Shorts - Thriller 2: Stories You Just Can't Put Down by _Collection

bag.
    Following the line of his gaze she saw what he did. Blood on the pavement. Not that of the man from the Tube. Hers. A line of dark, thick liquid gathering around her grazed knee, pooling as it trickled down her leg.
    The wailing of sirens grew louder. Vans and police cars seemed to be descending upon them from every direction. Men were shouting, screaming at one another. A couple were bent down over the broken body leaking onto the ground a few yards away.
    Before she could say another thing he bent down, looked in her face, breathed deeply, then scooped her up in his strong, certain arms.
    “There’s a nurse inside,” Sergeant Kelly muttered, a little short of breath, as he carried her through the security gate, past the door and the gawping, wide-eyed officers next to their untended machines, and on into the cool, dusty darkness of the Houses of Parliament.
     
    She knew the medical room, could picture it as he half stumbled, half ran along the narrow corridors. In the very foot of the tower, a clean and windowless cubicle with a single medic in attendance, always. Twice, she’d stopped by, for advice, for support,only to be told to see her own doctor instead of troubling the private resources of the Palace of Westminster.
    Except in emergencies.
    Sergeant Kelly turned down the final passageway, one that led into the very core of the building. The stonework was so massive here it scared her. Trapped beneath several hundred feet and untold tons of grimy London stone, an insignificant creature, like some tiny insect in the bowels of a towering anthill, she felt herself carried into the brightly lit room, lifted onto a bed there, placed like a specimen to be examined.
    It was the same nurse. Thickset, ugly, fierce. The place smelled of drugs and chemicals. The lights were too bright, the walls so thick she couldn’t hear a note of the chaos that must have ensued outside.
    The nurse took one look at the drying stain on her ankle and asked, “When are you due?”
    “Next week.”
    Her flabby face contorted in a scowl.
    “And you’re coming to work? Good God…Let’s take a look.”
    She was reaching for a pair of scissors, casually, with no panic, no rush. It was as if life and death cohabited happily in this place, one passing responsibility to the other the way day faded into night.
    He was still there as the woman came toward the hem of her dress with the sharp, shiny instrument, staring at the Palace of Westminster bag that she continued to clutch tight against the bump, as if it still needed protection.
    “You don’t need that anymore,” Sergeant Kelly said, half-amused, reaching down for the carryall in her hands.
    She let go and released it into his grip. The nurse advanced again with the scissors, aiming at her dress.
    “Sergeant…?” Melanie Darma objected, suddenly anxious.
    “I’m a London copper, love,” he answered, laughing a little. “There’s nothing I haven’t seen.”
    “I don’t want you to see me,” she told him firmly.
    The nurse gave him a fierce stare.
    Sergeant Kelly sighed, held the bag up for her to see and said, “I’ll look after your things outside.”
    As he opened the door, the faint wail of sirens scuttled inside, then died as he closed it again.
    It wasn’t like an anthill, she thought. More akin to being in the foundations of a cathedral, feeling the weight of ages, the massive load of centuries of tradition, of a civilization that had, at one time, dominated the known world, bearing down on her remorselessly.
    “The doctor might be a man, love,” the nurse said as she cut the fabric of the cheap dress in two, all the way up to the waist.
    Then she stepped back, eyes wide with surprise, unable to speak.
    It was all there. The plastic bag with the fake blood, and the telltale path it had left down the side of her leg after she burst it with her fingers. And the bulge. The hump. The being she had brought to life, day-by-day, out of stockings and underclothes,