Love in the Dark

Chapter Twelve

Rebecca was in room 586 at the Community Hospital, still wide awake in the wee hours of the morning. The uncomfortable bed, the IV in her arm, the constant murmur of voices in the hallway kept pulling her out of the drugged stupor she'd been in since they admitted her for bleeding ulcers.

Suddenly, the lights went out. Her small private room was plunged into total darkness. The rhythmic whir of the IV pump fell silent. The hum of the air system was quiet. Only the voices in the hall droned on.

Rebecca waited for the auxiliary power system to kick on. It seemed like the nurses and aides that were out in the hallway were also waiting.

It didn't.

The air started to feel stale. Voices in the hallway started to get loud and panicked. All of their supplies were kept in cabinets with electronic locks. All of the medical equipment that required a power source had failed. Although the fifth-floor unit had patients of lower acuity, patients on respirators in the ICU were dying. The two pharmacists that worked the third shift were now locked inside the pharmacy. A housekeeper and a doctor were stuck in the elevator. Phones weren't working, radios weren't working.

Rebecca's headache advanced to a full-on migraine as she struggled to sit up in bed. None of the windows in the hospital actually opened. The entire building depended on an air filtration system.

She was fairly certain that the endoscopy that was scheduled for the morning was going to be cancelled. The nurse came in, feeling her way along the wall in the dark. "Rebecca? Are you doing okay?"

"Uh, yeah. I guess. My head really hurts."

"I'm sorry, we can't get any orders for medication. I'm going to stop your IV, okay?" Rebecca could barely make out the nurse's black figure in the inky darkness, but she heard her fumbling with the IV pole.

"What's going on?"

"I'm not sure, but I'm sure that maintenance will have it all straightened out soon," the nurse said, with false optimism.

They didn't.

Hours stretched into days.

The power outage caused the hospital's lock-down system to engage. No one could enter or exit the building. It was meant to be a safety mechanism in the event of a domestic terror attack. It turned the hospital into a death trap. Bodies were piling up, until the small morgue started to overflow. Not that the refrigerator was working anyway.

The food in the kitchen quickly spoiled, and what didn't spoil ran out. Staff were carefully rationing the imperishables between the patients and themselves. Rebecca was surviving on jello and pudding cups, bottles of Ensure, and graham crackers. Still, patients and staff held out hope that the power would come back.

It didn't.

No one was quite sure where the sickness started. Which patient had the creeping crud that seeped through the hospital? Was it in the air that became increasingly foul? Was it spread from person to person as nurses still valiantly tried to care for the sick and the dying? Was it something new and alien related to the mysterious loss of power? No one knew. But it crept through the floors, taking out the elderly first, followed by the weakest. It started with a wheezing cough. It ended with seizures and internal bleeding.

With more wheezing being heard down the halls, and the last of the bottled water used up, patients and staff began plotting an escape. All of the windows on the first floor were bullet proof and impossible to break, but they began shattering the second floor windows, and those that still had the strength escaped down ladders made of bedsheets. They had no idea what they were running from, or what they might be running to.

Rebecca tried to go back to her apartment, but found that the entrance had been barricaded from the inside. She called out to her neighbors to let her in, but whoever was inside did not respond. She struggled up the fire escape to her third-floor window, only to find the glass was already broken, and her apartment had already been ransacked. Her cupboards were empty. Everything that had been in her fridge had spoiled. Only the coldness was keeping the flies at bay.

She struggled with her mattress, sliding it back onto the bedframe, grabbing blankets from the floor and pulling them around her as she lay curled on the bed. She coughed once, twice. Was she wheezing? She held her breath to stop the cough. She couldn't be sick. She went into the hospital for a bleeding ulcer. She squeezed her eyes tightly shut and felt her heartbeat pulsing in her head, with the headache that never seemed to relent.

That's why she had an ulcer. Too many NSAID pain relievers in an attempt to control the god-damned headaches. This was a nightmare, it had to be. Maybe it was the dilaudid they gave her in her IV, maybe it had given her this horrific, serial nightmare. She had to wake up. She would peel open her eyes, find herself safe and sound in her hospital bed, all ready to be prepped for her 9:00 AM endoscopy. She would wake up from this nightmare.

She never did.