A wave of nausea hits me.
“I’m going to speak to somebody,” I say, thickly.
I stride back towards Casualty. Farah calls after me, “It’s no use.”
I peer round the corner and scan the waiting room.
Nothing. No snotty toddlers, no old people with leg ulcers.
I turn back to Farah. “Where have they all gone?”
Farah shrugs.
“This place was full.”
“I don’t think so.”
I look again. I was wrong. The room isn’t completely empty. The same guy from earlier is still there, the one with the dressing packed against his neck and the blood soaking into his shirt. He watches me without a word.
“What about that guy?” I call to Farah. “Have you tried talking to him?”
“Don’t bother. You won’t get any sense out of him.”
The air in my throat feels too heavy.
I do my checks again, more urgently than before.
Index, middle, ring, pinkie; pinkie, ring, middle, index.
My mind fights to make sense of it. That’s what the brain does, I think, a little wildly; it’s a sense-making machine. Neurons stretch through the body and take in billions of impulses from everything we see and feel and do and our brains turn them into a world. The brain doesn’t just sense reality, it creates it.
But what if the reality it’s creating is … different?
“But I saw people,” I say, my voice catching. “This place was full.”
“You’re just seeing what you expect to see. It’ll pass.”
“Was there a fire drill?” I say. “An evacuation?”
Farah lets out a cynical laugh. “You know it’s not that.”
“Is it a dream?”
Farah stands and sighs. “Come on. I want to show you something.”
SIX
I follow reluctantly as she leads me deeper into the hospital. Past another set of doors, down another corridor with a glass panel set into the wall that looks on to wards filled with empty beds.
No light. No light, but I can still see.
“Shouldn’t we stay where we were in case they call our numbers?” I say.
She keeps walking. “You still don’t get it, do you?”
The nurses’ station is abandoned, monitors blank, phones silent.
“Where did everybody go?”
“I don’t think they’re gone,” Farah answers. “Not exactly.”
I don’t want to admit it, but I know she’s right. The nurses’ station doesn’t feel empty. It still has the official, unwelcoming air of a nurses’ station. The sense that the people who watch over it are out of sight for just a moment, as if they might appear from down the corridor, or from the door behind the counter any second.
More corridors, more abandoned wards. Everything is orderly: no sign of panic, no mess. I’ve seen enough zombie movies to know that when a hospital gets evacuated there are scattered notes all over the floor and up-ended medication trolleys in the corridors.
It still smells like a hospital: antiseptic and sweat and, distantly, vomit and faeces. We enter another ward, small and cramped and smelling more strongly of human waste. There aren’t beds in this ward; it has cots instead. Spaniel sized, with high Perspex sides.
“Do you hear that?” I say.
Farah gives me a pensive nod.
“Is that … a baby?”
“Don’t be scared,” Farah says.
“Are you serious?” I respond. “A crying baby in an abandoned hospital? I’ve seen this movie.”
