addressing “this crisis of epidemic proportion whose origin is still unknown.” Safe Havens. Yeah, right. And unknown origins. What a load of shit!
I’ve always been an avid reader of the press, so out of habit I began to flip through the pages. The international section was down to the bare minimum; the sports and business sections didn’t exist. Some newspapers had no more than thirteen or fourteen pages, all devoted to the pandemic. The articles must’ve been written by a skeleton team of journalists, the ones who dared to keep going to work.
I smiled at the foolish ideas and nonsense I read. The public was blind right up to the last minute. Arrogant, foolish sons of bitches.
I looked up to discover that Prit was not in his chair. Dropping the newspapers, with my soul on tenterhooks, I scanned the lobby and spotted the small figure of the Ukrainian, silhouetted against a wall by lightning. He was absorbed in something on that wall. When I figured out what had caught his attention, I felt my stomach shrink.
In a bright flash of lightning, I got a good look at that wall. It was covered with hundreds of messages and photos that had one thing in common. They were all notices of missing persons. Family or friends had stuck them up there, hoping for news of their loved ones. Photos of smiling people gazed down at me. Heartbreaking notes. Anyone knowing the whereabouts of Little Johnny, please call this number right away. Mr. So-and-So disappeared three days ago. Little Susie and her entire school bus vanished a day and a half ago. If anyone has seen our child, please contact us at this number. “Missing” was written in bold letters with a red marker below the picture of an older woman sitting at a table decorated for Christmas. The photograph of an entire family smiling in a garden, in summer, with “disappeared” written over it with a cell phone number. “Javier Pinon, we’re at your parents’ house. Meet us there.” “Luisa Sabajanes, if you see this note stay where you are. I’ll come by every day till I find you. I love you.” “If anyone has seen this man, please contact this number.” And on and on.
It was a sickening sight. I took a couple of steps back, stunned. Of course. A hospital was the logical place to look for a missing person. Thousands of missing people, in fact. You got a feel for the magnitude of this chaos. Fuck. It was chilling. I could feel pain and anguish oozing out of that wall. I was staring at pictures of thousands of people who were dead. Or worse.
I jumped when I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned and looked into Prit’s infinitely sad eyes. “Let’s go,” he said. “Let’s get out of this place right now, or by God, I’ll go crazy. Doctor my wounds someplace else, anywhere, just not here. We gotta go. This place is bad, very bad. Come on. Please.”
He didn’t have to ask twice. The Ukrainian wasn’t the only one on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I wanted out of that macabre place, too.
I went to the door, with Prit leaning on my arm, limping, and a rather cowardly Lucullus tangled around my legs. As we approached the door, an alarm went off in my head. Something wasn’t right. What was wrong with this picture? I couldn’t figure out what until we were standing right in front of the door.
Of course. Those ultramodern glass doors slid open on rails. There must be a sensor nearby. With no electricity, the doors remained obstinately closed.
Yet there we stood, Prit and I, like fools, expecting the doors to open by magic. When it dawned on us that those doors wouldn’t open by themselves, we calmly thought through the problem. Pritchenko said that kind of door had an emergency backup system. There should be a lever located on the door frame that could be activated manually in case of a power outage.
Nervously I felt around the edge of the doors, until my fingers found a recessed compartment on the floor, next to the door. I pulled off the cover and froze. All I found was the symbol for emergency and a diagram explaining how to use the lever. That was it. That and bare wires. Someone had ripped off the lever.
Fearing the worst, I rushed to the other two doors, but those levers were ripped off too. Someone had turned that sector of the hospital into a fortress and wanted to make sure those doors couldn’t be opened, even by accident.
I felt Prit’s eyes boring into me. I had a look of shock on my face. I picked up a heavy red fire extinguisher. I reared back and threw it as hard as I could against the glass. A loud
Seeing red, I threw the container against the glass again and got the same result. Choked up, unable to swallow, I cocked the pistol and, holding it with both hands, shot into the glass. The weapon kicked savagely and almost jumped out of my hand. A tiny hole opened two feet above where I’d aimed. I fired again. And again.
