The Hospital (2 page)

He was halfway into the first waiting room, in plain sight of the skylight, when he heard it. It wasn’t loud, but it was there. A
thump
, dull and clumsy, came from the stairwell. Gus froze and pointed his shotgun in the direction of the stairs. He waited and listened, listened
hard
, willing something to drop again, for the other foot to strike the floor. But it didn’t.

Eyes narrowed, Gus closed the distance between him and the stairwell then hugged a corner. He whirled around it, pointing the shotgun down the stairs, then up. He stretched his neck out over the railing, peering down as far as he could see, and saw only the darkness of an empty well. He looked up and repeated the action, then he remembered where he was and spun around on the hallway with his finger on the trigger.

Empty. All empty.

His danger sense was perhaps at three now, on a scale of five. Gus felt uneasy, but not afraid. He eased out into the open and walked forward. He cautiously made his way back to the storeroom he had recently plundered. There were no corners to hide around, but there were doors aplenty. He squinted at the dark signs above their frames,
Internal Medicine
. Gus moved to one of the open doorways and glanced in, shotgun first. The doctor, thankfully, wasn’t in, but the room was a mess. The desk was upended, making a low barrier. Two flat, smashed LCD screens were on the floor. Discarded books, papers, and other stationary debris were covered in a fine dust. Dried blood dappled everything, like arterial spray gone wild, but there were no bodies. No sleeping gimps.

He moved through the room, picking at the desk and prodding through the wreckage of whatever siege had occurred. He noticed some fragments of bloody cloth and realized it was a doctor’s white coat lying in tatters, ripped from the victim, no doubt. Gus hoped the doctor had already been dead at the time. He hoped he wouldn’t remember the sight. Augustus suffered during the nights when he tried to sleep. He used booze when he had it, drinking heavily. It would knock him out, but then the nightmares would come, and they were worse than the insomnia. They brought their own private movies, with mouths full of rotting teeth.

Gus became still, listening for anything beyond the room. He moved to the doorway and glanced about. All clear. He possessed a healthy fear of being ambushed. It hadn’t happened yet, and he meant to keep it that way.

He rooted around the office for a few more minutes, picking up functional pens and a notebook which he stuffed into his backpack. He kicked aside the discarded keyboard lying behind the desk. Computers had no place in the new world. There was a paperback, the one book still on a shelf, detailing vitamins and minerals, what they cured or staved off, and what foods to find them in. It was the only book that wasn’t covered in maroon and seemed like an easy read. Posters dangled from walls clearly outlining digestive tracts, which caused Gus to frown. He didn’t want to think of digestive tracts. He left the office, carefully going to the next, the second of four, but found nothing there. In the third office, stashed away behind some files in a desk drawer, was a small bottle of Jack Daniels. Gus’s grimace was one of pleasure. He hefted the bottle, practically full, wondering to God above how this treasure had been missed, then carefully stashed it in his backpack. He moved through the offices with little noise, past examination tables and medicinal items he didn’t recognize and had no idea how to use, always careful not to knock things over, scavenging what he could. He found rolls of gauze and bandages and took them all. He took a full bottle of antiseptic and a box full of alcohol pads. There was very little else, it seemed. The whiskey was the definite prize.

He left the offices and stood in the middle of the waiting area. There were no other rooms to explore in this section, and he thought about the time. He made his way back to the main hallway and once again looked toward the long corridor where the blood smears disappeared into the sepulchral gloom. Gus figured that if there was anything of real value, it would probably be down there. Murphy’s fucking law.

Then, he stopped in his tracks. Just off that dark tunnel was another wing. He took a few steps, and saw, just behind a counter, a wall of what looked to be medical supplies.

“Well, god
damn
,” Gus breathed. This was turning out to be a very fruitful day. He returned to his van, dumped the contents of the backpack into the hamper, and quickly retraced his steps to the hospital’s interior. His senses again filled with the dead air and the smell of something long gone bad. Gus pushed past it, however, and walked with care toward the hospital drugstore. He suspected there was a gift shop in there somewhere as well, chock full of items for the sick. He rounded the corner and––

Thump
.

