Page 28 of 59 Minutes

CARRIE

Carrie’s eyes water from staring at the strip light at the top of the dark staircase but she will not stop looking, nervous on some level that it’s just a mirage and if she looks away, it will disappear.

Carrie’s clothes are sweat-drenched and she can feel her hair sticking to her face, every step now exhausting and painful. When she finally reaches the top, she can see neither an exit nor Grace. ‘Where are you?’ Her voice is whiny, childish, when she – the adult – should be the one in control.

‘I’m here!’

She turns a final corkscrew and there it is. EMERGENCY EXIT.

And there Grace is, beaming underneath the exit sign, angelic in the electric light. Her fingers are on the door handle already, her face shining with sweat and smeared with grease. Without thinking, Carrie grabs and hugs her. Grace stiffens but then exhales into the hug.

The door is curved, almost hidden in the wall like a prank. They still don’t know where they’ll come out, how close they are to their homes, to their people. Nodding to each other, and in one shared movement, they pull the handle down and push the door open.

‘Oh my god,’ Grace says, as Carrie moves in front of her without thinking and then steps out into some kind of apocalyptic video game.

Sirens scream from all angles. People rush past Carrie and Grace as they step out cautiously into the crisp evening.

Carrie blinks and looks frantically around for something familiar, a landmark.

But this place is unrecognisable. Carnage.

Biblical scenes of mayhem and horror. People shoving and stumbling, charging at the closed doors of shops, banging on shuttered windows.

A cyclist is knocked off her bike nearby, her thin body skidding across the road, insectile. The man who pushed her is already on it and frantically peddling away. Everyone is trying to get wherever they need.

‘Where are we?’ Grace says.

Carrie spins desperately, trying to get her bearings, to see some kind of static landmark behind the frantic movement.

And then … a tall dark hotel building to their left, so large she didn’t see it there, pasted onto the sky. A railway bridge behind it. Waterloo Station behind that. They’re barely one hundred metres from where they first got the warning.

St Thomas’s Hospital is just along there, though not visible. Where she and Emma first held Clementine, first smelled her soft apricot skin.

Oh god, there are babies being born right now.

In this.

And what of people in surgery?

‘We need to go, Carrie.’ She feels a small hand gripping hers, pulling her gently. They inch carefully along the street, still holding hands.

Wild eyed, they dodge the staggering, the running, and the injured.

A car swerves the wrong way to avoid a taxi ricocheting between lanes and abandoned cars.

They turn a corner but Carrie knew already.

The relief is gravitational, she spins in her shoes like a compass magnet and now she’s facing Lambeth North Station.

She touches the blood-red tiles and earths herself.

She chose the right direction, down there in the sizzling dark.

And now they’re on their way home.