Kenopsia (Book 1 of Pandora's Wake: The Nomad Chronicles)

Selina Allmendinger leant back on the chair in one of the triage rooms and closed her weary eyes.

“Just a few minutes,” she told herself as waves of exhaustion washed over her. It felt like such a long time since she had last slept.

Despite her tiredness, her mind was still working overtime to process everything that she was trying to deal with. She felt guilty about leaving Cherubin to manage Camile’s care, even for a short time, but if she didn’t get a few minutes rest, she was afraid she wouldn’t be much help to anyone soon. The young girl was stable now, at least, but her reaction to the voriconazole had taken Amanda by surprised. She cursed herself, and not for the first time, over it. She should have known, indeed did know, the risk of side effects from the treatment, and with around 20 patients she admitted there was a fair chance that someone would have developed the side effects. What she hadn’t banked on was everyone else’s reaction to Camile’s symptoms.

She rubbed her forehead with her left hand. Stupid. She’d forgotten they were a small band of terrified survivors in a world gone mad. She forgot, because of how incredibly brave everyone seemed over the last couple of days, but their terror was still there. Still lurking under the surface. With a little more psychiatric training she might have predicted it, but she was no psychiatrist or psychologist for that matter. It was that thought which led her on to thinking about her next problem.

Florian.

That was his name, the man that Mathias, Ember and the others had found in the refectory. Florian Robinson.

It had taken her some time to get that out of him, and even then, in truth, it had been Ember who had finally managed to prise his name from him. He seemed to have taken a liking to her, then again people did. She had an easy going way about her that tended to make her popular and easy to like. Selina didn’t usually have much trouble putting people at their ease either, but Florian was a very special challenge in that regard. He didn’t trust doctors. He had been a nervous wreck when Selina first tried to examine him, pulling away and repeating “They left me!” in both English and his native Swiss-French.

It took both Ember and Esther to calm him down enough to let Selina look him over. Oddly, he seemed to have taken a liking to Esther as well, which was unusual. People didn’t tend to like Esther at first sight. For that matter, prolonged exposure to her didn’t seem to improve relations in most instances. She tended to make people uncomfortable. Not intentionally, of course, although she could be a bit brusque at times, but it was the feeling that something about her wasn’t quite right that tended to make people wary of her. Well, that and her tendency to be brutally honest. The fact that Florian’s first impression of her had been a violent one as she overpowered him would have, Selina imagined, made the frightened, timid man all the more wary of the frightening – and sometimes violent - Israeli woman, but it didn’t. He seemed to feel safest when she was around, which was pretty much the opposite of the effect Esther had on Selina if she was being honest with herself. In the end, though, it was one of Ember’s quips about how most men would love to have three women making a fuss of them that broke the tension and elicited the first smile from the man.

It was brief, and the gesture seemed to take Florian himself by surprise, but it had been enough to let Selina look him over and dress the wound in his left hand. There was no doubt in her mind that the wound was from where Florian had torn out an intravenous shunt at some point. He was criss-crossed with scars as well, across his back and the back of his head. All of which had convinced Selina that this was the man who had once occupied the filthy booth they had found when they arrived. Which in turn prompted her to find his notes and have a look once they returned to the ground floor and the Critical Care suite.

That sparked another attack of extreme distress in the patient. Once he realised where he was being taken, Florian had begun to scream and cry, pulling away and trying to flee back upstairs to the refectory. In the end, they had to agree he wouldn’t have to go into the examination or treatment booths, he could sit in the reception with the others. He was sceptical at first, but when they detoured back upstairs and took the long way round, bringing them back down to Accident and Emergency from the southern end, thus bypassing the private booths, he had calmed down. Seeing the reception area full of people had been an emotional moment for him, and Selina had to catch him as his knees buckled. Eyes wide, and staring like a child who has seen something wonderful for the first time, he had wandered around the reception area in a sort of half daze, alternately laughing and crying with relief and half a dozen other powerful emotions all hitting him at once. In the end, Selina agreed to treat him right there, in front of the rest of the nomads.

It was only once he was treated and settled with the other nomads that Selina had gone back to the treatment booths to recover his notes and try to piece together what she could.

