Читать книгу The Tower: Part Four - Simon Toyne, Simon Toyne - Страница 17

Inspector Arkadian was standing in a car park just outside the city limits, supervising the disembarkation of a busload of children when he became aware of eyes upon him. He looked down at a terrified and tearful-looking girl of about eight. He crouched down, bringing his head level with hers, fully aware of how frightening he must seem after all she had already been through, towering over her in the contamination suit that had become his second skin since the outbreak.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked, brushing her wavy brown hair away from her face with a gloved hand.

‘Hevva.’

‘Well, Hevva, there’s chocolate and cola inside.’ He pointed to the backpackers’ hostel that had been commandeered as a temporary orphanage.

‘Are we going to be taken into the mountain to die, like Mummy?’ she asked, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.

He felt something break inside him. ‘No. You’ll be safe here – I promise.’

She stared at him for a moment with the clear and searching expression only a child can manage, then slowly turned and rejoined the others.

The quarantine had been swift and had been put in place the moment the first infection occurred outside the Old City walls – a local teacher who had already infected the rest of the teachers in her school and many of the parents by the time her symptoms manifested. Arkadian’s blood had run cold when he first heard this news. Madalina, his wife, worked at a school, not the one that had been infected, but it was still a chilling reminder of how vulnerable everyone was in the face of this thing. Madalina was now in semi-quarantine in St Mark’s church near their house. All public workers who’d had extended contact with other people had been moved to large civic buildings for observation and she had been one of them. But these internal precautions were only part of the overall plan.

The last thing the national and international community wanted was a new killer disease to escape into the wider world. Ruin’s natural isolation, surrounded by the high, unpopulated foothills of the Taurus mountains, made it uniquely suited to be placed in its own self-contained quarantine. The rapid evacuation of the Old Town after the first outbreak had been effective enough to hold back the spread of the disease for the first month and so the policy was now extended to the city as a whole. There was only one road leading into Ruin and it was now blocked with no access in or out save for the daily food and medical supplies delivered by truck to the outer barrier, and only collected and transported into the city once the trucks had driven away again.

Inside the city there were further divisions. Ruin was naturally split into quarters by four great, straight boulevards that radiated out from the Citadel at the centre. Each quarter was now a self-contained borough, with the boulevards between them acting as a no-man’s-land no one was allowed to cross. There had been near riots as people tried to flee one part of the city and relocate in another following a rumour in the first few days of the quarantine that all new cases of the blight were in the Lost Quarter and that the neighbouring three boroughs were disease free. The unsteady peace that had eventually been re-established was now maintained by constant armed patrols. The only movement of any kind had been the transportation of the infected down the empty boulevards towards the Old Town and the Citadel, and the evacuation of children in the other direction.