Thicker Than Water

Lovely, there you go. You can rest now. And we’re going to do the same on the other side, but I’ll let you get your breath back. Does it hurt? No? Good. If it hurts, you tell me . . .’

The other three beds were all occupied by silent, sleeping men, one of whom had his face wrapped in bandages from hairline to chin, with only a breathing tube protruding from where his mouth ought to be. The chart beside the door told me that he wasn’t a Seddon, and neither was anyone else in the room.

Or the next.

It was the last room where I found Kenny, or at least his name on the door. It was there alongside another name - H. Piper - but at first glance only one bed seemed occupied. It was the nearest one, and there was no way that the man in it was Kenny. He was at least thirty years too old, for one thing, and for another he was black - as far as I could tell from the small areas of skin that were visible in between the bandages and the drip-feeds and the strips of micropore tape that were keeping all the dermal sensors in place.

I went back outside and read the list again in case either of the names had been crossed off. They hadn’t. Hurriedly, conscious that the nurse could appear at any moment, I scanned the room again. This time around I realised that the bed diagonally opposite me in the far corner of the room wasn’t empty at all: it was just that the guy lying in it was so skinny that he barely altered the line of the covers.

With one instinctive, pointless look over my shoulder, I slipped back inside and crossed the room. Looking down at the figure in the bed, I almost winced.

If this was Kenny Seddon, the years had kicked the living shit out of him. He’d been a big lad, and he’d grown into a big man - but right now the bigness was wrapped around nothing but skin and bone. The shape of his skull was unmistakably visible under the sallow skin of his face - one side of his face, anyway, because the other was mostly covered by a taped-on wound dressing - and where his badly fitting pyjamas lay indiscreetly open his ribs showed in a series of yellow-white knots like clenched knuckles.