Love in the Dark

Chapter Fifteen

Matthew trudged along the road next to Izzy, a crowbar propped over his shoulder. Izzy stood several inches taller than Matthew, and despite having a near perfect rack, had a suspiciously masculine physique. Her arms were long, her biceps decidedly more defined than Matthew's, and her hands were quite large. She wore a bright pink tank top with a deep scoop neck and a pair of tight-fitting leather pants. She had a Glock tucked into the back of her waist band.

"Hamil give you that gun?"

Izzy gave him a glance, "What's it to you?" she snapped. That's why Matthew had never liked Izzy. She was always a b***h, if "she" was even a "she".

The hospital looked like it had been abandoned for years, instead of just a few months. The once pristine gardens had been trampled. Trash was strewn across the parking lots. There were a few vehicles left, some of them burnt out, some of them stripped down. Matthew couldn't fathom what value old tires and cadillac converters, or airbags would have in the post-apocalyptic market. It was eerily quiet,the only sound the chirp of birds and the wind blowing pollen out of the flowered crabapples.

Even after months, the lock-down held. People had made attempts to pry open the doors, or smash the windows, but no one had successfully breached the first floor. However, many windows had been smashed out of the second floor, and a long contractors' ladder was still conveniently leaning against the building. Matthew struggled up the ladder with the heavy carbon-steel crowbar.

He climbed over the window ledge, glass crunching under his boots. The halls were dark and eerie, and the sickly sweet stench of death was heavy in the stale air. "Ugh," Izzy covered her mouth and nose with her arm. "That stink!"

Matthew had to agree. He was familiar with the layout of the hospital, but it was disconcerting in the dark. "Let's find the stairs," he said, swallowing bile down his throat. "The elevators are this way, there should be a stairwell nearby."

Looters had already been through the hospital, scavenging whatever they could find that was useful or valuable. There were still dead bodies in rooms, and the walls crawled with flies. Matthew kept his hand on the walls and continued deeper into the structure until he came to a bank of elevators. Fumbling around beside them, he found the door to the stairwell.

The darkness in the stairwell was even deeper, the air devoid of oxygen. They had candles tucked into their pockets, but Matthew didn't want to waste the precious commodity in the stairwell. With his hand on the rail, he felt his way down the stairs, with Izzy close behind him. They got to the landing on the first floor, but bypassed the door. What they were looking for was in the basement.

When Matthew opened the door to the ground floor, the smell of death was overpowering. He heard, but could not see, the buzz of insects everywhere, sometimes feeling them brush against his skin. Time to light a candle. He couldn't feel his way around the unfamiliar maze-like corridors of the basement. His small taper lit up a short section in the hallway, just in time for him to see Izzy double over and vomit.

"Oh f**k," Izzy wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She sounded nasally as she tried to talk without breathing through her nose. It was worse that way, because then she tasted it, like a mouth full of rancid meat.

"Which way," Matthew pulled his t-shirt up over his nose and mouth, but the thin fabric did nothing to stop the odor. Hamil had given the directions to Izzy, a point that had rankled with Matthew.

"Left," she said, turning her head to spit again. "And then left again."

Most people knew the hospital had a retail pharmacy upstairs, where patients and the public alike could fill up their medications. That pharmacy had been over run before the patients and staff had even broken the windows to escape. What most people didn't know was that the hospital had a second pharmacy hidden in the basement. Most of the staff didn't even know where to find it. There were no signs, for security reasons, and no one ventured down there except for the pharmacists, security and the cleaning staff.

The security to the pharmacy was tight. Double steel doors, locked with electronic boxes that require both a key code and a fingerprint to enter. Video surveillance on the doors at all times. An alarm that would sound if the door stayed open for more than sixty seconds. Beyond the first set of double doors was an anteroom, and then a second door which also required a special badge to open. Alarms and cameras were useless now. The electronic locking devices had failed, but the locks had not.

However, the main entrance was not what Matthew and Izzy were looking for. "Keep going down the hall," she instructed. The hall ended at an unmarked stairwell. Izzy opened the door to the stairwell. It was a service route only, not open to the public. And on the landing was a door with no handle, and no signage - the emergency exit from the pharmacy - which still had to be unlocked from the inside.

Hamil thought this door would be easier to pry open than the double doors.

The air in the stairwell was still stale and choking, but it offered some relief from the stench of the main hall. They set a candle on the stairs and went to work with their pry bars. The door was frustratingly secure, and it took more than an hour before they were able to buckle the lock away from the frame. Izzy slammed her shoulder into it impatiently, and finally, it gave way.

Matthew retrieved the candle and looked around what appeared to be offices and an employee lounge. Two dead bodies were curled up in the lounge, lying in a nest of scrubs and isolation gowns. The area around them was littered with empty IV bags, bags of intravenous nutrition, and the boxes and wrappers of anything and everything in the lab that had been edible. The smell of their decomposing bodies was amplified by the smell of sewage.

There was a paper near the bodies, with a scrawled message. "Nobody came."

"Well, that's f*****g depressing," Izzy said. She noted the syringe in one of the corpses' hands. "Something tells me they didn't die of natural causes."

Matthew leaned down and picked up a small glass ampule and held it up to his candle. "Fentanyl." He dropped it back into the debris. "Lets get this done, this place is creeping me out."

They left the lounge and followed the hallway of offices into the main area of the pharmacy, where there were massive shelves on tracks so that they could be pushed together and slid open to reveal only the shelf you needed with a particular medication. Izzy's face broke into a grin as she scanned the shelves. "Eureka," she said, pulling down boxes.

Neither of them had thought of bringing a sack to carry the drugs, but Izzy found a laundry bag outside of the "clean room". She packed the yellow cloth bag full of every narcotic and opioid pill and potion she could find. When she had cleaned out the pain killers, she started searching for the antidepressants. Anything and everything that might have a street value.

Matthew was distracted by a section of antibiotics. Hamil had sent them specifically to retrieve anything that could get a person high, but Matthew's thoughts were churning in a different direction. Sooner or later, a person might need antibiotics, otherwise they will die from strep throat and bladder infections. A simple scratch would be deadly. He smiled to himself and looked around. Finding an empty cardboard box, he started filling it with all manner of antibiotics.

"What are you doing?" Izzy asked impatiently. She was still pushing her way through the shelves. "Hamil doesn't want that stuff."

"It's not for Hamil," Matthew said with a shrug."You don't tell him about this, I won't tell him about all the oxycodone you just stuffed down your bra."

She flashed him a grin and patted her t**s. "Deal."