Here and there I could hear the falling of small bits of debris. I told myself it was just the unstable building shifting and settling but I knew that there could also be others, alive or changed within the walls of the hospital.
There were elevators closer to where the front entrance of the hospital was, in the administration department. I knew that because it was those elevators, I had used to get to the palliative care unit my grandmother had been in before she passed away.
I passed two stairway entrances as I made my way towards the elevators, both were collapsed and full of stone and steel. I couldn’t help but wonder if there were people attempting to escape the collapse by running down the stairs. At least it would have been a quick death, scary but quick. Unless they got trapped in a pocket amongst the rubble, a voice whispered in my head.
Quickly I pushed away that thought. Being buried alive, even the thought of it, I knew would put me into a full-blown panic.
It wasn’t until I rounded the corner to where the elevators sat that I noticed the red glow of the exit sign. The hospital did have some sort of power still. The emergency system would still be working. Passing by emergency lights I had assumed there was no power, but the impact had likely broken the bulbs or devices themselves.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
I stood still as fear crept up my spine. I listened in the silence and waited. Had I heard something or was my mind playing tricks on me, I wondered. The last time I thought I had heard something, I had but it was off in the distance. Now I thought I had heard something again.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
There it was again. It sounded like someone banging, slowly, on a door. Could there be someone trapped but too exhausted to call out or hammer any harder. Or, I thought to myself, was it another Stenson, having killed others and now found themselves walking endlessly into a wall.
Passing the elevators, I found another hallway, it looked as though it had not been affected by the world collapsing at all. The walls were not cracked, even the emergency lights dimly light up the hallway.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
What was making the noise was definitely down this hallway. The three doorways I could make out in the dim light were all open doors, it was the fourth door, further down the hallway that I could barely see that looked closed. I assumed that was where the thudding was coming from and whether alive or changed, someone was in there.
The hallway looked like something out of a creepy old horror movie as I shuffled slowly down it. I tried to avoid making any sort of noise, but as I passed the second door I began to wonder if that was smart. If there was something behind the door, something like Stenson, it would be best to have as much distance from it as I could.
Quickly I peeked into the closest room. The contents of the desk and table had not been spared from the shaking of the building as it collapsed above them. The computer was on the floor, its screen shattered. Paperwork and pamphlets were also scattered around the room. The room was; however, I was happy to see, empty.
“Hello,” I called out; standing in the doorway of the empty room, the gun pointed at the closed door. “Is there anyone down there?” My worries were not what could be trapped behind the closed door but what might hear me in other parts of the hospital - of things that were already free roaming.
The thudding continued. Thud. Thud. Thud. Whoever was making the sound, if it was behind the door further down the hallways, had either not heard me call out or it was something else altogether.
Taking a deep breathing I moved quickly down the hall and found myself at the next open door. Leaning around the door I held the gun up and flashed the light into the room. Another empty room. Much like the previous room, this room too had been affected by the building collapsing, only this room had been hit worse.
A long steel beam had come crashing through the ceiling and was driven through the bed. On the floor, laid sprawled out, was the body of an elderly man. His right arm had been severed by the steel beam, it laid on the bed, and the pool of dried brownish blood said he had bled to death.
Thud. Thud. Thud. The sound was louder now, it was closer. It was only now that I realized that the sound was not coming from around me it was coming from above me. Thud. Thud. Thud. Whatever was making the noise was getting closer to the hole, the door, so to speak, that the steel beam had cut through the roof.
Backing away slowly I aimed the gun up at the hole and waited. It didn’t take long before the noise maker came into view, falling through the ceiling, landing on the elderly man’s body. By the looks of the uniform the person was a security guard. Blood trails ran down the sides of his face from his ears. Where eyes should have been were empty sockets and the man gapped at the air, his tongue was missing.
This was not someone like Stenson at all, or like the four, this was a man - a living breathing human - who had been cut off from the world because his ability to see, hear, and speak had been taken from him. My first instinct was to put away the gun, to run to this man and to help him, but given his state there was no way this man would be able to tell I wasn’t the threat that had taken his senses to begin with.
Getting to his feet the man fumbled around, reaching out to see what him was around, finally he found the wall and the door and again the thudding continued as he moved out of the room.
As I watched him slowly move down the hallway - thud, thud, thud - part of me wondered if the more humane thing to do was to put him out of his misery. Only, this would not be killing something that was trying to kill me, this would be killing a helpless defenseless man who had already been tortured. I wondered how long the man had been wandering on the second floor of the hospital, amongst the rubble and possibly dead bodies, before stepping through the hole that dropped him onto the first floor.
Was this what Joanne had meant by ‘it would be easier to explain in person,’ did she do this? If so, had she been forced to or was she one of those types of people who lured others in to be tortured?
Though the security had disappeared around the corner, down the hall where the elevators were, I could still hear his feet shuffling and him pounding on the wall. Thud. Thud. Thud. Could he feel the vibrations; did it give him any indication of where he was, or was he trying to find someone to help him?
