by James Huss
Chapter XXIV
When the hospital was in sight, the doctor veered around the back. He slowed his stride just enough to walk in right behind a hospital employee, who carelessly and unwittingly held the door for him. We slipped into the employee lounge. The doctor swiped two lab coats hanging in an unlocked closet and put one on. The other he handed to me.
“Put this on.” I put it on. He straightened it. “Now act like you know what you’re doing.” He walked for the door. “Follow me.” On the way out, I grabbed a third coat hanging on a chair and tucked it folded under my arm. “What’s that for?”
“Just in case.” I followed him through a maze of hallways and stairwells. We saw doctors, nurses, patients, all shuffling in their apathetic way through another insufferable day at the hospital. They took no notice of us, though we were not inconspicuous.
Dr. Brown came to a door he recognized. “It’s here.” He looked around carefully before he started on the lock. “You just have to jiggle it a little bit—” He struggled for a few seconds before the door clicked and slid open. “There. Follow me.” He looked around and down the hallway again before slipping into the room.
There was nothing, just a big, empty space. Cords of various sizes and colors lay scattered across the floor; several rusty gurneys sat piled in a corner; broken and busted machines were planted to the tile. But there was not a living soul in that room. The doctor looked dismayed.
“What the ail?” He thought to himself for a moment and then in a burst of revelation exclaimed, “Follow me! We haven’t a moment to spare!”
He darted down the hallway, I close behind, and we half ran, half leapt down three or four or maybe five flights of stairs—I don’t know and can’t remember anyway; blood flew through my veins, tears flooded my eyes, and in my mind’s eye lay Shelley strapped helpless and dying to one of those rusty gurneys.
I knew we were in the basement only because there were no more stairs to descend. The doctor stopped at the stairwell door and stared through its glass. “It’s clear.” We carefully slipped through those doors and into an old underground parking garage. There were a few dilapidated cars, mostly parts and rust, still scattered about from the ancient times, but chiefly the garage was for storage and rubbish.
The doctor scanned the area. “Over there,” he whispered, and we glided through the maze of trash and waste around the far corner to the edge of a fresh-erected wall. It seemed to block nearly half the garage. At the other end of the wall was a set of double doors, wide enough for a gurney. “They must be in there.”
“Who?” I asked.
“There will be guards. Careful.” I followed him as he slid down the wall to the edge of the jamb. An opaque film covered the doors’ glass panels, blocking the view from the outside. The doors were of two types, appropriated from unused rooms in the hospital. The difference created a slight gap through which the doctor peered stealthily. “Two.” He thought for a moment. “I’ll be back. Hide behind that box and wait.”
“Wait for what?”
“Not sure. Haven’t figured that part out yet. But your Shelley is in that room.”
My stomach dropped like a stone, and my heart nearly leapt out of my chest. Dr. Brown gave me a look of tacit reassurance. There was speech in his reticence—it gave me confidence. The doctor disappeared into the darkness as I took my place of hiding.
Presently, an alarm sounded, rousing the guards from inside. Two lumbering golems—one tall and stocky, and the other slightly shorter but quite thick and barrel-chested—came barging through the door and disappeared into the dark corners of the parking garage. The alarm was my battle cry, though I snuck in like a spy.
What I stumbled upon was an unimaginable horror. The room was cavernous, filled with row upon row of bodies, each hooked to a strange-looking machine. Like everything else in the hospital, the machines were odd constructions of random technologies, mostly ancient. Exposed pipes and wiring hung from various places, and metal parts lay discarded in corners and crevices and crannies.
I scanned the rows for Shelley—she was nowhere in sight. I took a quick glance at each body, lying there on the precipice between life and death. It was not the serene painted death that graced those unconscious faces, but a far more dreadful depiction. It was death brought to life. They almost resembled the cyborgs from the old science fiction novels (although none of those ancient authors described a future quite like this!)—tubes penetrated noses and mouths, needles punctured veins in arms and legs, wires and probes pierced skulls. The souls of man were gone, but lo! the machines lived on! forcing air in and out of lifeless lungs, driving blood around hopeless hearts, stimulating bygone brains with shocks and pulses.
