Chapter 5, Ravensburg
The first impression was not a great one. It might have been dampened by the weather unfolding in the sky above us but Ravensburg did not have the look of a functioning anything about it. The huge gates which sat across an opening in the equally foreboding walls had been torn off their hinges by a tremendous impact at some point. They lay bent and mangled on either side of the entrance and their demise made our passage onto the grounds of Ravensburg that much easier.
Following our trauma on the road and the fact that poorly blockaded window frames which once contained glass were letting in water I was keen to get inside as soon as possible. For that reason I did not take the time to clarify the rain blurred signs which I squinted at as the land rover bumped its way through the puddles of the hospital car park.
What we were looking for was not hard to find anyway, the grand entrance to the hospital was marked by the tall doors beneath the colonnade and the intimidating statue of a raven with its outstretched wings which sat above it. Below the bird in large letters written across the lintel were the words 'Healing begins in the mind'. A nice little aphorism probably coined by one of the hospitals patrons.
The rest of the family disembarked and huddled in the shelter of the large grey columns while I parked the car. I even managed to park between the lines. Why? I do not know, for not a single other vehicle could be seen there, but old habits die hard. I got a strange feeling as I jogged through the rain and up the half dozen or so steps leading to the entrance. I remembered dropping Sue at the entrance to County General when Zak was born while I parked up nearby. She was sat waiting patiently in a wheelchair for me with an orderly who was grinning broadly at some jape about my parking I was certain she'd just made.
I recalled dropping her at that same entrance each time she brought another miracle into the world. She'd radiated such calm. In my recollections they were all sunny days, a marked difference from the grey and miserable turning of the clock under which we made new memories this day.
I ushered them through the tall red wood doors of Ravensburg Hospital and we surveyed the domain which lay beyond. The storm which had settled itself comfortably above us had made a bid to rob this day of all its sunlight, even so we could make things out in the murk. Long dusty corridors filled with the hustle and bustle of imagined spectres only. The nicely mosaicked floor was covered in broken glass and twisted metal, the foyer looked like a tornado had gone through it. The damage did not seem consistent with neglect or even the ravages of a cadaver outbreak, this looked more like deliberate and focused destruction.
“Where now dad?” whispered Mac. I didn't know why he was whispering and neither did he, it was just one of those places, the places where silence commands obedience to its law. Where the quiet will brook no contest to its mastery and will weave a hard fate on anyone who shatters its solitude with their own vocal chaos.
“Let me think” I responded peering into the gloom. Ellie coughed, and then coughed some more. I felt a creeping sensation behind me, it was nothing of the real world, it was regret, my old friend, he'd been absent for some time now. In this life the kind of decisions that you regret are not the kind of decisions that you live to see the other side of, which I sincerely hoped would not be the case for us today, for I was beginning to feel that familiar cold feeling of regret festering my mind.
This was not a place where lives would be saved. Like most of our land life had deserted this hospital long ago, there were no teams of experts waiting on had to assist us. No wise and learned men who would know the malady of my daughters lungs by listening to just one of those wracking coughs, which of late had started to leave little pin pricks of blood on her hand when she raised it. She hadn't said anything to me, but I'd seen the crimson fingers and I felt the pain she felt with each cough. It was the pain that drove me here, the blood which fuelled my worry and now added its weight to my regret.
But we were here now and we must try. “Doesn't look like there is anyone home” voiced my wife in a whisper which even at low volume could not disguise the 'I told you so hidden in it'
“We had to bloody try” I said with too much aggression. She looked wounded, though not wounded enough to stay a retort
“We didn't have to do anything” she snapped. I bit my tongue. It hurt. A lot. She'd been perfectly amenable to the idea of coming here, it had been a joint decision right up until the point it was the wrong decision, now it was slowly being painted and relaunched as my decision. Zak headed of any further arguing.
“There might be medicine” he offered helpfully. I nodded using his bright idea as a shield to ward off some of Sue's daggers. “Should we split into teams?” croaked Ellie in a tired and sickly voice. “No” said Mac straight away, “We don't split up, it's not our way” he looked at me and I handed out another approving nod. I looked around again, a plan forming in my mind, it was not the best plan, but it was the only one which my worried mind could muster right now.
“This main building works its way around a courtyard” I said peering out through a broken pain at the rain soaked plaza in the middle of the building.
