THE H-BOMB GIRL by Stephen Baxter (beach books txt) 📕

a duty to protect us. Especially Bern with her little one.

As I said. Saintly.

He brought back bottled water, and crisps and bread and stuff from the Jive-O-Rama larder.

The power’s off, he says. And the water. And the phone.

He peeked outside. He says it looks as if the city is still burning. But there’s a vast black lid of cloud over the sky. All the dust from the burning cities I suppose. You can’t tell if it’s day or night. No wonder it’s cold.

Since then Jimmy has got sick. He has a hot fever. His hair is falling out. He has diarrhoea. You can imagine what that’s like to live with. Joel says it’s the fall-out, and he shouldn’t have gone outside.

Bern won’t help us with Jimmy. Even though he took us in. She won’t even touch him, in case she gets contaminated. She’s hard inside. She’s thinking ahead about her own survival. And the baby’s.

*

Tuesday 13th November. Evening.

The two weeks are up.

Jimmy was bleeding from his gums. And he was sort of bleeding from his skin, even though he wasn’t cut anywhere. He was asleep most of the time. But he was incontinent.

So today we decided to take Jimmy to Broad Green Hospital. It was our first big trip outside.

We had to walk Jimmy between us, me and Joel. Bern still won’t touch him.

The sky is still black. OK, it’s November, but it’s so cold.

Half the houses around here are gone, burned or collapsed. Even the ones that stayed up are wrecks.

Bodies everywhere. Huddles in coats. Rats all over the place. We avoided them. Everybody alive is still hiding in holes in the ground I suppose.

All the food shops, if they’re still standing, are smashed open, gutted.

We passed a Co-op. A big sign had been stuck over its doorway. REGIONAL COMMISSION. FOOD DISTRIBUTION CENTRE. There was a riot going on. A big mob faced a line of soldiers and scuffers standing in front of the store. That was the only time we saw a scuffer or a squaddie, guarding the food, not the people. I heard one shot fired. We went on.

The hospital was open. It even had lights. Joel said it probably had its own generator.

The crowd of people around it was just vast. Like the streets around a football stadium on a big match day. A noise like a football crowd too, a sort of murmured shout. Except people were limping, or being carried on backs or in wheelbarrows.

We just had to wait and join the crush.

Eventually we came to a scuffer. He took one look at Jimmy. He pinned a big amber star with a number 2 on Jimmy’s jumper. Then he showed us which way to take him. Not a nurse or a doctor, a policeman, making medical decisions.

The scuffer looked very young, no older than Nick, say. He wore a cloth over his face. And he was dog tired, with black rings around his eyes. He told us they were calling the war the “Sunday war.” Over and done in one day. Joel asked him who won. The scuffer just laughed.

We left Jimmy in the car park. Just on the tarmac, no beds or stretchers. There were hundreds like him, all with amber stars, lying there in rows.

Everybody sort of stumbles around. I don’t seem to feel anything, about Jimmy or Nick or even Mum and Dad. I suppose we’re all in shock.

*

Wednesday 21st November.

I’ve been working at the hospital.

I’m working with a porter called Fred. He’s about fifty, I think. We lug people around, tend simple wounds, that kind of thing.

They need help. Fred says there are three hundred and fifty casualties for every doctor. No drugs left, no bandages, nothing. They used up everything on the first day.

I’m fit enough to do it. And I have a Brownie badge for First Aid. Which is more than most people have got. I had to lie about my age though.

Bern thinks I’m mad to work here. Joel too.

Well, it isn’t “Emergency Ward Ten.”

They call it triage. As soon as you “present,” as the doctors say, they take one look at you and put you in one of three categories. Green, amber, red, like the traffic lights.

In Category One, green, there’s a chance you will live and they treat you.

In Category Two, amber, they leave you in a “holding section,” a bit of the car park. If you recover you get moved to Category One. Otherwise you die.

Jimmy died.

They take Category Three, red, to a corner of the car park, and the scuffers shoot you. The doctors say it’s kinder that way. They’re making a big heap of bodies there.

I’ve had to carry bodies to the heap. When we do things like that, Fred makes me look at his face, and he smiles, and makes jokes or sings hymns, so I don’t have to look at what we’re doing.

Fred is an Irish Christian Brother. As it happens he used to work at Saint Edward’s, the school where the woodbines played. Now the school’s been taken over as an army base. Lots of them around now, army bases. Fred doesn’t wear his dog collar. He says people sometimes attack priests or monks, as if it’s all their fault, or God’s.

People come walking out of the city centre, even now, looking for help. They’ll hold their arms up, to ease the pain in their tight burned skin. Sometimes you see patterns, like shadows where clothes had been, bra straps or belts. You see women with shadows of flowers on them, patterns from their dresses burned into the skin.

Fred says that the people are like snapshots of the bomb. Wherever you happened to be sitting or standing or running at that moment, 11:32 a.m. on Sunday 28th October is preserved in your body, your skin.

I’m no saint, to be working here. We get paid in food. Everybody’s hungry. The only grub is in the government centres, and there’s precious little of that. You