by ES Richards
“Which way?”
“Right,” Samuel guided the other two, turning a corner as several other people ran past them, seemingly away from the final moments of the foodbank riot. It was obvious from the noise that the crowd had dissipated and the contest for the foodbank was over. No matter the result though, there would be no real winners. Managed improperly, the food would only last a handful of people for a few days and it was clear the city needed more than that. Foodbanks would no longer be getting donations and would quickly stop being a safe place for people to go and eat. The question of how people would survive once the basic rations ran out was going to get bigger and bigger over the next few weeks; those who weren’t prepared or willing to take matters into their own hands were likely the ones who would suffer. The elderly and vulnerable would go first, but the crash would not be selective in its victims. Everyone was going to suffer from what had happened, it was just a matter of when and how.
“Come on Daveed,” Austin spoke to the man in between him and Samuel, both of them feeling his weight grow slightly heavier as his head lolled about on his shoulders. “Look, the hospital is just there. Hold it together, big guy. Not much further now.”
Austin was right; they were only a few hundred meters from one of the hospital entrances now, but already they could both see it wasn’t going to be as simple as just dropping Daveed off with a nurse and leaving him to get help. The entrance was teeming with people, both injured and able-bodied but all frantically running around and trying to get what they wanted. Some people stood out as hospital workers by their clothing, but the non-uniformed men and women far surpassed them, showing just how much demand and strain the place was under.
“Help!” Austin cried out when they were close enough for people to hear him. “We need some help over here! Please, this man has been stabbed!”
A few faces turned in their direction, but no one even started to move. They all had their own problems to deal with, Daveed not one of their concerns.
“There!” Austin spotted a wheelchair lying abandoned on the tarmac. “Sam – the chair.”
Nodding, Samuel eased himself away from Daveed’s body and ran toward the wheelchair, righting it onto its wheels and pushing it back to the others as quickly as he could. Austin was struggling to keep Daveed both on his feet and conscious, the arrival of the chair coming just in time as he was forced to let the man fall into it.
“There has to be more staff inside.”
Austin agreed, taking control of the chair and starting to push Daveed closer to the building, maneuvering around the abandoned cars and people who littered the ambulance bay outside. Rushing through the automatic doors however, the scene only got worse. The hospital was awash with people in all sorts of different states; some bleeding and begging for help while others darted around trying to steal medication wherever possible. Samuel and Austin looked at one another with wide eyes, both shaking their heads.
“What do we do?” Samuel asked.
Before Austin could respond, the lights flickered above his head and the entire hospital descended into darkness.
Chapter 4
Several people screamed inside the pitch black, jam packed lobby of the small hospital. It wasn’t equipped for this number of people. As the building and its staff were put under more and more strain, the cracks began to show.
“What’s happened?”
“Power cut I guess,” Austin called back into the dim light, just able to make out Samuel standing opposite him as other people screamed and cried, human noises now the only sound anyone could hear as all the machinery went silent. “They must have a backup here though. A hospital can’t just go dark.”
But as the seconds passed and nothing changed, it slowly became apparent to both Austin and Samuel that there was no backup and this wasn’t just a regular power cut. Daveed groaned between them, but their problems seemed so much greater than him now. Still Austin wouldn’t just abandon the man, and Samuel was unsure of where to focus his efforts.
From the conversation around the room they both pieced together what had happened: it was a citywide blackout. All of New York had lost power due to the rolling effects of the crash. It was the middle of the day in the peak of summer and so in most cases, not a real problem. But in a hospital where hundreds of people were reliant on life support systems and other devices, this disaster had just ramped up another notch entirely.
Men and women who weren’t really injured or in need of assistance started to exit the building. There was still enough light to see by inside the lobby due to the large windows which ran along one side, but further down the corridors and into the buildings the light was dimmer and more dangerous. Staff were frantically running around and shouting to one another in search of medical supplies. Their resources were already running low and now they’d been plunged into even more danger without perhaps the one resource the hospital couldn’t function without. These were unprecedented times and from the staff reactions it didn’t seem like there was a contingency plan in place.
“Please,” Samuel reached out and grabbed a nurse’s arm as she tried to hurry past. “Please,” he repeated as she was forced to stop. “This man has been stabbed. Can you help him?”
The nurse looked at Daveed who had now completely lost consciousness, the shirt which he had been pressing against his stomach drenched with blood and laying loosely in his lap. “I’m sorry,” she shook her head. “You need to let me go.”
“Please,” Samuel repeated. “Is there anything you can do?”
“I can help,” Austin offered. “I have some medical training.”
“It’s too late for your friend,” the nurse replied, maintaining a very calm demeanor. “He’s lost too much blood.”
“There must be something –” Samuel started to question, finally letting go of the nurse apologetically.
“There isn’t,” she cut him off. “I’m sorry,” her tone changed again somewhat, using a voice which was often put on in confined rooms with distraught family members. “There’s nothing more you can do. I need to go.”
“Wait!” Austin called after the nurse. “We can’t just leave him to die in the lobby.”
