The hospital was dark.
None of the street lights in the empty parking area were on. Jayla pulled up to the emergency room entrance and tried to look inside. It was as dark inside as it was out. There were no ambulances anywhere.
She sat in her SUV for a while looking at the sliding glass doors. They were mostly closed, an inch or less gap between them.
Jayla felt alone.
The entire town must have evacuated and that had included the small, rural hospital. No one sat inside to help Jayla with her sister. No one waited to rush out with a stretcher to put her sister on, to give her an IV or feed her somehow like Jayla couldn’t. No one stood ready to test her sister with a rape kit that would exonerate Jayla from the beating she gave the old man.
Like the ski resort, a large hill stood between the hospital and the location of the meteor strike. The facility had been spared. Rocks still littered the road however, and Jayla wondered how far south the debris field would extend. If she continued on, she’d be picking her way around them in the dark.
She almost wished she’d stayed in her father’s cabin, but being alone in the dark up there, in the mountains with that monster, was out of the question. She shivered thinking about it.
She checked the charge on her SUV batteries. Too low. She wouldn’t get far without a recharge anyway. Electrical vehicles were economical, but with no electricity for a recharge, she wasn’t going anywhere.
Jayla tried to think logically. Tried to ask herself the questions her father would ask her. Tried to reason out her situation.
Nothing came.
Exhaustion overwhelmed her. She cried for a while, still staring through the emergency room sliding doors, hoping an answer would appear.
“Get it together, girl,” she said aloud eventually and wiped her tears. She looked at Jada, who stared glassily at nothing. She put her hand on her sister’s arm and told her she loved her and would be right back. With the shotgun in one hand and a flashlight in the other, Jayla carefully stepped out of the SUV and locked the doors behind her.
She shone the flashlight through the glass doors, but the dim beam didn’t reveal anything helpful to her. She was grateful at least that she didn’t have to worry about zombies hiding behind closed doors.
The doors didn’t open automatically. She chided herself for even thinking they might. No electricity meant no electricity.
She put her hand in the gap between the doors and pushed on one of them, but the door didn’t move. She pushed harder. Still no movement.
She set her flashlight down, aiming the beam at the gap, and got a better grip on the door with her hand. She couldn’t push it. She moved to the side and tried pulling, but the result was the same.
Trying to push or pull with the shotgun in one hand was awkward. She reluctantly set it down. There might not be any zombies, but there were other monsters she was afraid of. The shotgun helped.
With both hands on the edge of the door, she pulled. The large glass door wouldn’t budge.
She reasoned the problem out.
She needed leverage. Something that would help her move the door. She looked at the shotgun, and it was a lever.
Jayla put the barrel into the gap and pushed, worried she might break the gun in two. But the barrel and the stock held. And the doors still didn’t move.
Rifling through memories, she tried to come up with something that would help. Anything in her past that might help her figure out what to do.
She thought about blasting the door with the shotgun, but the noise it would make might attract things. Maybe. It just scared her to make that much noise. There had to be another way.
Her daddy made her help him move furniture once. A large china cabinet had been too heavy for them, and her daddy repositioned himself and they were able to move it anyway. He had gotten low on the cabinet, using his feet to push it. She needed to get low.
She moved the shotgun to the ground, sat down, and put her feet on the stock. The barrel pointed inside the hospital just in case it went off. She didn’t want to disable her only mode of transportation by shooting the SUV in the tires.
Pushing on her makeshift lever with as much strength as she could muster, the door gave a little. She smiled and pushed again. It gave a little more.
There was room now for her to stick her foot in and she pushed that way. The door gave a couple of inches. She pulled the shotgun out of the gap, stood, and tried to squeeze herself through. She didn’t have enough room yet, but now she could push on the bottom with her foot and in the middle with her hands. The door, having yielded a few inches, seemed to give up and keep moving. She could finally squeeze through.
Getting Jada through might be another issue, but she’d worry about that in a few minutes.
Retrieving her shotgun and her flashlight, she stood in the doorway and looked around. There were just four chairs in a tiny waiting area, an admissions window, and large double doors patients could be wheeled through on stretchers. Not much to see.
Jayla pushed on the double doors with the end of the shotgun, shining her flashlight through as soon as the doors were open enough.
