The Ward (7 page)

I dart another smudged look over my shoulder. The guard’s still some way behind us and we’re nearly at the security gate.

Oh shit
. ‘Oh shit.’

‘What?’ says Lisa, tugging on my arm.

‘The eye drops. I need the eye drops.’ No way am I going anywhere without those. ‘You go ahead. Don’t worry. Good luck, okay.’

‘Where are they?’

‘They’re on a shelf on the far side of my bed.’

‘Dammit…’ Lisa casts around, indecisive, breathing heavily. ‘Oh God. Okay. He’s gone into the toilet. I’ll be back. Don’t go anywhere.’

She sprints off and I stare into space for a minute. I imagine that the blurs I see are getting just a little crisper around the edges. An image of Katya’s bloodied face blindsides me and
I feel like I’ve been kicked in the chest. Glenn’s fat head looms over it.

Next thing, Lisa’s pressing the vial into my hand. Her quiet, shocked voice surprises me. ‘Did you see what was on the cabinet by your bed?’

‘I didn’t see anything. I can’t see.’

‘Okay.’

‘What was it?’

‘No, don’t worry. It’s nothing.’

‘Come
on
, Lisa! What the…? Lisa?’ She’s ducked out of my eyeline and now I can’t spot her blur anywhere. Has she gone without me?

‘Lisa!’ I call, aware that my voice is too loud in the deathly ward. I grope towards the security gate and walk into the guard’s patio chair; it clatters across the lino loud
enough to wake the dead. ‘Lisa,’ I hiss.
Fuck it
.

‘I’m here. Here. I brought you something to wear.’ She shoves a cotton bundle into my hands. ‘Just some scrubs. They look clean enough. Better than that,
anyway.’

Lisa leads me down a hallway to a lift and presses the button. The air smells different outside the Green Section, both fresher and ranker, as if fresh air from the outside world is mixing with
the gasses of seriously diseased and decomposing people in other sections, each washing over us in currents.

The lift door opens with a ding and Lisa presses a button. Soon as the door closes, I struggle to orient the baggy pants, then pull them on, keeping the gown on over them. We descend for a bit,
then the door opens again into a poorly lit space.

‘Where are we? What’s here?’

‘I don’t know. Two doors. One with a keypad.’ Her voice trails away as she goes. She rattles at the door and mutters something.

‘What’s there? Please keep talking.’

‘It’s locked. The other door looks like… Oh, Farrell.’

We both hear the lift grinding in the shaft behind us.

Fuck. ‘It could be the security guard,’ I say. ‘What about the other door?’

‘Uh…’

‘What’s the problem?’ The lift’s grinding closer.

More hesitation. Then she grabs my wrist. ‘Okay, come.’

I hear a heavy metallic click and a rubber squeal – somehow a familiar sound – and Lisa pulls me through the door with a squeaking shear, then slams it behind us. Clink. That’s
it, that’s where I know that sound. It’s just like the lock on the beer fridge in a bottle store. They don’t open from the inside.

A muffled voice from the other side of the door, then it stops. I hear only our breath. When I open my eyes, the light is bright, light green, like underwater. It’s cold.

Dead silence. Then what my mind’s been trying to ignore. The smell kicks in. Lisa grabs me and hides her face, cowering between me and the door.

‘What is this place, Lisa?’

‘Christ. It stinks in here.’ Farrell pulls up the top of his gown to cover his mouth and nose. ‘Fuck… Are we in the fucking morgue?’

‘Yes.’

‘
Fuck
.’

The morgues they show on
CSI
and
Silent Witness
are always clean, brightly lit places, clad in stainless steel and hi-tech fittings, but this area is small and dingy. The floor is
covered in that crappy linoleum, and the dented cadaver drawers are grubby and scratched and smeared with dirty fingerprints. Although it’s chilly, it’s as if there’s not enough
oxygen in the room, and I’m starting to feel light-headed. Still, as gross as it is in here, there’s a part of me that’s coldly fascinated by what I’m seeing.

Farrell shuffles to the side of the room and peers myopically at the three gurneys shoved against the drawers. They’re piled with lumpy, zippered black plastic bags.

‘Jesus,’ he says. ‘Are those bodies?’

‘I think so.’ Two of the bodies aren’t anywhere near large enough to fill the bags out and I try not to look at them.

‘Christ. Why aren’t they in the… freezer or wherever they keep them?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe there’s no space.’