Prit rested his hand on my arm, forcing the barrel down. “It’s useless. That’s security glass, nearly three inches thick. It wouldn’t break if you ran a truck into it.”
I punched the glass, enraged. So close, yet so far. We were just a few inches from getting out of there. We could see the way out…and we were still trapped. Damn it to hell!
Calm down, I told myself, think for a moment. On the way there, we’d felt a breeze, right? That gust of air came in somewhere. I just had to find where.
I dashed across the lobby and stood in the middle of the room, on top of the Galician Health Service shield engraved in the floor. I closed my eyes and stretched out my arms, trying to detect any puff of air. A slight breeze ruffled my hair. I opened my eyes. It was coming from the left, behind the reception desk.
I hooked my arm through Prit’s and dragged him over to that point. The Ukrainian seemed to draw strength out of weakness and despair. He contemptuously refused to use the wheelchair anymore. “If we’re fucked,” he said very seriously, looking into my eyes, “I want to die like a man, standing up, not sitting in a fucking chair.”
Despite his brave words, I noticed that the glow in the Ukrainian’s eyes had faded. Something had broken inside him when we walked through that room with all the children’s bodies. Seeing that boy’s body lying in the hallway had been the last straw. Under so much emotional pressure for months, he’d snapped. His nerves were shot. That tough soldier who’d survived the slaughter at the Safe Haven, the cold-blooded guy who slowly hacked off a woman’s neck without blinking, was falling apart. I’m sure any psychiatrist would’ve diagnosed PTSD. What good would that diagnosis do now?
There was a narrow corridor behind the front desk. Large metal cabinets were lined up silently against the walls, half-hidden in the shadows. Internet servers, I concluded, when I noticed the huge bundle of wires that ran along the baseboard.
The corridor led to a square room. At the back of the room was a big red door with EMERGENCY EXIT painted on it. Thick chains crisscrossed the two push bars. I rattled the door but couldn’t open it with my bare hands. I’d need an acetylene torch (before all this happened, I wouldn’t have even known what that was). Since I didn’t have one in my backpack, we were screwed.
A staircase disappeared into the shadows to the floor above. The flashlight’s beam reached the next landing, but no farther. I could only speculate where those stairs went, but that’s definitely where the breeze was coming from.
Cautiously, we started up the steps. Prit carried the AK-47 across his chest, strapped to his belt. I held the gun with one hand and the flashlight with the other. Lucullus skittered along, half-strangled by the cord tied to my wrist, glued to my ankles.
We had to climb three more sets of stairs before we reached the next floor. Before us was a cavernous, gloomy room. A row of overturned beds formed a bunker. Someone had tried to mount a defense there, but it mustn’t have worked. The left half of the row was completely pushed to one side.
A strange, watery slurping sound coming from behind one of the overturned beds put us on alert. We approached quietly, Prit on one side and me on the other, trying not to make any noise. I tied Lucullus to the leg of a chair so I had both arms free. Then I swapped the pistol for the speargun. We’d made so much noise on the ground floor, I didn’t want to make any more noise here.
Prit was already alongside the bed, waiting for me, looking disconcerted. He nodded. For so long, he’d seemed to be in another world. Now he was ready.
I took a deep breath and shone the light on the other side of the bed. Crouched on the floor, an orderly or a nurse (I couldn’t tell which, but it was wearing a hospital uniform) was bent over something I couldn’t see. I focused the flashlight on the thing’s head. When he noticed the light, he whipped around, and I saw two things. First, his face was covered with burst veins, his skin was a dead, yellow color, and fresh blood trickled down his chin. Second, a huge black rat lay on the floor, ripped open, its guts spilling out. The monster glared at me with bloodshot eyes. He’d been so engaged in his prey, we’d taken him by surprise.