Gus froze. There it was again, coming from the stairs. He turned in that direction, shotgun poised, and backed toward the counter. At one end was a swinging door, waist-high, and he edged that way. He glanced around and found the shadows beyond the counter to be clear.
Something upstairs
, he thought,
but you just stay there, and we’ll get along just fine.

He pushed the door open with his buttocks, and only semi-focused on his immediate surroundings. The sound from above had distracted him, so it was relatively easy for the hand to snake out and claw into his testicles. His leather and denim pants prevented his balls from being totally crushed, but the sudden sickening agony brought Augustus to his knees. His shotgun wavered and fell to the ground. He got one hand on the white wrist of the hand hooked onto him, but before he could summon his strength, what little he had remaining, the fist squeezed again.
Hard.

“Oh, there’s a good boy, yes, such a
healthy
boy,” a voice trilled.

A sickening weight had attached itself to him, pulling down on his testicular nerves like five-hundred-pound granite blocks, deep down where his senses buckled and warped and were only concerned with pain. Gone were thoughts of looting. Gone were thoughts of the noise from above. As if submerged under sixty feet of water, Augustus slowly bent at the waist, landing on his elbows. His breath left him. The pain… the pain was crippling. He opened his mouth to vomit, forgetting he still had his helmet on. His consciousness retreated, but never fully left, as the roaring fire of nausea and pain in his stomach and balls staved off any real release. Gus groaned, his lips pulling back from his teeth as if his flesh was being sanded from his skull.

“What’s that?” the voice asked sweetly somewhere above him. “What’s
that
?” it demanded, squeezing his jewels even further. Gus collapsed, going fetal, knowing nothing except that paralyzing, gut-contracting agony that did not lessen in the least. Then, right on the cusp of rupture, the hand released him.

“I’m sorry,” the voice said in a pitying tone. “I didn’t introduce myself.”

He felt his helmet being pulled off, powerless to stop it as both of his hands cupped his screaming balls. His eyes closed in agony, and he tucked in his chin, just before a boot kicked his head back, knocking him out cold.

Blackness as deep as the Atlantic Ocean enveloped him. He came close to surfacing once, as if in a pictureless dream. He was aware of a thumping noise and a pounding at the back of his head. Something scraped at his back. He moved upward in jerks and heaves.

A voice pierced his semi-consciousness. “
Big
man, big man, coming in here. Didn’t know Alice was here, didja?
Didja
? God, you weigh a ton. A
ton
. What have you been eating? The natives?” A cackle of icy laughter. “That’d be sumthin. The natives. Dead eat dog eat dead!” Another eruption of frightening mirth.

Augustus retreated into the depths of his skull, drawing back from his offline senses, away from the rant, and hiding in the comforting dark.

He drifted, unborn, in a cold place where he couldn’t see. He didn’t know anything in this place, except that it was cool and without a sun. His senses floated close to waking, close enough that he felt the pain flash through his night, like an angry thunderbolt. His eyelids flickered, and he moaned. Another cut of agony, and his eyes came open—ceiling, dark with stains. He tried moving his arms, but they were secured at his sides. Augustus’s chin touched his bare, hairy chest. A woman with a wild mop of white hair wearing the dirty scrubs of a nurse knelt before him, swishing a scalpel at his shins.

“Hey! Fuck off!” Gus blurted, and instantly regretted it.

The woman jerked up as if goosed and fixed him with eyes as shiny as marbles. The scalpel came up, and she hissed like a vampire being exposed to the sun. She stared at him, transfixed in the dim light, and Gus knew the woman was bug-nuts crazy. He tried lifting his arms again, couldn’t, and examined himself to see why. His arms were tied to metal railings by rubber tubing. A gurney––he was strapped to a gurney. He also discovered he was completely naked.

And the mad bitch before him was slicing him up like a piece of Japanese sashimi.

“You crazy bitch!” Gus swore and struggled to free himself of his bonds. The tubing wouldn’t give, and when he cried out a second time, the nurse in the soiled scrubs pounced at his face. She came in close, placing the edge of the scalpel to the curve of his chin, and breathed into his face. Mints. She smelled of mints.

“You shut up! You shut up right now, or I’ll gut you here!” she fired back, beady eyes blazing. “I’ll gut you right here, I swear to holy Jesus!”

Gus shut up, baring his teeth at the cold contact of the surgical instrument at his throat.