Farrell flaps a hand in front of his face. ‘Christ… I’ve never smelled anything like it.’

‘Try not to breathe too deeply,’ I say. ‘You’ll get used to the smell soon.’

‘How the fuck would you know that?’ he snaps. ‘Look, let’s just go back.’

For a second I want to do just that. The light-headedness is turning into a weird disconnected feeling as if part of me has skipped away for a bit. But then I remember that grey-faced man and
what I saw in Farrell’s room and the world snaps back into focus. We can’t go back.

‘Come on,’ he says, making for the door behind us.

‘Wait! Think about it, Farrell.’ I don’t recognise my voice. I sound sure of myself, in control. ‘There has to be another exit through here. I mean… I mean,
it’s unlikely that they’d bring the dead bodies through the hospital.’

‘Lisa, what the fuck are you talking about?’

‘I mean, funeral directors have to fetch the dead people from somewhere, right? There’s probably a back entrance or exit.’

He hesitates. ‘Lisa, you’re creeping me out a bit here. How in the fuck would you know something like that?’

Heat races to my cheeks. ‘Um, you know. TV and books and stuff.’ A sudden image of my room back home flashes into my mind – the room I sometimes don’t leave for days at a
time. What would Farrell say if he saw the pink flouncy coverlet, the piles of cheap true-crime paperbacks, my
Grey’s Anatomy
DVDs and the Girls Aloud posters that I haven’t
bothered taking down for years?

‘Let’s try through here,’ he says, heading towards the double doors in front of us.

They’re made of thick black rubber and he has to push against them with his shoulder to shove them open wide enough for us to slip through.

‘Ah, man,’ Farrell says. ‘It smells even worse in here. Like rotten meat only... I dunno, sweeter.’

This room is far larger than the last. The walls and floors are covered with cracked porcelain tiles and mildewed grouting; shallow open drains criss-cross the floor. The light winks off a saw
and pair of scales that are on a shelf next to the row of sinks at the far side. There are two stainless steel tables in the centre of the room; one is empty, but lying on the other is what looks
to be a twisted, charred tree trunk. I don’t get it. Why would there be burned wood in a morgue?

But my stomach figures it out before my brain registers what I’m looking at, and I have to swallow convulsively as saliva floods into my mouth.

It isn’t wood.

Of course it isn’t.

I grab Farrell’s arm to steady myself. ‘Oh God,’ I breathe.

‘What?’

‘You don’t want to know.’

‘Christ,’ he says. ‘Is that what I think it is?’

The thing on the table was once a person, its back twisted into an impossible converse foetal position, its limbs drawn tightly into its sides as if they’ve shrunk into its body. Its skin
is a cracked, hard, blackened mass; its fingers, toes and hair are gone. I can’t tell if it was once male or female, young or old. Then the nausea disappears and I find myself taking a step
forward and gazing down at the face, nothing but a charcoal rictus mask. It looks fragile, like, if I touched it, it would crumble.

‘You think this is someone from the crash?’ Farrell asks.

I jump as a door in the far right-hand corner of the room swings open and bashes against the wall. A stocky man wearing thick green gloves and a gore-spattered industrial-looking apron appears.
He’s mumbling to himself. He starts when he catches sight of us.

‘What are you doing in here?’ he says in a thick accent. ‘You should not be in here.’

Farrell clears his throat. ‘Sorry, we—’

‘No, no, no. This is not good.’ He’s foreign – Spanish or Cuban. I can’t tell how old he is; his olive skin is unlined, but his hair is wispy and thinning. He
stares at the dressing covering my nose and my hand automatically leaps to my face. His gaze slides to Farrell’s hospital gown, blue scrub trousers and bare feet. ‘How did you get
here?’

‘We’re lost,’ Farrell says, trying to grin charmingly. ‘We’d really appreciate it if you’d point us towards the exit.’

He remains impassive. ‘There is no exit down here. This is a restricted area.’

‘Yeah. Sorry about that,’ Farrell says. ‘Please, we—’

‘Which ward are you from? You are patients? You should not be here.’

The black doors smash open, and a porter pushing a gurney containing a sheet-draped body barrels in. ‘Incoming,’ the porter says. He’s a youngish guy with cornrows and
bloodshot eyes.

The Cuban man sighs. ‘How many more times? Do not bring them in here. They are to go to the viewing room for storage.’

The porter stares at him blankly.

‘The viewing room. Now!’ the man snaps.

