The Methuselah Factor by Vernon Eric Bridges

Author:Vernon Eric Bridges
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: mars, martian, antigravity, biological warfare, amolibros, vernon bridges, methuselah
Publisher: Amolibros

Mary’s Story

At the settlement Mary sat down in front of the fire and let her mind drift back.

She had left school at fifteen, wanting to go into nursing, but, finding she had to wait till she was eighteen, she’d enrolled as an auxiliary nurse. At eighteen she joined the school of nursing at the London hospital in Whitechapel. Her first duties were making beds, handing out bedpans and urinal bottles and generally making the patients comfortable, and other menial tasks. She had to learn the routines of protocol and etiquette, hygiene, neatness when making beds, never to run but to walk quickly. She soon became aware that the sister had her eye on you, waiting for the chance to pull you up on any mistake. But the one to be really wary of was Matron.

Mary passed her first year exams and by this time was working on the wards. But what she really wanted to be was a theatre nurse. Mary got her wish six months later but she still did her stint on the wards. Her theatre work often involved helping to set broken bones, removal of certain minor organs and sowing up incisions, also learning how to administer anaesthetics, something that was to prove useful in later life. She shared a room in the nurses’ hostel with a certain Nora Murphy.

Nora would tell Mary of her exploits with the various men patients on her ward. She had been straightening the sheets of one man’s bed on one particular night when he pulled her into the bed with him. “His hands were all over me,” she said, “in the top of my tunic, up my skirt, down my knickers, he was unstoppable. Let’s go to the bathroom,” I said. “So we went to the bathroom, in which there was a table. There he took my knickers off, laid me on the table and shafted me. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Every night after that we went to the bathroom for a leg-over. There was never any finesse about it, just a straightforward leg-over, but that gave me the taste for sex.”

Mary gained her SRN certificate when she was twenty-four and worked at the Whitechapel hospital for two more years, then she moved to Lincoln. She was twenty-seven at the time of the disaster.

On the day of the disaster she had been walking in the streets of Lincoln and had seen the white powder come down. It had settled in her hair and on her clothes but she ignored it. Ahead of her, a big man was walking—it was Ben as she learned later. She hurried to catch him up and when she got nearer she shouted to attract his attention. He stopped and turned towards her.

“Have you heard the news?” she asked him.

“Yes,” he said, “but I thought it must be a hoax.”

Mary said, “I also disregarded it, but I don’t know why.”

They walked on down the street together. Very soon they started to see people lying in the road and on the pavements.

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