I leaned in closely. It was a young man, about my age. He must have died from the Early Onset. I panicked. In face after face, though the vigor had escaped, the youth was still evident. I could think one thing—Shelley was hooked up to one of these contraptions!
I ran from bed to bed as quickly and quietly as I could. She was not among the living dead. When I got to the far side of the room, I saw a group of patients whose machines were not running, though they were still alive. I could see Shelley’s dark hair glistening under the harsh fluorescent lights. I ran over to her.
“Shelley!” I yelled in a whisper. She rolled over and looked in my eyes.
“Marlowe . . . Maaar–looowe.” She was sedated.
“No time, Shelley. We have to go.” I worked loose the straps from her arms and legs.
“Marlowe, Marlowe . . . did you know . . .” I sat her upright and wrapped the extra lab coat around her.
“We have to go.” I eased her to the floor.
“We have to go, Marlowe, Marlowe . . .”
“Yes, yes, we have to go.” Just then I heard the door slide open. I pulled Shelley down to the floor, where we crouched and waited. The two golems were talking.
“I told you it was a false alarm.” The shorter guard sat down at a small desk in the front while the other paced about. The tall one drew his baton and with a flick of the wrist slung it to its extended position. He swung it around as if engaged in an imaginary battle. “Nothing exciting ever happens around here. Nothing.”
Shelley was poking me, whispering, “Marlowe, Marlowe . . . did you know?”
“Sssshhh!”
“Did you know . . . I love . . . yo?” She giggled, and the guards went silent. The tall one stalked down the aisles of beds to find the source of the unexpected noise. The short one stood and loitered around his desk—he was in no hurry to do anything besides sit back down. He craned his neck as though his surveillance were of any use.
The tall one drew nearer—I could hear his feet fall one by one on the tile floor. My heart kept time as the footsteps rang out like the knell to my funeral—step, thump, step, thump, thump, step, thump, thump, thump—it was about to explode. And then, silence.
He sprang from behind the next bed with baton raised high. “You little pathogen!” I turned my body to protect Shelley, and just as the baton came down upon me, I could see the light of consciousness flash across her eyes.
CLANK! The baton caught a low-hanging pipe, and the tall guard was standing there dumbfounded, with his hands above his head. I will never forget what I saw, what I felt that day—his crotch called to me like the bull’s-eye calls the archer. No plan, no intention, not even a thought had manifest in the time between that guard’s errant blow and the one I delivered right between his legs. My foot came off the ground as if drawn up by the heavens, and my thrusting knee crushed his most precious paternal devices.
It was glorious. He fell to the ground, moaning and writhing. The other guard was coming, and quickly. I lifted Shelley to her feet. “We have to make a run for it!” She took a step, but her knees faltered beneath her.
“I can’t!” Those desperate eyes were pleading.
“Hold it right there.” The short guard was upon us. He was holding some sort of electric gun. “See this here? This her
e’s a taser. 50,000 volts of—” CLANK. The guard collapsed.
Dr. Brown was standing behind him holding a fire extinguisher. “I knew this thing would come in handy.” Then he spied the taser. “But this . . .” he said, putting down the extinguisher and carefully sliding the taser out of the guard’s hand. “This might save the day.” He pocketed the weapon. “Let’s go!”
“What about them?” Shelley said of the bodies on the beds. She was almost fully conscious. “We can’t just leave them here.”
“They’re dead, Shelley. They’ve already seen the Light. There is nothing we can do.”
“But these—these haven’t seen the Light. They’re still alive—like me!” There were four beds of patients, all in the same condition as Shelley. We worked furiously to unstrap them and rile them to consciousness. Dr. Brown used those same straps to tie up and gag the guards.
We made it to the last bed. In it rested a young man, like many of the other young men who had passed in that hospital, about my age. We got the straps off of him and tried to help him up. He came to quite suddenly. “It’s no use.”
“We can get you out of here” pleaded Shelley.
