by Skye Knizley
River shook her head and chewed the tire-like beef. “No. If we ever find the police, they’ll need to see the scene. It might be the only thing that keeps me out of jail. I’ve killed like six people tonight.”
“Shit. Do you think they will arrest you? It was self-defense, right?”
River shrugged. “Yes, it was self-defense. I think whatever is going on, they have bigger problems than a Marine shooting someone.”
They were finishing their food when Jody entered from the exam room.
“Has there been any sign of anyone else?” she asked.
River met Rylee’s eyes. “No. No cars, no police, no doctors, nothing. It’s like everyone just vanished into the sky. How is Richie?”
Jody looked back at the door. “His breathing sounds better, but he is pale. Dusty put the last of the blood on the IV a few minutes ago.”
Rylee stood and dusted off her hands. “I’m going to check his vitals, he should be getting stronger and have more color by now.”
River gathered their plates and tossed them into the trash, then looked back out the windows. The storm was getting worse, snow blew in all directions and now covered both the Raptor and the ambulance. Lightning flickered in the distance and thunder rolled, making the floor shake.
“Did you find them? The people I saw?” Jody asked.
River wasn’t sure how to answer. After a beat, she said, “Yes. I saw a group of people chasing another man. I lost track of them in the snow.”
“But no one else?”
River looked at Jody’s reflection in the glass. “No. Like I said, it’s like everyone just vanished.”
She turned back to the storm. Where the hell was everyone? This many people didn’t up and vanish. Were they all sick?
Rylee reappeared and joined her by the door. “His pulse is weak and his breathing is shallow. There is no sign of infection around the wound, but it is really too early to tell. When the transfusion is done I will add the nutrient solution. Then all we can do is wait.”
Jody leaned against the counter and rubbed her face. “He doesn’t sound good at all. Dusty is worrying himself sick over it, he blames himself for bringing us out here. How long do you think before we can change IV’s?”
“It will be a few hours yet. You and Dusty should get some rest,” Rylee said.
Jody nodded. “I will get us set up in the room next door. What about you?”
River turned. “I’m going to make sure the hospital is secure and see if there is anyone else living. When we’re secure I’ll go searching for the police and get us some help.”
“Why not just go look for the cops now? It’s their job to protect us,” Jody said.
“I’ve seen some pretty weird shit tonight,” River said. “We’ve been here for two hours and haven’t seen a living soul, my gut tells me I’m not going to find any police, either. I’m not leaving here until I know you’re safe.”
She reached behind the desk and retrieved a pair of keys that she used to lock the exterior doors. When she turned back it was to see Rylee checking her Glock.
“What are you doing?”
Rylee slipped the weapon into her waistband. “I’m going with you.”
River opened her mouth to object and Rylee covered her lips with her hand. “No. You aren’t going alone, I’ve spent too much time away from you as it is. We’re on our honeymoon.”
When she moved her hand, River asked, “what if Richie needs you?”
“I can’t do anything else for a couple hours. Dusty can remove the IV when the transfusion is done and I’ll set up the nutrient drip when we get back,” Rylee replied.
“I’ll keep an eye on them both,” Jody said.
Rylee pointed at the phone behind the desk. “If you need us, just pick up the phone and press the blue button. That’s the paging system. You can call for us and we’ll come right back.”
Jody gave a mock salute. “Aye, aye, sir.”
River smiled. “Just stay safe. We’ll be back as soon as we can.”
She started into the hospital while Rylee hugged Jody and hurried to catch up. Beyond the swinging doors were various hallways marked with small signs. The first led to the main entrance, patient registration, the cafeteria and blood drawing facility. River passed through to the front doors where she looked out into the storm. There were footprints in the snow, dozens of them. It looked as if a group of people had stood around in the circular for some time before moving off toward the water. She used the keys to secure the doors, then turned to Rylee, who was checking the computer behind the registration desk.
“Anything?”
Rylee pushed the keyboard away in disgust. “Everything is locked down and I can’t find the password written anywhere. What kind of weird receptionists don’t write the password down? Everybody does it.”
“Not in Winter Cove. Come on, let’s check the other wing.”
River had never noticed how quiet and tomb-like a hospital could be until she was in one that was empty. The silence was bad. The lack of windows and other people made the oppression nearly complete. She found herself sweating, it ran down her hand and made the grip of her Beretta slippery. She stopped outside the CT suite to wipe her hands, then pressed through the doors. Like the other rooms they’d passed, it was empty. An old cup of coffee, now stone cold, sat on the reception desk beside a half-eaten burrito, otherwise there were no signs of life. It may as well have been a mausoleum. Rylee sat behind the controls and pressed a series of buttons.
“Okay, whatever happened, it happened yesterday,” she said.
River frowned. “How do you know?”
Rylee didn’t look up. “Because the last person to be admitted for a scan was at 4:00 P.M. yesterday. There is no way they got through a full day without even a basic diagnostic, even in the middle of nowhere. But according to this, no one has touched the machine since yesterday and it was left on.”
