Dog Blood by David Moody

looked around. Behind him stood an elderly couple, who, if you looked past the emaciation, and their haunted, vacant stares, could have just stepped out of their house to go out shopping together. Their surprisingly smart clothes, albeit drenched with rain and streaked with dirt, looked several sizes too big for them. Phillips jumped off the desk, feet splashing in a puddle of mud, grabbed a chair, and placed it next to the one that was already opposite Mark.
    “I’ll leave you to it,” he said. “See you around.”
    With that he was gone. Mark gestured for the new arrivals to sit down. He hated doing this. It was hard. Damned hard. Too hard. He watched as the man sat his wife down, almost slipping in the greasy mud, then sat down next to her. Christ, after all they’d probably been through, he was still managing to be a bloody gentleman. He’d probably been looking after his wife for so long that he was hardwired to do it. She’d no doubt be the same, darning the holes in his clothes and checking he’d had enough to eat when both of them struggled to find any food and the world was falling apart around them. The couple huddled together for warmth, rainwater running off their clothes and dripping from the ends of their noses. The woman sobbed and shook, her shoulders jerking forward again and again. Her husband couldn’t help her or console her. He tried, of course, but she wouldn’t stop. He turned and faced Mark and stared at him, begging for help without saying a word, eyes filled with tears, mouth hanging open.
    “Okay, what are your-?” he began to ask, stopping short when a low-flying jet tore through the air above the park, sounding like it was just yards above the roof of the tent. The gut-wrenching noise and blast of wind made the canvas walls shake and the woman wail and screw her eyes shut. Her husband took her hand in his and gripped it tight. Mark waited a few seconds for the jet to completely disappear before trying again.
    “What are your names?”
    Nothing.
    “Do you have any identification papers with you?”
    Nothing.
    “Do you have any credit cards, letters… anything with your names on it, or an address?”
    Nothing. Mark sighed and held his head in his hands, barely making any attempt to hide his frustration and fatigue. He looked up again, reached across the table, and gently shook the old man’s wet right arm. The man reacted to his touch, shaking his head slightly as if he’d just been woken from a trance.
    “Can you tell me your name?”
    “Graeme Reynolds,” he finally answered, his voice barely audible over the rain.
    “Okay, Graeme,” Mark continued, looking down and scribbling the name at the top of the form he’d drawn up, “is this your wife?”
    He nodded. Mark waited.
    “What’s her name?” Mark asked finally.
    Another pause, almost as if he were having to dredge his memory for the answer.
    “Mary.”
    “Your date of birth?”
    No answer. Graeme seemed to be looking past Mark now, gazing into space. Waste of fucking time, Mark thought to himself. He’s gone again. What’s the point?
    “Wait there,” he told him, although he knew the man wasn’t going anywhere. He got up from his chair and walked across the dark tent to another table, where he added the couple’s names to a register and entered the same names against the next available address in another file. He wrote out the details on a slip of paper and took it back, wondering if anyone was ever going to collect the files and update the Central System. When he and Kate had first started volunteering, the system had been updated religiously by a dedicated team tasked with keeping the information as accurate as was humanly possible. Now, whether it was because of a lack of functioning computers, a lack of trained operators, or any one of a hundred possible other reasons, the system seemed to be falling apart as quickly as everything else.
    Mark handed the slip of paper to Graeme. He took it but didn’t look