Kenopsia (Book 1 of Pandora's Wake: The Nomad Chronicles)
We Are Not Alone

Ember checked her crossbow for what must have been the dozenth time since she had set off with Forrell, Esther and Ronan to reconnoitre the top floor of the hospital. Joanas and his team were on the floor beneath and the two teams were in radio contact, able to report their replaceings to one another or call for help.

Not that there’d been much to report. So far Joanas and his first team had found a series of offices and staff rooms that contained nothing but an abandoned mobile phone, some sour milk that was well on the way to turning itself into yoghurt, and a packet of biscuits.

Meanwhile, the second team was, as far as they could gather from the radio traffic, almost exactly above the first team – having found a series of empty offices, some stationary cupboards and another set of washrooms. None of which yielded anything more interesting than some post-it notes and paper clips. Up ahead the passage widened a little. According to the sign hung from the ceiling, they were approaching the cafeteria.

Ember’s mouth watered at the very idea of a cafeteria, and her mind wandered to happier days. Days before the Pandora Event, when she could have ordered something hearty and a hot latte or espresso! The caravan had been relatively lucky with food and they were a week or so from starving, but the rations were less than she was used to. Worse, they were a weird mix of whatever they found along the way or what people brought with them when they joined. She couldn’t believe how sick of the sight of chocolate she’d become, but it seemed they had more of that than anything else.

Aware her mind was wandering, Ember tried to put the thought of food out of her head and to concentrate on the task at hand. Somewhere in the hospital building was whatever Shamus had seen last night.

She shuddered at the thought. The two sweeper teams had elected to work the top two levels first and then down to the ground floor – or the parts of it the nomads were not already occupying.

Joanas and Mathias had agreed that if there was a threat still in the hospital it was probably lurking somewhere as far from the sound of a large group of humans and the gunfire they had been responsible for as it could. If it was confident enough to attack a group as large as theirs, they reasoned, it would have done so last night when Shamus first saw the shadow. For her part, Ember wasn’t so sure, but no one asked her. They probably assumed that being men they knew more about this sort of thing than anyone possessed of a pair of breasts. Men could be a bit like that, in her experience. Of course, to be fair, being a soldier who had more experience of fighting both humans and creatures of the other-verse, Joanas probably did have a better grasp of this sort of operation than she did. Now give her an engine to fix or a car to get working again and she would stack her skills against anyone, but this whole ‘warrior at the end of time’ thing she seemed to have stumbled into was still a bit new to her. She had seen ‘Mad Max’ and ‘The Walking Dead’ often enough before the event. She secretly suspected the latter might even be why she had chosen to learn how to use a crossbow when she was younger. However, none of it had really prepared her for the reality of post-apocalyptic survival in a world overrun by hungry alien monsters that liked people canapés or person burgers for dinner.

Damn it. Now she was thinking of food again. Her stomach rumbled. With any luck, the cafe kitchen might still have some canned food that would be in date – or even a little out of date, it’s not like she was all that fussy these days.

Without warning a slender, dishevelled figure appeared from a set of doors up ahead and off to the left side of the corridor. The figure’s appearance startled Ember so much she jumped slightly and then everything seemed to happen at once. She barely had time to register that the figure was that of a dirty, blood-stained man with wild blonde hair when she saw him hurl a cannister in their direction and slip back through the doors where he had emerged.

Forrell and Ronan let off a couple of suppressive rounds down the passage before throwing themselves sideways through the closest doors. One of them, Ember wasn’t sure which one in the confusion, yelled a warning,

“Grenade!”

All of a sudden she was alone in the passage, frozen for a split second by the speed at which everything happened. Forrell and Ronan were peering nervously out of an office door to her right, and Esther had disappeared through the door to the left. At Ember’s feet was the canister which had hit the ground with a thump and was now leaking some yellowish fluid over the ground.

“Get in cover!” a voice, certainly Forrell’s this time, yelled at her as the figure emerged again and flung a second container her way. Had the first one been a dud? Or was the fuse just a long one?

Or did the brightly coloured label wrapped about the can tell a different story from the one they had all assumed in the spur of the moment?

As the sound of more gunfire echoed through the passage Ember dropped to her haunches and picked up the first canister. The second bounced off a wall and rolled on past her.

