by Amy Cross
In the distance, beyond the woman and her child, beyond the window and even beyond the far-off highway, a faint sonic boom could be heard from a plane passing overhead.
“I...” Rachel began, her mind racing as she realized that whoever these people were, they'd clearly been dead for some time. She couldn't stop staring at the baby, and after a moment she realized that its dead eyes were looking up at its mother, as if she'd died first and the child had simply been left to wriggle and cry and die. Wrapped in a faded yellow blanket, the baby looked to have been only a few weeks old when it passed, and its tiny hands were visible on the blanket's edges. One of its hands was visible, reaching up toward its mother's breast.
And then, suddenly, there was a clicking sound.
Rachel froze.
Seconds later there was another click.
She took a step back. She couldn't tell where the click was coming from, but it was definitely over by the woman and the baby, almost as if it was coming from inside them.
The third click was louder.
As she watched in horror, Rachel saw the dead woman's hand suddenly move slightly, until its twisted, rotten fingers were touching the baby's face. In return, the baby's outstretched hand began to twitch; a moment later, the woman's head shuddered, before slowly starting to turn.
Unable to believe what she was seeing, convinced that it had to be some kind of trick, Rachel watched in horror until the woman's two empty eye sockets seemed to be staring straight at her.
She took another step back.
Suddenly the baby's cry returned, and the withered child began to wriggle in its dead mother's arms, reaching up to clasp at the woman's fingers.
“I'm sorry,” Rachel stammered, her mind blank with shock. “I'm sorry...”
Turning, she stumbled toward the door before tripping over the ledge at the bottom and almost falling. She dropped her phone but quickly grabbed it again, and then she froze. Telling herself that she must have imagined the whole thing, she forced herself to stay where she was, even though she could hear the baby crying still. Slowly, she turned to look back. For a moment she could make out nothing in the dark room, before raising her phone and finally seeing the chair, empty this time. She wanted to believe that the whole thing had been in her mind, but she turned and saw to her horror that the woman was now standing in the middle of the room, still staring straight at her while the baby cried in her arms.
“I'm really sorry,” Rachel stammered again, filled with panic. “Please, I didn't mean to disturb you...”
Turning and running, she bumped into the wall before reaching the hallway and then spilling out through the front door, back out into the night air. She was filled with panic as she stumbled across the rough ground, and after a moment she stopped and turned to look back, still convinced that she couldn't really have seen what she thought she'd seen, that somehow the late hour and her exhaustion from work had conspired to make her hallucinate. Taking a couple of steps back, she could still make out the dark silhouette of the shack, with the distant lights of the freeway far beyond, and although she could see nothing in the black windows, she felt with a creeping sense of certainty that the dead woman was watching her, while the child could still be heard crying. Taking a couple more steps back, she saw a hint of movement in the darkness, and a moment later she realized that the dead woman had emerged from the shack's front door and was walking toward her through the long grass.
“This isn't real,” Rachel whispered, trying to coming up with some kind of explanation for what she'd just seen. “It can't be real...”
Terrified, she turned and ran, hurrying across the rough ground while occasionally looking over her shoulder to make sure that nothing was following her. Imagining arms reaching out to grab her, she figured she just needed to get back to her car, drive away and call for help, and then someone would come and explain everything. After a few more steps she stopped and looked around, trying to work out how to get back to the dark road where she'd left her car. Worried that she was lost, she used her phone to light the ground ahead, but all she saw was more scrub-land. She turned, but the view was the same in every direction.
Somewhere nearby, the baby was still crying, carried closer with every passing second.
Stumbling forward, forcing herself not to panic, Rachel realized she was starting to sob. Tears were welling in her eyes and she couldn't hold them back, not as she found herself unable to stop thinking about the dead child in its mother's arms. She wiped the tears away, telling herself that she had to stay focused, and she looked around for a moment longer before starting to hurry in the direction she hoped would lead her back to the car. She almost stumbled a couple of times, but she kept going until suddenly she stopped again. Listening, she realized the sound of the baby crying had come closer again, and this time when she turned she saw a dark shape moving in the darkness just a few feet away, silhouetted against the night sky.
“Leave me alone!” she shouted, before turning and running again, racing as fast as she could manage across the uneven ground. Too scared to stop and get her bearings, too terrified to even think, she simply ran, desperate to get away. No matter how far she ran, however, the sound of the crying baby never seemed too far away, and every time she stopped she could hear it coming closer. Losing her footing as she reached a sudden incline, she fell forward but managed to keep running while clambering along until suddenly she felt tarmac under her hands. After a couple more steps, she stood upright and looked around, finally realizing with a huge sense of relief that she was standing on the road.
The sense of relief was palpable, as if something had struck her in the chest.
She looked one way and then the other, before spotting a road sign she'd driven past just a couple of minutes before stopping the car. After checking over her shoulder to make sure the dead woman wasn't close, she hurried along the road until she could see her car up ahead in the darkness, and for a moment she began to feel as if she'd found her way back to the normal world. Even the sound of the crying baby seemed further away than before.