The nurse faltered and looked back. “Come with me,” she answered after a moment. She led them further into the hospital, sounds of screaming echoing around them in the darkness. “You can leave him in here,” the nurse prompted as they reached a ward lined with several beds, all of them occupied.
“Is there anything we can do to help?” Samuel offered quickly, the short walk through the hospital making him realize how many people were in danger. It might be a small building, but there were still over a hundred patients inside. He had no idea how long the patients could cope without power to the equipment, but he knew the survival rates would be dropping significantly with every minute that passed.
The nurse turned and looked at him for a second. “Backup generator,” she replied. “It’s in the basement. We need to get it started or half of the people in here are going to die. If you want to help, that would be a good place to start.”
“Which way?”
“Through here and down the stairs at the back. Code to get in is nine-five, seven-five, two-zero.”
“Nine-five, seven-five, two-zero,” Samuel repeated. “Got it.”
“Thank you,” the nurse replied and rushed away. She didn’t spare another second to talk to the two men.
Samuel scanned the room. Staff members were quite literally pumping blood through people’s bodies with their own hands now. One doctor knelt over a patient on a bed performing chest compressions to try and get the patient breathing again, while a couple of beds down another doctor was performing mouth to mouth.
This was real. People were going to die if the hospital didn’t have power again soon and he had to do everything he could to help them. He might not know the first thing about back up generators, but he could try his best and hopefully, he could do something right.
“Au
stin?”
Austin’s eyes lingered on Daveed for a second longer, the man was still unconscious and his chest was moving much slower and more infrequently than before. He was dying, perhaps with only a few more minutes left. It felt wrong to leave him so close to the end, but much like Samuel, Austin was powerfully aware of the bigger picture. Trying to save Daveed had brought them to the hospital, now they had to try and save everyone else as well.
With a deep breath he looked away from the dying man and to Samuel instead, nodding and starting to jog through the ward looking for the door to the basement. The two of them tried not to look at the men and women filling the beds as they moved past, but it was impossible to avoid it. The ward was packed tightly together with beds no more than a meter apart, the patients all in varying states of illness or injury.
Just before they reached the door to the stairwell at the end of the room, Samuel laid eyes on a particular woman occupying one of the beds. He stopped dead in his tracks, unable to fathom who he was seeing in front of him. Austin reached the door and turned back, noticing Samuel walking over to one bed in particular as he reached out to the woman lying there.
“Sam! What are you doing?”
“Cassie?” Samuel whispered to the sleeping woman in the bed, shocked to see her lying there, both of her legs suspended above her in casts. The last time Samuel had seen her, had been just after they had escaped the Trident building – for the first time. She had worked in the marketing department with him and had been stuck on the fourteenth floor due to her crippling anxiety. Samuel had found her there when he was looking for information on what had happened and together, they had left the building; Cassie assuring him that she would be able to reach her family safely.
Now she lay in a bed in front of him, both her legs broken. He desperately wanted to know what had happened to her, but as he reached out to touch her arm and wake her up, Austin’s hand fell down on his shoulder.
“What are you doing? We need to get the power back on.”
“She worked in Trident,” Samuel answered, his eyes fixated on Cassie much like Austin had been with Daveed. “She worked in my department.”
“Ah man,” Austin paused. He was seeing the bigger picture now though, the backup generator down in the basement his priority. “Let’s try and get the power back on for her then, yeah? Come on, Sam.”
Samuel blinked and moved away from Cassie’s bed, following Austin’s instruction. He pulled open the door to the stairwell and stepped through as the lights suddenly flickered above him again, machines beeping to life in the ward he had just exited. As swiftly as it had turned off, the power came back on.
“What the…?”
“It’s back on! It’s okay!”
Austin’s cheer seemed somewhat premature as Samuel hurried back to Cassie’s side, startling the poor girl awake. She looked up with a confused expression.
“Samuel? What are you doing here?”
“Cassie! What happened? How did you end up like this?”
Watching Samuel question the young woman in the bed, Austin looked around the ward and it dawned on him that while the power may be back on, it didn’t mean everyone was out of the woods just yet. He left Samuel and ran back to where they had left Daveed, sinking to his knees next to the man and searching desperately for a pulse. Nothing. Daveed was dead; despite everything they had tried, it hadn’t been enough to save him. Austin’s fist clenched and his bottom lip wobbled, cursing everyone at the foodbank for what had happened there.
“Help! Someone help! Please!”
With the return of the power, the noises in the small hospital had increased once again, but as Austin knelt in front of Daveed, one voice pierced the air above all others, his head snapping back and forth to try and identify where it was coming from.
“He’s seizing! Help! Please!
Jumping up to his feet, Austin ran toward the sound of the male voice, following the cries until he saw a father struggling to hold his son still as he spasmed and shook in his hospital bed. A woman stood a few feet further back, tears streaming down her face as she looked on in horror, the little boy bouncing around in the bed like a ball loose on a trampoline.
“What’s happening? What’s caused this?”
