CHAPTER 10: The Hospital

  The hunger hit ninety seconds after the waking.

  Dave knew the signs: the lip quiver, the eyebrows pulling together, the full-body tension that meant Emma had surveyed her internal landscape and found it unacceptable. She'd been asleep for forty-three minutes. That was a long nap for her, which meant she was going to be ravenous, which meant he had approximately thirty seconds before the situation escalated from slightly upset to weapons-grade meltdown.

  He was already unslinging the go-bag. "Bottle. Give me a second, baby."

  "Mmmmmm." The sound was low and building. A warning shot.

  "I know. I know. Coming."

  Noor watched him. Dave didn't notice. He was deep in the subroutine. That was Sarah's phrase, not his, applied to the specific sequence of motions that turned a screaming baby into a fed baby in the minimum possible time. Formula canister. Bottle from the side pocket. Water from the sealed jug. Four scoops. Cap on. Shake. Test temperature on wrist.

  Eleven seconds. A personal best.

  He got the nipple into Emma's mouth at the exact moment the lip quiver crested into what would have been the opening note of a cry that could, based on the last three hours of evidence, potentially restructure local reality. The cry died unborn. Emma latched and drank with the single-minded intensity of a baby who had been, in her estimation, starving for approximately ten thousand years.

  The warmth surged. Whatever Emma's power ran on, it ran better when she was fed. Dave felt it immediately. The golden heat spreading outward from his chest, sharper than before, more focused. His senses opened up. The neighborhood around them snapped into resolution so detailed it was almost uncomfortable. He could count the blades of grass between sidewalk cracks. He could hear a door creaking six houses away. He could feel the pull toward Sarah.

  And the system blazed back to full brightness, with opinions.

  ~*~

  She was HUNGRY, Daddy.

  Feed the baby = power the Daddy.

  Science!

  ~*~

  "I know the system," Dave said. "I'm her father. I know when she's hungry."

  ~*~

  Just saying.

  ~*~

  Emma drank. The bottle was half gone in two minutes. She paused, burped, Dave had the technique, two pats and a gentle back rub, and went back to drinking.

  "You're good at that," Noor said.

  "I've had practice."

  "No, I mean — the speed. I've worked pediatric emergencies. Parents fumble. They drop things, they can't find the formula, they mix it wrong. You did that like a pit crew changing a tire."

  Dave shifted Emma slightly in his arm. She adjusted without breaking suction. "My wife made me practice. Timed me. Said if I could build a bottle in under fifteen seconds in the dark with one hand, she'd trust me with the overnight feeds."

  "Did you?"

  "Thirteen seconds. She still didn't trust me with the overnight feeds."

  Noor almost smiled. It was the first time Dave had seen her face do anything that wasn't assessment or suppressed trauma. The almost-smile lasted about a second before the professional mask reassembled.

  They'd stopped on a residential street two blocks from the hospital. Dave could see Millfield General from here. The main building was a five-story block of concrete and glass that anchored the east side of town. It was standing. That was the good news.

  The bad news was visible from two blocks away. The top floor had partially collapsed inward, the roof sagging into what had been, before this morning, the maternity ward. Two of the five stories had their windows blown out. Emergency vehicles cluttered the parking lot at angles that suggested they'd been moving when the world changed and had stopped where they stopped. An ambulance was on its side. A police cruiser had gone through a concrete barrier and was balanced, front wheels over empty air, on the edge of a fissure that split the lot diagonally.

  And the emergency department entrance was dark. The sliding glass doors, the ambulance bay, the triage area, all of it dark. Actively dark, in a way that had nothing to do with the power being out. The entrance was a rectangle of blackness that the orange light refused to enter, as if something inside was absorbing it.

  Noor was staring at the hospital. She'd been staring since they came around the corner and saw it. Her hand was on the pharmacy bag's strap, white-knuckled, and her jaw was set in a way Dave was learning to read as I am processing something that I do not want to process.

  "That's where I was," she said. "Four hours ago. I was in that ambulance bay when the sky changed."

  Dave waited.

  "I walked out. I walked out and I left—" She stopped. Reset. The professional mask flickered. "There were patients. In the ER. In the ICU. In every floor. I left them."

