Survivors by G. X. Todd

Author:G. X. Todd [Todd, G. X.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472233165
Google: IYwXuwEACAAJ
Amazon: 1472233166
Goodreads: 43849329
Publisher: Headline
Published: 2019-10-30T23:00:00+00:00

When the birds died first, falling from the spires.

The rooks and the starlings heaped on their feathery pyres.

Heads tipped back as they tangle in phone lines

We watched,

We watched,

In silence, grateful it wasn’t us.

‘Are there signs for staff parking?’ Pilgrim asked, talking over the end of the song.

Jay’s hair was flat and drenched. That fine, drizzling rain had fallen on them for the last twenty minutes. It felt colder now, compared to when tens of thousands of cars had chugged on their daily commutes through the city and people milled in every open space. Pilgrim didn’t know if it was his imagination or if the seasons had changed over the years, but there was a chill in his bones here, an empty coldness that he didn’t remember feeling before.

Jay sniffed and gathered his jacket closer to him as he looked around for a sign.

Tyler beat him to it. ‘There.’ She pointed. ‘Staff Lot B.’

A narrow road with speed bumps headed to the old eastern wing. As they followed the marked route, their boots loud on the asphalt, Pilgrim’s head remained permanently turned, his gaze on the hospital. The eyes of its windows tracked him. The mouths of its doors were grimly set, unhappy at seeing the intruders. It wasn’t a welcoming sight.

This place is massive.

Pilgrim looked at Tyler. Her hood was up, her face obscured. ‘Do you hear anything?’ he asked her.

Jay’s head turned in interest. He was curious about her, maybe even a little wary. Pilgrim could understand why. He didn’t know what they’d talked about as they’d walked together, but he assumed she’d been as forthright with Jay as she had been with him.

I hope she told him that no aliens beamed themselves into his head. Might help him sleep easier at night.

Tyler considered the hospital for long moments and finally gave a vague shake of her head. ‘No. Nothing so far.’

Best be careful anyway. Doesn’t mean there aren’t any non-hearing kinds of people around, Voice said.

The road ended in a large parking lot, big enough to accommodate a hundred cars or more. It was a quarter filled. The vehicles were all in disrepair, tyres rotted to rubber stubs, wheel-rims oxidized, grass and weeds grown through cracks in the blacktop and twining around axles and exhausts. It was a graveyard for vehicles. And beyond the graveyard was the birdcage.

The birdcage, Voice breathed.

Pilgrim didn’t know how he knew its name, it was just the birdcage. And it was a cage, all right. A fenced-in enclosure attached to a back wing of the hospital. Metal stairs ran up to its roof as part of the fire escape to access the floors. They staggered their way up four flights, but it was the birdcage that was of interest to him. A grilled gate at the near end stood ajar, a chain hanging from its sliding bolt. The padlock was missing.

How’d you know there was a padlock?

Pilgrim was picking at the bones of a past that even Voice didn’t have access to. A slab of unease shifted in his gut, a deep space opening up inside him, gaping into the unknown.

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