The Lost and the Damned (8 page)

Four of them continued walking, as if nothing had happened. It was the fifth one that worried me. The feral creature paused after my noise. Rather than follow the others, it stopped, turning back toward my direction near the gate. It padded back a few steps, slowly and carefully. It stopped, turning its head up to sniff the air.

After a moment, there was a strong smell in the air, and I knew it was from all of them, not just the feral creature that had stopped. It smelled like blood and ash, death and smoke. The scent filled my nose, so strong it felt like it burned the hair from my nostrils.  The acrid odor settled into my mouth and I wanted to spit, I wanted to wretch. I wanted to cleanse myself of that smell. But I didn’t dare move. I didn’t even dare breathe, not while that feral creature was curious.

It seemed so much longer than mere moments as I held my breath, watching that creature sniff the air and look at the darkness. My heart raced, pounding in my ears. My every muscle was tense, ready to run if I needed to. The stench still stuck on my palate, saliva welling in my mouth to get rid of it. I wanted the feral thing to go, in my mind shooing it as if it were a mangy dog. But I dared not move. I knew if I revealed my presence, it would mean my death.

Thankfully, the feral thing lowered its head and shook it. It turned and trotted in a circle like a dog before galloping after its retreating compatriots.  Once the sound of footsteps and occasional laughter receded into the distance, I finally breathed, gasping for air. My entire body relaxed, going slack, nearly causing me to fall back into the brush. My heart still raced, but it was slowing. Soon I could hear only my breathing and the high pitched whine of the pillar of light.

It was at this point I realized the high pitched whine from the pillar of light was changing. The whine was becoming louder and the pitch was changing. I can’t say how I knew it, whether it was an intuition or something insistent in the sound, but I knew this change to mean that bad stuff was about to happen. A smart man, a reasonable man, a very wise man would have had the sense to run away from what was making the bad sound. But I knew there was a half a million dollar girl inside that hospital and I needed to make sure she got through all this bad stuff unharmed. I ran across the parking lot for the main doors of the hospital, wincing every time I came down on my left ankle.

When I reached the doors, I saw that one of them had been removed from its hinges and left on the ground. It was also partially burned. I wanted to stop and check, but the whine was rapidly increasing in volume. I leapt over the fallen door and into the hospital. In the reception area the chairs were knocked over, magazines spilled onto the floor. I looked for the nurse behind the counter, but she was gone. The glass door to the left was shattered. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go through it. The right door was locked. Frantic, I limped up the stairs, finding a wooden door which I broke open by slamming it with my shoulder.

The whine was very loud and it sounded like it was reaching a boiling point. I was in a corridor stretching the length of the main building. I turned right and heard the loud whine from the far off wing. It was bad, but I could hear it was about to get worse. I slammed into the first door I saw, bursting into an office.

I barely got the door closed behind me before the world exploded. I was hammered by a shockwave and lost consciousness.

Four

I’ve never had a pleasant experience that started with me waking up on the floor in an unfamiliar room. Each and every one has ended badly, ranging from moderate discomfort to extreme unpleasantness. I’d like to say I had a pleasant experience, like one time back in college I was passed out after the party and when I woke up, the hot roommate who lived there took me back into her room and had her way with me, but such things have never happened to me. The best experience I’ve had waking up on the floor in an unfamiliar room involved having a splitting headache that wasn’t from a concussion and then not throwing up. Waking up in darkness on the floor of an office in a mental hospital doesn’t rank very high either.

 It was dark, but in a few moments, my eyes adjusted. There was faint light coming through the windows: moonlight, starlight, something. I could see general shapes in the room, but nothing too detailed: there was the desk, there was the half-toppled bookcase, etc. My body ached and my head hurt. I remembered the blast that knocked me out. I turned my head to look at the door, turning too quickly, which made me nauseous for a moment. I was more than a few feet from the door, meaning I had been thrown across the room. I remember the whine growing louder, then everything exploded with white light, finally unconsciousness. My hurting head reminded me my consciousness was still a very new thing.