“Peaches!” she yelled above the sound of gunfire as she waved her hands frantically.

“Stop bloody shooting at him! It’s a tin of peaches!”

The gunfire stopped abruptly.

“What?” Ronan asked incredulously.

“It’s a tin of peaches!” Ember repeated. “Whoever that is down there must be scared out of his wits because he’s throwing his dinner at us!”

There was a lull in the barrage of tinned fruit.

Whoever the stranger in the dirty hospital gown was, he had taken refuge in the cafeteria, from which he had emerged twice to make his ineffectual attacks. Ember’s heart sank, what if one of the rounds her companions had fired had hit him? She hoped not. He seemed more afraid than dangerous.

“If you bell-ends could stop shooting, we could take him alive and see what he knows!” she yelled.

“Will you get in cover!” Ronan yelled back at her.

“Oh, or what? What are we worried about? Afraid he might have a fully loaded meringue down there?” she snapped back.

After a moment’s silence, she became aware of the sound of barely suppressed laughter from the others. As the tension of the situation began to ease, she found herself giggling along with them.

Even the usually serious Mathias Forrell seemed to have a smile on his face and a hint of amusement to his voice as he spoke into the radio, assuring a worried first team that the gunfire they had just heard was nothing to worry about.

“We think we have found a survivor, but he seems to be unarmed, we are going to try to talk him down, stand by, Over.”

“Try French?” Ronan suggested to Mathias. The policeman had been trying, with no notable success, to calm the man in the cafeteria, calling out to him in German and applying all the skills he had learned in his old profession for dealing with hostage negotiations. The only result of which had been a corridor full of broken plates, which the terrified man at the far end had been launching at them periodically. So far, none of them had come close to hitting anyone.

Mathias shot Ronan an impatient look

“I do not speak French!”

“Let me try.” Esther volunteered,

“You speak French?” Ronan asked,

Esther shrugged, “No idea, I guess we are about to replace out.” She turned her face towards Ember so the men wouldn’t see and gave her a sly grin, eliciting a stifled giggle from the mechanic.

Mathias’s shoulders visibly slumped and, he muttered something under his breath in German.

“Nous ne vous voulons aucun mal!” Esther thought for a second before adding, “Pouvons-nous parler?”

Her efforts were rewarded with an incoherent whooping and a wail that seemed filled with all the anguish of a damned soul.

“We are coming down to speak to you, we will put our weapons away!” Ember ventured in English, suddenly aware that they hadn’t tried it yet. Although the nomads mostly spoke English to each other, they had assumed that this spectre, whoever he was, would speak either German or French – the two official languages of Switzerland. It occurred to Ember though, that she had rarely met anyone, since coming here, who didn’t also speak English as a second or third language.

There was, as if by way of an answer, a faint whimpering sound from the cafeteria.

“Are you hurt? Did we hit you before? We’re sorry, you took us by surprise, gave us a fright!”

Ember slowly rose to her feet and began walking down the passage, offering soothing platitudes as she went. Her nerves seemed to be on fire. Her legs felt as if hey were resisting her attempts to place them one in front of the other.

Beside her, Esther kept pace, sliding her pistol back into its holster and holding her hands away from her body.

“Wait here!” the Israeli woman dropped her voice to speak to Ronan and Joanas, “We will seem less of a threat to him I think!”

“Guess he doesn’t know you yet,” Ronan muttered

“Be careful!” Joanas said, unnecessarily, Ember thought, but then he added something that froze her blood.

“If he is in the cafeteria, it’s right next to the kitchen – where all the really sharp knives are!”

“Yeah, thanks for that, dad!” Ember said as she moved slowly and cautiously towards the far end of the corridor.

“He has a point!” Esther put in.

“I know, I know. Look I’m about one second from wetting myself as it is, any chance you could not dwell on how stupid this plan is?”

“This is a plan now?” Esther sounded incredulous, “I do not think that word means what you think it means!”

The two women almost crept down the hall, hearts pounding, nerves jangling, until they reached the doors on the left side of the passage that opened to the cafeteria. Ahead of them was a second set of doors, marked ‘Private’ and ‘Kitchen’ in both German and French. To their right were the metal sliding doors of three elevators.

“We are coming in now, is that alright?” Ember called through the cafeteria doors.