“It’s his epilepsy,” the father explained, trying to cushion his son’s head and stop him from slamming into the hard bed frame. “He started seizing when the lights came back on. Are you a doctor?”
“No,” Austin shook his head, “but I can help. I’ll be back.”
Sprinting away to the nurses’ station, Austin thankfully knew what he was looking for. He needed to put the boy under before he tumbled out of the bed and seriously hurt himself. He was only a preteen so a small dose would do it, he just needed to find a syringe and the right drug for the job.
All around him, Austin was realizing the trouble that the blackout had caused. Several patients lay lifeless in their beds, their bodies hooked up to machinery that had been down for nearly fifteen minutes, starving their bodies of oxygen or failing to keep their hearts pumping.
“Hey,” Austin caught sight of a man in a doctor’s coat dashing around the corner. “There’s a kid seizing over there, I need to put him out –”
“Here,” the doctor quickly reached into his inside pocket and pulled out a vial of medicine. “Five CC’s if he’s under sixteen. Ten otherwise.”
“Thank you.”
Austin was struck by the willingness of the doctor to help and just hand out medicine; everyone who remained in the hospital now was there to do their bit to help those in trouble however they could, there was no space for selfishness or fear. Tugging open the cupboard doors in the nurses’ station he rifled around inside for a syringe. He tried to channel his husband at that time and do what he would’ve done. Dante was incredibly selfless and would do anything to save a patient – or anyone in need – it was one of the reasons Austin had fallen so in love with the man, overpowered by his kindness and generosity that never seemed to fade or grow weary.
Finally closing his hand around a syringe, Austin sped back to the bedside of the seizing child, the father still trying to keep him still but becoming more and more traumatized as his son flailed in his arms.
“Hold him steady,” Austin commanded, drawing the sedative up into the syringe and flicking it as he had seen Dante do on several occasions, checking there weren’t any potentially dangerous air bubbles in the liquid. He walked to the bedside of the young boy with purpose and knelt down beside him as he had with Daveed, remembering the man he had been unable to save who now sat in a room alone, his family not even aware of what had happened. This young boy was lucky. He had both his mother and father with him and as Austin looked up at the father who restrained the child, he was determined to help them remain a proper family.
After the shot, the child relaxed almost immediately, his movements slowing and gradually stopping. He became still and peaceful so quickly it was almost like nothing had happened, his little face a picture of innocence in a building full of horrors. It was one life among hundreds which had been saved, for the time being.
Austin looked across the ward and saw Samuel who remained by Cassie’s bedside, talking to her soothingly and stroking her hair.
“Thank you,” the father gushed, grabbing Austin’s hand and shaking it feverishly. “Thank you so much.”
“It’s okay,” Austin replied, his eyes sweeping the room and counting the number of patients who seemed to be lying dead in their beds. “Glad I could help.”
He moved away from the family almost on auto-pilot, counting up the figures that he had been unable to save. He wasn’t a doctor or a nurse and he had done everything he could, but it was still difficult to see that many still bodies and know that there were plenty more that should still be alive. Samuel finally noticed him and turned away from Cassie for a moment, taking a step toward where Austin stood motionless. As he did, the lights flickered again and Austin’s breath hitched in his throat. Sur
ely not again. Not so soon.
Everyone on the ward seemed to freeze and there was a moment where they all looked upwards to the lights, begging for the same thing not to happen. They flickered again and then a silence came, the machines fading to nothing as yet another blackout ripped through the hospital and put everyone’s life back in immediate danger. Austin had managed to help one child, but how many more were there that were now going to be fighting to stay alive again.
He could only do what he could, but just like with Daveed, it didn’t feel like it was enough.
Chapter 5
“Okay, thanks Martha. We’ll see you later tonight.”
Closing the door on her friend, Jessie glanced down at the piece of paper in her hand and sighed. This was inevitable, but she still couldn’t believe it was happening. Today marked the second day on the island since the ship had left port, taking with it over half of those who had lived there. Now that the shock of what had actually happened was finally beginning to subside, those that remained on Kauai agreed it was time to start thinking about their future.
“What was that?”
“It was Martha from down the road,” Jessie informed her husband as she walked back into the kitchen. Arthur sat on the floor building blocks with their two sons. “There’s going to be a meeting later tonight for everyone who was left behind so we can try and figure out what we’re going to do.”
“What about the boys?”
“We can bring them,” Jessie replied. “Some of the older kids are going to look after them while we talk.”
“Okay,” Art smiled at his wife, seeing the worry lines that grew thicker and thicker on her forehead and wishing he could do or say something to ease her stress. “What time?”
“Five. At the surf shack.”
“Okay babe, sounds good to me.”
Jessie smiled wistfully at her husband and turned away, leaving him to continue playing with Zayn and Axel. She was struggling to talk about things in front of the boys, not wanting them to worry about what was happening but also aware that she couldn’t shield them entirely from the truth. Axel was already having nightmares about being trampled by the crowd as they rushed to board the disappearing ship, her youngest traumatized by something Jessie feared was only going to get worse.