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and up the half dozen or so steps leading to the entrance. I remembered dropping Sue at the entrance to County General when Zak was born while I parked up nearby. She was sat waiting patiently in a wheelchair for me with an orderly who was grinning broadly at some jape about my parking I was certain she'd just made.

    I recalled dropping her at that same entrance each time she brought another miracle into the world. She'd radiated such calm. In my recollections they were all sunny days, a marked difference from the grey and miserable turning of the clock under which our current memories were being born.

    I ushered them through the tall red wood doors of Ravensburg Hospital and we surveyed the domain which lay beyond. The storm which had settled itself comfortably above us made a bid to rob this day of all its sunlight, even so we could make things out in the murk. Long dusty corridors filled with the hustle and bustle of imagined spectres only. The nicely mosaicked floor was covered in broken glass and twisted metal, the foyer looked like a tornado had gone through it. The damage did not seem consistent with neglect or even the ravages of a cadaver outbreak, this looked more like deliberate and focused destruction.

    “Where now dad?” whispered Mac. I didn't know why he was whispering and neither did he, it was just one of those places, the places where silence commands obedience to its law. Where the quiet will brook no contest to its mastery and will weave a hard fate on anyone who shatters its solitude with their own vocal chaos.

    “Let me think” I responded peering into the gloom. Ellie coughed, and then coughed some more. I felt a creeping sensation behind me, it was nothing of the real world, it was regret, my old friend, he'd been absent for some time now. In this life the kind of decisions that you regret are not the kind of decisions that you live to see the other side of, which I sincerely hoped would not be the case for us today, for I was beginning to feel that familiar cold feeling festering my mind.

    This was not a place where lives would be saved. Like most of our land life had deserted this hospital long ago, there were no teams of experts waiting on hand to assist us. No wise and learned men who would know the malady of my daughters lungs by listening to just one of those wracking coughs, which of late had started to leave little pin pricks of blood on her hand when she raised it. She hadn't said anything to me, but I'd seen the crimson fingers and I felt the pain she felt with each cough. It was the pain that drove me here, the blood which fuelled my worry and now added its weight to my regret.

    But we were here now and we must try. “Doesn't look like there is anyone home” voiced my wife in a whisper which even at low volume could not disguise the 'I told you so hidden in it'

    “We had to bloody try” I said with too much aggression. She looked wounded, though not wounded enough to stay a retort.

    “We didn't have to do anything” she snapped. I bit my tongue. It hurt. A lot. She'd been perfectly amenable to the idea of coming here, it had been a joint decision right up until the point it was the wrong decision, now it was slowly being painted and relaunched as my decision. Zak headed of any further arguing.

    “There might be medicine” he offered helpfully. I nodded using his bright idea as a shield to ward off some of Sue's daggers. “Should we split into teams?” croaked Ellie in a tired and sickly voice. “No” said Mac straight away, “We don't split up, it's not our way” he looked at me and I handed out another approving nod. I looked around again, a plan forming in my mind, it was not the best plan, but it was the only one which my worried mind could muster right now.

    “This main building works its way around a courtyard” I said peering out through a broken pain at the rain soaked plaza in the middle of the building.

    “Lets do a circuit if this corridor, we will