Silence.

The two women looked at one another, nervously.

A few moments passed and Esther repeated Ember’s question, this time in French.

More silence.

Sighing, Ember waved Mathias and Ronan down and the two men emerged from the office and moved as silently as they were able to where Esther and Ember waited.

“He’s gone silent,” Ember whispered, “I don’t know if we hit him earlier and he’s passed out, or...”

“Or if he is waiting to ambush us on the far side of the door.” Ronan nodded.

“I’ll go in first,” Joanas volunteered, “at least I have body armour on. Ronan, Esther, you follow. Ember, bring up the rear. If we can, we take him alive, so don’t shoot unless you have to, and then shoot to wound if you can.” Mathias passed his shotgun to Ember and drew his baton then burst through the door.

The others followed him through. Beyond it was an abandoned cafeteria. Round tables ran in two rows down the centre of the room, square ones lined the left wall and to the right. A large serving hatch opened into the kitchen, with a door next to it connecting the two rooms. At the far end of the cafeteria were two sets of doors and the whole room was flooded with light from the plate-glass windows in the lefthand wall overlooking the hospital’s main entrance and forecourt.

“Clear!” Mathias called, surveying the room. He held his baton in a defensive grip before him, his feet planted at a distance designed to give him the best mobility at the same time as providing a stable fighting platform.

Ember peered around the room. There was no sign of the man in the bloody hospital gown, nor, she was pleased to see, was there any sign of fresh blood. What there was, however, were several possible exits from the room. She was dimly aware of Mathias Forrell beginning to say something when a sudden, violent, impact knocked the wind from her body. She doubled over, gasping for breath. A hastily thrown plate had struck her in the stomach. Gasping, she pointed at the serving hatch, from where the attack had come.

“There!” she managed to gasp as the others turned to look.

As if they were one, both Ronan and Mathias took off for the door next to the serving hatch, bursting through it, with Mathias in the lead, his baton at the ready.

The dishevelled man in the blood-stained hospital gown leapt from his crouching position, flinging the plate he had in his hand at the two men and striking Ronan on the forehead. The impact knocked the big man backwards off his feet and elicited a stream of strong language in a heavy Irish accent. As Mathias came forward the terrified man grabbed a butcher’s knife he had placed on the counter top and began jabbing inexpertly towards the advancing policeman.

In the cafeteria, Esther took a running start and launched herself through the serving hatch in a perfectly executed dive, landing behind the frightened man. She rolled to her feet and in a fluid motion grabbed his knife-arm from behind, hyper-extending it and twisting it into a lock. The knife fell from his enervated fingers as the Israeli woman executed a perfect tripping leg-hook and in the blink of an eye had him incapacitated on the kitchen floor.

“You have got to be kidding!” Ember gasped, her eyes wide in astonishment at what she had just seen.

Mathias Forrell straightened up from his combat stance, a look of astonishment etched across his face.

“Or we could just get Esther the Jewish ninja to take him out.” Ronan snorted as he climbed back to his feet, rubbing his head in a pretence of having felt pain from the blow. It came away dry and unbloodied, to his relief.

The man on the floor whimpered.

“I’m going to let you go now. If I do, don’t try to harm anyone and don’t try to run, we just want to talk. Do you understand?”

The blood-stained man whimpered again and then, he nodded. Satisfied, Esther helped him to his feet. Instead of running, his shoulders seemed to slump in a gesture of defeat. His face and hands, not to mention his hospital gown, were filthy. There was an obviously infected wound on the back of his hand where the remnants of filthy surgical tape still clung to the skin. His hair was a wild mess of blond, shot through with grey while his face sported a fortnight’s growth of stubble, streaked with stains from food that he hadn’t washed off.

“Well,” Mathias Forrell mused, “we’ve found the missing patient from the treatment booth downstairs, I think.”

“Were you being treated here when everyone left?” Esther asked

“Left, they all left. Left me here! They left me alone here!” the man managed in broken English, between rasping gulps of breath. Suddenly, as if a floodgate had opened in his mind, he began to sob uncontrollably, sagging to the floor until he sat cross-legged on the tiles. He rocked back and forth, his shoulders shaking as he wept, his hands clutching the sides of his head.

Ember looked from the man on the floor to Mathias,

“Better get the doc!”