Read Machine Of Death for Free Online Page B

light, inviting them to feed.
    “Come, beautiful ones,” he whispered to them as they circled close. “Come.”

    Story by Jeffrey Wells
    Illustration by Christopher Hastings

DESPAIR

    THEY DIED ANYWAY . Of course they did, that’s what those little cards are good for. The security guards here have a league table of the most impressive death predictions reported in the UK press: “The Cool List,” they call it. They got me to phone the doctor whose machine predicted that an eighty-three-year-old bedridden Cardiff woman would die of STUNT PLANE CRASH . I used to feel sick looking at the list, because for a moment a bit inside me would laugh in wonder at the improbabilities written there, and then the moment would pass and I would begin to imagine the Cessna tumbling from the sky, falling down, down, down onto a slate roof under which an old lady was sleeping. The top of the list at the moment is SOLAR FLARE . I have no idea how that one will turn out.
    The first one came in twenty-one hours ago, just as I’d started my shift. In the early morning the emergency waiting room was intolerably bright, and I squinted out of the windows—clean enough at midday, but blindingly dirty against the low sun. The call that the ambulance was coming in had been taken by the guy who’d just gone off shift, and I didn’t really know what to expect. In theory there is supposed to be some kind of chain of responsibility to keep us all prepared, but in practice, doctors have long shifts and want to go home more than they want to tell you that a middle-aged man is coming in suffering from severe pain and passing blood in his urine.
    This is the procedure now: A vehicle comes into the bay, paramedics pull a body out on an unfolding trolley, and a nurse meets them and asks them for the card. Sometimes she smiles, and you know that this one might well walk out of the hospital. Sometimes she gets a stony look on her face and you know that her eyes have flicked across to the patient to see who’s going to die. Sometimes—rarely, but sometimes—she frowns. As Nurse Kealing did with that first one.
    We doctors don’t like to look at the cards. Once upon a time all doctors sounded like Hawkeye Pierce. Death was our enemy, and if you can’t point to your enemy, your crusade is noble. You are fighting against the odds, snatching a few more years, months, weeks of life for your patients, defeating your endless foe. But of course, we don’t fight that fight anymore. We fight a stiff piece of card, and we know that ultimately we are going to lose. What could be more ignominious than to be defeated by a few grams of wood pulp?
    I examined the patient. Late forties, according to the driving license that the paramedics had found, but looking like he might be in his thirties. I had seen people like him at the speed-dating evening the previous Friday, divorcees taking their shot while they still had the time, boring and desperate. He could so easily have been there, and as I directed him to be moved into a nearby observation room I suddenly felt sorry for them. They were alive, and they deserved their chance at a little happiness.
    “Marianne,” Nurse Kealing said, by my elbow. The other doctors don’t like to be called by their first name, but I let the nurses do it because it endears me to them, and they don’t complain as much when I land them with paperwork that I should really be doing myself (which I do shamelessly).
    “What’s the verdict?” I asked her.
    “I…uh…” She held out the card to me, and I know that I recoiled, because I haven’t touched a card other than my own in five years. “You’d better look for yourself.”
    I stared at the card without reaching for it, and Nurse Kealing flipped it up so that I could see.
    TESTS .
    “Shit.” I ran back to the doors that lead to the ambulance parking area. The two paramedics that had brought in my patient were trying to manoeuvre out past another ambulance, and as I cleared