  "You survived."

  "Survival isn't the same as doing the right thing." She said this without self-pity, without drama. A flat observation about a professional failure. Dave recognized the tone. He'd used it himself, standing in Todd's empty living room, knowing he'd thrown a man through a ceiling and run.

  Emma finished her bottle. Dave burped her again, settled her in the carrier. She was alert and content and the warmth in his chest was a furnace. The system hummed in his peripheral vision, steady and golden.

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  Noor looked at the hospital. Looked at Dave. Made a decision.

  "I need to go in."

  "Noor—"

  "Just the ER. The ambulance bay. I need to see if anyone..." She didn't finish. She didn't need to. "Eleven minutes. If I'm not back in eleven minutes, leave."

  "I'm not going to leave."

  "You have a baby. You have a wife to find. If I don't come back in eleven minutes, it means I can't come back, and you standing here won't change that." She held up the box cutter. "Eleven minutes."

  Dave wanted to argue. The part of him that had helped Ron, that had promised Mrs. Huang, that had carried Noor's pharmacy bag when her shoulder got tired, that part wanted to go in with her. But Emma was on his back and the hospital entrance was a rectangle of wrong darkness and he was a father first.

  "Eleven minutes," he said. "I'm counting."

  Noor walked across the street. She walked the way she did everything: efficiently, without wasted motion, her steps measured. She didn't hesitate at the parking lot. She didn't slow down at the ambulance bay. She walked into the darkness of the ER entrance and disappeared.

  Dave stood on the sidewalk with his daughter and counted.

  One minute. He could hear nothing from the hospital. The darkness in the entrance didn't move.

  Two minutes. Emma babbled at a bird, an actual bird, a crow, sitting on a mailbox across the street, looking offended by the state of the world. The crow looked back at Emma with beady displeasure. Emma found this delightful.

  Three minutes. Dave's hand was on the crowbar. His system pinged intermittently, threat warnings, distant, nothing within a hundred yards. The neighborhood was quiet. The transformation was lighter here, as if the hospital's proximity had created a dead zone where the alien biome was less aggressive. Or maybe the biome had already taken what it wanted from the hospital and moved on.

  Four minutes. Five.

  Six minutes. Dave heard something from inside. A sound like pressure equalizing, a deep, resonant hum that vibrated in his teeth. It lasted two seconds and stopped.

  Seven minutes. His grip on the crowbar was leaving marks on his palm. He thought about going in. The thought was specific and physical. His right foot actually shifted forward, his body committing to the motion before his brain caught up and pulled the emergency brake. Emma. He had Emma. And Noor had said eleven minutes and Noor was a woman who meant what she said.

  But standing here, outside, counting seconds while someone who'd become important to him in the space of an hour was inside a building full of darkness, this was the hardest thing he'd done today. Harder than the frog-things. Harder than the overpass. Those had been action, reaction, the body doing what the body was designed to do when threatened. This was waiting. And Dave was learning, rapidly and painfully, that the apocalypse was mostly waiting. Waiting for Emma to wake up. Waiting for the next creature. Waiting for Noor to come back from the dark.

  The system text flickered:

  ~*~

  She's okay.

  Probably.

  ~*~

  "That's not reassuring," Dave muttered.

  Eight. Nine.

  Ten minutes. Dave shifted his weight. Adjusted the carrier straps. Looked at the entrance. The darkness looked back at him, featureless and absolute.

  Eleven minutes.

  Noor walked out of the darkness.

  She was carrying something: a duffel bag, olive green, the kind hospitals used for disaster supplies. It was full and heavy and she had it slung over one shoulder with the pharmacy bag on the other. Her scrubs were smudged with something dark, a residue that caught the orange light and didn't reflect it.

  She was walking differently. Dave couldn't pinpoint what had changed. Her stride was the same length, her posture the same. But the way she moved was different. Something had shifted into place, the way a lens comes into focus.

  She crossed the parking lot. Crossed the street. Stopped in front of Dave.

  "Eleven minutes," she said.

  "Eleven minutes."

  He waited for her to tell him what she'd seen. She didn't.

