The men in the hospital knew someone had been living there. They knew that someone was either hiding somewhere or had fled just ahead of them. But their search was half-hearted and they never tried to open the locked door to the janitor’s closet, let alone the locked door to the utility room Jayla and Jada hid in.
But Jayla could hear them.
She hadn’t realized the patient wing’s ceiling was false, suspended several feet below the actual ceiling so ducts and pipes from the utility room could snake out to each room.
The false ceiling allowed voices to carry, noises to carry, and Jayla had to remain absolutely silent.
The first night, she heard a man and a woman half talking, half arguing in the patient room directly adjacent to the utility room. She found a small step stool and, standing on top of it, she could just reach with her fingers the top of the concrete wall that divided the room she was in from the patient area. She pulled herself up and found she could see through the gap between the false ceiling and the concrete wall.
The man grabbed the woman, grabbed at her clothes, and the woman playfully resisted.
Realizing what they were up to, Jayla lowered herself carefully back down to the step stool. It shifted when she put her weight on it.
“Did you hear that?” the woman asked. Her voice was so clear, she could have been in the same room as Jayla.
“Don’t give me that,” the man said. “You ain’t getting out of this.”
“I’m serious, idiot. Listen.”
Jayla didn’t breathe.
“I don’t hear nothin’” the man said. He had a harsh voice.
“Stop!” the woman yelled. “I’m tellin’ ya. I heard something.”
“You’re just hearing alien bogeymen.”
The woman shrieked in laughter and the pair’s voices became indistinct. Jayla carefully descended from her step stool and sat next to her sister, plugging her fingers into her ears. Jada copied her.
Jayla hadn’t had time to bring in food, and after three days she was starving. She wanted to moan in pain and hoped her sister wouldn’t start doing that. But Jada had been eating so little, her ribs already exposed on her chest, her spine thick and knobby under shrunken skin, that she didn’t seem to notice.
Jayla noticed.
They would have died without the water. A floor sink for rinsing mops and filling mop buckets sat in the corner, and by slowly opening the faucet a crack, water would trickle noiselessly down a hose she held up to her mouth or to Jada’s mouth. So little came out that way, it took hours to get a proper drink. She drank when she was hungry also, but it only helped for a little while.
They used the drain as their toilet, Jayla awkwardly crouching over it or holding her sister over it the same way. After a couple of days, the floor sink began to smell.
The nights were the hardest. Afraid of snoring, Jayla didn’t sleep. She watched over her sister and muffled her when she made noises in her sleep. Jayla dozed occasionally but always awoke terrified, listening for sounds.
The gruff voices in the room next to the utility room always turned to giggles, then snoring, at night. She heard at least six distinct voices, four male, two female, and the women seemed to take turns with the men. Is that what survival at the end of the world meant? A woman using her body to gain protection for herself?
Her Daddy told her once that women had done that for thousands of years before civilization and laws and firearms began to slowly afford them protections. Guns were great equalizers. You didn’t have to be strong to kill someone with a gun. You had to be strong to fight with swords and bows like mankind had done for thousands of years. Women needed men’s protection and when they didn’t have it, they fell victim to other men’s depravities.
But her Daddy always warned her guns were like swords anyway, double edged things, benefit and detriment, blessing and curse, savior and destroyer.
They could protect the helpless, but they could also destroy.
She wished she still had her shotgun, but with only two shells in it, she couldn’t have fought six. Some equalizer.
Would she have to use her body to gain protection for herself and Jada? Would that be the only way to cope in the new society that was being formed? Would the privileges and respect for women gained over the past two hundred years be swept away overnight?
The thought disgusted her. She decided it would be better to die.
But could she make that decision for Jada?
The girl had been through enough. Her first experience with the terrible monsters men could be had left her a vegetable. If they both had to die, even if they both had to die from starvation in the utility room of an abandoned hospital, that’s what they’d do. She would save her sister if she could, but there were limits.
Trying to honor that commitment, to be strong, got her through the long, lonely nights sitting on a concrete floor, trying to stay silent and awake and watch over her sister, sleeping blissfully ignorant.
The fourth day, there was silence.
Jayla didn’t trust the silence, wondering if the invaders were simply in the basement or another part of the hospital. She listened.
The fourth night, no one returned to the patient wing. The invaders had slept there the first three nights, just as Jayla and Jada had. She didn’t know where else they would sleep. Listening to every sound, every tick or drip or creak, Jayla wondered, hoped, even prayed, that the invaders were gone. She even allowed herself to sleep, and once she’d made that decision, she passed out.
She awoke with her face smashed into cold concrete, her mouth open and drool pooled on her lips and cheek. She shivered. Her head hurt. Her face hurt.
Jada slept still, sitting up where Jayla had left her. She smelled.
Jayla listened for an hour before moving. She turned the faucet on and got a drink. Then she undressed her sister and cleaned her up as best she could. Her body had wasted away even more in the past few days. Jayla thought she could probably get a modeling contract now.
The internal joke made her laugh. Her laugh became hysterical and Jayla knew she had to eat and sleep to survive. They had to leave the utility room.
Listening more, but not hearing anything else, she opened the door. She knew her hunger was bad when the cleaning solutions in the janitor’s closet smelled good. If the invaders were still somewhere in the hospital and captured her, it suddenly didn’t matter. They’d either feed her or she’d starve to death. Either way, the feeling she had now in her belly would be over.
She closed the doors behind herself and looked at the patient wing. Everything had been ransacked. The wheelchair lay on its side, the nurse’s station had been cleaned out, and each room she peeked in looked like it had been emptied. She went to the room she and Jada had used and knew what she would find.
Her shotgun was gone.
Even Jada’s clothes were gone.
“Seriously?” she asked the walls.
In desperation, she ran to the kitchen. All the food there had been taken also. The two to three months of carefully calculated food stocks were gone. Even the food she’d dropped on the stairs had been taken.
She opened cupboards, rooted through drawers, checked every space. There was no food.
She opened the freezer drawer and looked at the melted ice cream on the bottom, now dried hard. She searched for a spoon.
Jayla brought a cup of the melted and dried ice cream to her sister. She’d tried to avoid as much of the moldy parts as possible, but even with as much as had melted, there wasn’t enough to satisfy her hunger. At least it gave her a few calories.
The people who had invaded her hospital had taken all the utensils also, and Jayla had been forced to dig up the dried ice cream with her fingernails.
She mixed it with water and Jada drank it. She also drank water, as much as she could.
She searched the patient rooms thoroughly and found a few crumbs from granol
a bars. She ate those.
The hospital had been cleaned out. Any remaining supplies were gone. Blankets were gone. Pillows were gone. The invaders had been thorough, more thorough than Jayla would have thought possible.
She went outside to her SUV, but it too had been stripped. The wheels were gone, the hood left up and the batteries taken, a window smashed and anything of any value removed. She found a few more crumbs in the seats and ate them.
Had they gone through the houses in the town the same way, or would Jayla be able to find food in them? If Jayla searched the houses, would she find other things? Other survivors willing to kill to defend what they had? Starving and rabid dogs?
Even without food like she’d planned, even without leaving some at the hospital for backup, Jayla decided she and her sister would head south.
She’d heard of a movie, made decades before she was born, of a father and son traveling a post-apocalyptic world down a road. Her Daddy had told her she couldn’t watch it; it was too gruesome. Instead, she checked the original book out of the library and she didn’t know how any movie could be more gruesome, more depressing than the book.
As she put Jada, dressed in soggy hospital gowns, into her wheelchair, and prepared to set out on the highway heading south, Jayla felt like the main character from that book. Where would her road take her?
36
Insertion Page 5