Free Live Free

“No, it just happens. Pretty often, really.”

The lights went out. All up and down the corridor, the lights on the ceiling went out behind their heavy glass bowls and wire guards. The long fluorescent over the empty nurse’s station by the elevator blinked out. The red elevator telltale between the elevator buttons, just above Sandy’s finger, winked out; and the sighing of the warm wind in the steel grills along the baseboard stopped when the EMERGENCY EXIT light over the entrance to the stairs went dark.

* * *

Sandy froze. It seemed to her that what had happened was much more fundamental, much more serious, than the mere extinction of light. Somehow, with her ears, with her nose, with senses she had written about but had hardly known she possessed, she knew everything had changed, though she could not have said how. She no longer walked on hard plastic tiles, but felt beneath her feet something more resilient and almost living, like the skin of an animal. Every wall save the one she faced seemed to fly away from her, off into the darkness. When she took her finger from the elevator button, that wall vanished too. A moment later she reached for it and felt nothing.

“Power failure,” someone—she thought it might be Stubb—said beside her. “It won’t last long.”

A completely new voice remarked, “I’m doing flips. Chocolate flips.” He-if it was a man—seemed to move past her in some complex fashion, then was gone.

Another voice (or perhaps it was only Stubb’s again) said, “You think it’s just the hospital?”

She heard herself say, “Probably.”

“Who are you?” (Possibly the second voice, or Stubb’s.)

“Sandy,” she told it.

“You don’t sound like Sandy.” A groping hand touched her face and she jerked back. Somewhere a human being was howling like a wolf.

Somewhere else—outside—a car or truck was howling too, moaning down the street and far out into the city. There was a crash, muffled but unmistakable.

“Do you think it’s all over? All over town?”

“I don’t know.”

“It must be. I can’t see any lights outside the windows.”

“There aren’t any here. Here in the hallway. You can’t tell by that.”

“Anybody wanna buy a bat?”

“There was a window in that doctor’s office.”

“To hell with that. Where’s the stairs?”

“Please! Please! We have an emergency generating system. The lights will be back in a moment.”

Sandy said, “My gosh, I hope he’s right.” She had lost contact with Stubb and Barnes, and with the wall as well. With each tentative step she felt sure her hands would encounter it, but there was only more space. It seemed colder already.

“If you’re in your room, please stay in your room.”

“Harris, is that you?”

“I’m just trying to maintain order, shit-face. O-w-o-o-o!”

“Stop that! Harris, go back to your room.”

Someone bumped into her. It was the second time in five minutes that she had been bumped, but she was too frightened to be angry. The bumper caught her before she fell. “Lady, where’s the steps?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m trying to find them myself.”

“You nurse?”

Then the lights came back. She was in the middle of the hall, with patients milling around her. The man before her was the man with pierced ears.

The lights went out again.

A Crowd Insane

“Sit down!” Dr. Bensen ordered.

Scuffling and a thump.

“What did I trip over?” Sandy asked.

“Me,” someone said. “Sit down!”

“I was trying to find a way out.”

“We all were. But as long as the lights are out, there’s no way out.”

“Heavy,” someone else said. “Who’s that?”

“Not heavy, just true, all right? This is the eighth floor—”