“That’s better.” She smiled a horrible grin. Her teeth were yellow, traced with black, and set in spongy-looking gums. “That’s better, you little bastard. Old Alice got ye. Alice got ye fine. You can be fresh, or you can be dead, doesn’t matter to me. The kids’ll mind a bit, but not for long, I wager. Not for long. Then I can get back to me flowers on the roof. Heeee! The flowers are in bloom up there. You should see ‘em. But you can’t. Youcan’tyoucan’tyou
can’t
, Heeee!”

With each
can’t
, the scalpel came away from his throat and jabbed toward his right eye. In terror, Gus squeezed his eye shut, expecting at any moment to have two inches of blade lick his cornea.

“That’s it, that’s it, shhhhh shhhhhh,” Alice coddled him. “You be fine. You be quiet. It won’t be long now anyway. Shhh.”

Whump.

The sound made Gus open one eye just a crack. Alice was still above him, her eyes all-a-glitter and smiling.

“You hear that?” Alice asked. “My kids. My little darlings. A mother has to take care of her children, you know. Any way she can.”

Whump.Whump
.

His breath quickened. His eyes got wider and flicked from side to side. How long
had
he been out? Long enough for the crazy bitch astride him to tussle him onto a––
Whump! Patpatpatpat
.

Then he heard the sound of something being smeared across glass. Gus dared not take his eyes off the woman. She moved in closer, until her right eye was over his. He breathed in, smelling mint again.

“Don’t you move now,” she whispered. “Don’t you move.” The point of the scalpel moved to the base of his neck, down between his man breasts, the steel slowly making a line over his belly. It paused at his navel, then continued to his pubic area.

“Don’t you move,” Alice instructed. He felt her fingers do a little dance in his hair down there. “You make a sound now, and I’ll cut it off. You hear me? I’ll cut it off in the name of Jesus. You hear? Nod if you do.”

Gus nodded and felt his balls go for high ground.

“Now here comes the hard part.” She grinned, close enough that for a moment he thought she was going to kiss him. She studied his lips, and licked her own. Then her mouth opened slightly and, he knew, as God was his witness above, she was going to bite his lips off. She was going to fasten onto him and shake her head from side to side until they were ripped from his face. “Here it comes, here it comes, no noise now.”

Gus had been a big man, not the biggest and not tall, but fat. He had lost an incredible amount of weight since the world went insane, perhaps ninety kilos or more, enough that he could presently get into a waist-size of thirty-eight. He still had something of a gut which, only a year ago, he joked that he had invested a lot of money in it. The rest of him still had some excess fat, but he figured that, as food became scarcer, his body would burn it off naturally. He still had a double chin, but his biker’s beard concealed it well.

He felt Alice gouge into the fat of his belly with the surgical instrument, digging it in, and then cutting vigorously across his pubic area in a jagged C-section.

Augustus Berry screamed.

He yelped loud enough that it startled Alice. She screwed up her face for a moment, then brightened, and once again gave his already tortured testicles a devastating squeeze and yank. The wind went out of Gus as if his lungs had been punctured, and he whimpered like a dying pup.

“That’s what you get,” Alice hissed. “I told you not to make any noise, and you did, so that’s what you get. I didn’t want to do that.” But her grin said otherwise.

Another
whump
and several more squeegee-like noises came from beyond. Gus distantly thought they were increasing in force. Red-faced from agony, he puffed out his breath but said nothing to his captor. Alice’s arm came up, and she placed it on the other side of his head. Gus saw enough to know she didn’t have the scalpel in that fist anymore. Then his features paled. He looked down at himself, and a cry of horror caught in his throat. The crushing of his nuts had diverted his attention away from the pain, but now his own eyes verified what Alice had done to him. She had left the scalpel in his belly, at an angle, like a bent-over buggy antennae.

There was a hard slap at the other end of the room, and Gus looked past the nurse in an attempt to see. There was something
bad
back there, something that raised his alert level and made him shiver. He couldn’t see anything. With the pain he was in, he couldn’t concentrate and, in the end, his head plopped back and fell on something cushiony. He turned his head, the pain of his lower body shrieking and remembered he was tied to a hospital gurney, a
lowered
hospital gurney. He felt air hook the flaps of his cut flesh.