I pushed myself up against the desk. It hurt to move, but it was a dull ache. I flexed all my joints gently. No sharp, screaming pain, so nothing was broken. My ankle still hurt more than the rest of my body, but I could manage. I still carried the belief that it was not broken. Slumped up against the desk, I fumbled through my pockets. Wallet, phone, emergency bag, keys. I grabbed my phone. No signal, no power. Great, dead phone. What was that, an EMP? Or did it just get broken when I did my Superman impression across the room? I had hoped to reach Morty and call in the cavalry. No such luck.

I pulled out my emergency bag and fished around in it for the flashlight. Click-click. Yeah, that still worked. I panned the flashlight around the room and found a typical office: desk, bookcases, and papers thrown all over by the shockwave. I picked up a few papers. They seem to be patient cases, interviews, drawings. They were all scattered and confused, making them difficult to follow. The patients were documented using numbers, so patient #457 was now mixed in with interviews from patient #399. I picked up a few pages and read the interviews, using them as a way to get my mind going before moving my body and feeling all that soreness. I retained little and understood even less, but it was a comforting return to form that helped get my mind running.

I’ll admit it right now: I’m a nosy bastard. Some of it comes from my job. When you’re trying to get the dirt on a man suspected of cheating on his wife, you have to find what you can to piece together their life. Stray papers, candy wrappers, receipts – anything that paints a picture of who they are and where they spend their time. This gets you digging through office trashcans and dredging through the floor mats of the cars they “mysteriously” left unlocked. I like putting together the pieces of a puzzle to figure out who I’m dealing with. I found myself doing that in the hospital office, putting together stories about patients as well as the owner of the office. The nameplate on the desk said “Dr. Arthur Merril”, so it was a starting point.

I had a pile of discarded papers on my lap when I realized I had read everything within reach. It was time to get up and move around. I was dreading getting up, but there was no way to avoid it. I pushed off of the ground, my arms first wobbling, then holding steady. I pushed myself up then grabbed the desk to lean on. I groaned as a whole collection of muscles in my abdomen I didn’t realize I had alerted me to their displeasure. I decided to take a minute to rest, leaning on the desk. That’s about the time when the floodlights went on.

An intensely bright light switched on, streaming through all the windows, temporarily blinding me. My first instinct had me immediately crouching behind the desk, groaning as I did, but it’d save me from getting shot. Assuming someone was trying to shoot at me, which I had no reason to assume. Still, better to test my reflexes than be slow the one time someone was trying to shoot me. I scrambled across the floor to the wall beneath one of the windows.

Slowly I poked my head up, looking out the window. From the orientation, I could tell that this room was almost above the reception area, maybe a few offices down the hall from it. I looked out to the parking lot. I couldn’t see the trees at the moment. The light was coming from a long line of floodlights that were set up just inside the tree line. It was difficult to see due to the lights, but it appeared like there were some dark figures and maybe some cars. Cops? I couldn’t tell. With what happened to the hospital I’m not surprised that someone came to check it out. The ache in my muscles reminded me I would be very glad to see cops here. With the shockwave, there could be damage to the hospital, and therefore possible harm to Katie. I’d take the trespassing charge for her to be safe.

For a while, nothing happened. I expected them to send people in to the hospital to check for survivors, secure the area, look for structural problems, something. But they didn’t do anything. They simply waited there, watching. The longer they did nothing, the more I got a bad feeling. Why weren’t they doing anything? What happened to protect and serve? Were they really the police?

The silence was broken by the sound of something clattering to my right. The noise was outside, so I moved so I could get a good glance. As I pressed against the window, I could see that the noise came from the hospital entrance. I saw a nurse barely holding a very bloody patient up with her shoulder. The clatter came from the door they must have knocked off its hinges.

The nurse carried the patient a few steps, limping on her own wounded leg. She must have seen the line of floodlights, because she called out. “Please! We need help!”

For a few moments, there was only silence, marred only by the faint buzzing of the floodlights. Then a response came from the tree line. The voice was slightly distorted by the bullhorn: “Stop! Please return to the hospital.”

“Help!” screamed the nurse, “He’s injured! We need help!”

