Sir Thursday(19)

Before she could get back in the elevator, they all noticed her.

‘Don’t step forward!’ boomed one of the hospital guards. ‘This whole level is Q-zoned. How did you get here?’

‘I just got in the elevator,’ said Leaf, acting younger than she was and much more stupid.

‘It’s supposed to be locked off from the ground,’ grumbled the guard. ‘Just get back in and go down to Level One.’

‘I won’t catch anything, will I?’ asked Leaf.

‘Go back down!’ ordered the guard.

Leaf stepped back in and pressed the button. Clearly something had changed in the time she’d been away. The fact that this whole quarantine level had now been locked off did not sound good. But the Sleepy Plague had gone …

The elevator doors opened on the ground floor. Leaf stepped out, into pandemonium. There were people everywhere, filling the lobby, the corridors, and the waiting areas. Most of the people sitting looked like hospital workers, not visitors, and as far as Leaf could tell from a quick scan, there were no patients.

She started walking through the crowd, her mind busy trying to work out what to do. The first thing would be to establish exactly what day it was and what was going on. Then she’d have to work out how to get to the linen storeroom where the Skinless Boy had supposedly hidden Arthur’s pocket. Then get that out of the hospital and find the manifestation of the House, which Arthur had told her ages ago had appeared near his house, taking up several blocks …

Getting there was going to be very difficult, Leaf realised as she looked out the main doors. They were shut and taped with black-and-yellow biohazard tape. The windows were pasted with posters that even from a distance Leaf could see were headed with the words Creighton Act, the legal authority that allowed the government to establish a quarantine area and use lethal force to make sure everyone stayed in it.

Beyond the windows, out in the hospital parking lot, there were four or five armoured vehicles and lots and lots of soldiers in biohazard suits. Mixing with them were orange-suited figures with three bright fluoro-yellow letters on their backs: FBA, which stood for the Federal Biocontrol Authority.

Leaf looked around to see if she could see anyone she knew. But there were no familiar faces, until she finally spotted one of the male nurses who she’d talked to when Ed and the rest of her family were first taken away. He was sitting with his back to the wall, wearily sipping a cup of coffee, while two other nurses dozed on either side of him, heads slumped forward, abandoned coffee cups and half-eaten sandwiches on the floor.

Leaf threaded her way through the crowd and stood in front of the nurse.

‘Hi,’ she said. She couldn’t remember his name, and the nameplate on his shirt was tilted down.

The nurse looked up. His eyes didn’t focus for a second. He shook his head, wiped a palm across his face, and smiled.

‘Oh, hi. You get caught here when we got Q-zoned?’

‘Yeah,’ said Leaf. ‘Only I was asleep in the waiting room … uh … over there, and I just woke up and I don’t know what’s happened. Is it the Sleepy Plague back again?’

‘No, it’s something else,’ said the nurse. He straightened up a little and Leaf saw his nameplate. Senior Nurse Adam Jamale. ‘Maybe nothing, even, but you know, no one wants to take a chance.’

‘So what happened?’

‘Beats me.’ Jamale shook his head. ‘It all came down an hour ago. I heard a rumour that they found signs of a bioweapon attack on one of the staff.’

‘Yeah, that’s right,’ said one of the other nurses with a yawn. ‘Dr Penhaligon herself, which kind of makes sense. I mean, if you’re going to take out someone, you take out the best, right?’

‘But who would do that?’ asked Leaf, immediately worried for Arthur’s mother. ‘And what kind of bioweapon?’

‘Maybe terrorists,’ said the other nurse. ‘We didn’t get any details. Just that Dr Penhaligon noticed some symptom and reported herself right away. She’ll be in total exclusion on Level Twenty now.’

‘I sure hope she beats whatever it is,’ said Jamale. ‘You know, she invented half the stuff we use to pinpoint viruses? Way back, from the Rapid-Lyse I to the new DNA deep-scanning PAG we got last month.’

‘Yeah? I didn’t know she was behind the Rapid-Lyse. She never mentioned it in that course we did on antiviral –’

Leaf tuned out. The bioweapon attack Arthur’s mum had noticed had to be the grey spores of the mould from the Skinless Boy. Since it was sorcerously created from some alien thing, it was extremely unlikely that human medical science would be able to do anything about it. But perhaps they might be able to slow it down.