“It’s no use. The Light—it’s coming!” He leaned back in his bed. We sat frozen and speechless. Dr. Brown watched carefully, as though hypnotized by the event. “It’s coming, and it’s beautiful! It’s true! The stories are true!” The boy spread his arms as if welcoming an embrace. “The Light! The Light! It takes me to the heavens!” His eyes rolled upward as he trembled, and then his back arched and fell, and he was gone. Shelley gently placed her hand upon his face to close his gaping eyelids, when a sudden last burst of air was loosed from his collapsing lungs. She shrieked, and the machine the dying boy was connected to coldly mocked her with shrieks of its own.
“We have to get out of here!” There were three with us now, two girls of about fourteen or fifteen, and a boy of the same age. They were all quite groggy still, so the doctor helped the two girls while I assisted the boy. Shelley was just about conscious enough to move on her own, though what would soon ensue frightened the stupor right out of her.
There were no guards in the garage—the false alarm Dr. Brown triggered had long subsided. So we hid underneath the stairs to rest and rouse our three companions to consciousness. We could hear people above us returning from the streets after their evacuation. Dr. Brown whispered a plan: “When it settles down, we’ll slip out the back. If something happens, separate—it’ll confuse the guards. Once we get out of the hospital, we’ll be safe.”
We all nodded in agreement and listened as the din and clamor above began to wane. Presently, the stairwell door swung open—it was the short guard. “In here!” he yelled, as he whirled his baton at Dr. Brown’s head. The doctor moved just in time to dodge the brunt of the force, taking a mere glancing blow to the arm. The short guard raised his baton again.
“Run!” yelled Dr. Brown, and the five of us scampered up the single flight of stairs to the first floor. I paused in flight long enough to see the guard jolted mid-swing, convulsing violently. The doctor was holding the taser to the guard’s belly, squeezing the trigger jubilantly. “Go! I’ll catch up!” The guard fell to the ground, moaning and groaning. The taller guard appeared at the door, and Dr. Brown jammed the taser into his belly. “Ha! Take that, you scourge!” He held the taser tenaciously on the falling guard, conducting still more voltage into that fast withering body.
The throngs had yet fully returned, and there was a small crowd still funneling through the doors. I held Shelley’s hand tight, and we tried to stay together, but the others were separated from us in the confusion. It was a mob of doctors and patients, surgical scrubs and hospital gowns. Nobody noticed the five of us—we slipped away easily.
There was mass confusion in the streets. The morbidly curious locals had come out in hopes of seeing the hospital aflame. Even the market was empty. I left a few of my coins on the counter of a deserted clothing shop and took a pretty dress for Shelley to wear, and then we headed for Southgate, the closest city exit.
Shelley left her bag in the hospital. We lost half our supplies. And her Book—her Book was in that bag.
“It’s okay, Marlowe,” she said. “We still have a little money, right? We can get back to the village.”
“But your Book.”
She patted my pack. “It’s in here. I slipped it in just in case.”
“Just in case what?”
“Just in case.”
We left that city in a hurry. The sun would set soon, and we had little time to find a place to camp.
Chapter XXV
“Stay close to the fence. We’ll walk alongside it until we reach the east gate. Then we can get on the road back to the village.” I grabbed Shelley’s hand, and we darted along swiftly. Next to the fence ran a well-manicured path used for maintenance and security. It was quite an easy walk. The air was cooling fast, and the morning’s humidity had drifted into the heavens, waiting upon the rain to begin the cycle again. We were lucky that day—there were no workers out doing their perfunctory assessments and repairs.
“But the rebel village—it’s too dangerous.” Shelley spoke with a slight pant in her voice as I dragged her along.
“Do you need me to slow down?” I asked.
“No, no—keep going. I’m fine. The village—don’t you think it’s too dangerous?”
“Surely the fighting has stopped by now. We should approach slowly, check it out from the ridge before we go down. Be careful. And quiet.”
“Okay, but it’s Shelley.”
“Huh?” She was looking at me very seriously.
“My name. Shelley. Not Shirley.”