Suddenly the road began to tremble.
Turing, she saw that a large truck was speeding straight toward her.
“Help!” she shouted, waving her arms furiously. “Help me!”
Stepping forward, she raised her arms to flag the truck down, but after a moment she realized that it was traveling too fast to stop. The lights bore down on her, and for a fraction of a second she saw the shocked face of the driver staring down at her from the cab. She stepped back and turned just as the truck began to brake and sailed past her, missing her by less than an inch.
Almost missing her.
At the very last moment, a trailing metal panel from the rear of the truck slicked into the side of her face, digging deep into the flesh and bone and ripping a good chunk away before she even had a chance to scream. The truck finally rolled to a halt about a hundred meters further along the road, with Rachel's face hanging from the rear panel, and then there was a moment of silence before a door at the front opened and the driver climbed down from the cab.
Apart from the truck's taillights, the only light for miles around came from the distant freeway far beyond the shack. The only sound, now that the baby had stopped crying, was the sound of liquid splattering against the tarmac.
“Hey!” the driver shouted as he made his way toward where Rachel was standing. “What the hell were you doing running out into the road like that?”
He stomped toward her, clearly angry and shaken, not noticing the flesh hanging from the panel. His heavy boots crunched the gravel and picked up a splash of red from the blood that had been sprayed across the tarmac. More blood was falling from the torn face, dripping in front of the truck's taillight.
“Hey,” he continued, stopping as he reached Rachel, “are you -”
He paused, unable to believe what he was seeing, as slowly his eyes widened with shock.
Rachel was still standing, but panel at the rear of the t
ruck had sliced her face clean off, taking her nose, mouth and cheeks with it along with her eyes and several parts of her skull. Her whole body was shivering as blood oozed from her wounds, dribbling down across the freshly-exposed meat until it reached the torn flesh of her chin, where it met more blood that was pouring out freely and spattering down onto her chest. Slowly, as the driver backed away, Rachel reached up and touched the edges of her face, her fingers running over the torn flesh and bone as if she didn't quite understand what had happened.
Her lower jaw, shattered and splintered, with the front completed smashed, was moving up and down frantically, and her exposed tongue was twitching as she tried to scream.
Part One
Overflow
Chapter One
Today
“Next stop, Middleford Cross,” said the automated announcer on the bus. “No interchange.”
As the bus bumped over a rough patch of road, Elly looked out at the darkness beyond the window. She'd boarded a half hour earlier, on a busyish road near her home in the suburbs, having waited a while in the glare of the convenience store's lights where she'd had to pretend not to notice the guys dealing drugs by the ATM. Since then, the bus had gone past the rundown suburb, then the suburb with the abandoned houses, then the suburb where the houses were just burned wrecks, then the suburb where darkness prevailed, and now it had reached the very edge of town, where the local paper claimed packs of wild dogs had been spotted. Squinting and leaning closer to the window, she saw nothing but dark, vacant lots outside, until finally she heard the hiss of the brakes being applied and realized the bus was slowing for the stop.
For a moment, she felt as if she was about to throw up.
“You'll be fine,” she remembered her mother telling her a little while earlier. “It's natural to be nervous on your first night at a new job.”
“But if I screw it up this time,” she'd replied, “I'll never get another chance.”
“You won't need another chance,” her mother had insisted. “You made one mistake, that's all. Just one. Everyone gets a pass on one mistake.”
“Not a nurse,” she'd thought, but not said. “When a nurse makes a mistake, people die.”
As the bus ground to a halt, she realized it was now or never. Getting to her feet, she made her way along the central aisle. When she reached the door, she turned to smile at the driver, but he was already making notes on a clipboard, so her smile wasn't even noticed. She wanted to say something to him, to make smalltalk, anything to delay the actual moment of getting out, but she figured she had no choice. Climbing down and stepping out onto the side of the road, she saw that the nearby streetlights weren't working. A moment later, the bus's door swung shut and it accelerated away. She turned and watched as the box of light reached the next turn, took a left, and disappeared into the distance, leaving her in darkness.
Glancing along her shoulder, she saw the dark road and imagined all sorts of figures loitering, waiting to mug her or worse.
A couple of hundred meters back from the road, a huge unlit building stood silhouetted against the night sky, with just a few lights showing from a section at the farthest end. Figuring that she must have found the hospital, since it was the only building with any lights in the area, Elly took a deep breath before swinging her backpack over her shoulder and hurrying off to try to find a path through the darkness. All the while, she kept checking over her shoulder, just to make sure that no-one was following.
***
“Welcome to the Overflow,” Sharon said with a laugh as she led Elly along the brightly-lit corridor a little while later. “You have any trouble finding the place?”
“No,” Elly replied eagerly, “well... Yes, but no, you know?”
