Page 74 of 59 Minutes

FRANKIE

TWO DAYS AFTER THE ALERT

‘Yes, moderate brain injury,’ Frankie says, the phone hot against her cheek even as she shivers in the hospital car park.

The November air is crisp out here, her breath fogging.

Frankie is desperate – surprisingly, inappropriately – for a cigarette.

The craving is so extreme and sudden, that she can taste the smoke in her mouth, feel her teeth furring with it.

She says a silent apology to the poppy seed in her belly, for the fact that she would without hesitation snatch a cigarette if one were in front of her right now, light it up and suck it down to the filter.

‘Thank god,’ Otis’s mum says down the line. ‘Moderate is …’

‘It’s better than it could have been,’ Frankie says, ‘but it’s not good. It’s not mild .’

‘He’s awake though?’ Jo says.

‘Yeah, he’s awake but he’s not really with it. He was out cold for four hours, near on. And they’ve—’

‘I’m coming down, love.’

Frankie shivers, tugs her hair out of its bun with her spare hand, mindlessly fidgeting with her painful hairline. She feels Janet’s deft fingers patching her, caring for her. She closes her eyes, but the memories remain.

‘The hospital is rammed, they wouldn’t let you in, Jo.’

A&E and the ICU is still teeming, just like Janet warned her it would be.

Car crash victims sardined in corridors, bruised parents shushing wild-eyed offspring, doctors and nurses with war-torn faces.

Otis and Frankie were lucky to have been in the first wave of casualties to arrive here, before the motorways were scraped for survivors.

Now people are being turned away or chucked out early.

Relatives sent to plead with cottage hospitals and health centres to provide emergency care they’re not equipped to give.

‘And how are you, Francesca? Are they looking after you?’

‘I was very lucky,’ Frankie says, after a long pause. ‘They discharged me this morning, let me go to sit with Otis in ICU. Hopefully no lasting damage … to me.’ She puts a hand to her stomach, roiling with nausea.

Frankie had asked them to check her belly, to give her an ultrasound.

They refused. It was an early pregnancy with no blood loss, hardly an emergency.

Every ultrasound machine was being used, trolley queues snaking through corridors as they waited.

‘If you start to bleed, go to the early pregnancy unit,’ a doctor told her as he walked away, calling back over his shoulder. ‘But it’ll be a long wait.’

‘I just don’t understand why Otis crashed his car,’ Jo says now, and Frankie can hear the rasping wheel of her lighter. It’s torture. ‘He’s always such a careful driver.’

‘They weren’t normal driving conditions,’ Frankie says, more snappily than intended. ‘It was misty, we were in the middle of nowhere and on the brink of nuclear war.’

‘Oh, that was never going to happen,’ Jo says, taking an audible drag. ‘Fake news.’

Frankie says nothing, she has not told Jo that Otis saved her life.

That he believed that ‘fake’ alert enough to drive his car into a truck to stop three psycho brothers stealing her away and doing fuck knows what with her and teenage Juno during nuclear winter.

That he must have known he might kill himself and still took the risk.

For her. For their baby. People died because he made that decision.

‘I’ll give him your love, Jo.’ She hangs up.