Finn watched as his sister swam out into the bay, towing the shopkeeper. He had watched her doing the Bay Swim many times before, but this was different. It felt dangerous. She was towing a man who might panic at any moment and drag them both down.
She swam forward until she was almost out of sight, then the two heads, Mohammed’s black one and Optima’s fair, paused. She was lying back, easing into the Desmond Current. If she’d found it, the current would bring them in under the Desmond Castle, a little way down the coast.
The mob, seeing her disappear, fell apart, going from one screaming multi-mouthed animal into its individual humans. Finn felt his shoulders drop and he sighed.
Then, farther up the street, a smash of glass was followed by shouts, and they were a mob again. They raced past, yelling, pushing each other away to get there first.
The promenade was empty. But no – an old woman was staggering along. She was going diagonally, and if she kept on like this she’d go over the edge – and there was something strange –
Finn ran for her and got her just in time. “Whoops!” he heard himself saying. “That was a near one!”
She turned her head towards him and he saw her face - streaked with bloody liquid, and with a gaping horror in her eyes where the irises should be. She pawed out at him. “Hospital… have to get to the hospital…”
“I’ll walk you down,” Finn said. “It’s not so far.” He turned her gently and took her hand and put it on his arm. “Just keep walking, I’ll tell you where there’s a step or anything.”
They started walking. Then he saw another. A man this time, with the same terrible red hollow in his eyes.
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By the time they were half way to the hospital, Finn had a double line of the blind behind him. They were walking very slowly. Each person held on to the one in front, and held a hand out to the side beside their face to fend off obstacles.
It took them until sunset to get to the hospital. The front entrance was crowded with crying, shouting people. Finn led them instead through a side door, and along the corridor. This was packed too. Full of pale and terrified people. He stopped a passing doctor with a stethoscope hanging on her neck.
She stared at the forty people behind him, all silent now from exhaustion. “Did you bring all these people by yourself?”
Finn shrugged. “Yeh. Who else was going to do it?”
The doctor went down the line, asking each person the same question. “Have you had lasik? Have you had cataracts fixed?” Then she went and got a pair of nurses, dragging them away from other people, and set them to bandaging Finn’s people’s eyes.
“What’s happening to me?” cried the old woman who was still holding his arm.
“For some reason, the plastic lenses set into your eyes have degenerated,” the doctor said.
“Can you fix it?”
Finn looked to see what the doctor would say. She gave a tiny shake of her head to him, and then said to the woman, “We’ll see what we can do. You just rest now. We have a lot of patients to treat today.”
She beckoned Finn into an office, shut the glass door, and said to him, “That was a good thing you did.”
She did not know what he had done. He felt hot tears running down his cheeks.
“Do you have any… any illness yourself?” she asked.
“Just asthma, but I’m fine with the inhalers.”
Of course there were no more inhalers.
She opened a glass-doored press, got a sugar tin and emptied the sugar into a cup, and then took the keys from her belt and opened a locked cabinet. She scooped out a handful of yellow pills and fed them into the tin and handed it to him. “Montelukast. Take one every day. Or one every two days…”
“With no cars, there’ll be no car pollution,” Finn said. “Maybe less asthma?”
“No cars? What do you mean?”
“Where do you live?”
“South down the coast about 60 kilometres.” She stared at him.
He closed his eyes. A poem from school came into his head:
…on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
“I have to go,” Finn said. “I have to find my sister.”