At some point in the past, chaos had reigned in the corridor. Hospital beds stood askew, IV stands, some upright, some tipped over, were scattered everywhere, and paper and clipboards lay on the ground. A wheelchair blocked one of the doors and Jayla had to shove the door to get through. The wheelchair smacked into a wall.
She maneuvered slowly through the abandoned equipment, much like she had through the rock debris on the road, searching.
She didn’t really know what she was looking for. She didn’t expect a cabinet to be labeled ‘rape kits’, but hoped that something would tell her what she was looking for. Some cabinets and drawers had been emptied out, the odd package or vial left behind, like someone had scooped the contents out into a bag or box. Other’s were fully stocked. Probably less important supplies.
Jayla looked around until she grew worried about Jada sitting alone in the SUV outside. She also decided if she found a rape kit, she wouldn’t know how to use it, wouldn’t know what to do with the results, and with everything as bad as it now seemed, who would be around to give the results to?
And if there were no police to give the results to, there were probably no police to investigate the old man in the woods. Would anyone even find him? She was certain he had freed himself from the zip ties, but what if he hadn’t? What would happen to him? Would he die?
If he died, that meant Jayla had killed him. In self defense, she reminded herself, although she remembered hitting him when he lay there, tied up.
She had been afraid. She had been terrified of the man. He wasn’t even a man. He was a monster. He had deserved to die, if that’s what happened.
She also imagined him getting free, finding his car, using an extra set of keys to drive down the mountain, and following her. If he saw her SUV in the hospital parking lot, he would know she and her sister were there. She had to hide it.
And if no one knew they were in the hospital, it might be a safe place to spend the night.
What if someone else thought the same thing?
Jayla breathed loudly. It calmed her a little.
Jada would be okay for a few more minutes, she told herself, while she searched the hospital. It was tiny and wouldn’t take long. Besides, if someone wanted to spend the night, they’d go where Jayla would. The patient rooms.
She burst into each room, shotgun raised, her flashlight shining everywhere. She checked in the closets, under the beds, and in the bathrooms. As she cleared each room, she moved quietly to the next, listening for noises or any indication of movement.
She tried the faucet in one of the rooms and water flowed.
With the sixteen patient rooms and the nurse’s station cleared, no evidence of any occupation at all, Jayla felt comf
ortable. The hospital was bigger than just the patient wing, with surgical rooms, examination rooms, and other facilities, but no one would live in any of those. They’d be right where she was right now.
Some of the rooms were missing beds, as if patients had been wheeled out to the emergency room and transferred into waiting ambulances. Which is probably exactly what happened during the evacuation. Everything made sense and Jayla breathed even easier. She and her sister would be alone in the big hospital that had seemed so small from the outside.
Remembering the wheelchair, Jayla headed out to get her sister. She pushed the wheelchair to the exit and had to squeeze through the gap in the doors again, putting her back on one side, her hands and feet on the other, and shoving until it was wide enough to fit the open wheelchair through.
She folded it up, put it in the backseat on top of the food she had stacked there, and started the SUV.
She drove around to the other side of the emergency room entrance, going where she thought the ambulances might park.
She found a loading dock and although the SUV would be visible to someone looking around, no one would be able to see it from the highway or even the parking lot. Hiding it there was good enough.
She backed in, making a getaway easier.
Jayla set up the wheelchair and pulled her sister out of the passenger seat, dropping her heavily into the chair. She opened up the back and filled Jada’s lap with food and water.
She could push the wheelchair with the flashlight in one hand, but not holding the shotgun. She cradled it in her arm, put both hands on the wheelchair and pushed, and dropped the weapon. She jumped and screamed a little, thinking the shotgun would go off, but it didn’t. She picked it back up.
Tucking the weapon behind Jada’s back, on the side, and angling the barrel so it wasn’t pointing at her own face, Jayla was able to get the wheelchair out of the loading dock and head back for the emergency room doors.
Through the doors, she turned and tried to close them. They remained as stubbornly open as they had been closed earlier, and she gave up.
Jayla wheeled three beds into one patient room. One for her, one for her sister, and the third to block the doorway. She wedged it in as tightly as possible.
With Jada still in the wheelchair, Jayla collapsed on a bed, promising herself she’d only take a quick break. She awoke to a dim sunrise, the sky obscured by gray clouds.
16