River looked through the Plexiglas at the imaging unit. It looked a lot like an uncomfortable bed attached to the world’s biggest donut. “Is it unusual to be left on?”
Rylee got up from the desk. “I don’t know. Ours is used twenty-four seven. What I mean is, it was left on and nobody touched it in almost thirty-six hours. That, my love, is odd.”
River turned from the machine. She’d been in enough to know what it did, if not how it worked. When she’d had her last scan, there had been a dozen other patients that day. Rylee was right, whatever had happened, it was weird for the equipment to be left unattended.
She held the door for Rylee and led the way through the maze of corridors, pausing to check any rooms they passed. Everywhere it was the same. Empty desks, cold coffee and half-eaten meals.
At the end of the corridor they found the rear elevator, which stood beside the radiology department. Like the imaging center, the radiology lab was empty and the only sound came from the humming equipment. River entered the office, which looked out on the equipment through a Plexiglas window, and looked at the logs. These, too, indicated they hadn’t been in use for some time, but had been left on instead of shut down.
She dropped into the chair behind the desk and stared at the equipment as if it held all the answers. She was staring at the image of someone’s broken hand left displayed on one of the screens when she noticed that the sound of the humming machinery was more muted, replaced by the same odd whispering sound she’d heard in the forest. It got louder, as if the noise was in the room with her, loud enough she put her hands on her ears to keep it out. Her eyes teared and she looked frantically for the source, but there was nothing. Nothing but the machinery, now so quiet she couldn’t hear it.
River stood and ran out the door, where she almost trampled Rylee. Rylee caught her and they spun in a wide circle.
“Riv? Baby, are you okay?” Rylee asked.
River wiped her eyes. “Can’t you he
ar it?”
Rylee looked blank. “Hear what, honey?”
“The noise, that whispering! It’s, it’s−”
River trailed off. The noise was gone.
“What whispering? You mean the heater noise?” Rylee asked.
River let go and turned a slow circle in the hallway. “No, not that, I heard it before, in the woods. It was like a bunch of people whispering, just at the edge of hearing.”
Rylee still looked confused. “You mean you heard this earlier?”
River looked back at her. “And just now, in the x-ray lab. You really didn’t hear it?”
Rylee stepped closer to her. “No, honey. All I heard was the heater kick on, and the rustling of some papers on a bulletin board.”
She held up a sheet of blue paper she’d held clutched in one hand. “I found this.”
On the front was written Evac, 1700.
“What the hell? Evac. Evacuate at five p.m.,” River said.
Rylee stuck the paper back in her coat. “Yeah, an hour after the last CT scan. Do you think they knew something was happening and evacuated?”
“Maybe. But if they knew and evacuated the area how come the ferry was still running? Why wasn’t anyone at the dock? It just doesn’t make sense,” River said.
“It makes more sense than an empty hospital for no real reason. This is creepifying, Riv,” Rylee said.
River looked back at the radiology lab. Rylee had no idea how right she was. Where had that sound come from and how had River not heard it?
“You’re not fucking with me, you really didn’t hear anything?”
Rylee snuggled into her back. “No, baby. But you’re stressed and you haven’t had a good night’s sleep in weeks. Maybe you imagined it.”
River didn’t think so, but she wasn’t going to argue the point. Not until she had more to go on. She turned and Rylee let go.
“Maybe. Let’s finish our sweep, we can take the elevator to the second floor then take the front stairs back down and get back to the others,” she said.
Rylee made a face. “Yeah, ‘cause an elevator in a strange empty hospital sounds like fun.”
River walked down the corridor, her fingers trailing on the green-painted concrete wall. “I’m sure it is safe. Like you said, they probably evacuated, that’s all.”
Rylee hurried to catch up. “If you believed that, we wouldn’t be searching the rest of the place, we’d be getting some sleep and bailing first thing in the morning.”
River pressed the button with her thumb. There was a distant whirring noise and the elevator started to climb from the basement. She half expected some faceless monster to be standing in the elevator when the doors opened, but when the rolled aside a few seconds later, the elevator was empty save for a wooden wheelchair that lay on its side in the middle of the floor.
“That’s not strange, not strange at all,” Rylee said. “Just an antique wheelchair in the middle of an empty elevator in the middle of an empty hospital in the middle of an abandoned town.”
River righted the chair and set it aside so they could enter. The doors started to close before Rylee could enter and she put her hand on the sensor. The doors rolled back, but Rylee just stood there.
“Are you coming?” River asked.
Rylee cocked her head. “Do I have to?”
River reached for the buttons. “You can walk back to the others or wait here, if you want.”
“Oh, because that is a better damn option.”
She stepped inside and leaned against the wall as far from the doors as she could get. River pressed the ‘2’ button and waited for the doors to close. The elevator motor whirred and the lift began to move before she turned back to Rylee.
“You’re not buying the evac thing either, huh?”
Rylee looked unhappy. “No, not really. I have never heard of a hospital evacuating when everything was still working. Hospitals are where people evacuate to, not from.”