Thong. Thong. Thong. The shuffling stopped, the pounding stopped; I knew the change in sound meant the security guard had just made it to the elevators. Perhaps this is what he was looking for. Step-by-step I moved down the hallway, towards the turn. I wondered, in my paranoid way of seeing things, if this man was trying to extract some sort of revenge on the one who took his senses away. Maybe he was…
My sentence was cut short, drowned out by the sound of something heavy crashing to the floor. Spinning around I could see a cloud of dust bellowing from the room where the security guard had fallen through the hole in the ceiling. Something else was in that room now, something much larger than the man hammering now at the elevators.
Shit, I thought to myself as I leveled the gun and flashlight in the direction of the room and backed up as quickly as I could while staying quiet. Whatever had fallen into the room had hit the ground hard and had not yet come out into the hallway, but it would soon, and I needed to get off this floor before it did.
Reaching the hallway where the elevators were, I turned to see the mutilated security guard standing next to the elevator doors which he had managed to pry open. Though I knew he could not see me he was staring in my direction. I stared at him for a moment and he stared unseeing at me and suddenly the edges of his mouth turned upwards slightly - he grinned, the same grin as Stenson and the others.
“Augh!” the man screamed out in my direction.
The sudden vocal outbursts caused me to back into the wall. Thong. Thong. Thong. The security guard hammered on the elevator door, staring at me, sniffing the air as he continued to grin. Somehow, he knew I was there; he could sense me, he could smell me.
Leveling the gun with the man's head I squeezed the
trigger. The gun erupted, the kick back pushing me into the wall. The bullet sailed through the air striking the man in the forehead. As his head tore open, he stumbled backwards, unable to catch himself he fell into the shaft and screamed until he hit the ground bottom with a loud bang.
A growling, not far away, from the hall behind me took my attention off the elevator shaft and back to the threat that lay in the room from something that I could not see. I wondered if it laid there on the floor injured or if it was simply waiting for me to make my move. In either case it had yet to reveal what or who it was; given the loud bang I knew it was bigger than me.
Flicking off the flashlight I stood in the darkness near the elevators for a moment and listened. Besides the guttural growls, which were low and even now, I could only hear the sound of my heart pounding. I hoped, as I stood there, that whatever lay in the room down the hall could not see in the darkness.
This had become a standoff. Not wanting to wait anymore, as the growler, which I had come to call this new one, was likely stuck behind a doorway too small to get through or the beam, which had broken through the ceiling in the first place, had injured it, I turned my attention back to the elevator shaft where the security guard had fallen to his final death.
Peering into the elevator, the doors having been pulled apart, I stared down into the darkness below. There were no lights, so where the security guard had landed, I could not see. Staring intently around the elevator shaft I could barely make out the outline of the maintenance ladder and the backside door. That would be my way down.
Leaning out into the darkness, my hands gripped firmly on the doors, I listened for anything. The darkness was just as silent as it always seemed nowadays, it was like being back in the bunker staring up at the darkness of the ceiling as I tried to drift off. How I missed the safety of the bunker and as much as I wished I would have stayed there I knew to survive I had to find others.
Returning to my current situation, pulled away from my thoughts of what I could have done instead of running out into this now unknown world of death and destruction, I looked down. Somewhere in the darkness below me there would be another set of doors and beyond those doors would be Joanne - dead, alive, or something else.
Amongst the thoughts of how to get down I began to wonder how Joanne had broken her leg. Was she already in the basement when it happened, or had she broken it falling down the elevator shaft trying to escape? Also, the other who had been with her at one time, as she had said there weren’t any people anymore, why had they stayed and not escaped themselves?
Knowing the batteries would die soon, I aimed the flashlight down in the darkness and click the switch back to on. The security guard was impaled on the crumpling pad shaft at the bottom of the elevator. He had landed on his back and it was protruding from his chest. The man was clearly dead, if nothing else.
The flashlight flickered twice before plunging me back into the darkness; the batteries dead. Sliding the switch into the off position, I removed my backpack and put the flashlight away. I would need to find new batteries; the flashlight was a very important tool at nighttime now that the power was gone. Once an optional emergency tool, the flashlight was now a main priority. I had kicked myself for not buying more batteries before the world went to hell.
Peering back into the elevator I tried my best to judge the distance I would need to jump to reach the ladder on the other side of the shaft. I would need to climb down to reach the bottom floor in the darkness, hoping I did not slip and the growler, which had gone quiet again, did not attempt to follow.
Pushing the safety button on the gun, I slipped it into the backpack. The gun would be of little use if I dropped it during the jump to the ladder. Sliding my backpack back on, I clipped the center strap together and tightened the arm straps, so it was snug.
Taking a deep breath, I prepared to run and jump when I heard a thunderous crash down the hallway where the growler was. The growler had been quiet while I contemplated descending into the elevator shaft, but now that I had begun, and it had grown impatient, it was trying to escape the room; to get to me.
I knew that I needed to go - now.