  "Medical supplies," she said, holding up the duffel. "Proper ones. Suture kits, IV bags, antibiotics, splints. The pharmacy was intact." She paused. "Most of it was intact."

  "And the people?"

  Noor's face did the thing. The crack in the composure, sealed fast. "Some of them got out. I found evidence of organized evacuation from the upper floors. Wheelchairs in the stairwell. IV poles. Someone led them out. Maybe down to the basement, maybe outside. I don't know where they went."

  "And the ones who didn't get out?"

  The silence lasted three seconds. In those three seconds, Dave watched Noor decide what to say, decide what not to say, and construct a sentence that contained the truth without containing the details.

  "They're not suffering," she said. "Whatever happened to them, it was fast."

  Dave didn't ask more. Some doors you didn't open for people, and some doors people closed behind themselves for good reason.

  Noor resettled the duffel on her shoulder. Adjusted the pharmacy bag. Looked northeast, down the road that led toward the center of town.

  "The hospital's gone," she said. "As a resource, it's gone. Whatever the system did to it, the drugs are there, the supplies are there, but the building isn't a hospital anymore. It's something else."

  "What?"

  She shook her head.

  "Let's keep moving," she said.

  They walked. East, then north, cutting through the neighborhood toward downtown. The residential streets were passable, damaged, overgrown with the wrong vegetation, but walkable. Every few blocks they'd see a house that was occupied, curtains twitching, faces in windows, a silence of people who were hiding and didn't want to be found. Dave's system tagged them intermittently. Gatherer, Level 1. Tinkerer, Level 2. The classes were varied and none of them were combat-oriented. These were people who'd been at home when the world ended and were still at home, waiting for someone to tell them what to do.

  Nobody came out. Nobody asked for help. Nobody offered any.

  "They're scared," Noor said.

  "Can you blame them?"

  "No. But they can't stay in their houses forever. The houses aren't going to stay houses forever." She looked at a ranch-style home where the front porch had begun to curve, the support posts bending inward as if the house were slowly closing its mouth. "This is getting worse, not better."

  Dave noticed something else about the occupied houses. Each one had the same thing: a faint shimmer around the door frames, barely visible, like heat distortion. The system tagged them when he focused: Shelter. Passive. Level 1. The people inside had been given something by the system, not a class or abilities, just a thin skin of protection around their homes. Enough to keep the transformation out. For now.

  How long would it hold? The ranch house with the curving porch had been someone's shelter too, probably. The shimmer was gone. The house was changing. Whatever grace period the system gave, it expired.

  "They need to move," Dave said. "All of them. They need to find groups, safe zones, something permanent."

  "That's not your problem."

  "It's going to be." He didn't know how he knew that. He just did. The same way he'd known Emma was going down before she closed her eyes, the same way he'd known the Walgreens was too intact before they went inside.

  Some knowledge came from the system and some knowledge came from being a person who paid attention, and Dave was learning that the two were getting harder to tell apart.

  Dave looked at the houses. At the faces in the windows. He thought about Mrs. Huang in the garage with her rake. About Ron, headed back to Birch Lane.

  He couldn't help them all. He couldn't help any of them. He had a wife to find and a baby to protect and a road that stretched northeast toward a pull in his chest that was getting stronger by the minute.

  But he filed them. The faces in the windows. The houses slowly changing. The people waiting for instructions that weren't coming. He filed them in the same place he'd filed Mr. Feldman's slippers and the Ortega kids' bicycle.

  He was building a debt. The kind you didn't forget and couldn't discharge with a single payment.

  Downtown was ahead. He could see it from the rise at the end of Hawthorn Street: the taller buildings, the steeple of the Lutheran church, the water tower. The skyline was wrong. Buildings at angles that defied their engineering. Something massive growing from the roof of the post office, a structure that hadn't been there this morning, crystalline and branching, catching the orange light like a crown.

  Noor saw it too. "That's going to be harder than the park."

  "Yeah."

  "Are you ready?"

  Dave looked at Emma. She was watching a butterfly, a real one, somehow, orange and black, dancing through the ruined neighborhood. She reached for it. Missed. Reached again.

  "Ba," she said to the butterfly. A greeting.

  Dave turned to Noor. "Let's go find out."