CHAPTER SIX
The elevator opened onto the second floor, which was laid out in a similar fashion to the first with a maze of corridors leading roughly east and south. A semi-circular reception desk and nurse’s station sat in the middle of the junction within earshot of the intensive care unit to the east. Because the town and hospital were so small, the ICU was only a dozen beds separated by curtains and equipment. Most of the beds were made with white blankets and blue blankets that looked warm if not inviting. Two of the beds, however, were unmade and the monitors beside both were screaming out in alarm that their patients were gone. Rylee moved to the first, silenced the alarms then did the same with the second, where she then examined the readouts.
“This patient was removed at 5:00 P.M. yesterday according to this,” she said.
River shrugged. “Maybe we’re wrong and they really did evacuate. If there was something happening that warranted evac, it might explain the security guys in the woods.”
Rylee shook her head and pointed at the readouts. “No, this doesn’t look right. This person’s vitals were way off, low pressure, low pulse, even low oxygen which means they were probably on support. They dip way down then suddenly come back up to normal, then off.”
“What does that mean?” River asked.
“I’m not sure. My first thought is someone faked the results to make it look like someone got up and walked away,” Rylee said.
River joined her at the bed. “Is that possible?”
“It’s just a computer, Riv. Given a few minutes and the right program you can make it play the national anthem backwards,” Rylee replied.
She turned away from the machines. “I have a really bad feeling, babes. I think we should get back to the others.”
“Just a few more minutes, we can check the other wing then get back downstairs. If it is safe to move Richie we will just get the hell out of here,” River said.
The patient wing extended over the main portion of the hospital and held fifty hospital rooms, most set up for double occupancy. Unlike the intensive care rooms, these rooms showed signs of having been occupied and hastily abandoned. Dinner trays, untaken medicine and a variety of bottles and papers littered the floors and hallways, beds were unmade, closet doors were left open− it was almost as if a whirlwind had passed through the rooms on its way out the front doors.
In the middle of the corridor, River spotted another evacuation notice pinned to a bulletin board. Something about it made her pause, the light was hitting it in a way that it looked as if there was a water mark. She tore it off and held it up to the light, hoping to make it out.
“Whatcha doin’?” Rylee asked from the door of yet another empty room.
River found what she was looking for. It was the same strange ‘S’ logo she’d seen on the crashed plane. She showed it to Rylee.
“I found this symbol on the wrecked airplane where I hid Richie. It was all over the place,” she said.
Rylee cocked her head. “I’ve seen that before, it belongs to the Sentynil Corporation. They are a huge medical technology manufacturer, most of the machines in ICU are probably theirs.”
“Why would they be sending letters about evacuating the hospital?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they supplied the paper, it’s the same color as their trademarks,” Rylee said.
River folded the paper and added it to the growing collection of items in her pocket. It was possible the paper had been supplied by Sentynil, a lot of companies put water marks in their paper, but that didn’t ring true. She didn’t believe in coincidences, and this was a big one.
She led Rylee through the rest of the rooms and found nothing that indicated why everyone was missing, nor signs of any living soul. Just room after empty room, so similar they could have been staged.
Back in the front lobby, she walked to the doors to look outside. The streets were nothing but
a golden glow behind the curtain of snow that continued to fall, broken only by flashes of silver lightning. Thunder made the windows shake with such force that River could feel it beneath her fingertips. The doors were still locked tight, but something was different, something minor. It took a moment for her to realize what was nagging at her subconscious. Though the snow had almost filled them, there were recent tracks in the snow left by a large vehicle.
“Shit!”
She turned and started running, her boots ringing out a cadence on the tiled floor. Rylee’s boots joined in from somewhere behind.
“What’s wrong?” Rylee yelled after her. “Dammit, Riv, slow down, some of us don’t have your legs!”
River didn’t slow down. She was too busy running and sucking air into her lungs. She rounded the last corner and crashed through the doors to emergency, making them slam into the walls and hang limply from their hinges. Two of the security men stood just inside the outer doors, which were smashed beyond repair. Blood covered the wall and reception desk and two more of the security men lay on the floor beside Dustin’s bleeding corpse. It was clear he’d killed them with his hunting rifle before being killed himself.
River didn’t slow. She launched herself at the two guards with such fury that they were unable to react. She kicked the first in the chest, sending him tumbling backwards through the broken doors, and punched the second in a swift combination that would have made her Drill Sergeant proud. When he doubled over in pain, her elbow came down and trapped his neck between it and her rising knee. The impact pulped his throat and he fell, gagging on his own tongue and blood.
River spun and drew her pistol. She fired three shots at point-blank range into the man she’d kicked then leapt through the doors, hoping to catch the other men off-guard, but she was too late. The Typhoon was already rumbling away in a cloud of diesel exhaust. She gave chase, screaming for them to stop, but there was no response. In moments they had vanished into the snow, leaving nothing but rapidly filling ruts and a trail of diesel exhaust.
“You’re hurt,” Rylee said when she sagged into an emergency room chair.