As best she could make out, Florian had been a victim of a hit-and-run car accident which had left him unconscious and in no state to be moved when the rest of the hospital staff had evacuated, for whatever reason. She wasn’t sure exactly when the hospital had been evacuated but, from the notes, his care had stopped abruptly, and there was nothing in them that prompted her to think the interruption in care was planned. Instead, she tended to agree with Mathias Forrell, that the remains they had found in the basement were most likely the care team that had stayed back to look after him, but had instead been devoured by those things in the basement – probably when going down to recover more medication from the pharmacy.

It was clear that Florian was suffering from abandonment issues of some form – and not surprisingly so, given the circumstances, but it bordered on paranoia and Selina was not at all certain she was in any way qualified to deal with that sort of problem. Worse, she just wasn’t sure she knew if the nomads or Florian for that matter, were going to be able to cope. What she wouldn’t give for someone qualified in the field of psychiatric care, or even a counsellor would do. To the best of her knowledge though, they didn’t have one. The closest they had was Father Mathias, and the two men hadn’t met yet. The priest was still sitting with Camile.

All of which reminded her, she would have to check on Camile soon. Just a few more moments with her eyes shut though. She could already feel the weariness draining from her.

Camile groaned audibly in her sleep as she shifted uncomfortably. Instinctively her mother put a hand to her forehead. It was hot, certainly, but if anything a little less so than before. Her eyes filled with tears and the tight knot in her chest, which had made its home there since her children first fell ill on the road, seemed to tighten even further. She felt helpless and frustrated. She had already lost her husband and her brother since the event, and so many other members of her extended family, but it was the continued threat to her children she found hardest to bear.

Father Businger sat across the bed from her his own face a mask of calm neutrality, all except for the eyes. He could never hide his emotions as his eyes always betrayed them, despite all his efforts. In the past she had always found the man a comfort, his presence exerted a calming influence on all he was near. At least, that was usually the case, but not today. Today he became the focus of Margot’s frustration and rage.

“Where is your God now?” She snapped at him without warning.

His expression never changed.

“I don’t know Margot.” He answered simply

If his answer had meant to appease her, it didn’t, it enraged her still further.

“Then what good are you?” She hissed.

“I have asked myself that same question many times lately.” There was a sadness in his voice and there it was again, in his eyes, the eyes that always gave him away. Margot’s anger began to subside, replaced now by another emotion, and one she didn’t care for any more than the rage. Shame.

“I am sorry, Father!” She muttered. It wasn’t him she was angry with, it was herself for being weak and useless, it was God for letting this happen, but it wasn’t the quietly dignified priest who had always been there for everyone, and who had been one of the few to face the mob of fearful nomads when Davil had first mentioned Crimson Spore.

“Don’t be.” Father Businger smiled a thin, but somehow comforting, smile, “It’s a natural response.”

Somehow that only deepened her shame, but there was a question she needed an answer to and perhaps he was the only man that could give it.

“Do you still believe, Father?” She had once been a woman of faith herself, but the end of the world and all the horror she had seen since had washed her faith away and left in its place a certainty that there was no God, only an uncaring universe. Some nights she missed that faith that certainty it would all be alright in the end. That one day she would see her husband and her brother and her parents again in heaven. Most nights though, she despaired of how naive she must have been to have ever believed and she chastised herself for how wrong she once was and of how it had taken the end of the world to open her eyes.

“Yes.” the clergyman answered, “Yes, now more than ever!”

His answer took her by surprise. She had expected some revelation from him that even his faith had been shaken, instead he seemed to be telling her it was stronger than ever. The anger rose in her again, but it was quickly suppressed by something new, curiosity.

“How... how can you still believe in him after everything you have seen?” She asked incredulously.

The clergyman shrugged,

“How can I not?” He asked.

Margot’s confusion must have shown on her face because after a brief moment he continued,

“At first, I doubted. IF there was a God, how could he let this happen? How could he stand by as millions died? As our world was swallowed by the Other-Verse, and then... then, well, then Kurt said something and it all made sense to me.”

“Kurt?” Margot was all the more surprised now. She had never thought of the German soldier as particularly religious. As if reading her mind, Father Businger went on,

“I don’t think he ever knew I was having doubts, we weren’t even talking about faith, or God, or any of it. He was telling me about how he and Joanas escaped when the UNCAIF fire base they were operating from was overrun by things from the Other-Verse, only, he called them Hölle geboren kreaturen - ‘hell born creatures’...” he trailed off.

