She nodded and the man looked relieved. He said, ‘You can come with us, if you like. There might be safety in numbers.’

Stevie thought he was probably right, but she shook her head. ‘No thanks.’ The man glanced nervously at the gun again and Stevie wondered if he was considering making a grab for it. ‘You’d best keep on going,’ she said, her finger on the trigger, the barrel still pointing at the man’s head. She watched until they vanished into the dark, like phantoms, the sound of her own breath loud in her head.

Once, a hand reached out, pale against the black, and a woman whispered, ‘Water,’ but when Stevie returned, with a plastic cup filled from a water cooler, the woman was gone. Her disappearance troubled Stevie and she upped her pace, holding on to the bannister as she ran down a darkened staircase towards the hospital exit, aware that to trip and break a leg now would mean a slow death.