An older woman with a friendly smile, Sharon was clearly amused by this response. She walked with both arms swinging, almost like a soldier. “I keep telling 'em they oughta put some lights on the path from the bus stop, else someone's gonna murdered or raped or something, and do you know what they say back to me? They tell me if I wanna go buy some lights and pay for 'em, I'm welcome to go screw 'em in myself. Can you believe that? How much would a bunch of lights cost? Nothing.”
She stopped at an open doorway and leaned through for a moment, as if she was looking for something or someone, but then she carried on walking, leading Elly further into the building.
“Still, you'll get used to that around here. The company that runs this hospital doesn't spend a penny it don't have to. Do you know why this place is nicknamed the Overflow?”
“Um, no,” Elly replied, hurrying to keep up. “I was going to ask.”
“Middleford Cross used to be a big hospital, one of the biggest in the county. Back in the day, there used to be eights wings to the damn place and close to two thousand patients at any one time, before -”
“Before the fire?” Elly said eagerly.
“Huh. I guess you've already heard that part of the story.”
“I know there was a big fire here about ten years ago. I know the hospital had been emptied and closed for repairs, and then one night it just burned to the ground. Well, almost to the ground. This part and a few others survived, but I read that most of it's just ash now.”
“Inside job,” Sharon replied, stopping at a set of double doors before turning and putting a finger against her lips. “Not that you heard that from me, but everyone knows the previous owners just wanted to bank the insurance money and run, and they got away with it too. Hundreds of millions of dollars, can you believe it?”
“No,” Elly replied. “I mean... Yes, I believe you. I'm not saying you're lying or anything like that.”
Sharon smiled. “You're a funny one.”
“I am?”
Pushing the doors open, Sharon led her along the next corridor. “No-one was willing to pay for Middleford Cross to be rebuilt,” she explained. “Hell, no-one was even willing to pay for it to get knocked down either, so most of the place was just left to rot after the flames were done with it. But then they needed a little breathing room for the other hospitals in the area, so this small section of one of the least-damaged wings was refitted and reopened with just the bare essentials. When other hospitals are running out of space, they send a patient or two to us, and that's why we're called the Overflow. Makes sense when you think about it.”
Spotting a broken payphone on the wall, with the front hanging loose, Elly realized that the whole place seemed completely rundown. Some parts of the walls had been painted, others hadn't, and there were cracks criss-crossing the ceiling.
“I guess they just brought it up to code,” she suggested meekly.
“Oh, not even that,” Sharon replied, stopping at a whiteboard on the wall and taking a look at the names written in red scrawl. Reaching up, she began to run a finger below some of the names, as if she was mentally organizing and underlining them, and then she grabbed a rag and rubbed one of the names out altogether. “There's so many code violations in this place, it'd get shut down in ten seconds flat if anyone actually came to inspect the damn place.”
“But they don't?”
“They're paid not to.”
“How is that legal?”
“Oh honey, Middleford Cross, or what's left of it, is kept well clear of the books. Well, well clear. The company really doesn't want anyone sticking their noses in and asking difficult questions, and the local politicians just want a cheap facility to take the strain, so officially, this facility isn't exactly talked about much. That's why the only patients who get sent here are...” She paused, before turning to her. “Well, that brings me back to my original point of why they call this place the Overflow. The patients who get sent here are, well, if we wanna be charitable about it, let's say they're the ones who aren't likely to be getting any visitors.”
Elly frowned. “Why not?”
“'Cause there aren't any visitors who wanna come and see 'em. We only get sent people who've got no family, no close friends, no-one who might come see th
em and start asking awkward questions about why the hospital is so rundown. People no-one cares about. That's the way the company wants it.”
“But how -”
“How does it keep going?” She chuckled at the question, before leading Elly through a side-door and into a small office. “Did you read the contract the company sent you before you signed it?”
“Of course.”
“Liar.”
“I read... most of it. The important parts. It was pretty long, it was like... almost a hundred pages.”
“Did you read the part about the potential hundred million dollar penalty if you breathe a word about this place to anyone?”
“I...” Elly paused. “I don't think so, no.”
“But you still signed the damn thing. You had to, to get the job.”
“Well... Yes.”
“It's all in the contract,” Sharon said, grinning as she examined the papers on a clipboard, “even if it's hidden away in the parts no-one reads. If you do or say anything to materially disadvantage the facility here or its owners, you're liable to compensate them for any lost earnings or regulatory fines they incur, up to a maximum of one hundred million dollars. You also waived your right to contest the amount. That clause is in there to shut people up and make sure no-one blows the whistle on what's going on around here. Works, too.”
“That... That can't be legal!”
“Oh honey, they've got some smart lawyers. They spoke to the right people and got it made legal.” She tossed the clipboard onto a nearby desk. “Best just to hunker down and get on with the job, and collect your pay packet each month. Oh, and maybe start looking for another job and playing the lottery. That's what I do.”
“But -”
“And write your phone number on this,” Sharon added, sliding a piece of paper toward her. “We don't have pagers, there's no budget for fancy stuff like that, so we have to use our own phones if we need to contact each other. And no, you don't get to claim the costs back.”