“And you think The Other-Verse is hell?” Margot asked.

“I don’t know,” he admitted, “But if I’d had to describe Hell on Earth, I think my description would not be very different from what has happened.”

She didn’t know how to answer that, or what to think about it. The delusions of a desperate man trying to cling to his faith, perhaps? Or perhaps the clarity of vision of a man who had undergone an epiphany. She wasn’t sure what she would have preferred.

“Do you expect me to believe that?” Was the best she could muster.

“No.” Father Businger shrugged, “You asked what I believed and I told you, that’s all. I could just as easily be wrong, but it’s what I choose to believe. What you choose to believe is for you to decide, when the time comes.”

Just then the curtain to the treatment booth opened gently. Ashley entered and patted Father Businger on the arm.

“How is she?” She nodded towards Camille who was sleeping soundly.

“About the same, but she is sleeping, at least there is that.” Margot’s tone was almost despondent.

“Oh, Father Businger!” Ashley turned to the clergyman “The patrol found a survivor, they think it was the person from the treatment booth across the way, but he won’t come near these booths. The doctor has seen him and patched him up, but you might want a word – he’s in reception. He seems a bit messed up.”

“Thank you, I’ll go and see if he wants to talk. Are you alright to take over sitting with Mrs Monnier?”

Ashley nodded.

“Yep, that’s why I came along,” she said.

Father Businger approached the newcomer, Florian, as he sat playing with Karloff and chatting to several of the nomads. The man was streaked with dirt and dressed in a hospital gown which was now stained with food from a dozen or so meals. His face was a picture of joy as he ruffled the dog’s fur about its head and it responded playfully by licking his hands and face, making clean patches where its tongue lapped. It was rare these days to see anyone looking so happy. From what Knut had told him when he came into the reception area, Father Businger suspected that the newcomer was almost overwhelmed by the site of so many people. That and the end of what must have been an interminable solitude. How long had he been here alone? Father Businger wondered. It must have been enough to drive him to the brink of madness itself, trapped, alone and with those ‘things’ in the basement.

From what the clergyman had been able to glean during his brief discussion with Knut, it seemed that Florian had not been able to tell them much about what had happened, every time he tried his emotions would get the better of him and he would begin to tremble and shake, weeping and becoming increasingly less coherent. Still, he was the best hope they had of trying to understand what had happened in Bex, why everyone had abandoned the town – or so Knut hoped. For his part, Father Businger doubted the man knew any more than they did. As far as he could gather, Florian had been unconscious when the town was evacuated and probably for some time before that. Still, he would do his best to learn what he could while trying to help the man. According to Knut, Florian was suffering quite a lot of emotional trauma and it was going to fall to Father Businger to help him through it as best he could.

“Florian?” He introduced himself to the newcomer who turned his head as he squared on the ground, playing with the dog.

“I’m Father Mathias Businger, nice to meet you!” He held out a hand which Florian took, tentatively at first, but then began to pump furiously, a grin spreading across his face that gave the clergyman cause for concern. There was something about it, the man seemed eager to please, all too eager, like a hostage that seeks to placate his captors.

Selina woke with a start, confused and befuddled. What time of day was it? The triage booth lacked windows and with the light turned off it was gloomy. There was someone in here with her, a frail frame standing beside her.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.” it was Knut’s voice, “The security teams have swept the whole building, it’s as safe as it can be.”

“How long have I been asleep?” the doctor asked.

“I’m not sure, a few hours, maybe? We just wanted to let you know the building is secured top to bottom, but we are telling people not to wander too far unless they are in a group, just in case. I’m going to start moving people up to the wards on the level above, they’ll be more comfortable there, just for a few days till we move on.”

“You should have woken me.” She chided him, gently.

“No need, Cherubin was able to manage, and you needed your sleep.”

Selina got up. She did feel a lot better for the rest, she had to admit, although she could certainly use more. Still, it was good news that the hospital was secured. She wanted to get the body of the soldier they had recovered from the ambush site into cold storage soon. She hoped that she would have time to examine it before the caravan moved off. Then there was the strange bug they had killed there as well – she wanted a better look at that, to find out what they were up against and what the connection between it and the soldier with the star-shaped wound was, although she had a sneaking suspicion she already had at least part of the answer.