The porter shrugs. ‘Don’t know it, boss.’ He glances at me and Farrell, then at the charred body on the table, but his bored, slightly resentful expression doesn’t
change.

‘Wait here,’ the Cuban guy says to us. Muttering under his breath, he herds the porter and the gurney back towards the double doors.

‘Now’s our chance,’ Farrell whispers when they’ve disappeared.

We head towards the door in the corner of the room. Farrell stumbles into one of the shallow drains in the floor and I grab his arm to steady him, trying not to step into the globs of…
matter… and drying blood that haven’t been sluiced away.

The door opens into a long, narrow corridor. It ends in a metal rolldown shutter like the doors you see in warehouses and halfway along it there’s another door set into the wall. I jiggle
its handle and push against it.

‘Locked.’

‘Fucking great,’ Farrell mutters.

‘There has to be a way to open that rolling door.’ Then I see it. There’s a chunky control panel hanging from a thick cord attached to the ceiling.

I race up to it and press the single red button.

Nothing happens for a second, and then there’s a whir as the metal door’s mechanism grinds into life. It starts inching upwards. Light seeps in from underneath. Daylight. I’m
sure of it.

‘I think we can get out this way,’ I say, as Farrell shuffles up behind me.

The door behind us bangs open.

‘Hey! No, no! You must not open that!’ the Cuban man shouts. He jogs towards us. ‘No!’

I turn to face him. ‘I’m sorry, but you don’t understand. We really need to—’

‘What in the hell…?’ Farrell says, scrunching up his eyes and leaning forward. He sounds shell-shocked. ‘This can’t…’

I turn back to the door. It’s now halfway open, and my stomach clenches into a sick, hard knot. Even with his blurred vision, there’s no way Farrell could have mistaken what’s
in front of us. I realise I’m looking straight into the back of a huge refrigerated truck that’s backed up against the doorway. There’s not enough space to slip around it, but,
even if there was, I’m not sure I want to get any closer. The truck’s floor is piled with more of those black body bags, seemingly chucked randomly one on top of the other. To one side
there’s a stack of bulbous transparent plastic bags, smaller, sealed with tape. I don’t want to think about what they contain.

I wait for the nausea to wash over me, but it doesn’t. All I feel is that strange detached calmness, as if my brain has decided that it’s not actually going to process what my eyes
are seeing.

‘What the hell is this?’ Farrell says to the Cuban guy. ‘What the hell is going on?’

‘The accident – it is very bad. There are too many people to deal with. The city morgue is backed up as it is. We have to store them somewhere for now. It is standard
procedure.’

‘You store them in a truck?’

The man nods. ‘Yes.’

‘But that’s disgusting. That’s not right!’ Farrell rubs a hand over his eyes. ‘How many bodies
are
there?’

‘There are many.’

‘Christ.’

The man shrugs. ‘You should not have been here. I now have no choice but to call security.’

‘Please,’ I say to him. ‘Please. We need to leave.’

‘How do I know that you are not thieves? Burglars?
Ladrones
?’

‘We’re not. You have to trust us.’ My cheeks are cold, and I rub my palms over them. Tears have leaked from my eyes without my being aware of them. ‘Please.’

He sighs. He looks from me to Farrell again, and seems to come to some sort of decision. ‘This way.’

We follow him back to the locked door. He pulls a bunch of keys out of his pocket, inserts one in the lock and opens the door. The hinges scream as if they haven’t been oiled in
months.

‘What’s through here?’ Farrell asks. He squints his eyes and shakes his head as if he’s trying to clear his vision. ‘It’s too dark for me to see.’

The door opens into a dim, sloping concrete walkway that seems to go on forever. It looks dusty and unused.

‘It is the old service corridor. You go up here, yes? Take the elevator to the third floor.’

‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘We’re very grateful.’

‘You don’t tell anybody you were here. Okay?’

We head through the door, and it slams behind us, the lock clicking with finality. Farrell stumbles, bangs heavily into my side.

‘Christ,’ he says. ‘Can’t see a thing.’

I hold onto his elbow and guide him forwards. There’s something not quite right about the camber of the slope, the angle feels awkward. It’s slow going, but I begin to make out the
lift doors at the end. They look old-fashioned, purely functional, larger than the kind you see in malls and parking lots. Made specially to accommodate the gurneys containing… But I
don’t want to think about that. I don’t want to think about what we’ve just seen. I can’t. I tentatively touch the bandage on my face.