The Bridge Read Online Free PDF Page A

and went through the trees and across the driveway to the staff quarters. What I saw there stopped me dead.
    The upper storey of the staff wing was gone. Huge chunks of masonry had crashed onto the lawns and lay half-buried, casting shadows in the firelight.
    People weren’t milling about here. They were standing and staring.
    And waiting. For sirens to come tearing up the driveway, for the paramedics and the police and the army. We waited for them to come.
    But no one came.
    No one came.
    After I don’t know how long, I started to walk through the crowd gathered outside the staff wing. I was looking for Lou and Bella and Dash and Fyffe, but I reached the edge of the crowd without finding any of them. Then, because no one had come to say ‘do this, do that, go here, go there’and no one was going to come from the staff quarters to say anything ever again, I picked my way through the rubble towards the infirmary garden where I’d been just a few hours before. Its walls lay smashed under pieces of fallen building.
    I went through the garden and stood outside what was left of the infirmary. I was breathing hard but trying not to because the air was thick with burning and it made me gag. In the firelight, I could see shapes tangled in the demolished walls. People. Three people. I clambered over the wreckage towards them. They were bloody, their clothes burned black into their skin. The burning smell was them.
    Dr Lewis. Sprawled on his back, his left arm half blown off, bones sticking out of it, and his face bloody all over.
    Dr Stapleton. Frowning. As if this was one more thing he disapproved of.
    And Dr Williams.
    They were dead.
    I knelt beside Dr Williams and shook his shoulder, lightly, just in case. His head lolled towards me, one eye wide and staring. The other side of his face was burnt through to charred bone and his whole left side was a mess of blood and burnt cloth. I thought, stupidly, this is how they look, people who die in war. They look like this.
    I knelt there and knelt there and couldn’t get up.
    I don’t know how long for.
    Somewhere, far off, hammer blows beat the earth. Someone was talking in my ear. Telling me to stand up and get out, pulling me away.
    Mace.
    He hauled me to my feet and pushed me out into the smoking, noisy dark. He made me sit down, wiped the blood off my hands, and put his jacket round my shoulders.
    Nearby, Jono was trying to stop Fyffe and Sol racing off to look for Lou. ‘He’ll find us. Don’t worry.’ He fished a flattened packet of cigarettes out of a pocket and handed them round, but I was shaking too much. Mace lit one for me. Sol sat down beside me, his face pale in the firelight. He looked at me with huge eyes and said, ‘Will they get us?’
    Fyffe took his hands in hers. ‘Sol. They won’t get us. I’m here, and Nik’s here and Jono and Macey. And Lou will be here soon. We’re going to be all right. Aren’t we, Nik?’
    ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Sure, we are.’ I put Mace’s jacket round Sol’s shoulders. Calming a terrified eight-year-old has its advantages: by the time Dash found us I’d almost stopped shaking.
    ‘It looks like a coordinated attack across the city,’ she said. ‘But it’s taken out communications, so we’re guessing at this stage.’ ISIS, she meant. She said ‘we’ like it wassecond nature to her already. ‘Nik, they want to see you.’ She put a hand on my arm. A whole hand – not smashed up or burned black with bones sticking through. ‘Nik?’ She brushed the hair out of my eyes. ‘God, you’re freezing. The ISIS agents want you. Come with me.’
    I started to hand Sol over to Fyffe and stand up, but Mace said, ‘Wait.’ He stubbed his cigarette out on the grass. ‘They say why?’
    ‘No,’ said Dash. ‘Of course not.’
    Mace lit another cigarette and watched me through the smoke. ‘Did you wonder, maybe, why they didn’t want him the first time?’
    ‘Sure,’ said Dash. ‘But –’
    ‘Anybody lost tonight