“Please return to the hospital. Do not approach the barrier. If you continue to approach, we will have to take appropriate measures.”

“Please!” she pleaded. “Help us!”

“Stop! Turn back. This is your only warning. We will open fire if you continue.”

Open fire? Were they serious? What was going on?

“Please!” screamed the nurse, her voice rasping, tears streaming from her cheeks, stumbling forward. “Just help us! Please!”

She had stumbled forward just a few more steps before an order was shouted at the tree line and they opened fire.

Before this, I had never seen anyone die, not in real life. I’d seen news clips of deaths and documentary films, but that wasn’t the same. In person I’d seen people beat up, stabbed, and once shot in the shoulder. At least while I was there, nobody died. They might have died afterwards, from blood loss or shock, but not while I was there. Seeing someone die before you is a more immediate experience, more disturbing. It’s a very clear shift from someone full of life, animated, emoting, walking to suddenly a lifeless corpse, limbs slack, expression rubbery. I didn’t even know the nurse or her patient but my heartfelt a sharp pain just watching it.

It was overkill. Disgusting, dehumanizing overkill. The nurse was limping and her patient could not stand on his own. Yet the amount of bullets that were fired into each of them… It must have gone on for thirty seconds, but for me it seemed an hour. I saw each bullet strike their bodies, most exiting on the other side. The bullets came so quickly, one after another, that their bodies were tossed around by the successive forces of each bullet like rag dolls. The noise was so deafening I could not hear if they screamed out, if they pleaded to God, or if their end was instead spent stoically staring into countless muzzle flashes in the darkness. When the final shout of “Cease fire!” was called, there were two limp and contorted bodies lying on the ground in a steadily growing pool of blood.

And then there was silence.

I turned around and slid back down the window, my back resting against it. Holy crap, holy crap, holy crap. My mind shouted this over and over. I had heard the noise of the guns. Those were fucking assault rifles! Cops don’t have fucking assault rifles. Who the fuck is out there? SWAT? Army? ATF? CIA? NSA? TLA? Holy fuck, what the hell was going on?

With my hands shaking, I fumbled for my emergency bag. I grabbed for my pack of cigarettes. I stopped smoking two years ago. I just kept the pack of cigarettes in the bag because… well, I don’t know why I kept them. Some sort of fetishistic ward against not smoking. Some trophy of quitting. Who knows? My shaking hands fumbled with the pack. Only six cigarettes left, all in horrible shape. I took a bent cigarette and put in my mouth, relieved just by its place between my lips. I grabbed the matches I kept in the cigarette box. I lit the cigarette with shaking hands and greedily inhaled. The cigarette was stale, but reassuring anyway. I sat in the darkness, staring at the shadows in the room caused by the floodlights.

I was finally beginning to relax, as much as someone could after seeing such a death, when I heard the bullhorn again, causing me to immediately tense.

“Attention occupants of the Bellingham Psychiatric Institute. Sommersfield is now under a state of emergency. Do not attempt to leave the hospital. Do not attempt to communicate with anyone outside of the hospital. All hostility will be met with lethal force. You will receive updates as this status changes. That is all.”

The bullhorn clicked off and we were left in silence. In my position slumped beneath the window, I had a thousand questions, but they all boiled down to this: what the fuck was going on? If it was a state of emergency, that means they were the Army. Why was the Army up here? How long was I out? What the hell happened that they needed to declare a state of emergency? Why the hell did they gun down that nurse and her patient? She just needed help.

I ignored my aching body and searched the room. The floodlights illuminated the ceiling, leaving the floor for a flashlight search. I knew I saw a radio when I covered the room with the flashlight earlier.

I found the radio half concealed by papers on the floor. It was an old radio, brown faux-wood panel outside, the glass on the dial so dirty that I couldn’t even see the numbers. I found a long black cord and my hope sank, as I bet there wasn’t any electricity left in the whole place. Luckily, flipping it over revealed it also had a battery compartment which was filled. I turned it on via the volume knob. I was greeted with static. Shifting the dial on FM produced more static, so I extended the antenna, pointing it out the window while I crouched below it, out of the view of the floodlights.