I stared at her in disbelief before ejaculating, “Oh my god that joke was so corny. And so old. You must have said it a thousand times.”
Shelley laughed hysterically at herself.
“Shhh!” I held my finger to my lips.
She clamped her hand over her mouth. “Sorry,” she whispered as we rounded the last turn of fence and spied the road that would lead us home.
“So corny,” I said under my breath with a chuckle. “And your timing. You waited way too long after I said surely.”
“Then why are you laughing?”
“I’m not laughing.” I was laughing. A little.
“There it is,” Shelly blurted out as we approached the east gate. I put my finger to my lips again. “Sorry,” she whispered. The same guard we met that morning was sitting in that same chair in the guardhouse. We were fortunate—he took no notice as we crept passed his little hovel and onto the road home. Perhaps he was sleeping. It was unusually cool that August afternoon. The oft-sweltering guardhouse must have been quite cozy.
The roads were clear, and we made it to the hill above the rebel village quickly. Just before we crested the ridge, I took Shelley off the road and into the brush so as not to be seen coming over the hill. We scurried through some sparse grass and bushes onto the exposed surface of a huge boulder whose bulk lay buried in the earth. The rock kept the brush and trees at bay, so we had a good view of the rebel village and the surrounding valley.
“Not as bad as it could be, I guess.” The main gate was completely destroyed and the market burned to the ground, but the rest of the village seemed mostly intact.
“I hope those nomads get what they deserve. Those people—they were not nice people, but they didn’t deserve that.” Shelley climbed up onto a small outcropping of rock that peered over the edge of the boulder and down into the valley. She stared blankly at the desolate scene. “Who are they?”
“Who? Where?” I climbed up next to her and gazed into the village.
“Those people. They’re wearing Shrouds like Pilgrims.”
“Must be a holy tribe.”
“A spirit tribe, Pilgrim. There’s a difference.” The voice came from directly behind us. Shelley froze. I turned slowly to see a hooded figure standing at the other edge of the boulder. He had snuck up on us. Tw
o more hooded figures emerged from the woods. The three were cloaked like Pilgrims, and each carried a formidable-looking walking stick in his hand.
I raised my arms and showed my empty palms. “We don’t mean you any trouble. We’re just trying to get back home.” Shelley covered her face with her hands. I trembled with trepidation.
The one who spoke drew back his hood to reveal a handsome, boyish face. “It’s okay. We’re not here to hurt you. We just thought you were lost, that’s all.” His blond locks were matted against his scalp, and as he brushed his hand casually back and forth across his head, they exploded into a mushroom cloud of soft curls. “You can turn around, miss,” he said to Shelley, who was still frozen with her back turned. He was really quite innocent looking.
The other two hoods revealed one darker, in both his hair and complexion, and one with those same blond curls as the one who spoke. The two said little, but always upon their faces was benevolent softness, accompanied often by loving smiles. They were kind in their looks, their words, and their deeds. When Shelley finally turned around, the boy who spoke reached out and helped her step down from the outcropping.
“Where’s your home? Maybe we can help you. That’s our tribe.” He pointed to the village. “Some nomads ransacked the trading post. We were camped just a few miles north. One of our scouts—my little brother over there,” the boy grinned and raised his prideful chin, “saw smoke and heard gunfire, so the deacons came to heal the hurt and mourn the dead.”
“Isn’t that dangerous?” Shelley asked.
The boy who spoke pressed his palms together as though about to pray. “It is our way. We spend our short lives helping others. The deacons know what they are doing, and Pastor is very old and wise—he has seen this many times. Come. We will take you to meet him.”
*.*.*
The spirit tribe elders—they called them deacons—were spread about the charred remains, checking for survivors, bandaging the victims, and preparing the dead. Just past the gate, in the public space before the charred remains of the market, elders were carefully laying bodies upon biers. Some bodies were all alone, others accompanied by mourning friends and relatives (and business partners). There were women among the elders—they provided condolence to the grieved and sustenance to their own. Piled over to the side was another set of bodies. These bodies looked coarser, wilder. They waited patiently for their fiery fare to the heavens.