Superior Saturday

THIRTEEN

LEAF’S EYES NARROWED and she blinked hard several times. Arthur had vanished. One second he was there, and then he wasn’t.

She looked around and scowled. Not only had Arthur disappeared but everyone else had become frozen –

The army is going to fire nukes at somewhere very close by, Leaf suddenly remembered. At one minute past midnight. So why I am standing here with my mouth open like some stupid goldfish?

‘Arthur!’ she shouted again. Then she started running, out through the ward with its frozen statues of sleepers. ‘Arthur!’

No one answered her. Leaf stopped at the end of the ward and looked around. Not only was everyone frozen, but there was also a kind of weird red light around them. Like a faint aura that she could only see when she looked out of the corner of her eyes. That same red glow was around the ward clock, high on the wall, which was stuck at three minutes to twelve.

Or not stuck. As Leaf looked, the red haze vanished. The minute hand sprang forward, and simultaneously the ward came alive with shuffling sleepers. Leaf heard someone call out from the office. Not Arthur – a woman’s voice. Probably Vess or Martine.

Two minutes! thought Leaf in panic. There’s not enough time to do anything. We’re all going to die!

The clock stopped. The sleepers became petrified once more. The red aura effect came back.

But Leaf could still hear the woman’s voice, and it got louder and louder until Martine burst into the ward.

‘What is going on? Where’s Lord Arthur?’

‘I don’t know,’ Leaf said. ‘Is there anything underneath this hospital? I mean underground levels... even a bomb shelter?’

‘I haven’t been here for twenty years!’ exclaimed Martine. ‘Ask Vess.’

Leaf looked around, then pointed. Vess was standing frozen in a corner of the ward.

‘Oh,’ Martine said. ‘Well, twenty years ago there were operating theatres on B3, and there was a bomb shelter once. I mean, this place was built in the fifties, so what do you expect?’

‘We have to get everyone down there,’ said Leaf firmly. ‘You and me. As quickly as we can.’

‘But they’re like statues...’

‘We’ll wheel them in beds. Two or three to a bed. I wonder if the elevators work? The lights do.’ Leaf saw the hesitation on Martine’s face. ‘Come on – help me load these two into this bed.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Martine said. ‘I thought that once I finally got back home, everything would be all right. But I still don’t understand anything. Why are we taking everyone downstairs? Why do we need a bomb shelter?’

‘Arthur said the army is going to nuke East Area Hospital at 12:01 because it’s a plague nexus. And East Area is not so far from here. Arthur’s done something to stop time, I guess, but it restarted a moment ago. It could restart again in a second, or a minute, who knows? Please, we have to get going!’

‘No,’ said Martine. ‘No.’

She turned and ran away sobbing, crashing through the swing doors and disappearing.

Leaf stared after her for a microsecond, then went and examined the closest hospital bed. It had wheels with brakes on them, which she clicked off. There was already a sleeper in the bed, so she grabbed hold of the rail and pulled the bed out and swung it around. It was harder than she’d expected, possibly because the bed had not been moved in a long time.

‘You’re number one,’ she said to the man asleep in the bed. ‘We’ll pick up Aunt Mango on the way, and that’ll be two. After you, I’ll only have approximately one thousand nine hundred and ninety-eight people to get to safety. In two and a half minutes.’

It took Leaf a lot longer than two minutes to find the elevators, and then she was dismayed to find that they weren’t working. Clearly, things that stayed the same from one moment to the next – like lightglobes – continued to work while things that moved were stuck in place. Luckily, there was a map next to the elevator bank that showed where there was a wheelchair ramp to get to the lower floors.

She’d loaded not only her aunt Mango but two other people onto the bed. They were the two smallest she could find in the immediate vicinity of her aunt, but even so, her back ached from dragging them across the floor and then levering them onto the bed. They actually were like statues to move, though fortunately ones made of flesh and blood, not marble. Still, their rigidity made them difficult to shift and manoeuvre.

There was another wall map near the top of the ramp, but it didn’t indicate where the operating theatres used to be, or the old bomb shelter. Leaf would just have to find them through trial and error. As she wheeled the bed along, she noticed a frozen TV at one of the nurse’s stations. The corner of the screen said it was 11:57, and a video image of some news was paused mid-sentence. The newscaster’s mouth was wide open and a frozen type crawl across the bottom said only measures may include drastic.

Once she got to the bottom floor, she saw it had long been deserted. It was dusty, there were cobwebs trailing from the ceiling, and only one in three ceiling light panels worked.

But there was also a faded sign on the wall, and colour-coded trails on the floor, which she could just make out through the dust. The red trail was to the operating theatres and there was a blue trail to something euphemistically called ‘Survival Centre,’ which was almost certainly the bomb shelter.

Leaf pushed the bed into the corridor, then left it to scout out where she should push it to, her running footsteps sending up clouds of dust as she raced along the corridor.

The Survival Centre was a disappointment. It was definitely a bomb shelter, featuring a reinforced door with a hydraulic wheel to open and shut it. But it was way too small and could only ever have sheltered perhaps twenty people standing up. All its pipes and fittings had been removed as well, leaving ugly holes and hanging wires. Leaf figured she might be stuck wherever she was going to be for some time, and she didn’t want that place to have no toilet or running water.

She raced on, flinging open doors. Most of the rooms were small and useless, but the operating theatre complex was more promising. Though it had been cleared out, there were four big operating theatres clustered around a large central room that had several sinks with taps that worked, and there was a bathroom with at least one flushing toilet reached from the corridor outside.

Leaf propped the doors open and ran back to get her first bed-load. As she pushed the bed back to the theatre complex, she wondered what on earth she was going to do. There was no way she could bring all the sleepers down here on beds. Even loading them up was very hard for her, given that nearly all of them were bigger than her, some of them weighed at least twice what she did, and their rigidity just added to the level of difficulty. She would be exhausted before she transported a dozen of them, even if she could do that before time restarted for everyone else.

I’ll have to just pick out the smallest, she thought. And do my best.

‘What have you got me into now, Arthur?’ she said aloud. ‘And where have you gone?’