Питер Мэй - Lockdown

Zoe wandered over to Amy’s table to look at the skeleton. ‘Just a kid, huh?’

‘Yes.’ Amy was annoyed by the interruption, but held her peace. She could smell the cigarette smoke now. It was better than the stale body odour which had hung around Zoe in a faint cloud while she was still living with her boyfriend. She had admitted once to searching through the laundry basket for something to wear when her blouse drawer was empty. Apparently, she thought this was an amusing anecdote. For everyone else it just explained the smell. But things had improved since she had moved back in with her parents. Her mother, it seemed, was doing her laundry now.

Zoe said, ‘You know, they’re gearing up for mass production of a new mask that’ll actually sterilise pathogens when an infected person sneezes or coughs. It’s got thousands of tiny perforations allowing it to breathe, so that it doesn’t blow back into your face. But here’s the clever bit — the perforations are medicated with an antiseptic that’ll sterilise any emissions passing through. Clever, huh?’

‘Very.’ Amy was trying to sort through the metatarsals of the right foot.

‘Have you any idea how many droplets there are in a sneeze?’

‘Millions.’

‘Yeah, and every one carrying the virus. Like an infected aerosol. Jesus, aren’t you glad they’ve given us a course of FluKill?’

‘Let’s just hope we never have to take it.’ Amy wanted to tell her to piss off, but it wasn’t in her nature to be rude. Her rescue came unexpectedly.

‘Isn’t there something you should be doing, Zoe?’ Tom threw Zoe one of his supercilious looks as he stepped up behind Amy, and she tutted a little huffily.

‘Yes, doctor.’ She flounced off across the lab.

Amy smiled at him gratefully. ‘Hi.’

He lowered his voice. ‘She’s a pain in the arse, that one.’

Amy raised an eyebrow. ‘You would know.’

He pursed his lips. ‘Not that kind of a pain.’ He looked at the skeleton. ‘How are you getting on with our unknown child?’

‘Getting to know her a little better,’ Amy said.

‘Her?’

‘Yes. She’s a little girl. But she wouldn’t have survived as long as she did if her bones had been in the order you laid them out.’

He grinned lasciviously. ‘Much more into the flesh, me.’

Amy completed the jigsaw of the right foot. ‘Speaking of which, how is Harry?’

Tom raised his eyes to the ceiling and sighed theatrically. ‘You know, I spend my life falling for straight guys, and the first gay who fancies me back turns out to be the most promiscuous creature on God’s earth. And you know me. A one-man man.’

‘What I know,’ Amy said with some certainty, ‘is that you and Harry are not a match made in heaven.’

‘Yes... there’s always some dick coming between us.’

Amy couldn’t resist a smile. Tom had made her laugh from the moment they had met at med school nearly twelve years ago. Oddly enough, their first encounter had been in anatomy, and Tom had made some crude comment about having a boner for the prof. Even though they had gone on to quite different specialities, they had remained friends throughout their training, and beyond. She had no idea how she would have survived those dreadful months following the accident without him. He had been, literally, the best friend a girl could have. And so she put up with all his foibles and moods and let him sleep on the settee in her apartment when he and Harry fell out. Which was regularly.

She waved a hand vaguely towards the next table. ‘Could you get me that dental chart over there?’

‘Get it yourself, girl.’

She gave him a look, and he tipped his head and cocked an eyebrow at her, and she thought how good-looking he was. And what a waste. That shock of straw yellow hair, and pale blue eyes. It was his way never to pander to her. He had always insisted she do things herself. He wasn’t her slave, and she wasn’t an invalid. It was his forcing the issue that had made her as independent as she was now. She grabbed the controller on the right armrest and spun the chair around, propelling herself towards the next table to get her chart.

Across the room there was a loud sneeze and all heads turned towards Zoe. Everyone was hypersensitive these days to the slightest sniffle. A sneeze was enough to cause cardiac arrest. Zoe raised a hand of apology and grinned. ‘It’s okay. Honestly. I’m not coming down with anything. It’s my parents’ cat. I’m really allergic to it.’

The area between the road and the hole where the bag had been found was divided up into squares. Fine white plastic lines stretched between short stakes, a little like the lines of latitude and longitude on a map. Yellow and black crime scene tape fluttered around the perimeter in a chill breeze blowing down from the direction of the river. A six-man team in Tyvek and bootees and plastic caps moved from square to square, each allocated his own area to search, each tiny item recovered from the mud carefully placed in its own plastic evidence bag.

The workforce stood around in the park in small orange clusters. The cement trucks had gone, and the heavy machinery stood cold and silent, waiting with the rest of them.

The man from the ministry sat in the back of a black BMW parked up on the pavement by the hospital, smoking cigarette after cigarette, the window down, watching them through clouds of escaping smoke. MacNeil could feel his anger from where he sat on an upturned wheely bin next to the old basketball court. The foreman was pacing restlessly next to him. ‘It’s our bonuses, mate,’ he said. ‘The only reason we’re here, risking life and fucking limb, is ’cos of the money. And that’s dependent on meeting the targets.’

‘What is the target?’ MacNeil turned disinterested eyes towards him.

‘Seven days.’ The foreman shook his head. ‘It was tight before. But now...’

MacNeil shrugged. ‘What’s the point in setting unrealistic targets?’

‘Not me that sets them, mate. The Chinese built a whole hospital in a week during the SARS outbreak. So our lot figured, why couldn’t we do the same? We’re not even building a hospital here. Just an overspill facility. A space they can heat, a space that can take beds. A place for people to die in.’

‘And is it really worth the money?’

‘Well, we’re not making it any other way right now. And they’re treating us good, aren’t they? A lot of the lads come from outside the M25. And ever since they declared the ring road the outer limit, we knew that if we came inside we wouldn’t be allowed out again. It’s fucking creepy, you know, like something out of a movie. Seeing all those soldiers with guns on the bridges and flyovers.’

‘So where are you staying?’

The foreman chuckled. ‘That’s part of the deal. All the big tourist hotels are empty. So we get our own rooms, meals cooked for us at all hours. Me and some of the boys are at the Ritz. There’s others at the Savoy. And we get to stay there till the emergency’s over.’ A cloud cast a shadow on his smile and he remembered to glower at MacNeil. ‘Assuming we meet our targets, that is.’

In the distance, an ambulance siren pierced the cold January air. Another victim. Another bed required. Every hospital in the city was full, but at least the high mortality rate meant that beds were constantly becoming available. Illness had reduced staffing by nearly thirty per cent. Health workers were at greatest risk, and suffering the highest casualties. In spite of FluKill. Nobody went to work any more. Only a handful of shops were open for a few hours a day. There was no public transport. The airports had been closed indefinitely. The economy of the capital was in free fall, and the rest of the world was ready to do anything it could to help the city contain its sickness. Primarily by banning all traffic in and out of the UK. It was, of course, only a matter of time before the virus swept the world. But if it could be contained long enough to produce a vaccine...