Running towards the elevator I tensed my muscles, reading them to jump, when my paranoid thoughts piped up with question that I did not need to be considering right now.
What if you miss and fall? What if the ladder was lose from the collapsing of the upper floors? Are you ready to plummet to your death?
The horrific guttural growl of success told me that the growler had broken free. Pushing away the unspoken questions of my paranoid mind and the growler I reached the elevator doors and leapt out into the darkness.
I wanted to close my eyes, to push away my thoughts. Even though I knew I was leaping across, in the darkness, it felt as though I was falling down. My heart rate shot up through the roof as fear gripped me. The ground would come up fast if I missed my mark, or slipped, and there would be no stopping it; except when I hit it.
Reaching the ladder, I grabbed it with everything I had, wrapping my fingers tightly around the metal bars as my feet slipped. I dangled for a moment, shaking, not wanting to open my eyes, but the sound of heavy footsteps pounding down the hallway forced me to; the growler was coming towards the elevator.
Hand-over-hand I descended as fast as I could without thinking. Some of the ladder was sticky and slippery, I knew it was blood from where the security guard had slammed into the walls on his way down. The sound of hammering on the elevator doors echoed through the shaft and more than once I had to stop myself from grabbing my ears to block out the sound. The one thing that kept me moving was, if it was hammering on the doors it meant that it could not fit through them.
In a final attempt to get through the doors, I could hear the growler back away and then run towards them. You’re going to die, my paranoia kicked back in. Torn off the ladder as that thing falls, your hands left hanging, and crushed on the shaft below. The growler hitting the doors of the elevator quieted my thoughts, but it shook the elevator shaft and I lost my grip.
Falling in the darkness I wondered what death would be like, if there was a heaven and hell and which one, I would be headed towards. I slammed into the ground hard, knocking the wind out of me. I had survived the fall, but I was losing consciousness. I could feel the darkness within the darkness surrounding me. Perhaps I had survived the fall only to die at the bottom
.SIX.
Two Kinds of People
The cellphone sat leaned against the mirror in the woman’s bathroom. I stared at it. I knew that I wanted to leave something behind if I didn’t survive but what was I going to say. The video diary was the doctor's idea, he said it would help me keep my sanity in what was going on. Reaching forward, not wanting to waste the battery life I cleared my throat and pressed the little red button on the screen.
“My name is Joanne Pearson and I am,” I stopped myself for a moment because I was not what I had been. Taking a deep breath, I continued. “I was, I should say, a medical student at the St. Mark’s Central Hospital. I and three others are alive right now in the basement. The hospital above us has collapsed and the elevator shafts are not stable. We are hoping to get out of this alive, but in the event that we do not, these recordings will be a log of what is happening to us.”
Knock. Knock. Knock.
The sound of someone knocking on the door startled me and I knocked my phone over. Quickly gathering it up I hit the stop button and the recording saved. Pushing the phone back into my pocket I moved to unlock the door. It was Dr James Harron.
“Joanne,” Dr. Harron said. “Are you alright?”
“Yes,” I said clearing my throat. “I was just doing the video journal you suggested to help me get through this.”
“I see,” Dr. Harron said. “Well you know it’s dangerous to leave the area we have deemed stable. I would prefer if you told me before you did so. I was worried and no one knew where you had gone.”
I understood Dr. Harron’s posi
tion and simply nodded. There was no way of truly telling how much of the hospital’s basement was stable and we had experienced some cave-ins while searching for supplies and a safe way out. Letting the bathroom door close I allowed the doctor to lead me back to the morgue.
Both Michael Peterson, a patient who had managed to get lost in the basement trying to find a safe place, and Benjamin Steinem, a security guard for the hospital, stood up as me and Dr. Harron entered the room. They had been playing cards, by the looks of it, while Dr. Harron had been searching for me.
Searching for me. Why? Where was I? Slowly I opened my eyes, my entire body hurt, a throbbing pain in my right leg as I tried to sit up. Dr. Harron was beside me his penlight shining towards the doors.
“Wha…” I tried to ask what had happened, but Dr. Harron put a finger to his lips and tapped his ear. He wanted me to be quiet and listen but listen for what? It was faint at first, but I could hear it. ‘Joanne. Dr. Harron. Joanne. Dr. Harron.’ Someone was calling our names, but it was in a harsh whisper. I tried to look around, but the room was too dark to see anything.
Talking Dr. Harron I mouthed 'Where is Mike?’ to which he pointed towards the door. ‘Where is Ben?’ I mouthed. Dr. Harron looked at the ground, shaking his head. Something had happened but I couldn't remember anything. The throbbing in my leg bothered me and I reached down to rub it. Shocked, I found my leg was wrapped in a makeshift case - it was broken. The sound of our names being called fainted and when they were gone and Dr. Harron breathed a sigh of relief I decided it was safe to talk quietly.
“What the hell happened to my leg?” I asked in a whisper. “Where is Ben and Mike; what the hell is going on?”
Survival Series (Book 1): Survival Page 6