“Lets do a circuit if this corridor, we will work our way around and check rooms which lead directly off of it only, we don't go wondering down any other long dark corridors and if we get back here without having found anything then we will hunker down in reception, wait for the rain to stop and come up with a better idea, okay?” I received a collective of much appreciated nods.
“Torches?” I quizzed looking at a Zak. He nodded and pulled a number of torches from his rucksack and handing them out to the others. They all seemed surprised that I'd suggested deploying the artificial illumination. Even before the apocalypse I'd been stickler for conserving power, and that was back in the days when I could nip to the shops and buy some Duracell. Many things had changed in the new world, and one of them was that I'd gone from being a stickler to being the grand arbiter of all draconian rules regarding torches. Many nights in the early days had been spent sitting in a cold light less camp with my families hostile glares directed at me through the dark. But I hadn't relented and thanks to that here we were, eighteen months beyond the end of the world and we still had working torches.
I sheathed my machete in exchange for a hefty silver maglite. With the hatchet in my other hand we started to make our way down the right hand corridor which would bring us around the large courtyard.
The hospital was huge, beyond this central compound there were a number of wings and dozens of outbuildings and tenement blocks. It would take days to search the whole place, days of exposure to the hidden dangers which lurked beneath every shard of broken glass which crackled like frosty snow beneath the tread of my size ten boots.
I did not switch on my torch just yet. That would be a last resort, when the dark had grown so powerful as to rob me of the sight of the hand in front of my face.
The ramshackle nature of the place did not improve. The building was by no means new and had fared badly in this era of doom. The rain formed puddles not only from the leakage which came in through broken windows but also from all the droplets which cascaded to the floor from many points in the ceiling. In places the mould had grown so thick and so black that it resembled a monster pulsating out of the wall, eating away at the old lead paint and sending the spores of its invasion force to cover the walls around which had yet to feel the force of the conflict.
There were other things on the wall. Things I hoped that the others were not seeing but that I knew they were. Blood, plenty of blood, and shit by the looks and smell of things. There were words too, words written in blood and shit as well as words written in traditional ink, which looked something of a cop-out against the backdrop of bodily fluids which some enthusiastic souls has used to daub the place. Much of what was written was nonsensical ravings, the same mad desperate phrases which we'd seen covering the sides of thousands of buildings in our journey into doom. 'God save us' 'God help us' 'Where is my family?' etc etc.
&n
bsp; There was some originality here, sadly it was fairly negative in its outlook 'I will eat the eaten' 'blood rivers run not dry' 'welcome to the hall of the shadows own accord'. So many people became writers when the apocalypse happened, yet they all seemed to be able to write only about the doom that was occurring, very few spoke of hope or salvation, I could not blame them, but if they did not look for it then how would it every find them?
We darted off into a hundred side rooms on the way round. We ransacked cupboards which had already been ransacked many times by hands equally as desperate as ours. Some cotton wool, many pieces of obscurely shaped plastic that I could only imagine where to insert. The dirt of the world had been blown in through thousands of tiny cracks into this place which had once been a centre of healing. Things scurried in the dirt, they hurried this way and that beneath the rotten mass of the world, but they paid us no heed and we did not pursue them. Though my mind had entertained such thoughts more than once they were far from a reality, the remainder of the Robinson larder as well as the bounty of our vegetable patches were in the back of the landrover, I would eat rat one day maybe, but I would be much closer to death than I was today.
We'd reached the top of the central corridor which led back down to reception. We'd just rounded the corner to make our way empty handed back down to our starting point when I saw it. The silhouette was hundreds of metres away, standing in the light of the doorway which we'd come through an hour before.
I put my arms out and we all stopped, we all peered but could make out nothing of the figure but its dark outline. Something was not right, something hadn't felt right from the moment we'd left Mrs Robinsons, I felt a very real sense of dread wash over me, it came from every crack in every wall, through every broken window, it infused my being, I stood and watched the figure at the end of the corridor, transfixed by the patient silhouette which swayed gently from side to side.
Then came the scream. It made its way up out of the earth, from some dark room beneath us, far away yet close enough to pierce the dread. It was a soulless bestial noise. It was pain the likes of which can only come from a body whose spirit has already escaped it in madness. Then the silhouette started to run towards us, it was joined by more, some from the left, some from the right. They looked like shadows as they ran through the gloom towards us, but they cackled with a cruelty that only men can muster.